The Cold War never ended for the American right Cliff Schecter posted the clip below last night and it’s a fine example of the conservative reflex for branding as communist everything and everybody they dislike. Three-plus decades after the end of the Cold War that they declared Saint Ronald of Reagan had won, they still can’t let it go. They’re still looking for commies in woodpiles and for Reds under their beds before they cower beneath the sheets. Upon review, I was surprised to see that Ed Kilgore wrote in response to Donald Trump branding his opponents communists that he “hadn’t heard a Republican call a Democrat a commie since the high tide of McCarthyism.” Looking at the clip Cliff posted, where’s Ed been all this time? Kilgore wrote in March 2022: It’s not just Trump throwing the term around.
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More smoke grenades It’s time to revisit some old posts about a tactic used by the right now being deployed against the supposed “Biden crime family.” It is a variety of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks (All the president’s lawyers; 9/7/22): It is a time-tested tactic on the right. Practiced and perfected. Gin up fake controversy over anything and everything. From tan suits to sloppy salutes. From Benghazi to emails. Pimp it like hell until the press can’t stop itself from reporting the controversy. Rush Limbaugh built a career on serving up a daily dose of outrage to his listeners until they would go into withdrawal if it stopped. I’ve described the decades-long, Republican phony effort to convince the public there is massive voter fraud as them lobbing smoke bombs into newsrooms. By the time the smoke clears and we discover, yet again, there was never a fire, all the public remembers is they saw smoke and heard someone yelling, “Fire!” Lather, rinse, repeat. Digby calls it the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” gambit.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Musk/Carano, The Sandman, Good Omens 2, WWE SummerSlam, Star Trek: Prodigy, Ms. Marvel, Doctor Who, and more!
Henry’s post on the correct way to argue with Hanania was good. In light of late revelations (probably you’ve heard), revisitation, for extra emphasis, may not be taken amiss. (Or skip it, if it looks like a dead horse.) Henry’s point, riffing on DD (riffing on Galbraith, riffing on Friedman) is: you don’t want to […]
The Modi government has weaponized India’s sedition and anti-terror laws to disappear Khalid and other political critics from public life.
The post Umar Khalid Challenged Modi’s Anti-Muslim Agenda. India Accused Him of Terrorism and Locked Him Up. appeared first on The Intercept.
The Modi government has weaponized India’s sedition and anti-terror laws to disappear Khalid and other political critics from public life.
The post Umar Khalid Challenged Modi’s Anti-Muslim Agenda. India Accused Him of Terrorism and Locked Him Up. appeared first on The Intercept.
‘All I can do is pray – earnestly, relentlessly – for world peace.’ Fujio Torikoshi was eating breakfast with his mother when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Feeling a rumble underneath his feet, Fujio stepped outside into the front garden and saw a black dot in the sky. That’s when it burst outwards, […]
Six months after the East Palestine derailment disaster, the only safety victory on our nation’s railroads came from workers.
Since the overthrow of Niger’s US-friendly government, West African nations of the ECOWAS bloc have threatened an invasion of their neighbor. Before leading the charge for intervention, ECOWAS chair Bola Tinubu spent years laundering millions for heroin dealers in Chicago, and has since been ensnared in numerous corruption scandals. Hours after Niger’s Western-backed leader was detained by the country’s presidential guard on July 28, Nigerian President and chair of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Bola Tinubu leapt […]
The post From Chi-Town bagman to ECOWAS chairman: meet the former money launderer leading the push to invade Niger first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post From Chi-Town bagman to ECOWAS chairman: meet the former money launderer leading the push to invade Niger appeared first on The Grayzone.
*sigh* Everything old is nude again. From Sam Adams’ Slate review of Ira Sach’s Passages: Movie theaters are full, Eurodance is big: Close your eyes and it’s the 1990s again. Adding to the throwback vibe, there’s a new controversy about sex in movies. The story of a love triangle between a German film director (played by Franz Rogowski), his husband (Ben Whishaw), and an elementary school teacher (Adèle Exarchopoulos), Ira Sachs’ Passages premiered to strong reviews at Sundance but was given an NC-17 rating by the Motion Picture Association for its explicit sex scenes. The film’s distributor, Mubi, has opted to release it in theaters unrated, but not before a round of interviews in which Sachs called the MPA’s decision “a form of cultural censorship” and pointed to the ratings board’s long history of disproportionately stigmatizing sex, especially when it’s between same-sex partners. Created in 1990 to replace the disreputable X, the NC-17 rating, which bars admission to anyone under the age of 17, has fallen almost completely out of use in recent years.
Lol. And, once again, what is with the vests with their names on them? Why????
DeSantis-stans are in a tizzy over his collapse. Jonathan Chait takes on their latest excuse — Democrats made the Republicans do it: National Review’s Andrew McCarthy explicated this theory in more specific lunatic detail: Today, the Journal — which previously only hinted at the notion that Jack Smith might be deliberately trying to help Trump beat DeSantis — goes all in: That this theory is totally deranged hardly requires saying. There is no evidence any, let alone all, of the prosecutors investigating Trump have coordinated with the Biden administration or have any interest in affecting the Republican nomination. Trump’s legal woes are easily and parsimoniously explained by the fact he has habitually flouted the law throughout his career, beginning at least 50 years ago, when he and his father refused to allow Black people to rent apartments, and continuing through decades of assorted schemes and swindles. More to the point, the Republican electorate’s attachment to Trump is explained even more easily.
It’s early, but it’s worth thinking about this anyway. I assume you’ve already read or heard about the NY Times poll this week which has everyone scared to death that Donald Trump will win again in 2024. (I would just say that people need to remember that almost every re-elected incumbent was very unpopular at this stage of the campaign. It’s the normal dynamic.) This discussion with the pollster Nate Cohn is instructive about the possible advantages for Biden and also the possible roadblocks, one of which is terrifying to me: Michael Barbaro: … [G]iven that at this moment he’s tied with Trump at 43 percent of the electorate that was polled here, that leaves us with about 14% of the general election voters who seem up for grabs. So what can you tell us about that group of people? Nate Cohn: Well, the main thing that characterizes this group is that they don’t like either of these candidates, but to be honest they’re not a bad group for Democrats on paper, and they’re not a bad group for Joe Biden. On paper, this is a group that’s disproportionately young.
Australia’s environmental protection legislation needs all hands-on deck right now. City centre households have lower emissions than the suburbs. Northern hemisphere summers getting hotter. Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act review Regular readers of my Sunday contributions will be aware that I consider climate change and the loss of biodiversity to be not the Continue reading »
Over twenty ALP branches around Australia have now passed anti-AUKUS resolutions and the list is growing by the day. Many of the branches are calling on the Albanese government to withdraw from the pact while others want a parliamentary inquiry into the $368 Billion deal. AWPR supports the call for a full and open inquiry which was Continue reading »
During his recent speech at the Solomon Islands National University, Minister for International Development and the Pacific Pat Conroy said “strategic competition […] is an unavoidable reality for our region”. July has already seen Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare visit China, French President Emmanuel Macron visit Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia, and United States Secretary of State Continue reading »
CANBERRA 2 August 2023.– One of Australia’s longest-serving senior federal bureaucrats – Andrew Metcalfe – says poor training, insufficient funding and sometimes ‘fragmented and desultory’ efforts by the public service were responsible some of Australia’s greatest public administrations tragedies. Metcalfe also blamed the previous Coalition government for starving Commonwealth departments and agencies of additional staff, Continue reading »
In the Ukraine War, scholar Serhii Plokhy has his own biases, which can get in the way of his profession’s fidelity to evidence. Are historians, as Serhii Plokhy suggests, really the worst interpreters of current events, except for everyone else? As a historian myself, I would like to believe so. It’s a comforting thought at Continue reading »
At 3 a.m. on July 26, 2023, the presidential guard detained President Mohamed Bazoum in Niamey, the capital of Niger. Troops, led by Brigadier General Abdourahmane Tchiani closed the country’s borders and declared a curfew. The coup d’état was immediately condemned by the Economic Community of West African States, by the African Union, and by the European Union. Both Continue reading »
This is ridiculous: M. Evan Corcoran, a lawyer who accompanied former President Donald J. Trump to court this week for his arraignment on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election, has given crucial evidence in Mr. Trump’s other federal case — the one accusing him of illegally hoarding classified documents. Another lawyer close to Mr. Trump, Boris Epshteyn, sat for an interview with prosecutors this spring and could be one of the former president’s co-conspirators in the election tampering case. And Mr. Epshteyn’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, is defending Mr. Trump against both the documents and election case indictments. The legal team that Mr. Trump has assembled to represent him in the twin prosecutions by the special counsel, Jack Smith, is marked by a tangled web of potential conflicts and overlapping interests — so much so that Mr. Smith’s office has started asking questions.