Portside

After visiting Guantanamo, Judge Gorsuch offered the prison operation commander a glowing review. "Being able to see first hand all that you have managed to accomplish with such a difficult and sensitive mission makes my job of helping explain and defend it before the courts all the easier.”

What's the future of our environment? A poisonous wasteland, says Sam Friedman, offering a bleak view of what's imminent.

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Trump admits his health care plan would benefit rich investors, screw over people who voted for him. He didn’t even pretend otherwise.

Sanders succeeded where so many Democrats failed this past election cycle—by connecting with red-state voters.

Jackson is regarded as the first populist president; his purported connection to the ordinary people from which he sprang is the stuff of legend. Hailed as an economic populist for having opposed the creation of a centralized bank, instead he favored local banks. And it was local banks that backed Jackson and his friends, who all reaped rewards from the Indian removal policy.

Thoughts that huge tax cuts to high-income households will offset a downturn in automobile sales, cuts in public spending, rising college tuition or a dismantling of the health sector are irrational. If theFed raises interests rates, it will threaten a more fragile economy than appears at the moment. The drive to be “normal” in a world that is clearly not normal, may put us in danger of a downturn that will be difficult to recover from.

When Irish left-wing labor leader James Larkin arrived in the United States he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) and the Socialist Party. A supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, Larkin was arrested during the 1919 Red Scare and sentenced to hard labor at Sing Sing. There he was visited by Charlie Chaplin who described the prison as "grimly medieval," and wondered "what fiendish brain could conceive of building such horrors."

David Cay Johnston, the journalist who broke this story, suggests that the documents could possibly have come from Trump himself, or someone acting at his direction.

Florida, nicknamed the Gunshine State, became a symbol of strong self-defense laws after George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, in 2012 and was later acquitted when a jury found he was justified in pulling the trigger.