Dean Baker at TruthOut wonders if the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" will prove to be "Obama's Vietnam." Mr. Baker's thesis is a tad obscure -- Mr. Obama now pushes the TPP to "preserve American credibility," the same reason we gave for staying in Vietnam -- but it's sure a lot better than wondering if Afghanistan is "Obama's Vietnam" (versus, say, "Bush's Other Vietnam"), as Newsweek did some years back. But n.b.: "The classic story of gaining from free trade by removing trade barriers doesn't really apply to the TPP primarily because we have already removed most of the barriers between the countries in the pact." Unless, I suppose, one considers "I can't redistribute as much worker wealth upward to myself as possible" a barrier, as many of Our Glorious Elites apparently do.
Leaked DNC emails prove that top Democrat officials were certainly biased against Bernie Sanders, just as he always said -- so the "liberal" media instantly converts that fact from "conspiracy theory" to "no big whoop." They're "no big deal" now because politics is mean, though they were just saying that politics is not mean in precisely this way! You may smell the faint odor of "liberal" media coverage of the Downing Street memos, which the "liberal" media first ignored, and then said were no big deal because everyone knows Bush lied us into war, although everyone knew that with virtually no help from the "liberal" media. (But n.b. that the FBI is actually looking into foreign involvement in the DNC email leaks now.)
Iranian government destroys more than 100,000 satellite dishes because they "deviate the society's morality and culture" and cause "increased divorce, addiction and insecurity." Obviously I'm not unsympathetic to the notion that media is disruptive and decadent, but I suspect the "foundations" Gen. Naghdi values are the ones Iranian society has built on top of women. And if 70 percent of Iranians use satellite dishes despite facing a fine that exceeds Iran's poverty line, I'd say it's a bit late to close the barn door.
Finally, Donald Trump defends Roger Ailes from the multitudinous charges of sexual harassment that have helped end his career at Fox News by saying that "some of the women that are complaining, I know how much he's helped them." Because everything in life is a simple negotiation, even the law and order of which Mr. Trump professes to be the One True Defender! Seriously, Mr. Trump's post-convention bounce is over -- there aren't that many men in America who are this much of a neanderthal, but there are that many women who've suffered at the hands of one.
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