When will Democrats understand that they get no points for being nonpartisan? Perhaps someday Democrats will learn their lesson but I’m not holding out much hope at this point. I’m referring, of course, to their inexplicable habit of allowing only Republicans to hold the job of Special Prosecutor. This has been going on for decades now and the results have been predictable. The idea is to prove how noble and non-partisan they are in comparison to the hacks on the GOP side and it just ends up coming back to bite them. The habit goes back to Watergate after President Richard Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, a Democrat, in the Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon had Cox replaced with one of his supporters, Texas Judge Leon Jaworski, whom everyone assumed would be sympathetic to the president. As it turned out he was appalled by what he saw and issued subpoenas for the tapes which wound up in the Supreme Court as US v Nixon. However, it was later revealed that Jaworski didn’t agree with the Grand Jury’s recommendation to criminally indict the president and resigned from the job just as the cover-up trials began.
Reading
The Pentagon is covering up the real purpose of Tower 22: targeting the very Iran-backed militant groups that attacked last month.
The post “Logistics” Outpost in Jordan Where 3 U.S. Troops Died Is Secretly a Drone Base appeared first on The Intercept.
Advice for Biden This piece by Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic makes a good point: [M]istakes like these are nothing new for Biden, who has been mixing up names and places for his entire political career. Back in 2008, he infamously introduced his running mate as “the next president of the United States, Barack America.” At the time, Biden’s well-known propensity for bizarre tangents, ahistorical riffs, and malapropisms compelled Slate to publish an entire column explaining “why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” The article included such gems as the time that then-Senator Biden told the journalist Katie Couric that “when the markets crashed in 1929, ‘Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed.
Your partner bought two tickets to see BAND YOU ONLY HEAR NOW AT THE DMV & CVS. “What do I wear?” you wonder. Certainly, your CLOTHING ITEM YOU ROUTINELY SLEEP IN should be fine. On the day of the show, you take a nap so you’ll be fresh for the event. But you quickly feel yourself slipping into DARK EMOTIONAL STATE as circling to find parking drags on for TIME IT TAKES TO GET AWAY FROM BRAGGY NEIGHBOR AT THE SUPERMARKET.
The terms of the emerging deal with Hamas are being presented by Israel as entailing a “painful price.” It is based on the assumption that whatever is good for Hamas must be bad for Israel and whatever is bad for the Palestinians is good for us: a zero-sum game. Israel has convinced itself that it Continue reading »
What is almost universally agreed is that an enduring peace settlement for Palestine must be based on a two-State solution. However, getting that settlement accepted will require active intervention by the US to broker the deal. It is now four months since the horrendous attack by Hamas on Israel that resulted in around 1200 Israeli Continue reading »
The Year of the Dragon is bound to be big. Among the twelve zodiac animals that mark the traditional cycle of calendar years, the dragon is the only mythical beast and the most powerful. It stands in marked contrast to the rabbit that will hand over its psychic reign on 10 February. Soothsayers may well Continue reading »
Biden and Schumer’s proposed $61 billion for the Ukraine war will make no difference on the battlefield except to prolong the war, the tens of thousands of deaths, and the physical destruction of Ukraine. President Joe Biden is refusing to fold a losing hand as he bets with Ukrainian lives and U.S. taxpayer money. Biden Continue reading »
Any Australian parent and grandparent would be aghast by the actions of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Victoria Police involving an investigation into a 13 year old autistic boy who was charged in 2022 with terrorism offences. The boy had an IQ of 71. During questioning before a senate inquiry, the AFP argued the Continue reading »
How our cost of living can be eased with a Woolworths-AGL-Qantas merger, government promises political donation reform before 2045 election, Dutton’s vision of a zero-government Australia. Read on for the weekly roundup of links to articles, podcasts, reports and other media on current economic and political issues. Taxation – beyond Albo’s tweaks Looking beyond the Continue reading »
As the Lunar New Year approaches, many Chinese families clean the front door of their home and hang poetry around it. This is a rich and age-old Chinese tradition, both cultural and religious. Chinese couplets (duilian 对联) are a pair of calligraphed sentences written in traditional Chinese that hang on the two sides of a Continue reading »
The diplomatic recognition of the Taliban government in Afghanistan on January 31, 2024 by China must be bracketed with two other far-reaching regional policy moves by Beijing in the post-cold war era —the Shanghai Five in 1996 — later renamed as Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in 2001— and the Belt and Road Initiative announced by President Continue reading »
DMFI, a staunch ally of the right-wing AIPAC, is only the latest centrist group to throw support behind conservative Democrat Tom Suozzi.
The post Pro-Israel DMFI Backs Centrist Democrat Who Progressives Fear Will Side With GOP appeared first on The Intercept.
One of the weirdest things happening in the world today is the way US officials keep insisting that they are not at war with the groups they’re dropping bombs on in the middle east, and that they do not seek conflict with the people they are attacking. Shortly after another massive round of attacks on Continue reading »
The Drupal Community Working Group is pleased to announce that nominations for the 2024 Aaron Winborn Award are now open.
This annual award recognizes an individual who demonstrates personal integrity, kindness, and above-and-beyond commitment to the Drupal community. It includes a scholarship and travel stipend for the winner to attend DrupalCon North America and recognition in a plenary session at the event.
Nominations are open to all Drupal community members*, including but not limited to people who have made a big impact in their local or regional community. If you know of someone who has made a big difference to any number of people in our community, we want to hear about it.
As a community book seller loses her unique shop in Shepherd's Bush Market, Iain Overton looks at the broader struggles facing London's historic markets, facing the juggernaut of modern development.
Dream bigger “When does a political fight over some people’s rights feel like some people’s fight — and when does it feel like everyone’s?” asks Anand Giridharadas at The Ink. His topic is “de-siloing” our struggle for rights for specific groups and instead universalizing their struggles. We are too easily trapped in our own narrow narratives and sucked into right’s. Special counsel Robert K. Hur knew he would catch hell from MAGA Republicans for his investigation concluding without indicting President Biden for his retention of privileged materials. So on Thursday Hur redirected the public narrative away from “no criminal charges are warranted” to Joe Biden is senile with a few poisoned adverbs and adjectives. No one will talk about Biden’s innocence now, or the remarkable achievments of a great president. They’re too busy stomping around in the right’s “he’s too old” framing. What the left must do to de-silo their defense of liberties is less rhetorical jujitsu than speaking in terms that bring everyone into the fight.
The press did not fail to learn from 2016. It learned what drew eyeballs. Do reporters want to find themselves flung out of windows after January 20, 2025 under a Trump dictatorship? Seems so, the way they rushed to cover the poisoned special counsel report on “painfully slow,” old Joe Biden’s handling of sensitive materials. His exoneration was buried beneath coverage of a gratuitous, MAGA-reinforcing narrative in the report raising Biden’s age as an issue. The path the press chose, The New Republic subhead reads, “suggests we’re stuck in 2016 again.” We know what Trump thinks of the media. We know he admires how Vladimir Putin and other world strong men control theirs. He dreams of ruling with an “iron fist,” like the Chinese president. We know what sort of second term he has in mind. A dictatorship, more or less, with himself unfettered by law to do as he pleases. Including to whom he pleases. So, does the American media have a death wish? Apparently, but reporters will be making the owners money all the way to the sidewalk.
I think this is worth listening to. I’ve put notes below. It’s not in essay format, just what I found significant as I was listening.
Whatever you think of Putin, at least he’s educated and speak in complete sentences and has a historical understanding (whether you agree with it or not.) He makes Trump and Biden look like the idiots they are.
In fact, Putin makes almost every Western leader look like an ill-educated moron. Orban is an exception. This isn’t a political judgment. I don’t much like Putin, but I can respect him. I can’t respect Biden, Trump, Sunak, Scholz, Macron, Von Der Leyen or my own PM, Trudeau.
“Against the kingdom of the Beast, we witnesses shall rise!” Addressing the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s October 1981 London demonstration, Edward Palmer Thompson reached back into the mists of radical history, welcoming the crowd of 250,000 to Trafalgar Square with the revolutionary-millenarian marching call of seventeenth-century England’s New Model Army. A socialist historian, poet, peace […]