Today marks the first anniversary of the extremely brutal assault called Operation Protective Edge that Israel perpetrated on the people of Gaza. Glenn Greenwald interviews Max Blumenthal who has a new book out that deals with that event called The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. (You can read Greenwald’s review of the book here.)
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If you have been listening over the last year or so to the mainstream media discussing Greece, you would have got the impression that Greece is like a spoiled trust fund child used to living a carefree life at others’ expense and now throwing a major tantrum when the ‘adults’ (i.e., the IMF and the European Commission and Germany) say that they are cutting their allowance and can no longer expect the rest of Europe to subsidize their lazy, hedonistic lives.
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I tend to favor the underdog. And there is no question that the oligarchy, the one-percenters who control so much of the nation’s wealth and seek even more as their just due, have been taking a beating in parts of the media. It is just not fair. Thankfully, someone has recognized this imbalance and started a news channel called “One Percent News so that they can get their side of the story out to combat all the negative propaganda being waged against this fine group of people.
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The news that the Obama administration and Cuba will reopen embassies in each others’ countries made quite a bit of news. But almost ignored was another news report that showed that despite the crippling US-imposed embargo, that country manages to maintain a high standard not just of medical care but also of medical research.
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The attempts by opponents of same-sex marriage to stall the inevitable continue. There was a pathetic effort by a Catholic youth group called Catholic Vote to produce a video that mimics the It Gets Better Project and video series that encouraged young gay people who felt victimized to not lose hope. The Catholic Vote video shows young people hesitantly revealing their belief that marriage should only be between a man and a woman, implying that young people who feel that way nowadays suffer the same level of ostracizing that gay teens feel.
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There is no chance that Donald Trump will ever become the nominee of the Republican party for president, despite the fact that he has surged to #2 in some polls. Even within the Republican party there is a limit (the crazification factor of 27%) to the number of people who will support an out-and-out buffoon and he has to share that vote with the likes of Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Santorum. At the very worst, the party establishment will deliberately torpedo his candidacy if he becomes a real threat.
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While Eric Holder did a lot of good work in the civil rights area while serving as Attorney General in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2015, his performance when it came to prosecuting the big banks that were responsible for the financial collapse was nothing short of scandalous. He was the one who backed the idea that the banks were too big to fail and he refused to criminally prosecute the top executives of those banks for their crimes, allowing the banks to pay fines without admitting guilt and thus allowing the top executives to get huge bonuses instead of going to jail.
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So the Greek public followed the lead of their prime minister Alexis Tsipras and his Syriza Party and voted overwhelmingly 61.3%-38.7% to reject the bailout deal demanded by the so-called troika of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission backed by Germany and France. The Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, considered a key architect of the Greek strategy to fight the troika’s terms and had thus enraged them, resigned following the successful outcome of the vote so as to clear the way for fresh talks to begin.
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Ohio, the state I live in, can claim to be the birthplace of many presidents but none of them covered themselves with great glory. That does not mean that the people of Ohio are not capable of jealously guarding the right to name random national landmarks after them, as Jordan Klepper discusses with reference to an Alaskan mountain that the native Athabascan population has always referred to as Denali though officially it is called Mount McKinley.
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