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.

[Read more…]

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.
[Read more…]

What to expect after Carlson’s departure

The circumstances that led to the firing of Tucker Carlson by Fox News are still murky. Neither he nor Fox have made any statement as to the precise reasons but speculation is that the abrupt nature of the firing in the absence of any obvious factors suggests that something serious had emerged to cause the rupture between them. We will have to see what that is. The one thing you can be sure of is that this was not a split caused by a clash of high-minded principles because neither party has any. It will be because of some grubby and tawdry issues. What I would like to see is a bare-knuckle brawl where they air each other’s dirty laundry.

As to what happens next, media analyst Jack Shafer says that nothing will really change after the departure of Carlson because what Fox does is not create shows around individuals but around certain types of people and it is easy replace a type. In fact, Fox has a deep bench of people who can step into Carlson’s shoes and pick up where he left off in targeting white nationalists and in incendiary rabble-rousing around culture war issues as well as race and gender.
[Read more…]

Fox News splits with Tucker Carlson

Fox News announced this morning that the network had severed ties with Tucker Carlson who attracted the biggest audience for the network during his nightly 8:00pm show. The network said that starting today, his time slot will be hosted by a rotating panel until a permanent host is found. A clue that the parting was not amicable can be seen in the fact that Fox said that his last show was the one he gave last Friday, which means that he will not be given the opportunity to say farewell to the many racist, bigoted, and white supremacist fans that tuned in to watch his daily message of hate. His ended his show on Friday saying “We’ll be back on Monday”. Famous last words.

I am as surprised by the development as anyone. While the lawsuit brought by Dominion had devastating internal messages by him that undoubtedly contributed to Fox settling for a massive $787.5 million instead of going to trial, he was by no means the only one fingered as systematically lying. Since the network was not required by the settlement to give an on-air apology, I thought that they would simply go back to lying as before, except leaving Dominion out of it and being more careful not to name entities that were powerful enough to sue it. In other words, just basically stick to their business model of pandering to racists and bigots by attacking marginalized groups.
[Read more…]

Sex and seances

The 1920s were a high point in people believing that they could communicate with the dead. This may well have been due to two major events: the First World War of 1914-1918 and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919. Both of them resulted in many millions of deaths, many of them sudden and of young people, causing deep grief among the survivors. One can well understand the yearning of people to somehow connect with the ones they had lost.

Naturally this created a market for those who could claim to channel the spirits of the dead and as a result there was a cottage industry of people conducting seances, where you go to talk with a loved one through an intermediary. Belief in this was widespread and indeed this form of ‘spiritism’, the belief in the existence of an afterlife where the deceased lived and could be communicated with, was viewed as a kind of religion that was independent of other religions and devoid of beliefs in any particular god. Belief in communicable spirits was supported by many eminent people of that time, including scientists such as Sir Oliver Lodge, whose son had died. Another notable believer was Arthur Conan Doyle whose son Kingsley had died during the war and Doyle believed that through a medium, he had been able to talk with him. His wife Jean also claimed to have the ability to communicate with the dead using the mode of spirit writing, where her hand would be guided over paper by the spirit.
[Read more…]

Willie Nelson at 90

Willie Nelson who, along with Snoop Dog, has become the poster boy for smoking marijuana, is turning 90 but is still active, writing songs and planning a new tour.

His song There’s nothing I can do about it now is my personal favorite. In it, he captures a sentiment that those of us who are older and looking back will recognize, that it is too late to change some things, however much we may regret them now, and that while we should do what we can to rectify things, there is no point in wallowing over what we can’t do. The message is one of cheerful resignation, set to a bouncy, uptempo beat.

I found these words to especially resonate with me.

I could cry for the time I’ve wasted
But that’s a waste of time and tears
And I know just what I’d change if I went back in time somehow
But there’s nothing I can do about it now
I’m forgiving everything that forgiveness will allow
And there’s nothing I can do about it now.

There are many other great lines in the song, such as these:

I’ve seen the fire of a woman scorned
Turn her heart of gold to steel.

Jewish extremist attacks on Christians in Israel

Right wing evangelical Christians in the US have at least two agendas. One is to portray themselves as a persecuted minority both at home and abroad. In the US, this ‘persecution’ takes the form of whining about not having a privileged place in the public sphere, even though as a majority they have so many advantages. They are also quick to seize upon attacks on Christians who are a minority in other countries as further evidence of this global persecution of their faith.

The other agenda of right wing evangelical Christians is to be strong supporters of the right wing of the Israeli political spectrum. This results in them not being critical about the harsh treatment of Palestinians in Israel and in the occupied territories that has resulted in what is effectively apartheid-like conditions imposed on them. The reason for this may be because Christians and Jews share the Old Testament of the Bible and that forms a bond. Another is the shared antipathy to Muslims who are deemed to be not worthy of consideration of the same rights as anyone else. Yet another may be that evangelical Christians eagerly await the second coming of Jesus and seek signs of his imminent arrival. These End-Timers view strife in the Middle East as a key indicator of Armageddon’s onset and thus view any escalation of violence there as a good thing.
[Read more…]

The Republican war against sex

Unmarried people living together is so common now that few bother to even comment on it. But that was not always the case and as an example, there is a 1931 law in Michigan that prohibits that practice. This is one of the many laws dating back ages ago that are seen as out of date and are routinely violated without any authority taking action against the violators. Occasionally someone decides that they might as well repeal the law in case some overzealous prosecutor or mischief maker discovers its existence and dredges it up to harass someone they dislike or make some kind of point.

You would think that voting to repeal a prohibition against unmarried cohabitation would be a no-brainer. But some Republicans in Michigan are fighting even this.
[Read more…]

Easy access to guns results in needless death and injury

A colleague of mine had as his tagline to his emails the old saying, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. Recent events have made me think that “When you have a gun, everything looks like a threat’, while less pithy, expresses a truism.

This thought was triggered by a recent set reports of people shooting at others seemingly for no reason other than they felt threatened by innocent actions and happened to have guns conveniently at hand to use. In each case, death and injuries arose simply because one person had a gun and felt that its use was the only way to deal with a situation when doing nothing or just talking would have worked much better. But having a gun not only prevented them from exploring other options, it escalated the situation beyond all reason.

One case that has received a lot of publicity is that of a 16-year old Black adolescent Ralph Yarl who happened to go to the wrong house in Kansas City, Missouri to pick up his younger siblings from a party. When he rang the doorbell, the 84-year old white homeowner Andrew Lester, seeing him through the glass door, shot him twice, once in the head. Yarl survived but it is very likely that there will be long-term consequences that he and his family will have to deal with.

The homeowner’s grandson said that he was disgusted by the shooting and that his grandfather said racist things and watched Fox News round the clock.
[Read more…]

Rightwing extremists fare poorly in school board elections

Rightwingers in the US have made schools and libraries the focus of their culture wars, seeing those venerable institutions as somehow indoctrinating children with liberal values, when in reality they are largely providing fairly ideologically neutral services. What has happened is that rightwingers have lost the culture wars as the zeitgeist has shifted under their feet, resulting in the public at large more accepting of those groups that were formerly invisible or marginalized because of their gender identity or sexual orientation or ethnicity. As a result, the rightwingers have become the fringe but still see themselves as upholding mainstream values, and have launched an assault on schools and libraries in their effort to take control of what they think they have lost.

But it looks like becoming ever more extreme, as often happens with groups fighting culture wars, may be a losing political strategy because it makes their toxic views more public and alarms those do not agree with them. Those who may formerly have been somewhat passive politically have now become more active in trying to stop the extremists and we are seeing some evidence of that as rightwingers have recently lost in many school board elections.
[Read more…]