Poor Ivanka, so put upon, like all the Trump family

Honestly, the sense of entitlement of Trump’s family is difficult to comprehend. After having been subpoenaed to testify at the fraud trial of the family business, daughter Ivanka Trump appealed the demand to appear because, as the mother of three school-age children, it would cause too much hardship to fly to New York to attend a mid-week trial.

The former president’s daughter, a senior adviser during his single term of office, asked the panel to set aside a ruling by a district court judge compelling her to testify next Wednesday, 8 November.

“Ms Trump, who resides in Florida with her three minor children, will suffer undue hardship if a stay is denied and she is required to testify at trial in New York in the middle of a school week, in a case she has already been dismissed from, before her appeal is heard,” her lawyers said in a legal filing on Thursday.

What did she expect the court to do? Delay the proceedings until the summer school break? Move the trial near to her home in Florida?

The appeals court was having none of it.

But in an expedited ruling on Thursday night, the appeals court offered a curt, 11-word response.

“Application for interim stay pending decision on the motion is denied,” the judges wrote.

Ivanka had no trouble traveling all over the globe when her father was president. She also has a husband, the father of her children. Why couldn’t he look after them? And given their wealth, I am pretty sure that they have plenty of hired help with everything domestic related. I just don’t see them looking after the children and taking care of their home all on their own. And even if they did, every two-parent family has to deal with many, many occasions requiring the absence of one parent or even both. Single-parent families have it even worse, where the parent has to be unavoidably away from their children. All make whatever arrangements they can, even if they can ill afford it. That is all part of life.

When you have a lot of money, there are so many other options at your disposal. But the Trumps are such precious snowflakes that it is intolerable for them to have to put up with the kinds of inconveniences that are routine for pretty much everyone. They expect the world to accommodate them.

Expect her father to let loose with another rant about this further shows how everyone is being so unfair to them.

New speaker’s cynicism already on full display

The new speaker Mike Johnson has wasted no time in showing that he is as much a cynical politician as any in the GOP. Given the enthusiasm with which his election was received by the party, we should have expected no less, but it is still noteworthy.

The Biden administration had asked Congress for $104 billion for aid to Ukraine, Israel, and other causes. Spending bills have to originate in the House of Representatives and Johnson has decided to show his cleverness by passing a bill that would provide just the $14.3 billion for Israel, but require that this spending be offset by cutting the same amount from that dedicated to the IRS to hire new tax auditors in the Inflation Reduction Act passed earlier.

Johnson argues that this proves that the GOP are fiscal conservatives, a blatant lie since they have bloated the deficit repeatedly when they controlled Congress and the White House, by providing massive massive tax cuts for the rich. The Congressional Budget Office says that in reality, this bill would actually increase the deficit since the ‘saving’ of $14.3 billion on IRS agents will actually result in more than $26.8 billion of lost revenue due to inadequate auditing of wealthy people.

This bill is so obviously unserious that it will not even be brought up in the senate and president Biden has said he will veto it anyway. Johnson is trying to make the claim that Democrats prioritize hiring IRS agents over aiding Israel when the reality is that it is the GOP that is prioritizing helping the wealthy over aiding Israel. The devotion of the GOP to preserving and increasing the wealth of the already filthy rich is a marvel to behold.

Meanwhile, while he pursues these stunts, the budget deadline of November 17th is less than two weeks away.

This cartoon perfectly captures Johnson’s logic.

The motivations of mass shooters

Thanks to the easy availability of high-powered weaponry, mass shootings in the US are depressingly frequent. In almost all cases, the shooter ends up being killed by law enforcement officers or kills themselves in the immediate aftermath, as was the case with the recent Maine shooter who killed 18 people. One cannot help but think that these people knew they were going to die so their rampage was part of a death wish plan.

But the question is why, if they sought death by suicide, they felt the need to kill other people, often total strangers, as a prelude. What do they gain? For some it may be that they seek posthumous fame, however fleeting. For others it may be due to an inchoate rage that seeks vengeance against the world for some harm that the shooter feels that he has suffered. For yet others, it may be an attempt to make some kind of political statement, however confused. Also, why are these shooters almost always male? By now, when I hear of such shootings, even before we get any details, I simply assume it was done by a man.
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The predictable aftermath of the Israeli response in Gaza

The steady killing by Israel of the entire population of Gaza continues with their total blockade of the territory that prevents anyone from entering and leaving while denying them the basic essentials of life such as water, food, medicines, and fuel. At the same time, we see the Israel lobby in the US spring into action to try and control the narrative here to limit any criticism of the actions of the Israel government and. military. Norman Solomon writes that right from the beginning, Israeli spokespersons have laid the groundwork for creating a massive death toll among the Gazans.

When Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations spoke outside the Security Council on Sunday, he said: “This is Israel’s 9/11. This is Israel’s 9/11.” Meanwhile, in a PBS NewsHour interview, Israel’s ambassador to the United States said: “This is, as someone said, our 9/11.”

While the phrase might seem logical, “Israel’s 9/11” is already being used as a huge propaganda weapon by Israel’s government — now engaged in massive war crimes against civilians in Gaza, after mass murder of Israelis by Hamas last weekend.

On the surface, an analogy between the atrocities just suffered by Israelis and what happened on Sept. 11, 2001 might seem to justify calls for unequivocal solidarity with Israel. But horrific actions are in process from an Israeli government that has long maintained a system of apartheid while crushing basic human rights of Palestinian people.

What is very sinister about trumpeting “Israel’s 9/11” is what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the shroud of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy suffered inside its own borders as a license to kill vast numbers of people in the name of retaliation, righteousness and, of course, the “war on terror.”

It’s a playbook that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu is currently adapting and implementing with a vengeance. Now underway, Israel’s collective punishment of 2.3 million people in Gaza is an intensification of what Israel has been doing to Palestinians for decades. But Israel’s extremism, more than ever touting itself as a matter of self-defense, is at new racist depths of willingness to treat human beings as suitable for extermination.

On Monday, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described Palestinians as “beastly people” and said: “We are fighting animals and are acting accordingly.”

Imagine the reaction if anyone had used that language about Israelis.
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Robert E. Lee statue melted down in secret

The US may be one of the few countries where people who tried to destroy their nation are honored as heroes and have statues put up of them in public places. I am referring of course to the attempt by the states of the Confederacy to dismantle the Union and create a separate nation. They were defeated by president Abraham Lincoln and for a while the people who led that rebellion were viewed as treasonous. But over time, a revisionist movement sprang up that portrayed the goals of the Confederacy as not the actual one, which was to preserve slavery, which by then had become seen as indefensible, but as a fight over so-called ‘states rights’ against the power of the national government and that the leaders of the insurrection needed to be honored and not vilified. This is the ‘Lost Cause’ narrative.
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Death and suffering inside Gaza

The slow and steady strangulation of the entire population of Gaza, all two million of them, continues. Israel has cut off all water, food, medicines, and electricity, in addition to steadily bombing the area. What aid that has been allowed in has been tiny, nowhere near enough to meet the needs. Now the internet has also been cut off so that people cannot even call for help when they are injured or dying. Hospitals are suffering without power, with doctors having to perform surgeries by the light of their cell phones. The Gaza Ministry of Health reports that more than 7,000 Palestinians have been killed, including nearly 3,000 children.

In the US, to voice even the slightest concern for the lives of people in Gaza is to risk being condemned. Anything other than unequivocal support for anything and everything that Israel doses, however monstrous, is portrayed as making one a terrorist sympathizer, such is the powerful propaganda machine of the Israel lobby here. The political class in the US, including the Biden administration, has fallen in line, with only the mildest of calls for Israel to show restraint. The US and Israel were joined by only 12 other countries in voting against a UN resolution calling for a humanitarian truce.

The US has ended up looking quite badly isolated after only 12 countries joined Washington and Israel at the UN general assembly in opposing a motion calling for a sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities.

One hour after Israel had extended its offensive in Gaza, Jordan’s motion was passed in New York by 120 votes to 14, with 45 countries abstaining. The outcome was remarkable for showing the limited direct support for the world’s greatest superpower, with even France, Spain and the UK refusing to join the US in voting against the motion.

Israel is ignoring even those calls and seems intent to starving the people to death. Now they have even started casting doubts on the death tolls put out by the Gaza ministry of health, this being another way of making Gaza lives seem less valuable.
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Stephen Colbert on the Maine shooting

He delivers a powerful editorial on the latest mass shooting, this time in Maine where 18 people were killed and many others injured and condemns the weaselly response that people like the new speaker Mike Johnson give after these needless tragedies that keep happening over and over again. The suspected shooter was later found dead, probably self-inflicted.

For corporations, money excuses everything

Megan Twohey has an investigative report into the relationship between Kanye West (who now goes by the name Ye) and shoe maker Adidas. It is astonishing the extent to which the company was willing to overlook Ye’s behavior because he was bringing in money.

For almost 10 years, Adidas looked past West’s misconduct as profits soared. The partnership, which began in 2013, boosted company profits and made West a billionaire. But West subjected employees to antisemitic and other abusive comments. And though their contract for years had a clause allowing Adidas to end the agreement if West’s behavior harmed the company’s reputation, it’s not clear that executives ever considered invoking it before terminating the deal last year.

West showed a troubling fixation on Jews and Hitler. At a 2013 meeting with Adidas designers at the company’s headquarters in Germany, he drew a swastika on one of their sketches. He later told a Jewish Adidas manager to kiss a portrait of Hitler every day. And West told Adidas colleagues that he admired Hitler’s command of propaganda.

He brought pornography and crude comments into the workplace. Weeks before the swastika episode, West made Adidas executives watch pornography during a meeting at his Manhattan apartment. Last year, he ambushed Adidas executives in Los Angeles with a pornographic film. Staff members also complained to top executives that he had made angry, sexually offensive comments to them.

Big demands and mood swings weighed on the relationship. West, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, at times rejected the assessment and resisted treatment. Tears were common; so was fury. In 2019, he abruptly moved the operation designing his shoes, called Yeezys, to remote Cody, Wyo., and ordered the Adidas team to relocate. In a meeting with company leaders that year to discuss his demands, he hurled shoes around the room.

Adidas adapted to West’s behavior. Managers and top executives started a group text chain, called the “Yzy hotline,” to address matters involving West. The Adidas team working on Yeezys adopted a strategy they likened to firefighting, rotating members on and off the front lines of dealing with the artist.

I am not naive about the extent to which corporate America makes everything subservient to its search for profits but usually they try to avoid those things that might harm the corporate brand and turn off customers. But here it seems like anything Ye said and did, however outrageous, was tolerated and worked around, like the indulgent parents of a a spoiled toddler. Surely they must have known that these things would eventually come to light.