Not content to hang out online and spread hate speech against homosexuals and transsexuals the old fashioned way, the vicious animals of the right wing have taken their mindless rage into the 21st century and made a video game out of hate crimes: A new video game promoted by ...read more
Last week, a Muslim man was arrested during a child porn raid in Dunedin, Florida. During the raid, the police found in this man's closet 20 guns, thousands of rounds of ammunition, knives, bombs, bomb making materials, and aerial photos of a Tampa-area elementary school, middle ...read more
Even before we learned his name, it was already obvious from the media's refusal to call the attack in Las Vegas terrorism that the shooter was white and his political leanings were not immediately identifiable as liberal. It's the worst kept secret in America that "terrorism" ...read more
The Washington Post is not prone to Onion-style headlines but I still started to smile when I read what had to be a joke of some sort: A neo-Nazi with explosives and a framed photo of Timothy McVeigh is not a threat, judge rules. I started to read the article expecting a weird, ...read more
Barely a month after Republicans voted a self-confessed pussy grabber to be president, but before they elected a pretend Montana cowboy who assaulted a journalist as a congressman, there was Captain Clay Higgins. A disgraced former police captain who was essentially forced to ...read more
Rudy Giuliani wants it both ways. On one hand, he wants us to remember 9/11 because it made him look really, really good. On the other hand, he wants us to forget about 9/11 because it makes his party look really, really bad. When he wants to scare us into voting for Republicans, ...read more
OPEN in a city street. We meet a POKEMON sitting behind a trashcan. A TERRORIST runs around the corner and crouches next to the POKEMON.POKEMON: Hello. I’m a Pokemon.TERRORIST: I’m a Terrorist.POKEMON: I’m kind of a big deal. I’m all over people’s News ...read more
This article was originally published in Banter M, our weekly long form digital magazine. For whatever reason, my politics are growing closer to Bill Maher's. I don't imagine I'll ever agree with the HBO host and standup comic on everything, and I'm no one's disciple. But there ...read more
Monday night, Bill O'Reilly appeared on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert and the usually unflappable host appeared almost completely deflated by O'Reilly's bellicosity in the aftermath of Orlando, along with the Fox News Channel pundit's backstopping of Donald Trump's ...read more
This weekend's Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando is such a multi-layered tragedy that it's difficult to know where to begin to pull it apart. On one hand it's being labeled a terrorist attack, largely because of the shooter's Muslim faith and his maybe too convenient embracing ...read more
If you have paid attention to Right wing media outlets, the Islamic terror threat facing America is the most pressing issue facing the country bar none. Forget climate change wreaking havoc on the earth's bio-systems, forget cancer and forget blowback from countries the US has ...read more
Just how disconnected are Republicans from reality? In his desperation to slam President Obama on Tuesday, former Governor and first-ever Secretary of Der Homeland Security Tom Ridge blamed Obama for the fear of Muslims that has gripped so many Americans. On MTP Daily, Chuck ...read more
We have a winner everyone -- the prize for the most disgusting manifestation of American ignorance and unbridled hatred goes to one Michele Fiore (R), a Nevada Assemblywoman who told listeners on her weekly show on Las Vegas radio station KWDN that she would like to fly to Paris ...read more
Concerns of a religiously influenced terrorist attack on American citizens in the US and abroad have resurfaced in lieu of the recent events of mass death that have occurred around the world. On November 13th 2015, ISIS carried out an attack on civilians in restaurants and a ...read more
In the wake of the ISIS attacks on Paris, the NRA reposted one of it's promo videos of TV host and Navy SEAL Marcus Lutrell, who apparently "has a message for Islamic extremists" who want to take his freedom. The NRA provided the following description of what can charitably be ...read more
For anyone who has studied the dynamics of terrorism, one of the major tools used to further an extremist agenda is to create an irrational response to acts of violence. ISIS attacked Paris, calculating that a French response would create further division between Muslim and ...read more
Two days after 9/11 I was at the armory at 25th and Lexington where families of those missing from the World Trade Center were being sent for information. My job was to produce live shots from the scene -- and that scene was one of nonstop, emotionally shattering chaos. ...read more
The ISIS attacks on Paris last night have left at least 127 people dead with hundreds more wounded or in critical condition. In what was the biggest attack on French soil since World War II, the nation is reeling in shock from the sheer callousness of the bloodshed. The targets ...read more
Want to know why 9/11 happened? Donald Trump has the answer, and it's not what you think. While the traditional narrative has been that a group of predominantly Saudi Arabian terrorists hijacked four passenger jets and attempted to crash them into symbols of American power with ...read more
At Wednesday's White House daily briefing, the arrest of Ahmed Mohamed for showing a science project to his teacher was a hot topic. The high school freshmen was turned in to police by his teachers when they became concerned that the homemade clock he had built might just be a ...read more
With the Patriot Act set to expire on June 1, and the bill that aims to replace and reform it facing razor-thin opposition in the Senate, the White House is ratcheting up the pressure on Republicans to pass the USA Freedom Act. On Thursday morning, White House Press Secretary ...read more
On Tuesday morning, Germanwings Airlines flight 4U 9525 crashed in the French Alps, likely killing all 150 or so passengers and crew. Preliminary (unconfirmed) information says that the Airbus A320 descended rapidly, but under control, to 6,000 feet from its cruising altitude of ...read more
By Michael J. Parker In his recent address during a summit on terrorism, President Obama refused to equate or even connect Islam with terrorism, or to paint the atrocities by ISIL and Al-Qaida as Islamic. Obama prefers to refer to the atrocities in the Middle East as a sort of ...read more
You can almost set your watch to it. Within 24 hours following nearly every recent terrorist attack or horrifying ISIS video, The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald exploits the tragedies as a platform for his ongoing finger-wagging and tsk-tsk scolding of the U.S. and other western ...read more
President Obama has come under fierce criticism over his stepped-up use of drone attacks, even drawing criticism from kill-crazy Republicans, but sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning, the tables were turned, and a drone made its way through White House air space and ...read more
When they aren't beating President Obama to death for not attending a rally in Paris on 36 hours notice, the political press has been beating itself into an excited frenzy over the news that former Governor Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) is a dressage horse-hair away from announcing a ...read more
On Tuesday, The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill went on CNN and accused the network's terrorism experts of being "frauds." “CNN and MSNBC and Fox are engaging in the terrorism expert industrial complex, where you have people on as paid analysts that are largely frauds who have made a ...read more
While the world's gaze is riveted to the conclusion of the manhunt for the murderers in the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Amnesty International says Boko Haram committed its worst massacre to date this week. The terrorist group responsible for the abduction of 276 schoolgirls in ...read more
(Photo: Michel Euler/Associated Press) In 2010, a letter was sent from Osama bin Laden to an associate in Yemen that sought to remind him of al Qaeda's mission. "We need to extend and develop our operations in America and not keep it limited to blowing up airplanes,” he wrote. ...read more
BBC Headline: Gunmen have shot dead 12 people at the Paris office of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in an apparent militant Islamist attack. It’s hard. It’s hard not to become Islamaphobic. It’s hard not to descend into hate and fear of the Islamic faith and those who ...read more
The French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo has spent a good portion of the past 44 years gleefully aiming its poison pens at the world's sacred cows. It's taken on the elite and the powerful, the corrupt and the unjust, and it's done it all in the name of using its absurdist ...read more
If you’ve ever been on a plane near someone who's just chased Mexican food down with a few too many margaritas at the airport Chipotle, eventually you’ll realize that person has an explosive situation brewing south of the border. Yet, as bad as those burrito butt bombs might be, ...read more
The Pakistani Taliban committed an unspeakable horror on Tuesday, attacking the Army Public School and Degree College in Peshawar, where they began slaughtering children by shooting them classroom by classroom. One teacher was reportedly set on fire as the students were forced ...read more
A hostage situation that developed in Sydney, Australia on Monday ended in gunfire after a 16-hour standoff that culminated in a joint SAS/police raid during which the hostage-taker and two others were killed. During the siege, national media organizations followed police ...read more
It has become a sad fact of life that it is never too soon to use tragic events for political reasons, but even within that ghoulish game, there are rules. Sure, you might expect the douchiest of politicians to make political hay at a press conference, or on some cable news ...read more
If Glenn Greenwald's agenda hasn't been made abundantly clear thus far, it should be today. In case you're just joining us, his mission, more than anything else, is to shame, ridicule and scold what he considers to be evil western nations. The list naturally includes the United ...read more
Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby confirmed this evening that air strikes inside Syria are underway in an effort to destroy ISIS: I can confirm that U.S. military and partner nation forces are undertaking military action against ISIL [ISIS] terrorists in Syria ...read more
As the U.S. ceaselessly moves towards yet another large-scale conflict in the Middle East, hawks in Congress are already screeching that the current U.S. strategy to destroy Islamic State just isn't bold enough. Instead of planes and air-to-surface missiles, they insist, Obama ...read more
There's an old saying in Texas: Fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again. Drudge and the far-right media have been suckered into promoting another James O'Keefe prank, taking the fraudster at face-value despite his lengthy track-record of ...read more
Not too long ago, I referred to open carry protesters as being comparable to terrorists. The reasons are obvious: in an age when armed madmen routinely blitz through schools and movie theaters, gunning down innocent people, it's not such a smart idea to promote your fringe ...read more
If your impression of the past 14 years of American foreign and security policy was, "Needs more Dick Cheney," then I have good news for you: You are getting more Dick Cheney. And he's practically salivating over the prospect of a terrorist attack "far deadlier" than 9/11 -- ...read more
Over the weekend, Tommy Christopher posted a recap of Paul Rieckhoff's bust up with Glenn Greenwald on Bill Maher over Ed Snowden and the NSA leaks. Tommy's summary of the exchange was fairly explicit in his headline: "Iraq War Vet Mops Floor With Glenn Greenwald On Real Time ...read more
Concluding our trilogy of Republicans who we shouldn't take seriously on Iraq, patient zero in the series has to be former Vice President Dick Cheney. His total lack of credibility in this issue notwithstanding, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial by Cheney, titled ...read more
Yes, the Republican leadership went there. Back in 2012, when a deal to release Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, an American POW held by the Taliban for five years, was first on the table, Republicans reportedly described the idea as President Obama's "Willie Horton moment." As you may or ...read more
I always chuckle a little when I hear people tell me that George Will is one of the smart, reasonable conservatives. While, yes, there are indeed many smart, reasonable conservatives, George Will isn't one of them. He can occasionally say something that sounds promising, but ...read more
The Wall Street Journalreports today that a "web intelligence" company called Recorded Future has determined that in the months following the initial NSA revelations by former contractor Edward Snowden, al-Qaeda operatives switched to new encryption software for the first time ...read more
Oh, Sarah Palin. You cringe-inducing, Chiclet-brained troll. Every time you open your mouth, you prove to the world exactly why you should never be allowed anywhere near the White House, or any elected office, ever. Not only are you way, way out of your depth -- even as a ...read more
I didn't really intend to write yet another post about The Intercept and Glenn Greenwald today, I really didn't. But as I wrote over the Summer, I'll stop doing it when he stops misleading the public. And it happened again today. For the record, I'm neither a fan nor a defender ...read more
Abla Fahita is the latest terror suspect in Egypt, The Washington Post reported yesterday. She's also likely the first one crafted from felt and yarn. In her story for The Washington Post, Erin Cunningham wrote: “Fahita — a Muppet-style character who regularly appears on ...read more
By way of a follow-up to my column from earlier today, 40 Gunmen Armed with Assault Rifles Terrorize Gun Control Group at a Texas Restaurant, I thought I'd address the pro-gun meme circulating Facebook and the comment section of Banter. In response to the article here, along ...read more
