Category: News

It’s interesting that accusations that Putin is trying to swing the election to Trump peaked, for now, in the midst of the Democratic Convention, and distracted nicely from what was revealed in the hacked emails. Hmmm.

Putin was then ushered off stage, to be replaced by the Wrath of Khan and their son, who died in Iraq 12 years ago. I wonder now when Putin will be brought back. He will of course be brought back, being far too good a bad guy to waste in this most obscene of elections.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no global enemy for America to face down. No big nasty to spur weapons procurement, or to justify a huge standing military with hundreds of bases around the world, or to pick fights with to allow a president down in the polls to morph into a war leader.

Continue reading “Waiting on Putin, The Dream Candidate”

The Obama Administration announced yesterday that it would begin a sustained bombing campaign against ISIS in Libya. The Administration said it was acting in response to a request by the Libyan “Government of National Accord,” which was created by the UN rather than voted in by the Libyan people. Asked about the scope of this new US war on Libya, Pentagon Spokesman Peter Cook said, “We don’t have an end point.” Thus far Congress has been silent on this new war. We are not silent, however. Tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

On August 6 each year, the world commemorates the dawn of the atomic age by remembering the obliteration of Hiroshima. In May, President Obama laid a wreath in the Peace Park that marks ground zero there.

This is also the time each year when politicians, historians, veterans, and peace activists revisit the decision to use this new weapon for the first time, then for the second three days later at Nagasaki. The rationales are familiar: nukes would shorten the war, save American lives, and demonstrate the country’s overwhelming military and technological superiority. It did not last long. Stalin mobilized Soviet resources to break the American monopoly soon after receiving intelligence reports on the successful Trinity test in New Mexico. The arms race began to sprint before the nuclear dust settled in Japan.

Continue reading “After Hiroshima and Nagasaki”

The ad pierces your consciousness and catches you by surprise. Plastered on the side of Seattle’s King County Metro it hurls you momentarily back in time, to a time when nuclear weapons were an imminent threat to our survival. Or did the era never end?

The ad – sponsored by local Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action – reads: "20 miles west of Seattle is the largest concentration of deployed nuclear weapons in the U.S."

Behind this text is a map, depicting the proximity of Seattle to Naval Base Kitsap, located on the eastern shore of Hood Canal, one of the four main basins in Washington state’s Puget Sound. The base is home port for eight of the US Navy’s 14 Trident ballistic missile submarines as well as an underground nuclear weapons storage complex. Together they’re believed to store more than 1,300 nuclear warheads, according to Hans Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.

This is arguably the biggest single concentration of nuclear warheads not only in the US, but in the world.

Continue reading “Massive Deployment of US WMD Spotlighted by Peace Group”

Acclaimed author and vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League, Mark Twain, popularized the expression, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Bureaucrats revel in distorting life’s spontaneous order with data-driven government policies and interventions. They hide behind their numbers to provide a facade of respectability, or in other instances, employ data to argue conclusions that are just as absurd as the State’s present brutality and thievery. Some statistics, however, frighten even the administrators of Leviathan.

Americans’ trust in government is at historically low levels. According to recent Gallup and Pew public opinion polls, more than four-fifths of Americans do not trust Washington, D.C. “to do what is right.” During the past half-century, a fluctuating segment of those respondents – not an insignificant number, but in the single digits – said that they never trust the federal government.

Never. That’s a good start.

Continue reading “I’m Paying Taxes, But What Am I Buying?”

US Celebrates Unprecedented Expansion of Global War on Terror

The US announced a new target country in the War on Terror, as airstrikes rained down on Sirte, Libya. The target was ISIS and heavy casualties were reported in the initial aftermath, though it’s not clear whether any were civilians.

It’s not the US’s first rebound with Libya after the 2011 US-led NATO intervention dramatically destabilized the country. It also won’t be the last, as Libya remains in abject chaos and ISIS has had a foothold for some time.

The problem of Libya has not been a major theme of the 2016 political cycle so far. Donald Trump has seemed reluctant to focus on it, perhaps for fear of appearing too “soft” on foreign policy. And given that Hillary Clinton was a major proponent of this clearly disastrous war, she would like to keep the conversation on just about anything else. The (limited) good news is that Hillary’s vulnerability on the issue may make President Obama exercise some restraint in Libya prior to the election, if only to avoid drawing any extra attention to the debacle.

Continue reading “US Celebrates Unprecedented Expansion of Global War on Terror, and Other Stories”