Remember when I wrote about the 13-stop North American tour that Bill and Hillary Clinton were going to make where people were charged pricey amounts to watch them talk on stage, though if you were willing to fork out even more hundreds dollars, you could also get a brief meet-and-greet with them? I wondered at that time whether we hadn’t had our fill of the Clintons and whether enough people would be willing to pay such amounts.
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The death of the 41st president George H. W. Bush has resulted in the usual gushing and fawning obituaries that are used to paint a rosy picture of US politics by ignoring all the awful things he did. Today’s front section of the Plain Dealer was pretty much devoted to praising him, extending over 12 pages. Even this obituary that did not go overboard in praising him ignored his failings.
Fortunately there are people like Mehdi Hasan who do not forget and are disdainful enough of the false privilege we give to public figures to remind us of the more unsavory aspects of his career, such as his war crimes, racism, and obstruction of justice, not to mention that he was also a serial groper of women.
I have written before about how plea bargains are used against poor people to get them, even if innocent of the crime were originally arrested for, to plead guilty to some other charge and accept a lower penalty, even if it includes jail time. Poor people do not have the resources to mount a vigorous defense and do not have access to the top prosecutors who make the decisions about who to prosecute and how vigorously. With rich people, it is the other way around, as I have described before with the way that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. treated leniently the wealthy and influential and well-connected and those who contributed to his campaigns (like Harvey Weinstein and members of the Trump family) but went after the poor and Chinese immigrants.
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I just watched this film, based on a true story, that is set in the town of Colorado Springs in 1978. John David Washington plays Ron Stallworth, the town’s first black police officer who, pretending to be a white man, responds by phone to a newspaper advertisement placed by the Ku Klux Klan for new recruits. For actual meetings with the local KKK branch members, he sends in his colleague Flip Zimmerman (played by Adam Driver) who is Jewish. The two of them continue to play their parts as Stallworth, once the KKK people were satisfied that did not “have any Jew in him”, rises in the organization and he even becomes friends over the phone with David Duke, then the Grand Wizard of the KKK (played by Topher Grace).
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To no one’s surprise, Cindy Hyde-Smith won the run-off election for Mississippi’s senate seat over Democrat Mike Espy by 54-46%. So if you are keeping score, it is not enough for a candidate to be a stone-cold racist to lose the backing of Republican voters in a deep-red state. You have to be a stone-cold racist plus a religious nutcase plus a borderline pedophile to even barely lose, as was the case with Roy Moore in Alabama.
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Last November the New York Times published a piece titled A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland that focused on one particular member in Ohio of a white supremacist group and was widely blasted for humanizing neo-Nazis by allowing them to portray themselves as your typical guy next door who just happens to have views that you might disagree with. Here’s a sample.
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When media color code the map of the US by which party wins a state or congressional district with red being for Republicans and blue for Democrats, they tend to do it by state (for statewide results as in the electoral college) or by district (for congressional seats). The resulting map tends to be largely blue on the east and west coasts with vast swathes of red in the middle, giving the impression that the country is dominated by Republicans. Conservatives like to use such maps to bolster their claim that the US is largely a right-wing conservative country.
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His latest episode on Patriot Act deals with the way that Donald Trump and the Republicans took an already bad deportations policy under Barack Obama and then made it much worse by being really cruel and heartless, that has now extended to even tear-gassing families at the border and has resulted in children choking.
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Stan Collender is puzzled by something.
This story from today’s The Washington Post about President Trump’s complete lack of understanding about the federal budget is both fascinating and very scary.
It shows that, two years in to his presidency, Trump still doesn’t understand enough about the federal budget to make informed choices about what it will take to reduce the deficit as he said before the election he wants to do.
…It also demonstrates a complete failure by Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney and the rest of the Trump administration’s economic team. How is it possible that they have had so little influence with and impact on the president that, almost two years after he took the oath of office, he is so clueless?
Bernie Sanders keeps pushing the Democratic party towards a more progressive agenda. He has come out with a 10-point plan for the Democrats that, as he says, “reflects the needs of working Americans — centered on economic, political, social, racial and environmental justice.” He outlines them under the following headers:
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