Russ McBee

David Neiwert, who has written extensively about eliminationist rhetoric from the right wing against liberals, had this to say about Sunday's tragedy in Knoxville: In reality, of course, rhetoric like this has historically played a critical role in some of the ugliest episodes in American history, as well as thousands of little acts of ...

Yesterday, a senseless act of non-random violence struck this city. A man, mad at the world and blaming liberals for his personal ills, targeted the innocent congregants of a progressive church in Knoxville, killing two and wounding seven. Like everyone else in Knoxville, I've spent the last couple of days in a state of shock over this. Described ...

Foreign Policy has a short but fascinating interview with former Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who was the chief architect of the 1995 Dayton Agreement, which ended the war in Bosnia. He discusses the recent arrest of the fugitive Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic, and its parallels with the recent indictment of Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan ...

This week, the UN's Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee (the ''Third Committee'') approved a resolution calling for a global moratorium on the death penalty; the resolution will go to the full General Assembly for consideration, possibly as soon as next month. Of course, the United States voted with the medieval contingent: The ...

One year ago today, President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This malignant, perfidious law gives the president the authority to suspend habeas corpus for anyone he chooses. It also sanctifies the admissibility of evidence obtained through torture. For a full year now, our country has been deprived of one of its most ...

Finally: The American Psychological Association ruled Sunday that psychologists can no longer be associated with several interrogation techniques that have been used against terrorism detainees at U.S. facilities because the methods are immoral, psychologically damaging and counterproductive in eliciting useful information. Psychologists who ...

Jose Padilla was convicted yesterday on terrorism support charges, after spending five years in legal limbo. His guilt or innocence long ago stopped being the primary issue in this case; rather, the issue has been whether we as a society are willing to allow United States citizens to be ''disappeared'' into a military gulag and then tortured. The ...

An ABC News poll (PDF) has shown that the majority of Americans seem to prefer a police state. The question in the poll was worded this way: Some people support the use of surveillance cameras in public places as a way to help solve crimes. Others say these cameras go too far as a government intrusion on personal privacy. What’s your opinion – ...

A long time ago, on this day of the year, a certain gentleman from Virginia articulated the thoughts of his countrymen and wrote these words: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of ...