I have long had a deep contempt for senator Lindsey Graham. He is like the late John McCain, an extreme warmonger who pretends to be an independent person but when it comes to actions is an utterly dependable, extreme rightwing Republican party apparatchik. He is matched only by former senator Joe Lieberman in the ability to get favorable media attention by uttering sanctimonious pieties while advancing odious policies.
[Read more…]
John Cox is a Republican running for the governorship of the state of California. The current governor Jerry Brown is a Democrat and the state legislature has majority Democrats. So Cox naturally tries to paint the state as in a mess that requires a change in leadership. But his statement to someone he met inside the Sacramento office of the Department of Motor Vehicles was a doozie.
“You know, I met a Holocaust survivor in Long Beach,” Cox said to a man waiting inside. “He survived concentration camps, and he said this was worse. He’s 90 years old and he had to wait four hours down in Long Beach. Can you imagine that?”
First of all, I cannot imagine a Holocaust survivor ever making such a comparison. In fact, Cox later said that he had confused what the man had said, and that was that the DMV reminded him of the long lines seen in pre-World War II Germany and Latvia.
But supposing Cox did think the man had said something vaguely similar to that, I cannot imagine how anyone would take it seriously enough to actually repeat it.
Bernie Sanders has been hammering away at the fact that because companies like Amazon pay such low wages, the taxpayer has to subsidize their workers through things like SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. He has proposed legislation to tax the companies for the cost of the benefits. His group has put out a short video describing the working conditions which Amazon workers experience.
Amazon is driving down wages. Here's how: pic.twitter.com/63F32C2gIj
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) September 21, 2018
Amazon has responded.
Yesterday I wrote about the weird Twitter stream of Ed Whelan, a prominent conservative lawyer and friend and ally of Brett Kavanaugh, who concocted an elaborate theory that Christine Blasey Ford was confused and that the person who sexually assaulted and attempted to rape her at a party when she was 15 was another man who was also a friend and classmate of Kavanaugh’s. Ford has flatly denied that she was confused since she said that she knew both Kavanaugh and the other man.
[Read more…]
This campaign ad in a congressional race in Arizona for Democrat Steven David Brill, who is running against Republican opponent Paul Gosar, looks pretty run-of-the-mill until you get to the end.
I am guessing that Thanksgiving dinner for the Gosar clan is going to be somewhat strained.
I know all you cricket fans must be disappointed by the lack of posts recently on this topic. Well, the big news is about Afghanistan, that country that is wracked by violence aggravated, if not caused, by decades of interference in its internal affairs by outsiders. Currently the Asia Cup is underway to which six countries were invited. The format consisted of creating two groups of three countries for the first round. Within which group, each team would play the other two with the top two teams going to the next round.
[Read more…]
Have you ever had the feeling that you have discovered something really important and new and exciting, wondered why no one else had not thought of it before, and couldn’t wait to tell it to the world but on checking carefully realized that the great idea was wrong, or even worse, utterly stupid? If you were lucky, you arrived at the realization before you broadcast the news. But that was more likely to happen before Twitter where people are able to post their half-baked theories as soon as it enters their head and then have to backtrack later.
[Read more…]
The Democratic party and many in the media could learn a lot from her in the way she frames the Brett Kavanaugh accusations.
But Bee is not the only on delivering some needed truths. Stephen Colbert reminds us of something that should not need to be said and that is that not every man, indeed almost no one, goes through a sexual assault phase, so the ‘boys will be boys’ excuse has to be seen as the disgusting evasion it is.
It looks like the Republicans are hoping that their rejection of a request for an investigation of Christine Blasey Ford’s claims of attempted rape by Supreme Court nominee and their demand for her written testimony by Friday morning will result in her not attending the hearings. That will enable them to avoid the spectacle of eleven Republican men on the Senate judiciary committee openly expressing skepticism about the claims of a woman that she was sexually assaulted by a man. They are also likely fearful that the longer this process goes, the more likely it is that other damaging revelations will emerge, as is often the case when the dike of silence against a powerful person is breached.
[Read more…]
The controversy over the behavior of Serena Williams at the US Open final overshadowed the powerful performance of the winner Naomi Osaka who showed great power and skill during a match that she dominated from the start. But while the US media may have talked most about Williams, in Japan it was quite different, and they exulted in Osaka’s win, which also had the effect of bringing to prominence the role of mixed-nationality people in a society that struggles with xenophobia and outright racism. As Jake Adelstein points out, pride in her victory enabled most people to overcome, at least in the short run, the antipathy felt by many towards those who are not considered ‘truly Japanese’, which not only means having both a Japanese mother and father but also having been born and grown up in Japan.
[Read more…]