Drug raids should end

The list of tragic deaths of innocent people caused by police and SWAT teams blasting into people’s homes in the middle of the night with battering rams and with their guns firing continues to grow. Some jurisdictions have stopped the use of so-called ‘no-knock’ warrants that allows them to break down doors without warning.

But John Oliver on last week’s Last week Tonight says that there is little difference between a ‘no knock’ warrant and a warrant that requires knocking, since the police are only required to wait only 20 seconds after knocking before breaking down the door. Since they usually arrive in the middle of the night, the 20 second limit is meaningless. Hell, it often takes me longer than that to answer the door even when I am awake and dressed and it is in the middle of the day.
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ICC starts war crimes investigation in Israel’s occupied territories

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has opened a war crimes investigation into war crimes committed in the territories occupied by Israel. An examination of events in that apartheid state is long overdue.

Fatou Bensouda said the probe would cover events in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip since June 2014.

Last month, the Hague-based court ruled that it could exercise its criminal jurisdiction over the territories.

Israel rejected Ms Bensouda’s decision, while Palestinian officials praised it.

The US expressed disappointment and opposition to the move.
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How much of this outrage is performative?

We are now fed a regular diet of outrage about the most trivial of things. The latest are the ones about the Muppets, the Potato Head toy, and some Dr. Seuss books

These things are definitely ginned up in order to get viewers and clicks. I am pretty certain that the people on Fox News and similar sites (even the most dimwitted) know that these things are silly even as they feign outrage over these pseudo-controversies. But I wonder about their target audience of older, white, right-wing viewers. Do they view these things as serious issues and get angry or do they see them as merely entertaining? I am sure that some do get genuinely fired up but I cannot imagine that it can be a large number. Maybe there is an unspoken agreement in which the people in the media pretend to be outraged and their audience pretends to be angry. Or maybe I am just naive in thinking that adults can’t surely care that much about such things.

Stephen Colbert had a very thoughtful segment on the Dr. Seuss books faux-controversy and gives some children’s books recommendations of his own.

Neera Tanden is out

Joe Biden’s pick to head the Office of Management and Budget has withdrawn her name in the face of stiff opposition. In all the coverage that I have been reading about her nomination in the mainstream media, attention has focused entirely on her supposedly ‘toxic’ tweets. For Republicans to be upset over mean tweets is of course rich, given that their hero Donald Trump was an utterly vicious tweeter.

But what is noticeable is that nowhere in the coverage did I see any mention of what should have been the real obstacle to her nomination, which is her awful record as head of the Center of American Progress and that silence says a lot about the corrupt bipartisan politics in the US.

Tanden will likely end up in some other Biden administration post because she is a strong Democratic partisan and prolific fundraiser even from unsavory sources and money talks.

The USPS Board gets new people who may fire the postmaster general

Louis DeJoy, the Postmaster General of the US Postal Service, was a businessperson and Republican fundraiser with no experience in the area of the agency he was picked to lead by Trump. He seems intent on ruining the postal service in the name of cost savings and efficiency. Like many Trump and Republican free market enthusiasts, they do not seem to realize that some vital government services are just that, services whose goal should be to serve the public well, not to generate profits.

What is even more puzzling is that in providing uniform pricing for mail, the USPS is using the heavier volume of mail sent to and from urban areas (which makes it cheaper to handle per item) to subsidize the mail sent to and from rural and remote areas. For some rural areas, the postal service is their lifeline to the rest of the country and the way they get essential items like medicines. Since urban areas tend be more Democratic and rural areas more Republican, cutting postal services or raising prices would hurt Republicans more. And yet, Republicans, so indoctrinated against the government, seem to be on board with both those measures that are promoted in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘cost cutting’.
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Using gods to support bigotry

People who are homophobic and transphobic do not hesitate to say that their stance is what their god wants, as if they have a hotline to their deity who keeps them informed. Republican congressperson Greg Staube said on the floor of the House of Representatives that his god opposes transgender rights. Congressperson Al Green, who is Black and gay, had no hesitation about putting such people in their place during the debate on provide protections against discrimination to the LGBTQ community by pointing out how people had invoked their god in support of slavery and other abominations.

A different March Madness

March Madness is the name given to the college basketball championships in the US but it may acquire an additional significance this year. One of the features of apocalyptic cults is that when the predicted day of reckoning fails to materialize, they simply shift the day. This is happening with the QAnon and other dead-enders who believe that Trump should still be president. After the overthrow of the election did not occur on January 6th despite their riot, they thought that Trump would seize power on inauguration day. When that did not happen and he slunk off to Florida, they needed a new day and it appears that Thursday, March 4th is the one.
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Trump’s surprisingly poor showing in the CPAC straw poll

As expected, Trump received a rapturous welcome at the CPAC conference that ended yesterday and went through his usual spiel for ninety minutes, again claiming that he won. He clearly seeks to remain as the leader of the Republican party and thus has frozen the race to be the party’s next nominee in 2024, similar to the way that Hillary Clinton froze the Democratic race in 2016 until she finally did announce her candidacy.
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Doubling down on the lies to pick the pockets of the gullible

Donald Trump makes a return to the public eye with a speech today to the annual right-wing Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida, providing the finale to this right-wing nut fest. While CPAC is independent of the Republican party, CPAC drives much of the party’s agenda. So far, the event has been doubling down on the Big Lie that the election was stolen from him and the reasons for doing is obvious, because it gets the party faithful to open their wallets.

“Donald Trump convinced his base – a majority of Republicans, if polls are to be believed – that the election was stolen. Though the CPAC organizers likely know it’s false, they’re using this as a wedge issue to excite the base and sell more tickets,” said Nick Pasternak, who recently left the Republican party after working on several GOP campaigns.

He added: “CPAC’s willingness to make the election lie such a big issue this year is a concerning symbol of what many in the party think – and what they’ll do.”
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Jay Williams, a Republican strategist in Georgia, said the focus on elections was a way to gin up support among the party’s faithful base, which remains largely loyal to Trump and his allies.

“I would not equate ‘the party’ with CPAC so I wouldn’t put much stock in it from that perspective,” he said. “CPAC exists to make money and so it’s no surprise to me the organizers have jumped on to this issue as a way to drive engagement of their target market.”

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