Politics

1. What would you like the U.S. discretionary budget to look like? With 60% now going to militarism, what percentage would you like that to be?

2. What program of economic conversion to peaceful enterprises would you support?

3. Would you end, continue, or escalate U.S. war making in: Afghanistan? Iraq? Syria? Yemen? Pakistan? Libya? Somalia?

4. Would you end the exemption for militarism in Kyoto, Paris, and other climate agreements?

There were two simultaneous Brett Kavanaugh stories. Together, as part of the confirmation process regarding his nomination as Supreme Court Justice, they revealed how political discourse in the United States has reached a new low, with debate over the man’s possible predilection to make judgments based on his own preferences rather than the US Constitution being ignored in favor of the politically motivated kabuki theater that was deliberately arranged to avoid that issue and instead go after his character.

Very few Americans know who Sheldon Adelson is and fewer still appreciate that, as America’s leading political donor, when he speaks the Republican Party listens. By virtue of his largesse, he has been able to direct GOP policy in the Middle East in favor of Israel, which might well be regarded as his true home while the United States exists more as a faithful friend that can be produced at intervals whenever Israel finds itself in need of a bit of cash or political cover.

Adelson’s recent successes in translating his political donations into policy favorable to Israel have included shifting the US Embassy to Jerusalem, cutting aid to Palestinians, ending the Iranian nuclear monitoring agreement and closing the Palestine Liberation Organization’s diplomatic office in Washington. All those Trump Administration measures were reportedly worked out privately by Adelson speaking directly with the president.

Never before has the Republican Party so explicitly shown its true colors. It is now so far off to the right the Clintons look like raging communists. The all-male Republican membership of the Senate judiciary committee refused to interview a female sexual assault victim themselves. They hired a prosecutor to interrogate the victim and say next to nothing to the accused. Senators whom had previously railed against Trump lost all moderate credibility when they leapt to the defense of a Supreme Court nominee accused of sex crimes and perjury. The entire party has been astoundingly flagrant in its disrespect and disregard for women.

Joe Biden:

Today Senator John McCain is being buried together with the young woman who leaked the transcript of these funeral proceedings. John would have been honored to know that he was posthumously connected to such swift and cost-saving justice in protection of our national security — which I think should more than compensate for his being buried together with someone he would have referred to as lowlife scum. Can I get a Praise Jesus?

John McCain and I worked together with many of you and I believe every single media outlet that has been permitted into this holy cathedral today to launch and prolong a war in which we did so much damage to the world in so many ways, that my own son was killed by our open burning of all kinds of toxic waste, and I’ve barely even registered that fact. Hell, it’ll be years before it occurs to me that a lot of Iraqi people probably died too. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t use that word in a church. I mean Iraqi lowlife scum.

I was a hippie/bicycle delivery boy living in San Francisco when the Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago fifty years ago, so I absorbed the chaos, the police riot, from half a continent away, but I knew with absolute certainty that the nation was changing and I was part of it.

We were in the violent spasm of transition. How long would it last? MLK and RFK, as they called for peace and sanity and civil rights for all, had just been assassinated. This was the God of War, turning its vengeance inward.

A year earlier I had been part of the march on the Pentagon. At one point a group of soldiers charged us as we stood on the grounds next to the building and I got clonked in the head by a rifle butt. Later, as we sat in, I felt with sudden certainty that Lyndon Johnson was going to emerge from the Pentagon and declare an end to the Vietnam War. Uh . . . that didn’t happen.

rogressives should figure it out. Amplifying the anti-Russia din helps to drown out the left’s core messages for economic fairness, equal rights, environmental protection, diplomacy and so much more. Echoing the racket of blaming Russia for the USA’s severe shortages of democracy plays into the hands of Republicans and corporate Democrats eager to block progressive momentum.

When riding on the “Russiagate” bandwagon, progressives unwittingly aid political forces that are eager to sideline progressive messages. And with the midterm elections now scarcely 100 days away, the torrents of hyperbolic and hypocritical claims about Russia keep diverting attention from why it’s so important to defeat Republicans.

The Democrats have been in turmoil for the last half century and then some, when they abandoned their racist base and supported the civil rights movement.

Revved up by the spirit of the ’60s, the party began opening itself to further change, even daring to push beyond the financial interests of its controlling oligarchs and declare an opposition to war. “I have no secret plan for peace. I have a public plan,” George McGovern said during his 1972 presidential campaign . . . and that was that. After his crushing defeat, at the hands of Richard Nixon and his “Southern strategy,” the Dems quietly retreated. Their prevailing slogan ever since, whispered subconsciously, has been: We don’t stand for all that much.

The Dems are now Republican lite. They don’t have the will to disrupt anything that seems tried and true — such as, for instance, American exceptionalism and bloated militarism.

s we celebrate our nation’s birth, and organize to once again overthrow an illegitimate tyrant, we might pity Trump’s classic liberal enabler, Al Dershowitz.

The pitiful self-promoting professor is being horribly snubbed by his fellow liberal neighbors on Martha’s Vineyard because he now supports Trump.

The ordeal must be every bit as painful as being separated from one’s children at the Mexican border.

But all whining aside, it should be clear that The Donald’s primary enablers (alongside his mob boss, Vladimir Putin) have been self-proclaimed “liberals” far more important than Dershowitz – namely Nancy Pelosi and her Corporate Democrats.

Their corruption and incompetence got him into the White House in the first place. And he can’t continue to rule without them.

Let’s count a mere 57 of the ways:

1) Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and the Corporate Democrats are nearly all multi-millionaires, locked into the corporate oligarchy;

2) Hillary Clinton lumped all us social democrats into that “basket of deplorables”;

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04 July 18

s we celebrate our nation’s birth, and organize to once again overthrow an illegitimate tyrant, we might pity Trump’s classic liberal enabler, Al Dershowitz.

The pitiful self-promoting professor is being horribly snubbed by his fellow liberal neighbors on Martha’s Vineyard because he now supports Trump.

The ordeal must be every bit as painful as being separated from one’s children at the Mexican border.

But all whining aside, it should be clear that The Donald’s primary enablers (alongside his mob boss, Vladimir Putin) have been self-proclaimed “liberals” far more important than Dershowitz – namely Nancy Pelosi and her Corporate Democrats.

Their corruption and incompetence got him into the White House in the first place. And he can’t continue to rule without them.

Let’s count a mere 57 of the ways:

1) Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and the Corporate Democrats are nearly all multi-millionaires, locked into the corporate oligarchy;