The charges against former media mogul Harvey Weinstein, that he abused and raped multiple women, keep growing even as his trial on some of the charges begins. But it seems like he has found his soul mate in his lawyer.
Looks like Weinstein hired his perfect match as a lawyer. https://t.co/pp1ttah0WN
— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) January 7, 2020
What century is she living in? And what have everyday courteous behavior and mild pleasantries got to do with rape and sexual abuse?
Well, not really. The British royal family would not let faux journalist Pie within a mile of them. What he does is interview a fictitious member of the British royal family (the ‘Duke of Chesterton’) who bears a resemblance to Andrew about his friendship with a known pedophile that involved sexual acts with underage people. It is of course a parody of the disastrous interview that Andrew gave to the BBC about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and the charge made by Virginia Giuffre that she was forced to have sex with him.
Seth Meyers takes a close look.
I am seeing plenty of handwringing articles by journalists wondering what happened to Lindsey Graham, a US senator from South Carolina, to make him become one of Donald Trump most obsequious and groveling supporters, willing to support any insanity that his dear leader says or does.
I have always considered Graham to be an unprincipled hack and a notorious warmonger. His only skill seemed to be his ability to find the right things to say that would get him on TV. Hence the fact that while he harshly criticized Trump before he won the presidential nomination of the Republican party, he has since become one of the toadiest of toadies to Donald Trump after he became president, did not surprise me in the least. What surprised me is why the media took him so seriously in the first place.
[Read more…]
At times like this when people are being wound up to go to war, I wish the media would reprint this Mark Twain piece.
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and sputtering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spreads of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country and invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpouring of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.
[Read more…]
This story about a police officer who scrawled an anti-police epithet epithet on his McDonald’s coffee cup and then uploaded a photo of it to Facebook, claiming that the barista had done it. The hoax was discovered when security footage revealed that no employees had written those words. The police officer then admitted the hoax (he said it was a ‘joke’) and has since resigned.
But this story is symbolic of the tricky world we live in where people manufacture bogus stories that promote an agenda and hope that others will believe them. What if there had been no exonerating footage? The hoax could have resulted in the barista losing their job and suffering all manner of opprobrium. Will there come a time when we will all have to wear bodycams in order to protect us from those who try to harm us by making up stuff?
I speculated that the acquittal of Scott Warren for giving aid to the people crossing the desert regions on the US southern border was possibly a case of jury nullification, the process by which juries acquit someone who is guilty on the facts because they feel that the law is unjust or should not have been applied in that case. Ryan Devereaux of The Intercept says that what happened with Warren was not jury nullification but the government being unable to make the case.
To put this another way: there is no indication that this was a case of jury nullification. The government lost all on its own by putting on a case that was unconvincing to the jurors.
— Ryan Devereaux (@rdevro) November 21, 2019
In reading and listening to the commentary in US media about the killing of Qassem Suleimani by the US government, even those who disapprove of the action do so largely on strategic and tactical grounds and claim that the US was morally right to do what it did. The argument they give is that Suleimani was the operational head of the Iranian government’s elite Quds force who oversaw a terrorist network in many countries that the US has invaded or otherwise has troops in and thus deserved to die because he was behind the deaths of many Americans. (Murtaza Hussain provides some background on Suleimani and how he was viewed in both Iran and Iraq.)
Whenever I hear people saying these things, my reaction is “Really?” Suleimani was small potatoes compared to what the US government and the CIA have been doing around the globe for decades.
[Read more…]
Companies often try to gouge tax breaks and other incentives from local governments by creating a bidding war among them, by promising to build a large new facilities that would create many high-paying jobs, even though the company has likely already decided on the best site even before the process starts. These promises by the company are rarely realized in practice and the net result is that the companies get the tax breaks they were promised while not upholding their end of the bargain, creating fewer jobs and lower paying ones at that. The latest glaring example of this is Foxconn in Wisconsin, a company that richly deserves the ‘con’ in its name.
[Read more…]
