Progressive gains strike fear into Democratic party leaders

Recent political developments have greatly encouraged progressives in the US and struck fear into the hearts of the Democratic party leadership. That leadership is pro-corporate, pro-war, and reflexively pro-Israel, not willing to say anything critical even as Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Forces have gone on a genocidal rampage of unbelievable cruelty against Palestinians, committing war crimes left and right. It has come to a point where one does not need to dig up evidence of the crimes, each day’s news just provides yet more evidence.

The Democratic party leadership wants the energy and youthful passion of the progressives to campaign and vote for them but wants them to also then just shut up about the issues that they care about and let them govern. This was why Zohran Mamdani’s win was so remarkable. The corporate and Israel lobby threw everything at him while the Democratic party leadership either stayed silent on the sidelines or grudgingly supported him very late in the campaign or, in the case of senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, refused to even say whom he voted for, which clearly meant that he voted for the odious Cuomo against his own party’s nominee.

But Mamdani’s win was not the whole story even though it got the most attention. There was a blue wave all across the state.
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Assisted dying pioneer dies the way he wished

Ludwig Minelli died yesterday at the age of 93. He had long promoted the idea that people facing death should have the option of choosing when and how they died and the organization he founded in 1998 called Dignitas helped people to do just that. It was announced that that was how he died.

Ludwig Minelli, who founded the group in 1998, died on Saturday, days before his 93rd birthday, Dignitas said. It added: “Right up to the end of his life, he continued to search for further ways to help people to exercise their right to freedom of choice and self-determination in their ‘final matters’ – and he often found them.”
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Minelli, a journalist turned lawyer, faced many legal challenges and made several successful appeals to the Swiss supreme court and the European court of human rights (ECHR).

Internationally there has been a significant shift in attitudes towards assisted dying in the nearly three decades since Dignitas was founded. France recently voted to allow some people in the last stages of a terminal illness the right to assisted dying. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Spain and Austria have all introduced assisted dying laws since 2015. In the US, assisted dying is legal in 10 states.
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Paying tribute to Minelli on Sunday, Dignitas said his work had had a lasting influence on Swiss law, pointing to a 2011 ECHR ruling that recognised the right of a person to decide the manner and time of their own end of life.

Swiss law does not allow for euthanasia, where a doctor or other person administers a lethal injection, for example. But assisted dying – when a person who articulates a wish to die commits the lethal act themselves – has been legal for decades.

Unlike some similar organisations in Switzerland, Dignitas, which says it has more than 10,000 members, also offers its services to people living outside the country.

I am aware of the pitfalls associated with this practice, the main one being that some people may be unduly pressured by others to exercise this option simply because they have become seen as a burden to others or to society.

But I for one would like to have this option. I have reached an age where friends and relatives my age (and even younger) are going through very difficult times involving their health, and even dealing with various forms of dementia. Seeing them struggle, and the thought of facing a similarly protracted end of life, is something I wish to to avoid.

Assisted dying is not available everywhere in the US. It is currently available in 11 states and the District of Columbia (of which fortunately California is one) though that right is under threat in two of those places, New Jersey and DC.

Repeated warnings of Trump collapse

In many of the websites that I read, I come across repeated articles with headlines that suggest that Trump is unraveling because he is mentally and/or physically falling apart or that his cult following is defecting. They warn that one or other impending event is going to finally cause the collapse. These headlines have become so common that I have stopped clicking on them because they seem to be largely wishful thinking. Until I see some very tangible evidence that this is the case, I tend to ignore such teaser headlines.

This kind of thing is not only on the left-liberal end of the political spectrum. Neoconservative Bill Kristol is someone I despise. He was one of the key people who urged the US to invade Iraq as part of the imperialist neoconservative ambition to take over Iraq. Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia as outlined in their manifesto Project for a New American Century. But he and some other neocons have become, for various reasons including Trump’s campaign promise to avoid further foreign entanglements (which he seems to have forgotten), opposed to Trump and he says that the way Trump is behaving with respect to the Epstein files shows that he has something to hide and is feeling cornered.
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The weaponization of the justice system

The American justice system has hardly ever been something to boast about. It is heavily tilted to serve the interests of the rich and powerful and against ordinary people, not to mention often being racist and misogynistic to boot. But with Trump, it has opened up new areas of legal malpractice, violating some of the norms that used to exist.

When Joe Biden was president, whenever any person or group on the conservative end of the spectrum was investigated for anything, rightwingers would howl in indignation that Biden had ‘weaponized the Justice Department’ to attack them, even though there was scant evidence that this was the case. In fact, Biden seemed to go to great lengths to distance himself from his attorney general Merrick Garland and Garland himself seemed to be very conscious of his duty to be independent of Biden.

All that seems so quaint now. With Trump, the weaponization of the entire US government against his perceived political enemies is going full blast. His attorney general Pam Bondi acts as if she gets her instructions directly from Trump. The firing of career people and replacing them with ideologues who will do her bidding is her way of making sure that political vendettas can be carried out. As a result, Trump keeps losing case after case because they are overstepping the bounds.
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Strange weekend political developments

There were two surprises last Friday. One was the meeting between New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and Trump. Given that the former had referred to the latter as a despot and fascist and Trump in return had called him a lunatic communist, you might have expected sparks to fly. That did not happen and what occurred was almost a love-fest.

The highly anticipated Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani – the mayor-elect of New York City, the US president’s beloved home town – was hardly the combustible tête-à-tête many had predicted. For the moment at least, the two New Yorkers appeared friendly, smiling and cautiously optimistic about the work they might accomplish together.

Neither revived their hot campaign trail rhetoric, in which they cast each other as diametrically opposed political adversaries. Trump had labeled Mamdani a “100% Communist Lunatic” and urged voters to back his opponent, the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. In turn, Mamdani had assailed Trump as a “despot” and pledged to be the president’s “worst nightmare.”

But Trump went out of way to gush over Mamdani, even running interference when conservative media reporters tried to spark a conflict.
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Politico fails at basic journalism

I came across this news item that said that Democrats have a glimmer of optimism about their chances to win a special congressional election in a deep red district in Tennessee.

I was intrigued since I had had not known about this election and so I looked for the fact that interested me the most and that is the date of election. But the article did not say. The only references to a date was to say that the election is ‘upcoming’, which is not helpful at all since it is obviously not in the past, and that it will be held ‘next month’ which is irritatingly vague.

This is infuriating and I consider this journalistic malpractice. The date should be in the opening paragraph. How hard would it be to just state the damn date, which is surely one of the most significant facts? But unfortunately, this kind of omission happens quite frequently, as I have complained before.

So I looked online and found that the date will be Tuesday, December 2, less than two weeks away.

The problem of the modern university

Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. In an interview, she describes how she almost left academia because of her dislike of the entire ethos that existed there. The last paragraph is telling.

I teach at a university where the preponderance of our undergraduates go into finance, consulting, and tech jobs that they are recruited for almost the moment that they arrive in Cambridge, and whose time, instead of being devoted to academics, is devoted to securing positions in those industries. The pleasing of their parents, and the pleasing of those students, is the economic engine of the college and therefore of the university, in a way that I do not think is consistent with what a university is for. There are universities now that are creating centers for open inquiry. What is a university if not a center for open inquiry? Why would we need such a center? That anyone suggests such a center should raise a lot of eyebrows.

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Good riddance, Larry Summers

The insufferably pompous, arrogant, and sexist former president of Harvard University has been forced to withdraw from many of his public positions because of his tawdry email exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein. However, he says that he plans to continue teaching at Harvard though it remains to be seen if that is possible given the outcry. It is a deserved comeuppance of someone who had a ‘kiss up and kick down’ attitude to people. When those peoplel get wounded, few will come to their defense.

You can read all the details of his rise and fall here.

On The Daily Show, Ronny Chieng discussed Summers and other Epstein files fallout.

Trump abruptly reverses course on Epstein files

After fighting tooth and nail to prevent the so-called Epstein files from being released, last night Trump reversed course and issued a statement reversing course asking his party members in Congress to vote to do so. The House vote to release the files was scheduled for this evening or tomorrow.

Late on Sunday, Trump wrote on his social media platform: “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files because we have nothing to hide.

“And it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party,” he added.

Why the switch? Here’s the conventional wisdom:

Trump spent last week aggressively squeezing allies in the US House, including Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, to back off in their support of releasing the files. Those efforts were unsuccessful, and when it became apparent the measure was going to pass, Trump backed it in an effort to salvage an embarrassing political loss. “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide,” he posted on his Truth Social network on Sunday evening.

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The strange saga of the Epstein files

I have not written much about the Epstein files and the recently released trove of emails between Jeffrey Epstein and Trump and other various well-known people because it is being covered so extensively in the media. Susan Glasser writes in The New Yorker that the Epstein emails are becoming a chronic problem for Trump.

On Capitol Hill, the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, kept the chamber in recess from mid-September to mid-November in what seemed to be a transparent effort to block a vote on releasing the Justice Department files. This, I’ve long thought, should have been more of a scandal in its own right—Congress closing for business for weeks and weeks because a Speaker was running interference on behalf of a President who didn’t want more details to emerge of his dealings with a sleazy dead rich guy who had sex with underage women on his private island? How was that not a bigger deal?

But, in order to end the longest-ever government shutdown, Johnson had to give in this week and order the House to return to work. That meant swearing in a new Democratic member who had won a special election in September; she quickly became the two-hundred-and-eighteenth signatory of the discharge petition that will now force Johnson to hold a floor vote on releasing the files.

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