Elizabeth Warren has released a statement questioning whether she should run for president.

WARREN: I am not running for president. You want me to put an exclamation point at the end?

Clearly if she was not questioning whether to run for president she would have said, "I'll put an exclamation point at the end!" Obviously she's still questioning, see the question mark in the quote above. There can be no doubt that she wants us to continue our quixotic quest by telling her:  No. We don't want a exclamation point. We want you to run for president.

I don't have a cell phone or a twitter account but I'm sure if someone starts  #wedon'twantanexclamationpoint she will soon run. Maybe some twit out there will do that.

The dystopian future promised by the Citizens United decision is upon us. It reminds me of the bad old days when energy tycoons like John D. Rockefeller bought control of state governments to facilitate their plundering of national resources. Read this important and disturbing article.

Why is so much news coming out of Israel distorted and one-sided?  The author, a former AP Jerusalem reporter and editor, gives many reasons.  Partly, because reporters accept NGO press releases uncritically;  partly, because reporters fear for their own safety;  but mostly because of a sort of herd instinct.

"Most consumers of the Israel story don’t understand how the story is manufactured. But Hamas does."

"Cameramen waiting outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City would film the arrival of civilian casualties and then, at a signal from an official, turn off their cameras when wounded and dead fighters came in, helping Hamas maintain the illusion that only civilians were dying. "

"The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby—and the AP wouldn’t report it"

Police say gang that lived near US embassy in Nairobi was "preparing to raid the country's communication systems".

Al Jazeera, Dec. 4 -- Kenyan police have arrested 77 Chinese nationals and are consulting experts to see if they used advanced communications equipment in several houses in an upscale Nairobi neighbourhood to commit espionage.  Kenya's foreign ministry has also summoned China's top diplomat in the capital Nairobi as it seeks to establish if Beijing was in anyway linked to the affair.....

Dec. 4,  NY Times....The attack came just hours before President Vladimir V. Putin delivered a state of the nation speech in Moscow, in which he made only a passing reference to the violence.

The Russian state news media reported that the militants had seized an office building, which was then recaptured by security forces, and a school. Terrified residents of Grozny said they heard loud explosions and saw armed gunmen roaming the streets....

New York Times headline story right now:

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was asked to resign his post, officials said, as President Obama’s national security team has struggled to stay ahead of an onslaught of global crises.

From the Washington Post's 50 notable works of nonfiction:

Wolraich traces the Republicans’ swift loss of power in the early 20th century in what he calls “the greatest period of political change in American history.”

By Helier Cheung, BBC News, 17 Nov., 2014

The number of deaths from terrorism increased by 61% between 2012 and 2013, a study into international terrorism says. There were nearly 10,000 terrorist attacks in 2013, a 44% increase from the previous year, the Global Terrorism Index 2014 report added [....] Five countries - Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria - accounted for 80% of the deaths from terrorism in 2013. More than 6,000 people died in Iraq alone. India, Somalia, the Philippines, Yemen and Thailand were the next five, with between 1% and 2.3% of global deaths by terrorism [....]

In a rational political system, the American neocons would be the most discredited group in modern U.S. history. If not in the dock for complicity in war crimes – from Central America in the 1980s to Iraq last decade – they would surely not be well-regarded scholars at prominent think tanks and welcomed as op-ed columnists at major publications.

By Robert Zaretsky, ForeignPolicy.com, Nov. 12, 1014

American and French politics seem to be devolving in parallel. That's bad news for the left in both countries.

In the 21st century, the techniques of the political technologists have become centralized and systematized, coordinated out of the office of the presidential administration, where Surkov would sit behind a desk with phones bearing the names of all the “independent” party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night. The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human-rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern-art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.