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Heidi Przbyla at Politico reports on yet more degradation of the Supreme Court: Princeton Professor Robert P. George, a leader of the conservative legal movement and confidant of the judicial activist and Donald Trump ally Leonard Leo, made the case for overturning Roe v. Wade in an amicus brief a year before the Supreme Court issued its watershed ruling. Roe, George claimed, had been decided based on “plain historical falsehoods.” For instance, for centuries dating to English common law, he asserted, abortion has been considered a crime or “a kind of inchoate felony for felony-murder purposes.” The argument was echoed in dozens of amicus briefs supporting Mississippi’s restrictive abortion law in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court case that struck down the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. Seven months before the decision, the argument was featured in an article on the web page of the conservative legal network, the Federalist Society, where Leo is co-chair.
In 1981, India’s post office issued a stamp showing the flags of India and occupied Palestine flying side by side above the phrase “Solidarity with the Palestinian people.” That now seems like ancient history. Today, Hindu nationalists are flying the flags of India and Israel side by side as a demonstration of their support for that country’s catastrophic war on Gaza. It’s a match made in heaven (or do we mean hell?), because the two nations have similar “problems” they’re trying to “solve.” Israel has long been engaged in the violent suppression of Palestinians whose lands they occupy (including the current devastation of Gaza, an assault that 34 U.N. experts have labeled a “genocide in the making”). Meanwhile, India’s Hindu... Read more
Source: The Israel-India-U.S. Triangle appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
Russell T. Davies discussed Disney+'s "soft push" for the Doctor Who 60th anniversary episodes and the "big push" planned for Ncuti Gatwa.
If you are a person who understands the trauma that October 7th caused to Israelis and Jews around the world, you should see the reality here. The ongoing carnage in Gaza cannot be defended and Israel is very close to losing the support of the rest of the world that currently supports it: US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Israel risked “strategic defeat” in its war with Hamas if it fails to heed warnings about the mounting civilian death toll. “I have personally pushed Israeli leaders to avoid civilian casualties, and to shun irresponsible rhetoric, and to prevent violence by settlers in the West Bank,” Austin said in a speech to the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, on Saturday. Austin’s comments come as top US officials have grown increasingly vocal in their warnings to Israel about the death toll in the Gaza Strip. Those warnings, previously confined to closed-door meetings, have been thrust into the open by mounting pressure from Israel’s Arab neighbors, human-rights activists and opinion at home — including the left of President Joe Biden’s Democratic Party.
DeSantis tries to ape Trump again, in the stupidest way possible: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he would replace Obamacare with a “better plan” — part of an interview in which he criticized former President Donald Trump for failing to deliver on numerous policy promises during his term in the White House, including frequent pledges to replace the health care law. “Obamacare hasn’t worked,” DeSantis said in the interview with moderator Kristen Welker, which aired Sunday morning. “We are going to replace and supersede with a better plan.” He declined to provide details about how his plan would “supersede” Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act, adding that his campaign would most likely roll out a proposal in the spring. I can’t wait. I think this is good. With all the Republicans now falling in line to repeal Obamacare and kill Social Security and Medicare, in addition to their hostility to abortion rights, I think we have the makings of a good domestic argument about the future. And they are on the wrong side of it.
The White House requested billions to support refugee resettlement from Ukraine and Gaza in October.
The post Netanyahu’s Goal for Gaza: “Thin” Population “to a Minimum” appeared first on The Intercept.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 3, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-01-2023]
Trump has always been a sloppy speaker. But he’s not the same person he was, that’s clear. Someone pointed out the other day that the past and the present seem to be merging in his mind at times. The stuff where he’s talking about golden showers and how his wife took it and constantly saying that Obama is president are tells that something is off in his sense of time and place. Here are a couple more excerpts from speeches he gave this weekend. They are bizarrely disjointed even for him. Some are just the usual misspeaking but he doesn’t seem to realize he’s done it. In the past he would do some verbal gyration to cover it (of course, he would never say “excuse me” and correct himself as normal people do) but he just sails past this stuff now. This is just delusional: This is a massive Freudian slip: Of course, he’s also the same jackass he always was: The Flock of Seagulls hairdo gets more elaborate by the day. Can he not see it?
For the sake of Australia’s national interest, and for journalistic integrity that will be judged by history, can mainstream media maintain independence from short-term, vulgar political and geopolitical influence and interference, especially with regard to reporting about China? At last, the relationship between Australia and China has been stabilised. One indicator is the welcome home Continue reading »
America’s huge role in international affairs is undisputed but one aspect that tends to get overlooked is the way its support of local actors tends to inflame the situation. Indigenous political forces, be they governments or regimes in power, or movements or individuals seeking power, have their own agendas and motivations. If these objectives are Continue reading »
Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy says Australia is not worsening the arms race and gives assurance about the submarines’ nuclear reactors. The deal could still spark a defence build-up in Asia-Pacific while Australia lacks the facilities to deal with nuclear waste, analysts say. Australia may have asserted that its acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines under AUKUS Continue reading »
I write this brief letter and appeal on this fifty-second day of conflict between the Israeli government and the hapless population in Gaza. I also write as a child of Holocaust and concentration camp survivors. LETTER TO THE DANDENONG COUNCIL, Melbourne, Australia, ABOUT THE IMMINENT GENOCIDE IN GAZA, November 29, 2023. The propaganda narrative since Continue reading »
Our voices will be thunderous, a storm that will not cease, A tempest of determination, a wind of lasting peace. In this hallowed land downunder, where change is underway, Lies a spark, untamed and fierce, that will not fade away. It’s a flame that feeds on anger, on the wrongs we can’t ignore, It’s a Continue reading »
A frontline medic writes of two individuals she met in Kayah State, whose stories exemplify the diverse ways Myanmar’s youth are contributing to, and sacrificing for, the revolution. As the conflict grinds on, every month brings fresh horrors. Since early last year, when I left my medical studies in Yangon and joined a team of Continue reading »
The Israeli government is putting pressure on the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz to line up in support of the government in its conduct of the war in Gaza. The communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, has suggested financial penalties be applied to the paper accusing it of “lying, defeatist propaganda” and “sabotaging Israel in wartime”. The proposal aims Continue reading »
Via Axios: Muslim Americans in several swing states are scheduled to gather in Michigan on Saturday to start a campaign they’re calling #AbandonBiden, a reflection of their outrage over President Biden‘s handling of the Israel-Hamas war. Arab American and Muslim American anger could hurt Biden’s re-election prospects in most of the 2024 swing states he won in 2020, as those groups have been heavily Democratic. Muslim American leaders from Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania are expected to meet in Dearborn, Mich., to start the new campaign. “This #AbandonBiden 2024 conference is set against the backdrop of the upcoming 2024 presidential election and the decision to withdraw support for President Biden due to his unwillingness to call for a ceasefire and protect innocents in Palestine and Israel,” the group said in a statement. “Leaders from swing states will work together to guarantee Biden’s loss in the 2024 election.” The campaign primarily will focus on social media for now, organizer Jaylani Hussein of Minneapolis tells Axios.
There are dozens A Newsweek headline on Saturday caught my attention: Democratic 2024 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson compared the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Florida Democratic Party to the now defunct Soviet Union, telling Newsweek on Saturday that their actions ahead of the primaries are “essentially authoritarian.” Williamson, along with fellow Democratic contenders Cenk Uygur, a political commentator and creator of the The Young Turks, and Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, has slammed the Florida Democratic Party’s decision to not include their names on the primary ballot. Instead, Democratic voters in the southern state will only see Biden’s name listed—unless the decision is reversed. In an earlier story, Newsweek reminded readers that Uyger is ineligible to serve as president. But that’s an aside. As for the Florida Democratic Party, it’s been a mess for some time. Not that we can talk here in North Carolina where Democrats in 2022 opposed Green Party recognition. Unwisely, I think. I hope that’s changed.
From U.S. efforts to undermine a global carbon market to medicines disappearing from insurance plans, here’s a roundup of our reporting from the past week.
Sleepwalking into dictatorship The first time I heard colonizer used was (IIRC) in Black Panther (2018). Since then the smear has caught on a bit, and not in a Martin Luther King sort of way. But that single word of dialogue served in the film to instantly replace the European view of Africa with an African view of Europeans. It carries racial connotations, but is anchored not as much in skin color as behavior, on what Europeans do. We’ve used enablers in the past to describe Donald Trump’s allies inside and outside of government. Former Rep. Liz Cheney offers on “CBS Sunday Morning” a more pointed term for Trump’s confederates based on what they do. They are collaborators, and she doesn’t mean colleagues. She deploys collaborators as the French Resistance might against the Vichy government. “If you look at what Donald Trump is trying to do, he can’t do it by himself,” Cheney tells John Dickerson. “He has to have collaborators.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Gunn/Waller, Doctor Who, Halo, Star Trek: Discovery, HOTD, Reacher, Rick and Morty, The Boys, Fallout & more!