Donald Trump’s personal lawyer has said that that he has no respect for Trump accuser, the actress Stormy Daniels.
“I respect women – beautiful women and women with value – but a woman who sells her body for sexual exploitation I don’t respect,” said Rudy Giuliani.
“Someone who sells his or her body for money has no good name,” he added.
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The famous linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky describes his own political stance as that of anarcho-syndicalism and he is no fan of libertarianism. In an interview with Chomsky, Michael S. Wilson says that in the US, anarchists are largely seen as consisting of “disenfranchised punks throwing rocks at store windows, or masked men tossing ball-shaped bombs at fat industrialists”. Wilson asks Chomsky what he thinks the two positions represent and why he favors the former and dislikes the latter.
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Yesterday was primary election day in California. David Dayen and Ryan Grim analyze the results and argue that progressives had a good outcome, despite fears that the unusual system in that state might lead to a disaster.
With all precincts reporting, [Katie] Porter, a Sen. Elizabeth Warren protégé invested with the hopes of the progressive movement, ended with 19,453 votes. It was enough, putting her roughly 2,600 ahead of her main Democratic challenger David Min.
…Min, a former Sen. Chuck Schumer staffer, Center for American Progress fellow, and assistant professor at Porter’s school, UC Irvine, had the backing of the state party and the New Democrats, a Wall Street-friendly bloc that supplied 27 of the 33 House Democratic votes in favor of the recent bank deregulation bill. Porter was the only House candidate endorsed by Warren, her former teacher and co-author.
Min, meanwhile, was hesitant to embrace “Medicare for All” and ran a slashing race attacking Porter’s credentials. Porter ran on battling big banks, expanding Social Security, reversing the Trump tax cuts, and establishing “Medicare for All” — and she won.
…THE NEW DEMOCRATS suffered another defeat in a race that pitted the two camps of the party against each other in San Diego’s 50th District. Ammar Campa-Najjar, who ran as a progressive with the backing of Justice Democrats, PCCC, and DFA, beat Josh Butner, endorsed by the New Democrats and backed by the Wall Street-friendly Rep. Joe Crowley, the chair of the House Democratic Caucus, who is facing his own challenge from the left back home in the Bronx and Queens from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
During the Vietnam war, an American major said after the destruction of the Vietnamese village Ben Tre that “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” That macabre statement grimly captured the senselessness of war in general and the Vietnam conflict in particular, as the US laid waste to that country ostensibly to save it from Communism, but in reality for a complex of reasons that it was unwilling to explicitly acknowledge.
A similar statement can be applied to the way that the police in the US respond to calls that suggest that someone has suicidal thoughts. Police with guns drawn broke into the apartment of Chelsea Manning for what is called a “wellness check” after they received a call from someone that she had posted tweets that suggested suicidal thoughts. Fortunately for Manning, she was not at home (she was out of the country) or she might have been shot dead. Here is video footage from security cameras that show the police entering the apartment.
Watch this ad made for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who is challenging long time New York Democratic incumbent congressman Joe Crowley in the June 26th primary.
The US Supreme Court yesterday issued a 7-2 ruling that upheld the decision by a Colorado baker to not bake a cake for the wedding of a same-sex couple. While this is not a good thing, it could have been a lot worse. The ruling was very narrowly crafted to deal with very specific particulars of this case and so cannot be taken as a blanket license for private businesses to discriminate against the LGBTQ community. Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor were the dissenters. You can read the opinions here.
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This is a pretty funny show that has a clever premise. It involves Kristen Bell playing Eleanor Shellstrop, a thirtyish woman who opens her eyes and finds herself facing Michael, an elderly man played by Ted Danson. Michael tells her that she has died but that everything is fine because in the afterlife she is in The Good Place. Who ends up in The Good Place is determined entirely by an algorithm that assigns a numerical score (positive or negative) for every single act on Earth and then computes the final tally. Only the people who have lived the most exemplary lives on Earth end up there. He tells her that The Good Place is divided up into communities of exactly 322 people with each community designed by an architect of the afterlife and this one is his first design. Each person is assigned a soul mate and hers is Chidi Anagonye (played by William Jackson Harper) who was a professor of moral philosophy when he was alive.
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The Democratic senator from New Jersey is one of the sleaziest members of the US Congress and that is saying something. He barely escaped going to jail on corruption charges because of a hung jury. Glenn Greenwald asks and answers the obvious question: How can such a sleazy politician get re-nominated with virtually n opposition?
In so many ways beyond the corruption and sleaze, Menendez is the classic representation of what the Democratic Party is at the national level. He first made it to the Senate when he was appointed by former Goldman Sachs CEO and then-Democratic New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine. Though he is a somewhat reliable Democratic vote on standard domestic debates, in the area where he has exerted the greatest influence as Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, he has been far to the right, especially recently, despite being from one of the country’s bluest states.
In 2006, he joined with the GOP and right-wing Democrats to enact the Bush/Cheney Military Commissions Act, which stripped War on Terror detainees of the right to judicial review (it was later struck down as unconstitutional). He is one of the Senate’s most extreme Iran hawks, having opposed Obama’s Iran Deal (as the party’s senior foreign policy Senator) and serving as one of the most vocal loyalists for a pro-regime-change Iranian cult that had been on the U.S. terrorist list (once it was removed from the list, money associated with the group began flowing aggressively to Mendenez).
…Most of all, the New Jersey Democrat is one of the most fanatical loyalists to the Israeli Government and AIPAC. He has been the honored guest of the American Friends of Likud, along with officials from the Netanyahu government. AIPAC supported him vocally during his corruption trial, and after his hung jury, he received what the JTA described as a “hero’s welcome” in March. Menendez was also one of the co-sponsors of a bill that would have made it a crime for companies to support a boycott of Israel, which the ACLU denounced as a severe threat to free speech.