Surprisingly? The right wingers are having themselves a good old-fashioned cry today. Or, more accurately, a full-blown tantrum. It’s just astonishing. This is my favorite take on that by Philip Bump. He asks Republicans a question I wish everyone would ask: “I’m running because far too often, we have two standards of justice — one for the rich and powerful and connected, and another for everyone else,” Bragg said in a video announcing his bid. “We must follow the facts wherever they lead, regardless of how influential the person under investigation is.” In the years since, the idea that there are two standards of justice has been embraced by Bragg’s most prominent target: former president Trump. In Trump’s formulation, the issue isn’t that people in positions of influence are getting away with crimes. Instead, it’s that he — and theoretical others on the right — are being unfairly targeted by an out-of-control criminal justice system. It’s an argument that holds enormous sway with Trump’s base of support and the broader right-wing media bubble that surrounds it.
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Israeli forces’ slaughters of Gazans, journalists, doctors, humanitarian aid workers are described by military spokespersons and by Prime minister Netanyahu as tragic mistakes. In retrospect, killings appear an intention conducted by an alleged accident, in which well rehearsed explanations are part of a familiar two faced process of speaking with double tongues. There are evil Continue reading »
Pro-Israel forces in Washington are trying to derail Karim Khan’s request for Israeli and Hamas arrest warrants. U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham was bursting with contempt for the International Criminal Court (ICC) when he grilled U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a May 21 congressional hearing. Wagging his finger, he warned that, if the ICC gets Continue reading »
The stunning conviction in New York of Donald Trump on 34 felony counts is more likely to encourage his legion of supporters than otherwise. Throughout the course of his trial, he well prepared them to accommodate the gift of such an outcome in further propelling the outrageousness of his gift for mendacious hoopla to new Continue reading »
The question has been asked many times, but it has rarely led to constructive public debates: is Australia a racist country? Depending on how we interpret the recent comments by ABC veteran journalist Laura Tingle, she seems to have expressed a view that is hardly controversial but widely shared in Australia. Not only have various Continue reading »
Is Australia’s new industrial policy a way forward to a competitive, innovative, and sustainable future in which the benefits of new technologies such as renewable energy and artificial intelligence are widely shared throughout society? Or a reversion to past failed attempts to protect local industry, pick winners at taxpayers’ expense, lag in innovation and productivity Continue reading »
ABC TV’s Landline programme has declared that “Australia’s dairy industry is licking its lips at the prospect of increased demand from Indonesia.” The cow cockies’ cliched hopes are based on the applauded pledge by Indonesia’s incoming president and former general Prabowo Subianto to give 83 million school kids free feeds and milk. The salivators are Continue reading »
According to the Australian Government’s Future Gas Strategy, gas is “critical” to the nation’s economy. In view of this, many Australians might be surprised to learn that a large amount of the country’s gas reserves are essentially being given away for free. Australia has ten facilities that export gas as liquified natural gas (LNG). Six Continue reading »
‘My dad is gone… where will I go?’ Nine-year-old Omar Hamad just lived through the worst day of his life, when his father was burned alive in Israel’s attack on a tent camp in Rafah. Dozens of Palestinians in Gaza were killed that day, and dozens more lost loved ones. Watch Omar speak to Al Continue reading »
This is the opening move in a protectionist regime the U.S. president will extend significantly to prove his bona fides as a Sinophobe. I love the photograph The New York Times ran atop Jim Tankersley’s May 18 story analysing the inadvisable raft of tariffs on Chinese imports President Biden authorised four days earlier. There is the old coot signing Continue reading »
The former US President was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to adult actress Stormy Daniels
Sad! Julia Davis at the Daily Beast follows the Russian media. They’re even more distraught than the Republicans: Russian state-controlled media apparatus closely followed legal troubles of the former U.S. President Donald J. Trump, spicing up most of their coverage with pro-Trump clips from Fox News and Tucker Carlson. Russian propagandists were openly hoping for a hung jury and were visibly disappointed when Trump became a convicted felon on all 34 charges he was facing. On Friday morning, Dmitry Kulikov, host of Solovyov Live, the self-described “most patriotic channel” in Russia, said on-air, “They wronged our Donald Trump!” Malek Dudakov, a political scientist who specializes in America, said that the hope for a miracle—meaning a hung jury—was extinguished. He said, with Russia’s affectionate middle name usage, “The miracle did not happen. Our Donald Fredovych was found guilty on all 34 counts.” For that, Dudakov blamed the judge and the jury and baselessly claimed that all of them were prejudiced against Trump.
“It’s hard to see this wildly disproportionate response as anything other than an attempt to chill speech on this issue.”
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The worst has happened.
Donald Trump is now a convicted felon, found guilty by a jury of his peers in the city in which he was born and raised and lived for the first 70 years of his life. The front page of his former hometown newspaper looked like this today: Republicans have all rallied in support of the Dear Leader by whining and complaining about the judicial system being used against a political opponent, apparently trying to convince the American people that anyone running for office should be immune from prosecution for their crimes. (That’s pretty rich coming from the crowd that chanted “lock her up” for four solid years.) Needless to say, every one of the lawsuits filed against him and the crimes he is accused of were being very publicly investigated long before he decided to run for president again. In fact, there’s a good case to be made that that’s why he did it. As the LA Times Doyle McManus pointed out back in October of 2021: As long as he’s running (or even sort of running), Trump can denounce every inquest and subpoena as just another part of a political vendetta.
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That was a moment, wasn’t it? Watching MSNBC’s Guilty/Not Guilty counter click its way up to 34 Trump guilty verdicts was a moment I won’t forget. I heard about the 9/11 attack in New York from a colleague who’d heard of it in a phone call from home. I thought it must have been an internet rumor. Then I couldn’t even connect to the internet to check. It wasn’t a rumor. Neither was yesterday’s verdict. So. What does it mean? Well, Donald John Trump is a felon 34 times over. His cult is pissed (Reuters): Supporters of former President Donald Trump, enraged by his conviction on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, flooded pro-Trump websites with calls for riots, revolution and violent retribution. After Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, his supporters responded with dozens of violent online posts, according to a Reuters review of comments on three Trump-aligned websites: the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Patriots.Win and the Gateway Pundit. Some called for attacks on jurors, the execution of the judge, Justice Juan Merchan, or outright civil war and armed insurrection.
The latest episode of the hit Media Storm podcast focuses on unpicking the narratives around South Africa's stance on two of the world's biggest geopolitical issues
Convicted like you’ve never seen before It’s a first America doesn’t need, and yet it does. The Washington Post reports yesterday’s news: Donald Trump was convicted Thursday on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in his New York state hush money case, becoming the first former U.S. president to be tried and found guilty of a crime. All of America watched in the aftermath of the Great Recession as its architects in the finance industry took home bonuses even as they took back the homes of families to whom they’d sold “No income, no asset” (NINA) loans, a.k.a. “liar loans.” The Department of the Treasury under Barack Obama “foamed the runway” for the banks to prevent hard landings in the crisis. But it left homeowners out in the cold. The Department of Justice looked the other way.