Stephan: Beginning with the Bush-Cheney phony Iraq war and continuing down to the present day, the United States has been the principal terrorist nation in the world. That may be hard to accept but the facts will have it no other way. Because we don't have a conscription armed forces only 1 percent of Americans are actively involved with the military so what we are doing doesn't register as it would with a conscription miitary, where many more families from a much larger demographic would be involved.
The ongoing U.S. “war on terror” has forcibly displaced as many as 59 million people from just eight countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia since 2001, according to a new report published Tuesday by Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
The latest figure represents a dramatic increase from the Costs of War Project’s 2019 report, which estimated that 21 million people had been displaced internally or forced to flee their home countries due to violence inflicted or unleashed by U.S.-led wars over the past two decades. That report also put the death toll of the so-called war on terror at 801,000 and the price tag at $6.4 trillion.
The new report argues that “wartime displacement (alongside war deaths and injuries) must be central to any analysis of the post-9/11 wars and their short- and long-term consequences.”
Stephan: Christianity in the United States, on the basis of the data, is less a religion and more a White supremacist, male dominance, christofascist political movement. This is a familiar path trod by the Communists on the left and the Nazis on the right. And now we see it in the U.S.
Right wing Christians
Religious right activists are inserting themselves into the election process by gearing up to challenge votes cast by mail and watch for suspected fraud at polling stations.
Right-wing Christians and conservatives are training thousands of volunteers to challenge the validity of some votes cast in key battlegrounds states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, reported The Guardian.
“I’m particularly concerned about mail-in voting fraud,” said Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of the Texas-based group True the Vote.
There’s no evidence that mail-in voting has caused widespread problems in U.S. elections, but Engelbrecht’s group has already trained about 10,000 volunteers to sniff out alleged fraud in targeted counties through handwriting analysis and other methods.
Engelbrecht became especially concerned about the potential for fraud after some NBA teams offered their arenas for in-person voting to ensure Black Americans had access to the polls as the Trump administration imposed new limits on the U.S. Postal Service.
True the Vote, which has roots in the Tea Party movement, has offered training sessions with religious and conservative groups such as Intercessors for America, the […]
Stephan: I'm just going to let this report speak for itself. The Trump administration and Trump himself have reached a level of vileness beyond anything I have ever seen.
Firefighters work beneath the destroyed mullions, the vertical struts which once faced the soaring. Credit: AP/MARK LENNIHAN
A New York Daily News scoop published Thursday revealed that the Trump administration has siphoned around $4 million from the New York City Fire Department’s fund for its September 11 first responders, drawing outrage on the 19th anniversary of the attacks, but the U.S. Treasury says the money was diverted because of “delinquent debt” owed by New York City to the federal government.
The funds are part of the FDNY World Trade Center Health Program, which was established by the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010, a bill passed by Congress that provides healthcare to first responders who have suffered a range of illnesses from exposure to dust and smoke at Ground Zero.
“TRUMP DOESN’T ONLY HATE VETERANS, HE HATES FIRST RESPONDER HEROES,” tweeted actress Debra Messing in reaction to the Daily News report.
Fred Guttenberg, father of Parkland school shooting victim Jamie Guttenberg, said he was “F—KING P—-ED” about the report, because his brother […]
Raphael Satter, Christopher Bing and Joel Schectman, Reporters - MSN News/Reuters
Stephan: Here we go again. The amazing thing is Russia has this dinky little economy, about the size of New York state, it's economy is almost entirely dependent on oil and gas, dying industries, and except for its nuclear weapons Russia really shouldn't be considered a major geopolitical power. What makes them one is not Russia, but Trump. The way he defers to Putin, Trump's failure to protect allies, to impose sanctions; his attempts to degrade NATO. Trump functionally is a Russian agent, and they will do anything to keep him in power,
Trump’s Controller
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Microsoft identified a suspected hacking group that targeted a firm working with Democrat Joe Biden as the same Russian-backed unit blamed by the U.S. government for breaking into the campaign of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, according to two sources briefed on Microsoft’s analysis.
The hacking attempts targeted staff at Washington-based SKDKnickerbocker, a campaign strategy and communications firm working with 2020 presidential election hopeful Biden and other prominent Democrats, over the past two months, the sources said.
SKDK Vice Chair Hilary Rosen declined to comment. The Biden campaign said it was aware Microsoft said a foreign actor had tried and failed to access “non-campaign email accounts of individuals affiliated with the campaign.” Microsoft, which has shared with SKDK its assessment that Russian state-backer hackers targeted the firm, declined to comment.Democratic U.S. presidential nominee and former Vice President Biden visits Detroit. Credit: Reuters/LEAH MILLIS
The Russian hacking group, which many cyber researchers refer to as “Fancy […]
Stephan: By almost any social outcome data you care to cite from infant mortality to longevity we are a nation in precipitous decline. Nicholas Kristof lays it out very well. The only thing that is going to change this is we ourselves. Four more years of Trump and we will be a christofascist kleptocratic oligarchy. The choice is yours. You have until November 3rd to decide which side you are on.
This should be a wake-up call: New data suggest that the United States is one of just a few countries worldwide that is slipping backward.
A woman in Pennington Gap, Va., a town that has suffered the ravages of the epidemic of despair. Credit:. Johnathon Kelso/The New York Times
The newest Social Progress Index, shared with me before its official release Thursday morning, finds that out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s.
“The data paint an alarming picture of the state of our nation, and we hope it will be a call to action,” Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor and the chair of the advisory panel for the Social Progress Index, told me. “It’s like we’re a developing country.”
The index, inspired by research of Nobel-winning economists, collects 50 metrics of well-being — nutrition, safety, freedom, the environment, health, education and more — […]
Democratic U.S. presidential nominee and former Vice President Biden visits Detroit. Credit: Reuters/LEAH MILLIS 
