Author: Common Dreams

Panicked children and adults ran for their lives Monday as at least six people were killed and dozens more were wounded in a mass shooting that took place during a Fourth of July parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park. Veteran Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet, who described the scene of the shooting as a “bloodbath,” said she saw blankets covering three bloodied bodies and five other people wounded and bloodied near the parade viewing stand. More than 30 people who were wounded, mostly by gunshots but some from the ensuing chaos at the parade, were taken to...

Wisconsin Democrats on June 21 led calls for U.S. Senator Ron Johnson’s resignation after the House January 6 committee revealed texts indicating that the Republican’s office wanted to hand-deliver certificates of fake electors to then-Vice President Mike Pence in service of former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The bipartisan congressional panel probing the deadly 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol showed an exchange of text messages initiated by Johnson’s chief of staff Sean Riley to Pence legislative director Chris Hodgson that the Republican senator wanted to advance an “alternate slate of...

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said on June 26 that right-wing U.S. Supreme Court justices who “misled” senators during their respective confirmation hearings about whether they supported overturning Roe v. Wade should be impeached for lying under oath. During an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Ocasio-Cortez told host Chuck Todd that the high court’s reactionary majority “dramatically overreached its authority” when it struck down the 1973 legal precedent on Friday, imperiling access to abortion care throughout the U.S. “If we allow Supreme Court nominees to lie under oath and secure lifetime appointments to the highest court...

The conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that expanded access to abortion nationwide. This is on top of decisions deeply wounding state’s rights to make gun regulations, to hold police civilly accountable for reading suspects their Miranda rights, and even the separation of Church and State in regard to public funding of parochial schools. Let me be very clear — this is not about consistency based on legal precedent or interpretation of the law. It is ideology — pure and simple. In the case of abortion, these four men and one woman did it because...

Proceeds from an auction of an unusual edition of Margaret Atwood’s classic dystopian novel The “Handmaid’s Tale” will go to the free expression advocacy group PEN America, as the group stands up to right-wing attempts to ban books in the United States. The single copy of the novel is made entirely of flame-resistant material, as evidenced in a video released on May 24 in which Atwood herself attempted to light the book on fire. Atwood and the publishing company Penguin Random House announced Monday that the book will be auctioned off at Sotheby’s New York, both to help PEN...