Politics

Whenever I think of Richard Nixon, a wave of pity washes over me. Has there ever been a mainstream politician in America who was so hated, so reviled, so disrespected as Nixon? (I’m sure my esteemed editor would say that Nixon deserved every last brickbat thrown at him.) Like Shaft, Nixon was a complicated man–charming and cold, clever and calculating, craven and crafty. Dead for more than twenty years–he died a month before Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the widow of his late rival, John F. Kennedy, in the same hospital in which she was treated–he would have been 102 years old on January 19. The former president is still a fascinating study.

For decades, people have tried to fix the Democratic Party. They've imagined that their failings in this regard could be overcome by a greater effort. But it is hard to imagine anyone in the future mounting as significant an effort as did Bernie Sanders and his supporters.

We're cynically told to just wait, because younger people hold better views. But the holding of views, by anyone, has nothing to do with it. And younger people have a pretty consistent record of becoming older people.

Why does the holding of views have nothing to do with it? Because the Democratic Party is bought and paid for and directed from the top down.

Here is a party that pretends to have solved the healthcare crisis with such self-deluding intensity that it refuses to express support for providing universal healthcare.

Here is a party that criminally pushes for more militarism and war including the overthrow of the Syrian government, and that will not admit the existence of occupied Palestine.

Brexit — the stunning British vote to leave the European Union — is a clear and dramatic rebuke of the country’s political and economic elites. A majority voted to leave even though the heads of the United Kingdom’s two major parties, more than a thousand corporate and bank CEOs, legions of economists, the leaders of Europe and the United States, and the heads of the international financial organizations all warned of dire consequences if they did not vote to remain.

For Americans, one question is whether this result has implications for the 2016 presidential campaign. Political sea changes tend to cross national boundaries. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 tracked the rise of Margaret Thatcher to power in Great Britain. Bill Clinton’s New Democrats were mirrored by Tony Blair’s New Labour Party. So does Brexit presage the rise of Donald Trump in the United States?

This decision overturned former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell's
conviction, making it more difficult for the US government, even when it
wants to, to prosecute officials for public corruption.

The Supreme court on the surface creates a higher standard for prosecuting
corruption, bribes, malfeasance, etc., positing that when an official
assists an affluent contributor in giving them access to other state
officials, in this case, and among others, researches at a University in
Virginia, although the public may find this reprehensible, that this is
not necessary illegal.

Monday's decision "leaves intact the ability of federal prosecutors to go
after official misconduct at the state and local level," said Columbia Law
Professor Richard Briffault, and frequent writer and commentator on
enforcing standards of ethics. Prosecutors, he said, "have to link up the
quid and quo more tightly and show that the gifts influenced real official
actions."

The Chief Justice, John Roberts Jr., said that the former governor's

he Sanders campaign has more than enough principled reasons to resist conventional political wisdom and carry on its campaign at least into convention floor fights and street demonstrations, not least because Democrats are acting as if they want only to co-opt Sanders supporters and send the Sanders political revolution down the memory hole.

Well meaning people just spent a quarter billion dollars on the Bernie Sanders campaign which continues operations while its candidate says he will vote for Hillary Clinton for president.

"I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don't think I'd be waving those (rainbow)flags in God's face if I were you. …this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It'll bring about terrorist bombs; it'll bring earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor." --- Rev Pat Robertson, Christian Fundamentalist tele-evangelist, predicting - and perhaps inciting - violence against the LGBT community in Orlando, Florida. The homophobic Robertson was critical of LGBT organizers who were putting up rainbow flags around the city in celebration of the city’s stance on diversity issues. (Quote from The Washington Post, 06-10-98)