The most extraordinary kerfuffle has broken out between Donald Trump and Jeb Bush. You may recall that during the second Republican debate, when Trump said that the poor record of George W. Bush helped lead to the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and was a reason to be wary of his brother, Jeb Bush made the assertion to loud applause that his brother had ‘kept us safe’.
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Maher is a supporter of Bernie Sanders and he had him on his show to try and make the word socialism not be so scary to many people. It actually was a good discussion that got into some real details about what Sanders means by socialism, something that has been discussed in the comments on this blog. I liked the fact that towards the end Sanders emphasizes that Democrats should not write off the large numbers of working class people all over the country who traditionally vote Republican but actually support his policies.
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I must admit that I am quite intrigued by Ben Carson’s sensational Popeye story. So now it appears that there is still no corroboration of his account of being held at gunpoint at a Popeyes restaurant. Yesterday the Baltimore police said that even with the narrowing of dates of this possible event, they could find nothing.
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Politics is full of characters who don’t do the right thing when they are in office but become righteous after they leave. For example, when he was Attorney General, Eric Holder and president Obama refused to prosecute those people who were responsible for torture and stonewalled any attempts to shed light on them. He was also terrible when it came to prosecuting the top executives at the big banks. Dan Froomkin says that Holder is now calling for the release of documents about the torture program.
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As the Republican party flails around trying to find someone willing to be elected as Speaker of the House of Representatives, Jessica Williams explains that the process by which Paul Ryan went rapidly from being a right wing extremist darling to being seen as suspiciously liberal is similar to what happened with Playboy magazine, because extreme right wing politics and hardcore pornography have a lot in common.
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The Intercept has come up with a blockbuster report about the US drone killing program that demonstrates the many lies used by the government to justify its killings. The series of articles by Jeremy Scahill, Cora Currier, Josh Begley, Ryan Devereaux, Ryan Gallagher, and Nick Turse are based on secret documents released by an internal whistleblower who, like Edward Snowden, felt that what the US government was doing was wrong and that the public needed to know what was being done in its name.
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There has been an intriguing post-debate debate on who ‘won’ the Democratic debate. I commented before that the professional pundits in the media seem to be overwhelmingly of the opinion that Hillary Clinton won while my opinion of it was that Bernie Sanders did much better. Of course, all these are just subjective opinions and colored by one’s own preferences. Since I am a Sanders supporter and a Clinton skeptic, my views have a high probability of being skewed.
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The issue of migrants has dominated the news recently, both in terms of US domestic policies in the Republican primaries and in Europe where people are taking desperate measures to flee horrendous conditions in their effort to find a more peaceful life. The media uses scary language to create a sense of foreboding among people that these migrants are going to destroy their way of life.
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At a recent luncheon, I got involved in a political discussion where I disagreed with the stance taken by another guest. That person said that what he was advocating was required by capitalist principles, and acted as if that settled it. I told him that I was a socialist and not a capitalist so I did not accept his premises. He seemed shocked and said that since America was a capitalist country, I had no choice but to accept it.
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I have been enjoying the comedy series Veep starring Julia Louis-Dreyfuss that I reviewed earlier. It is one of the many TV shows and films that purport to show what life is like in the executive branch of government, like The West Wing or House of Cards. This naturally raises the question of which program most accurately captures what life is like in that world.
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