The GOP ignore these warning signs at their peril

Michigan is seen as a swing state but recently in both the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 mid-terms, the state has swung Democratic.

Across Michigan, which Trump lost by 2.8 points, voters have overwhelmingly rejected election denialism and embraced measures to expand voting access. Proposition 2, a ballot measure that established early voting and expanded absentee voting passed by 60%. Secretary of state Jocelyn Benson won her seat in a definitive race against Kristina Karamo, who spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, and voters in the state elected Dana Nessel as attorney general over Matthew DePerno, who led multiple unsuccessful legal challenges to the 2020 presidential election in Michigan.

But things were quite different in Hillsdale county, which remained a Republican stronghold in which “Karamo earned 66% of the vote and DePerno swept, nearly earning 70% of Hillsdale county voters in his election.” This county is also the home of Hillsdale College, a prominent conservative Christian college. (I was invited there during the height of the Intelligent Design controversy to debate ID proponents.)
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This testimony could be very damaging for Trump

Yesterday Lisa Birnbach, one of E. Jean Carroll’s friends, gave testimony at the trial about how Carroll had called her immediately after the alleged rape by Donald Trump. She described how Carroll had been hyperventilating as she described what Trump had done to her. She said that she had urged Carroll to go to the police because what had happened to her was rape but Carroll refused and asked her not to tell anyone about it and she had honored that request all these years.

Another woman described how Trump assaulted her on a plane.

The court also heard dramatic testimony from a businesswoman, Jessica Leeds, who said Trump grabbed her breast and attempted to put his hand up her skirt on a flight in 1979.

Leeds is one of two women the judge has ruled can give evidence about the former president’s alleged sexual assaults. She told the jury she was seated next to Trump on a flight to New York. After chatting for a while and eating dinner, he suddenly “decided to kiss me and grope me”.

“He was trying to kiss me. He was trying to pull me towards him. He was grabbing my breasts. It was like he had 40m hands.

“It was when he started putting his hand up my skirt, that gave me a jolt of strength.”

Leeds said she was able to pull away and fled to the back of the plane. She went public with her account of the alleged attack weeks before the 2016 presidential election, after Trump denied having sexually assaulted women.

Leeds said she saw Trump three years later, when she was volunteering at a Humane Society event.

“He looked at me and he said, ‘I remember you, you’re that cunt from the airplane,’” Leeds said. “It was like a bucket of cold water thrown over my head.”

There seems to be no limit to the amount of evidence revealing what a disgusting creep Trump is.

The news reports do not mention any cross examination by Trump’s lawyers of these two witnesses but the trial is still ongoing so maybe that will come later. Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina seems to be the bulldog type and has not shown himself to be subtle and sensitive. The two women are now 79 and 81 years old and subjecting elderly women to brutal cross-examinations may not play well with a jury.

Interestingly, the Leeds story with all its graphic details was prominently reported in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post as well. I would have thought they would downplay or even ignore it. I wonder what that says, if anything, about the state of the Trump-Murdoch alliance.

When South Africa came close to civil war

During the time that I was a student in Sri Lanka, South Africa was an apartheid state. Nelson Mandela was an iconic figure for us as a freedom fighter, along with Che Guevara, but he had been languishing in prison since 1962, his arrest reportedly facilitated by the CIA. (The US for a long time supported the apartheid state of South Africa while giving lip service to human rights.) White supremacy was so deeply entrenched that I thought it would never yield unless there was a violent uprising by the Black and colored population that would result in enormous bloodshed. I expected Mandela to die in prison. So the peaceful transition to a democracy that resulted in majority rule and Mandela being elected president was one of the big surprises that taught me that one should never discount the possibility of things turning out better than one might have realistically expected.

The architects of that transition were Mandela and F. W. de Klerk, the president of that apartheid regime. de Klerk had the foresight to see that apartheid had to end one way or the other and that it was better to be part of the transition than being forced out. He saw the writing on the wall more clearly than his white predecessor presidents and so he released Mandela from prison in 1990.
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Extraordinary developments in Haiti

Haiti has been going through a hell of a time in the recent past but especially since its former president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in 2021 and the prime minister Ariel Henry took power. The subsequent governments have been weak and as a result, armed gangs have started taking over in parts of the country, especially its capital Port-au-Prince, terrorizing he population.

People seem to have finally had enough and as a result vigilante groups of citizens have struck back at the gangs.
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Credibility is the key issue in Carroll case

In the sexual assault and defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump that is currently underway in a New York courtroom (the grim details of which can be read here), Carroll has faced the toughest part and that is the cross-examination from Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina.

In a case like this that took place over 30 years ago and for which there is no physical evidence or witnesses to the event, it all hinges on how jurors judge the credibility of the person making the allegations. In this case, Carroll did not scream or report the rape to the police and waited a long time to come forward with the allegations, all which Tacopina focused on to cast doubt on her testimony. However, she did tell two friends of hers at that time about what happened and they will be called to testify. The infamous Access Hollywood tape where Trump was caught boasting of his habit of grabbing women by their genitals will also be played. There may also be testimony from two other women who have publicly claimed that Trump sexually assaulted them as well.
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Disney decides to play hardball with DeSantis

The Disney corporation and Florida governor Ron DeSantis have been in a tit-for-tat escalation ever since Disney criticized Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ laws which DeSantis has been using as his signature issue to highlight his ‘anti-woke’ credentials that he clearly hoped would propel him to the Republican nomination for president, even though he has not formally declared himself as a candidate yet.

The Disney corporation has now escalated it even further by suing DeSantis.

Disney sued Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida and presumed challenger for the Republican presidential nomination, on Wednesday, saying he had subjected it to “a targeted campaign of government retaliation”.

The entertainment giant wants a court to overturn state efforts to exert control over Walt Disney World in Orlando. The lawsuit was filed within minutes of a DeSantis-appointed oversight board voting to override agreements made in February that allowed the company to expand the theme park and maintain control over neighboring land.

Disney called the state government’s action “patently retaliatory, patently anti-business and patently unconstitutional”.

It added: “At the governor’s bidding, the state’s oversight board has purported to ‘void’ publicly noticed and duly agreed development contracts, which laid the foundation for billions of Disney’s investment dollars and thousands of jobs.

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They really, really hate transgender people

Recently there was a ridiculous fuss raised by the usual suspects whenever transgender issues come up. This was when the beer company Anheuser-Busch featured a trans woman influencer in an online promotion. On his show Last Week Tonight John Oliver describes the absurdity that ensued. (For some reason the full clip was not available anywhere but it can be found split into two parts.)

The sexual assault case against Trump began yesterday

The first day saw opening statements by lawyers for E. Jean Carroll, a writer who was an advice columnist for Elle Magazine, and Donald Trump.

Carroll accuses Trump of assaulting her in a dressing room of the New York department store Bergdorf Goodman in 1996 after they ran into each other at the entrance and he asked for help in choosing a present for a friend.

Carroll sat stony faced at the front of the courtroom as her lawyer, Shawn Crowley, told the jury that Trump manoeuvred her client into a dressing room and then attacked her. The lawyer said Trump banged Carroll’s head against the wall, pinned her arms back with one hand, pulled her tights down with the other and then rammed his fingers into her vagina.

Crowley said that Carroll kicked Trump and tried to knee him off but he was too strong for her.
“He removed his hand and forced his penis inside her,” the lawyer told the jury.
…

But Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, told the jury of three women and six men that Carroll filed the lawsuit for political ends, to sell a book and for public attention.

Tacopina said that the rape accusation was invented by Carroll and two other women who are expected to testify that she told them about the assault shortly afterwards.

“They schemed to hurt Donald Trump politically,” he said.

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Harry Belafonte (1927-2023)

The singer, actor, and activist has died at the age of 96. All his life, he was an untiring fighter for civil rights and social justice and an opponent of US imperialism, as you can see from this brief biography.

As well as performing global hits such as Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), winning a Tony award for acting and appearing in numerous feature films, Belafonte spent his life fighting for a variety of causes. He bankrolled numerous 1960s initiatives to bring civil rights to Black Americans; campaigned against poverty, apartheid and Aids in Africa; and supported leftwing political figures such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
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