In U.S. political talk, Iraq is often treated as a “finished chapter.” The invasion is history, the occupation is history, and even the war against ISIS is presented as something largely completed. Yet in 2025, Iraqis are still living with the consequences of decisions made in Washington, and U.S. power in their country is not disappearing – it is simply changing shape.
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One of the inconveniences in my life these days is called gout, a condition – in my right knee – that absolutely lives up to the negativity of its name. Ongoing ouch. Careful, careful. I’ve had it on and off for a couple of years now, and recently it started getting worse. Indeed, getting around with the help of a cane – whom I had named Citizen Cane – no longer felt sufficiently safe. I started using a walker.
These words, spoken by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson at the opening of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal of Nazi war criminals, might give pause to White House and Pentagon strategists who appear anxious to launch a U.S. war on Venezuela, if only they had a fear of violating international law.
Growing up surrounded by World War II veterans, most of whom refused to discuss their service fighting the horrid fascist enemies, as kids we turned to the movies to learn about war. The WWII Vets I knew did not brag about their “lethality,” or their “warrior ethos.” Most of them refused to talk about it at all, apparently regarding their service as at best a necessary evil, not something to celebrate. That was the difference between America’s great citizen soldiers and Nazi Germany’s warrior culture that elevated war to be the highest achievement.
President Donald Trump’s Achilles Heel initially wounded by the explosive Epstein files —never healed. Long before the latest disclosures emerged, flight logs, photographs, victim testimonies, and now-public emails had already punctured the myth of invincibility he built around himself. These newly uncovered emails — referencing “private evenings,” coordinated travel, and access to Epstein’s network of trafficked young girls — may not alone prove criminal guilt, but they obliterate the illusion of distance Trump once claimed existed between them.
I suppose Sense and Trump in the same sentence is an Oxymoron Moron for certain!
On March 16, 1968, Thompson, a young Army helicopter pilot in the 123rd Aviation Battalion of the 23rd Infantry Division, flew over the South Vietnamese village of Sơn Mỹ and witnessed something unimaginable. American soldiers were systematically killing unarmed civilians—women, children, and the elderly. There were no enemy combatants. This was not war. This was a massacre.
News of the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s health struggles has stirred many. It has me praying. And it has me remembering the hard lessons he taught, shaped in the trenches of our people’s ongoing fight for freedom.
America just celebrated Thanksgiving, so family and friends gathered around the table to give thanks and to have some food.
When Dr. Martin Luther King was jailed in Birmingham in 1963 for protesting racial segregation in that city, he declared that such protests were needed to create a “constructive nonviolent tension” that would lift individuals out of the “dark depths of prejudice and racism.” As he explained, “the purpose of the direct action was to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”