Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas gave a speech at the United Nations where he accused Israel of committing war crimes in its assault on Gaza and called for the body to set a firm deadline for the withdrawal of all Israelis from the occupied territories.
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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has emerged as the leading liberal voice on the US Supreme Court. At age 81, she is also the oldest justice. She gave an interview to the magazine Elle in which she discussed, among other things, why those who have been publicly urging her to retire while president Obama is still in office so that he can appoint someone else in her mold are misguided and that she has no plans to retire.
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Stephen Colbert interviewed a congressman from California and zeroed in on the fact that in his bio he gives his religious affiliation as ‘unspecified’, like 10 other members of Congress. This is up from six in the previous Congress. Colbert suggests to him that he is in fact a hell-bound heathen but is trying to hide the fact.
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A year ago I wrote about ProPublica’s reporting on the case of Carmen Segarra who was fired by the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the institution charged with regulating the big Wall Street banks. Jake Bernstein of ProPublica now has another big story based on secret recordings made by Segarra.
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The Daily Show comments on the fact that each day the US seems to be confronted with a new and even graver existential threat than the day before, and that needs to be responded to with yet more war.
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is emerging as one of the most perceptive social critics. I have already linked to his thoughtful pieces on the 2014 Academy Award nominees for best film (I happened to agree with his choice but it did not win) and his reflections on the Ferguson shooting which he said was more than about race and was part of a broader class war.
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The predictable result of somebody jumping over the White House fence and running up to the front door has been, of course, media hysteria. Rather than the Secret Service being commended for their restraint in that they captured the intruder without killing him, some are seeing even that as a failure and saying that the intruder should have been killed. Why? Because this is America, dammit, and anyone who goes on someone else’s property without permission must be shot dead.
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Defense industries make money in two ways. One is by persuading the government that the weapons they already have are becoming obsolete (even if they are not) and that they need to upgrade to more expensive systems to fight future threats. The other is by having governments use their weapons in wars so that they are used up so that they make profits by selling more. So wars are really good business
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It is astonishing to me that the US, which owes a lot of its dominance in the world to the science and technology that it produces, has on its main policy-setting body, the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, people who seem to be determined to undermine the very things that the nation depends upon. They may do this for a variety of reasons: venality because of the people who give them money, stupidity, or religious fanaticism but the end result is the same.
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As Glenn Greenwald points out, the advent of the Syria bombing campaign marks the seventh Muslim-majority nation that the Nobel Peace Prize winning US president has bombed, and the lack of any meaningful debate on the legality, let alone the wisdom, of this latest move in noteworthy but depressingly predictable.
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