No one could ever figure out what Omarosa Manigault Newman’s job was as an aide to Donald trump. The only thing we heard about was that she spent a lot of time planning an elaborate wedding for herself using the White House as a background. But now it is becoming clear that she spent a lot of time talking to people and, according to her, secretly recording the conversations.
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Lost in the primary news from last week was one item. You may recall me writing about Arthur Jones, described as “an outspoken Holocaust denier, activist anti-Semite and white supremacist”, who is now the Republican nominee for a US Congressional seat in Illinois. He ran unopposed in a district that is strongly Democratic and the Republican party did not think it worthwhile to run someone against him in the primary, since the winner was likely to lose in the general election anyway.
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You may recall the horrific killing by Israel in 2014 of four young children playing on a beach in Gaza. Robert Mackey writes that a confidential report reveals that these children were murdered using drones operated remotely.
Testimony from the officers involved in the attack, which has been concealed from the public until now, confirms for the first time that the children — four cousins ages 10 and 11 — were pursued and killed by drone operators who somehow mistook them, in broad daylight, for Hamas militants.
The testimony raises new questions about whether the attack, which unfolded in front of dozens of journalists and triggered global outrage, was carried out with reckless disregard for civilian life and without proper authorization. After killing the first boy, the drone operators told investigators, they had sought clarification from their superiors as to how far along the beach, used by civilians, they could pursue the fleeing survivors. Less than a minute later, as the boys ran for their lives, the drone operators decided to launch a second missile, killing three more children, despite never getting an answer to their question.
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I was traveling to attend a wedding over weekend and so did not get to follow the news but was gratified upon my return to read that the much-promoted Unite the Right 2 rally that was supposed to be a show of force of the white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and fascists in front of the White House where they now think they have a friend turned out to be a total bust, with the number of counter-protestors utterly dwarfing the few people who turned up for the rally under heavy police protection.
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Cory Doctorow has a good essay where he critiques the recent alarms sounded by conservatives (triggered by the banning of Alex Jones and his Infowars from some social media platforms) that the left is dominating the digital media world. These conservatives are arguing that America always used to be a country where people would ‘fight to the death’ to defend the right of those with opposing views to express themselves, and that that ethos is now disappearing. Doctorow says that this rosy view of the past is rubbish.
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The latest gossip about the shenanigans in the White House comes via a new book written by former aide Omarosa Manigault Newman. In it she claims that her former boss Donald Trump is a racist, misogynist, and bigot. Is anyone really surprised by this?
Donald Trump is a “racist” who has used the “N-word” repeatedly, Omarosa Manigault Newman, once the most prominent African American in the White House, claims in a searing memoir.
…She also claims that she personally witnessed Trump use racial epithets about the White House counselor Kellyanne Conway’s husband George Conway, who is half Filipino. “Would you look at this George Conway article?” she quotes the president as saying. “F**ing FLIP! Disloyal! Fucking Goo-goo.”
Both flip and goo-goo are terms of racial abuse for Filipinos.
…In another damning passage, she describes his “broken outlook” and how “the bricks in his racist wall kept getting higher”, wondering if he did “want to start a race war”. She adds: “The only other explanation was that his mental state was so deteriorated that the filter between the worst impulses of his mind and his mouth were completely gone.”
The billionaire Koch brothers, massive funders of all manner of right-wing candidates and organizations, who are totally against any government regulations that hinder their ability to make money (especially environmental and climate change measures), conducted a survey to measure public opinion on various issues and, would you know it, while the public agreed with them on vague general principles such as “the right to personal property is key to a free and just society”, on practical matters the public seems to be in favor of the very things they hate.
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It may seem like there is nothing that the fever swamps of the right wing can throw up that would be disavowed by the Republican party. But it seems that even they have limits. You may recall my post on QAnon, the bizarre conspiracy mystery phenomenon that has inexplicably captured the allegiance of so many people despite its manifest wackiness, such as that Donald Trump and the military are in a secret allegiance to combat the Deep State and are at this very moment poised to carry out sweeping indictments and arrests of vast numbers of well-known people before they can stage their coup.
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Reports are emerging of a major atrocity in Yemen.
Dozens of civilians, mostly children, have been killed and others wounded in an airstrike by the US-backed, Saudi-led coalition in Yemen that hit a bus in the rebel-held north of the country.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), one of the few humanitarian institutions helping civilians on the ground in the war-torn country, said a hospital it supported had received dozens of casualties after the strike at a market in Dahyan, in Sa’ada governorate.
“Under international humanitarian law, civilians must be protected during conflict,” the organisation tweeted. Johannes Bruwer, the head of delegation for the ICRC in Yemen, tweeted: “Scores killed, even more injured, most under the age of 10.”
…It was not possible to confirm the death toll, but Abdul-Ghani Nayeb, a health department chief in Sa’ada, told Reuters 43 people had been killed and at least 61 injured. Houthi-controlled Almasirah television broadcast unverified footage of dead and bloodied children being transferred to a hospital.
This week will see the anniversary of the Unite the Right rally of white supremacists and neo-Nazis that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11 and 12, 2017. The same people wanted to hold an anniversary rally in Charlottesville but their application for a permit was turned down. But their application to hold a rally in Washington, DC was approved by the National Park Service and they are planning what they call a ‘White Civil Rights Rally’ this weekend in front of the White House. No word yet if Donald Trump has been invited to address the groups, since they clearly see him as a supporter. But a coalition of 18 groups under the umbrella ‘DC Against Hate’ plan a massive counter-protest. This has again reignited the debate as to the best way to deal with hate groups: whether to ignore them and that, starved of attention, they will disappear, or that letting them to do their thing with impunity just emboldens them.
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