Laura Gottesdeiner at Mother Jones finds our ongoing war against ISIS to be, well, rather less "precise" than advertised, to the point where many Syrian citizens think the Americans' main aim is to kill as many civilians as possible. You'd hate to think we've outdone Mr. Assad in the area of killing Syrian civilians, let alone ISIS, but in May and June we managed to outdo both in that area. And if you're thinking destroying ISIS is more important than worrying about the "collateral damage," you have to consider what killing civilians always does in the long term -- namely, that it creates more ISISes.
You've heard from right-wingers that consumers win more money through arbitration than class-action lawsuits, but the Economic Policy Institute reminds us that so few consumers ever win in forced arbitration -- a mere 9% do, making that nice-looking $5,000-plus average virtually meaningless, since you get zero dollars if you lose. Also, and we often forget to talk about this when we talk about forced arbitration, that corporations win even more often when they take you to arbitration, and they collect, on average, over $7,000 when they win. Class action lawsuits may not make you rich, but it ain't all about you -- it's also about everyone else who got harmed, and making sure corporations don't harm people again.
The Turkish government has detained half a dozen activists for the heinous crime of discussing and learning about encryption and digital security. Oh, sure, the charges include things like "committing crimes in the name of a terrorist organization without being a member," which sure sounds like a made-up thing, but make no mistake: they're oppressing good activists laying their lives on the line for their fellow citizens. And like so many other governments around the globe (cough Venezuela cough), Turkey's government does these things because it knows it will shrivel and die under ordinary circumstances. (But remember that our own CIA Chief, Mike Pompeo, has all but equated encryption to criminal activity as well.)
Ho hum, would-be Estate Tax killers still trot out family farms, even though the stodgiest Estate Tax opponents have never been able to find even one family farm that succumbed to it. Last month a House Ways and Means Committee hearing brought in a North Dakota farmer to decry the Estate Tax when his farm won't be subject to the Estate Tax, and a 2014 ad campaign against the Estate Tax featured a Kentucky farmer who took over $150,000 in farm subsidies over the previous 20 years! The Estate Tax repeal movement has always been one of America's stupidest -- but how many more bullets do we have to pump into this zombie lie to keep it down for good?
Finally, Janine Jackson at FAIR reminds us of the dangers of believing credulous "liberal" media stories about attacks against America by describing how the Tonkin Gulf "attack" led to the catastrophe in Vietnam. You have to hope that if/when Donald Trump tries something similar, today's "liberal" media will hate him enough to be a bit more skeptical, except that the "liberal" media seemed to love him best earlier this year when he fired a bunch of Tomahawk missiles at a just-deserted Syrian air base. So it's down to us to keep us out of war, as usual.
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