He’s still a MAGA POS Remember when we all thought that guy was a real threat? I always knew that Trump would be the nominee but it never occurred to me that the guy to whom everyone was singing hosannas as the greatest politician since Lincoln was actually one of the worst duds in history. I think we all assumed that his strategy was to out-Trump Trump in order to win the nomination but it turns out he’s just another MAGA extremist along the lines of a Kari Lake or that weirdo from Pennsylvania Doug Mastriano: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has revealed that he’s “looking” into ways to block President Joe Biden from the 2024 primary ballot in Florida. “This is just going to be a tit for tat and it’s just not gonna end well,” the GOP presidential candidate warned Friday alongside Rep. Chip Roy, R-TX, according to a video posted by CNN.
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We find ourselves in a peculiar place. We are more interconnected, yet more misinformed. At ease with more advanced technologies, but more easily mislead by them. “Doing our own research”, but ending up deeper in conspiratorial rabbit holes.
When discussing complex topics — pandemic, war, the housing crisis, or some thorny family affairs — it is surprisingly easy to jump to conclusions, to oversimplify, ignore crucial nuance, and thus get untethered from reality. To label someone as “evil”, “unethical”, fall back on tribalism. Our brains are always looking for a shortcut, and many of these shortcuts lead us astray. Sometimes we get fooled, sometimes we fool others. Neither helps in the long run.
Those unlucky enough to have to return to the office today have been forced to endure the painfully boring showing of holiday pictures from their colleagues. One such office, based in Parramatta in Sydney’s West has had to suffer through... Read More ›
Back in 1968, my father announced that, if Richard Nixon were elected president that November, he was going to move us all to Canada. I’m not sure who “us all” actually was, since my younger brother and I were then living with my mother and my parents had been divorced for years. Still, he was determined to protect us, should someone he considered a dangerous anti-Semite make it into the Oval Office — and leaving the country seemed to him like the best way to do it. As it happened, Nixon did win in 1968 and none of us moved to Canada. Still, I suspect my father’s confidence that, if things got too bad here, we could always head somewhere... Read more
Source: Nowhere to Run appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
Andrew Weissman takes up the issue of the “interlocutory” appeal that all the lawyers are talking about regarding Trump’s alleged immunity from prosecution. It could have major implications for the election and he does a good job explaining it to non-lawyers: Last month, Judge Tanya Chutkan (correctly) rejected Trump’s motions to dismiss special counsel Jack Smith’s grand jury indictment on grounds including that he was immune from prosecution. In turn, Trump brought what’s known as an “interlocutory” appeal — meaning an immediate appeal before a final judgment in the lower court. With the agreement of both sides, Chutkan stayed “any further proceedings that would move this case towards trial or impose additional burdens of litigation” on Trump until the appeal is decided by the D.C. Circuit (and potentially the Supreme Court). We understand why both parties want these underlying questions to be reviewed before trial, yet the default rule is that appeals courts must wait until the end of a trial to hear a case. It is the rare exception, not the norm, to accept an interlocutory appeal. But here, the D.C.
He apparently considers that his official duty There’s interesting news on the Jack Smith front. Word has leaked out that his devoted manservant Dan Scavino testified before the Grand Jury and backed up the story that Trump did absolutely nothing during the insurrection despite pleas from everyone around him to take action to end it. And Scavino’s not the only one: Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has uncovered previously undisclosed details about former President Donald Trump’s refusal to help stop the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol three years ago as he sat watching TV inside the White House, according to sources familiar with what Smith’s team has learned during its Jan. 6 probe. Many of the exclusive details come from the questioning of Trump’s former deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino, who first started working for Trump as a teenager three decades ago and is now a paid senior adviser to Trump’s reelection campaign. Scavino wouldn’t speak with the House select committee that conducted its own probe related to Jan.
1 package (10 ounces) frozen leaf spinach or chopped broccoli2 pounds ground beef2 eggs¾ cup soft bread crumbs (about 1 slice bread)¼ cup catsup¼ cup milk½ teaspoon salt¼ teaspoon pepper¼ teaspoon dried oregano leaves1 teaspoon salt1 package (3 ounces) smoked sliced ham3 slices mozzarella cheese, each 3×3 inches, cut diagonally into halves (optional) Rinse frozen […]
A review of Philip Norman’s “George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle” by Senior Editor Brad Hundt appears in Beatlefan #265. Hundt found the book to be “eminently readable,” but also a “by-the-numbers biography” and concluded: “Everyone who already is familiar with … Continue reading
Has there ever been a more nakedly ambitious politician in history? I honestly don’t think so. I still don’t think Trump is going to choose her for VP no matter how hard she licks his boots. She just isn’t out of central casting in his book. But she’s certainly giving a hell of an audition.
Few countries are offering ships and reportedly a significant number want their support to remain secret! The token Australian response has turned out to be not out of keeping with that of many similar countries. In an earlier P & I article (The Red Sea: Think it through before jumping! December 22, 2023) I argued Continue reading »
If we forget the lessons of the Holocaust, we forget who we are and what we are capable of becoming. Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastructure, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to Continue reading »
Orchestrated components are coming together to enable the US to recruit Australia in future wars of choice. Our media must begin to ask questions about the crude but successful ways the Australian people are being groomed to provide passive or enthusiastic consent. A version of the long awaited Defence Strategic Review for public consumption will Continue reading »
Hamas was voted in by Palestinians in Gaza in a fair election (as agreed by international monitors). It was primarily a welfare organisation providing services and infrastructure for the general population. It primarily still has this role, with an attached small military wing. It reminds me of my time in Sri Lanka working for CARE Continue reading »
The dismissal of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam by Queen Elizabeth’s Vice-Regal representative, Sir John Kerr, was an extraordinary event. For almost fifty years a debate has raged about why the Governor-General took the unprecedented action he did on 11 November 1975. This five-part series puts a spotlight on the on the external events that Continue reading »
Now that the dust has begun to settle, we can look at the referendum result with a little more clarity. Those of us who supported the Voice saw with some dismay how the initial widespread support in favour of a yes vote began to wither away. yet we should not be fooled by the headlines Continue reading »
Hong Kong tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying urged the US to use its “moral authority” to impose “very draconian” sanctions on mainland China, prosecutors told the court on Tuesday, as they played footage from the publisher’s past media interviews. Prosecutors at the West Kowloon Court played six interview clips that showed Lai expressing support for foreign Continue reading »
Trump and Biden each believes that he alone can fix it. One will wreck it; the other could.
The post U.S. Democracy Hangs on Two Men’s Egos appeared first on The Intercept.
Jamelle Bouie writes in his newsletter about the shock of 2016 and how it led to the media obsessing over “the Trump voter” and what they were thinking: One inadvertent consequence of this understandable bout of introspection was, I think, to validate Trump’s claim that he spoke for a silent majority of forgotten Americans. It was easy enough to look at the new president’s political coalition — disproportionately blue-collar and drawn almost entirely from the demographic majority of the country — and conclude that this was basically correct. And even if it wasn’t, the image of the blue-collar (although not necessarily working-class) white man or white woman has been, for as long as any of us have been alive, a synecdoche for the “ordinary American” or the “Middle American” or the “average American.” You may remember the constant discussion, while Trump was in office, over the effect his chaos and corruption might have on voters. Would they care? Where this “they” often meant the blue-collar voters associated with Trump’s victory.
Trump did more than nothing ABC News has a this tantalizing Jan. 6 story this morning: Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has uncovered previously undisclosed details about former President Donald Trump’s refusal to help stop the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol three years ago as he sat watching TV inside the White House, according to sources familiar with what Smith’s team has learned during its Jan. 6 probe. Many of the exclusive details come from the questioning of Trump’s former deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino, who first started working for Trump as a teenager three decades ago and is now a paid senior adviser to Trump’s reelection campaign. Scavino wouldn’t speak with the House select committee that conducted its own probe related to Jan. 6, but — after a judge overruled claims of executive privilege last year — he did speak with Smith’s team, and key portions of what he said were described to ABC News. […] Sources said Scavino told Smith’s investigators that as the violence began to escalate that day, Trump “was just not interested” in doing more to stop it.
Scenes from a slow civil war on women Jeff Sharlet posted a long thread on Saturday reflecting on reporters’ initial reaction to his use of the the term “fascism” in “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.” One element dovetails with a post I’d already prepped from Jessica Valenti’s “Abortion, Every Day” substack. “The anti-abortion movement is launching a national campaign to trick women into carrying doomed pregnancies to term,” Vessica Valenti wrote in October in a post titled “Calculated Cruelty.” She summarized it in a followup post on Friday and cautions that the movement has moved upstream of abortion clinic protests to targeting prenatal testing that might reveal fatal fetal abnormalities: The short version, though, is that a coalition of the most powerful anti-abortion groups in the country are working together to ban abortion in cases of fatal fetal abnormalities, and to do away with the prenatal testing that provides those diagnoses.
From faulty health insurer provider lists to a troubling regulatory win for the crypto industry, here’s a roundup of our reporting from the past week.
After being tasked with editing David Ricardo’s Collected Works in 1930, Piero Sraffa, with the assistance of Maurice Dobb, published them between 1951 and 1973. This work earned him the 1961 Söderström Gold Medal from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. For the edition, Sraffa wrote an interesting and thought-provoking introduction. Its purpose was to demonstrate […]
There will be no weekly roundup today or next Sunday. It should return on the 21st of January.
Hezbollah just hit Meron airbase hard, in retaliation for Israel assassinating a Hamas leader in Lebanon. This was a major intelligence center, commanding drones and connecting other radar centers.
They have recently withdrawn two brigades from Gaza and intend to pull back more. They don’t control even the land in Gaza they claim to control, and are being bled white by an insurgency they can’t come to grip with and which is outfighting them.
I finished the Obelisk Gate today; it’s book 2 of NK Jamison’s Broken Earth series. I want to write some notes here about the book to cement them in my mind. Spoilers ahead. I mentioned on Mastodon that the series had been pretty striking for me. It’s the story of a future (probably) world in … Continue reading The Obelisk Gate