A cease-fire, even a partial one by only some of the parties to the war in Syria, is the perfect first step — but only if it’s widely understood as a first step.

Almost none of the news coverage I’ve seen speaks to what purpose the cease-fire serves. And most of it focuses on the cease-fire’s limitations and who predicts someone else will violate it, and who openly promises to violate it. The big outside parties, or at least Russia, plus the Syrian government, will go right read more

By David Swanson, American Herald Tribune

The U.S. government, from Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton, told blatant lies about the Iraqi government creating chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons in 2002, despite having been informed of the fact that Iraq was doing no such thing. U.S. leaders lied about ties between Iraq and terrorists that they also knew did not exist.

Then the U.S. military attacked and invaded Iraq, in the process heavily bombing old sites of Iraqi chemical weapons from the 1980s, read more

By Harvey Wasserman, David Swanson, Bob Fitrakis

Bernie Sanders’ common sense proposals for dealing with universal health care, college tuition, restoring the infrastructure, confronting poverty and more have encountered predictable scorn from “fiscally responsible” corporatists.

They all scream about the “deficit spending” and tax hikes that might be required to pay for these vital programs. From predictable right-wing corporatists to Hillary Clinton (“free stuff! free stuff!” she read more

The United States has launched over 100,000 air strikes during its war on (or is it of) terror. It’s blown up houses, apartments, weddings, dinners, town hall meetings, religious gatherings. It’s killed senior citizens, children, men, women. It’s tapped them, double tapped them, bugsplatted them, targeted them, kill-sported them, and collateral damaged them by the hundreds of thousands. It’s killed civilians, journalists, mercenaries, opportunists, those trying to get by read more