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A Funny Thing Happened to John Kiriakou

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Ted Rall
John Kiriakou wasn’t exactly down and out. But he was struggling. Not only was John broke, he was drowning in legal fees he owed to the lawyers who’d defended him when the federal government came after him. Despite an impressive resume, whose entries included Arabic fluency, a storied CIA career and authoring bestselling books, he couldn’t find a decent job. He wound up on food stamps. Whether the hitch was his age (61) or being blacklisted by U.S. government, who could say? About those last three items: under different circumstances, in a fairer country during a better time, John would have been considered a hero. To those who knew the truth, that’s exactly what he was. John Kiriakou was the whistleblower who exposed the CIA’s Bush-era torture program, infamous for waterboarding and other atrocities. Rather than the medal and a ticker-tape parade he deserved, the government sent him to federal prison for nearly two years—for the crime of telling a…
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A Message from President Trump to the People of France, June 6, 1944

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Ted Rall
Hello, Occupied France, from your Favorite Country, America! Happy 1944 or, as the late, great Hannibal Lecter put it, Steak au Poivre! It’s me, YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT, DONALD TRUMP! Good news, Frog People. No one ever thought anything like this could ever be thought of, much less done except by me, your favorite President, so I’m doing it: I’m bringing MY ARMY to come LIBERATE YOU from the worst, evil people, Germany (except for my father’s family)! Not that you’re grateful for everything America did for the radical Left lunatic Lafayette during your “French Revolution,” am I right? One of our great generals, Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower—some people say he’s better than Caesar AND Cicero—will soon be arriving in Normandy, which we have renamed after the great city of Omaha in Nebraska because who can spell “Normandy,” with thousands of soldiers and big strong ships and the HUGEST BIGGEST GUNS EVER. You’re welcome!!! MAKE FRANCE GREAT AGAIN! And welcome us…
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Voter ID: Political Suicide for Republicans

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Ted Rall
It’s common sense, Republicans say. You have to show ID to buy a beer, board a plane, or land a job as a snow shoveler. Why not require proof of identity from those who seek to exercise our most sacred civic right, casting a vote? According to the polls, the GOP has won the argument. Most Americans favor a Voter ID law. What Republicans are currently pressing for, the SAVE Act, however, is not a Voter ID law, a requirement that registered voters prove who they are when they go to the polls. SAVE is a Prove You’re a Citizen law. Why is the GOP pushing SAVE? Republican voters will be hit hardest. Clearly, neither President Trump nor the Republican Party knows what’s good for them. A Voter ID law—something most states, especially red ones currently have—passes the common-sense test for most Americans because it requires a form of identity nine out of ten people have, or can obtain fairly…
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Trump Has Good Reasons to Cancel the Midterms

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Ted Rall
Will there be another election? Americans have asked that question before, and when they did, the reassuring answer has always landed on a variant of “why wouldn’t there be?” Even in 1864, in the throes of the Civil War, Lincoln submitted to a challenge from a long-forgotten Democrat, General George McClellan, albeit in a deeply flawed campaign in a rump Union where troops faced pressure to vote Republican. There have been hiccups in the electoral road since then—worries about Islamist terror attacks in 2004 after 9/11, logistical concerns during the pandemic, New York’s 2001 mayoral primary in which a delay denied a Democrat a likely victory—but fear of a canceled election is at a fever pitch not seen in living memory. 60% of respondents to the Feb. 9-12 Yahoo/YouGov poll believe President Trump is “not likely to accept” a scenario in which Democrats “win enough seats in November to take control of the U.S. House or U.S. Senate.” How far might…
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How To Save Newspapers

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Ted Rall
Ten years ago, the shuttering of The Tampa Tribune shocked Media World. Last month, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette disappeared, turning western Pennsylvania into a news desert. Now The Washington Post is entering a death spiral. Hell, D.C. never got over the Washington Star. We remember what we lost recently, not what we lost in total. When Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013 (with promises not to do what I’m about to describe), his newsroom employed 2,500 people. Last week, there were 800. Thanks to Bezos, they’re down to 500. The print newspaper model that drives American journalism has been in crisis all my life. I was born in 1963, the year that daily newspaper circulation peaked. It’s been all decline ever since—first due to television, then corporatization, and competition from the now-defunct alternative weeklies, bean counters’ obsession with short-term profits over long-term investment, and now the Internet. This is a problem, partly because “democracy dies in darkness,” and also because…
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“Mad Max” Anarchy Is Safer Than Trump’s Terror State

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Ted Rall
Many people assume that Germany instantly transitioned from representative democracy to totalitarianism following the ascension of Adolf Hitler to chancellor on January 30, 1933. Actually, the Weimar Republic had already been reeling from the global Great Depression, unpopular austerity measures and overreliance on emergency decrees that restricted civil rights. Throughout the 1930s until the invasion of Poland formally marked the start of World War II, the Nazi leadership had to tolerate—less so as time passed and they consolidated power—the German deep state: conservative economists, a military general staff dominated by Prussian aristocrats whom the former Austrian corporal couldn’t stand yet couldn’t do without, the civil service lifers who kept the bureaucracy functioning, and the legacy German judiciary and its overlapping state and national courts presided over by judges beholden mostly to laws passed before the fascist seizure of power. The 1934 Enabling Act turned the Reichstag into a rubber-stamp parliamentary validation for anything the Führer State proposed. Even so, during…
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Never Mind the Democrats. Get Organized.

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Ted Rall
As a leftist, I’m heartened by the reactions of the citizens of Minneapolis and its neighboring municipalities to ICE’s assault against their non-citizen neighbors. The killing of Renee Good makes the risk of confronting illiterate armed paramilitaries hopped up on aggression-fueling steroids brutally clear. Plus, this is Minnesota in January. Mixing it up with government goons in the tundra isn’t a weekend walk in the park, or a performative, city-licensed, thrice-yearly “No Kings” stroll down Fifth Avenue. I was similarly pleased by previous spasms of protest: Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, March for Our Lives, Ferguson, Women’s Marches, the Battle of Seattle. America has leftists. Leftists get angry. Leftists show up. This is not, at least totally, a conservative country. You wouldn’t know that from our news media. I’m still waiting to see an on-air discussion about a foreign policy crisis in which a guest suggests it’s not our business and that we shouldn’t get involved. Peaceful protests and…
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For Trump, Deprofessionalizing Government Is a Feature

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Ted Rall
The killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in a Minneapolis suburb has prompted a familiar debate over civil disobedience and government policing of the sort that typically follows these incidents, in which justification of the use of force, or lack thereof, depends on your political stance. There is, however, an aspect here that everyone ought to be able to agree about regardless of where they stand on the libertarian-to-authoritarian spectrum: ICE behaves highly unprofessionally. All you have to do is look at them. Cops wear matching uniforms. So do soldiers. Cops identify themselves and drive clearly marked vehicles. Soldiers even identify themselves to the enemy if they’re captured in battle. ICE agents—assuming the unidentified, masked dudes terrorizing cities are actually ICE and not rapists and kidnappers masquerading as government deporters—wear a hodgepodge of off-the-shelf vests and insignia, cruise around in rented vehicles, and illegally change their license plates daily to avoid accountability. ICE’s defenders argue that Jonathan…
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Checks and Balances Are Dead

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Ted Rall
Checks and balances, our teachers taught us, were America’s ace in the hole. Human beings are highly fallible and easily corruptible. Because the Founding Fathers knew that—“The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted,” James Madison warned— they crafted the three branches of the new federal government as counterweights in which the natural impulse of officials to jealously preserve their power and prerogatives was accepted as a given rather than as an evil to be controlled. Accepting human nature as it was formed the basis of what was credited as one of the most ingenious systems ever created in the West. Checks and balances, it turns out, are bullshit. Because sometimes, like now, the desire to accrue and preserve personal and organizational power takes a back seat to sycophancy and cowardice. The 25th Amendment created a mechanism for suspending the authority of a physically or otherwise unfit president. Those who drafted it invested that power in…
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Democrats, Don’t Claim a Mandate

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Ted Rall
There is, at this writing, a better-than-even chance that Democrats will recapture the House of Representatives. They also have a shot at the Senate. If either or both happens, Democrats will declare victory. That’s fair. They will claim a mandate. They will describe their win as vindication of their candidates and their ideas. Unfair. And dumb. About “mandate” and “vindication”: As Inigo Montoya famously says in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” To be fair to the future probably-victorious Democrats of mid-November 2026, both parties overstate the extent to which voters want them to aggressively promulgate their policy agenda. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump declared after winning the 2024 election after winning 49.7% of the popular vote. Biden claimed “a mandate for action” while the 2020 votes were still being counted. “I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I…
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