Pete Buttigieg: The ‘outsider’ who is actually a neoliberal insider

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg has got a lot of mileage and positive press with his claims of being a religious person and mayor of a small rust-belt Midwest town and thus an outsider to the swamp of Washington politics. But as his campaign has gained ground and peoplelook more closely at his background, that veneer has started peeling off, revealing him to be very much a part of the national security state. Max Blumenthal writes that he is very much a political insider being groomed by the neoliberal establishment and the ‘liberal interventionist’ faction of US politics.

Blumenthal looks at the parts of Buttigieg’s resume that he does not talk much about, starting with Tulsi Gabbard’s criticism of Buttigieg’s support for sending US troops to Mexico to fight the drug cartels, and his angry and defensive response.
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An own goal by Andrew Yang?

The entrepreneur whose candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president has shown surprising longevity (he was one of only seven candidates who qualified for the last debate) may have said something that might doom it.

Andrew Yang said he does not think Trump should be facing criminal charges and would consider pardoning Trump if he were in fact prosecuted.

“We do not want to be a country that gets in the pattern of jailing past leaders,” Yang said, adding that “there’s a reason why Ford pardoned Nixon.”

“I’d actually go a step further and say not just, hey, it’s up to my [Attorney General]. I would say that the country needs to start solving the problems on the ground and move forward.”

“Would you consider a pardon then?” NBC News asked.

“I would,” Yang said.

We actually should get in the pattern of jailing past leaders if they have committed crimes because that is the only way to prevent them from committing crimes in the first place. There was outrage at Ford for pardoning Nixon and strong suspicions that it doomed his re-election campaign. This idea that we should ‘move forward’ and not look back, the same excuse president Obama gave for not prosecuting the torture war crimes committed by the Bush administration and the CIA, is what enables presidents to willfully abuse their power, over and over again.

Yang saying that he would pardon Trump, someone who has abused his office and taken vilification of Democrats and indeed anyone who even mildly criticizes him to high levels, may well turn off many Democrats, similar to the adverse reaction to Tulsi Gabbard’s decision to merely vote ‘present’ on the impeachment articles. It will undoubtedly infuriate the many who think Trump is an absolute danger to democratic norms.

Trump is mad as hell about being impeached but not acquitted

As one might have expected, Donald Trump is annoyed that he may not get the quick impeachment trial and acquittal in the US senate that he seeks.

The Senate adjourned until January with the Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and Democratic leader Chuck Schumer unable to agree on trial procedure. Pelosi has said she wants to know how the trial will be handled before she sends two House-passed articles of impeachment against Trump to the Senate.

Trump, who was due to arrive at his private Palm Beach resort late Friday, has been looking forward to a trial in the friendlier Republican-controlled Senate and is riled up about the delay, according to Senator Lindsey Graham.

“He’s mad as hell that they would do this to him and now deny him his day in court,” Graham told Fox News Channel after meeting with Trump at the White House on Thursday night.

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Michael Moore on Mother Jones and the 2020 election

Mother Jones is the name by which Mary Harris Jones (1830-1930), a legendary union activist and organizer, was known. The nickname was given to her by the workers because of the caring way she dealt with them especially during strikes.

Known as the miner’s angel, Mother Jones became an active campaigner for the United Mine Workers Union. A political progressive, she was a founder of the Social Democratic Party in 1898. Jones also helped establish the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905. For all of her social reform and labor activities, she was considered by the authorities to be one of the most dangerous women in America.

Nothing could dissuade Mother Jones from her work. At the age of 82, she was arrested for her part in a West Virginia strike that turned violent and was sentenced to 20 years. But her supporters rallied and convinced the governor to grant her a pardon. Jones, undeterred, returned to organizing workers.

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Australian government absurdity on fires and climate change

Parts of Australia are going though a terrible time with bushfires burning out of control, coupled with a drought and heat wave. The city of Sydney is blanketed by a smoky haze because of the fires and there seems to be no real prospect or relief other than hoping for rain.

The conservative Australian government. like the US government, consists of people who want to do nothing about climate change . Like Trump, the Australian government is a fierce defender of coal, and in its attempt to shift attention away from the contribution that global warming may be playing in creating this crisis, its deputy prime minister has issued a statement that comes close to matching the stupidity of Donald Trump who blamed Californian forest fires to the forest floors not being swept clean of debris.

The deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, has conceded Australia must take further action to combat the climate crisis and acknowledged that the bushfires ravaging New South Wales and South Australia have further shifted community sentiment on the issue.

But McCormack, who is acting prime minister while Scott Morrison returns from a much-maligned holiday in Hawaii, also linked the fires to other causes, including dry lightning strikes and self-combusting manure. [My italics-MS]

Film review: The First Temptation of Christ (2019)

Some of you may remember my review of the hilarious short (45 minutes) film The Last Hangover by a Brazilian comedy troupe Porta dos Fundos that that has a reputation for skewering religion, politics, culture and other hot-button topics. That earlier film envisaged the Last Supper as a massive drunken blowout that resulted in the apostles waking up the next day to find Jesus missing and having only the vaguest notion of what had happened.

The troupe has returned with an even funnier short film (45 minutes) The First Temptation of Christ that is being streamed on Netflix. The central premise is a surprise 30th birthday party for Jesus thrown by his parents Mary and Joseph when he returns from spending forty days in the wilderness. But things start to go awry because Jesus (played here by the same actor who played Judas in the other film) has brought a friend Orlando with him whom he met during his desert sojourn. God (whom Jesus has known all his life as just his Uncle Vittorio) also turns up and he and Joseph and Mary have to tell the oblivious Jesus the truth about his real parentage, that he is the Son of God with miraculous powers, and what his mission in life is to be. We also have cameos by the Buddha, Shiva, and other gods who all get their share of barbs thrown at them.
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Dominos and disability rights

Mike Ervin writes in the December 2019/January 2020 issue of The Progressive magazine about the way that the Dominos pizza chain responded to a blind customer Guillermo Robles who filed a lawsuit in 2016 that the company’s mobile app did not have the features that would enable blind people to navigate it, thus violating Title III of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act that requires that disabled people be provided with access to places of “public accommodation”. This act has opened up vast areas of life that had hitherto been closed to people with disabilities.
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Trump’s deranged rally speech

Seth Meyers describes the rally that Trump held while the impeachment process was going on, where he went on a tirade against dishwashers, showers, sinks, toilets, and other household items.

It seems to me that the places that Trumps lives in, which proudly bear his name, have the lousiest appliances. How many people have exploding dishwashers or showers that give out four drops of water or toilets that must be flushed ten times?

This is what happens because of Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric

The hatred that he has been promoting has reached such a pitch that ordinary people are trying to kill random strangers on the spur of the moment.

A woman has been charged with attempted murder after telling police in Iowa that she deliberately drove into a girl because she appeared “Mexican”.

The victim, who is 14, sustained “numerous injuries” in the incident.

Police say she was struck while walking to a local school, near Des Moines, on the evening of 9 December.

They initially appealed for the public’s help in identifying the hit-and-run before Nicole Marie Poole Franklin was arrested.

“Investigators determined that this incident was an intentional act, not an accident,” Clive police said in a Thursday statement announcing the attempted murder charge.

Speaking at a press conference on Friday, Police Chief Michael Venema said he was “shocked” by the suspect’s admission.

“Franklin told investigators that she ran the girl over because she was, in her words, ‘a Mexican’,” Chief Venema said. “She went on to make a number of derogatory statements about Latinos to our investigators.”

“I want to say, in the strongest terms possible, that there is no place in our community, or any other for that matter, for this type of hatred and violence,” he added.

The poisonous climate that has been created will take a long time to clear away. What I fear is that it will get even worse before it gets better.

It never seems to strike these people that the many Americans in Mexico might be endangered because of revenge attacks.