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Category: Sean Hannity

  • Five Actions that Definitively Disqualify Trump for his Coveted Nobel Peace Prize

    I am especially proud to be the first President in decades who has started no new wars.
    — Donald Trump, Farewell Address, 20 January 2021

    I am the Peace President and only I will prevent WW3!
    — Donald J. Trump, Truth Social, 6 September 2024

    I think I’m going to get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things, if they gave it out fairly, which they don’t.
    — Donald Trump, Washington Post, 23 September 2019

    Seemingly crushing Trump’s aspirations, Cross World News has headlined: “Donald Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize Push Rejected.”

    It has long been obvious that the self-described “president of peace” Donald Trump has been immodestly pining and campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize. Trump figures if Barack Obama — audaciously though — was awarded the peace prize, then he should be as well. “They gave it to Obama. He didn’t even know what he got it for. He was there for about 15 seconds and he got the Nobel Prize.” Trump complained, “With me, I probably will never get it.”

    Nonetheless, Trump believes that he has the bona fides to win a vaunted and tainted Nobel Peace Prize. Trump prides himself on his having held negotiations with the DPRK and on his role in pushing for the Abraham Accords in the Middle East. In more recent times, he has taken credit for having ended seven wars. Even if all this were indisputably true, he still should not be in contention for a peace prize.

    Five solid reasons that invalidate peace credentials

    To start, a nomination from Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu — indicted for alleged responsibility “for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024” as cited by the  UN-backed International Criminal Court (ICC) — should raise some eyebrows.

    Even so, Berg Harpviken, who guides the Nobel Peace Prize committee said, “To be nominated is not necessarily a great achievement. The great achievement is to become a laureate.” Trump is just one of 338 individuals and organizations nominated this year.

    1) — More egregious for Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize aspirations are his administration’s actions that are strongly supportive of the Israeli government’s genocidal actions in Palestine.

    2) — There is the case of the ongoing US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. This was admitted by secretary of state Marco Rubio, in an interview with Sean Hannity, saying, “And frankly, it’s a proxy war between nuclear powers – the United States, helping Ukraine…” US involvement is cited as prolonging the fighting that has seen, according to retired US colonel Douglas Macgregor, over 1.7 million Ukrainian soldiers killed or missing in action, including over a hundred thousand Russians.

    3) — In March 2025, the United States launched Operation Rough Rider, a large campaign of air and naval strikes against Ansar Allah targets in war-ravaged Yemen.

    4) — On 22 June 2025, the US air force and navy bombed three nuclear facilities in Iran, this despite Iran having not attacked or threatened the US and being in negotiations at that time with the US over Iran’s nuclear program.

    5) — On 3 September 2025, the US Trump attacked a small Venezuelan boat, allegedly carrying drugs bound for the US, killing all eleven people onboard. The BBC cites experts calling the attack illegal:

    [Prof Michael Becker:] “Not only does the strike appear to have violated the prohibition on the use of force, it also runs afoul of the right to life under international human rights law.”

    Prof [Luke] Moffett said that the use of force in this case could amount to an “extrajudicial arbitrary killing” and “a fundamental violation of human rights”.

    The US narrative has since been heavily called into question.

    Subsequently, on 13 September 2025, according to the Venezuelan foreign minister Yvan Gil, the US navy further ratcheted up tensions by raiding a Venezuelan tuna boat with nine fishermen while it was sailing in Venezuelan waters.

    Conclusion

    Actively abetting a genocide, promoting a proxy war, launching attacks on nuclear facilities, bombing war-ravaged Yemen, and illegally bombing and raiding small boats in open water on unproven claims, separately, and definitively in totality, must rule out any consideration for a peace prize.

    The post Five Actions that Definitively Disqualify Trump for his Coveted Nobel Peace Prize first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • DeSantis and Newsom’s Shouting Match Seems Unlikely to Shift Tide of GOP Primary

    Next week Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy will head to Alabama to square off in yet another contest between the four GOP presidential hopefuls. While none of them are within easy striking distance of former President Donald Trump, over the past few weeks, momentum has shifted noticeably…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Marco Rubio Accidentally Makes A Great Argument Against US Dollar Hegemony

    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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    Some empire managers are so brash about wanting to rule the world that they’ll occasionally voice their position so directly it sounds like an anti-imperialist said it.

    We saw just such an instance last Wednesday during a conversation between empire propagandist Sean Hannity and warmongering senator Marco Rubio on Fox News. So frenzied was Rubio in his vitriol about the rise of China on the world stage that he accidentally wound up providing a very good argument against the hegemony of the US dollar.

    Rubio began with a rant about how the US is in a “conflict” with China in response to a question from Hannity about whether Xi Jinping is preparing for war with America.

    “The bottom line is we’re in a conflict, and I think we have to start talking about it that way,” Rubio said. “I was very young, obviously, at the end of the Cold War, but it’s been about 30 years since there was another superpower on the earth that was in conflict with the United States. We are back in that place. We need to stop pretending like that’s not the case now.”

    Hannity repeated the soundbyte he’s been pushing for the last few weeks saying that China, Russia and Iran are a “new Axis of Evil,” then Rubio made a very revealing comment about a recent deal that was struck between China and Brazil.

    “Just today, Brazil, the largest country in the Western Hemisphere, cut a trade deal with China,” said Rubio. “They’re going to, from now on, do trade in their own currencies, get right around the dollar. They’re creating a secondary economy in the world totally independent of the United States. We won’t have to talk about sanctions in five years, because there’ll be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.”

    Rubio is not the first US imperialist we’ve seen expressing concern about the US dollar losing its position as the dominant currency of the world, not just with regard to China and Brazil but between China and Russia, between China and Saudi Arabia, between China and India, and between India and Russia.

    “The dollar is America’s superpower,” Fareed Zakaria writes for The Washington Post. “It gives Washington unrivaled economic and political muscle. The United States can slap sanctions on countries unilaterally, freezing them out of large parts of the world economy. And when Washington spends freely, it can be certain that its debt, usually in the form of T-bills, will be bought up by the rest of the world.”

    “Now an increasing number of nations are eager to find alternative financial systems to insulate themselves from Washington’s willingness to use sanctions as political leverage,” writes Jamie Seidel for the Murdoch-owned News.com.au, quoting an Australian Strategic Policy Institute think tanker as saying, “Chinese authorities were shocked by the seizure of the Russian central bank’s foreign exchange reserves following the invasion of Ukraine. In the event of a Sino-American conflict, Chinese assets would similarly be vulnerable.”

    The other day Pentagon insider and DC swamp monster Elbridge Colby spotlighted a concern on Twitter that the US might not be able to finance a war with China if the US dollar loses its status as the world’s reserve currency.

    The US has engaged in a tremendous amount of manipulation to secure the dollar’s position as the global reserve currency and all the power that comes with it, and has used it to fund a war machine of unprecedented might and to inflict starvation sanctions on disobedient nations around the world. It is a weapon, and US imperialists are bemoaning the looming loss of that weapon because they want to use it on many more people for the advancement of the interests of the empire.

    Economic sanctions are somehow the only form of warfare where it’s considered acceptable to deliberately target civilian populations with deadly force, and the US empire makes liberal use of them. Starvation sanctions always hurt the weakest and most vulnerable members of a population by depriving them of access to medicine and adequate nutrition, and future generations (if there are future generations) will judge harshly those who used them.

    It seems unlikely to me that the emergence of a multipolar world will in and of itself produce any kind of wonderful utopia, and as Professor Richard Wolff explains the dollar’s decline could potentially give rise to a lot of economic chaos and suffering. But at the very least the fall of US dollar hegemony would deprive one group of psychopaths a powerful weapon they should never have had, and could even end up impeding the empire’s ability to ramp up for a global conflict between major powers — a conflict which must never occur.

    In any case humanity cannot continue along the trajectory it has been on, and any divergence from that trajectory opens up the possibility of real healthy change. Here’s hoping Marco Rubio is given a lot more to be upset about in the coming years.

    __________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • ‘I Did Not Believe It For One Second,’ Hannity Says of Trump’s Big Lie While Under Oath



    Sean Hannity, the Fox News opinion host and erstwhile purveyor of Donald Trump’s “Big Lie,” did not believe the disgraced former president’s 2020 election fraud claims “for one second,” details from a sworn deposition revealed Wednesday.

    Hannity, who was deposed as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News, was asked under oath if he believed claims by conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, amplified on his show, that the Colorado-based company was part of a plot to rig its voting machines to switch large numbers of votes from Trump to President Joe Biden.

    “I did not believe it for one second,” Hannity testified, Dominion attorney Stephen Shackelford Jr. said Wednesday in a Delaware Superior Court hearing, according to NPR.

    “And yet he pushed these lies anyway,” tweeted Rantt Media co-founder Ahmed Baba. “Fox News hosts knowingly lie to their viewers and admit it. This should be a bigger scandal.”

    Hannity’s admission echoed sworn testimony from other Fox News personnel, including opinion host Tucker Carlson and executive vice president Meade Cooper, who “confirmed under oath she never believed the lies about Dominion,” Shackelford said.

    “Tucker Carlson, he tried to squirm out of it at his deposition,” the lawyer added before the judge cut him off.

    Public policy expert Maya Contreras called the depositions the “strongest evidence yet to emerge publicly that some Fox employees knew that what they were broadcasting was false.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Hannity Says He Didn’t Believe Election Lies Despite Pushing Them on His Show

    Fox News host Sean Hannity, who invited guests on his program to peddle false claims of election fraud in the weeks after former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to President Joe Biden, told a courtroom on Wednesday that he never believed the lies that he perpetuated on his show. Hannity made his comments during a pre-trial court hearing in Delaware.

    Source

  • Trump Claims He Used His Mind to Declassify Documents Before Leaving White House

    In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Wednesday, former President Donald Trump claimed that he could have declassified government documents he removed from the White House upon leaving office simply by using his mind.

    “There doesn’t have to be a process, as I understand it,” Trump said. “You’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified, even by thinking about it.”

    Trump went on to say that his actions — taking government documents from the White House to his estate in Palm Beach, Florida, upon his exit from the presidency — somehow automatically declassified any previously classified documents.

    “In other words, when I left the White House, they were declassified,” he said.

    Trump’s comments contradict his previous claims about the transfer of classified documents to his home, however. Last week, for example, the former president said he had given “verbal orders” to declassify the government materials — although experts have said that this argument doesn’t hold up in court, either.

    “There is case law from the Trump era clarifying how, in the view of the courts, a mere tweet or verbal statement was not enough to actually declassify a record. Further action was required,” said Bradley P. Moss, a national security lawyer.

    Trump’s latest defense — that he can just “think” the documents declassified, and they will be — was panned by many social media users.

    “If all documents can either be classified or unclassified by the president in his head, but no one knows it until he says it, are all government documents both classified and unclassified?” a tweet from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said. “Did we just invent Schrödinger’s Document?”

    Others noted that Trump’s comments undercut his previous defenses of his removal of classified documents.

    “The focus is understandably on Trump’s claim of mental declassifications from his Hannity interview,” tweeted New York Times senior political reporter Maggie Haberman. “But he appeared to indicate he intentionally sent the documents to Mar-a-Lago, which cuts against the ‘it was an accident’ claims.”

    It’s likely that Trump’s shifting excuses will be used against him if he’s eventually indicted, former Department of Justice staffer Eric Columbus said.

    “The problem with a possible criminal defendant publicly making contradictory defenses (‘I declassified! It was an accident! The FBI planted it!’) is that prosecutors can use every word and jurors will be less likely to believe whichever defense is actually used at trial,” Columbus explained.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Overton Window Is Being Shoved Toward Warmongering Extremism

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    A substitute teacher at an Arlington, Virginia middle school has been suspended for teaching an insufficiently one-sided perspective on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Apparently one of the students recorded the lesson and showed it to their parents who complained to the school.

    This happens as RT America shuts its doors following an astonishingly aggressive censorship campaign against Russia-backed media outlets throughout the western world.

    The virulent post-9/11-like hysteria about Russia that has been promoted by one-sided mass media reporting on the war, and by the five years of fact-free conspiracy mongering which preceded it, has created an environment where you’ll get shouted down on social media for voicing any opinion about this conflict apart from saying Putin invaded because he is evil and hates freedom. Voices calling for diplomacy, de-escalation and detente are being systematically drowned out.

    Meanwhile you’ve got massively influential pundits like Sean Hannity calling for a direct NATO airstrike on a Russian military convoy in Ukraine, without the slightest risk of losing his immense platform for advocating a move that would probably lead to a very fast, very radioactive third world war.

    “You know, if we can see on satellite imagery where the convoy is, I don’t know, maybe some smart country, maybe NATO might take some of their fighter jets, or maybe they can use some drone strikes and take out the whole damn convoy,” Hannity said on Premiere Radio Networks’ The Sean Hannity Show on Wednesday. “And then nobody takes credit for it, so then Putin won’t know who to hit back.”

    Hannity hastily adds that he’s “not talking about nuclear war,” but then adds a “but” which completely contradicts him.

    “But at what point is this gonna end?” Hannity asks. “Cuz nobody did anything after Georgia was taken in ’08, nobody cared about Crimea being annexed in 2014.”

    On the other side of illusory US partisan divide you’ve got MSNBC pundits like Richard Engel and Clint Watts also calling for direct hot war with Russia.

    “Perhaps the biggest risk-calculation/moral dilemma of the war so far,” tweeted Engel on Monday. “A massive Russian convoy is about 30 miles from Kyiv. The US/NATO could likely destroy it. But that would be direct involvement against Russia and risk, everything. Does the West watch in silence as it rolls?”

    “Strangest thing – entire world watching a massive Russian armor formation plow towards Kyiv, we cheer on Ukraine, but we’re holding ourselves back,” tweeted Watts less than two hours later. “NATO Air Force could end this in 48 hrs. Understand handwringing about what Putin would do, but we can see what’s coming.”

    “Putin knows stop the West throw ‘nuclear’ into discussion and we’ll come to a stop, but the world should not be held hostage to a killer of societies, the west has nuclear weapons too, and Putin’s track record is clear, every war he wins is followed by another war,” Watts added.

    You’ve also got increasingly bold calls for no-fly zones and close air support from the western political/media class, which would also mean hot war with Russia.

    Now, theoretically, the actual decision-makers of the imperial war machine know better than to initiate a hot war with Russia because it would likely lead to an unthinkable chain of events in which everyone loses. But what these insane Strangelovian calls for nuclear armageddon do, even if they never come to fruition, is push the acceptable spectrum of debate far toward the most hawkish extremes possible.

    When you’ve got the hawks screaming that Putin is Hitler and calling for airstrikes on the Russian military while the doves are using extremely mitigated both-sides language and taking great pains to forcefully condemn Putin to avoid being shouted down and censored, what you wind up with is a spectrum of debate that has been pulled so far toward insanity that the “moderate” position becomes support for unprecedented acts of economic warfare and funding a brutal insurgency in Ukraine.

    As a result, advocating for western powers to initiate de-escalation, diplomacy and detente becomes an extremist position, comparable to or worse than advocating for hot war with a nuclear superpower. In reality it’s the obvious moderate, sane position on the table, but taking that position unequivocally would be disastrous for the career of any mainstream politician or pundit in today’s environment, because the spectrum of debate has been pulled so far toward hawkish brinkmanship.

    Noam Chomsky outlined this problem clearly when he said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

    And that’s exactly what we are seeing here. Look at this soup-brained take by comedian Tim Dillon, for example:

    Ideally this kind of insane extremist talk would get you chased out of every town and forced to live alone in a cave eating bats, but because the Overton window of acceptable debate has been dragged so far away from its center, people think it’s a moderate, heterodox position. Dovish, even.

    This spectrum of debate has been further shoved away from moderation with the help of pseudo-left narrative managers like  George Monbiot and The Intercept, who have both published obnoxious finger-wagging articles scolding leftists who’ve been insufficiently servile to the US/NATO line on Ukraine. As though there’s somehow not enough promotion of the State Department narrative on this subject by every single one of the most powerful governments and media institutions in the entire western world, rather than far, far too much.

    The worst people in the world have their foot on the accelerator driving us toward escalations that should terrify anyone with gray matter between their ears, while those who want to tap the breaks get their foot immediately slapped away. This is not leading good places. And we know from experience how profoundly unwise the power structure overseeing all this can be.

    Treasure each moment, my lovelies.

    _____________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • To Understand the Debt Ceiling Crisis, Observe the Far Right Clown Show in Idaho

    Idaho Lieutenant Gov. Janice McGeachin speaks during a mask burning event at the Idaho Statehouse on March 6, 2021, in Boise, Idaho.

    The debt ceiling crisis has been temporarily settled — momentary relief to be followed almost certainly by at least some degree of mayhem just when Santa is warming up the sled — and almost nobody is satisfied with the outcome. The jangled confusion of today’s “resolution” is the essence of what happens when Republicans try to govern Republicans.

    At first blush, the idea of confusion within the GOP ranks seems incongruous; they are, if anything, more adept at marching in step than the Marine Corps Brass Band. Look closer, though, and understand where they’re marching to: “No masks! No mandates! Donald Trump is the president!” This is the far right being shoved by the far-far right, and the lot of them inevitably wind up going over a cliff together, inevitably taking the rest of us with them.

    A perfect microcosm of this phenomenon has been unspooling itself in Idaho this week. The Gem State is no stranger to hard-right politics; there is currently a movement to have Idaho absorb five conservative Oregon counties and refashion itself as, I don’t know, Super Trump Idaho or something. The senior senator from Idaho is Mike Crapo, who famously un-endorsed Trump after the “grab her by the p—-y” video came to light at the end of the 2016 presidential campaign. After the roof caved in on him, Crapo scrapped his un-endorsement and stapled himself to Trump for all time.

    So, yeah, it can get pretty weird in Idaho, but this story is another thing entirely. The state’s Republican governor, Brad Little, took a trip on Tuesday to the southern border in Texas, where he was joined by ten other Republican governors to grandstand about President Biden’s immigration policies.

    The moment his plane disappeared into the sky, his lieutenant governor — one Janice McGeachin, among the hardest of the hard righties in that state and an assumed candidate for Little’s job next time it comes up — initiated what amounted to a palace coup in order to shove a wad of far-right nonsense into the daylight.

    First, McGeachin attempted to call up the Idaho National Guard and send it to the Texas/Mexico border, presumably near where Little already was, in order to fight the “invasion” of the country. She was stonily rebuffed by Major General Michael J. Garshak, commander of the Guard, who reminded her, “As you are aware, the Idaho National Guard is not a law enforcement agency.”

    McGeachin wasn’t finished. Assuming the powers of the governorship, the lieutenant governor signed a number of executive orders banning vaccine requirements for all K-12 schools and universities, even though no such requirements existed to begin with; she banned stuff that wasn’t there. From Texas, Little rescinded her executive orders and National Guard call-up, and scolded her actions as “an affront to the Idaho constitution.”

    I’m not sure why Little was surprised. McGeachin pulled this same number back in May when Little left town for a conference of the Republican Governors Association. After he left, McGeachin barred all local officials and state schools from requiring masks, even though, again, no such requirement existed. Little reversed her again, reprimanded her again, and will likely have to deal with her when he runs for re-election. These little insurrections were McGeachin’s first campaign commercials, and they have put Little in a bind.

    Little, who is far right, gets shoved by the far-far right McGeachin, all because of Donald Trump’s ongoing gravitational pull within the Republican Party. Little put no mask or vaccine mandates in place — a fact his state is suffering for — but McGeachin has painted a portrait of Little The Lefty crushing everyone’s freedom while she alone acted in defense of liberty. Little can try to explain himself, but all McGeachin has to do is howl “Tyranny!” and she’s won the exchange… so Little will be forced to tack even further to the right to defend his flank.

    As it goes with Idaho, so it goes in Washington, D.C. The country came to this place with the debt ceiling because Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wanted to throw sand in the gears of President Biden’s domestic agenda but was not intentionally destructive enough to appease his own far-far right flank. He and Little should compare notes.

    The handiest hostage in McConnell’s initial effort was the threat of defaulting on the nation’s debt, an act that would have clobbered an already precarious global economy. As the October 18 deadline drew closer, Democrats could not be sure if McConnell was truly enough of a nihilist to follow through on his threat, and they began scrambling for ways to go around him. That got weird in a hurry; ideas like minting a trillion-dollar coin were floated and dismissed.

    Meanwhile, McConnell started getting an earful from banks and business interests, asking him to kindly refrain from destroying the world. Overtures were made by McConnell to the Democrats regarding potential resolutions, at which point the far-far right within McConnell’s caucus began to shove. What deal? they asked. I thought we were doing this. We have to do this!

    Then it got better: “Looks like Mitch McConnell is folding to the Democrats, again,” Trump whaargarbld from Florida. “He’s got all of the cards with the debt ceiling, it’s time to play the hand. Don’t let them destroy our country!”

    Not to be outdone even by his lord and master, Sean Hannity of Fox News weighed in. “Radical Democrats on Capitol Hill have a brand new hero,” he seethed, “with their multi-trillion-dollar socialist agenda now stalled in Congress, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is throwing them a lifeline. In a backroom deal, McConnell agreed to raise the debt ceiling, giving Democrats more time to use a process known as ‘reconciliation’ to ram through their socialist agenda.” Hannity concluded his aria by demanding that McConnell “stop being a Washington swamp-creature and start acting like a conservative.”

    Despite this outraged yowling, the deal came together before noon on Thursday. “Top Senate Democrats and Republicans said on Thursday that they had struck a deal to allow the debt ceiling to be raised through early December,” reports The New York Times, “temporarily staving off the threat of a first-ever default on the national debt after the GOP agreed to temporarily drop its blockade of an increase.”

    The problem — of course there’s a problem, there’s always a problem — is that the McConnell “resolution” accepted by the Democrats does not fully meet the amount required to meet the country’s debt, and it will all have to be re-litigated in December, smack-dab in the middle of the holiday season and right when the next government shutdown confrontation is set to take place. While McConnell may enjoy the chaos this will inevitably cause, the fact remains that what came out of his oven on this was half a loaf, and half-baked at that, because of the shouting from his own right flank.

    Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took the deal because it averts an imminent economic apocalypse, and also gives his caucus a couple of months to hammer out the details of President Biden’s Build Back Better Act. All for the good, sure, but also a damn mess, one created by an intramural shoving match between Republican politicians seeking to out-Trump each other in time for next year’s midterms. Just another day of Republican politics, Idaho-style.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sean Hannity Uses Afghanistan Crisis to Advertise MyPillow Products

    Supporters of then-President Donald Trump watch a video featuring Fox host Sean Hannity ahead of Trump's arrival to a campaign rally at Oakland County International Airport on October 30, 2020, in Waterford, Michigan.

    It is getting exponentially more difficult to maintain a positive attitude these days. As if COVID’s rampaging Delta variant and the climate screaming, “Told you so!” by way of fire and flood were not sufficiently disheartening, there is the last act of our 20-year calamity in Afghanistan to contend with. The corporate “news” networks are reveling in footage of Afghan civilians running for their lives while pundits gravely opine about nothing of depth or substance beyond the six opportunistic inches in front of their faces.

    This, though, is verging deeply into last-straw territory: On Tuesday night, Fox News wretch Sean Hannity took a moment during his nightly show to offer a few words for the families of those Americans still trying to find a way out of the chaos in that country, just in case they were in a mood to do some shopping.

    “How would you like to be in Kabul today, as an American, and you can’t get to the airport?” asked Hannity. “Where are you thinking your life is headed? If you’re one of those family members, I bet you’re not sleeping. I don’t even think My Pillow can do it. MyPillow.com. That’s where I go. I fall asleep faster, I stay asleep longer. These are going to be a lot of sleepless nights for so many of our fellow Americans. We’ve got to get them home.”

    That happened, and on live television. With the deft touch of a lowered bulldozer blade, Hannity perfected the ruthless art of disaster capitalism. That he used the plight of those families to pitch a product, made by a guy running around the country barfing up dangerous 2020 election fictions, took another bad year and turned it positively surreal. It was as filthy as anything I have ever seen, which makes it about par for the current course.

    Hannity’s execrable pillow peddling was reinforced one short night later by Fox’s vile potato monster Tucker Carlson, who stomped right through the gruesome aftermath of the U.S.’s 21st century wars to offer yet another reason to target immigrants and love the GOP. There is concern within European governmental circles, you see, that the far right could capitalize politically on another refugee crisis arising from the Middle East, as they did in 2015. Carlson cottoned to this, and made for daylight like a rattlesnake in the corn.

    “[W]e are now living through the biggest influx of American refugees in American history,” Carlson said on Wednesday night. “We are on pace for at least 2 million illegal immigrants arriving in America this year alone. That’s far more than the number of asylum applicants who arrived in Europe in 2015. That was over 1 million, just over 1 million, that totally changed Europe forever.”

    Quick quiz: What do the 2015 refugee crisis and the current Afghanistan refugee crisis have in common? If you guessed “failed American wars,” go pick yourself out a prize. The calamity of Iraq — which spawned the war in Syria and the violent rise of ISIS just across the border — was the catalyst for the 2015 tide of humanity seeking to flee the carnage. The cause of the crisis unfolding today is, again, another U.S. warmaking debacle. Can’t talk about that on Fox News, though, or any other major media outlet for that matter. Makes it harder to sell those pillows.

    Two years ago to the day, Donald Trump told the press his administration was having “having very good discussions” with the Taliban about establishing a peace deal and ending the war. He was, as usual, half-assing his way toward a cheap talking point and a few minutes of positive TV coverage, as current events most vividly demonstrate. This was also the day Trump announced that the U.S. was interested in buying Greenland. “It’s something we talked about,” he said. “Denmark essentially owns it, we’re very good allies with Denmark.”

    So it goes, I suppose, in the land of the free, or something. Hannity tries to sell fascist pillows to the families of Americans caught in a post-war zone of fear and uncertainty, while Carlson once again tried to spook the Fox-watching horses about refugees (the ones we caused to flee their homeland with 20 years of bombs and shooting) and immigrants, and all two years after the world heavyweight champion of shabby presidents told us all was so well that he was in the market for a large partially melting land mass.

    You could write all this off as standard-issue Fox/Trump material, but that would be a dangerous mistake. Racism, war and shamelessly voracious capitalism are the nucleotide bases within the DNA of the business deal we call “The American Dream.” This is not new; it is, in fact, as old as the first European invasion of this land. The fact that it has its own dedicated TV network is only slightly more malevolent than the reality that the other networks are almost — but not quite — as bad.

    Anyone want to buy a pillow? They’re great at soaking up tears.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.