Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
by the editorial board
“During a recent cable news appearance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed no American lives had been lost in the Iran war, an error he blamed on confusion with President Donald Trump’s earlier invasion of Venezuela. And perhaps it is difficult to keep one’s wars straight in an administration that has attacked seven countries in less than two years. But while Lutnick’s claim was horribly wrong in fact, it was an accurate reflection of the administration’s consistently reprehensible diminishment of the costly war it started more than six months ago without congressional authorization or public support. The day after the secretary’s gaffe, Vice President JD Vance denied the very existence of the conflict, telling reporters, ‘I wouldn’t call it a war’ …. The day after that, Trump himself dismissed the war as ‘small potatoes’…” (09/13/26)
“If you’re a sane Republican – and yes, I do believe such people exist – the past week had to be monumentally embarrassing. President Donald Trump, who’s terrible at pretending to be a conservative, tried to bribe U.S. voters by saying every adult would receive a $5,000 ‘Trump Dividend’ if Republicans win the midterm elections. If it weren’t a complete con, that would cost about $1.3 trillion at a time when the national debt has surpassed $40 trillion. So much for fiscal conservatism. The president made the embarrassing kickback offer Sept. 9 during an equally embarrassing Republican midterm convention that centered around idolatry of Trump. At the event in Dallas, he implored GOP voters: ‘Pretend that I am on the ballot.’ Does that make you feel good if you’re a Republican?” (09/13/26)
“The Trump 2.0 era has intensified a deeply entrenched pathology in the American media system: concentrated corporate ownership. During less perilous times, legitimate concerns about a few corporations capturing so much of our news and information have often been dismissed as conspiracy theories and paranoia. But Donald Trump and his coterie of plutocrats have made our media oligarchy problem acutely evident and impossible to ignore. Constant controversies, from government and corporate censorship of television comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert to the algorithmic and editorial abuses of Elon Musk’s X and Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, remind us why media ownership holds such high stakes for any semblance of democracy. Meanwhile, rightwing nepotistic dynasties like the Murdochs and the Ellisons hold inordinate influence over what millions of people can see, hear, and read in their daily media.” (09/11/26)
“In a Thursday address at the GOP midterm convention that exalted President Donald Trump and demeaned his opponents as ‘extremists who openly hate our nation,’ Vice President JD Vance hardly spoke about foreign policy. He did not mention the war in Iran directly, and he only brought up foreign policy as an example of an issue that divides the party’s base. He urged voters not to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ because ‘you happen to disagree with us on a policy issue here or there.’ The acknowledgement of foreign policy as a divisive issue in the MAGA coalition is a stark retreat for Vance, who staked his 2023 endorsement of Trump on the fact that ‘he started no wars despite enormous pressure from his own party and even members of his own administration,’ framing the president’s America First record as a much-needed deviation from decades of bipartisan hawkishness.” (09/11/26)
“Bin Laden’s plan was to trap the U.S. in expensive, foreign quagmire wars that would trigger a domestic economic collapse. It was patterned on the strategy that the local mujahideen, he and other foreign fighters, and the U.S. and its allies had used to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Not only does bin Laden’s strategy continue apace long after his 2011 death, but it also spawned an even more effective means of destroying America from within. Bin Laden’s attacks turned the U.S. government into an engine for the destruction of America, inducing it to implement policies that have devastated the country and immiserated its people.” (09/11/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“It’s so undignified how Zionists keep trying to resurrect the ‘stop calling it a genocide’ conversation about Gaza when every relevant human rights group on earth says that’s exactly what it is. The latest effort to revive this long-dead debate comes in the form of a letter signed by 5,000 high-profile Israel supporters like Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, Zionist megadonor Haim Saban, and neoconservative war criminal Elliott Abrams. ‘We the undersigned are outraged and sickened by the latest blood libel to be inflicted on the Jewish people: the lie that Israel committed ‘genocide’ in Gaza. We reject this accusation with contempt,’ the letter says, followed by the usual mountains of hasbara verbiage.” (09/12/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Mark Nayler
“After another summer of heatwaves and wildfires, Spain is petitioning the EU to create a climate adaptation fund. In a letter sent to the EU’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, the Spanish minister for the ecological transition Sara Aagesen Muñoz said that Europe needs a blanket strategy to help its member states cope with climate change, and to mobilize the ‘resources needed to deliver the necessary investments.’ The mobilizing strategy favored by Muñoz is a permanent windfall tax on energy companies, many of which have cashed in on higher gas and oil prices resulting from the wars in Ukraine and Iran. … The fairness of windfall taxes, of course, is one of the most questionable things about them. As the Portuguese finance ministry said when introducing its windfall levy, the elevated profits of oil and gas providers this year have resulted ‘solely from external market conditions.’ So why punish them?” (09/11/26)
“New and returning students have been flocking to college campuses across the United States this month. And, at several institutions – such as Brandeis University, just outside Boston – they are encountering a higher education reinvention that’s rapidly picking up pace: the concept of ‘applied’ humanities or interdisciplinary and skills-focused liberal arts learning. For Brandeis and similar institutions, changing demographics (fewer college-age students overall) and budget shortfalls are an immediate impetus for this shift. But underlying such pragmatic considerations is also a growing willingness within higher education to better align with the needs of a changing society and economy. And that signals both humility and introspection – qualities integral to the humanities, which prize curiosity and the willingness to change and expand thinking and reasoning. ‘Higher ed shouldn’t be an ivory tower concept,’ according to Sonya Christian, chancellor of the California Community Colleges system, the nation’s largest.” (09/11/26)
“Many on the right think the near-acquittal is an indictment of women or of feminism, even though two of the three male jurors also favored acquittal. As I see it, there are several problems with the take by the right and some libertarians here. First, from the fact that Clancy killed her children, they conclude that it’s obvious she should be found guilty and imprisoned for life. This shows no awareness of the complex nature of criminal trials.” (09/12/26)
“To many Americans, al-Qaeda’s brutality seemed to represent both a wake-up call and a challenge. Because they are used to sitting atop the geopolitical hierarchy, Americans don’t necessarily think all that much about what lies beneath. It turns out that the rest of the world hates us, or so many concluded in the wake of 9/11. From that ostensible insight flowed the challenge: Are they right to hate us? Have we whiffed on our global leadership? Are we the tyrannical oppressors of our age? Across the intervening years, those questions have played out in the American consciousness like a bruising taunt heard in childhood that one can never quite forget.” (09/11/26)
