The big news today is the announcement of a deal between the P5+1 nations and Iran that would result in the easing of some of the tensions between Iran and the west, with the quid pro quo being restrictions imposed on Iran’s nuclear program in return for a lifting of sanctions. Julian Borger lists what he sees as the key points of the deal.
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The US Supreme Court ruling in the case of Citizens United has opened the floodgates to money in US politics, since it ruled against limiting the amount of money that private groups can spend on elections. There are estimates that the 2016 election will see about $10 billion spent, an obscene amount. The influence of money has always been large but now it is so massive and the Federal Election Commission is so dysfunctional that the head of the FEC has pretty much thrown her hands up in the air and said that she cannot control the abuses anymore.
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Jean Maria Arrigo is a 71-year old psychologist who for nearly a decade tried to expose the complicity of the American Psychological Association in the Bush administration’s torture program and for her pains was subjected to a campaign of harassment by leading officials of the APA, often done behind closed doors, and had her warnings treated with indifference by the bulk of the membership.
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Omar Currie is a 25-year old second-year third-grade elementary school teacher in Charlotte, NC. He noticed that one of the children in his class was being bullied and called ‘gay’ in a derogatory way by fellow students. In order to make the child feel that he was not alone and to teach children tolerance and acceptance, he recalled that he had heard in his teacher-education program about a book called King & King by Linda De Haan and Stern Nijland that is a fable that tells the story of two princes who fall in love and get married. Since the class was reading fairy stories, he thought that book would make for a timely inclusion. The book was not available in his school library but his assistant principal had a copy and he borrowed it and read it to the class.
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You may recall that when Obamacare was first introduced, one of the features that critics seized on was the fact that doctors would be reimbursed for counseling Medicare patients on end-of-life care. This was taken as proof that the government was seeking to cut costs by condemning grandma to death by cutting off life-saving treatment for those who were no longer able to live productive lives. As a result of the furor over what were called ‘death panels’, that feature was removed.
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I have followed the work of journalist Max Blumenthal for a long time. He was a correspondent for the magazine The Nation among other publications and his forte was to document the follies of right wing politics in the US. He would often go with a camera crew to the functions hosted by various right wing political and religious groups and interview the ordinary attendees and any dignitaries he could collar and then post videos of what they said on the internet. Since the people at these events said the most ridiculous and extreme things, his videos were both amusing and disturbing.
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You may recall Casey Davis, the county clerk for Casey County in Kentucky, who decided that his religious beliefs did not permit him to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples but, unlike the clerks in a neighboring county who resigned because of similar beliefs, Davis felt that he had every right to stay in office while not doing his job.
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In May of this year, three Stephen Soldz (clinical psychologist and professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis), Steven Reisner (clinical psychologist and founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology), and Nathaniel Raymond (director of the Signal Program on Human Security and Technology at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and the former director of the campaign against torture at Physicians for Human Rights) issued a report that was highly critical of the complicity of the American Psychological Association in the torture practices of the Bush administration, providing it with the cover to claim that what it did was legal and ethical.
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It is now less than a month before the first Republican primary debate to be held in Cleveland on August 6th. Being selected to take part in the debate has suddenly become a very important measure of candidate viability and some serious kvetching has begun about the method of selecting who will be among the ‘elite’ (I use the word loosely) that will be invited to participate. Here’s a list of 17 declared or likely Republican candidates who have achieved some level of name-recognition, but there are about a dozen more that no one other than their families know are running.
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The South Carolina legislature has voted to remove the confederate flag from the state grounds and it was done at 10:00am today to the accompaniment of cheers from the assembled crowd. This follows a wave of other steps taken by other southern states to remove the flag from public display.
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