The politics of celebrity absolutions

Comedian and daytime talk show host Ellen DeGeneres was recently seated next to former president George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys football game in the special luxury box owned by wealthy owner of the team Jerry Jones. She was clearly pleased to be with Bush and was shown laughing and generally having a good time with him. When she was criticized for this, she gave the following apologia on her show as an example of how we should all get along with people with whom we might disagree.

“I’m friends with George Bush. In fact, I’m friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have. We’re all different, and I think we’ve forgotten that that’s OK that we’re all different. … Just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean that I am not going to be friends with them. When I say be kind to one another, I don’t mean only the people that think the same way you do. I mean be kind to everyone.”

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Democrats duck from the truth about the American empire

Jon Schwarz writes that in the Democratic debate on Tuesday, none of them grappled with the fact of how American imperialism has been a bipartisan debacle years in the making and the incoherence on what to do about the current situation with Turkey, Syria, and the Kurds is just a manifestation of it. His view is a more fleshed out version of my briefer reaction.
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The need to tighten vaccination mandates

The editors of Scientific American magazine have come out with a strong editorial arguing that the present exceptions for vaccinations given to people based on their religious and philosophical beliefs is threatening public health. While many of the people seeking exceptions do so on religious grounds and come from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities or Muslim or Christian academies or alternative-learning institutions, quite a few claim philosophical exemptions because they have been frightened by the refuted study of Andrew Wakefield that has been touted by celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and spread widely over social media.
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What a possible Brexit deal might look like

One big sticking point in getting a Brexit deal that will be agreeable to the EU and can get passed by the UK parliament is what to do about the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. The UK leaving the EU means that Northern Ireland would also leave while Ireland remains in the EU. That would seem to require a customs and tariffs barrier between the two parts of the island, something everyone hates and would be a deal breaker. A proposed deal being worked on by government of Boris Johnson would make the customs and tariffs barrier run down the Irish sea separating the two islands. But this would mean that goods could flow freely across the land border dividing Northern Ireland and Ireland even though Northern Ireland is subjected to UK rules and the Ireland to EU rules.
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A great ad during the debate

During the Democratic debate yesterday, I was surprised to see an ad on CNN by the Freedom From Religion Foundation featuring Ron Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s son, who introduced himself as an “unabashed atheist” and said that the FFRF is the nation’s largest organization of atheists and agnostics and that it seeks to keep church and state separate.

I liked the ad and loved his final words because you don’t hear things like that on mainstream TV very often.

How some of the tax plans compare

Economist Gabriel Zucman has compared what the average tax rates will be depending on your income, based on the various plans offered by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, and under Donald Trump. It should come as no surprise that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren go easy on the bottom 99% and start taxing the richest 1% very heavily, with Sanders really socking it to them. Joe Biden and Donald Trump tax the 99% more than the other two plans, tax the top 1% a lot less, and greatly reduce the tax rates of the top 400 individuals.

My reactions to the Democratic debate

Last night, twelve Democratic candidates debated for three hours. I watched almost all of it with a bunch of Bernie Sanders supporters at a pizza parlor. My capsule reactions were that Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Tulsi Gabbard came out of it looking more positive. Sanders and Warren refrained from attacking each other and instead emphasized their commonalities on the issues of Medicare for All and imposing very high wealth and income taxes to fight the obscene levels of inequality that exist in the US and is still growing.
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Great job, US police and immigration services!

[UPDATE: The US Customs and Border Protection agency has given their version of events, saying that the border crossing was not an accident but deliberate. The whole thing seems a little weird. (Thanks to WMDKitty.)]

I have to say, if the US were trying to alienate as many people as possible, its immigration and police services are doing a magnificent job. The world is already pretty much aware of the utter cruelty and inhumanity with which undocumented immigrants and refugees are treated when they arrive at the borders. We also know the racism of Donald Trump in the way he openly disdains countries that are the home of people of color. But it seems that even people from the favored European countries who happen to stumble into the arms of US police and the immigration system are subject to abuse.
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Film review: Official Secrets (2019)

I just saw the above film and it is excellent. It is based on real life events and tells the story of Katharine Gun, a fairly low-level intelligence analyst working for the GCHQ (the British equivalent of the NSA with all its evils) who, during the push by the Bush-Cheney regime to get support for its plans to attack Iraq in 2003, comes across a memo sent by a top official in the NSA to the GCHQ asking for help in getting dirt on the non-permanent members of the UN Security Council in order to ‘pressure’ them (i.e., blackmail) to vote in favor of the second UN resolution to go to war with Iraq since it was felt that the 2002 resolution was a weak legal footing on which to wage war.
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National Weather Service being undermined again

John Oliver looks at how the Trump administration is trying to limit the services provided by this very important agency because the private sector cannot compete with it. It is doing so by trying to appoint the head of a private weather company AccuWeather to head the NWS. So much for the claims that the private sector can do things much better than the government can. This comes after the earlier failure in 2005 of another attempt to prohibit the NWS from giving its information away for free.