Chat with Jessica Stern (sub req), executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Thursday, May 21st at 2 PM Eastern in The Hive. The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission is an organization that specializes in gender, sexuality and human rights globally. A champion of social and economic justice, Stern has previously worked at Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, among other organizations. She currently serves on the board of the International Bar Association’s Committee on LGBT Rights and teaches at Columbia University.
Jessica is looking forward to talking to TPM readers about gay and lesbian issues, as well as the impending Supreme Court decision on gay marriage. Drop your questions at or before 2 PM on Thursday May 21st!
As the GOP has quickly settled into a new consensus that the decision to invade Iraq was – at least in retrospect – a mistake, it has come with a willful amnesia bordering on a whole new generation of deceit about exactly what happened in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. To hear Republican presidential candidates tell it, Americans believed Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction which justified and necessitated the invasion. Since he didn’t, there was no reason to invade. The carnage and collateral effects we’ve seen over the last dozen years only drives home the point: knowing what we know now, the invasion was a mistake. We wouldn’t do it again.
I sit down with James O’Keefe and talk about the state of journalism today. http://t.co/6hgVV8MNx4
— Judith Miller (@JMfreespeech) May 15, 2015
h/t Brendan James
If it’s true, as I wrote below, that the public case for the Iraq War was built on a series of half-truths, misdirections and lies, it’s fair to ask, just what was the point then? And what did President and Dick Cheney and everyone else think was going to happen after the invasion? It’s a good question. Let me try to answer it.
Two married WNBA stars, Brittney Griner and Glory Johnson, have each received seven game suspensions – the league’s longest ban in its history – for a domestic violence incident last month.
Bruce Bartlett is a conservative economist and policy hand (very much out of the supply-side and monetarist movement) who I think still considers himself and by rights is a conservative but at this point in his life is very much a dissident and critic of American conservatism. He just published this article ‘How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics.’
Here’s the abstract …
There are so many things going on here: one is the deep, unresolved specter of the Iraq War looming over the Republican party, notwithstanding what seemed like a rapid fire consensus last week that it was a bad idea; another is the fact that Marco Rubio just doesn’t seem like the most cognitively dexterous contender for the Republican nomination. Whatever it is, after seeming to come down on the side of ‘knowing what we know now, it was a mistake’ side of the equation, Rubio went back to the other side of the debate and then stumbled and then got miffed when Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace grilled him on his flip-flop and then apparent re-flip live on this morning’s show.
My favorite part of the latest installment in the Jade Helm hysteria is that Keesler Air Force Base is located smack dab in the middle of Biloxi, so if the military wanted to impose martial law it wouldn’t need to sneak in under the guise of using an abandoned casino and closed school for “training.”