Gina Haspel, a person with an infamous history or torture in the CIA, has been nominated to head that agency. Glenn Greenwald writes that it should be an easy call for Democrats to oppose her nomination and help kill it. But that may not happen because there will may well be a few defectors who vote with Republicans to confirm her.
[Read more…]
I have railed many times against the fact that police, prosecutors, and even judges far too often see getting a conviction of anyone at all as more important than finding the actual guilty person, even if that results in an innocent person being put to death while the actual criminal walks the streets freely. Very often this is due to the fact that in many jurisdictions in the US, prosecutors and judges and some law enforcement officers are elected positions and being seen as ‘tough on crime’ and boasting of how many people they have put in prison plays positively with voters.
[Read more…]
The right to unionize and to strike has been fundamental in improving the lives of all of us. It is the only counterbalancing weapon that low-level workers have against the power of their bosses. But the downside to strikes, apart from the fact that workers suffer loss in wages during it, is that the general public also suffers. So when for example, teachers go on strike, students and their parents are inconvenienced and teachers need their support and understanding to prevail. The situation becomes harder for nurses where striking means leaving patients without adequate care.
[Read more…]
For most of the American public, once US troop stop dying in significant numbers, then the wars that the US is involved in have effectively ended, even though the US continues to rain havoc on those countries and inflict immense misery on its people using its firepower. Andrew Cockburn has been covering the many wars that the US is involved in and writes in the April issue of Harper’s magazine (subscription required) that the war in Afghanistan is now effectively on autopilot, with the US continuing its bombardment with no end in sight. The same strategies are tried over and over again based on the same rationales. The fact that the strategies have not worked in the past and the rationales go counter to the actual evidence seems to have no effect on the policy makers back in the US or the commanders in the field.
[Read more…]
The state of West Virginia has as its slogan ‘Wild, Wonderful, West Virginia’. Tomorrow will see a primary race for the US senate where the ‘wild’ part is clearly on display. The Republicans will choose a candidate to run against the Democratic incumbent Joe Manchin. One of the people vying is Don Blankenship, the CEO of a coal mine that collapsed in 2010 killing 29 workers. He was convicted for negligence and served a year in prison and was released last May. He now wears that as a badge of honor. No, really. He says that he was framed by (of course) Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
[Read more…]
One of the amusing things to observe is how so many leading lights in the evangelical Christian movement have abandoned all pretense of upholding moral standards in their efforts to defend their support of Donald Trump. That support was always highly hypocritical even at the best of times, excusing vicious assaults on the poor and the LGBT community and other marginalized groups as long as the politician opposed abortion and spouted pieties about their god and family values. But now even that fig leaf is gone and they have been revealed to be absolutely shameless in their abandonment of even the rhetoric of morality.
[Read more…]
It is fun to see so many well-known actors do a cameo on Saturday Night Live. But ultimately it is the quality of the writing the matters because otherwise it just becomes a game of ‘identify the star’. On the writing scale, this was middling.
Tony Frank is the president of Colorado State University. Recently the university was in the news because two potential Native American students visiting the campus had the police called on them by the parent of another potential student who felt that they did not ‘belong’. Humiliated and embarrassed, the two students left. Here’s a video of the incident.