Chris Hedges – Legalized Murder and the Politics of Terror

Police officers carry out random acts of legalized murder against poor people of color not because they are racist, although they may be, or even because they are rogue cops, but because impoverished urban communities have evolved into miniature police states. Police can stop citizens at will, question and arrest them without probable cause, kick down doors in the middle …

AMANDA MARCOTTE – Fear, racism, and hatred: Why the gun industry makes so much money off mass shootings

Even though the mass shooting in Orlando over the weekend is the largest in our nation’s history, the fallout is following a standard pattern, a narrative so well-worn that it’s impossible not to become numb to it: Liberals call for gun control, conservatives act like you are trying to take away their precious babies, nothing gets done, everyone eventually drifts …

Clearing The Fog – FBI Stings of Muslims Worsen Bigotry and Security – 06.14.16

A study from 2014 showed that 99% of domestic terrorist plots in the US are aided in some way by the FBI; only 4 out of 400 were not FBI stings. And human rights groups found that the way the sting operations are conducted violate human rights. Sue Udry of Defending Dissent will speak about the ways these sting operations have been used to fuel hatred against Muslims. And to discuss the shooting and mass murder in Orlando, FL, Janaid Ahmad of Just International and Peace for Life speaks about the rise of homophobia and violence within Muslim communities because of Western influence and support for extremist sects such as the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia.

U.S. Economic Confidence Index Retreats to -12

President Barack Obama’s upbeat analysis of the nation’s economic progress in his Jan. 12 State of the Union speech may have helped lift the weekly Economic Confidence Index five points to -7. That gain disappeared last week, with the index returning to -12. Nearly all the movement over the past three weeks has come among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, particularly …

Leid Stories – 01.26.16

Killer Cop Trials Show Disturbing Prosecutorial Trend of ‘Errors’

Audacity and Hope: Obama Shamelessly Shills for Hillary

“Attorney at War” Alton H. Maddox Jr., who in a series has been discussing legal issues associated with the several high-profile cases involving police killings of unarmed people, looks at the disturbing trend of “errors” that compromise the integrity of prosecutors’ cases and often result in no convictions.

Leid Stories in a commentary discusses President Obama’s shameless shilling for Hillary Clinton and explains why he’s doing so.

Leid Stories – 01.06.16

Tear Jerker: Obama Weeps for [Politically Appropriate] Victims of Gun Violence
Does God Love Ugly?: Wheaton to Fire Prof for Pro-Muslim Sympathies
In an emotional, teary-eyed speech yesterday at the White House, President Barack Obama delivered yet another homily about gun violence, imploring an impassive Congress to enact measures to curb illegal gun sales. He’s not waiting for it to act, he said, noting a list of mass killings he linked to easy access to assault weapons. Via executive orders he’ll enact some long-overdue regulations and policies himself, he said. Leid Stories takes a closer look at Obama’s gun-violence pronouncements.
Dr. Larycia Hawkins, the first female African American tenured professor at Wheaton College since its founding in 1860, is soon to be dismissed. She has refused to explain statements that “seem inconsistent with the college’s doctrinal conviction,” the college says, citing a Facebook posting in which Hawkins said that Christians and Muslims worship the same god. Leid Stories asks about Wheaton’s move: Does God love ugly?

Derrick Jensen – The Eco-Modernist Manifesto: a Program of Genocide and Ecocide

The idea that anthropocene — the human alteration of natural ecosystems — can be good or even great, as promised in the recently released Ecomodernist Manifesto, is purely delusional. Worse, it underlies a narrative in which the wholesale destruction of nature and of sustainable indigenous societies is repackaged as a noble mission — one whose ultimate purpose is the complete alienation of humans from the planet …

HENRY GIROUX – America’s Addiction to Violence

On December 2 2015, 14 people were killed and more than 20 wounded in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that both lives by violence and uses it as tool to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Violence runs through American society like an …

This Is What Obama Was Doing During The Democratic Debate

If you missed the third democratic debate, don’t worry, you are not alone: the President himself had much more important pursuits to attend to when the potential successor from his party was laying out her (or his) ideological vision for the future of America. As Politico reports: On his first full day of his annual Christmas vacation in Hawaii, President …

Poll: 71% believe mass shootings are now just a normal part of American life

A new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that a whopping 71% of Americans surveyed believe the many shootings and other acts of mass violence in we’ve seen in 2015 are now a permanent part of life in our country. That’s compared with just 21 percent of Americans who think the violence this year — from Charleston, S.C., and Oregon, to the terrorist …