What is he, three? Philip Bump did a nice rundown of the “tortured” right wing rationalizations over Trumps criminal behavior. (gift link)If you don’t watch Fox you will be surprised at just how stupid it really is: If last week is any guide, somewhere north of 2 million people tuned in to Jesse Watters’s prime-time show on Fox News on Monday night to hear him moan that Donald Trump was being tortured. That the treatment the former president was experiencing during his criminal trial in New York was equivalent to — or perhaps worse than? — that experienced by at Guantánamo Bay. “Donald Trump, been on the move his whole life,” Watters told viewers after describing the purported leniency Democrats had offered those detainees. “Golf. Rallies. Movement. Action. Sunlight. Fresh air. Freedom. This isn’t lawfare. It’s torture.” He played a clip of a podcast hosted by Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen — expected to testify against Trump in the Manhattan hush money case — and whimpered about how unfair it was.
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Except for the police unions, the unions are putting some real muscle behind Biden in this election:
The Bulwark’s JV Last with a very interesting historical observation: In taking in the testimony of David Pecker, it is tempting to say that he was the Joseph Goebbels of the MAGA movement, but that’s not quite right. Pecker is much closer to Dietrich Eckart. Let’s talk about this villain. Dietrich Eckart was a German “journalist” who co-founded the German Worker’s Party, which was the precursor to the Nazi Party. Eckart met Adolf Hitler in 1919 and saw in him a kindred spirit. They became friends and Eckart was something of a mentor. He believed that Hitler was the man to lead German workers to power. To that end, in 1920 he convinced some Nazi financial backers to purchase a tabloid newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (the “People’s Observer”). Eckart became the paper’s editor and this former tabloid suddenly started functioning as the house organ of the Nazi Party. The Völkischer Beobachter was not sympathetic to the Nazi Party. It did not have goals and beliefs aligned with the Nazi Party. It took direction from the Nazi Party.
At the levels of public ritual and private observance, the ANZAC narrative is much about processing loss and assuaging grief. But let us recall here its nature as an imperial romance, and what that might mean for our place in the multi-polarity of the current world order? With its genesis in imperial war, the Anzac Continue reading »
Perhaps it is my imagination, but in the days immediately preceding Anzac Day 2024, there seems to be less media exhortation to observance than has been usual in recent years. I think that we can take it as given that those who march and attend at dawn will participate again this year with undiminished spirit Continue reading »
Anzac Day. We mark it respectfully. True respect demands that we also not forget the essential question about the first ‘Anzac Day’ – 25 April 1915. Why were Australian soldiers at Anzac Cove in the first place? In fact, Gallipoli provides a stunning lesson in the disasters that can follow from unwavering loyalty to a Continue reading »
The non-violence training to join the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s ships to Gaza has been intense. As hundreds of us from 32 countries gathered in Istanbul, we were briefed about what we might encounter on this voyage. “We have to be ready for every possibility,” our trainers insisted. The best scenario, they said, is that our Continue reading »
The director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a lobby group for big tech and foreign agencies, claims that China’s alleged targeting of the agency “should be of concern to all Australians”. In an op-ed written for the Canberra Times, Justin Bassi said the “revelation” of a foreign government taking aim at an Australian institution “should be Continue reading »
The 100 000 or so dead men and women in Australia’s overseas wars are symbolised by red poppies, on the Roll of Honour at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, in shrines around the nation, on the more than 5000 war memorials in our towns and suburbs, in war cemeteries overseas, and worn on Anzac Continue reading »
Check out these new preview images of Ncuti Gatwa (Fifteenth Doctor) & Millie Gibson's (Ruby Sunday) from the new season of Doctor Who.
Big Oil is fighting to limit safety protections to expedite its build-out of experimental carbon dioxide pipelines, endangering nearby communities.
The Department of Education is probing claims that the school discriminated against Palestinian and Arab students amid Israel’s war on Gaza.
The post “Kill All Arabs”: The Feds Are Investigating UMass Amherst for Anti-Palestinian Bias appeared first on The Intercept.
Think about this: In his first questions of the day, Associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch asked Turner to parse exactly how close a patient needs to be to death under Idaho’s law. He asked whether the law would permit an abortion in the case of a molar or ectopic pregnancy — both of which are nonviable and can be life-threatening — but deny one in a case where a patient would probably die at some point, but not imminently. “It doesn’t matter whether it happens tomorrow or next week or a month from now?” Gorsuch asked. “There is no imminence requirement,” Turner said. “This whole notion of delayed care is just not consistent with the Idaho Supreme Court’s reading of the statute and what the statute says.” This is what these monsters are discussing in the Supreme Court today. They are actually turning over in their minds when it’s acceptable to let women die for their grotesque ideology. This whole argument is just horrifying. From what we have learned, it appears that the Supreme Court majority believes that states have the right to completely deny health care to pregnant women, even if it means they will die.
Writing is an often solitary process, but it rarely happens alone. This brief email, which I hemmed and hawed over for seven weeks before finally dashing it off and sending it in a thoroughly uncharacteristic burst of un-self-conscious productivity, could not have happened without the support of countless others. While it might be only my name in the sender field, I would be remiss not to acknowledge and thank the many people who helped make it all possible.
I, of course, must begin with the inspiration for this work: the acquaintance who emailed me seven weeks ago, asking a relatively straightforward question that was nevertheless open-ended enough to make it seem like answering it would be unpleasant and difficult, prompting me to do my best not to think about it, until answering it actually did become unpleasant and difficult because first I would have to apologize for putting it off so long. You challenged me in the best way, and I hope you find this email worthy of your readership, even if it is probably arriving six weeks to six weeks and six days later than you expected to receive it.
By attacking the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Netanyahu sought to escape the inevitable reality of a bitter military failure and to restore Israel’s illusion of power. As is often the case, he managed to do the exact opposite.
The post Shockwaves to Shattered Defenses: The Myth of Israeli Supremacy Crumbles appeared first on MintPress News.
Social Security benefits for recipients’ spouses and ex-spouses often help women, who tend to earn less than men and are likely to have fewer retirement resources.
Joe Biden’s the big winner — on policy anyway While most of the country was riveted by recaps of Donald Trump’s sordid hush money trial on Tuesday, something amazing was happening in Washington: the US Senate debated and then passed the national security package that’s been consuming the capitol for the last six months. With a lopsided vote of 79-18 the bills with aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan among some other things will finally be behind us. Notably, there is no increased funding for the border because Donald Trump ordered the Republicans to reject it so that he can keep demagoguing the issue during the campaign. It’s a big win for President Joe Biden and the Democrats. The GOP infighting has escalated in the wake of the House’s months long tantrum led by the far right extremists who seemed to truly believe that they could hold their breath until they turned blue and they would eventually get everything they wanted. Leading MAGA rebel Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., left town without calling for Speaker Mike Johnson to vacate the chair, demanding instead that he resign, which isn’t going to happen.
