An important elected office that few pay attention to

In November, people will vote for all 435 members of the House of Representative, 35 senate seats, and 39 state and territorial governorships. Most media attention will be focused on these races. Hardly any attention will be paid to one of the most important elected offices and that is the prosecutors. There are a total of 2,437 elected prosecutors in the US, going under various titles from county district attorneys to state attorney generals. In all but three states, prosecutors are elected. In many ways, prosecutors are the most important people in the legal system since they have the power to decide whether to pursue a case, whom to charge and with what crime, make plea deals, strongly influence who gets bail and how much, and they and have great power over the flow of information pertaining to the case. And yet, 85% are elected unopposed and I suspect that few can name the person who occupies that position in their area.
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Yet another rabbit hole to avoid

There are so many weird news items these days that I simply ignore most of them as not worth following up, since their existence is so fleeting and they are soon replaced by the next absurdity. But if they occur frequently enough, then the names and words associated with them stick in my mind and once in a while I find an article that explains what is going on. That is the case with QAnon.
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Remembering Ron Dellums, a pioneering socialist member of congress

Dellums died on Monday at the age of 82. Jon Schwarz writes an appreciation of the life of this avowed socialist congressman who had to fight opposition from even within his own Democratic party. In a memoir, Dellums described the approach he took in 1970 to unseat a Democratic incumbent who was a Cold War liberal who had supported Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war policies.
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The emerging Democratic-neoconservative alliance

The neoconservatives have had a terrible influence on US politics. They gained a firm foothold in the Bush-Cheney administration and succeeded in pushing for disastrous wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and threatening war against Iran. Their goal was the destabilization of the Arab governments in the region, and the dynamic they created resulted in the Obama administration continuing the policies and leading to chaos in yet more nations like Libya and Syria. The resulting blowback with the rise of groups like ISIS resulted in the neoconservatives being discredited and lying low for awhile but they are making a comeback.
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What the US did during World War II and the Korean war

We now know much about the horrors inflicted by the US on Vietnam during that war. It is sometimes suggested that the atrocities committed by the US during that war were an aberration of some kind, a deviation from its usually honorable behavior in wars such as in ‘good’ wars like World War II. But this investigation from Reveal discusses how in that war, US soldiers committed a war crime when they rounded up German prisoners of war in a field and machine-gunned them. General George S. Patton called it a murder but none of the people involved were punished.
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The rise of black women freethinkers

It has rightly been pointed out that while atheists span the entire spectrum of the population, the atheist movement itself, in the sense of the leadership of organizations and the most visible atheists in the media, has been dominated by white men. This is fortunately changing and Christopher Cameron in an article titled Black atheists matter: how women freethinkers take on religion reports on those developments. In doing so, he addresses the often-raised question of why the horrors of slavery did not result in the wholesale discrediting of religion in the black community since religion was often used not only to justify slavery but to encourage black people to passively accept their situation in return for their reward in heaven. He says that support for religion in the black community ebbed and flowed depending on the contemporary situation.
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar also picks up the baton of The Heritage

In my series of posts about Howard Bryant’s book The Heritage, I discussed the book’s thesis of how the responsibility of successful black athletes to speak out on issues of injustice that was started by Paul Robeson, and carried on by Jackie Robinson, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, and Muhammad Ali, went into decline with the arrival of extremely successful athletes like OJ Simpson, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods who wanted to do nothing that would endanger their lucrative corporate endorsements.
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The British Jewish establishment’s attacks on Jeremy Corbyn

I have been writing about how the Israel lobby in the US is attempting to stifle criticism of Israel for its atrocious treatment of Palestinians, the latest move being to pass a law declaring the country as a Jewish state, placing into law what had been in practice already. One effort to stifle critics in the west is to formalize the definition of anti-Semitism, while at the same time expanding its definition to include legitimate criticisms of Israeli government policies. In the US, the lobby is going so far as to advance legislation to punish advocacy for the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) Movement that seeks to apply to Israel actions similar to those that led to the collapse of apartheid in South Africa. The reason for the lobby’s actions is the concern that an increasing number of Jews and non-Jews alike see the actions of the Israeli government as indefensible and are referring to its policies as apartheid.
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