When future historians go searching for the final nail in the US coffin, they may well settle on the date April 20, 2024. On that day Congress passed legislation to fund two and a half wars, hand what’s left of our privacy over to the CIA and NSA, and give the US president the power to shut down whatever part of the Internet he disagrees with. The nearly $100 billion grossly misnamed “National Security Supplemental” guarantees that Ukrainians will continue to die in that country’s unwinnable war with Russia, that Palestinian civilians will continue to be slaughtered in Gaza with US weapons, an ..read more

House Speaker Mike Johnson betrayed liberty and the Constitution by making a full-court press to get a “clean” reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Act through the House. Section 702 authorizes warrantless surveillance of foreign citizens. When the FISA Act was passed, surveillance state boosters promised that 702 warrantless surveillances would never be used against American citizens. However, intelligence agencies have used a loophole in 702, allowing them to subject to warrantless surveillance any American who communicated with a non-US citizen who ..read more

Even Republican stalwarts like current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are starting to notice that something is shifting in the party. While McConnell announced recently that he would step down as Republican leader in the US Senate, in an interview last week he was adamant that he would continue to serve out his term in the Senate with one purpose in mind: “fighting back against the isolationist movement in my own party.” He sounds worried. What McConnell deems to be “isolationism” had for much of our history been called America’s traditional foreign policy. There have been major except ..read more

This weekend’s late-night spending vote in Congress seems like another in an endless series of sequels to a bad suspense movie. Just at the brink of “disaster,” just before the stroke of midnight, Congress pulls off a miracle and passes an omnibus bill to save us from a “government shutdown!” The heroes have saved the day! Unfortunately, this latest sequel is as bad as the previous ones, as the American people are left with a massive $1.2 trillion dollar spending package to add to our already $34 trillion in debt. Military spending will, of course, be increased yet again, as the military-indus ..read more

President Biden may have recently made history as the first president to discuss snack chips in the State of the Union message. He used snack chips to illustrate the phenomenon of shrinkflation. Shrinkflation occurs when businesses reduce the amount of goods sold in order to avoid raising prices. President Biden pointed out that businesses hope that, since both the price and the size of the package remain the same, most consumers will not notice they are getting fewer chips, cookies, or whatever other product has been affected by shrinkflation. President Biden called on Congress to pass legisl ..read more

Last week President Biden delivered a dark and angry speech meant to convince the low percentage of Americans who still feel positive about his presidency that everything is fine and will only get better if he is re-elected for a second term. Unfortunately we have come a long way from the optimism of a Ronald Reagan, who won a second term partially on the popularity of his “Morning in America” campaign commercials. Reagan was far from a perfect president, but it was that sense of optimism in otherwise difficult times that resulted in a record re-election victory. Biden’s speech, by contrast, w ..read more

According to the Federal Reserve, credit card delinquencies increased by 50 percent in 2023, while consumer debt grew to 17.5 trillion dollars. A recent survey by Clever Real Estate found that three in five Americans have credit card debt and that 23 percent of Americans increase their credit card debt every month. The survey also found that 48 percent of Americans (including 59 percent of millennials) use credit cards for essential living expenses. The overreliance on credit cards and the accompanying increase in consumer debt are consequences of our fiat money system. Since Richard Nixon sev ..read more

In a recent CNN interview, the normally very confident US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland sounded a little desperate. She was trying to make the case for Congress to pass another $61 billion dollars for the neocons’ proxy war project in Ukraine and she was throwing out the old slogans that the neocons use when they want funding for their latest war. Asked by CNN whether she believes that Congress will eventually pass the bill, Nuland responded that she has confidence that, “we will do what we have always done, which is defend democracy and freedom around the world…” What Nuland is att ..read more

Protecting democracy and the Constitution from Donald Trump and the “MAGA extremists” is a major theme of President Biden’s reelection campaign. As is often the case in American politics, President Biden is just as, if not more, guilty of posing an “existential threat” to the Constitution as those he smears as “extremists.” For example, President Biden and members of his administration have waged a campaign to undermine the First Amendment by “encouraging” companies to suppress the expression of “unapproved” views online. The latest example of the administration trying to get a private interne ..read more

There has been much written and said about Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week. As of this writing the video on Twitter alone has been viewed nearly 200 million times, making it likely the most-viewed news event in history. Many millions of viewers who may not have had access to the other side of the story were informed that the Russia/Ukraine military conflict did not begin in 2022, as the mainstream media continuously reports, but in fact began eight years earlier with a US-backed coup in Ukraine. The US media does not report this because they don’t wan ..read more