Nikki Haley’s puzzling end game

Nikki Haley, like Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, and most of the other people who started out vying for the Republican presidential nomination, seemed to have decided early on in their campaigns that they needed to avoid attacking serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and alienating his MAGA cult followers as much as possible and so refrained from mentioning him except in the mildest and vaguest terms. Many observers wrote about the incompetence of SSAT’s challengers and the fact that although they raised quite a bit of money, they did not spend it on attacking SSAT.

This strategy of not going after the front-runner never made much sense if they wanted to win the nomination and so it was assumed that they were merely auditioning for the vice-presidential slot. And that seemed a valid theory as they dropped out and embraced SSAT. But their strategy of treating SSAT with kid gloves in order to ingratiate themselves with him did not make much sense either since SSAT hates anyone who does not completely kowtow to him and so he began attacking them, especially DeSantis and Haley, since they were the ones who had the best shot by the time the caucuses and primaries actually had their contests. As this dawned on the two of them, they started going after SSAT, mildly at first but more pointedly later.
[Read more…]

Israel’s murder of Gazans continues

There is no other word to describe what is happening in Gaza other than to call it the willful murder of innocent people by a rampaging Israeli army that is using indiscriminate force as never-ending revenge for the attacks on October 7. Almost 30,000 Gazans have now died. The sheer scale of the killings of ordinary people is evidence that these actions are deliberate policy of the Israeli government, not those of a few rogue soldiers. This extremely sad story about one family captures the sheer horror of what is happening.

A six-year-old girl who went missing in Gaza City last month has been found dead, along with several of her relatives and two paramedics who tried to save her.

Hind Rajab was fleeing the city with her aunt, uncle and three cousins when the car they were travelling in appears to have come face to face with Israeli tanks, and come under fire.

Audio recordings of calls between Hind and emergency call operators suggest that the six-year-old was the only one left alive in the car, hiding from Israeli forces among the bodies of her relatives.

Her pleas for someone to rescue her ended when the phone line was cut amid the sound of more gunfire.

Paramedics from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) managed on Saturday to reach the area, which had previously been closed off as an active combat zone.

They found the black Kia car Hind had been travelling in – its windscreen and dashboard smashed to pieces, bullet holes scattered across the side.

One paramedic told journalists that Hind was among the six bodies found inside the car, all of which showed signs of gunfire and shelling.

[Read more…]

I see doppelgangers

A doppelganger is what we call someone who looks a lot like someone else, although the dictionary says it can also refer to someone with the same name.

I have noticed that I see doppelgangers everywhere. There are many people whom I meet who strike me as having a strong resemblance to someone else I know or, more likely, to a public figure whose image frequently appears in the media. It seems to be a personal quirk since other people don’t seem to see the resemblances that I see. When I am watching TV with friends and family and I say that someone on the screen looks like someone else whom we both know, very often they cannot see the resemblance at all.

The funny thing is that even though I often see doppelgangers of other people, I have never seen a doppelganger of myself. Perhaps we are reluctant to give up the idea that we are so distinctive that there is no one else who could be possibly like us. This may also explain why, when I tell someone that their looks remind me of someone well-known, they are always surprised and because they sometimes do not view it as a compliment, I have stopped telling people this.

Jon Stewart on gun control

Ever since Trevor Noah left as host of The Daily Show, the show has been having a series of guest hosts, seemingly trying out people to see who might fit the bill best. The results must have been unsatisfactory because they have brought back former long-time host Jon Stewart, the person who made it much more focused on sharp political and social satire until he retired from the show nine years ago. He will host the show only on Mondays, though, with the correspondents doing the next three days of the week.

In his first appearance, Stewart did an extended piece on the absurd lack of reasonable gun control measures in the US. (I am informed by commenters Bruce and johnson catman that this is an old clip that they see-released on the TDS website. His first appearance will be this coming Monday.)

Living the high life on donor money

In US politics, money plays a huge role because of the length of the campaigns and the high cost of TV ads. It is only a minor exaggeration to say that a better predictor than opinion polls of who is going to win a race is to look at which side raised more money. This is why media organizations eagerly report the fund-raising totals that are regularly released, though the relaxing of campaign financing rules means that nowadays a lot of that money can be kept hidden. As a result, the correlation between fund-raising and electoral success was perhaps more true before the narrow 5-4 US Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case in 2010 that prohibited “the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, including nonprofit corporations, labor unions, and other associations”. That decision opened the floodgates for much more so-called ‘dark money’ than before, so that now even minor candidates in lower tier races can raise huge sums.

One result is that some candidates and parties running campaigns have chosen to live the high life on campaign cash, using it to fund private jet travel, limousines, resorts, and any other aspect of a fancy lifestyle that they thought they could pass off as a campaign expense. For example, this report describes what the Republican National Committee has been spending money on.
[Read more…]

GOP: The party that can’t count straight

The US House of Representatives is structured so as to give the speaker, who is selected by the majority party, almost total control over what legislation comes to the floor for a vote. This means that you are almost guaranteed that when the speaker put a bill before the house, it is because they are confident that they have the votes to pass it. When Nancy Pelosi was the speaker, she was an accurate vote counter and never lost a vote.

But yesterday, the GOP lost a vote. This was not over a trivial issue but a vote to impeach homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. A major goal of the GOP is to impeach someone, anyone, as revenge for the two impeachments of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) but their efforts to do so against Joe Biden are floundering because they cannot find any grounds for dong so. They decided on Mayorkas because he deals with border security and accusing him of failing to protect the country advances that agenda too. Not everyone in the GOP was happy with the idea of frivolously using the impeachment process this way and three of the GOP members said that they planned to vote vote against the measure but the speaker went ahead with the planned vote anyway.
[Read more…]

Using outrageous statements to make a nice living

There are a large number of right wing people that one hears about who have a penchant for saying the most outrageous things. right wing media and use that as a route to financial success.

Take, for example, Candace Owens who is employed by the website The Daily Wire as a columnist. She started out as a political activist by criticizing the Republican party and serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) but then suddenly in 2017 she became a conservative and started attacking the usual targets of the extreme right wing. She is now a pro-Trump conspiracy-spouting election denier who seems to be a popular figure in right wing circles despite not saying anything worthwhile. She is not alone. The last decade has produced a regular stream of such people.
[Read more…]

What kind of immigrants should the US admit?

The issue of the border and migration is a politically charged issue. Republicans have seized upon it as one of the few concrete issues that they think can help them win elections, since their other issues involve culture wars that do not seem to have gained much traction. So desperate are they to keep this issue alive that the speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson, urged on by serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), has promised to torpedo a bipartisan plan negotiated by Republicans and Democrats in the Senate to deal with the border issue, so that it will not be resolved before the election, even though the plan seems to give hard-line Republicans almost every thing that they had demanded.

Opponents to any attempt to deal with the border issues have exploited the xenophobia that is always lurking in the minds of people to view anything other that harsh exclusionary treatment of those seeking asylum as constituting an ‘open borders’ policy that will destroy the US. This xenophobia is laced with racism since the immigrants they are concerned about stopping are people of color, while SSAT has bemoaned that they are not people from Europe who would no doubt be welcomed into the country.
[Read more…]

The ‘average’ child

As someone who has spent almost his entire life in academic institutions, I know how easy it is to put labels on students depending upon one’s perception of their academic potential. When faculty talk about students, they will frequently characterize them by such labels. It is a destructive habit since it seems to suggest to students that they are limited in what they can do. I tried to fight against that tendency in my own speech and encouraged fellow faculty to take a less rigid view but was not always successful, so encompassing is that mindset in academia.

It can affect more harmfully those who are thought to be ‘average’ or below since it can reduce their ambitions, as this poem by Mike Buscemi serves to remind us.

THE AVERAGE CHILD

I don’t cause teachers trouble;
My grades have been okay.
I listen in my classes.
I’m in school every day.

My teachers think I’m average;
My parents think so too.
I wish I didn’t know that, though;
There’s lots I’d like to do.

I’d like to build a rocket;
I read a book on how.
Or start a stamp collection…
But no use trying now.

Cause, since I found I’m average,
I’m smart enough you see
To know there’s nothing special
I should expect of me.

[Read more…]

Wind, rain, and power outages

California has been hit with heavy rain and gusty winds the last few days. In my area, yesterday was the worst, with wind gusts up to 60 mph and heavy rain, with short periods of bright sunshine in between. I lost power the whole of Sunday which is why there were no posts. Since I did not have to go anywhere, I stayed at home and watched the weather changes through my window, with the winds causing the trees to sway to and fro. I have not seen this kind of weather since I moved here over four years ago.

Since sunset is about 5:30 pm at this time of year, it was interesting to sit inside and slowly watch everything becoming totally dark, since there were no lights anywhere in the area and the heavy cloud cover shut off any light from the moon and stars.

Today the winds and rain have eased up here but the news says that it is still hitting the southern part of the state hard, with further flooding expected.