Morley Safer in Vietnam

The recent death of Morley Safer, veteran correspondent for the CBS news magazine program 60 Minutes, has led to an outpouring of tributes such as this one. Long before he became the genial avuncular reporter of human-interest stories that viewers were familiar with, Safer made his name for his hard-hitting reporting from Vietnam where, rather than depend on the sanitized and dishonest press briefings given by the US military, he and a few others went out with the troops and reported on the horrors being committed by the US military on hapless innocent Vietnamese villagers in angry retaliation for attacks on the US forces by the Viet Cong, something that came as a shock to American TV viewers who like to think of their military as always acting righteously and wholly on the side of angels.
[Read more…]

Time for Debbie Wasserman Schultz to go

The number of calls for the chair of the Democratic National Committee Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign has been steadily increasing. The impetus has come from the way that, rather than being scrupulously neutral in the Democratic primary contests, she has been perceived as stacking the deck in favor of her preferred candidate Hillary Clinton. In addition, she is seen as having aggravated tensions between the Clinton and Bernie Sanders camps rather than smoothing them over.
[Read more…]

Remember the PUMAs!

The Hillary Clinton backers who are calling on Bernie Sanders to quite the race even as he continues to win primaries seem to have forgotten 2008 when Clinton contested the election all the way to the final California primary. As for the charge that his supporters are too angry, remember the PUMA movement back in 2008? That stood for ‘Party Unity, My Ass!’ and was the name adopted by those Clinton supporters who vowed never to support Barack Obama. Their numbers ranged in the 40%, far higher than the number of Sanders supporters who currently say they won’t vote for Clinton. In the end, those who voted for Clinton in the 2008 primary ended up splitting 83%-16% in favor of Obama over John McCain.
[Read more…]

The problem with being ‘socially liberal but fiscally conservative’

Lorraine Berry uses the current long lines at airports due to cuts in the staffing of TSA personnel at the security checkpoints as the starting point to argue that there is an inherent contradiction in the SLFC (socially liberal but fiscally conservative) stance that is popular, especially among young people. The problem is that implementing socially liberal policies costs money.
[Read more…]

Poor rich losers

Samantha Bee interviews a wealthy man who has thrown a ton of money at losing candidates over the various elections cycles and is now kind of depressed about it. Going well back to her stint at The Daily Show, Bee has shown herself to be brilliant at faking empathy when interviewing people whom she is not sympathetic to and she does not disappoint here with this hilarious segment from her show Full Frontal.
[Read more…]

The extent of corruption in the US and UK

Economist Jeffrey Sachs argues that while the release of the Panama Papers has brought welcome attention to the existence of these off-shore tax havens, we should not forget that the roots of the problem lie much closer to home.

The tentacles of corruption reach deep into the UK (and US) financial systems. Banks in the City of London and Wall Street have paid tens of billions of dollars of fines for insider trading, financial fraud, price rigging and other financial crimes in recent years. Yet almost no leading bankers have taken a hit for their organization’s malfeasance. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the major financial firms are part of a global network of organized financial crime.
[Read more…]

Requiem for the Republican party and a warning for the Democrats

Immediately following the Indiana primary that saw a crushing defeat for Ted Cruz that led to him quitting the race and leaving Donald Trump as the Republican party nominee, the ever-readable Matt Taibbi looked at what this election says about the state of democracy in the US and the Republican party in particular. It is a long piece but well worth reading.
[Read more…]