He explains what is going on in the effort to suppress the votes of poor and minority groups. He says that the Democratic party leadership and Joe Biden are avoiding taking the step of abolishing the filibuster and passing stronger voting rights laws, thinking that they can out-organize the Republicans and get out a large vote like they did in 2020. But that is not a given.
A leader in the new Taliban government is promising a return to barbaric punishments.
The Taliban will resume executions and the amputation of hands for criminals they convict, in a return to their harsh version of Islamic justice.
According to a senior official – a veteran leader of the hardline Islamist group who was in charge of justice during its previous period in power – executions would not necessarily take place in public as they did before.
The Taliban’s first period ruling Afghanistan during the 1990s, before they were toppled by a US-led invasion in 2001 following the 9/11 attacks, was marked by the grisly excesses of its perfunctory justice system, which included public executions in the football stadium in Kabul.
The secretary of defense Lloyd Austin, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff of the US military general Mark Milley, and the head of the US Central Command general Frank McKenzie have all been trying to explain the reasons for the debacle in Afghanistan, not just the final chaotic withdrawal but the failure of the entire two-decade long nation building enterprise and the inability to defeat the Taliban despite pouring vast amounts of money into the Afghan military and providing all manner of material, training, and air support. When the USSR was the occupier of that country, the US government was providing covert support to the then-Mujahideen to undermine the Soviet-backed government but there is no evidence that any outside power, Russia or any other country, was providing anything like significant support for the Taliban in its fight against the US.
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Back in 2016, I blogged about a family of Sri Lankan asylum-seeking refugees in Hong Kong who in 2013 hid Edward Snowden in their tiny apartment when he was hiding from the media and the clutches of the vindictive Obama administration. This was after he left the hotel from where he had released his bombshell revelations about the massive spying efforts waged by the US and its allies against their own citizens. The family sheltered him for two weeks before he was able to get to get out of Hong Kong and into Russia where he now lives. The role of this family was only revealed in 2016 in the Oliver Stone film Snowden.
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The way that the US forces left Afghanistan left the whole world aghast at its utterly chaotic nature. It has become a cliche to describe Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires, humbling the British, the Soviet Union, and the US. But not all such attempts by empires ended as pitifully as the way that the US did. The NPR radio program Morning Edition compared the US exit with that of the Soviet Union in 1989.
One feature that is similar is that by its end, the occupation was seen as a tragic blunder by the Soviet Union.
By the time the Soviet army withdrew, the war was seen by most Soviet citizens as a mistake. Fifteen thousand soldiers had been killed, thousands more wounded. And an estimated million Afghans had died in the fighting. After a decade of war, many Soviets couldn’t understand what the USSR was even doing there.
Watch as 67-year old Joe McCarron, hospitalized with Covid-19 in Ireland, is urged by a fanatical anti-vaxxer and covid-denier to check himself out of the hospital while a doctor calmly, kindly, and patiently explains why that would not be a good idea for someone in his condition and urges him to stay, saying that he was very ill and could die if he went home. But the person with McCarron badgered him to leave and he finally acquiesced. Two days later, he was back in the hospital with breathing problems and subsequently died.
Jordan Klepper continues his journey among the vaccine deniers and MAGAheads. He went to meetings of local school boards which have become the new focal point of the anti-maskers who have been using the public comments portion of the meetings to vent their feverish conspiracy theories. I linked to a compilation of those comments recently.
One of the things I noticed in the Klepper video below is that a couple of the people rationalized their weird beliefs by saying that they had done ‘research’ on it. They seem to think that the scientific-sounding word ‘research’ means finding some sources on the internet that support their beliefs, rather than an evaluation of actual research results supported by empirical data that has been done and carefully analyzed by credible experts.
The new slogan of those opposed to any anti-Covid 19 measures for children that are mandated by the government seems to be “I don’t co-parent with the government”.
I did learn something new, and that is that Satanist rituals involve people wearing masks and standing six feet apart from each other. What more evidence do you need that masks and physical distancing are evil? Wake up, sheeple!
I was chatting at my local bridge club with a visiting couple from out of town and they mentioned that they do not watch sports because of the protests during the playing of the national anthem. As long time readers of this blog know, I think patriotism is a bad thing and so am not a fan of the symbols used to promote it such as national anthems or flags. But in the US, those two symbols are fetishized as being somehow sacred and any sign of disrespect is enough to bring down strong disapproval. Look at how football players kneeling during the national anthem created such a brouhaha.
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The much-ballyhooed ‘audit’ of the presidential election results in Maricopa county in Arizona that Joe Biden won by a huge margin is over. It appears that even though this ‘audit’ was done by a highly partisan Trump-supporting group under the most dubious of conditions, the results were unchanged and that buried in the report is the information that Biden’s lead actually increased by a small amount.
This must have been a huge disappointment to Trump and his cult members who had been banking on their delusion that Trump won would be validated. The report managed to obfuscate its findings with other falsehoods that the cult has seized on to pursue similar audits in the other states that Biden won in 2020 that Trump won in 2016.
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