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Q: Is Project 2025 ideological lunacy? Trump VP contender Marco Rubio: No. I think it’s center-right Q: Is Project 2025 ideological lunacy? Trump VP contender Marco Rubio: No. I think it’s center-right (Trump’s Project 2025 wants to ban abortion nationwide, restrict IVF access, defund education, round up immigrants in mass detention camps, put guns in classrooms, and go after… pic.twitter.com/kUyupdYtwA — Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) July 7, 2024 It’s good to know what’s considered “center right” these days: By the way: The three top guys on the Project 2025 website are all former Trump admin staffers:Paul Dans (chief of staff at Trump OPM) Spencer Chretien (special assistant to Trump) Troup Hemenway (Trump OPP)  Of the folks assigned to write or co-write policy chapters, most are Trump admin veterans.

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Many war stories end with hunger wreaking havoc on significant portions of a population. In Christian theology, the Biblical “four horses of the apocalypse,” believed by many in early modern Europe to presage the end of the world, symbolized invasion, armed conflict, and famine followed by death. They suggest the degree to which people have long recognized how violence causes starvation. Armed conflict disrupts food supplies as warring factions divert resources to arms production and their militaries while destroying the kinds of infrastructure that enable societies to feed themselves. Governments, too, sometimes use starvation as a weapon of war. (Sound familiar? I’m not going to point fingers here because most of us can undoubtedly recall recent examples.) As someone who... Read more

Source: War and Famine appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Fascists always understand the power of the really big show.

The Australia Institute has recently argued for the introduction of a system for measuring the extent of poverty in Australia, pointing out that the government’s recently established wellbeing measurement framework, Measuring What Matters, does not measure the number of Australians living in poverty. Greg Jericho and the other researchers at the Institute have argued that Continue reading »

The birth of Israel on 14 May 1948 is said to be based on three related claims. Some people regard these claims as questionable. They form the basis for why Israel’s birth is said to be illegitimate. Firstly, a claim much set in concrete is that Israel is the “promised land” of the Jews. However, Continue reading »

Reflecting on some relevant aspects of just war thinking that I mentioned in my recent contribution to Pearls and Irritations on “Why Israel’s war violates just war principles” I decided it would be worth addressing some of those issues further and also broaching some important ones that I then did not discuss. I do so Continue reading »

Best-selling British writers, George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison, have very recently published “The Invisible Doctrine”, which is a powerful critique of neoliberalism, and the role they believe it is playing in destroying our human future. The authors say that the neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of our time, but many people do not know much Continue reading »

Twice in a fortnight, the president of the Heritage Foundation has declared that America is experiencing its second revolution. The revolution would remain bloodless (because their side is “winning”) “if the left allows it to be.” The two bodies whose acts provoked the announcements are leading Atlas Network partners. They are also spending millions of Continue reading »

Australia’s drug budget heavily focuses on law enforcement over harm reduction and prevention, underscoring the need for more balanced, effective spending. How much do Australian governments spend on illicit drug issues? Australia’s drug policy spending remains heavily skewed towards law enforcement, raising concerns about priorities and effectiveness. According to a 2021/2022 drug budget report by Continue reading »

There is an oft-quoted legal dictum known as “The Rule of Law” that posits that all people are equal before the law regardless of status or standing, and that all must obey the law. How then (one must ask) does such a widely-held principle conform to the recent ruling of the US Supreme Court that Continue reading »

Job cuts continue across the empire as the business model dies a slow death. Few things say “company in decline” louder than the now-annual round of job cuts in the troubled news media segment of global media behemoth News Corp, with last month’s annual budget meeting in Sydney revealing more cuts planned across the next Continue reading »

Biden wanders offstage or walks like a geriatric robot. Yet we are meant to believe he’s carefully navigating us through the nuclear tripwires of the West’s serial wars. We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible. And yet we are Continue reading »

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 07 2024

by Tony Wikrent

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

The Weekend at Yale That Changed American Politics 

Michael Kruse [Politico, magazine September/October 2018]

It’s not too extreme to say that one wonky student group founded in 1982 has reshaped the Supreme Court, and the nation. What actually happened at the birth of the Federalist Society? ….

This is the way to do it James Fallows, former presidential speechwriter, writes a speech for Joe Biden: Address to the Nation President Joe Biden July 2024 My fellow Americans:             I’d like to talk with you tonight about the faith that connects nearly all of us who share the blessing of calling ourselves Americans.             That is a faith in the country’s past and a belief in its future. And a willingness, in the here and now, to do what we can—to fulfill our duty—to make our country stronger, prouder, fairer, greater.             More open to opportunity. More equal under the law. More faithful to the values to which so many generations of Americans have pledged “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” as our founders put it nearly 250 years ago in the Declaration of Independence.

Taniel at Bolts with a short primer on today’s runoff in France. France is holding its parliamentary elections today. Clear stakes: Will far-right end up governing France? And if it fails, what possible coalition will end up governing given fragmentation? You can follow me for results starting at 2pm ET; but a quick context 🧵:  Let’s start with: In France, president runs the show… as long as their party controls the Assembly. If presidential party loses that control, the president has few domestic powers—no veto, for instance. This isn’t a US-style split government. That’s why stakes today so high.  Macron called these just 4 weeks ago. Decision shocked his own allies. He already lost his gamble: His bloc is sure to lose seats & its tentative control on Assembly.

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Trump “is somebody who is trying to destroy our country” Democrats need to look themselves in the mirror when former Republicans from the Lincoln Project are standing behind Joe Biden more steadfastly than they are. We need to look beyond the players to the broader stakes in this election and make clear to voters what they are. “I will take an old man with a cold over a narcissitic sociopath with a dictator kink any day,” said Ryan Wiggins, the group’s chief of staff. “We have got the Democratic nominee’s back because Trump cannot be president of this country ever again.” “Our answer is to go out and find the bad guys and punch them in the face,” insists Rick Wilson. “You can never take your foot off the gas in attacking Donald Trump.” When you’ve cut your opponent over the eye, work the eye! “Only one of the two main presidential candidates poses an existential threat to democracy,” said MSNBC’s Ali Velshi Saturday. So take a deep breath and hold that thought.

Thanks to Doctor Who, Ncuti Gatwa has helped bring the expression "babes" to the American LGBTQ community, and it's been catching on.

By Neil Wilson. Reposted with permission from Neil’s New Wayland article.   The strike action by UK junior doctors has an unreal quality. It lacks the media and political actions …

The post Junior Doctors: your 35% payrise is already in place. Demand that it be paid appeared first on The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies.

I’ve spent many hours trying to take pictures of these over the past three years and have a large collection of indistinct blurs as a result. But I went back to basics, studied the camera setting, watched a bunch of “how to” videos on YouTube and actually managed this one:

Junior Doctors need to enforce their equal pay rights to get the pay they deserve.

THE Kangaroo Bus is coming to town, bringing ease of access to government services and transactions to Aboriginal communities in regional NSW. The bus is a dedicated Service NSW Mobile Service Centre providing drivers licence and vehicle registration renewals, Seniors Card applications, driver testing and more. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth...

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