You may recall the case of a man who killed an Indian-American and wounded another in a bar in Kansas because he thought they were Iranian. He had yelled “terrorist” and “get out of my country” at them before going home, getting one of his guns, returning to the bar, and shooting them. He also wounded a third person who tried to help, He has now been sentenced to three life terms without parole.
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Today is yet another Byzantine day in American politics, with various kinds of elections taking place. Much media attention is focused on a special election in Ohio for a seat in the US House of Representatives. This is a solidly conservative district that has been represented by Republicans for decades and Donald Trump won by a margin of 7 points. So why the fuss? Because according to polls, Democrat Danny O’Connor is giving Republican Troy Balderson a close run. I am not hopeful, though. Ohio is quite a reactionary state.
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What kind of person would want to own a house that is an architectural nightmare and has three bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, three kitchens, eight dishwashers, 13 porches, and an elevator? The same kind of person who would own 10 yachts, because the goal of such people is ostentatious wealth. Yes, we are talking about the Betsy DeVos, the education secretary who has been working to undermine public schools. This is merely her summer home, somewhere that has easy access to her summer yachts.
The incredible cruelty and sheer viciousness in the way that the Trump administration, through its justice department and homeland security agencies like ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), has treated the children of undocumented immigrants, ripping them away from their parents and sending them off to distant places where it is hard to reach them, is enough to make you sick. Back in 1897 Oscar Wilde, just prior to his own release from prison, observed similar senseless, unfeeling cruelty towards children in prison, especially one incident in which a prison guard was dismissed for a small act of kindness towards an inmate child.
After his release, Wilde wrote a letter to the editor of The Daily Chronicle newspaper describing what he saw. Written with the eloquence that only someone like Wilde can summon, what he describes is an example of the banality of evil, and is applicable to the actions of ICE in the US now. I give below an extract but it is worth reading in full. (Note: What Wilde calls ‘sweet biscuits’ are what are referred to as cookies in the US and a ‘warder’ is a prison guard.)
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In November, people will vote for all 435 members of the House of Representative, 35 senate seats, and 39 state and territorial governorships. Most media attention will be focused on these races. Hardly any attention will be paid to one of the most important elected offices and that is the prosecutors. There are a total of 2,437 elected prosecutors in the US, going under various titles from county district attorneys to state attorney generals. In all but three states, prosecutors are elected. In many ways, prosecutors are the most important people in the legal system since they have the power to decide whether to pursue a case, whom to charge and with what crime, make plea deals, strongly influence who gets bail and how much, and they and have great power over the flow of information pertaining to the case. And yet, 85% are elected unopposed and I suspect that few can name the person who occupies that position in their area.
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There are so many weird news items these days that I simply ignore most of them as not worth following up, since their existence is so fleeting and they are soon replaced by the next absurdity. But if they occur frequently enough, then the names and words associated with them stick in my mind and once in a while I find an article that explains what is going on. That is the case with QAnon.
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PZ at Pharyngula recently alerted me to what happened to Chrys Stevenson when she pointed out to the people on a Facebook group that is called Atheist Safehouse that claims to have 42,4114 members that their page featured a montage of eight atheists, all of whom were male and only one was non-white.
Dellums died on Monday at the age of 82. Jon Schwarz writes an appreciation of the life of this avowed socialist congressman who had to fight opposition from even within his own Democratic party. In a memoir, Dellums described the approach he took in 1970 to unseat a Democratic incumbent who was a Cold War liberal who had supported Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war policies.
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The neoconservatives have had a terrible influence on US politics. They gained a firm foothold in the Bush-Cheney administration and succeeded in pushing for disastrous wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and threatening war against Iran. Their goal was the destabilization of the Arab governments in the region, and the dynamic they created resulted in the Obama administration continuing the policies and leading to chaos in yet more nations like Libya and Syria. The resulting blowback with the rise of groups like ISIS resulted in the neoconservatives being discredited and lying low for awhile but they are making a comeback.
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We now know much about the horrors inflicted by the US on Vietnam during that war. It is sometimes suggested that the atrocities committed by the US during that war were an aberration of some kind, a deviation from its usually honorable behavior in wars such as in ‘good’ wars like World War II. But this investigation from Reveal discusses how in that war, US soldiers committed a war crime when they rounded up German prisoners of war in a field and machine-gunned them. General George S. Patton called it a murder but none of the people involved were punished.
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