Today is Thanksgiving day in the US. It is a holiday that has problematic roots in history and now has become associated with the kick-off to an orgy of shopping. But despite all that baggage it is a nice holiday that celebrates wholesome virtues such as getting together with family and friends and we will spend it with some old and dear friends as we always do.
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Abby Martin of Telesur interviews him on the current state of politics. As usual, he paints an accurate picture, that the spectrum of political opinion has become so skewed that it only ranges from the center to the extreme right and that the current Republican party is off the spectrum and that what we have is a plutocracy with democratic forms, with the actual wishes of the public largely ignored.
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The US military has ‘investigated’ itself about the attack on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz that killed 30 people. The US commander in Afghanistan spoke at a press briefing today with the expected language, saying that ‘mistakes were made, equipment failed, and we will fix them’, so let’s forget about this and move on.
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The idea of screening refugees by religion and allowing only Christians into the US has been suggested by Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz and supported by others, based on the notion that these people would be unlikely to be terrorists. Cruz has been quite explicit on this topic, saying, “There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror. If there were a group of radical Christians pledging to murder anyone who had a different religious view than they, we would have a different national security situation”.
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Stephen Colbert had a lot of fun a week or so ago with the rules that broadcast television networks use when it comes to nudity, and the problems they encounter when they have to report news involving classical paintings, such as the auction of Modigliani’s Reclining Nude.
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Whatever one might think of the politics of Donald Trump, there is no question that he seems to have an unerring knack for gauging the visceral feelings of the small group of Republican supporters who play a disproportionately large role in the Republican primary process. He seems to know exactly what buttons to push so while the pundit class takes each outrageous statement of his as the sign that this time he really has gone too far and that people will now abandon him, in reality his popularity remains undiminished or even increases.
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In a discussion Harris says:
“Given a choice between Noam Chomsky and Ben Carson, in terms of the totality of their understanding of what’s happening now in the world, I’d vote for Ben Carson every time,” Harris stated. “Ben Carson is a dangerously deluded religious imbecile, Ben Carson does not…the fact that he is a candidate for president is a scandal…but at the very least he can be counted on to sort of get this one right. He understands that jihadists are the enemy.”
When people think of violent Islamist groups, the image they have may be of disaffected young people who are the outcasts of society, poor and poorly educated. But a new book titled Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education based on research done by two academics Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog finds a surprisingly large number of engineers among the people labeled as Islamic radicals.
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I think we have to be resigned to two things: (1) Donald Trump will keep raising the stakes on saying crazy things and that many of the other Republican candidates will follow him and even try to outdo him; and (2) his popularity among Republican voters will keep increasing even as the rest of us look on in horror.
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I had been wondering when Michael Moore would come up with another of his zany documentaries and whether he was working on one at all. I was glad to see that he was and that he did it in secret to enable him to employ his usual guerilla filmmaking tactics more effectively. It is going to be out soon. In this one, Moore ‘invades’ Europe to see how those countries differ from the US and to seize all their good ideas, rather than invade countries for their oil.
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