Over the past few years, the Banter has intermittently covered internet troll HA Goodman, a case study in what happens on the political fringes in America. Goodman originally wrote hundreds of articles claiming Hillary Clinton would be indicted. Since then, he has evolved (or ...read more
Today Donald Trump retweeted this: There's little analysis one can do of why Trump retweeted this, because we already know why he did: 1. He's a thin-skinned bully who only wants praise. 2. He's a racist piece of shit. But how about the guy who's responsible for the tweet in the ...read more
There's never anything more depressing than reading the comments section of YouTube. It rarely matters what the video is about, as it is almost a guarantee that hordes of lonely psychopaths descend upon the comments section to spew hateful venom at each other, the video or to ...read more
For several weeks now, the nation's attention has been focused on Ferguson, Mo., and in particular, the militarized response of police to mostly-peaceful protests of the killing of 18 year-old Mike Brown. On Wednesday, a considerably less-tragic reminder of overboard police ...read more
If you haven't seen this by now you probably just logged into your computer today. It's almost impossible to know at this point whether what you're about to watch is entirely for real, but it damn sure looks that way. The set up: last weekend in the parking lot of a Dollar ...read more
What's up with that? At midnight, Google put out a video about how the video site was going to shut down soon and this got some people pretty worked up. You can read more here. Check it out here: ...read more
By Bob Cesca: Yesterday I wrote a column with the headline The Biggest Mitt Romney Lie (So Far). I specifically covered my ass with the parenthetical qualifier "so far" knowing that he'd one-up himself with another cynical whopper of a lie very, very soon. I had no idea it ...read more
By Chez Pazienza: There are a few subjects that I feel like I've written about so often that when they inevitably come up again, I'm at a loss to say anything about them that I haven't said before. It's one of the occupational hazards of blogging steadily for six years: You ...read more
By Ben Cohen: On a fairly regular basis, I'm asked to comment on various political and economic issues on the RT network (the English language Russian news network). I enjoy going on the shows and engaging in debate and commentary that is never seen on regular cable news. RT has ...read more
From Information Week: Google warns that government attempts to remove online information are increasing and that some of the governments making censorship requests are Western democracies. U.S. authorities, for example, made 6,192 requests seeking the removal of information ...read more
I received a fair few emails about my piece defending George Monbiot against Noam Chomsky, most of them supporting Chomsky's point of view. My take was pretty one sided - I believe that Chomsky was way off the mark and was completely unfair to Monbiot, who was asking him a ...read more
By Bob Cesca: There's a YouTube video circulating throughout the right-wing blogosphere showing an older woman sobbing out loud while an airport TSA security official pats down her legs. The woman is clearly very upset by the indignity she's suffering in the name of simply ...read more
Newt Gingrich is dramatically curtailing his campaign schedule, laying off about a third of his staff and dismissing his campaign manager as he focuses on a last-ditch effort to win the Republican presidential nomination at the party's convention. Gingrich's strategy hinges on ...read more
The growing ranks of Syria's disaffected appeared to get a high-profile addition Wednesday, when a man identifying himself as Abdo Hussam el Din, the country's deputy oil minister, announced in a video posted on YouTube that he was defecting from the regime of President Bashar ...read more
by Ben Cohen TechCrunch reports on a bizarre case when London based artist Calvin Harris found his own music removed from youtube. Harris apparently wasn't informed before the song was removed, and needless to say, wasn't particularly happy. Here is his response on his twitter ...read more
