Back in 2014, with the rabid support of the Tea Party and far-right talkshow hosts like Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, and Ann Coulter, Dave Brat, an econ professor at Randolph–Macon College with an Ayn Rand fetish and a talent for riling up crowds of angry voters, somehow managed to win the Republican primary for Virginia’s […]
About a week and a half ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a news conference at the Ministry of Defence in Tel Aviv, where he stood in front of an enormous “Iran lied” graphic, and talked of the country’s covert nuclear arms program. What wasn’t clear to everyone watching, however, was that none of […]
Quite a bit has happened over this past week. For the purposes of this post, I’d like to focus on just three of the many story lines that I’ve been following; our bombing of Syria, the Scooter Libby pardon, and the criminal case against Donald Trump’s “fixer,” Michael Cohen. Let’s start by talking about Michael […]
A few nights ago, I told you about a family member of mine who had shared a purposefully misleading political graphic on Facebook, and how I responded. The piece, which incorrectly attributed $5 billion of the nation’s debt to the “Democratic majority,” was produced by an organization called Right Change, a fake grassroots entity bankrolled […]
Bush administration sought to discredit local academic, Juan Cole
I don’t imagine that much will come of it, but the New York Times has learned that, during the Bush administration, employees of the CIA were instructed to unearth information that might be used to delegitimize the work of U-M professor Juan Cole, a well-regarded critic of the war in Iraq. The following clip comes […]