Samantha Bee talks to three different sets of people (two elderly nuns, a woman in a wheelchair, and a black man with Tourettes) who were treated appallingly by the police when they engaged in peaceful protest and contrasts it with how the violent insurrectionists were treated on January 6th.
Trump was acquitted of the impeachment charges by the US senate because despite the fact that a sizable bipartisan majority of 57-43 found him guilty, the rules require a super majority of at least 67-33 to convict. I am willing to speculate that almost all of them believed him to be guilty of the charge but were scared to convict him for fear of angering Trump and repercussions from his cult followers. So they seized upon the fig leaf that is is unconstitutional to convict someone who is no longer in office, an argument that not only is absurd on its face but was roundly rejected by a large number of legal scholars and was even rejected by a majority senate vote of 56-44 before the trial started.
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Joe Biden has nominated Neera Tanden to the head the Office of Management and Budget, an important position in the administration. She is an awful person for a multiplicity of reasons, as Max Blumenthal explains, but Democrats are likely to go along with her nomination while Republicans will focus on how mean she was to them, with both ignoring the very real and substantive reasons why she should be nowhere near high office.
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I was pleased to be reminded of this great moment from one of the debates between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Democratic campaign that showed once again why she was such an awful candidate. How anyone could value the friendship of that war criminal and see him as a mentor beats me.
"I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend."
Five years ago today, @BernieSanders attacked the legacy of Henry Kissinger in a presidential debate. pic.twitter.com/HLDHhRUcV4
— Jacobin (@jacobinmag) February 12, 2021
The head of Tokyo’s Olympic organizing committee Yoshiro Mori gave as his reason for opposing naming more women directors that “women talk too much”.
The remarks set off a firestorm of protest and Mr Mori apologised at the time but said he would not resign.
But on Friday he apologised for his “inappropriate statement”.
“What is important is to hold the Olympics from July. It must not be the case that my presence becomes an obstacle to that,” he said at a special committee meeting on Friday, where he also announced his resignation.
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As part of his xenophobic, racist, nativist, anti-immigrant campaign, Trump pushed for a ‘big, beautiful wall’ along the border that Mexico would pay for. Like most of that blowhard’s promises, it was a sham. The useless wall is neither big nor beautiful nor did Mexico pay for it. Trump built a total of 453 miles of wall but many parts of it were not contiguous making it even more useless. Worse, the process of construction led to the carving of access roads and blasting staging areas that left horrible scars on a pristine, beautiful landscape, scars that will lead to further erosion over time. I hope this becomes known as Trump’s Folly.
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The death penalty should be abolished because it is a barbaric practice. I wrote yesterday about the renewed drive to abolish it and later I came across this article that provides another reason to end it, in that prosecutors demanding the penalty results in trials being delayed. This arose in the case of the student who went on a rampage in a high school in Parkland, FL.
It’s been more than 1,000 days since a gunman with an AR-15 rifle burst into a Florida high school, killed 17 people and wounded 17 others.
Yet, with Valentine’s Day on Sunday marking the three-year milestone, the trial of 22-year-old Nikolas Cruz is in limbo.
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Over time I have noticed that political developments in the US show a pattern that is similar to that of Sri Lanka in the way that democratic norms get eroded, except that there is a lag of a decade or two. Sri Lanka has been a democracy since it obtained independence in 1948 but it has periodically come under great strain as various leaders and parties tried to undermine the institutions of democracy in order to obtain short-term political gain. Undermining the independence of the judiciary and the media and using the instruments of state power to the advantage of the party in power have all been features that I saw in Sri Lanka back in the day and I see in the US now.
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There were many things that I hated about the Trump administration but one of the most gratuitously revolting things was how in its last days, we had the grotesque spectacle of Trump and his attorney general Bill Barr rushing through the executions of people on federal death row. There was absolutely no reason for this killing spree except that with Joe Biden being against the death penalty, Trump and Barr mush have feared that those people might be reprieved once Biden came into office. Trump and Barr did not want to give them any chance of life. It was truly sickening. One should never take away someone’s life. To rush to do so when you did not have to reveals the existence of a deeply disturbed mentality.
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He gave a pretty good summary of what went down.
It is interesting how the various late night talk shows are emerging from the pandemic lockdowns. Kimmel and Samantha Bee are back to what it was like before, wearing formal outfits and standing on stage in their studios, though without a large live audience. Seth Meyers is back at his desk on the studio stage but still dressed casually. Stephen Colbert is also dressed casually and in his office. Trevor Noah is the most casual. He looks like he may be still at home, though it may be his studio office. He dresses in a hoodie and is unshaven and letting his hair grow out.