Sri Lankan cabinet minister rebukes leading Buddhist monk for tirade against Muslims

After the deadly attacks by ISIS-inspired suicide bombers that killed and injured over 250 people in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, there has been retaliation against ordinary Muslims. A friend of mine in Sri Lanka says that people are not patronizing Muslim-owned business, not taking the tuk-tuks (the ubiquitous small three-wheel scooter taxis) driven by them, Muslim students being asked to leave their lodgings, private buses refusing to accept Muslim passengers, etc. One wonders what people think they will accomplish by discriminating like this against ordinary people who had nothing to do with the attacks. Do they think they are striking a great blow for justice when all it is is a petty act of vengeance? Surely they should realize that people become even more resentful when they are punished for the actions of others and that it simply compounds the problem? That is such an obvious lesson from history that I find it incredible that people don’t realize it.
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Samantha Bee gives some advice to the low-polling Democratic candidates

I think that much of this concern over so many candidates at this stage is misplaced. This is the time for multiple candidates and views to be aired. As time goes by, the field will be winnowed and those who lose out will seek other positions, such as the senate seats she is urging. Running for president gives them the national attention that politicians tend to enjoy.

What we should hope for is that the field is winnowed by policies and the preferences of voters, not by the pundits and party establishments

“Welcome back to the USA”

Seth Harp is a journalist and like many white people, was not quite aware of how militarized the US immigration system has become because on his return from his frequent trips abroad, he is usually waived through immigration after being asked a few perfunctory questions. That is, until he returned recently from an assignment in Mexico and was subject to ‘secondary screening’, that he dewcribes as “a quasi-custodial law enforcement process that takes place in the Homeland Security zone of the airport.” He was interrogated for hours by the Customs and Border Protection agency that has become a gun-toting quasi-military force, and they ransacked his phone and laptop after demanding that he give them the passwords.
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The self-described “bitch for God” who is running for president

Marianne Williamson is one of the two dozen or so people running for the Democratic party nomination for president. I had never heard of her until she announced her candidacy and knew little about her. This week she created some controversy by making anti-vaccination comments. As she probably desired, this brought her some publicity and this article by Shira Feder gives us some background on this person and one thing you can say about her is that she is not your run-of-the-mill politician. No, sirree! She seems to be some kind of new age guru spouting spiritual mumbo-jumbo.
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Who are these creepy old senators?

Roy Moore, the controversial former chief justice of Alabama’s supreme court who seems to have had a life-long penchant for very young girls, news of which contributed to his loss to Democrat Doug Jones for the senate seat in 2018, has said that he will run again, much to the consternation of Donald Trump and the Republican party leadership who had thought that this was a senate seat that they would easily recapture in 2020 with any extreme Republican candidate who was not tainted by suspected pedophilia. That seems to be the only line that they draw.

They have vowed to try and stop him from winning the Republican nomination in the primary but I was struck by a comment from one of the current Republican senators who was appalled by the prospect of having Moore as a colleague. Sen. Martha McSally (R-Arizona) was quoted as saying, “Give me a break. This place has enough creepy old men,”

Who are these creepy old senators? Inquiring minds want names, Martha!

Trump’s disappointing re-election rally crowd

We know that Donald Trump is an insecure narcissist and wants desperately to project the image that he is massively loved by everyone. We also know that he is an inveterate liar. These things come together when he lies about the crowds at his rallies and at his inauguration. On Wednesday he kicked off his 2020 re-election campaign at a rally in Florida. Suspiciously, he held it in an arena that only seats 25,000 people, a decent size but not huge and that was likely because he loves to boast that he gets sellout crowds at his rallies and that there is massive overflow. And sure enough, the Trump people claimed that they had issued over 100,000 tickets and had to arrange for a screen outside so that the huge overflow crowd could see their hero.
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This is where you end up when defending Trump administration policies

If you work in the Donald Trump administration, you will find yourself steadily violating any ethical principles you might have started with until at some point, you end up not having even a shred of decency. That point was reached on Tuesday for Sarah Fabian, the justice department lawyer arguing before a US Appeals Court that the appalling conditions under which detained migrant children taken into custody at the US-Mexico border were being treated, such as keeping them in freezing cages where they had to sleep on the floor, were justified.

Fabian claimed that these children are not entitled to what most people would consider the most basic sanitary necessities. This was in a court case where the administration was sued that they were not complying with the requirements laid down under the earlier Flores guidelines for how children should be treated. (Incidentally, cases are always referred to by the names of the party or parties involved though Donald Trump, genius that he is, thought that Flores was the name of the judge who made the ruling and because it was a Hispanic name, concluded that it meant he was a biased judge.)
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The case against war with Iran

On the public radio program 1A this morning Vali Nasr, Dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, discussed what the shooting down of a US surveillance drone by Iran might lead to and it is well worth listening to. He made the point that Iran might just be fed up with the US essentially trying to strangle that nation’s economy with its sanctions policy. He argues that the deal that was signed between Iran on one hand and the US, Russia, China, France, UK, and Germany on the other required that the earlier sanctions should be eased in return for commitments made by Iran regarding its nuclear program. He said that while Iran has kept its end of the bargain, the other nations have not and the promised sanctions relief has not come about.
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UN report says that bin Salman should be investigated for Khashoggi murder

It has long been clear that the brutal murder and dismemberment in a Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi who was working for the Washington Post had to have been ordered at the very highest levels of the Saudi government. That crown prince Mohammed bin Salman was likely to have been involved was also apparent though he denied it and placed the blame on that familiar scapegoat ‘rogue elements’. The amount of high-level support that these murderers had in carrying out this crime makes that claim laughable. The only purpose of that claim was to provide Donald Trump and his family with a fig leaf to not disassociate themselves from bin Salman.
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Film review: Salt of the Earth (1954)

I recently watched this powerful film that I heard about on a podcast on Latino USA. It reminds us, if we needed it, how much we owe to the unions who fought hard to get the benefits and working conditions that so many of us now take for granted. The film also brings to the fore the major but often unrecognized role that women played in these struggles by keeping things from falling apart by maintaining homes and raising children under very difficult conditions. This film, though, shows an occasion when women actually took the lead role.
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