The political leaders of the United States never tire of proudly proclaiming their adherence to the idea that we are a nation of laws, unlike all those other nasty countries that protect abusers and criminals. But the reality is that the US is one of the worst when it comes to bringing its criminals to account, especially if they are high-ranking ones.
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Yesterday, all the Republican candidates for president showed up at yet another audition for Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire who has been teasing all of them with the promise of major financial support. The venue was the organization Republican Jewish Coalition that is sponsored by Adelson. The main (if not only) criterion used by Adelson and his wife is enthusiastic support for the most extreme right-wing expansionist and anti-Palestinian policies of Israel and almost all the candidates dutifully went down that road, trying to outdo one another in proclaiming their loyalty to his agenda, to the extent of some going overboard.
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1968 was a turbulent year. Marin Luther King, Jr and Robert Kennedy had both been murdered, opposition to the Vietnam war was at its height, the Tet offensive had shattered the US government’s claim that they were winning that war, and racial tensions were soaring. It was in this volatile environment that the two political parties held their nominating conventions. The 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago was notorious for mayor Richard Daley imposing what was essentially a police state, with tanks and armored vehicles patrolling the streets and the violent clashes that ensued. Haskell Wexler’s film Medium Cool (1969) captures the mood well.
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There is a well-known idea proposed by psychologist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross that people pass though five stages of grief when they are given a diagnosis of a terminal illness: (1) Denial (2) Anger (3) Bargaining (4) Depression (5) Acceptance. Some have expanded this to seven stages, adding Shock/Disbelief and Guilt: (1) Shock or Disbelief (2) Denial (3) Anger (4) Bargaining (5) Guilt (6) Depression (7) Acceptance and Hope.
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[This post has been updated as new information comes in.]
And so we have another mass shooting less than a week after the last one. This time 14 people were murdered and 17 wounded in a matter of minutes because people were able to easily and legally obtain the kinds of lethal weaponry that combat troops use. And as usual, those opposed to any kind of reasonable checks on the ability to obtain such weapons have tried to find ways to not address this glaring problem.
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While the brutal murders at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado has focused attention on the most extreme forms of violence that is being aimed at women’s health clinics, we should not forget that abortion providers and their patients and clients are the victims of daily, ongoing, routine threats and harassment.
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Human Rights Watch, a major human rights group in the US, has issued a report detailing all the abuses committed by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and others and calling for them to be prosecuted.
It is now well established that following the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operated a global, state-sanctioned program in which it abducted scores of people throughout the world, held them in secret detention—sometimes for years—or “rendered” them to various countries, and tortured or otherwise ill-treated them. While the program officially ended in 2009, the cover-up of these crimes appears to be ongoing.
Many detainees were held by the CIA in pitch-dark windowless cells, chained to walls, naked or diapered, for weeks or months at a time. The CIA forced them into painful stress positions that made it impossible for them to lie down or sleep for days, to the point where many hallucinated or begged to be killed to end their misery. It used “waterboarding” and similar techniques to cause near suffocation or drowning, crammed detainees naked into tiny boxes, and prevented them from bathing, using toilets, or cutting their hair or nails for months. “We looked like monsters,” one detainee said of his appearance while in CIA custody.
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The more we learn about Robert Louis Dear, the man who opened fire on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, the more it is becoming clear that he was someone who believed that he was saved by Jesus and thus could do what he liked. And what he liked was ugly.
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Marco Rubio thinks that the events of 9/11 and the Paris massacre were all part of god’s plan.
Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio spoke about seeking God’s guidance, arguing that the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris last month and in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, were both part of God’s mysterious plan for the universe.
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One of the perennial puzzles that political observers in the US have struggled to understand is how it can be that a political party like the Republicans that is so nakedly supportive of the interests of the plutocracy manages to win so many elections. The Republicans consistently advance policies that are harmful to practically everyone except the very wealthy and yet they currently have majorities in the US Senate, House of Representatives, governorships, and state legislatures.
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