Book review: Reporter by Seymour M. Hersh

I am not in general a fan of the memoir genre but when I heard that legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh had written one, I rushed out to buy a copy the day it was released because I knew it would be good. And I was not disappointed. The book is excellent, containing details of how he arrived at his stories and should be required reading for anyone who wants to be a good reporter because he tells you how he went about getting important information. As I read it I started marking various passages to quote in a review but they became so numerous that there is no way that I can do so without this becoming very lengthy. What I will do is from time to quote from sections of it as it relates to other topics I write about.
[Read more…]

Which side are you on? The choice the Democratic party can no longer ignore

As a result of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win, the Democratic Socialists of America are reporting an increase in their membership. Matt Taibbi has a roundup of the alarmed reactions to this result from the political-media establishment and says that the Democratic party leadership and the media pundits are dumping on AOC’s victory because she represents a different world from their comfortable one.
[Read more…]

Why do police use excessive force? Because they can

Shuan King sent out this Tweet showing police tasering a man for no reason even though the man was just sitting on the curb. Why? Because they can.

Attacks on Ocasio-Cortez begin already

I had expected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be attacked by the political-business-media establishments for her progressive views, for calling herself a democratic socialist, and for her highlighting of the deaths of dozens of protestors in Gaza at the hands of Israeli Defense Forces. The loss of her opponent, incumbent Joe Crowley is being mourned by lobbyists and business-friendly pundits, though Crowley himself was extremely gracious to her in conceding his loss.
[Read more…]

Michelle Wolf on news talk shows

One periodically reads news stories of spokespersons for Donald Trump going on news talk shows (other than Fox News) and then being taken to task by the hosts for their evasions or lying. “That’s great!” you think, someone is finally telling it like it is to these people. But Michelle Wolf, in a very good segment, exposes this for the charade it is. It is all a game played by the media and politicians and their spokespersons to provide entertainment to the rubes, with the same scenario played out over and over again.

The reverberations of Ocasio-Cortez’s win

The political media is abuzz about the implications for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s shocking win over fourth ranking Democrat long-term incumbent Joe Crowley by a 15% margin in the New York primary election.

Ocasio-Cortez represents in many ways the new face of progressive politics growing in strength on the left flank of the Democratic Party. She is a young woman of color whose campaign platform included Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a universal jobs guarantee, protection for Dreamers and a “clean campaign finance” system. You couldn’t have written a more liberal platform if Bernie Sanders – for whom Ocasio-Cortez worked as an organizer in 2016 – had written it himself. Late Tuesday night, Sanders said in a statement: “She took on the entire local Democratic establishment in her district and won a very strong victory. She demonstrated once again what progressive grassroots politics can do.”

[Read more…]

Surprise win in New York Democratic primary

This news just broke.

The fourth-ranking Democrat in the House has lost his bid for another term: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old activist who ran on abolishing ICE and making Medicare a universal program, defeated Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) in an upset.
…

Ocasio-Cortez argued that the increasingly non-white district, which stretches from the Bronx to Queens, had been represented too long by a figure from the local political machine.

…

Ocasio-Cortez told voters that they could do better — she refused corporate PAC money, emphasizing that most of the $300,709 she’d raised for the campaign came from small donors, most of them from in and around the district.

She not only won, she won by a whopping 57.6-42.4% margin.

I wrote about Ocasio-Cortez’s insurgent campaign against the Wall Street friendly Crowley before. For a young progressive Latina to beat an entrenched incumbent who was fourth highest in the party leadership is a huge upset. I hope the party leaders learn a lesson from this.

Reality Winner’s guilty plea

Trevor Timm writes that the whistleblower has agreed to plead guilty to one count under the Espionage Act and serve a sentence of 63 months in prison plus another three years of supervised release. Her lawyers felt that given the enormous resources that the government has, all the roadblocks that they threw up against her lawyers to provide a reasonable defense, and their sheer bloody-minded vindictiveness, this was the best outcome she could hope for.
[Read more…]

“Be a Hitler”

I have written many times about how there is a militant and bigoted group of Buddhists that includes Buddhist monks who feel that Sri Lanka should be a purely Sinhala Buddhist country and that every other ethnic-religious group does not belong. They have incited mobs to attack non-Sinhala Buddhists, most recently against the Muslim minority. Now a leading monk has gone to the next level, explicitly urging a presidential candidate to adopt Hitler as a model.
[Read more…]