The six primaries that were held yesterday resulted in Joe Biden winning four, Sanders winning one, with the state of Washington still to be called where the two are tied with 67% of the vote tallied. Biden has increased his lead in the delegate count to 856 to 708 for Sanders. It is hard to see how Sanders can regain the lead.
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The longest war in US history is in the process of finally winding down, at least as far as the US is concerned. The US has begun the first stage of the process of withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan from 13,000 to 8,600, one of the elements of the peace deal signed by the US with the Taliban. Another element is that the Taliban begin negotiations with the US-backed Afghan government to begin today in Oslo and that the government release 5,000 Taliban prisoners it is holding. The Afghan president signed a decree yesterday authrorizing the release of just 1,500 prisoners. It is not clear if this will satisfy the Taliban enough to start the talks.
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Seth Meyers says that we are in trouble because at a time of concern over a pandemic when we need sober leadership, we have a president who thinks that he can lie the problem away and we have people around him who are enabling his delusions.
While driving yesterday, I turned on the radio listened on the radio and found it was broadcasting a live press conference in which vice president Mike Pence was giving an update on the coronavirus. In between providing bits of information, he gushed over the leadership of Donald Trump in dealing with the coronavirus. I was not at all surprised to find that Trump had been there the whole time because Pence then handed it over to Trump who then boasted about how well he is dealing with the situation. It was sickening.
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One thing that you can be reasonably sure of is that when the US government and the media focus relentlessly on the actions of an adversarial foreign government, it is often to distract from the fact that the US does exactly the same things, sometimes on a much larger scale. A case in point is all the righteous indignation over Russian meddling in US elections while left unsaid is that the US, usually through the CIA, has a terrible history of doing much worse to countries all around the world over a long time and still continues to do so today.
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Lost in the news about the coronavirus is a big story emerging from Saudi Arabia about the arrest of several members of the family of the 84-year old ruler King Salman, along with other leading figures.
Among those held in the sweeping crackdown are two of the most prominent royal family members: Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, a younger brother of Saudi King Salman, and Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the king’s nephew and former crown prince.
…The sweep broadened on Saturday, the Journal later reported, to include dozens of interior ministry officials, senior army officers and others suspected of supporting a coup attempt. Prince Nayef bin Ahmed, a former army head of intelligence, was also among the detainees.
We have yet another case of someone acting against the interests of a group they belong to.
Former Republican member of Congress Aaron Schock came out as gay on Thursday in a long statement posted to Instagram and his personal website.
Schock spoke about his years of struggling with his sexuality and estrangement from his conservative family, and added that if he were in Congress now, he would “would support LGBTQ rights in every way [he] could.”
During his six years in Congress representing Illinois, Schock consistently voted against policies supported by the LGBTQ community, including the 2010 repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which allowed gay and bisexual people to openly serve in the military, and the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
It had been widely speculated that he was gay at the time he was a congressperson but we should not be too quick to judge and condemn Schock as yet another right-wing hypocrite. When he says that he was “struggling with his sexuality”, it is not clear whether his votes against providing justice to the LGBT+ community occurred during the time when he was in denial about his own sexual orientation and was trying to convince himself that he was not gay by going to the other extreme of overt homophobia. That condition is not that uncommon and reflects the sad fact that homosexuality still carries with it a stigma in many quarters.
But if he was cynically throwing the LGBT+ community under the bus and using those votes as a cover to hide his identity for the sake of advancing within the homophobic Republican party, then he deserves all the opprobrium he gets.
The last week has seen the media focus almost obsessively on the coronavirus and one aspect of its coverage has been its supposed negative effect on the stock market. I have been railing about the absurd obsession in the US with stock market prices, to the extent that the Federal Reserve of the US, supposed to deal with the fundamentals of the economy, cut interest rates by a huge amount, seemingly in response to the fall in stock prices before it was clear that the epidemic had any impact on those fundamentals. Not that it helped, since the stock market continued to fall anyway. We know that Donald Trump cares deeply about stock prices, the only thing really matters to him.
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Yet another person has been fired by Donald Trump late on Friday night, the infamous time for what is known as the ‘Friday night dump’, when administrations do things that they do not want much attention paid to. This time it was his chief of staff Mick Mulvaney who was fired. Mulvaney is a truly awful person, a liar and someone whose ambition was to stick it poor people and help the rich, such as his strenuous efforts to gut the work of the Consumer Financial Protections Bureau. You would think that this would make him a soul mate of Trump but even being a groveling toady is never enough to please someone as self-centered as Trump.
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A new analysis shows that Bernie Sanders’s’ signature proposal of Medicare For All would be a net positive for the economy and jobs.
A new analysis of the economic impact of a Medicare for All health care reform, like the signature policy proposal of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, suggests that such a plan would not only increase wages for workers but also create additional jobs.
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