Death and suffering inside Gaza

The slow and steady strangulation of the entire population of Gaza, all two million of them, continues. Israel has cut off all water, food, medicines, and electricity, in addition to steadily bombing the area. What aid that has been allowed in has been tiny, nowhere near enough to meet the needs. Now the internet has also been cut off so that people cannot even call for help when they are injured or dying. Hospitals are suffering without power, with doctors having to perform surgeries by the light of their cell phones. The Gaza Ministry of Health reports that more than 7,000 Palestinians have been killed, including nearly 3,000 children.

In the US, to voice even the slightest concern for the lives of people in Gaza is to risk being condemned. Anything other than unequivocal support for anything and everything that Israel doses, however monstrous, is portrayed as making one a terrorist sympathizer, such is the powerful propaganda machine of the Israel lobby here. The political class in the US, including the Biden administration, has fallen in line, with only the mildest of calls for Israel to show restraint. The US and Israel were joined by only 12 other countries in voting against a UN resolution calling for a humanitarian truce.

The US has ended up looking quite badly isolated after only 12 countries joined Washington and Israel at the UN general assembly in opposing a motion calling for a sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities.

One hour after Israel had extended its offensive in Gaza, Jordan’s motion was passed in New York by 120 votes to 14, with 45 countries abstaining. The outcome was remarkable for showing the limited direct support for the world’s greatest superpower, with even France, Spain and the UK refusing to join the US in voting against the motion.

Israel is ignoring even those calls and seems intent to starving the people to death. Now they have even started casting doubts on the death tolls put out by the Gaza ministry of health, this being another way of making Gaza lives seem less valuable.
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Stephen Colbert on the Maine shooting

He delivers a powerful editorial on the latest mass shooting, this time in Maine where 18 people were killed and many others injured and condemns the weaselly response that people like the new speaker Mike Johnson give after these needless tragedies that keep happening over and over again. The suspected shooter was later found dead, probably self-inflicted.

For corporations, money excuses everything

Megan Twohey has an investigative report into the relationship between Kanye West (who now goes by the name Ye) and shoe maker Adidas. It is astonishing the extent to which the company was willing to overlook Ye’s behavior because he was bringing in money.

For almost 10 years, Adidas looked past West’s misconduct as profits soared. The partnership, which began in 2013, boosted company profits and made West a billionaire. But West subjected employees to antisemitic and other abusive comments. And though their contract for years had a clause allowing Adidas to end the agreement if West’s behavior harmed the company’s reputation, it’s not clear that executives ever considered invoking it before terminating the deal last year.

West showed a troubling fixation on Jews and Hitler. At a 2013 meeting with Adidas designers at the company’s headquarters in Germany, he drew a swastika on one of their sketches. He later told a Jewish Adidas manager to kiss a portrait of Hitler every day. And West told Adidas colleagues that he admired Hitler’s command of propaganda.

He brought pornography and crude comments into the workplace. Weeks before the swastika episode, West made Adidas executives watch pornography during a meeting at his Manhattan apartment. Last year, he ambushed Adidas executives in Los Angeles with a pornographic film. Staff members also complained to top executives that he had made angry, sexually offensive comments to them.

Big demands and mood swings weighed on the relationship. West, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, at times rejected the assessment and resisted treatment. Tears were common; so was fury. In 2019, he abruptly moved the operation designing his shoes, called Yeezys, to remote Cody, Wyo., and ordered the Adidas team to relocate. In a meeting with company leaders that year to discuss his demands, he hurled shoes around the room.

Adidas adapted to West’s behavior. Managers and top executives started a group text chain, called the “Yzy hotline,” to address matters involving West. The Adidas team working on Yeezys adopted a strategy they likened to firefighting, rotating members on and off the front lines of dealing with the artist.

I am not naive about the extent to which corporate America makes everything subservient to its search for profits but usually they try to avoid those things that might harm the corporate brand and turn off customers. But here it seems like anything Ye said and did, however outrageous, was tolerated and worked around, like the indulgent parents of a a spoiled toddler. Surely they must have known that these things would eventually come to light.

Lesson of Johnson’s election: The squishes always cave in the end

One of the widely held beliefs of politics is that the squishes always cave. ‘Squishes’ is the pejorative term given to those in the minority of some political group who oppose some policy or action of the majority but are not strong-willed and can usually be bullied into acquiescing. In the UK, Margaret Thatcher used the term ‘wets’ to describe those in the Conservative party who were not sufficiently gung-ho about her policies.

In British slang, “wet” meant weak, “inept, ineffectual, effete”. Within the political context, the term was used by Thatcher’s supporters as both as a noun and as an adjective to characterise people or policies which Thatcher would have considered weak or “wet”.

In the GOP, squishes are those who opposed the various appalling candidates like Jim Jordan who were being put forward to be the speaker. But when they held firm in opposition despite intensive bullying and tanked Jordan’s bid, it seemed like the squishes had suddenly developed some backbone and there was even an article describing their behavior as “the revenge of the squishes”.

But that did not last long. When Mike Johnson was proposed as the Speaker nominee, the squishes returned to form and all fell in line, although Johnson held all the attitudes that they said they objected to in Jordan. They all caved, every one of them.
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A test of how prudish Virginia’s electorate is

The US is a prudish country when it comes to issues of sex. While sexuality is rampant in films and TV, and pornography is easily available and consumed widely, in public people tend to espouse a Christianity-based attitude that frowns on sex outside of marriage, same-sex relationships, and the like.

An upcoming election to the Virginia House of Representatives will provide a test of how prudish the people in that district are. It appears that the Democratic candidate for the seat had in the past live-streamed sex acts with her husband. Now people who have obtained footage of the videos are circulating it in an effort to damage her candidacy. To the credit of the Democratic party, they are not backing away from her.

Democrats in Virginia are defending their candidate for a competitive statehouse seat against “desperate” efforts by Republicans to exploit her appearances on an adult porn website.

The state’s Republican party has admitted it sent out several thousand “explicit” flyers to voters in House district 57 containing still images reportedly of Democrat Susanna Gibson engaged in live-streamed sex acts with her husband.

The nurse practitioner and first-time candidate denounced as “gutter politics” the publication of a report last month that the couple had performed on the pornographic website Chaturbate in exchange for electronic “tips”. Videos of their encounters were archived last year, according to a Washington Post report, although it is unclear when they were shot.

Election day is just two weeks away on November 7 and Gibson is in a close race with Republican David Owen. The Republican governor Glenn Youngkin. has weighed in on the issue.

Youngkin told the station he had not seen the mailers, but felt Gibson should be held accountable. “This candidate’s personal life is something that that candidate needs to explain to people, and the Democratic party needs to have an opinion on this,” he said.

What is she being ‘held accountable’ for? Why should she explain her personal life to others? And what is there to explain, anyway? Gibson and her husband did something that was completely consensual and legal. If they had livestreamed the two of them renovating houses or cooking, shows that seem to be very popular,, there would be no issue. It is purely the fact that they engaged in sex that Republicans are trying to exploit.

I would like to think that voters nowadays are sex positive enough, or outraged enough by this dragging of the candidate’s personal life into a political campaign, that they would vote her in. But I am not sanguine. We live in a very prudish, uptight, hypocritical society and Virginia is not noted for its broadminded outlook.

Clarence Thomas is a cadger

The latest example of how the justice of the UDS Supreme Court mooches off his rich friends (and one wonders if they think of him as their friend only because of his position) is the example of the luxury motor home that he ‘purchased’ 1999 with a ‘loan’ of $267,000 (which allowing for inflation would be about $500,000 now) from a millionaire who later forgave the principal on the loan.

In the case of the luxury RV – a Prevost Marathon Le Mirage XL – Welters loaned Thomas the money in 1999. The businessman told the Times: “I loaned a friend money, as I have other friends and family. We’ve all been on one side or the other of that equation.”

But on Wednesday the Senate finance committee said it had now seen documents that showed an annual interest rate of 7.5% but no obligation to pay down the principal, only annual interest payments of $20,042. The committee also said it had seen a note from Thomas promising to abide by the terms.

“None of the documents reviewed by committee staff indicated that Thomas ever made payments to Welters in excess of the annual interest on the loan,” the panel said.

As described by the Times, when the loan came due, in 2004, Welters granted a 10-year extension “despite the fact that the previous year Justice Thomas had collected $500,000 of a $1.5m advance for his autobiography, according to his financial disclosures. Then, in late 2008, Mr Welters simply forgave the balance of the loan, according to the committee’s report.”

Thomas seems to be someone who really enjoys living the high life on other people’s money. What a sleaze.

There is a new speaker – and he is awful

Republicans finally united behind a speaker, a congressman from Louisiana named Mike Johnson. He is an election denier and checks off all the extreme right wing boxes.

There does not seem to be anything substantive that distinguishes him from all the others who tried and failed so I suspect that it was due to sheer exhaustion and embarrassment that any would-be opponents decided to swallow their reservations and vote him in. If his name had come up earlier, he would likely have been rejected.

Let’s see how he manages to run things.

A Modest Proposal

As the GOP members of the House of Representatives continue to flail around trying to find a solution to their problem with electing a speaker, they seem to be trying the same thing of having a candidate forum and selecting a nominee only to have that person withdraw because they cannot get the 217 votes needed on the House floor to win. The difference is that the time taken to find a nominee and having his candidacy collapse is getting shorter and shorter, which is progress of a sort. Late Tuesday night, they voted for Mike Johnson to be their latest nominee. He beat out the Byron Donalds in the final round by 128 to 29 with 49 not voting for either. That means that another five were not even present in the room. They will vote Wednesday morning to see whether he can get the necessary 217 votes or meet the same fate as the previous nominees and have to withdraw. That Johnson got just 129 votes does not augur well for him.

If there is yet another failure, I think they need to try something different and so I am offering a modest proposal. Despite the title of this post suggesting that it is some kind of Swiftian satire, I offer it in all earnestness as a way out of the impasse.
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It looks like déjà vu all over again

The GOP circus in the US House of Representatives keeps going on. After multiple votes for the nine candidates who had entered the race, the last person standing was Tom Emmer, the chief whip and the third in the party’s house hierarchy. (I had not realized that Emmer was first elected to congress in 2014, filling the seat vacated by that other noted nutjob Michele Bachmann.) Since the former speaker Kevin McCarthy and the next in line majority leader Steve Scalise were rejected, it was fitting that Emmer would be the next person to be unceremoniously dumped by his colleagues.

And so it appears. Emmer had 26 defections in a vote to see how many would vote for him on the floor of the house, even more that Scalise and Jim Jordan. In fact, 15 of those defectors voted for Jordan. And then serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) launched a major attack on him even though Emmer had tried groveling to SSAT. That pretty much doomed his chances and the latest reports are that Emmer has dropped out.

So now what? Does the GOP go down the list of the eight people who lost to Emmer to see if any of them is willing to be humiliated next? Do they go back to McCarthy, Scalise, and Jordan? Do they look for someone else entirely? How long before the only people left are Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert? The former has been sucking up SSAT in the most disgusting fashion and the latter has shown that she is willing to ‘reach across the aisle’ with at least one Democrat. (Ha!)

All such impasses have to end some time, even if just out of exhaustion or because some catastrophe is imminent. But I just cannot see what form that ending will take with this bunch of rigid extremists with idiosyncratic obsessions that they are unwilling to let go of.