Democracy gone Astray: Thursday, September 28, 2023

Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Thursday, September 28, 2023

Zelenskyy hails F-16 commitment on visit to Netherlands

The Netherlands confirmed that it will provide Ukraine with F-16 fighter jets following approval from the U.S. allowing Ukrainian pilots to get training to fly the planes and eventually to provide the aircraft themselves.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy received the assurance on the jets, which he called a “breakthrough agreement,” from Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on a visit to Eindhoven on Sunday. Rutte confirmed that Denmark also will deliver F-16 aircraft to Kyiv, after the Biden administration last week gave final approval for the delivery of Dutch and Danish F-16s to Ukraine as soon as pilot training is complete.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy promised retaliation for a Russian missile attack on Saturday that killed seven people including a 6-year-old girl.

The missile hit the city center of Chernihiv, 150 kilometers north of Kyiv. The attack was carried out on a religious Orthodox festival and injured 144 people, including 15 children, Zelenskyy said in a statement early Sunday morning.

“Our soldiers will respond to Russia for this terrorist attack,” Zelenskyy said. “Respond tangibly.”

The first Russian lunar mission in nearly half a century ended with a bang.

The Luna-25, which left earth on August 10, crash-landed on the moon nine days later after an incident involving the pre-landing maneuvers malfunctioned, Russian space agency Roscosmos said late Saturday on its Telegram channel.

According to Roscosmos, the last communication with the spacecraft was at 2:57 p.m. Moscow time (13:57 CEST) on Saturday. Efforts after that to get back in contact with the craft did not produce any results, the agency said.

ATLANTA — Having lost the once reliably Republican state in 2020 and now under a racketeering indictment for trying to steal its presidential election after that loss, how can Donald Trump possibly win Georgia in 2024?

Conservative activists, including those who voted for him twice, worry that the answer is pretty simple: He cannot.

“I don’t think so. We didn’t go for him last time,” said Brenda Mitcham, a retiree from DeKalb County who was attending radio talk show host Erick Erickson’s candidates forum Friday and Saturday.

Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) slammed Donald Trump for attacking the criminal justice system, telling the former president “if you’re innocent, start acting like it.”

The Colorado Republican appeared on CNN Thursday evening to discuss Trump’s legal predicament and the 2024 presidential race.

Trump has continually attacked those involved in his four felony indictments. Many have since been targeted by violent rhetoric and threats. In Georgia, authorities are investigating threats against grand jurors who voted to indict Trump and 18 others in a racketeering case over their push to overturn the 2020 election.

A few days after he announced he would sell his Nobel peace prize medal at auction – and give the millions of dollars raised to Ukrainian refugees – the Russian newspaper editor Dmitry Muratov was sitting on a train bound for the city of Samara.

Just before the train pulled away from Kazansky station in Moscow, the door to his carriage was flung open and a masked man threw a bucket of stinking red liquid over him, shouting the words: “This is for our boys!” The liquid – it turned out to be paint mixed with acetone – drenched Muratov in crimson and half-blinded him, but he still had the presence of mind to chase his attacker down the platform. He apprehended the masked man talking to a police officer and demanded his arrest. No action was taken.

While we often point out that making the debate stage is the most important hurdle for any Republican aspirant running in the primaries, hosting a presidential primary debate is enormously important to television networks. But for the Murdoch empire, beset by upstart rivals, it is existential.

RUPERT MURDOCH and DONALD TRUMP are the two most important sources of information for Republican voters, and in the last eight years they have waged war for supremacy. Sometimes they use each other (Trump gets airtime, Fox gets ratings), sometimes they are closely aligned (as in a general election against the Democrats), and sometimes they are openly hostile to one another (during primary season in 2015-2016 and again today when Fox and other Murdoch entities search for an alternative to Trump).

At least seven people were killed and 144 injured in a “vile” Russian missile strike that hit a theatre and a central square in the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said.

“I am sure our soldiers will give a response to Russia for this terrorist attack,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address, delivered early on Sunday at the end of a visit to Sweden. “A notable response.”

A six-year-old girl named Sofia was among the dead, Zelenskiy said, and 15 of the injured were children. Fifteen others were police officers, interior minister Ihor Klymenko said on Telegram. Most of the victims were in vehicles, crossing the road, or returning from church when a missile hit the city’s landmark Drama Theatre, he said.

Israel 2023, South Africa 1948. I’ve lived through it before: power grabbing, fascism and racism – the destruction of democracy. Israel is going where South Africa was 75 years ago. It’s like watching the replay of a horror movie.

In 1948, as a teenager in Cape Town, I followed the results of the 26 May election on a giant board on a newspaper building. The winner-takes-all electoral system produced distorted results: the Afrikaner Nationalist party, with its smaller partner, won 79 parliamentary seats against 74 for the United party and its smaller partner.

Treading carefully between the plots, Lidiya Sribna, 51, goes from grave to grave placing a red carnation on each of the mounds of soil.

Sometimes, on these visits to Krasnopillya military cemetery on the outskirts of Dnipro, in south-east Ukraine, she will balance sweets or biscuits on the black wooden crosses – a Ukrainian tradition – or give the small plaques a wipe and pick up any litter that has been scattered by the wind.

More than a decade after he left the Élysée presidential palace after one term in office Nicolas Sarkozy is, once again, making political waves in France and abroad.

The former French president’s publishers brought forward the release of his second volume of memoirs, Le Temps des Combats (The Time of Battles), today after an international row erupted over his comments on Russia and Ukraine.

As the Kremlin took urgent measures to stabilise the plummeting rouble last week, one thing became clear: rampant spending on its war machine and social welfare programmes could not go on for ever. Few observers believe the Russian economy is in danger of imminent collapse. But it has reached a point, they say, where the Kremlin may have to weigh the cost of spending trillions of roubles on its war with Ukraine, and withstanding unprecedented sanctions, while maintaining prewar levels of public spending.

Two Israelis, reportedly a father and son, have been killed in a suspected Palestinian shooting attack on a car wash in a volatile stretch of the occupied West Bank, the latest outburst of violence in the region.

The Israeli military said it was searching for suspects and setting up roadblocks near the town of Hawara, a flashpoint area in the northern West Bank, which has been the scene of repeated shooting attacks and a rampage by Jewish settlers who set light to Palestinian property.

DES MOINES, Iowa — Jill Connell is sick of hearing the word “woke.”

The 66-year-old from Kansas is an undecided Republican voter with a host of concerns about the country, and she knows for sure what doesn’t top that list.

“To me, wokeness is, ‘Hey, I woke up this morning,’” Connell said, employing the most literal definition of a word the right uses to describe what it sees as left-wing ideas and political correctness. “I call it goofy — it’s ridiculous. I’m a person who believes you should love everybody. I’m a person of faith.”

KYIV, Ukraine — A missile attack in the center of a northern Ukrainian city killed seven people and wounded scores of others on Saturday, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy traveled to Sweden, his first visit to the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.

As Zelenskyy arrived in Sweden, a Russian missile strike killed seven people and wounded 117 others in the city center of Chernihiv, the regional capital of the northern Ukrainian province of the same name, acting mayor Oleksandr Lomako said. A 6-year-old girl was among the dead, while the wounded included 12 children.

“Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia — never,” President Joe Biden said in a speech in Poland this year, and rightly so. For the war in Ukraine to end on terms consistent with American interests and ideals, Ukraine must be seen to have won, and Russia’s invasion must go down in history as a decisive failure, enough to deter other authoritarian powers from launching similar wars of aggression in the future.

That much is easy to say. But it raises a critical question. What is an achievable definition of victory for Ukraine (and defeat for Russia), at least in the current phase of a contest that’s likely to continue in some form for many years?

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis may not have been the first person to get an indictment of Donald Trump, but she may have produced the biggest one — at least by some metrics.

The indictment, which alleges that Trump participated in a criminal scheme to change the outcome of the election in Georgia in 2020, is nearly 100 pages long — more than twice as long as Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s latest indictment. Willis’ case also includes far more co-defendants — 18 — than any of the other cases, including big names like Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani. And the prosecution seems to deploy a more aggressive legal theory by using as its linchpin the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act — a name that tends to conjure up images in the public mind of high-profile mob takedowns and the like.

When Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo lands in Beijing for an expected visit next week she’s likely to hear an unprecedented request from her hosts: Help us with our struggling economy.

Raimondo’s long-anticipated visit coincides with a worsening downturn in China’s financial health marked by plunging exports and foreign investment as well as soaring youth unemployment. The latest data suggest that the once-unstoppable economic juggernaut has finally hit a serious pothole.

The Biden administration has formally approved the transfer of F-16 training materials to Denmark, allowing Ukrainian pilots to begin training on the long-anticipated fighter jets, according to two U.S officials.

At the same time, the U.S. this week provided written assurances to Denmark and the Netherlands promising to “expedite” the approval of all necessary transfer requests so that the aircraft can be sent to the battlefield as soon as the pilots are trained to use them, according to one of the U.S. officials and a State Department spokesperson.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The United States has given its approval for the Netherlands and Denmark to deliver F-16s to Ukraine, officials in Washington and Europe said Friday, in a major gain for Kyiv even though the fighter jets won’t have an impact any time soon on the almost 18-month war.

It was not immediately clear when the first F-16s might enter the conflict but Ukrainian pilots will first have to undertake at least six months’ training on the aircraft, according to officials.

The 2020 murder of Vera Pekhteleva, by her ex-boyfriend, was so gruesome that even in Russia, where violence against women often goes under the radar, it caused a media outcry.

Vladislav Kanyus spent hours torturing Pekhteleva before she died; neighbours repeatedly called police to report horrifying screams coming from the neighbouring apartment, but the police did not show up. At trial, it emerged there had been 111 injuries on Pekhteleva’s body.

China has launched military drills around Taiwan in what its described as a “stern warning” to so-called separatist forces on the self-governed island.

This tension between China and Taiwan on Saturday comes a day after Taiwan’s Vice President William Lai returned to Taipei after making two stopovers in the United States as part of a trip to Paraguay.

Lai’s transits through the US have angered Beijing which considers Taiwan part of its territory and Lai a “troublemaker” working in collusion with Washington to push separatism on the democratically-run island.

China has launched air and sea military exercises around Taiwan to send a “stern warning” to separatist forces on the island following a recent visit by Taiwan’s Vice President William Lai to the United States.

Taiwan responded on Saturday saying the drills highlighted Beijing’s “militaristic mentality” and that combat aircraft, naval ships and land-based missile systems had been tasked with monitoring Chinese forces.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that possession of nuclear weapons protects Russia from security threats and that Moscow continually reminded the West of the risk of a nuclear conflict.

Lavrov’s comments are the latest reference by Russian officials to their country’s nuclear weapons arsenal, a rhetoric of military escalation by Moscow that has gained tempo and frequency since Russian forces

Last month, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Moscow would have to use a nuclear weapon if Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russian troops was a success.

Earlier this year, a group of Democrats urged Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to open a probe into Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito after journalists uncovered egregious corruption in the form of alleged violations of the court’s ethics code and financial disclosure requirements.

Chief Justice Roberts rebuffed their call, as new reporting reveals, with just one sentence — revealing his apparent disinterest in reining in rampant corruption on his court.

The U.S. Supreme Court, whose current ideological leanings are extremely reactionary, has spearheaded a broad national regression on human rights. Indeed, the United States is a global outlier on multiple fronts (the only wealthy nation without a universal health care system and number one in firearms per capita, to name just a few), and some of the latest Supreme Court rulings (on abortion, guns and affirmative action) are turning the country into “a global pariah.”

How do we make sense of these utterly dangerous developments? First of all, why is the Supreme Court acting like the executive committee of the Republican Party? Are there even clean legal arguments upon which its rulings are based? In this exclusive interview for Truthout, renowned law professor and anthropologist Khiara M. Bridges, who specializes in the intersection of race, class, reproductive justice and law, shares her insights into the issues raised above and offers some legal remedies that she believes will help achieve racial justice and equality in the 21st century.

A tussle over tax hikes in California is intensifying. California Democrats have answered a tax-reform push by business groups with their own proposal to undercut it.

The escalating dispute over voters’ roles in approving or rejecting tax increases is a reflection of ballot initiatives’ outsize role in Sacramento and the game of cat and mouse that often plays out between opposing interests.

CAMP DAVID, Md. — President Joe Biden on Friday signed historic agreements with the leaders of South Korea and Japan, bridging the fraught history between the two countries with promises of strengthening each nation’s economic and national security interests.

In what was a clear message to China, Biden welcomed Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol for the first trilateral meeting between the three countries that wasn’t held on the sidelines of an international gathering.

Denmark and the Netherlands have said the US has cleared the way to allow F-16 fighters to be re-exported to Ukraine after some of its pilots are trained to fly them, helping restore momentum to a process that appeared to be stalling.

Ministers from both countries, the leaders of an international coalition to help Ukraine obtain the jets, thanked Washington for the green light, although it remains unclear when any F-16 transfers could take place.

A billionaire and close ally of Roman Abramovich has failed in his attempt to overturn UK sanctions, ending a challenge that had been seen as a crucial test of the government’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The high court in London on Friday rejected the effort by Eugene Shvidler to have the sanctions on him declared unlawful.

Shvidler’s lawyers immediately said he would appeal.

Russia has banned dozens of British journalists, media representatives and senior UK politicians from entering the country, including five Guardian journalists and executives, the foreign ministry said on Friday.

In a statement published on the foreign ministry’s website, Moscow said the sweeping action was a response to UK sanctions and the “spreading of false information about Russia”, as well as “London’s unrelenting military support for the Kyiv neo-Nazi regime”.

The number of battlefield casualties in Ukraine is approaching nearly 500,000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers, US officials have told the New York Times, marking a significant rise in the death toll this year following intense fighting in the east of the country.

Russia’s military casualties are approaching 300,000, the officials claimed, with as many as 120,000 killed in action.

Last November, Gen Mark Milley, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, said 100,000 troops on each side had been killed or wounded.

Donald Trump is getting mocked on social media after making two announcements in a row on Thursday.

First, the former president canceled his big news conference on Monday, when he had promised to deliver “irrefutable” evidence of 2020 presidential election fraud in a “CONCLUSIVE” report that would lead to “a complete EXONERATION.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Authorities are searching for a member of the Proud Boys extremist group who disappeared days before his sentencing in a U.S. Capitol riot case, where prosecutors are seeking more than a decade in prison, according to a warrant made public Friday.

Christopher Worrell of Naples, Florida, was supposed to be sentenced Friday after being found guilty of spraying pepper spray gel on police officers, as part of the mob storming the Capitol as Congress was certifying Joe Biden’s presidential victory on Jan. 6, 2021. Prosecutors had asked a judge to sentence him to 14 years.

Former President Donald Trump will not participate in the Republican Party’s first presidential primary debate next week, choosing instead to sit for an interview with Tucker Carlson, according to The New York Times and CNN.

Both outlets reported that Trump had spent the last day telling people close to him about his plans. Both also reported that sources reminded them how Trump is prone to changing his mind.

Elon Musk’s latest plan for Twitter — er, X — apparently focuses on pissing off a large number of users.

The man-child mogul announced on Friday that the site would be largely dumping the “block” feature that allows users to heavily restrict interactions with the accounts of others, claiming that “It makes no sense.”

Prosecutors are seeking 33-year prison sentences for former Proud Boys chair Enrique Tarrio and his ally Joe Biggs, who they say aimed to foment a revolution on Jan. 6 to keep former President Donald Trump in power.

The proposed jail sentences would nearly double the lengthiest Jan. 6 sentence handed down to date — 18 years for Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes — a decision prosecutors say reflects the pivotal role that Proud Boys leaders played in stoking and exacerbating the violence at the Capitol that day.

Russia has fined Google 3 million rubles — around €30,000 — for not deleting what it says is fake news about the war in Ukraine.

A Moscow court found Google guilty on Thursday for failing to remove from YouTube what it considers “prohibited information” — allegedly detailing how to enter certain protected facilities — and "false information" about the "special military operation in Ukraine," despite having been ordered to do so by Russian authorities, according to Russian state-run news agency TASS.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has treaded cautiously around Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary, careful not to suggest that Trump’s mounting legal troubles or his loss in 2020 make him the wrong choice for the GOP nomination.

But in a local radio interview Tuesday, DeSantis came closer than ever to suggesting that Trump, the GOP front-runner despite all his baggage, shouldn’t have joined the 2024 race.

“Well, look, I never thought he should run to begin with, even before all these legal cases when he left office in January of 2021,” DeSantis told veteran Boston journalist Dan Rea on WBZ NewsRadio.

Donald Trump gleefully taunted his former Attorney General William Barr before their dueling interviews on Fox Business and Fox News on Thursday.

Ready to turn the tables on anyone who has defied him, the former president warmed up for his first TV appearance since his last criminal indictment by accusing Barr of cowardly kowtowing to the left.

The Justice Department is seeking 33 years in prison for Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy in one of the most serious cases to emerge from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to court documents filed Thursday.

Tarrio, who once served as national chairman of the far-right extremist group, and three lieutenants were convicted by a Washington jury in May of conspiring to block the transfer of presidential power in the hopes of keeping Republican Donald Trump in the White House after he lost the 2020 election.

Donald Trump’s alleged criminal efforts to use lies about the 2020 presidential election to steal a second term have now landed him two indictments, one each in federal and state court. But to those who’ve built up their livings, identities and communities around those lies, the stakes are, in some ways, even higher than potential prison time.

And nowhere was that more obvious than at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s latest election fraud-themed event, which took place on Wednesday and Thursday in Springfield, Missouri.

Sean Hannity on Tuesday predicted Donald Trump will be convicted in at least some of the trials that await him, prompting a specific challenge for Republicans. (Check out the clip below.)

On his radio show, the Fox News host echoed the claims of many on the right that trial venues in Democratic-leaning areas such as Fulton County, Georgia, New York City and Washington, D.C., will tilt verdicts against Trump.

CNN’s Van Jones just zinged Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) political ambitions with major shade and a fiery one-liner. (Watch the video below.)

The far-right Greene said Wednesday she was pondering a run for Senate in a potential battle against Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), but was entertaining other possibilities.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on Fox News Wednesday that Donald Trump was being treated like a criminal simply for challenging election results, inviting fierce fact-checks from critics on the platform formerly called Twitter, now known as X.

As many Republicans have done, Graham noted that the four-time-indicted Trump is facing charges in court venues where he’s not popular.

“He’s been prosecuted in a way to make challenging an election a crime just for him,” he said on “Hannity.”

Rudy Giuliani traveled to Mar-a-Lago earlier this year to plead with former President Donald Trump to pay his mounting legal bills, CNN reported Wednesday.

Giuliani, a former lawyer for Trump, and his own attorney Robert Costello, met Trump at his home twice in late April to “discuss Giuliani’s seven-figure legal fees, making several pitches about how paying Giuliani’s bills was ultimately in Trump’s best interest,” the news network wrote, citing a source “familiar with the matter.”

Jenin, occupied West Bank – A commander of a Palestinian armed group has been killed by Israeli forces and his older brother arrested in an early morning raid, the Palestinian health ministry said.

Mustafa al-Kastoni was shot in the head, chest and stomach, the ministry said, and was pronounced dead at the government hospital in Jenin, in the northern occupied West Bank.

The 32-year-old was one of the commanders of Fatah’s armed wing in Jenin, known as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

If you were wondering whether the often-controversial Premier Danielle Smith would become less controversial after winning Alberta’s May election, have I got news for you.

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She’s not.

In fact, she has begun cranking up the controversy dial once again.

A new survey suggests the growing pile of criminal indictments and felony charges against Donald Trump could eventually erode the former president’s substantial lead in the GOP primary if enough voters pay attention to news from reliable outlets.

Republicans who correctly answered three questions gauging their knowledge of politics and current events — a sign they pay attention to the news — were much more likely than others to see indictments against Trump as “legitimate” and consider voting for a different Republican, according to a new national survey of 800 likely Republican primary voters by Fairleigh Dickinson University. In all, 48 percent of Trump supporters said they would at least consider voting for a different Republican, a number that jumps to 54 percent when respondents were first reminded by pollsters about the indictments against Trump.

In recent weeks, Hong Kong national security police have embarked on a tactic more commonly associated with their counterparts in mainland China. In early July, Hong Kong police announced arrest warrants and HK$1m bounties for eight dissidents currently in exile overseas. Just days later officers began showing up at their families’ homes in Hong Kong, taking away parents, siblings, children and in-laws for questioning.

None of the family members have been arrested or charged. Observers and supporters say while there is still fear that could happen, it isn’t really the point.