Abominable treatment of detained migrant children

The news that yet another Guatemalan child has died has once again focused attention on the utterly cruel treatment that is meted out to the child migrants who are in the custody of the Customs and Border Protection agency. Felipe González Morales, the UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, had already called for a full investigation of the first child’s death.
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Please, please don’t let it be of Donald Trump

According to a court filing, special counsel Robert Mueller is said to have obtained a ‘nude selfie’ during the course of his investigations into possible Russian interference in US elections. No one knows who is in the selfie but I don’t think that the nation can survive the collective psychological trauma if the photo is released and we find out that it is of Donald Trump.

I think that this is one of those situations when invoking national security to keep such a selfie secret would be justified.

Bernie Sanders and women and people of color

One of the most common criticisms of Bernie Sanders by liberals and even by some people on the left is that his supporters are predominantly white and male (derisively referred to as ‘Bernie bros’) and that is because Sanders is locked into a white privilege mode and has not addressed issues of importance to women and people of color. This view is promoted by the Democratic party establishment and its media supporters, who backed Clinton during the last campaign and are backing Joe Biden now. It is true that Hillary Clinton seemed to have more support from women and people of color during the campaign for the 2016 nomination but the reasons for why that was so are not clear. Katie Halper writes that the current media narrative that Sanders lacks support fro those groups is false and deserves to be countered.
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Live by the stock market, die by the stock market

During all the fiascos that have been happening one after the other during the Donald Trump presidency, there was one thing that he could boast about and that was the stock market. During his first year of office, it rose by a whopping 25%, greatly pleasing the wealthy class that are the ones who have most of their assets in the stock market. Ordinary people with retirement plans also have a stake in the stock market because those funds are invested in it but I suspect that most are like me and have little idea of what is happening because we do not actively buy and sell stocks ourselves.
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A small but significant shift against US involvement in the war in Yemen

Clio Chang and Ryan Grim describe the delicate maneuvering that went into the Senate vote against US involvement in the war in Yemen and what happened in the House. In both cases we saw people like Bernie Sanders and progressive forces in the Democratic party push a reluctant party leadership to support the moves, while liberal groups for various reasons tended to sit on the sidelines or provide only lukewarm support.
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The tightly knit but strangely solitary world of QAnon cult members

Sometime ago, I wrote about the mercurial rise within about a year of the QAnon phenomenon, one of the more bizarre political developments of the internet age, that says that Donald Trump is a genius who is cleverly drawing his enemies out into the open before he and his allies in the military suddenly swoop and arrest all of them. The evildoers include “the global banking elite, death squads operating on orders from Hillary Clinton, deep-state intelligence operatives, and Pizzagate-style pedophile rings.”
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Don’t cry for Mattis – he was as bad as the other generals that once surrounded Trump

Lucian K. Truscott IV has some harsh words for the outgoing secretary of defense Jim Mattis, touted as the ‘Last Adult in The Room’, just like all the other high-ranking military officers that the media automatically endows with sterling qualities simply by virtue of their office. Truscott says like the other three generals that Donald Trump once had and have now left, Mattis was a toady who went along with pretty much all Trump’s hare-brained ideas, resigning only because his feelings were hurt that he was not consulted about the Syria withdrawal.
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LeBron James lashes out at NFL owners

If there is one athlete in professional sports who is untouchable, that is LeBron James. He is increasingly using that power to speak out in harsh terms against the power structure in professional football and to support the protests of people like Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid who have been punished by NFL owners for their kneeling protest against police brutality, an issue that Donald Trump exploits whenever he needs a distraction from his own problems.
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What ending US military involvement in Syria reveals about the War Party in the US

Donald Trump took pretty much everyone by surprise with his statement that he wanted to pull US troops out of Syria. Why did he do it? Why does he do anything? Trying to figure out what is going on that swirling confusion of rage, narcissism, insecurity, envy, vindictiveness, pettiness, and racism that constitutes his mind is a mug’s game. Not only is it difficult but before one can even start to make sense, he has moved on to yet another confounding statement or action. This time, it is his decision to reverse course and trigger a government shutdown that went into effect at midnight.
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