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It’s Wednesday and today I don’t comment on the US Supreme Court decision to embed criminal behaviour in the presidency (how much of a joke will the US become) or the Presidential debate, which has focused on the performance of Biden while, seemingly ignoring the serial lies told by the other contender. If these two…
Oligarchy is the default state of politics, and it is surging back. How do we stop it? By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 27th June 2024 We are about to return to normal politics. After 14 years of Tory corruption and misrule, a Labour government will put this country back on track. Justice and […]
You know what they say: “They always come in threes.” It’s been a rough couple of weeks for film buffs who grew up in the “New Hollywood” era. First, Donald Sutherland. Then Martin Mull. And now, as I’m just learning this evening: The gift of his words, indeed. Although, it’s possible that his true gift was gleaning exactly what was better left unsaid. As he once observed: “Good dialogue illuminates what people are not saying.” Quality, not quantity. A quick refresh on his credits reveals an impressive number of films of note on which he was “uncredited” for his contributions (Drive, He Said, Cisco Pike, The Godfather, The Parallax View, The Missouri Breaks, Marathon Man, et. al.) much less the classics that he is most well-known for. It’s difficult for me to come up with adequate words to honor such a wordsmith, so I think I’ll follow his sage advice by not getting too flowery. Here are my top recommendations: The Last Detail – Hal Ashby’s 1973 comedy-drama set the bar pretty high for all “buddy films” to follow (and to this day, few can touch it).
Yes, yes they should… I’m seeing a lot of discussion about whether or not the Democrats should use this Court’s extreme decisions as a primary issue in the fall since there’s not a lot we can do about it. I say yes. It’s all part of the far-right power grab that includes Trump and Project 2025. Of course they must run on it. Josh Marshall wrote this today: Obviously, wanting to focus attention on something doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. And for those ready to pounce: No, this is irrespective of who is at the top of the Democratic ticket. The obvious fact is that any day Democrats are talking about Joe Biden’s age is a wasted, lost day. What’s more relevant is that this is not and would not be changing the subject. It is the subject. It’s the actual subject that the campaign and election are about. Donald Trump threatens the entire existence of the American republic. He is able to do this because the Supreme Court he created is assisting him in doing so. It is a corrupt Court. It overturned a central right for half of our population.
As voters look for another option, alternative Democratic leaders poll similarly or even better than Biden — even without name recognition.
The post Every Democrat Other Than Joe Biden Is Unburdened by What Has Been appeared first on The Intercept.
Steve from Accounts, otherwise known as the office-know-it-all, has been spotted hanging out in the break room flicking through a cycling magazine in an attempt to lure people in to a one-sided chat about the Tour De France. ”Last month... Read More ›
A behavioral neurologist spells out the danger.
The post Big Brother of the Brain Is Here appeared first on Nautilus.
Vance said that while he thinks presidents (read: Republicans) should have immunity, it would be up to future Attorney General to decide if Biden should be prosecuted for crimes. I think he undoubtedly speaks for the entire GOP on that. It won’t be hard for them to find a loophole that allows such a thing if Trump is in the driver’s seat. Amanda Marcotte at Salon had a good piece on this today. An excerpt: For all the people who are semi-joking that President Joe Biden now has a legal right to have the military assassinate Trump, Chief Justice John Roberts gave himself an out. Roberts insists that the president “is not above the law.” It can still be a crime if the court determines that the behavior falls outside of “his official acts.” But what makes something an official act?
It’s Gilead rising This didn’t get much notice but it’s telling: The only three Republican women in the South Carolina Senate took on their party and stopped a total abortion ban from passing in their state last year. In return, they lost their jobs. Voters removed Sens. Sandy Senn, Penry Gustafson and Katrina Shealy from office during sparsely turned out primaries in June, and by doing so completely vacated the Republican wing of the five-member “Sister Senators,” a female contingent that included two Democrats and was joined in their opposition to the abortion ban. For Republicans, the departure of Senn, Gustafson and Shealy likely means there will be no women in the majority party of state Senate when the next session starts in 2025. It could also mean that women will not wield power for decades in the fiercely conservative state where they have long struggled to gain entry into the Legislature. As South Carolina goes, so goes the nation — under Trump and the Supremes. They’re just going for it.
Polls continuously show that RFK Jr inexplicably garners from 10 to 15% of the vote. We don’t really have a good idea whether he draws more from Trump or Biden but it’s a terrible risk to have him on the ballot. He’s crazy and he just doesn’t care. Vanity Fair has a new profile of him and it’s actually disgusting. I don’t know if the crazy people who are saying they’ll vote for him will ever know about it but what it says might even make them think twice. Here’s just one little excerpt: Last year Robert Kennedy Jr. texted a photograph to a friend. In the photo RFK Jr. was posing, alongside an unidentified woman, with the barbecued remains of what appears to be a dog. Kennedy told the person, who was traveling to Asia, that he might enjoy a restaurant in Korea that served dog on the menu, suggesting Kennedy had sampled dog. The photo was taken in 2010, according to the digital file’s metadata—the same year he was diagnosed with a dead tapeworm in his brain.
Do Gazans truly die when their body is not whole or cannot be found and when they cannot be properly grieved? This is now a strange scene; to be at a funeral and see a shroud, inside which is a whole body with two hands, ten fingers, two feet, and a head. Nowadays, we Gazans Continue reading »
Senator Fatima Payman’s riveting conversation with David Speers on Sunday’s ABC Insiders program was powerful, erudite, compassionate and completely in line with Labor Party policy on Palestine. With her call for the party to recognise Palestine and take action to stop the massacres, the genocide and the forced starvation that is currently taking place in Continue reading »
President Bongbong Marcos played down the ramming of a Filipino Navy boat by a Chinese coastguard on 17 June. Calling it an accident, not amounting to an armed attack, when the photos showed otherwise. It was an embarrassing afterthought for a Head of State. The incident at Second Thomas Shoal has clearly breached Article IV Continue reading »
Even some of the more thoughtful justifications of AUKUS are ultimately implausible as they ignore real and immediate threats while inflating the significance of improbable dangers Australia can do little to address. Continue reading »
The Frontier Wars were fought in every part of the vast Australian continent from the 1790’s to the 1920’s. How could they be overlooked in local or even in global history? The ownership and control of a continental landmass was at stake. First Nations’ warriors bled and died on, and for, their own country. Why Continue reading »
Nuclear energy proponents are disseminating several myths that are receiving little or no challenge in the mainstream media. They are incorrect or misleading. Continue reading »
On 1 July, an important change in the industrial relations landscape came into force. Industrial awards (‘modern awards’, as they’re now called), that set minimum standards in workplaces, will include guarantees of rights for workplace union delegates. All new enterprise agreements must also include such provisions. This is a result of the first part of Continue reading »
The Australian All-Ords index rose 8.3% during the financial year ending last Sunday. But Australia’s economy has had a dismal time with real GDP per capita contracting in each of the five quarters to March 2024. With annual CPI inflation rebounding after earlier falls, the market now expects the RBA to further dampen consumer spending Continue reading »
Australia’s obsession with every little political twist or swing in the US seems to grow with each day, with the latest event to gain saturation coverage being the first presidential debate of the current American political cycle. The event was shown live on the public broadcaster, though it is highly debatable whether an Australian audience, Continue reading »
One myth that keeps cropping up about Ukraine is that it has been plagued by outsized far right or neo-Nazi influences, particularly during the Maidan protests of 2014 and the later Donbas conflict. This claim is a favourite of Jeffrey Sachs, echoed in recent articles in P and I by Paul Heywood-Smith and Keri McKern, Continue reading »