There have been some surprising and encouraging results in various elections around the country. Primary elections held in Florida on Tuesday resulted in a surprise win for Andrew Gillum as the Democratic nominee for governor. Shaun King writes that the nominations of three black candidates for governorships (Ben Jealous in Maryland, Stacey Abrams in Georgia, and Gillum in Florida) marks a watershed in US politics.
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Apparently word was conveyed to her that it would be better if she stayed away from the funeral service for John McCain. This should not come as a surprise to her. It has long been public knowledge that despite his public protestations to the contrary, McCain regretted his choice of her as his running mate in 2008.
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I am a long-standing member of the ACLU. After the election of Donald Trump, the membership in this group more than tripled. I ran into the then-director of the Ohio ACLU and she wryly told me that while this surge in membership was welcome, there would come a time when the ACLU would take a stand on some issue that would make many of these new members realize that the ACLU was not an arm of the Democratic party and they would react angrily.
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A jury in Texas has found a police officer Roy Oliver guilty for the murder of Jordan Edwards, a 15-year old unarmed black youth, while he was a passenger in car driving by. The story was a familiar one in which the officer argued that the boy and his friends had been acting aggressively towards his partner and that he had been forced to fire at them in defense. But the body cam videos showed a very different story, that the car had been moving away.
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A little over two years ago, in June 2016, the people of the UK voted in a non-binding referendum to leave the EU, what is now known as Brexit. I have been following the fallout off and on but have to admit that my eyes glaze over when I read articles about Brexit, because the issues seem so complicated and technical. None of the major British political parties seem to like the idea of leaving the EU in general, though significant factions within them are pushing for it. There is talk of a hard Brexit, a soft Brexit, and things in-between. There are so many possible directions in which it can go, each of them having major problems.
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In my post and the comments about people whom I would be shocked by being charged with sexual abuse, Crip Dyke asked the following interesting question about the names given by me and other commenters.
I find it interesting that Tabby is the only person to name any women. Are there really no women who would shock the commenters on this post? Or is it that it doesn’t even occur to you that women might be perpetrators, so you didn’t imagine being shocked at an accusation because you can’t even imagine the accusation?
Larry Sabato is a political analyst who is frequently quoted in the media, usually in the role of prognosticator about who is likely to win seats in Congress. Following the death of John McCain, Glenn Greenwald highlighted a tweet of Sabato’s that has become a routine sentiment following the death of well-known establishment politicians.
"Everyone but the bitter and vicious" salute him. And maybe also the people in the many countries he bombed and wanted to bomb. And maybe also the many people in his own countries hurt by the horrible policies he helped enact. This mandated reverence is ugly and coercive. https://t.co/qmDtWgu6LZ
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 26, 2018
Put me down as one of the ‘bitter and vicious’. It is extraordinary how it is mainly with politicians that we are expected to suspend criticisms upon their death and let a wave of praises go by unchallenged. You are far more likely to get an honest and balanced appraisal of the life of a dead writer or actor or musician than you are of a politician. This may be because the media establishment feels more subservient to politicians than to those other public figures. But those who claim that we should ‘keep politics out’ in the immediate wake of the death are in fact committing a deeply political act. By focusing only on the good and ignoring all the bad, they are enabling a form of historical cleansing that normalizes awful actions.
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The death of John McCain has resulted in the usual gushing tributes that are given to almost any long-serving American politician. I never bought into his self-promoted image of being a principled maverick, bucking party orthodoxy and forging his own path. McCain was in reality a faithful follower of the party line, voting with it on almost every issue and in addition being one of the worst warmongera. I wrote about what McCain was really like back in 2008. To his credit, he did discourage the crude race baiting of the Republican voters when in the 2008 election campaign they recklessly brought up the Marxist-Kenyan-Muslim tropes about Barack Obama, the kind of thing that has now become routine in the Republican party. It is because Donald Trump is so extremely awful that ordinary awful Republicans like McCain look better in comparison.
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The influence of money in politics lies largely in the fact that if you are a big donor to politicians, you can get immediate access to them. Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. is perhaps the best example of this process in action. It turns out that the Manhattan district attorney’s office is currently considering bringing criminal charges against the Trump organization in the wake of the information released in the recent convictions and plea deals of close associates of Donald Trump.
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Just weeks after an attack that killed 40 children, the Saudi-US-UAE coalition forces have killed another 26 children and four women in two attacks.
A senior UN official has condemned another deadly Saudi-led coalition air strike in Yemen, which has killed at least 22 children and four women.
The victims were fleeing fighting in the al-Durayhimi district, south of the port city of Hudaydah, when their vehicle was hit on Thursday.
A separate air strike the same day killed four children, according to the UN’s humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock.
…Mr Lowcock’s statement on Friday confirmed that the victims had been fleeing violence around the rebel-held port city Hudaydah.
He renewed calls for an impartial and independent investigation into air strikes. A report by Human Rights Watch the same day accused the Saudi-led coalition of failing to hold “credible” investigations into such incidents.
The reported attack was condemned by Unicef, Save the Children and other international organisations.