Palace intrigues in Saudi Arabia

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.
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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.

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When personal identity and politics collide

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 US obsession with the stock market

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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Bye, bye Mick

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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Medicare For All would boost wages and create new jobs

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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Birds of a feather …

Guess who has come out in support of Chris Matthews, who resigned from his MSNBC show Hardball following many allegations of inappropriate behavior towards women, not to mention his highly inflammatory and offensive Nazi analogies against Bernie Sanders?

Yes, it is that champion of free speech and critic of political correctness, Bill Maher. The way he minimizes Matthews’s conduct is typical of such apologists.
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Some progressive down ballot candidates to watch

The Democratic party leadership is center-right in its ideology and hopelessly locked into the corporate-military structure. It needs to be transformed by getting more progressives elected at all levels. While much attention is being paid to the Democratic race to be the party’s presidential nominee, we should not ignore the progressive candidates who are vying to replace either right wing Democratic incumbents in safe Democratic seats or Republicans. They face tough odds because the party establishment supports these Democratic incumbents even though many of them vote with Republicans on key issues, especially when it comes to the rights of women, the LGBT community, and minorities. Defeating those incumbents would send a strong signal to the party leadership of the need to change and give a shot in the arm to a stodgy party, similar to the way that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did.

Here are some new faces that are worth following.
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Great moments in mathematics

Michael Bloomberg spent $500 million on his campaign. The US population is 327 million. How much does that work out to per person? Brian Williams and his guest on MSNBC seem to be working with pundit math rather than the mathematics that ordinary people use.

What is astonishing is that this was not an off-the-cuff mistake that anyone can make, though one would have thought that the figure was so outlandish that it would have given them pause before saying it on air. This had been thought of before the broadcast aired, as can be seen by the fact that they had prepared a graphic of it. So the many people involved in putting these shows on also did not notice the glaring error.