The most glaring topic that is missing in action from the 2016 U.S. presidential race – climate change. The candidates almost never mention it. Reporters and debate moderators rarely ask about it. Supporters of candidates usually don’t mention it as a prominent reason for their support.

The Clinton camp has been able to project a kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria: that Russia is responsible for everything.

Clinton’s email scandal is not the real issue. She has spent her political career ruthlessly advancing the interests of high finance, the military industrial complex and corporate America, with dramatic repercussions for minorities and the marginalised inside the United States, and the civilian populations of countries targeted for US military intervention and destabilization during the her time as an influential first lady, senator and secretary of state.

On March 16, 1986, President Ronald Reagan went on national television to make a desperate pitch for the restoration of congressional aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. This particular war had never been popular with Americans, who stubbornly remained indifferent to lurid scenarios proffered by the Great Communicator that the Sandinistas might sweep north through Guatemala and Mexico to menace Texas. So Reagan deployed a new tactic, denouncing the Sandinistas as a regime that had its hand in the drug trade.

At least 40 women have accused Bill Clinton or Donald Trump of rape or other sexual assaults going back to the 1960’s and forward through every decade since.

The prevailing view is that foreign policy is Hillary's strong suit, and that she is a seasoned and capable leader, a “progressive pragmatist” who knows how to get things done. Conventional wisdom often conflicts with reality. Sometimes it inverts it. This is one of those times.

In the recent Wikileaks revelations confirming Hillary Clinton’s duplicity, one of the clearest disclosures of her policy plans concerns her intention regarding Social Security. She stated that she would return to the position of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, charged with producing recommendations for reducing the deficit, i.e. cutting government social spending.

Americans have been led to believe when their house increases in value it benefits them, it doesn’t. Elevated housing costs have been shown to drive homelessness more than poverty rates.

Clinton is, to put it gently, a confirmed and unapologetic “hawk.” She calls for what in the US is euphemistically called a “muscular” foreign policy. Muscular is a term of art in vogue among Washington chicken hawks that means using the US’s outsized military might to pressure or even terrorize other countries into backing US foreign policy, and to invade or subvert those that do not go along. http://www.counterpunch.org/…/…/03/the-problem-with-hillary/

Wtf is this shit?

Israel and its enablers have successfully engineered a hollowing out of official discourse about Israel to blunt even the mildest criticism.

The unequal distribution of living space is part of the fabricated global hierarchy of human value.

Well, here we are: at the bottom of the barrel under forty feet of slag. In a few days’ time, we’ll know our fate: the five-alarm fire of Trump Rule (oh, how those police unions are chomping at the bit!) or the Clinton Age of Hyper-War (oh, how those neocons are chomping at the bit!). In either case, the entrenched coagulation of corporate interests and war profiteers that have strangled the peace, prosperity and prospects of the American people will not be budged an inch.

#NoDAPL

So you joined law enforcement or the National Guard because you wanted to uphold the law, protect innocent civilians against the bad guys, and help your community in times of need. Instead, they’re having you blockade unarmed people who are trying to hold a prayer vigil, chasing them with armored vehicles and ATVs, raiding their tipis and sweat lodges at gunpoint, and shooting them (and their horses) with pepper spray, concussion grenades, tasers, and rubber bullets. You thought you’d be the cop on the beat or the citizen soldier, and they’ve made you into the cavalry riding in with Custer.

The West is feeling more and more like an irrational maze. The banks are mad. The austerity too. But the anti-Russia hysteria is the final straw. It’s not just “anti-Russia”: it’s anti-truth, anti-rational and anti-modern. It’s the end result of postmodernism. What began as irony is now systematic madness.

Dakota Access caught sending fake armed protesters to infiltrate the Water Protectors.

Cuba may soon turn out to be a helpful neighbor to the United States. U. S. barriers have prevented that from happening. But bi-national relations are improving and there are signs that Cuba is primed to lend a hand.

As they seek to block construction on the 1200-mile long pipeline, Water Protectors are getting arrested by the hundreds in North Dakota, victims of a police force now virtually indistinguishable from an occupying army.

To understand the situation in Aleppo is to understand that key to the conflict in Syria at this juncture is whether it is Washington and its allies or the Syrian Army and Russia who liberate Raqqa, the capital of the so-called Islamic State.