You might recall how Donald Trump mentioned that the reason the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan was because terrorists were crossing the border into Russia. And so, in 1979, the Soviets retaliated by invading. While babbling incoherently, as he always does, Trump blurted, “The ...read more
President Obama has steadfastly refused to engage in a ground war in Syria to stop ISIS despite calls from Republicans to put "boots on the ground". In another time, a ground invasion may have been the right strategy to pursue to remove the very real threat of ISIS, but in 2015 ...read more
Where were you on the morning of September 11th, 2001? If you live in the states, it's a question you've no doubt heard several times over the last 14 years. That's because the attacks of 9/11 stand as the defining moment of this American generation. I remember where I was all ...read more
One of the greatest tricks the rich have discovered throughout history is the divide and conquer tactic. If you can make poor people hate each other, you can distract them from the real source of their poverty and continue to preside over a system that impoverishes them and ...read more
(Image via Instagram) Every year, my parents go to a health resort in Austria to spend a week exercising, eating healthy food and consulting with the wellness staff on how to integrate healthy practices into their lifestyle in London. Every year, I make the same joke to my dad: ...read more
After the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were ratified, collectively freeing the slaves and granting them full citizenship rights (the men anyway), white supremacists concocted various subversive laws to oppress African-Americans within the new mandates of the Constitution. The ...read more
When Christian conservatives wax apoplectic about the "war on Christmas," they're engaging in one of their favorite time-honored traditions: casting themselves as martyrs for a moral cause increasingly under attack from the godless heathens of secular society. Whereas Jesus was ...read more
This article was originally posted in 2012, but is worth reprinting again given the persistent myth that Christopher Columbus was a great man and brave explorer. "Christopher Columbus was a great man," wrote Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel. "A man who endured much and ...read more
On Monday, May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds at a group of students at Kent State University, some of whom were protesting Nixon's Cambodian Campaign during the Vietnam War. Four students were killed and nine were wounded, including ...read more
You'd never know it by listening to AM talk radio or watching cable news or even reading social media, but based on leading economic indicators, President Obama's record on the economy is actually much stronger than Ronald Reagan's record. Shocking, I know, but it's true. ...read more
The internet became abuzz Sunday as the Liverpool Echoreported that a forensics expert named Dr. Jari Louhelainen, a senior lecturer in molecular biology at Liverpool John Moores, had discovered the identity of Jack the Ripper by extracting 126-year-old DNA from a shawl found ...read more
Happy Labor Day! It's understandable if you're jonesing for your daily Banter fix and this holiday has you tweaking, but fortunately, sometimes, just sometimes, there's valuable stuff worth reading on other sites. Here's what we recommend: Ben Cohen "The Other Neanderthal" by ...read more
Back in 2001, after spending nearly 30 days on vacation in Crawford, Texas, President Bush returned to Washington on the Friday before Labor Day, rather than on Labor Day itself. Why? Because he got hammered in the polls by Americans who thought he had taken too much time off: ...read more
A particularly intolerable meme continues to play out in the news media and online: apparently U.S. history began on January 20, 2009 when Barack Obama was inaugurated. In case you were unaware, President Obama is evidently the first president to take vacations; he's the first ...read more
Back in 2011, Matt Damon made headlines when during an interview with Elle, the once very vocal Obama supporter threw some shade Barry’s way by saying, "You know, a one-term president with some balls who actually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of the country, ...read more
If you're the type of conservative who thinks that being called out for homophobia is a form of bigotry or censorship, dealing with the liberal crowd on Facebook might be too much for you. Until now, Republicans' main alternative has been the Tea Party Community, a writhing ...read more
Rasmussen released the results of a poll on Monday showing that 23 percent of Americans believe President Obama wasn't born in the United States. By itself, that number isn't too shocking. But when you add the percentage of people who "aren't sure" whether the president was born ...read more
Up to 100,000 people out of a population of 700,000 will have their water shut off at least temporarily in Detroit, reports The Atlantic. Thanks to a budgetary crisis, the city's water service has decided to aggressively cut off subscribers who can't or won't pay their bills at ...read more
It might not be "too soon," but perhaps there are certain things we simply shouldn't know about former presidents, especially ones who were inaugurated nearly 100 years ago. President Warren G. Harding served from 1921 to 1923. Among other things, he created the Veterans Bureau ...read more
Yesterday, The Daily Banter's Tommy Christopher covered a new Quinnipiac Poll showing that a plurality of Americans believe that President Obama is the worst president since World War II. At the risk of sounding like an Obamabot (I'm not, but that won't prevent trolls from going ...read more
HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher is shaping up to be a sort of Drunk Black History, with the host blithely explaining, last week, why black people love their Cadillacs, and this week, delving into the shockingly recent origin of the slur "nigra." While Maher was dead wrong to the ...read more
Most presidents have a legacy. It's usually an event or cultural movement that defines not only a presidency, but an era in history. Lincoln had the Civil War, tasked with holding the nation together. Teddy Roosevelt transitioned the nation from a continental power to an ...read more
The physics of this thing should baffle anyone with even a basic grasp of logic. So, conversely, it makes perfect sense to Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX). Speaking for a World Net Daily presentation titled “Washington – A Man of Prayer,” a ridiculously misleading history of how ...read more
If there's one defining theme when it comes to European history, it is one of extreme violence. No one has done war, conquest and exploitation of its neighboring countries (and others) better than the Europeans - so much so that the continent engulfed almost the entire civilized ...read more
Yes, this is what the American debate has come down to: whether Abraham Lincoln would've appeared on Zach Galifianakis' internet comedy show "Between Two Ferns." But leave it to (ghost-written and factually shoddy) Lincoln "expert" and chairman of the loud-mouth, ...read more
Fox News Channel and too many far-right screechers are crapping their cages today over President Obama's hilarious appearance on Zach Galifianakis' "Between Two Ferns" web series. But they're not alone. An ABC News White House correspondent asked Jay Carney if the sketch would ...read more
It's been five years since the official founding of the tea party movement. Weird, it seems like much, much longer, but there it is. Five years since tri-corner hats with dingle-dangle tea bags glued to the brim became the national symbol of incoherent, far-right outrage over ...read more
On Tuesday, the activists/burglars who stole top secret J. Edgar Hoover-era FBI files including documents about what's known as COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), and subsequently delivered the files to reporters some 43 years ago finally revealed themselves in The New ...read more
You might've noticed that I've been away on vacation for a couple of weeks, but now that I'm re-entering the atmosphere and catching up with national events, one of the many things that hasn't changed is the garment rending and disinformation campaigns regarding the ...read more
The Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus is regarded in American culture as the first Westerner to discover the Americas, and he will forever be remembered as a pioneer and a hero. The historical record however, shows Columbus to be a brutal murderer who participated in ...read more
By Robert Parry It’s kind of a waste of time but perhaps we must address a recurring rejoinder from some of the Republican Right’s benighted adherents who make a big deal about the fact that the Republican Party pioneered many important civil rights laws in the century ...read more
By Robert Parry In the U.S. news media, there is often a distinction made between the racist Right, which emerged from the struggle to maintain slavery and segregation, and the “small-government” Right, which supposedly represents a respectable conservatism focused on the ...read more
By Lawrence Davidson There is an American tradition of frequent war. Indeed, over the course of the country’s history the United States has been at war almost constantly. Some of these have been relatively short conflicts like interventions in various Central American venues. ...read more
If you lie to Congress, it is a crime. It’s called perjury. You may remember that when Roger Clemens did it, he barely escaped two counts of it. And you should remember that the official reason President Bill Clinton was impeached was because of perjury (you know, it had ...read more
Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc self-immolating in a protest against the U.S.-backed government of Ngo Dinh Diem. (Photo credit: Malcolm Browne) By Beverly Deepe Keever The 40th anniversary of the withdrawal of American troops from the Vietnam War was recently commemorated, but ...read more
The battle flag of the Confederacy, often called the “Stars and Bars.” By Robert Parry The Republican Party has talked a lot about the need to re-brand, but the Right has pulled off a very successful re-branding of its own by shifting its imagery from the Confederacy to the ...read more
Continuing in the longheld GOP tradition of making shit up, Karl Rove has come out swinging to defend George W. Bush's legacy as President. In a wide ranging interview, he made the following claims on an ABC interview: 1. “He kept us safe after 9/11," 2. "He moved to ...read more
President Obama was officially sworn in yesterday for his second term as chief executive and, this afternoon, he'll be ceremonially sworn in with all of the usual Capitol fanfare and speeches. While not as historically striking as his first inaugural, I couldn't help but to ...read more
James Madison, architect of the U.S. Constitution and author of the Bill of Rights. By Robert Parry: The American Right is fond of putting itself inside the minds of America’s Founders and intuiting what was their “original intent” in writing the U.S. Constitution and its ...read more
By William Blum: From the Congress of Vienna of 1815 to the Congress of Berlin in 1878 to the “Allies” invasion of Russia in 1918 to the formation of what became the European Union in the 1950s, the great powers of Europe and the world have gotten together in grand meeting ...read more
By Jim DiEugenio: What is one of the first things Hamas does when it is fresh off standing up In 2009, Professors James Blight and Janet Yang were part of the team that gave us the documentary film and book Virtual JFK. Both the film and book explored the issue of whether or ...read more
President Richard Nixon By Robert Parry: Republicans are fond of comparing their scandal-mongering – like the current hype over the terrorist assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya – with genuine scandals, like Watergate, which sank Richard Nixon’s second term, and ...read more
By Bob Cesca: I hate to disappoint the 675,000 whiny diaper babies calling for secession in the wake of the election but, sorry, no matter how hard they stomp their feet and pout and fling their feces at the electoral map, demands for secession might as well be demands for ...read more
By Robert Parry: In 1968, Sam Brown, like many of his youthful contemporaries, was disgusted by the Vietnam War which had already claimed more than 30,000 American lives and killed countless Vietnamese. So, he poured his energy into Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign for the ...read more
By Paul R. Pillar: As this year’s presidential campaign turns to debates about certain foreign conflicts and controversies with the potential for sucking the United States into war, here is an anniversary-based fact that does not seem to have received notice — certainly nothing ...read more
By Lawrence Davidson: Mitt Romney might be the most brazen political liar since James Polk, who served as the 11th U.S. president (1845-1849) and lied through his teeth – to Congress, to his cabinet, to the newspapers – to get the country into a war with Mexico. Of course, ...read more
By Jada Thacker: Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has been roundly criticized for being light on substance and long on fluff. But his running mate Paul Ryan is promoting a dangerous idea that refutes the historical foundations of democratic government. Practically ignored by ...read more
By Bob Cesca: I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm thoroughly excited about the first presidential debate tomorrow night. I can sense it coming down Main Street: something harrowing will in fact occur on that stage and given what we know about the candidates and the expectations ...read more
By Lawrence Davidson: The Ku Klux Klan (the name derives from the Greek word Kuklos meaning circle with a modification of the word clan added), an American terrorist organization, was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865. It was organized by Southerners who refused to ...read more
By Ben Cohen: I'm sure lots of outlets will be doing similar lists of the late iconic Gore Vidal's best quotes, but I thought I'd chime in with my own as there are plenty to choose from. Here are the ones I believe capture the genius of the man who stands as one of the most ...read more
