June 6, 2019

Joe Biden's support of the Hyde Amendment makes him unfit to lead

If Joe Biden wants to carry the banner of a party that claims to champion, protect and uphold the inalienable rights of black, brown and poor people, he must reverse his support of the Hyde Amendment and follow the lead of his fellow Democratic candidates. Anything less would be the former vice president throwing under the bus the people whose support he needs most directly, at a moment when they are uniquely vulnerable. These positions may not stop Biden from getting the Democratic Party’s nomination. But they make him unfit to lead.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/joe-bidens-support-of-the-hyde-amendment-makes-him-unfit-to-lead/2019/06/05/b78f025c-87bf-11e9-a870-b9c411dc4312_story.html

June 4, 2019

Franklin Graham has played his ultimate Trump card

Excerpt: In their day of prayer, Graham and other Trump evangelicals have used a sacred spiritual practice for profane purposes. They have subordinated religion to politics. They have elevated Trump as a symbol of divine purposes. And they are using Christian theology as a cover for their partisanship.


So: This is blasphemy, in service to ideology, leading to idolatry, justified by heresy. All in a Sunday’s work.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/franklin-graham-has-played-his-ultimate-trump-card/2019/06/03/22a50b18-862b-11e9-98c1-e945ae5db8fb_story.html

June 4, 2019

Trump supporters barricaded in Wetherspoons by police as protesters chant 'Nazi scum off our streets

Trump supporters barricaded in Wetherspoons by police as protesters chant ‘Nazi scum off our streets’

Pro and anti-Donald Trump protesters have clashed during a march from Trafalgar Square to Parliament in central London.

A small group of supporters of the US president found themselves surrounded by demonstrators in Whitehall.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/trump-uk-visit-latest-protesters-wetherspoons-trafalgar-square-whitehall-nazi-scum-a8943351.html

June 2, 2019

Trump's politics are toxic and dangerous, says bishop of Liverpool

Excerpt: A senior Church of England bishop has criticised Donald Trump, questioning whether he is a Christian, and backed protesters who plan to demonstrate against the US president’s state visit to the UK, which starts on Monday.

Paul Bayes, the bishop of Liverpool, said Trump’s populist way of doing politics was “toxic and dangerous”. He said: “I don’t agree with him, I think he’s mistaken in many of his policies, and I think that the Christians who identify with him, especially in the US, are not properly responding to what our Christian faith says they should do.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/02/trump-politics-are-toxic-and-dangerous-says-bishop-of-liverpool-paul-bayes?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

June 2, 2019

Corbyn's destructive ambiguity on Brexit has failed

Excerpt: I could hardly agree more with Mason’s call for Labour to “scrap Brexit and rebuild Britain instead”. In which context, people who have been asking me “where is Gordon Brown?” should be pleased to hear that he is now playing a prominent role in the counterattack on that notorious snake-oil salesman, the egregious Nigel Farage.

Brown takes Farage seriously. He speaks of “a new battle for Britain”: “This is a battle against intolerance, prejudice, xenophobia and the manufacture of distrust and disunity.” Incidentally, while cynically continuing to draw an income from the European parliament, Farage, with a characteristic mixture of ignorance and prejudice, proposes to ban university courses in European studies.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/02/corbyn-destructive-ambiguity-brexit-failed-euroscepticism-collapsing

June 2, 2019

It's un-British to roll out the red carpet for Donald Trump

Praising the “very fine people on both sides” when torch-wielding white supremacists and antisemites marched through the streets clashing with anti-racist campaigners. Threatening to veto a ban on the use of rape as a weapon of war. Setting an immigration policy that forcefully separates young children from their parents at the border. The deliberate use of xenophobia, racism and “otherness” as an electoral tactic. Introducing a travel ban to a number of predominately Muslim countries. Lying deliberately and repeatedly to the public.

No, these are not the actions of European dictators of the 1930s and 40s. Nor the military juntas of the 1970s and 80s. I’m not talking about Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un. These are the actions of the leader of our closest ally, the president of the United States of America. This is a man who tried to exploit Londoners’ fears following a horrific terrorist attack on our city, amplified the tweets of a British far-right racist group, denounced as fake news robust scientific evidence warning of the dangers of climate change, and is now trying to interfere shamelessly in the Conservative party leadership race by backing Boris Johnson because he believes it would enable him to gain an ally in Number 10 for his divisive agenda.

Donald Trump is just one of the most egregious examples of a growing global threat. The far right is on the rise around the world, threatening our hard-won rights and freedoms and the values that have defined our liberal, democratic societies for more than seventy years. Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France and Nigel Farage here in the UK are using the same divisive tropes of the fascists of the 20th century to garner support, but are using new sinister methods to deliver their message. And they are gaining ground and winning power and influence in places that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/01/donald-trump-state-visit-red-carpet-unbritish?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

June 2, 2019

Donald Trump: send in Nigel Farage to negotiate with the EU

Trump can’t run his own country but he can’t resist telling other countries how to run their affairs.

Excerpt: Donald Trump has called on Britain to leave the European Union without a deal if Brussels refuses to meet its demands, as he urged the government to send Nigel Farage into the negotiations.

In his second extraordinary intervention into British politics ahead of this week’s state visit, the US president suggested the UK should “walk away” from talks and refuse to pay the £39bn divorce bill if its requests were not met.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jun/02/donald-trump-send-in-nigel-farage-to-neogiate-with-the-eu?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

June 1, 2019

Antonio Salieri's Revenge

As someone that enjoyed the film Amadeus, I found this New Yorker article on Mozart’s film nemesis rather enlightening.

Antonio Salieri’s Revenge

Excerpt: Two centuries of calumny have created sympathy for the musical devil: I found Salieri’s grave festooned with bouquets. These were evidence that the man and his music are enjoying a modest comeback. Of his forty-odd operas, more than a dozen have been revived, and artists such as Riccardo Muti, Cecilia Bartoli, and Christophe Rousset have pleaded his case. I was in Vienna to attend Rousset’s performance of Salieri’s French opera “Tarare” at the Theater an der Wien. A German-language biography of Salieri, by the composer and musicologist Timo Jouko Herrmann, was published earlier this year. In 2015, Herrmann discovered the score of a cantata, “Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia,” with one section composed by Salieri and another by Mozart. The find made clear what scholars have long known: that the two were more colleagues than rivals, and that their relationship was complicated mainly by Mozart’s tendency to see plots arrayed against him.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/03/antonio-salieris-revenge

May 31, 2019

Pelosi: Impeachment is off the table (2005)

That was Speaker Pelosi in 2005 after British newspapers broke the story on the Downing Street Memos that showed a conspiracy between PM Tony Blair and President George W. Bush to invade Iraq under false pretenses.

Hundreds of thousands died. Millions became displaced as war refugees. If a war based on lies was not enough reason to impeach Bush, I hold little hope that Trump will be impeached on lesser grounds.

Let’s Go to the Memo
What’s really in the Downing Street memos?

By FRED KAPLAN
JUNE 15, 2005 5:52 PM

Is there anything important in the Downing Street memo? This is the now-notorious secret transcript of a British ministerial meeting on July 23, 2002—obtained and published by the Sunday Times of London just this past May Day—which seems to suggest that, nine months before the war in Iraq got started, the Bush administration a) knew Saddam Hussein didn’t pose a threat; b) decided to overthrow him by force anyway; and c) was “fixing” intelligence to sell the impending invasion to a duped American public.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2005/06/what-s-really-in-the-downing-street-memos.amp

May 30, 2019

Deceased G.O.P. Strategist's Hard Drives Reveal New Details on the Census Citizenship Question

Excerpt: Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats. And months after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, he wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-question-hofeller.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

GOP will stop at nothing to subvert the popular will at the polls.