The US military is now taking Israel's increasingly belligerent rhetoric against Iran more seriously and is directly warning it not to take any action. The delicate and volatile situation puts the United State's interests in the area in jeopardy and it is now calculating that ...read more

By Ben Cohen: The pretense that the United States is an honest broker in the Israeli/Palestinian crisis must now be completely dismissed from serious circles. From the Guardian: The United States has warned European governments against supporting a Palestinian bid for enhanced ...read more

The White House has apparently rejected a request by Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to meet President Barack Obama when he travels to the US later this month for the UN General Assembly meeting. An Israeli official told the Reuters news agency that Netanyahu's aides ...read more

By Bob Cesca: Technically, the U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee the right to vote. It seems odd, considering all of the various other rights, guarantees and structural details enumerated in the document. That said, there are amendments that provide reasons why certain ...read more

By Ben Cohen: According to the Mississippi Tea Party, the implementation of Obamacare is tantamount to treason, and the chairman is advocating an armed uprising to get rid of the 'criminal invaders' residing in the White House. On their official website chairman Roy Nicholson ...read more

By Ben Cohen: When faced with a serious problem, it is always crucial to understand exactly what you are dealing with in order to change it. The first step is an awareness of the problem itself - if you don't see it, you can't fix it, and the problem remains. And if everyone ...read more

By Robert Parry: The chaos that is engulfing Europe, where 17 countries share a common currency (the euro) but lack a unified fiscal policy, underscores again the wisdom of America’s Framers, who cast aside a states-rights-oriented system in favor of a strong central government, ...read more

The Atlantic has a great piece on the very lucrative side industry of Presidential politics where candidates turn failure into a media career. The best (and worst) examples: Pat Robertson (1988): His Christian Broadcasting Network and its flagship show, The 700 Club, had been on ...read more

By Ben Cohen: The world is used to watching turmoil in the Middle East. The region has suffered decades of war at the hands of multiple aggressors - some domestic and some foreign - the results always being the same: Death. And lots of it. Currently, Syrian President Bashar ...read more

By Ben Cohen: Those who define themselves as Libertarians, Tea Partiers, and Free Market Capitalists have one primary objective: To get rid of government and let markets reign supreme. Unfortunately, none of them seem to have thought through the consequences of a country with ...read more

By Robert Parry: If you relied on one signpost for where not to go, it might be the columns of New York Times star Thomas L. Friedman: If he’s pointing in one direction, like some humorless Cheshire Cat, it’s usually a safe bet that you should go the other way. Sure, he’s not ...read more

By Robert Parry: As the Republican-controlled Supreme Court gets to work writing its opinion on the Affordable Care Act – with many observers expecting that the five GOP justices will strike the law down – it’s worth recalling how a similar batch of Republican justices twisted ...read more

By Bob Cesca: It's very unlikely the president will offer up a new healthcare reform bill if the current law is ripped to shreds by the conservative-controlled Supreme Court. In his own words, there are only two ways to make sure all Americans can afford healthcare: the current ...read more

By Robert Parry: If Fox News and Antonin Scalia were around in 1792 when James Madison and George Washington helped push through the Militia Acts requiring citizens to buy muskets and other military supplies, those Founders likely would have heard complaints like: “What else will ...read more

By Robert Parry: The Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court behaved more like Fox News pundits than serious jurists weighing the constitutionality of an important law addressing the health of the American people. On Tuesday, they posed silly hypothetical questions of the ...read more

By Robert Parry: Does anyone doubt that if a Republican president had enacted the Affordable Care Act – with its individual mandate devised by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and with Mitt Romney denouncing “free riders” not paying their share of health care costs – the U.S. ...read more

This says it all: Being a millionaire many times over, Romney has about as much understanding of the worries regular people face as Kim Jong Il did about North Koreans (and no, I'm not comparing Mitt Romney to Kim Jong Il). The United States is one of the most divided nations ...read more

If you add up all the things that Ron Paul believes are unconstitutional, there would literally be no reason to have a government at all: Why on earth this man is viewed as being a serious candidate is anyone's guess, but then looking at the rest of the GOP field, it isn't that ...read more

Steve Benen comments on the alarming fact that Americans understand that the Republicans are deliberately sabotaging the economy, but take it out on Obama regardless of his ability to do anything about it: The degree of national cynicism is so intense, many Americans may ...read more

Senator McCain in 2009: Senator McCain in 2011: This is another classic example of the United State's contradictory and hypocritical stance on foreign leaders. In 2009, Gaddafi was an 'interesting man' apparently worthy of obtaining American military hardware as an 'important ...read more

Chez Pazienza boils down the competing theories as to why Ron Paul is largely ignored by the mainstream media, despite his obvious popularity (Paul actually finished second in the Iow straw poll last week - a fact no one seems to recall): There are two contradictory arguments ...read more

Chris Hedges on the abysmal treatment of Muslim Americans post 9/11: We no longer have freedom; there is only the appearance of freedom. We are consumed by an endless and vague war on terror in which the perfidiousness of our enemy, whose number, location and nature are never ...read more