Larry Krasner wins re-election in Philadelphia

In the US, the district attorney in any jurisdiction has a huge amount of influence in who is charged, what bail is required, what kinds of plea deals are offered, and what sentences are sought. Philadelphia is a city that has had a notorious past where district attorneys backed by authoritarian mayors and ruthless policing were the norm for decades. When Larry Krasner ran for district attorney and won four years ago, he was one of the first reformists to win such elections such offices across the country who promised to end the way things were done.

KRASNER WAS ELECTED in 2017 on a promise to end mass incarceration in the city and transform the way prosecutors approach crime. At the time, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch described Krasner’s win as “a revolution.” The win by a former criminal defense and civil rights attorney who had never worked as a prosecutor until his election ushered a new era into an office that had been run for two decades by one of the “deadliest prosecutors” in the country, Lynne Abraham, whose office sent 108 people to death row.
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Yoga is ok but saying ‘namaste’ is not?

Alabama has, after nearly three decades, lifted the ban on teaching yoga in public schools.

Alabama has lifted a three-decade-long ban on allowing yoga to be taught in its public schools – though the word “namaste” and chanting “om” will still be barred in classrooms.

Governor Kay Ivey, a Republican, signed a bill which overrides the state’s 1993 ban on yoga instruction and allows local school boards to decide whether students can be taught the ancient practice.

Some conservative Christian groups fought to retain the ban, arguing that allowing yoga in the classroom could result in children converting to Hinduism.
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The final legislation was amended to include a regulation that parents must sign a permission slip for students to practice yoga.

Another amendment said: “School personnel may not use any techniques that involve hypnosis, the induction of a dissociative mental state, guided imagery, meditation, or any aspect of eastern philosophy and religious training.”

‘Namaste’ is just a form of greeting, a more respectful form of ‘hello’ that is from Sanskrit and means ‘I bow to you’ and is uttered with a slight bow when meeting someone. While ‘om’ is now used in chants in secular meditation practices, its origins do lie in Asian religions . The use of ‘om’ is now so widespread (and the word is so easy to make puns with) that it is often the source of humor.

I cannot see courts upholding the ban on saying words like ‘namaste’ and ‘om’ unless it is ruled that they are religious words. Even with ‘om’. the courts may rule that it has long since been stripped of its original religious meaning and is now just a word and thus exempt from the Establishment Clause. That is similar to the reasoning the US Supreme Court used in deciding that “In God We Trust” on US currency did not violate the Establishment Clause. I have not been able to find out if the ban on using these words has been challenged in court.

Apart from the legal issues, I find it extraordinary how the beliefs of some devout Christians are so fragile that just doing yoga and saying some words can undermine them.

More on police lies

I recently posted about how the initial police reports of incidents that are routinely used by the media in their reports often contain distortions or outright lies, all. designed to exonerate the police from any blame when things go wrong. I used the George Floyd case as one of three examples. A new report in just the state of California shows how widespread the practice is.

A review of police killings in California showed that law enforcement spokespeople frequently publish highly misleading or sometimes false information about the people they have killed. Over the last five years, the Guardian found at least a dozen examples in the state of initial police statements misrepresenting events, with major omissions about the officers’ actions, inaccurate narratives about the victims’ behaviors, or blatant falsehoods about decisive factors.
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One should not have to even say this …

… but in the propaganda world we live in in the US, it has to be constantly repeated.

Run Lula Run!

The former president of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as just Lula, lambasted the current president Jair Bolsonaro as a psychopath who has made Brazil into a global pariah.

In an interview with the Guardian, Brazil’s former leftist leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – who is widely tipped to challenge Bolsonaro for the presidency after regaining his political rights – stopped short of explicitly confirming he would run. But Lula, who rose from rural poverty to become Brazil’s first working-class president, left no doubt he was plotting an extraordinary finale to one of the world’s most enduring and dramatic political careers.
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Hope for the end of neoliberalism in Chile

Chile was where US imperialism had one of its darkest chapters, in a history of dark chapters, where in 1973 the Richard Nixon-Henry Kissinger team first tried to destabilize the economy and then had the CIA instigate and support a military coup that violently overthrew that country’s democratically elected government and murder its president Salvador Allende because he was advocating socialist policies. The US installed the brutal dictator General Augusto Pinochet who then implemented the neoliberal agenda that the US seeks to impose via outright fascists, theocrats, and other authoritarians.

Chileans are celebrating the possible end of neoliberalism in that country that had been written into their constitution by the Pinochet regime.

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Bob Garfield fired from On The Media

I am a regular listener and supporter of the public radio show On The Media whose co-hosts over its 20-year history have been Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield. I have frequently linked to clips from the show, most recently just yesterday. Hence I was shocked to learn later that same day that Garfield has been fired from the show.

Bob Garfield, host of the public radio show and podcast On The Media, has been fired. According to a statement from New York Public Radio, an outside investigation found that Garfield violated the company’s anti-bullying policy. Garfield was the subject of a similar investigation in 2020 that resulted in, “disciplinary action and a warning about consequences if the behavior continued.”

On Twitter, the veteran journalist and critic denied that he was fired for, “bullying, per se but for yelling in 5 meetings over 20 years.” Garfield continued, “the provocations were just shocking. In time the story will emerge and it is tragic.”

I found Garfield to be a good interviewer with a droll sense of humor and and sharp sense of irony. His laid back manner on air did not prepare me for the charge that he had a bullying attitude, which just shows that one never knows how closely the public and private personas of people mesh.

Israel is increasingly recognized as an apartheid state

While Israel’s supporters keep claiming that it is a democracy, the reality is that it is an ethno-religious state that privileges the rights of the Jewish community over even its non-Jewish citizens and treats the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories in a manner that can only be described as an apartheid system. Gaza is rightly described as the world’s largest open-air prison. In addition, Israel practices collective punishment, legalized discrimination, forcible ethnic cleansing, and destroys the offices of Palestinian media outlets, all of which automatically disqualifies it from claiming the right to be called a democracy.

For the longest time, the Israel lobby in the US has managed to keep this ugly reality under wraps by lobbing the explosive charge of anti-Semitism at anyone who pointed out the truth. They were aided in this by a political and media establishment that would faithfully parrot the official line that Israel was seeking peace with the Palestinians, that a two-state solution was the way forward, that the US government was a neutral party seeking to broker peace, and that it was only the intransigence of the Palestinians that was holding back a solution, all of which have been manifestly false for a long time.
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John Oliver and Samantha Bee on combating gun violence

Oliver discussed how pernicious so-called Stand Your Ground laws are, since they seem to give a license to many people to shoot at the slightest provocation.

Meanwhile, Bee points to some hopeful grassroots groups that are trying to reduce the number of gun deaths and injuries, such as Moms Demand Action that seeks to combat the NRA at the local level and violence interrupters who try to identify potential dangers in their local communities before they occur and step in to mediate conflicts.

The ongoing war on the working class

Ronald Regan’s ‘welfare queen’ rhetoric propagated the myth that many Americans are lazy good-for-nothings who would take any opportunity to not work, a slander on working people that did not seem to hurt his popularity with the working class, perhaps because many people believes it to be true of other people, not themselves. The reason for pushing that myth was to justify cuts in benefits to the poor (“It is for their own good, so that they learn the value of work.”) in order to give tax cuts to the rich. Neoliberal Democrats like Bill Clinton also seized on it continue the cuts, in the name of ‘ending welfare as we know it’.
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