The corporate Democrats can see through false dichotomies when it suits them to do so. When National Rifle Association Republicans ritually assert (after big mass shootings, like the recent one in Virginia Beach) that “people kill people, guns don’t kill people,” smart corporate Democrats point out that the extreme number of people killed by other people wielding guns in the United States cannot be understood without factoring in the weakness of gun laws and the remarkable availability of lethal weaponry in the nation. Most corporate Democrats rightly call out “the people kill people” vs. “guns kill people” dichotomy as dangerously false. More

In recent days, in response to the Trump administration’s issuance on May 23 of a 17-charge indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a number of prominent liberal columnists and Democratic politicians have come out with highly critical comments. Understandably, many long-time supporters of Julian Assange have seized on these condemnations as a chink of light in the darkness of the U.S. Government’s decade-long pursuit of the trailblazing publisher, as a hopeful sign that, finally, it might be possible to move defense of Julian Assange into the mainstream. More

From the start, I’ve been worried about the effect of Wikileaks, not on the brutal western governments whose activities it has disclosed in shocking detail (especially in the Middle East) but on the practice of journalism. When we scribes were served up this Wikileaks pottage, we jumped in, paddled around and splashed the walls of reporting with our cries of horror. And we forgot that real investigative journalism was about the dogged pursuit of truth through one’s own sources rather than upsetting a bowl of secrets in front of readers, secrets which Assange and co – rather than us – had chosen to make public.Why was it, I do recall asking myself almost 10 years ago, that we could read the indiscretions of so many Arabs or Americans but so few Israelis? Just who was mixing the soup we were supposed to eat? What had been left out of the gruel? More