Hearings? What hearings?

I am following the he congressional hearings on the causes of the riot on January 6, 2021, the latest of which is taking place today. Jordan Klepper talked to some people who were attending a Trump rally in Mississippi s asked them for their response to the hearings so far. Many said that they had not watched the hearings at all (unsurprising), some said that they were not even aware that hearings were going on (surprise), and some even said that they had no idea what the term ‘January 6th’ refers to and did not know what had happened on that day in 2021 (incredible).

When he showed them clips of Trump’s own attorney general Bill Barr saying that the election fraud claims were “bullshit”, they claimed that it might be doctored video. When two women said that they only believed Trump and his family, he showed them the clip of Ivanka Trump saying that she believed Barr when he said there was no fraud. Their response? That it was not Ivanka at all but possibly a clone. That actually is plausible. There is something curious about Ivanka’s stiff affect. She looks like a Barbie doll with a voice synthesizer installed.

The scandalously slow police reaction to the Uvalde shooting

Immediate post-tragedy statements by the local police chief said that the long delay in responding to the Uvalde school shooter was because they were waiting for protective gear and firepower and a key to open the door to the school. All those turn out to be false, as Trevor Noah discusses. There were many police equipped with weapons and equipment just standing nearby and the door was unlocked.

Once again, ‘the good guy with the gun’ (in fact many of them heavily armed and supposedly highly trained) did not solve the problem of dealing with a single, heavily armed person with murderous intent.

Juneteenth and Father’s Day

Today is June 19th, the day known as ‘Juneteenth’, the anniversary of the day when the news of the emancipation of slaves finally reached Texas in 1865. Although Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, enforcement of it in the secessionist states had to await the arrival of the Union army and Texas was the most remote part of the Confederacy. It was declared a federal holiday last year and tomorrow will be the first time the holiday will be celebrated as a national holiday though it has long been celebrated in the African-American community.

Today is also Father’s Day, one of the many ‘special’ days that the retail industry in the US loves to publicize and that are used to drive shopping. Naturally I ignore it.

My own father died over four decades ago. He was a wonderful man, kind and generous and always willing to do anything for his children. We had a great relationship but it was not manifested in long conversations or gift giving. Father’s Day was not a thing in Sri Lanka but if it were and if my father and I did talk on the phone, the conversation would be pretty much like the one below.

(Baby Blues)

The needless childbirth deaths in US

It is scandalous that the richest country in the world has such a high mortality rate of women giving birth. While politicians and religious people on the right loudly pontificate about how they value life, their words are exposed as hollow when it comes to how little they do to curb the massive number of avoidable deaths that occur when women, especially Black women, give birth and the number who die due to the easy availability of guns.

Samantha Bee discusses how the high rates of childbirth deaths could be easily reduced.

This is one area where having a single payer health care system could make a huge and immediate difference. Spared from the waste and profit motive that plagues the current private health care system, one could easily build small birthing and pre-natal care centers in local communities that provide check ups to pregnant women and doulas and midwives in their neighborhoods that aid in the actual birth. These centers would be much cheaper to run than big hospitals, which is why of course the current system does not do it. There is little profit to be made from providing basic health care to underprivileged groups.

The gripping congressional hearings on the events of January 6th

I generally follow US political news fairly closely so you would think that the public hearings on the riot on January 6th would not contain much that is new to me. But I have been impressed at how well put together the hearings have been, with the committee combining live testimony with previous closed-door testimony to lay out a clear and coherent picture of what happened and why. What it laid out was a damning indictment of what a lying, lawless, person Donald Trump is.

What the hearings reveal is that what happened on January 6th was the culmination of a plan hatched by Trump and a few of his close political advisors, based on a hare-brained theory concocted by a lawyer named John Eastman, that Mike Pence had the power to unilaterally overturn the results, a theory that all the legal and other sane people working in the White House and justice department thought was utterly crazy and possibly criminal. They told Eastman and Trump so but they went ahead anyway, which shows criminal intent.
[Read more…]

Satire at the NRA convention

The NRA had its convention right after the school massacre n Uvalde, Texas. At the event, a prankster named Jason Selvig took the opportunity to make a short speech that was ostensibly praising NRA head Wayne LaPierre but was actually a slap at their absurd responses to the massive gun violence in this country. The satire was subtle enough that he was allowed to speak uninterrupted for two minutes and was even applauded by some in the audience but the internet knows satire when it sees it and it has gained wide circulation, with 10 million views on Twitter alone.


[Read more…]

The problem of tech monopolies

On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver discussed how four companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon) are each monopolies in one area and how that works against innovations and makes us unable to escape their clutches, and they use their power to suppress any new company that might hope to compete with them.

He argues that we need to invoke anti-trust legislation to break them up. Those companies warn us, as they always do, that they provide good products and services and forcibly breaking them up would harm consumers. Oliver reminds us that AT&T made that same argument when they were a telephone monopoly but that breaking it up resulted in a flood of innovations that we cannot imagine being without now. He makes the point that consumers may have been happy with AT&T because they had no idea what was out there in terms of possible innovations until the monopoly was broken up.

Samantha Bee on the degeneration of the NRA

She discusses how the National Rifle Association began as a movement to support safe and responsible gun ownership and usage and then became a lobby to prevent any and all restrictions on the ownership and usage of any almost kind of weapon, however deadly, and how so many politicians now grovel before it.

Correspondent Amy Hoggart went to the NRA’s convention last weekend in Houston. Texas, just 300 miles away from the recent massacre in Uvalde, to talk to the attendees about the spate of mass shootings and she had to endure the usual evasive, obfuscatory, excuses from them as to why these repeated tragedies do not reveal what is so obvious to everyone else, that the US just has too many damn guns that serve no purpose than allow some murderers to kill large numbers of people in a very short time.