New speaker’s cynicism already on full display

The new speaker Mike Johnson has wasted no time in showing that he is as much a cynical politician as any in the GOP. Given the enthusiasm with which his election was received by the party, we should have expected no less, but it is still noteworthy.

The Biden administration had asked Congress for $104 billion for aid to Ukraine, Israel, and other causes. Spending bills have to originate in the House of Representatives and Johnson has decided to show his cleverness by passing a bill that would provide just the $14.3 billion for Israel, but require that this spending be offset by cutting the same amount from that dedicated to the IRS to hire new tax auditors in the Inflation Reduction Act passed earlier.

Johnson argues that this proves that the GOP are fiscal conservatives, a blatant lie since they have bloated the deficit repeatedly when they controlled Congress and the White House, by providing massive massive tax cuts for the rich. The Congressional Budget Office says that in reality, this bill would actually increase the deficit since the ‘saving’ of $14.3 billion on IRS agents will actually result in more than $26.8 billion of lost revenue due to inadequate auditing of wealthy people.

This bill is so obviously unserious that it will not even be brought up in the senate and president Biden has said he will veto it anyway. Johnson is trying to make the claim that Democrats prioritize hiring IRS agents over aiding Israel when the reality is that it is the GOP that is prioritizing helping the wealthy over aiding Israel. The devotion of the GOP to preserving and increasing the wealth of the already filthy rich is a marvel to behold.

Meanwhile, while he pursues these stunts, the budget deadline of November 17th is less than two weeks away.

This cartoon perfectly captures Johnson’s logic.

SBF found guilty on all counts

The jury returned a verdict of guilty on all seven counts in the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried.

“Mr. Bankman-Fried. Please rise and face the jury,” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan commanded just before a jury forewoman responded “guilty” seven times to two counts of wire fraud, two counts of wire fraud conspiracy and three other conspiracy charges, which carry potential penalties adding up to 110 years in prison. Bankman-Fried is likely to face far less than the maximum at a sentencing set for March 28.

Given the complexity of the entire cryptocurrency enterprise that few understand, there was the possibility that the jurors might be overwhelmed. The defense indeed emphasized that it was so complex that even their client was out of his depth and did not know what was going on and did not have the intent to defraud.

However, the prosecution decided to treat the whole cryptocurrency part as just a black box whose details were largely irrelevant. What they focused on was common-or-garden fraud, whereby SBF took the money of investors and diverted it for his personal use, including a lavish lifestyle.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, who sat in the front row of the spectator section during the verdict, stood before cameras outside the courthouse and said Bankman-Fried “perpetrated one of the biggest financial frauds in American history, a multibillion dollar scheme designed to make him the king of crypto.”

“But here’s the thing: The cryptocurrency industry might be new. The players like Sam Bankman-Fried might be new. This kind of fraud, this kind of corruption is as old as time and we have no patience for it,” he said.

He said the case should serve as a warning to every other fraudster who “thinks they’re untouchable, that their crimes are too complex,” that they are too powerful to prosecute or can talk their way out of their crimes because “I promise we’ll have enough handcuffs for all of them.”

That kind of fraud is easy to understand and the jury provided a verdict very quickly after just a few hours.

Should long films include intermissions?

In the past, film used to be about 90 minutes long, occasionally running to two hours. If they went longer than that, the so-called ‘epic films’ like Lawrence of Arabia and Cleopatra, they would include an intermission. This was a boon to those who needed to use the bathroom and also to the concession stands who got to sell more stuff.

But the intermission being included as part of the film seems to have disappeared even with films running over three hours. As a result some theater owners are inserting their own. This has brought mixed reviews. I for one am in favor of an intermission but, as Nardos Haile writes others are not.

In the last few years, moviegoing has become a larger-than-life experience, and a part of that theater experience has felt like films seem to have increasingly grown longer and longer . . .

Some moviegoers have said this about Martin Scorsese’s newly released masterful Western epic “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The film is a three-hour and nearly 30-minute-long vicious tale of the Osage murders at the hands of greedy white men in 1920s Oklahoma who are trying to steal their oil money. Its runtime is not unusual for Scorsese as his last film “The Irishman” is also three and a half hours long. 

But in the case of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” its lengthy, bladder-busting runtime is causing independent theaters in the U.S. and overseas in the U.K. to include intermissions. According to the British theater chain, Vue, the break they’ve implemented during “Killers of the Flower Moon” has been a success with moviegoers. Vue chief executive, Tim Richards said that they’ve “seen 74% positive feedback from those who have tried our interval.”

Meanwhile, in the states, a Colorado theater that also had an intermission was told by the film’s studio representatives that the intermission violates their licensing agreement.

This has ignited a larger discussion online on whether intermissions should be widely implemented for longer films. However, I don’t believe films like “Killers of the Flower Moon” need an intermission and, while this may be an unpopular opinion, I’m actually against them in most cases.

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The motivations of mass shooters

Thanks to the easy availability of high-powered weaponry, mass shootings in the US are depressingly frequent. In almost all cases, the shooter ends up being killed by law enforcement officers or kills themselves in the immediate aftermath, as was the case with the recent Maine shooter who killed 18 people. One cannot help but think that these people knew they were going to die so their rampage was part of a death wish plan.

But the question is why, if they sought death by suicide, they felt the need to kill other people, often total strangers, as a prelude. What do they gain? For some it may be that they seek posthumous fame, however fleeting. For others it may be due to an inchoate rage that seeks vengeance against the world for some harm that the shooter feels that he has suffered. For yet others, it may be an attempt to make some kind of political statement, however confused. Also, why are these shooters almost always male? By now, when I hear of such shootings, even before we get any details, I simply assume it was done by a man.
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The predictable aftermath of the Israeli response in Gaza

The steady killing by Israel of the entire population of Gaza continues with their total blockade of the territory that prevents anyone from entering and leaving while denying them the basic essentials of life such as water, food, medicines, and fuel. At the same time, we see the Israel lobby in the US spring into action to try and control the narrative here to limit any criticism of the actions of the Israel government and. military. Norman Solomon writes that right from the beginning, Israeli spokespersons have laid the groundwork for creating a massive death toll among the Gazans.

When Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations spoke outside the Security Council on Sunday, he said: “This is Israel’s 9/11. This is Israel’s 9/11.” Meanwhile, in a PBS NewsHour interview, Israel’s ambassador to the United States said: “This is, as someone said, our 9/11.”

While the phrase might seem logical, “Israel’s 9/11” is already being used as a huge propaganda weapon by Israel’s government — now engaged in massive war crimes against civilians in Gaza, after mass murder of Israelis by Hamas last weekend.

On the surface, an analogy between the atrocities just suffered by Israelis and what happened on Sept. 11, 2001 might seem to justify calls for unequivocal solidarity with Israel. But horrific actions are in process from an Israeli government that has long maintained a system of apartheid while crushing basic human rights of Palestinian people.

What is very sinister about trumpeting “Israel’s 9/11” is what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the shroud of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy suffered inside its own borders as a license to kill vast numbers of people in the name of retaliation, righteousness and, of course, the “war on terror.”

It’s a playbook that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu is currently adapting and implementing with a vengeance. Now underway, Israel’s collective punishment of 2.3 million people in Gaza is an intensification of what Israel has been doing to Palestinians for decades. But Israel’s extremism, more than ever touting itself as a matter of self-defense, is at new racist depths of willingness to treat human beings as suitable for extermination.

On Monday, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described Palestinians as “beastly people” and said: “We are fighting animals and are acting accordingly.”

Imagine the reaction if anyone had used that language about Israelis.
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Lewis Black is not a fan of The Golden Bachelor

I have not seen any episodes of the TV series The Bachelor but have seen clips and read enough news items to know that it is a show where multiple women compete to gain the affection of a man, with successive women being eliminated until just one remains, who becomes his fiancee. It all seems rather degrading to me but people seem to be willing to be embarrassed just for the chance to be on TV. Like all so-called reality shows, it is contrived and partially scripted, but it seems be very popular.

The show originated in 2002 sand its success has (of course) spawned multiple variations and latest known as The Golden Bachelor makes the participants all older people, with multiple women aged 60 or more competing to ‘win’ a 71-year old man.

Lewis Black is not impressed and lets loose with one of his typical rants.

Robert E. Lee statue melted down in secret

The US may be one of the few countries where people who tried to destroy their nation are honored as heroes and have statues put up of them in public places. I am referring of course to the attempt by the states of the Confederacy to dismantle the Union and create a separate nation. They were defeated by president Abraham Lincoln and for a while the people who led that rebellion were viewed as treasonous. But over time, a revisionist movement sprang up that portrayed the goals of the Confederacy as not the actual one, which was to preserve slavery, which by then had become seen as indefensible, but as a fight over so-called ‘states rights’ against the power of the national government and that the leaders of the insurrection needed to be honored and not vilified. This is the ‘Lost Cause’ narrative.
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Responsibility

(Non Sequitur)

If you click on the link and see the strips for the five subsequent days, you get the full range of weasel words and phrases used to actually escape responsibility while claiming to accept it.

When someone in an official position says “I take full responsibility” for some disaster, it is meaningless unless it is immediately followed by “So I am resigning”.

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.