Democracy gone Astray: Monday, October 09, 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.]

Monday, October 09, 2023

Russell Brand never hid his misogyny. So why did so many fail to see it?

Blatant displays of misogyny, such as “jokes” about sexual abuse and degradation of women, are never “harmless banter”. Radical feminists have been saying this since “lad culture”, a popular youth subculture that glorifies male violence, exaggerated expressions of masculinity and sexual aggression, first emerged in Britain as part of a backlash against feminist gains in the 1990s.

Whenever we tried to raise the alarm about this misogynistic “banter”, which came to dominate TV shows, newspaper columns, comedy acts and student life alike throughout the 2000s and 2010s, they accused us of “not having a sense of humour”, of being “too uptight”.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Working furiously to take control of a House in disarray, allies of Speaker Kevin McCarthy implored their Republican colleagues Saturday to drop their hardline tactics and work together to approve a conservative spending plan to prevent a federal shutdown.

In public overtures and private calls, Republican lieutenants of the embattled speaker pleaded with a handful of right-flank holdouts to resist further disruptions that have ground the House to a halt and back McCarthy’s latest plan to keep government open before next weekend’s Sept. 30 deadline for a shutdown.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Staring down a fast-approaching government shutdown that threatens to disrupt life for millions of Americans, Speaker Kevin McCarthy has turned to a strategy that so far has preserved his tenuous hold on House leadership but also marked it by chaos: giving hard-right lawmakers what they want.

In his eight months running the House, McCarthy has lived by the upbeat personal mantra of “never give up” as he dodges threats to his speakership and tries to portray Republicans as capable stewards of the U.S. government. He has long chided Washington for underestimating him.

Russia’s foreign minister has told the UN that Ukraine’s proposed peace plan and the latest proposals to revive the Black Sea grain initiative were “not realistic”.

Sergei Lavrov spoke at a press conference on 23 September after a week of intense global diplomacy at the annual gathering of world leaders at UN headquarters in New York where Ukraine and its western allies sought to drum up support for Kyiv.

“This summer, we are lucky if we get water in my home once in twenty days,” reported Ramzy, a nearby villager from Jifna, as he filled his grimy four-gallon tanks from a tap near the open road. We were standing at a spring just a few miles north of Ramallah, a city with an annual rainfall greater than London but which, like the rest of Palestine, suffers from a condition of artificial water scarcity at the hands of Israel. “There is a great lake of water beneath us,” Ramzy pointed out (referring to the bountiful Mountain Aquifer), “but we do not see any of its benefits. If we try to dig a well, we will be fined, and maybe worse.” Like the others lined up with their containers, he was relying on the largesse of a man who had found a spring while digging the foundations for a new house and decided to make the water available to the public.

Ukraine says Friday's missile strike on the headquarters of Russia's Black Sea fleet in Crimea was timed to coincide with a meeting of naval officials.

In a short statement, the Ukrainian military claimed the strike had caused deaths and injuries but did not provide more details.

On Friday Moscow said one serviceman was missing after the attack.

Poland’s prime minister has told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to never “insult” Poles again, returning to harsh rhetoric towards Kyiv after the Polish president had sought to defuse a simmering dispute between the two countries over the issue of Ukrainian grain imports.

Zelenskyy angered his neighbours in Warsaw – a key military ally against Russia – when he told the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week that Kyiv was working to preserve land routes for its grain exports amid a Russian blockade of the Black Sea, but that “political theatre” around grain imports was helping Moscow’s cause.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has called the West an “empire of lies” and accused it of adopting a neo-colonial mindset in its overtures to the Global South to win backing for Ukraine in the war.

Speaking after a week of intense global diplomacy at the annual gathering of world leaders at UN headquarters in New York, where Ukraine and its Western allies sought to drum up support for Kyiv as it fights against Russia’s invasion, Lavrov said a “global majority” was being duped by the West.

On Jan. 25, 2018, dozens of private jets descended on Palm Springs International Airport. Some of the richest people in the country were arriving for the annual winter donor summit of the Koch network, the political organization founded by libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch. A long weekend of strategizing, relaxation in the California sun and high-dollar fundraising lay ahead.

Just after 6 p.m., a Gulfstream G200 jet touched down on the tarmac. One of the Koch network’s most powerful allies was on board: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) called Joe Biden an “old fart” on Friday, but the insult whiffed with many social media users.

On Friday, the president announced the creation of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention within the White House and later tweeted that “it’s time to again ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — The shadowboxing between one former Republican president and another’s legacy was bursting out into the open.

On one side of the country, Donald Trump was airing his vision of a “lost” and weakened “nation in decline.” On the other — just days before a debate at the Reagan Library here that Trump is not expected to attend — keepers of Ronald Reagan’s flame were calling Trump a “spoiled brat in a sandbox,” or “Voldemort.”

President Joe Biden will travel to Michigan to join the picket line of auto workers on strike nationwide, he said on Friday afternoon.

“Tuesday, I’ll go to Michigan to join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of UAW as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create,” Biden wrote on X, the platform previously known as Twitter.

After invoking the legacy of Ronald Reagan to suggest that striking United Auto Workers members should be fired for demanding higher wages, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., may soon find himself before the National Labor Relations Board. On Thursday, Shawn Fain, the president of UAW, filed a complaint claiming that Scott’s utterance violated federal labor law. Under the National Labor Relations Act, anyone can file a charge against an employer, even if they do not work for that employer.

The sun was setting on a June evening as Hardeep Singh Nijjar walked across the car park of the gurdwara. Nijjar’s day job was as a plumber but this gurdwara, located in the city of Surrey, in Canada’s British Columbia province, was where he dedicated most of his energy. That day he had made an impassioned speech about the fight for an independent, safe state for Sikhs.

But as he reached his pickup truck, two heavy-set, masked gunmen lay in wait. Shots rang out across the car park and Nijjar, killed instantly, crumpled to the ground as the suspects fled – first on foot and then in a getaway car.

A report detailing how Clarence Thomas secretly participated in donor events staged by the hard-right Koch network drew more fierce protests and outrage over the conservative supreme court justice’s proliferating ethics scandals.

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee who has advanced ethics reform amid reports about Thomas and other justices, said: “Oh, my.

A Chinese dissident known for regularly commemorating the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square has fled to Taiwan where he pleaded for help in seeking asylum in the US or Canada.

In a video posted online on Friday, Chen Siming said he was in the transit area at Taoyuan international airport to escape Chinese political persecution.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged Canada to stay with Ukraine to victory when he went to the Canadian parliament seeking to bolster support from western allies for Ukraine’s war against the Russian invasion.

“Moscow must lose once and for all. And it will lose,” Zelenskiy said during his address in parliament on Friday.

Zelenskiy said Canada has always been on the “bright side of history” in fighting previous wars and said it has helped save thousands of lives in this war with aid.

As billionaire Rupert Murdoch announces he will resign as head of his media empire, we speak with Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of the watchdog group Media Matters for America, about the right-wing mogul’s influence on journalism and politics over the last seven decades. The 92-year-old Murdoch will step down as chair of Fox Corporation and News Corporation in November, with his son Lachlan to head both companies that control Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and more. Carusone says as the elder Murdoch steps back, it’s important to “make sure that his legacy doesn’t get sugarcoated, that we are really cognizant of the scale of damage that he’s created,” which includes climate denialism and the growing influence of the far right in politics. Carusone also warns that Lachlan Murdoch is more conservative than his father, with a “nihilist” worldview that could make Fox News and other properties even more extreme.

Next week, the GOP-led House will hold the first hearings in its impeachment inquiry into whether President Joe Biden abused his office to reap illicit benefits for his son, Hunter. The House will also subpoena Hunter Biden’s bank records.

That Hunter Biden is something of a sleazeball is hard to dispute; though one could well argue that his actions in trading on the family name to rake in cash are tame compared to those of Trump’s children. But to proceed from that conclusion to the notion that Hunter’s father is enmeshed in a meta-conspiracy around the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, around pressuring the Justice Department not to charge Hunter, and around a slew of other crimes is, at this point, a leap of faith. (Burisma is the politically connected Ukrainian energy company that hired Hunter as a board member in 2014 and that was being investigated by a Ukrainian prosecutor who, due to his corruption, the Obama administration pressured the Ukrainian government to fire.)

Rupert Murdoch’s preferred mode of transportation has always been the shock wave. Where other media moguls might carefully plot with a compass and protractor a safe and steady path through the minefields of life and commerce, Murdoch has always relied on the high torque of a jet. Moving with the stealth of a predator, giving no advance notice on his destination, by the time he blows by, roar and rumble are the sole artifacts of his supersonic passing.

Rudy Giuliani has gone from “America’s Mayor” to “America’s Deadbeat,” according to “Morning Joe” hosts Willie Geist and Joe Scarborough.

The MSNBC personalities coined the moniker Friday as they recapped the latest in the former Donald Trump attorney’s fall from grace.

“I don’t know if he faces prison, if he faces bankruptcy, if he faces additional charges,” said Scarborough. “It’s just from from all directions. And this is the cost, of course, when you turn your life over to Donald Trump.”

Donald Trump reportedly made a callous comment about wounded veterans during Gen. Mark Milley’s 2019 welcome ceremony as the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, per a lengthy article by The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg published Thursday.

Trump reportedly demanded to know why a wounded veteran had been invited to perform “God Bless America” at the event, wrote Goldberg, who spent time with Milley for the piece.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) wants to declare war — but not against a country.

The Republican lawmaker said Thursday that she is “drafting a Declaration of War against the Mexican cartels,” even though the last formal declaration of war by Congress occurred during World War II.

Greene espoused her dubious strategy to Charlie Kirk, the far-right founder of the conservative student group Turning Point USA. She said on his podcast that she “would like to get Washington to realize who our real enemy is.”

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said Thursday that an ongoing GOP blockade of hundreds of President Joe Biden’s military nominees may actually be a good thing for America since Biden has been trying to bring more diversity into the nation’s military.

In an interview with conservative radio show host Hugh Hewitt, Scott, who is running for president, was asked if he supports Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) in blocking more than 300 military nominations in protest of the Pentagon’s policy on providing abortion-related travel. Tuberville has been leaning on Senate procedural rules since February to derail their confirmations.

CNN’s Abby Phillip gave longtime Fox boss Rupert Murdoch a fitting send-off by airing an extended supercut of the right-wing network’s lowest moments.

“His legacy is outrage porn: partisan red meat stoking relentless culture wars,” she said of Murdoch, who on Thursday announced that he was stepping down as chair of Fox Corp. and News Corp.

She said Fox News began as what was arguably a “noble vision” of a center-right news network with views from outside the media bubbles of New York and Washington.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the country’s most influential pro-Israel lobbying group, is recruiting candidates to challenge progressive members of the Congressional Black Caucus in primaries next year.

The CBC has been silent on the AIPAC bid to challenge at least three of its members who are part of the so-called Squad, a loose group of progressive representatives. According to media reports and The Intercept’s investigation, the only incumbents AIPAC has targeted so far in this election cycle are CBC members.

WARSAW — Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party is in the fight of its political life ahead of next month's general election — and in its scramble for votes it's taking aim at the country's alliance with Ukraine.

The latest blow came from Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who on Wednesday said that Poland has halted shipments of its own armaments to Ukraine.

For twelve years starting in 1982, my partner and I in San Francisco joined with two friends in Seattle to produce Lesbian Contradiction: A Journal of Irreverent Feminism, or LesCon for short. We started out typing four-inch columns of text and laying out what was to become a quarterly tabloid on a homemade light table. We used melted paraffin from an electric waxer to affix strips of paper to guide sheets the size of the final pages.

Eventually, we acquired Macintosh computers, trekking to a local copy shop to pay 25 cents a page for laser-printed originals. We still had to paste them together the old-fashioned way to create our tabloid-sized pages. The finished boards would then go to a local commercial printing press where our run of 2,000 copies would be printed.

In a Truth Social post on Wednesday night, former President Donald Trump demanded that Republican lawmakers in Congress shut down the federal government in order to aid him in thwarting the charges against him in the federal grand jury investigations into his actions.

With a funding crisis looming, and no indications that a deal between Democrats and Republicans (much less between Republicans and Republicans) is in motion, the federal government is set to run out of funding by the end of September.

Thousands of protesters and counter-protesters in cities across Canada have clashed over the rights of trans children and youth. The “1 Million March 4 Children” on Wednesday was part of a widespread and growing “parental rights” movement targeting inclusive public education.

This movement has already influenced provincial politics in Canada, including via Policy 713 in New Brunswick, where youth under 16 years of age are now required to obtain parental consent before they can change their name and pronouns at school.

Riding waves of fear and anger emanating from Russia’s war in Ukraine, the cost-of-living crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, nationalist, populist and far-right parties are eyeing rising support across Europe.

Polls have suggested that a backlash against immigration, LGBTQ rights, abortion and support for Ukraine is unfolding across the continent.

That has political forces branding themselves “conservative” and “patriotic” eyeing next year’s EU elections as a prime test.

United States President Joe Biden and other leaders expressed concern to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the G20 summit earlier this month about Canada’s claim that New Delhi was involved in the killing of a Sikh separatist leader, the Financial Times (FT) has reported.

Several members of the Five Eyes – an intelligence-sharing network that includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the US – raised the killing of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar directly with Modi, the newspaper reported on Thursday, citing three people familiar with discussions at the G20.

House Republicans were set Thursday to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and again try to get back to passing spending bills to avoid a looming government shutdown after the defense funding bill was stalled for the second time in three days.

“That was the most productive meeting we’ve had in some time and frankly we heard really good ideas,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told reporters after emerging from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) office.

WASHINGTON ― Coup-attempting former President Donald Trump demanded that House Republicans use the looming threat of a government shutdown to “defund” the federal criminal prosecutions against him.

“Republicans in Congress can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government that refuses to close the Border, and treats half the Country as Enemies of the State,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social media platform late Wednesday. “This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”

When a grand jury indicted Hunter Biden last week for buying a gun in 2018 despite using crack cocaine, the legal logic was clear: You can’t own a gun if you use illegal drugs, and he clearly did both.

The Navy Reserve had discharged the president’s son four years earlier after he tested positive for cocaine, and he discussed his crack addiction in his 2021 autobiography, “Beautiful Things.”

That gives special counsel David Weiss substantial proof that Biden lied when he signed the required ATF form pledging that he did not use illegal drugs so that he could buy a .38-caliber revolver — and that he possessed the gun illegally because of his drug use.

The most politically significant segment of Donald Trump’s interview on “Meet the Press” this past Sunday was his discussion of abortion, although perhaps not for the reason you’ve heard.

During the conversation, the former and possibly future president called Florida’s six-week ban on abortion a “terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” It was a direct attack on rival GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, who as governor of Florida signed that prohibition into law, and it was consistent with previous statements Trump had made about Republicans alienating the public with extreme positions on abortion.

NEW YORK (AP) — President Joe Biden raised “hard issues,” including protecting the “checks and balances” in a democracy, in a Wednesday meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pushing the Israeli leader to find a compromise on a judicial overhaul that has set off months of mass protests in Israel and concerns in Washington.

Biden also raised concerns about the far-right Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinians, urging Netanyahu to take steps to improve conditions in the West Bank at a time of heightened violence in the occupied territory.

The United States has poured more than a hundred billion dollars into Ukraine's effort to repel Russia's invasion, spending far more than any other nation. But as President Volodymyr Zelensky comes to Washington to ask for more, there is growing Republican scepticism about funding the war effort.

In his Tuesday speech to the UN, Joe Biden made a passionate plea for the global community to not turn its back on Ukraine.

Khirbet Susiya, occupied West Bank - Heyam Nawajah never knows what to tell her daughter when she asks why they don't have a home.

“My daughter keeps asking: ‘Why don’t we have a house? Why can’t we build a house? Why can’t I have my own room?’” the Palestinian Bedouin mother of six said.

According to the 31-year-old Heyam, the Nawajahs have lived in Khirbet Susiya since the early 19th century.

Ukraine destroyed state-of-the-art Russian air defences in Crimea and captured two key towns near the eastern city of Bakhmut in the 82nd week of the war.

Ukrainian forces may also have put three modern Russian warships out of action, demonstrating an increasing ability to attack enemy assets at range while maintaining the momentum of their territorial gains.

Poland, one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies, has announced an end to its arms transfers to the country, a day after President Volodymyr Zelenskiy accused Warsaw of playing into Russia’s hands by banning Ukrainian grain imports.

Poland is one of Kyiv’s main weapons suppliers and has been one of the loudest cheerleaders for the Ukrainian cause since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, but relations have soured over recent days amid the growing row over grain.

A school district in Texas has fired a teacher who assigned eighth-grade students a graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary.

The Hamshire-Fannett Independent School District’s communication coordinator, Mike Canizales, told KFDM-TV in Beaumont, Texas, that an unnamed teacher allowed students to read a version of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in class that was “not approved” by the district.

The diplomatic row between India and Canada over the murder of a Sikh activist has continued to escalate as New Delhi warned its nationals of “growing anti-India activities and politically condoned hate crimes” in Canada.

Justin Trudeau alleged on Monday that there were “credible allegations” that the Indian government played a role in the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was connected to a Sikh separatist movement, in British Columbia in June.

Someone in the congressional office of Rep. Angie Craig is having fun with acronyms.

On Wednesday, the Minnesota Democrat unveiled a bill taking aim at House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as the federal government nears a shutdown at the end of the month. Party in-fighting has left the Republican leader struggling to pass a spending plan to fund government services.

Craig’s bill would block members of Congress from receiving their scheduled pay if the government shuts down and federal workers are furloughed. She is calling the legislation the My Constituents Cannot Afford Rebellious Tantrums, Handle Your Shutdown Act, or the MCCARTHY Shutdown Act for short.

WASHINGTON ― The nation’s top law enforcement officer said Wednesday that Republican allegations of a two-tiered justice system favoring the president’s son are a fantasy.

During a House Judiciary Committee hearing with U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Republicans said Garland’s Department of Justice has gone easy on Hunter Biden while throwing the book at former President Donald Trump.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday urged former U.S. President Donald Trump to reveal his long-teased plan for ending Russia’s war in Ukraine in 24 hours.

“He can publicly share his idea now, not waste time, not to lose people, and say, ‘My formula is to stop the war and stop all this tragedy and stop Russian aggression,’” the Ukrainian leader told CNN, according to a translation provided by the network.

As public schools across Canada sound their bells this morning, parental rights activists will stage what they call a “coast-to-coast walkout” under the moniker Hands Off Our Kids and hashtag #1MillionMarch4Children. B.C.’s rallies are set to take place across the province in Coquitlam, Nanaimo, Vancouver and Victoria, and in other towns and cities across the province including Chilliwack, Powell River, Kamloops and Fort St. John.

Using language popularized by social justice movements, the Hands Off Our Kids community describes itself online as a “collective effort” united “in solidarity,” embracing “the principles of human dignity” and “bringing together diverse voices.”

Larry David did not curb his enthusiasm for calling out Elon Musk.

According to Walter Isaacson’s new biography on the Tesla CEO, via Insider, the “Seinfeld” co-creator didn’t hold back from expressing his disgust of Musk’s politics to his face while the two were sitting at the same table during a wedding reception for Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel in May 2022.

Conservative attorney George Conway on Tuesday explained why a favorite tactic of Donald Trump won’t do the former president any favors if he deploys it during testimony at one of his upcoming trials.

Trump “will be destroyed on the stand in about 30 seconds by any decent cross-examiner on almost any subject” if he tries to spin his way out of answering questions and attempts to maintain a plausible deniability defense because of the coded way he communicates orders, Conway told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner.

Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo urged Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) to “have some self-restraint” after the far-right congresswoman was booted from a performance of “Beetlejuice” at a Denver theater for disruptive behavior.

“You are the congresswoman of Colorado, not Megan Thee Stallion,” Arroyo said on Laura Ingraham’s prime-time show this week, referring to the rapper featured in “WAP.”