Politics

The current notion of a “moderate Republican” is an oxymoron that helps to move the country rightward. Last week, every one of the GOP’s so-called “moderates” voted to install House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who won with the avid support of Donald Trump and got over the finish line by catering to such fascistic colleagues as Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.

Even before the new Israeli government was officially sworn in on December 29, angry reactions began emerging, not only among Palestinians and other Middle Eastern governments, but also among Israel’s historic allies in the West. 

 As early as November 2, top US officials conveyed to Axios that the Joe Biden Administration is “unlikely to engage with Jewish supremacist politician, Itamar Ben-Gvir”. 

These days, conventional media wisdom says that President Biden will have a smooth path to renomination if he wants it.

Don’t be so sure.

Fifty-five years ago, pundits scoffed when a Democratic senator announced that he was running against incumbent Lyndon Johnson for their party’s presidential nomination. Eugene McCarthy launched his campaign to challenge Johnson’s continual escalation of the war in Vietnam.

Joe Biden’s public approval rating is now at 42 percent, virtually identical to what it was for President Johnson when the McCarthy campaign began in November 1967. A few months later, on March 12, 1968, McCarthy received 42 percent of the votes -- a stunning result, just 7 percent behind Johnson -- in the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary. Senator Robert Kennedy jumped into the race four days later. And two weeks after that, Johnson shocked the country by declaring that he would not seek re-election.

There is considerable irony in the fact that Donald Trump when president virtually crawled to do Israel’s bidding more than any of his predecessors. He moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, he accepted brutal Israeli settlement and control of the Palestinian West Bank, approved of the Israeli annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, and ignored repeated Israeli war crimes using US provided weapons. Yet for all his gifts to Israel, which did not serve any actual US interest, he is currently being crucified by the Jewish/Israel Lobby because of an idiotic dinner with a pair of alleged anti-Semites, one of whom has been labeled a “holocaust denier.”

 No amount of post-election puffery about Joe Biden can change a key political reality: His approval ratings are far below the public’s positivity toward the Democratic Party. Overall, the Democrats who won the midterm elections did so despite Biden, not because of him. He’s a drag on the party, a boon to Republicans, and -- if he runs again -- he’d be a weak candidate against the GOP nominee in the 2024 presidential campaign.

 While the electorate is evenly split between the two parties, there’s no such close division about Biden. NBC reported its exit poll on Tuesday “found that two-thirds of voters (68 percent) do not want Biden to run for president again in 2024.”

After the election comes . . . the coverage, which always, at least in the mainstream media, seems to reduce everything to winning and losing, to strategy and tactics, rather than to the deep issues shaping the future.

The mainstream-created context of this year’s midterms amounted to: Will there be a “red tsunami”? That is, will the GOP, riding joyfully on the back of the bucking bronco of inflation, overwhelm Sleepy Joe’s Democratic Party and grab control over the House and Senate? Or will the Dems hold on, luck out, lose only minimally?

And the post-election news, of course, is the latter. The count continues as I write and not all election results, at national and state levels, are known yet, but what is known indicates that both parties more or less held their own and there definitely was no red tsunami. For the Democrats, this is the equivalent of a big victory.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's recent tour in Africa was meant to be a game changer, not only in terms of Russia's relations with the continent, but in the global power struggle involving the US, Europe, China, India, Turkey and others.

The arrogance of power is especially ominous and despicable when a government leader risks huge numbers of lives in order to make a provocative move on the world’s geopolitical chessboard. Nancy Pelosi’s plan to visit Taiwan is in that category. Thanks to her, the chances of a military confrontation between China and the United States have spiked upward.

 Long combustible over Taiwan, the tensions between Beijing and Washington are now close to ablaze, due to Pelosi’s desire to be the first House speaker to visit Taiwan in 25 years. Despite the alarms that her travel plans have set off, President Biden has responded timidly -- even while much of the establishment wants to see the trip canceled.

Green Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Zoom #104 opens with the legendary Bill Russell, the the Greatest of All Time professional athlete/civil rights activist in all sports based on having won 11 NBA championships in 13 years, including the last two as the first African-American coach of a major professional team. Russell did all this while serving as one of our most critically important pioneering activists of equal rights for all citizens.

He will be incredibly missed, as will NICHELLE NICHOLS, Star Trek's first African-American female, one of the great icons of our culture (&counter-culture).

RAY MCCLENDON clarifies the on-going very much alive & well prosecution of Donald Trump in Fulton County, Georgia. Ray further updates us on the escalating grassroots campaign in GA leading into the 2022 mid-terms.

JOEL SEGAL connects that GA campaign to his work in NC…and then explains in great detail the considerable impact of the new Biden-Manchin bill, not yet passed, on our national health care system.

You may find this shocking, but a little over a decade ago I spent a weekend learning how to shoot a handgun — under the auspices of the NRA. I wound up earning myself an NRA “personal protection in the home” certificate.

For years I have pondered writing about this weekend, but never found quite the right context for doing so. But the recent decision of the Supreme Court in the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen — declaring that the possession of pistols in public is a constitutional right — has pulled that weekend up from my memory (as well as from the pages of the journal entry I made afterwards, on May 2, 2011).

The ruling, as Karrie Jacobs has written, intensifies the danger we all face simply by being out in public, noting that in its wake “our sense of security in crowded places may be more permanently damaged than it was by the pandemic.

She adds: “It advances a perception of the United States as a dystopian nation where day-to-day survival depends on being armed.”