Rolling Stone has a story about televangelist John Hagee's church, written by Matt Taibbi.

The whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to "hurry God up" in his efforts to bring about Armageddon.

Eight installments into the so-called "Twitter Files," and The Intercept's Lee Fang finally revealed something that was actually noteworthy: Twitter played an active and willing role in aiding the US military's propaganda operations in Arab-speaking countries.

After six installations of mostly-uninteresting "Twitter Files" released as clumsily-connected Tweet threads, Bari Weiss and Co. have finally started compiling their findings into some actual prose pieces published through her new media venture, "The Free Press."

In an introductory article to the Files, Weiss offers a little transparency into how the whole ordeal came about — with Musk apparently inviting her and Taibbi, et al, to Twitter HQ with just a few hours notice. — Read the rest

Matt Taibbi's (previously) latest Rolling Stone column traces the long history of rich Democrat donors and the officials whom they fund attacking progressive candidates, showing how the same playbook used to attack Dennis Kucinich in 2003 is now being rolled out to attack Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (I am a donor to both the Sanders and Warren campaigns).

From a distance, it's hard to understand the nuance of the mass "gilets jaunes" protests that rocked France; with one in five French people identifying as a yellow vest and more vests marching in Basra, Baghdad and Alberta (and with Egypt's autocrats pre-emptive cracking down on the sale of yellow vests ahead of elections), it's clearly a complicated and fast-spreading phenomenon.

George HW Bush was a mass murderer and a war criminal and now he is dead.

In 2008, the Bush and Obama administrations both argued that they had a duty to transfer more than $700,000,000,000 of American taxpayers' money to the largest banks in the country, because these banks were "too big to fail" and allowing them to collapse would do much more harm than a mere $0.7 trillion subsidy.

Nobody covered the Wall Street collapse, bailout, and corrupt resurgence better than Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, from giving Goldman Sachs its unforgettable epithet to covering the hearings on the bailouts to documenting the foreclosure mills, to deep dives into the sweetheart deals the banks got; to the revolving door between finance regulators and the finance sector to the rise of Occupy; to the consolidation of financial primacy after the collapse; to the double-standard for criminal justice revealed by the collapse; to the frauds that surfaced after the crash; to the tiny bright spots where bankers were brought to justice; all capped by an incandescent, outstanding book about the crisis and the systematic racial and economic justice it revealed.

The Trump Administration just published a small notice in the Federal Register announcing that it would waive the outstanding criminal sanctions against some of the world's largest banks, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Barclays, UBS and Deutsche Bank.

Senator Bob Corker got a rush of progressive love when he dissed Donald Trump in public, then fell from grace when he flipflopped on blocking the tax-bill after his colleagues modified it to personally give him millions — but that guy was always dirty as hell.

Hang around libertarians long enough and eventually one of them will start talking about "public choice theory" (I last heard it raised by a prominent libertarian scholar to justify corporations imposing adhesion contracts on their customers to force them to buy expensive consumables and service). — Read the rest

A lawsuit against JP Morgan-Chase — the nation's largest bank — asserts that the institution paid off the $4,200,000,000 in mortgage forgiveness that it agreed to as a settlement for widescale mortgage and foreclosure fraud by committing a lot more mortgage fraud, in which homeowners, ethical lenders, and American cities were stuck with the bill.

Oklahoma Senator James Lankford (@SenatorLankford; (405) 231-4941) sounded the alarm about Russian trolls spreading discord about NFL athletes kneeling for the national anthem, citing as evidence a Twitter account called "Boston Antifa" whose "location" field had been filled in "Vladivostok, Russia."

When Trump was on the campaign trail, he had a surefire racism strategy: he'd say something horribly racist ("Mexicans are rapists") then refuse to back down (giving comfort to overt racists), then finally back down a little (giving comfort to closet racists), then complain that the press wouldn't accept his apology (reinforcing his point that the media was unfair to him and pleasing his whole base).

Tim Harford points out that Dieselgate — when VW designed cars that tried to guess when they were undergoing emissions test and dial back their pollution — wasn't the first time an industry designed its products to cheat when regulators were looking; the big banks did the same thing to beat the "stress tests" that finance regulators used to check whether they would collapse during economic downturns (the banks "made very specific, narrow bets designed to pay off gloriously in specific stress-test scenarios" so that they looked like they'd do better than they actually would).

Rolls Royce just arranged for a "deferred prosecution" with UK prosecutors over revelations that it had committed jailable offenses by bribing overseas officials in order to secure their business; under this arrangement, prosecutors have allowed Rolls Royce to pay to have the prosecution halted and to have their executives immunized from criminal repercussions for their actions.

The most remarkable criminal justice story of 2017 is that the FBI has arrested a real corporate criminal, a VW executive who tried to engineer a coverup of the Dieselgate scandal, and that he might go to jail — it's remarkable because the Obama administration spent eight years resolutely not sending criminal executives to jail, preferring instead to let their corporations buy their way out of criminal sanctions with huge fines, a doctrine pioneered by Obama Attorney General Eric Holder back when he worked for Bill Clinton's administration. — Read the rest

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is an authoritarian war criminal who is part of the worldwide surge of trumpist leaders and hopefuls, including Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte; Hungary's Viktor Orbán; Russia's Vladimir Putin; South Korea's Park Geun-hye; France's Marine Le Pen; the UK's Nigel Farage, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and others — bound together by xenophobia, a lack of transparency, violent suppression of opposition, and savvy use of the internet.

Amy Goodman, award-winning journalist and host of Democracy Now, has been facing an outrageous arrest warrant in North Dakota for "criminal trespass" since early September. The charges are a result of her merely doing her job as a reporter and covering police violence against oil pipeline protesters in North Dakota. — Read the rest

The three senior bankers who were sentenced on Friday are among the first to go to jail for illegal actions that contributed to the global economic crisis of 2008, which triggered waves of global instability, which contributed to the ongoing refugee crises and wars, mass unemployment, crippling austerity, the near-collapse of the Eurozone, Brexit, and soaring inequality.