The Final Countdown – 12/6/23 – Israel Intensifies Gaza Attack Amid Move South

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong discussed various current events, including federal prosecutors’ latest allegations against Trump pertaining to Jan. 6. 

 
Esteban Carrillo – Journalist, Editor of The Cradle 
Dan Lazare – Independent journalist and author 
Melik Abdul – Co-host of Fault Lines 
Jeremy Kuzmarov – Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine
 
The show begins with the Editor of The Cradle, Esteban Carrillo, who discusses the latest out of Gaza amid Israel’s ongoing military offensive in the region. 
 
Then, journalist Dan Lazare joins later to share his perspective on the upcoming Republican debate and Trump’s town hall. 
 
Melik Abdul, Co-host of Fault Lines, joins the hosts at the start of the second hour to weigh in on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s evidence against Trump that he says proves the former president’s role in Jan. 6. 
 
The show closes with Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine, Jeremy Kuzmarov, sharing his perspective on Putin’s trip to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. 
 
 

The Final Countdown – 12/5/23 – Israel Intensifies Gaza Attack Amid Move South


On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong discussed various topics from around the globe, including Israel’s offensive in Gaza. 
 
Mark Frost – Economist and Professor
Steve Gill – Lawyer and Political Commentator
Dr. Guy Mcpherson – Award-winning Scientist, Speaker and Author 
 
 
To kick off the show, The Final Countdown hosts discussed the latest out of Gaza, including Israel’s ongoing offensive moving toward the Southern region.  
 
Then, Economist and Professor Mark Frost joined the show to talk about the U.S. running out of funding for Ukraine and the Democrats ‘ waning support for “Bidenomics”. 
 
The second hour starts with lawyer and political commentator Steve Gill sharing his perspective on the latest out of Hunter Biden’s legal troubles, as IRS whistleblowers testify in the probe against him. 
 
The show finished with a dynamic conversation between the hosts and Dr. Guy Mcpherson, an Award-Winning Scientist, about the ongoing COP 28 Summit and the threat of climate change. 
 
 

The Final Countdown – 12/4/23 – House Republicans Ramp Up Campaign to Impeach Biden

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong discussed several topics from around the globe, including House Republicans ramping up a Biden impeachment campaign. 
 
Steve Abramowicz – Owner and CEO of Mill Creek View, Host of Mill Creek View Podcast 
Ryan Cristian – Founder, Editor, The Last American Vagabond 
Andrew Langer – President of the Institute for Liberty 
Mark Sleboda – International Relations and Security Analyst
 
The show kicked off with Steve Abramowicz, who discussed the House Republicans’ campaign to impeach Biden. 
 
Then, Ryan Cristian joined to share his perspective on the latest out of Israel’s military operation in Gaza. Cristian and the hosts later touched upon the Houthi attack that targeted a U.S. warship. 
 
The second hour began with Andrew Langer who talked about Ron DeSantis’ turbulent presidential campaign, as his Super PAC, Never Back Down, fired key leaders. 
 
The Final Countdown then spoke to international relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda about the latest out of Donbass, and Ukraine’s internal political tensions.  
 
 
 

The Final Countdown – 11/30/23 – Fox Hosts First Ever Debate Between Rival Governors

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong discussed current events worldwide, including the upcoming Fox News debate between rival governors Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis. 
 
Mitch Roschelle – Media Commentator 
Todd “Bubba” Horowitz – Chief Marketing Strategist 
Jeremy Kuzmarov – Managing Editor of Covert Action Magazine
Professor Francis Anthony Boyle -American Human Rights Lawyer, Professor of Int’l Law 
 
The show kicks off with media commentator Mitch Roschelle, who weighs in on the upcoming, unprecedented Fox News debate between rival governors Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis. 
 
Then, Chief Marketing Strategist of BubbaTrading.com, Todd “Bubba” Horowitz shares his perspective on the imminent stopgap funding vote regarding the stopgap, as Congress members prepare for talks on the important bill next week.
 
The second hour begins with editor and author Jeremy Kuzmarov who discusses leaked documents revealing the “anti-disinformation” group CTIL’s role in online censorship.
 
The show closes with international affairs professor and human rights lawyer Francis Boyle to discuss the latest out of Gaza, including the Israel-Hamas truce extension. 
 
 
 

The Final Countdown – 11/15/23 – Biden-Xi Talks Take Center Stage at APEC

On this episode of the Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong discussed a wide range of topics, including the meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. 

Dan Lazare – Independent Journalist 
Carl Zha – Host of Silk and Steel Podcast
Elijah Magnier – Veteran War Correspondent 
Paul Wright – Managing Editor at Prison Legal News 
 
The show kicks off with Independent journalist Dan Lazare talking about the House voting to curb a government shutdown and the Senate rejecting an individual bill that would fund Israel’s military.  
 
Then, Host of the Silk and Steel Podcast, Carl Zha, shares his perspective on the upcoming talk between Xi and Biden at San Francisco’s APEC Summit. 
 
The second hour begins with Elijah Magnier sharing his insights on the Israeli military offensive in Gaza, and its attempts to capture Al-Shifa Hospital.
 
The show closes with Paul Wright, Managing Editor at Prison Legal News, discussing the tragic murder of an Alabama prison inmate. 
 
 

The Final Countdown – 11/11/23 – Google Paid $26 Billion to Become Your Phone’s Main Search Engine

On this episode of Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong discussed a multitude of topics from around the world, including a new revelation about Google’s attempt to maintain its hold over the search engine industry. 

Nebojsa Malic – Journalist and Geopolitical Analyst
Professor Francis Boyle – International Law Professor
Ray McGovern – Activist and Lecturer 
 
In the first half hour, Final Countdown spoke to journalist Nebojsa Malic about the antitrust case against Google and the new revelation about its $26 billion payments to become the default search engine for the top cellular phone companies. 
 
In the latter part of the hour, Ted and Angie discussed the discovery of high-end brothels in northern Virginia and Boston that were frequented by politicians, tech leaders and military officials. 
 
In the last hour, Final Countdown spoke to professor Francis Boyle about the latest from the Israel-Hamas conflict, as the Israeli Defense Forces continue their military operation inside of Gaza. 
 
To conclude the show, the hosts spoke to activist Ray McGovern about the CIA Director visiting Qatar to meet with his Mossad counterpart and the Emir of Qatar. 
 
 

SYNDICATED COLUMN: How I’d Spend My Powerball Winnings

Musings of a Wannabe Newspaper Warlord

Asked how they’d spend the $293.7 million they won in November’s record Powerball lottery, a Missouri couple told reporters they planned to buy a Camaro. They plan to travel to China. They might adopt a second daughter. They’ll up their grandkids’ college tuition. OK, so that leaves $293.6 million.

They obviously have absolutely no idea how much money $293.7 million is.

Mark and Cindy Hill seem like an average couple in their early 50s. Working class. Salt of the earth.

But man, what a waste of money to give all that loot to them! $200,000 would have been more than enough to change their lives. Not really knowing what to do with such a massive sum, the Hills will likely waste most of it on America’s self-perpetuating charity industry, which says that spending up to 35% of donor money on six-figure executive salaries and other luxuries is perfectly acceptable.

It is, of course, the Hills’ quarter-billion-plus to spend/squander. Not mine. I get it; I grew up under capitalism.

Let’s get something straight. I’m not jealous. I can’t envy the Hills because there is no way I could have won. This is because I don’t buy tickets. Whether I play or not, I figure the odds of winning are basically the same.

However, I do know how I’d spend their money.

Like the Hills, I’m a Midwest boy without fancy tastes. I’d pay off my mortgage and credit cards. My mom loves the beach; I’d buy her a house over the ocean. My car is eight years old; I’d buy one of those new Challengers.

Which would leave me $293.4 million.

Lottery winners always talk about helping their families. What about their friends? I have friends whose lives would be instantly transformed by $5 million checks. Brilliant cartoonists who could quit grueling day jobs and focus on developing their careers. Ailing writers who could finally get medical care for chronic conditions. Aspiring entrepreneurs who could capitalize their great ideas. People who are stressed out because work is scarce or nonexistent and are having trouble making ends meet. I have a couple dozen of friends like that. Helping them out would cost me about $100 million. Money well spent.

I want to help transform the media. That’s my big dream. Unfortunately, I will never realize it because I don’t have access to the kind of capital necessary.

The disintegration of print newspapers and the failure/refusal of digital media to deeply invest in serious journalism and smart commentary and satire is making Americans stupider, allowing evil corporations and corrupt, lazy politicians to thrive.

Warren Buffett is a smart man, picking up newspapers at rock-bottom prices. Personally, I’d buy The Los Angeles Times now that its parent, the Tribune Company, has emerged from bankruptcy. Experts guesstimate you could pick the Times for $185 million or less.

(Full disclosure: I draw cartoons for the Times.)

Aside from the fun of running a major metropolitan daily newspaper—12 pages of full-color comics!  Hire a kick-ass investigative reporter to infiltrate government for a year or two and then cough up all the dirty secrets! Create an editorial page that runs no one to the right of Mao Tse-Tung!—I think the Times would be a fab investment.

People say newspapers are dying. Specific companies are hurting, many are dying, but the dead tree form is here to stay. They said radio was dead after TV came along, but radio is bigger today than ever. TV killed old-timey radio—plays, variety shows. New formats—album-oriented rock, news talk—emerged. Old-fashioned fat lazy newspapers basically minting money from gigantic office towers in the centers of major cities are on the ropes, but as long as print can do something that digital can’t, it will survive and thrive. TV can’t replace radio because you can’t (or at least shouldn’t) watch TV while you drive. Similarly, an iPad or a Kindle can’t replace a print newspaper’s awesome disposability, portability and—an advantage that people are just starting to become aware of—memory retention.

Print magazines and newspapers will get their groove back when they understand what they are for. The Internet is for short updates. The Web and apps tell you what happened and who won the game. Print is for long-form analysis. Print tells you why you should care about what happened, walks you through how the game was won and how the season is shaping up.

We need serious analysis. But no one wants to read 15,000 words on a smartphone.

These days, the clueless barons of print are screwing up big time; Tina Brown just closed Newsweek after using the glossy to try to out-Internet the Internet with full-page photographs, vacuous “charticles,” and more lists than you can shake a Daily Beast at. The publications that are doing okay are those that are embracing in-depth feature stories, like the Economist and Vanity Fair. Publishers are going to figure out that that the destiny of print is more, longer, smarter, edgier content.

The future of newspapers in the United States will look a lot like Europe, where nations have a few big national newspapers, each of which serves a particular political orientation or interest, like sports or finance, and individual communities are served by hyperlocal outlets and, possibly, regional ones that would go to, for example, people in the Southwest.

We already have a few big national newspapers. USA Today was first, but it lost its way before it found one. The New York Times is our big national paper of news and high culture. The Wall Street Journal, of course, is the national paper of finance. (Under Rupert Murdoch, the Journal is muscling in on the Times’s territory.) The Washington Post should be the big national political paper, but its management doesn’t get it, so there’s an opening there. Anyway, there should be a big national newspaper focused on entertainment—video games, film, music, I’d also include books—and the logical candidate is the Los Angeles Times. They have the contacts, the location, and the brand recognition to pull it off. What they need is for someone to point them in the right direction.

Imagine if it worked! Not only would you make a killing, you’d establish a template to revive American journalism. Don’t forget, over 90% of all news stories originate in newspapers.

Which would leave me with about $8 million. Call me the man who would be king minus the panache of Sean Connery, but the salary of a soldier in the Afghan national army is about $2000 a year. The Taliban pay closer to $4000. So I could hire 2000 badass Afghan mercenaries for a year for my spare Powerball change and take over a province or two after the U.S. pullout and the civil war heats up. I’m not exactly sure whom we’d fight. Maybe Turkmenistan because, well, why not? Perhaps we’d just sit in the Hindu Kush and shoot at pictures of Arianna Huffington while reading back issues of the Los Angeles Times. I’ve always wanted to test-fire an RPG.

I may never win a Pulitzer, but no one can ever take having been a cartoonist-columnist-newspaper-baron-warlord away from you.

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: American Dogs Count More Than Afghan People

Helicopter Shootdown Story Unmasks Bigoted Media

New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins couldn’t help liking the young American soldiers with whom he was embedded in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Recognizing that, Filkins tried to maintain some professional distance. “There wasn’t any point in sentimentalizing the kids; they were trained killers, after all. They could hit a guy at five hundred yards or cut his throat from ear-to-ear. They had faith, they did what they were told and they killed people,” he wrote in his book of war vignettes, “The Forever War.”

Alas, he was all but alone.

All wars demand contempt for The Other. But the leaders of a country waging a war of naked, unprovoked aggression are forced to rely on an even higher level of enemy dehumanization than average in order to maintain political support for the sacrifices they require. Your nation’s dead soldiers are glorious heroes fallen to protect hearth and home. Their dead soldiers are criminals and monsters. Their civilians are insects, unworthy of notice. So it is. So it always shall be in the endless battle over hearts and minds.

Even by these grotesque, inhuman rhetorical standards, the ten-year occupation of Afghanistan has been notable for the hyperbole relied upon by America’s compliant media as well as its brazen inconsistency.

U.S. and NATO officials overseeing the occupation of Afghanistan liken their mission to those of peacekeepers—they’re there to help. “Protecting the people is the mission,” reads the first line of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Commander’s Counterinsurgency Guidance statement. “The conflict will be won by persuading the population, not by destroying the enemy. ISAF will succeed when the [Karzai government] earns the support of the people.”

Of course, actions speak louder than words. Since 2001 ISAF has been doing precious little protecting of anything other than America’s geopolitical interests, using Afghanistan as a staging ground for thousands of drone attacks across the border in Pakistan. Protecting Afghanistan civilians has actually been a low ISAF priority, to say the least. They’ve been bombing civilians indiscriminately, then lying about it, sometimes paying off bereaved family members with token sums of blood money.

The verbiage deployed by American officials, dutifully transcribed by journo-stenographers at official press briefings, sends nearly as loud a message as a laser-guided Hellfire missile slamming into a wedding party: Afghan lives mean nothing.

The life of an American dog—literally, as we’ll see below—counts more than that of an Afghan man or woman.

In the worst single-day loss of life for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Taliban fighters shot down a Chinook CH-47 transport helicopter in eastern Wardak province with a rocket-propelled grenade on August 6th.

(I lifted that “worst single-day loss of life” phrase from numerous press accounts. The implication is obvious—the U.S. isn’t accustomed to taking losses. But tens of thousands of Afghans, possibly hundreds of thousands, have been killed in the war that began in 2001.)

Western media’s attitude toward the Afghans they are supposedly trying to “assist” was as plain as the headlines. “U.S. Troops, SEALs Killed in Afghanistan Copter Crash,” reported Time magazine. (SEALS are U.S. Navy commandos.) “31 Killed in Afghanistan Chopper Crash,” said the ABC television network. “31 Dead in Afghanistan Helicopter Crash,” shouted Canada’s National Post. (The number was later revised to 30.)

Eight Afghan government commandos died too. But dead Afghans don’t rate a headline—even when they’re working for your country’s puppet regime. As far as the American press is concerned, only 30 people—i.e., Americans—died.

An initial Associated Press wire service report noted that the dead included “22 SEALs, three Air Force air controllers, seven Afghan Army troops, a dog and his handler, and a civilian interpreter, plus the helicopter crew.”

The dog. They mentioned the dog.

And the dog’s handler.

After 9/11 American pundits debated the question: Why do they [radical Muslims] hate us [Americans] so much? This is why. It is official Pentagon policy not to count Afghan or Iraqi or Pakistani or Libyan or Yemeni or Somali dead, civilian or “enemy.” But “our” guys are sacred. We even count our dogs.

Lest you think that I’m exaggerating, that this was merely another example of a reporters larding his account with excessive detail, consider this maudlin missive by Michael Daly of the New York Daily News, one of the biggest newspapers in the United States:

“Among the SEALs were a dog handler and a dog that would remind outsiders of Cujo [a rabies-infected beast in one of Stephen King’s horror novels], but held a special place in the hearts of the squadron,” wrote Daly. “SEALs have a soft spot for their dogs, perhaps partly because a canine’s keen senses can alert them to danger and give them a critical edge. A dog also allows resolutely reticent warriors to express a little affection; you can pet a pooch, if not another SEAL.”

Get a grip, Mike. Lots of people like dogs.

“Many of the SEALs have a dog stateside,” continueth Daly. “To take one on a mission may be like bringing along something of home.”

Or maybe they just come in handy for Abu Ghraib-style interrogations.

Daly tortures and twists his cheesy prose into the kind of savage propaganda that prolongs a war the U.S. can’t win, that is killing Afghans and Americans for no reason, that most Americans prefer not to think about. Soon a group of elite commandos—members of Team Six, the same outfit that assassinated Osama bin Laden—become helpless victims of the all-seeing, all-powerful Taliban of Death. In Daly’s bizarre world, it is the Afghan resistance forces and their 1980s-vintage weapons that have all the advantages.

Note the infantile use of the phrase “bad guys.”

“The bad guys knew when the Chinook helicopter swooped down into an Afghan valley that it would have to rise once those aboard were done. All the Taliban needed to do was wait on a mountainside. The Chinook rose with a SEAL contingent that likely could have held off thousands of the enemy on the ground. The SEALs could do nothing in the air against an insurgent with a rocket.”

Helpless! One could almost forget whose country these Americans were in.

Or what they were in Wardak to do.

Early reports had the dead Navy SEALs on a noble “rescue mission” to “assist” beleaguered Army Rangers trapped under “insurgent” fire. Actually, Team Six was on an assassination assignment.

“The American commandos who died when their helicopter crashed in eastern Afghanistan were targeting a Taliban commander directly responsible for attacks on U.S. troops,” CNN television reported on August 7th. “Targeting” is mediaspeak for “killing.” According to some accounts they had just shot eight Talibs in a house in the village of Jaw-e-Mekh Zareen in the Tangi Valley. Hard to imagine, but U.S. soldiers used to try to capture enemy soldiers before killing them.

Within hours newspaper websites, radio and television outlets were choked with profiles of the dead assassins—er, heroes.

The AP described a dead SEAL from North Carolina as “physically slight but ever ready to take on a challenge.”

NBC News informed viewers that a SEAL from Connecticut had been “an accomplished mountaineer, skier, pilot and triathlete and wanted to return to graduate school and become an astronaut.”

What of the Afghans killed by those SEALs? What of their hopes and dreams? Americans will never know.

Two words kept coming up:

Poignant.

Tragedy (and tragic).

The usage was strange, outside of normal context, and revealing.

“Of the 30 Americans killed, 22 were members of an elite Navy SEAL team, something particularly poignant given it was Navy SEALS who succeeded so dramatically in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden,” said Renee Montaigne of National Public Radio, a center-right outlet that frequently draws fire from the far right for being too liberal.

Ironic, perhaps. But hardly poignant. Soldiers die by the sword. Ask them. They’ll tell you.

Even men of the cloth wallowed in the bloodthirsty militarism that has obsessed Americans since the September 11th attacks. Catholic News Service quoted Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, who called the Chinook downing a “reminder of the terrible tragedy of war and its toll on all people.”

“No person of good will is left unmoved by this loss,” said the archbishop.

The Taliban, their supporters, and not a few random Afghans, may perhaps disagree.

This is a war, after all. Is it too much to ask the media to acknowledge the simple fact that some citizens of a nation under military occupation often choose to resist? That Americans might take up arms if things were the other way around, with Afghan occupation forces bombing and killing and torturing willy-nilly? That one side’s “insurgents” and “guerillas” are another’s patriots and freedom fighters?

Don’t news consumers have the right to hear from the “other” side of the story? Or must we continue the childish pretense that the Taliban are all women-hating fanatics incapable of rational thought while the men (and dog) who died on that Chinook in Wardak were all benevolent and pure of heart?

During America’s war in Vietnam reporters derided the “five o’clock follies,” daily press briefings that increasingly focused on body counts. Evening news broadcasts featured business-report-style graphics of the North and South Vietnamese flags; indeed, they immediately followed the stock market summary. “The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 16 points in light trading,” Walter Cronkite would intone. “And in Vietnam today, 8 Americans were killed, 18 South Vietnamese, 43 Vietcong.”

Like the color-coded “threat assessment levels” issued by the Department of Homeland Security after 2001, the body counts became a national joke.

In many ways America’s next major conflict, the 1991 Gulf War, was a political reaction to the Vietnam experience. Conscription had been replaced by a professional army composed of de facto mercenaries recruited from the underclass. Overkill supplanted the war for hearts and minds that defined the late-Vietnam counterinsurgency strategy. And reporters who had enjoyed near total freedom in the 1960s were frozen out. Only a few trusted journos were allowed to travel with American forces in Kuwait and Iraq. They relied on the Pentagon to transmit their stories back home; one wire service reporter got back home to find that the military had blocked every single account he had filed.

Citing the five o’clock follies of Vietnam and declaring themselves incapable of counting civilian or enemy casualties, U.S. military officials said they would no longer bother to try. (Covertly, the bureaucracy continued to try to gather such data for internal use.)

Meanwhile, media organizations made excuses for not doing their jobs.

The UK Guardian, actually one of the better (i.e. not as bad) Western media outlets, summarized the mainstream view in August 2010: “While we are pretty good at providing detailed statistical breakdowns of coalition military casualties (and by we, I mean the media as a whole), we’ve not so good at providing any kind of breakdown of Afghan civilian casualties…Obviously, collecting accurate statistics in one of the most dangerous countries in the world is difficult. But the paucity of reliable data on this means that one of the key measures of the war has been missing from almost all reporting. You’ve noticed it too—asking us why we publish military deaths but not civilian casualties.”

No doubt, war zones are dangerous. According to Freedom Forum, 63 reporters lost their lives in Vietnam between 1955 and 1973—yet they strived to bring the war home to homes in the United States and other countries. And they didn’t just report military deaths.

There’s something more than a little twisted about media accounts that portray a helicopter shootdown as a “tragedy.”

A baby dies in a fire—that’s a tragedy. A young person struck down by some disease—that’s also a tragedy. Soldiers killed in war? Depending on your point of view, it can be sad. It can be unfortunate. It can suck. But it’s not tragic.

Alternately: If the United States’ losses in Afghanistan are “tragedies,” so are the Taliban’s. They can’t have it both ways.

“Tragedy Devastates Special Warfare Community,” blared a headline in USA Today. You’d almost have to laugh at the over-the-top cheesiness, the self-evident schmaltz, the crass appeal to vacuous emotionalism, in such ridiculous linguistic contortions. That is, if it didn’t describe something truly tragic—the death and mayhem that accompanies a pointless and illegal war.

On August 10th the U.S. military reported that they had killed the exact Talib who fired the RPG that brought down the Chinook. “Military officials said they tracked the insurgents after the attack, but wouldn’t clarify how they knew they had killed the man who had fired the fatal shot,” reported The Wall Street Journal.

“The conflict will be won by persuading the population, not by destroying the enemy.” But destroying the enemy is more fun.

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL

Later This Week: Scott and Ted’s Excellent Radio Show

Conservative editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis and I are teaming up this coming Thursday and Friday morning for three hours of morning drive talk radio each morning–in Birmingham, Alabama. This is a one-time thing, not the beginning of a regular show.

Topics will include national and international news, local stuff, and social/pop culture.

When: 6-9 am East Coast time
Thursday, June 11 and Friday, June 12

If you’re in Birmingham, Alabama, check out the show at 1070 AM WAPI. There’s also a link (on the upper righthand corner) to LISTEN LIVE online.

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