Robert Menendez is a symbol of what is wrong with the Democratic party

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).
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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.

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Israel guns down medic and seeks to criminalize reporting on atrocities

The deadly violence in Gaza continues with snipers of the Israeli Defense Forces shooting at protestors. The latest outrage was the killing of a 21-year old volunteer medic Razan al-Najjar and the shooting of three other medics, even though she was wearing the white coat that identified her as a medic. Here is a photograph of al-Najjar and one in which she was treating an injured demonstrator.

You can see scenes from her funeral that thousands attended here. Israel has said that it would investigate the death of al-Najjar but you can be sure that they will find no wrongdoing because in their eyes, the IDF can do no wrong.

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The obscure words of the Spelling Bee

This year’s national Spelling Bee competition ended on Thursday and, to no one’s surprise, the winner was once again an Indian-American. All but three winners since 2002 (and every one since 2008) have had Indian-sounding names. I have written many times before about the Spelling Bee, expressing my view that it seems like a colossal waste of time and effort by children and their families spent in learning to spell obscure words that they will likely never encounter again in their lives, apart from the fact that they could always simply look it up if they needed to.
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When was modern science invented?

Questions like the above are inherently ambiguous and will not have an answer that satisfies everyone because of the difficulty of defining what we mean by the word ‘science’ even with the added qualifier ‘modern’. The latest issue of New Humanist has an interview with David Wootton, professor of history at the University of York and author of the book The Invention of Science, who takes a stab at it and argues that “it happened between 1572 (when astronomer Tycho Brahe saw a new star in the sky) and 1704 (when Isaac Newton drew conclusions about the nature of light, based on experiments).”
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Starbucks racial bias training video

After the infamous incident when police were called on two black men who were at a Philadelphia Starbucks restaurant because they hadn’t ordered anything (they were waiting for a third person to join them), the coffee chain closed all its restaurants for a time earlier this week so that all its employees could have racial bias training. As part of that process, they viewed a video by documentarian Stanley Nelson.

I thought it was pretty good. Will it help change attitudes? I don’t know. But every little bit helps.

Roseanne Barr thought Valerie Jarrett was white?

Roseanne Barr has been running through various excuses for the racist comments that not only got her show canceled, even her management company dropped her, and some of her co-stars and producers condemned her, though I did notice that John Goodman has been silent during all his.

First there was the old standby that what she said was just a joke. Then came the attempt to shift blame by saying that other people have said worse things. Why do people consider that a defense? However bad your words or actions, you can ALWAYS find someone who is worse so it is hardly worth saying.
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Seymour Hersh shows the difference between a reporter and a stenographer

Seymour Hersh is a legendary investigative reporter who has broken many major stories, perhaps most famously the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the torture by the US in Abu Ghraib. He has just published a memoir Reporter and Matt Taibbi says that current journalists could learn a lot from Hersh from the way he describes how he got information. Taibbi points to a story Hersh tells about what happened when he was preparing to write a story in 1999 in the New Yorker about Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard,
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Justice-American style

There were massive protests in Washington DC on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration and the authorities rounded up large numbers of people. Of course, it will not do to have people protesting in the streets. What do these people think, that they are living in a democracy? So in order to deter such unseemly behavior in the future, the authorities decided to throw the book at the arrested people, charging them with conspiracy to riot, that could have resulted in decades in prison if they were found guilty.
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