Goodbye and good riddance to Tulsi Gabbard

Tulsi Gabbard is the director of national intelligence, tasked with overseeing the many intelligence agencies in the US. Although she tried desperately to suck up to Trump when it became clear that he was not happy with her for some reason, it was not enough for her to keep her job and today Trump fired her. You can read the twists and turns of her weird political journey here, where, like so many others, she sacrificed what she said were her strong principles in order to kowtow to Trump.

As usual, this kind of news is released on a Friday evening in the hope that most people will not be paying attention.

The White House forced Gabbard to resign, the Reuters news agency reported, citing a source familiar with the issue. Fox News was first to report Gabbard’s exit, citing her husband’s cancer diagnosis.

Trump was asking cabinet members last month whether he should replace Gabbard, according to two people briefed on the discussions.
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Gabbard already seemed marginalized last June, when Trump endorsed Israel’s decision to attack Iran before the US joined the war by ordering the bombing of the Islamic regime’s nuclear facilities.

The decision was a public repudiation of Gabbard’s earlier testimony on Capitol Hill that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. Trump seemed to add insult to injury by declaring he did not care what she said, and dismissing her assessment as “wrong”.

Within weeks, Gabbard made a public effort to get back into the president’s good graces by calling for Barack Obama and several top national security officials in his administration to be prosecuted, alleging that they had conducted a “treasonous conspiracy” to falsely depict Russia as interfering in the 2016 election on Trump’s side.

She is the fourth woman that Trump has fired, following Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer.

The big mystery is how FBI director Kash Patel still has a job. Patel is an incompetent grifter and clown. He should thank his lucky stars that he is male, since Trump seems to give men more leeway.

Gauging the Xi-Trump summit and its geopolitical implications

After summit meetings of the kind we just had with Trump and Xi Jinping, sometimes there is a joint communique and signing ceremony outlining what the two sides agreed upon. That did not happen, leaving observers scratching their heads as to what the point of the meeting was. Immediately afterwards, Russian president Vladimir Putin also went to China and the contrast between that and the barrenness of the Xi-Trump meeting was quite stark. They not only issued a joint communique, they also had a joint signing ceremony of all the agreements arrived at.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin issued a joint condemnation of “irresponsible” US foreign policy on Wednesday, warning of “a drift back to the law of the jungle”.
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The exchanges between Xi and Putin were notably warm and Wednesday’s summit appeared to be more substantive than Xi’s meetings with the US president.

In their joint statement, Xi and Putin said they looked forward to further bilateral cooperation ranging from artificial intelligence to the protection of rare tigers, leopards and pandas. 
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The spectacle of the leaders of the cold war superpowers – each weakened by conflicts of their own making – flying thousands of miles to sit down with Xi in the Great Hall of the People underlined the Chinese president’s status on the global stage.

Xi and Putin went into their summit with a long record of close cooperation. They had already met more than 40 times, and Xi has described the bilateral relation as “without limits”.

The two leaders scolded the US for undermining global stability, in particular for seeking to develop a “golden dome” missile defence system, and for allowing a nuclear arms treaty to lapse in February.
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Xi and Putin then attended a signing ceremony for numerous documents spanning technology, trade, scientific research and intellectual property.

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Trump is the Republican party

Even as his poll numbers nationally sink to historically low values, Trump’s grip on the Republican base seems to be as strong as ever. We can see this in the way that he was able to have his acolytes defeat well-established incumbents in primaries. He had done this on Sunday in Louisiana where incumbent senator Bill Cassidy lost his primary and yesterday we saw seven-term incumbent congressman Thomas Massie lose his race in Kentucky. In addition to Trump, the Israel lobby also poured money into the race against Massie. Trump’s next target is incumbent senator John Cornyn in Texas, where Trump has endorsed scandal-plagued Ken Paxton in the May 26th primary.

Trump has undoubtedly been successful in getting loyal cult members to win their primary races against anyone who displeases him, even if that displeasure is caused by the perception that the person is insufficiently servile to him or their rival is more servile. This was the case with Cassidy and Cornyn who were hardly rebels. In fact Cassidy was the deciding vote that enabled nut job Robert Kennedy Jr to become secretary of health and human services, arguably the worst person to ever serve in that important position.
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Immigrants abused by DHS seek millions in damages

The abuse of immigrants by agents working for government agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Department of Homeland security (DHS) has been occurring on such a scale and over such a long time that we can easily become numb, especially since other horrors on an international scale like Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its expropriation of Palestinian land, its bombing of Lebanon and, of course, the wars in Iran and Ukraine compete for attention.

But we cannot ignore these local horrors and ProPublica reports on how one group of abused immigrants are fighting back, suing the government for damages. In the suit, we learn of the terrible abuses they suffered at the hands of these government thugs, who seem to act like they are members of the military attacking an enemy.
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Xi-Trump summit stalemate

To no one’s surprise, the summit meeting between Trump and Chinese premier Xi Jinping did not produce any major agreements. Although Trump claimed to have settled a lot of issues, nothing was detailed about the main issues of Iran, Taiwan, trade, tariffs and rare earth supplies.

Trump took along with him a whole slew of business leaders and oligarchs from the US, but that did not seem to have produced any tangible benefit. It is not clear how they could personally contribute to such talks anyway. It seems like they were taken along because of Trump’s belief that having wealthy people along with him might somehow sway the Chinese to give concessions on technology and trade. That did not happen, as far as we know, and indeed despite the Boeing CEO being there, the deal on planes that was announced was for just 200 planes, a big drop from the 500 that had been expected before the summit.

Trump likes to play power games with foreign leaders such as with handshakes but this time it was Xi who came out on top. His mention of the ‘Thucydides trap’ seemed like a twofer. One was to show his intellectual superiority since it is certain that he knew that Trump would have no clue as to who Thucydides was, let alone what the trap was about. But his use of that trap also implies that it is China that is the rising power and the US the one in decline, and that the US should tread warily, especially on the issue of Taiwan.
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How ProPublica works to address important local and national issues

In the US, local media has been on a steady decline over decades, with local newspapers either closing or being bought up by giant national chains and their local reporting gutted and replaced with general stories that are written for all their newspapers across the country. This means that important local issues do not get covered and local politicians and institutions do not get the close scrutiny they deserve because local media do not have the resources needed to do investigative reporting.

ProPublica has tried to combat this news vacuum by collaborating with local journalists to cover important stories and then using their national networks to provide these stories with greater publicity by having them appear in major media, thus increasing the impact. ProPublica can provide the local allies with the kind of resources needed for on-depth work. This approach has garnered them various awards, including the prestigious Pulitzer and Polk awards that are shared with the local collaborator, giving them recognition that they would not have otherwise had.

In a recent article, they discussed the various successes they have had, such as the one where they joined forces with The Connecticut Mirror to expose how Connecticut’s unique towing laws enabled towing companies to ripping off low-income people by quickly selling the cars they they towed.
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What is the point of this summit?

Trump, currently in China for a summit meeting with the Chinese president Xi Jinping, is definitely in an inferior position.

Donald Trump has landed in Beijing, the first visit to China by a US president in nearly a decade, as he seeks to mend power and prestige weakened by the war in Iran.
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The war has entered its third month, with Tehran tightening its grip over the strait of Hormuz and Washington struggling to turn a fragile ceasefire into a lasting settlement.

Behind the scenes, US officials have spent weeks urging China – Iran’s biggest oil customer and one of the few powers with leverage in Tehran – to pressure the Islamic Republic into reopening the strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply ordinarily passes, while accepting US terms for peace.

The US recently sanctioned several Chinese firms accused of assisting Iranian oil shipments and supplying satellite imagery allegedly used in Iranian military operations. China condemned the measures as “illegal unilateral sanctions” and invoked a rarely used blocking statute prohibiting Chinese entities from complying with them.
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AI is making spam moderation harder

Whenever a new person tries to comment on a post here, the WordPress platform that this blog uses has filters to check if they could be spam. A visit to the spam folder shows that each day tens, if not hundreds, of potential comments are summarily dispatched to the spam folder without my ever seeing them. If a comment passes those checks, then it is sent to me for moderation, to enable me to make sure that it is not spam. Once I approve the first comment from a new person, subsequent comments from that same person go through immediately, so spammers have to make the first comment plausible.

It used to be fairly easy to identify spam comments that make it past the filters and get to me. They were usually poorly written with typos and grammatical errors, they would have links to sites that had nothing to do with the post, they would often have effusive but generic compliments on the content of the post and my writing, and they would usually arrive a long time after the post originally appeared.

But in a recent post of mine about the blame game that has begun over the stagnation in the Iran war, I received the following comment for moderation.
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Evaluating the Democratic candidates for CA governor

In the previous post, I discussed the peculiar features of the so-called ‘jungle primary’ system in California to be held on June 2 that is used to select which two candidates will face off against each other for the governorship in the general election in November. I also discussed the two leading Republican contenders whom I will definitely not be voting for.

Before we get to the Democratic candidates for governor, we have to remember that outgoing governor Gavin Newsom, while good at gaining visibility by trolling Trump on social media is far from progressive and very much a protector of the wealthy. His actions seem to be designed to gain media attention and name recognition to lay the groundwork for a run for president in 2028. John Nichols exposes the hollowness of Newsom

Gavin Newsom made headlines this winter by vowing to defeat a proposal for a one-time 5% tax on billionaires in the state…Last year, a Reuters-Ipsos poll reported that a whopping 86% of Democrats said “changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority.”
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While pandering to business elites, Newsom has slashed budgets to assist the poor and near-poor with healthcare, housing and food – in a state where seven million live under the official poverty line and child poverty rates are the highest in the nation.
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