The 16-year old Palestinian girl Ahed Tamimi has become a cause celebre across the world after she slapped an Israeli soldier who had entered her family compound. This was after “an Israeli soldier shot Ahed’s 15-year-old cousin in the head with a rubber-coated metal bullet during a demonstration against the ongoing military occupation”. In retaliation, the Israeli authorities arrested her and she remains in custody.
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Two stories in The Intercept illustrate well how skewed the justice system is in the US.
In the first case, Shaun King writes about a man, clearly inflamed and influenced by Donald Trump’s attacks on the media and in particular at CNN, who phoned in multiple deaths threats to that network.
EARLY TUESDAY MORNING, we learned that Brandon Griesemer, a 19-year-old grocery store clerk from Novi, Michigan, made at least 22 calls to CNN’s Atlanta headquarters where he not only threatened to shoot and kill employees, but used racial and ethnic slurs for both African-Americans and Jews. The calls were made two weeks ago, and Griesemer was charged last Friday.
This was not Griesemer’s first rodeo. On September 19, he was reported to have made similarly ugly calls to an Islamic center in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Brandon Griesemer is a bigot.
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Ryan Grim and Lee Fang write that while the actions and words of Donald Trump and his Republican enablers have angered and energized progressives across the country to run for office, they are being blocked by Democratic party dead-enders in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and their allies like Emily’s List who are backing the same losing candidates and polices of the past, based on their ability to raise money rather than gain votes. The DSCC keeps pursuing the tired strategy of trying to win over Republican voters, which means backing more conservative candidates and policies, rather than attract those voters who have opted out of politics because they feel that the Democrats are just Republican-lite.
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After Donald Trump’s insulted Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa, Conan O’Brien thought that he should visit Haiti.
“I have no idea what the president has against the people of Haiti, but if the president doesn’t like them, they must be lovely people,” the TBS host added on his show last Monday. On Thursday, he landed in Port-au-Prince, where he spent the weekend taping his special, which aims to show the president and those like him how much Haitian immigrants have to offer the United States.
Now we have our first look at the hour-long show, which will air this coming Saturday night. “President Trump insulted Haiti, so I thought it was only fair to Haitians the chance to return the favor,” O’Brien says in the new clip.
Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow nails it.
If you follow US political news at all, you have undoubtedly heard of Gloria Allred, the attorney who has represented many female clients in high-profile gender-related cases and who is currently taking on Donald Trump on behalf of Summer Zervos who says that she was defamed by Donald Trump when he publicly called her a liar for saying that he sexually assaulted her in 2007. Allred has been portrayed negatively by her opponents as a publicity-seeker whose expertise mostly lies in getting attention for her press conferences with the victims of abuse.
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For most of us, because we associate with others largely by choice, the people in our social circle tend to be those who share our worldview in general, especially when it comes to political and social issues. Thus political discussions usually take place upon generally agreed principles and within common frameworks, and such discussions tend to be more analytical and less emotional and confrontational. This is not the case when it comes to family members who can be all over the map and problems can also arise when the two groups overlap. Thus the advice to avoid topics like politics and religion at social gatherings where people might have widely differing views is quite sound.
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Politicians in the US love to prate on and on about how the US is the world’s greatest system of government. The US senate is routinely referred to, by its own members of course, as the ‘world’s greatest deliberative body’, despite all evidence to the contrary. But things like having periodic government shutdowns must surely make such boasts ring hollow. How can any government fail at its most basic task of keeping the lights on? I myself am aghast that such a thing could happen at all in any country, let alone one with the largest economy and military, and yet we have had a shut down in 2013, almost another one in 2015, and yet another one going on right now. It is becoming routine.
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At least this story takes out minds off the absurdity of the US government having to go into partial shut down mode. This is how the world’s largest economy is run?
Here’s Seth Meyers.
And Stephen Colbert
What happens when you put a group of old white people who voted for Donald Trump in a room and one of them who is disillusioned with him calls them a cult? Pretty much what you’d expect. (If you cannot access the video below, try this.)
Nearly one year after President Donald Trump took office, @FrankLuntz asked a group of his voters what they think of his first year and if they would vote for him again.
This is what they told him.
See more tonight on our special, America First, on @HBO at 7:30PM EST pic.twitter.com/xtialWLQG4
— VICE News (@vicenews) January 19, 2018