Ray Torres is the director of the short film

Beyond Credit Unions

The film is available for groups to show. Contact Ray at 215 753 9022

Flyer

Also: Press Release

I kinda like this as an anthem for the left these days.

Brief history of PRAWN

• Network groups, organizations, and individuals to stop the repression caused by "never ending wars" at home and abroad, by the US corporate military state
• Support organizations having common ground
• Educate and activate the general public

• East Timor & Indonesia Networks (ETAN)
  
• Delco Waging Peace
  
• Granny Peace Brigade - Philadelphia
• Otherjones - A blog by Deena Stryker
  
• Media Tank  
• Philly Against War
• Northeast Philly for Peace & Justice
  
• Philadelphia Veterans For Peace
• Wounds of War
• Northwest Greens
• Progressive Democracy of South Jersey (PDSJ)
• UFPJ-Delaware Valley Network
• UPenn - FASWI
• Delaware Valley Veterans for America

National Organizations

• United For Peace & Justice (UFPJ)
• World Can't Wait
• ACLU's Blog of Rights

Upcoming Events

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Midsection archive

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Protesting Israel's attack on Palestine

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Defund the Pentagon

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2nd Amazon-Alabama protest

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Union demonstration Amazon-Alabama

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Nuclear weapons declared illegal by UN

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Getting signatures

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BLM March - September

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Pro-Post Office protest

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Rally at African-American Museum

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BLM March 13 June

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Black Lives Matter marches - 6-8 June

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Between the marches - morning of 3 June

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Memorial Day protest

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May Day Car Caravan

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Pro-Impeach and Remove from office

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Demonstration against Iran War

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Demonstration against Iran War

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Demonstration against Iran War

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Impeachment Eve rally

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Rally to support the Kurds

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Climate Strike

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Pro-Venezuela Anti-Intervention

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Horsham Air Base protest

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Protesting giving GW Bush a medal

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Pro-Mueller Investigation protest

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Rally to abolish ICE

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Democratic Rally

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Climate March

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Anti-Drones protest

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Rally at Logan Circle for families

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Protest against the Trump family separatin policy on the Mexican border

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Anti-Drone Protest

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Palestinians and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

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Rally for Palestinians

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March For Our Lives

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Lancaster Direct Action against a fossil fuel pipeline.

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Women's March 2018

Info, articles, etc.

Sign of growing disaffection between corporations and the GOP. Great news for Democrats, of course!

Very happy to see CNN joining the skeptical chorus on the Arizona Cyber-Ninja recount.

Dang! When even a Ukrainian oligarch feels the need to distance himself from Rudy Giuliani!

Senator Marco Rubio says: “[small business owners] can’t find people to fill available jobs.” Well, you know, there has been a movement for quite a while to raise the minimum wage (been $7.25 an hour since 2009) to $15 an hour. So y'know, that might be relevent!

April

And here w have another case that QAnon completely failed to discover! Gee, it's almost like they have no investigative capability at all! Josh Duggar:

pleaded not guilty to one count of receipt of child pornography and one count of possession of child pornography, CNN reported. He faces up to 20 years in prison and fines of up to $250,000 if convicted.

A quickie summary of what Josh Duggar’s been up to for the last several years.

In the section named: "COVID-19 AND THE FAILURE OF REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS," the blogger points out that whether or not you caught COVID-19 during 2020 was very highly dependent on what political party your governor belonged to.

Way back in the old days (2012), Obama's margin of victory was so great (about 4 1/2 million votes) Romney conceded pretty much immediately. Biden won 2020 by around 7 million and Trump still hasn't conceded! 70% of Republicans means about 20% of the country.

Seriously, when an online magazine puts out a piece on a writing project like the 1619 Project and makes so many mistakes that the editor of the Project has to put out a seven-tweet correction, not sure if that calls for hara kiri (rittual suicide), but seriously! At least some people should be fired!

This might be part of the reason that TLG appears to be lost in a world of fantasy. If he thought the stock market was a real-time barometer of his success as president, then the current Happy Days Are Here Again performance of the market must be driving him nuts!

Wondering why we're not getting much news on the border "crisis?" The Biden Administration has appointed good people and has allocated resources. The problem is being solved.

Former Vice President Mike Pence is very, very upset that the current president is such an extreme leftist radical. Erm, approval for Biden's latest speech was 85%!

How both Israel and the US are battling the charge by Human Rights Watch that Israel is an Apartheid state.

Scientists working on better psychedelic drugs so that patients could get the comforting part of psychedelic drugs without tripping out.

As I said, Democrats can do business with Representative Liz Cheney. She's not a lberal, so we strongly disagree with her on a lot of stuff, but she's not a QAnon freak.

This was an interesting part of Biden’s not-exactly-a-SOTU speech. Sigh! Yeah, hope we can keep it up!

Yeah, I watched this rebuttal to the Biden speech and was so completely unimpressed by all of the half-truths and misleading anecdotes, I turned it off after only a few minutes.

Senator Scott (R-SC) gave the response to the Biden first-year Joint Congressional speech. Senate Minority Leader McConnell considered the speech as the future of the Republican Party. It’s hard to see anything praiseworthy about the speech. Sure, Scott “criticized Biden for not uniting America,” but Republicans have not reciprocated to his outreach efforts in any meaningful way. “Tim Scott explicitly told the public, ’[O]ur nation is starving for more than empty platitudes” but had no substantive plans to offer.

During his deposition, Trump Jr. was asked about Winston Wolkoff: "Do you know her?" He replied, "I know of her. I think I’ve met her, but I don’t know her. If she was in this room I’m not sure I would recognize her."

It's pretty clear from the rest of this report that Winston Wolkoff and Don Jr. were acquained with each other on a first-name basis.

1. Because Wyoming, Texas, Pennsylvania and Vermont all have two senators each, saying that the Senate is divided 50-50 between the parties hides the fact that Democrats represent about 40 million more people than Republicans do.

2. The Brennan Center says: “As of March 24, legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states.” Both sides are attempting an “overhaul” of our voting laws. The difference is that Democrats want to do it all in two bills, HR 1 and HR 4.

3. Senator Manchin doesn’t want “a voting bill to restructure the voting of America on a partisan line” basis. Okay, but does he have a realistic plan to reach a voting bill on a bipartisan basis? It’s a nice idea that we can all sit down and sing kumbaya together, but we need practical solutions!

Sorry, I just can’t see that Manchin has any sort of point here.

Hmm, think the two sides are ju-u-ust a little bit apart! Biden wants an infrastructure spending bill of $2.3 trillion. Republicans, once we eliminate all of the BS, want $0.189 trillion.

Yeah, this does not increase my confidence in the ridiculous and unnecessarily secretive "audit" of last November's vote in Arizona!

Yeah, I'd hate to use Gitmo to prosecute Trump, but it's a highly secure place in which to do it. Already has a lot of the necessary facilities and is inaccessible to mob vengeance.

Human Rights Watch has declared Israel to be an Apartheid state, where

...the Israeli state systematically privileges the Jews, wherever they are, and disprivileges the Palestinians, an the basis of race.

I saw on Twitter last night that "Iroquois Confederacy" was trending in response to Rick Santorum's speech. As a young'un, I was vaguely aware that there was an Iroquois Confederacy, but had no idea as to how significant it was to organizing our government. Native Americans were pretty ticked off about his comment.

Update (23 May): Santorum fired from CNN.

From 1993 to 2017, we had a top income tax rate of 39.6% at the maximum (going as low as 35% for many years), then it went to 37%, now Biden wants to put it back at 39.6%. Axios calls this new rate “eye-popping.” Journalistic FAIL!!!

Many years ago, politicians argued that the president should have a “line item veto,” that, after signing a bill, he should be able to go through and delete certain provisions. One of the more powerful arguments against it was that an already-lengthy process would be interminably stretched out still further. Instead of having the process end with the signing, it would then go on and on. This by Arizona will do the same thing to our elections. Right now, elections end with finality when states certify the results.

The Fox & Friends crew is desperate to explain why Biden is more popular than The Last Guy ever was!

Ah, now I get it! Larry Kudlow was trying to make fun of us crazy liberals and spoke of "plant-based beer," as though beer was actually some variety of Soylent Green.  

“What... what does Larry Kudlow think beer is made from exactly?”

Fox News has now had to admit that, no, there is no ban on beef. No one’s consumption will be limited.

430k years ago, a meteorite about 100 to 150 meters wide broke up into tiny particles and super-heated gas and hit Antarctica at the speed of several miles per second.

Senator Lindsey Graham is very upset with US policy under Biden. He really went off on current policy towards Iran:

Did the former president have Iran “on the mat?” Looking at the Global Security piece, it’s far from clear that Iran felt itself on the defensive. It was actually quite clear that Russia and China were not cooperating in any kind of alliance against Iran.

Newt Gingrich is convinced that Biden is “waving a red flag at the bull” by supporting liberal priorities. The way I see it, Biden is simply supporting liberal priorities and really couldn’t care less what the right wing thinks. Frankly, for the party that said “#$@% your feelings” in 2017 when they were in power, for them to think liberals are now going to feel any sympathy for them is pretty rich.

MSNBC’s Tiffany Cross reminds us that former Speaker John Boehner wasn’t that heroic or respectable when he was in office and that we shouldn’t get too excited now, either.

This is very good news! From the 70s onward, business and the GOP had been very tightly allied. Starting with LGBTQ rights, the relationship began to fray and they started growing apart. Democrats are finding more and more that business is on their side!

Alexei Navalny has gotten a check-up by trustworthy doctors, but their diagnosis is that he really needs to be checked back into a proper hospital to receive time-urgent treatment.

This is a real problem with the consumers of media today. We have people checking different sources, they check both Fox News and CNN, but they don't have any means of being able to critically distinguish between the two. All they know is "Different people are saying different things."

Aww! That’s sweet! The kids include Kale in their football game!

Well worth the two minutes it takes to watch this. Olivia Troye tells us the inside story of the day The Last Guy suggested that people might try bleach to deal with the coronavirus. An alarmingly high number of people actually tried to do that.

Important part of a lengthy twitter thread. This is about the company Cyber Ninja that's conducting an audit of November's vote in Arizona. Rachel Maddow discussed them on her show last night (22 April - transcript of show). Does not appear to be a professional outfit!

Yeesh, what a mess! The recount problems in Arizona.

The recount conducted by the "Cyber Ninjas" has all kinds of problems and desperately needs oversight.

Charles Darwin came up with theory of evolution. Many have improved on it, but his framework is still the template that everyone follows. John Maynard Keynes came up with modern economic theory. People have made really strenuous efforts to replace it and the Republican Party is absolutely convinced that Keynes was replaced. But he wasn't. Keynes is still the template.

Twitter has all sorts of fun as conservative commenter Ben Shapiro shows off a $3 piece of wood that he bought at Home Depot. Why? They're heroically and courageously remaining out of Georgia's voting fight, meaning they support voter suppression as "neutrality always serves the oppressor, never the oppressed."

Seriously, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been trying to get corporations involved in politics for many decades. He's changed his mind now, just they consult their polls and spreadsheets and decide that standing for democracy is the profitable thing to do!

Many people disagree with the Derek Chauvin verdit. Of course, they tend to be followers of QAnon.

Why are our police so violent? Part of the answer may have to do with a training course that encourages a military-style understanding of how policing works. Ufortunately, the fellow who provides this training doesn't have the credentials to do so.

"Breaking: Israeli Neo-Fascist LeHava Is Wilding Through Jerusalem"

Sounds like very bad news in Jerusalem.

So the latest Republican infrastructure plan is they want to spend $0.568 trillion whereas Biden wants $2.3 trillion. Erm, yeah, the two sides are pretty far apart!

I've always hated it when political figures speak in vague, fuzzy generalities. When Ben Carson speaks about people injecting politics into vaccinations, he's really only talking about his side of the political aisle. Democrats didn't really do that.

I'm sorry, the hypocrisy here is just unbelievably thick! Senator Cruz talks about the "Rule of Law" after being very quiet or outright supportive during four years under the last president, who really, truly thought the Department of Justice was his very own personal law firm.

Republican senators want spending cuts to equal the new spending. Of course, the cuts they always settle on are those of politically weak constituencies. Never those who make lots of political contributions, etc.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo won himself some really, really bad reviews as the SoS! Larger piece here also looks at Chris Christie and his campaign for president.

Sagittarius A* (pronouncing sag-A-star) is a 4.6-million-solar-mass black hole at the center of our galaxy. Something caused it to flash at 100 times its usual brightness.

Say her name: Makhia Bryant! Also, a fact-check piece says the knife was in Bryant's hand and not on the ground. Does that justify her being shot? $%#@ no!

Doesn't really sound to me as though the police were in any danger.

Woo hoo! Vanita Gupta is confirmed! The piece goes through all of the trouble she had to go through.

So where are we on infrastructure? Biden wants to spend well over $2 trillion, Representative AOC thinks that's being cheap, the moderate group of Republicans advocates for a $0.8 to $0.6 trillion bill and of course there are the hard-liners who think "Democrats should be denied a win at all costs" and want to spend nothing.

The Derek Chauvin verdict on the murder of George Floyd reminds me of the 2002 conviction of a Roman Catholic priest for pedophilia/child rape. It was the first step in a long journey that still isn't really finished. The Church has come a long way since then, but no, the goal was not "chaos," it was justice. Eventually, our police departments will be brought under control as well.

Ahh! More policies from TLG (The Last Guy) being tossed into the dumpster! This time, it's about the environment. 

"Insider" books on Trump are not selling well as the MAGA crowd doesn't want to read about palace intrigue when there is no palace. Best quote from the larger piece: "I think Trump is fading much quicker from the national consciousness than people were banking on.”

Representative Maxine Waters is not at all impressed by GOP members freaking out over her remarks.

Allegedly, Democrats are angry at Representative Waters. Can we find any Democrats to quote? Err...um.

Ah yes! I saw a number of episodes of the 1972-75 Kung Fu series. Good to see an updated reboot of it.

Derek Chauvin: Guilty!

Philonise Floyd (George's brother): "It's justice."

Thought on what the Chauvin verdict meant.

This initial report on George Floyd’s death should raise awareness on how many other sanitized reports there probably are out there.

Very interesting. The official line of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) is that the trial was fair and that former Officer Chauvin was properly convicted.

I followed this dispute on Twitter yesterday. Again, where were the editors?!?!?! When the writer has to defend his work almost immediately after publication from a chorus of critics that are all making the same point, that's a massive editor/writer FAIL!

Good! This change is just rhetorical, but it's a very positive change. "Illegal alien" is out, “undocumented noncitizen” is in.

Woo hoo! First flying craft on another planet!

The spunky little chopper stayed in the air nearly four times longer than the Wright brothers’ first flight (not that it’s a contest)...

Aww! Sorry to hear that Walter Mondale has died.

We really need H.R. 1 to pass in the Senate. Only way to do that is to eliminate the filibuster.

Heh! You can see with Brianna Keilar's promotion (to a morning co-host) that CNN has clearly made some strategic decisions, chiefly that Fox News is now a target at which CNN hosts can "fire at will."

New technology would be nice, but switching the US power supply over to 100% renewables can be done using just current technology for $4.5 trillion, or about three times the last covid/stimulus bill. 

It cost al Qaeda about half a million to launch the September 11 attacks. The US has spent enough on the war in Afghanistan to have paid off all of our student debt, with $600 billion left over. We’ve spent $296 billion just on veteran care alone.

Trudy Rubin, a columnist in the Philadelphia Inquirer, compares Afghanistan to Germany and South Korea, two states that have received protection from the US Government for a great many years. Problem is, I think that after a 20-year occupation, the government of Afghanistan resembles that of South Vietnam far more than it does the other two. The collapse of South Vietnam was very rapid. “We kicked in the door and the house fell down.”

So it seems that around 15 years after the TV series Friends ended, Courtney Cox has settled in the horror genre as her regular thing.

Yeah, I very strongly disagree with the former Speaker John Boehner that the problem with passing gun safety measures back when he was in office was that Democrats and Republicans couldn't agree. The real problem was that Republicans felt completely beholden to the NRA and the NRA didn't want reforms.

The former Speaker Boehner tries very, very hard to keep the Republican Party and especially the hard-line Freedom Caucus, out of the discussion. He simply refuses to admit that his own party was a problem.

Dana Bash of CNN appears to see her role as merely to get the views of various people "on the record." She doesn't appear to see her role as involving any sort of pushback or arguments.

So essentially what Stephen Miller is saying is that he'd like to go back to the days before the Civil Rights Act of 1965, when states could make their own rules in order to remain in power, just as Georgia is attempting to do today.

Yeah, Roger Stone is definitely in trouble here! An LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) is so that you can invest in a business, not so you can pay for

a down payment on a Fort Lauderdale condominium, paid for personal expenses and covered some of their tax liabilities…

and even groceries!

Wow! Representative Ted Lieu is right! This group, led by Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, is a real mess and yes, sounds straight out of the Third Reich. This piece includes their policy platform. The second page begins with "Election fraud" and it's quite clear that the 60 or so cases Rudy Giuliani and company initiated and that all failed didn't make the slightest impression on Greene & Gosar.

Heh! Well, that didn't last long!

Heh!

What’s interesting is that after Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney hinted around that she should have kept it in the original German, [Representative M.T.] Greene quickly walked it back, and genuflected to Trump as the one, true America Firster.

Good! I followed this case with great alarm and am very happy Ellis has saved the Biden Administration the trouble of having him occupy such a sensitive position. Michael Ellis was assigned to be the NSA General Counsel, from which he could have passed all sortss of information on to Trump and others. Trump's phone call to Ukraine was the basis for his first impeachment. Ellis was one of the lawyers who hid the records of that phone call on a top-secret server.

Ooh! Not good! Alexei Navalny is conducting a hunger strike. He really can't withstand one in his condition and so might die at any minute.

Good for Meghan McCain! She stands up for Alexei Navalny and encourages fellow Republicans to do the same.

Update (9 May): Navalny ends his hunger strike with the promise of better medical care.

Do both white and Black people suffer from police violence? Yes.

Do whites suffer statistically more than Blacks? Yes.

Do Black people suffer proportionately more than whites do? Yes. The white population in the US is 76.3%, the Black population is 13.4%. But the numbers of Black people killed is about half that of whites.

This is kind of a problem with the GOP position on infrastructure. They allegedly want for Americans to have nice things, but if the 2017 tax cut is completely untouchable, then they can't seem to favor any way of paying for it.

Ugh! That's an unpleasant milestone! Total world coronavirus death toll just topped 3 million.

I think one of the problems that Tucker Carlson is complaining about, the rapid pace of change that the Senate is now able to make, is partially due to the complete Democratic rejection of austerity economics, but a really big factor is that either Republicans have been in charge of the Senate or they've been using the filibuster to block everything useful for quite some time, so now there's a backlog of bills that really need to be passed.

Day-yu! Pat Robertson is "Woke!" Seriously, Robertson says a lot of good stuff here very much including the idea that if you don't pay for good government services, you don't get good government services.

This is one of the reasons I appreciate the blogs/alternative media. The usual mainstream media (MSM) tends to take the "View from Nowhere," the idea that people have no history and that nothing they said in the recent past should be held against them. The blogs take the view of "Then this &%#@ing guy...!"

See, this is the other half of the problem. not only are Black people being killed by police officers, but guys like this, apparently, have absolutely nothing to fear from the police! What happened to this guy should be the ordinary, standard default for all citizens!

I've spoken of Representative Liz Cheney as someone Democrats can work with. Senator Tom Cotton is someone that Democrats can't work with! The filibuster has to be removed from Senate procedures!

Ivanka Trump get her shot today! Good for her!
Problem (for her): The MAGA people are furious and dismissive as she's pushing back against QAnon and anti-vaxxer theories. Whatcha gonna do, eh?

Biden Administration acts in a way that distresses those fringe political groups that snidely refer to our problems with Russian interference with our elections as "Russiagate."

Mark Zuckergerg, the CEO of Facebook and the former Governor of California Arnold Scwartzenegger, both made no-strings grants to election officials to enable the voting effort. So naturally, the GOP is trying to make such grants illegal.

Would Republicans filibuster an anti-Asian hate crime bill? Yes, the whole point of Republican filibusters is to stop everything regardless of merit.

Blogger looks at US Annual Threat Assessment as regards the Middle East, especially Afghanistan.

CBS News:

Senator John Cornyn asks Assistant Attorney General nominee Kristea Clarke a really stupid question because he was unaware that it was based on a satire.  Obviously, Cornyn was poorly served by incompetent staff, but as he's the guy in charge, it's ultimately his fault.

This is very, very good news! Corporations have decided that it's a good PR move to be in favor of democracy! This decision sets them directly against the Republican Party, which is trying to restrict the vote.

Lots and lots of very good questions about the Daunte Wright police shooting case. In the update, developments in the Breonna Taylor case.

For Democrats to dump the 2017 tax break is apparently a deal-breaker. But the tax break accomplished nothing. It didn't even pay for itself. The GOP doesn't have any alternative idea to fund infrastructure. Saw a comment today that it'll be funded by "rainbows and unicorn farts." 

See, here's the problem with short-term capitalist thinking. A few companies gave one-time bonuses as a response to the 2017 tax cut but that was about it. They now find they can't justify the $1.9 trillion that it cost the Treasury. Intelligent, long-term planning would have meant reducing their own, short-term profit and then they could have justified further tax breaks.

Yep! Agree completely! “We're done! Let's go home (from Afghanistan).”

The plan for Afghanistan is just GTFO!

The blogger gives a hearty “Hoo yah!” to our leaving Afghanistan. 2019 saw the dropping of nearly 7,500 bombs on that country, accomplishing what?

Two groups of Democrats on negotiations with Iran, a larger group that wants true diplomacy and a smaller group that wants to keep trying the Trump method. The Trump method was not producing results. Neither Obama nor Trump was in direct talks with Iran at the ends of their respective terms, but Obama was in a much more promising position.

Problem with the Senator Menendez letter is that it brings in many other issues. I believe the reason the Obama 2015 deal happened is because it was focused on just one. He didn't try to resolve every issue under the sun all in one big agreement.

Yeah, I really couldn't care less what former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo thinks of the Biden Administration getting back into the Iran nuclear deal. The Trump-Pompeo policy was obviously a complete failure.

If, as Bunch suggests, traffic stops are intended to increase police revenue, then we're engaged in a "false economy." We're paying for that revenue through more violence at traffic stops.

Was the shooting of Daunte Wright a racist act? What is clear is that the reason he was stopped in the first place was that the police department needs to fund itself through making BS traffic stops and then fining people. They can't do this to white people as whites have political power, so they'd soon be barred from doing that, so they do it to Black and brown people. In effect, yes. If the policy is not explicitly racist, it might as well be.

On the general subject of disposable people, why was the Dakota Access oil pipeline designated to be where it was? The Standing Rock tribe felt it was because the alternative was to run it through a white area near the city of Bismarck ND and that posed an unacceptable danger to Bismarck's drinking water, so they chose to run it through tribal land instead. Was that a racist decision? Yes. The tribal people were considered to be disposable.