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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.

In Green Grassroots Election Protection zoom #122 we pay tribute to pioneer election protection mainstay CLIFF ARNEBECK, who has just passed.

This heroic Ohio attorney joined with BOB FITRAKIS, CLINT CURTIS, JULIE WIENER & others who demanded an end to the 2004 electoral fraud that wrongly gave GEORGE W. BUSH a 2d term.

Clint gives us a tour of the paper ballot issue and questions the use of computerized ballot images to count the vote.

We then hear from DEEPA DRIVER and VINCENT DeSTEFANO about the situation with JULIAN ASSANGE.

Deepa delivers a brilliant talk on the absolute need for protected journalism and a public funnel for critical documents.

She is briefly joined by TATANKA BRICCA who promises to tell us in a later session about LEONARD PELTIER.

We’re further joined by Vince DeStefano, who explains the possibility that Australia’s change of government may open a door for Julian’s release.

We hope it comes next week, as we adjourn for MLK DAY, returning January 23.  No Nukes!! 

Part 1:
 

Once more, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) will offer a legal opinion on the consequences of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine. 

 A historic United Nations vote on December 31 called on the ICJ to look at the Israeli Occupation in terms of legal consequences, the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and the responsibility of all UN Member States in bringing the protracted Israeli Occupation to an end. A special emphasis will be placed on the “demographic composition, character and status” of Occupied Jerusalem. 

It was the guacamole’s fault!

That’s the guy’s defense, anyway — that plus his right to carry four handguns, an AR-15 and a 12-guage shotgun into a supermarket in Atlanta. Oh yeah, and he was wearing body armor. This was in March 2021, barely a week after an actual mass shooting at several massage parlors in Atlanta, in which eight people were killed. And it was only two days after a mass shooting at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, where ten people were killed.

After departing Mangareva, everyone aboard Aranui 5 – from passengers to crew – must submit to the voyage’s second obligatory covid test, no exceptions. The first swab for the swabbies, of course, had been taken a day before shoving off from Papeete, and now another one to make sure outsiders don’t carry the dreaded plague to the 40-plus inhabitants of way out-of-the-way Pitcairn Island is also required. Testing positive back at Papeete meant being barred from boarding Aranui 5 for the voyage. While if one passed the test but later flunked it before reaching Pitcairn doesn’t quite mean the infected shipmate has to walk the plank, it does oblige the afflicted to remain solitarily sequestered in his/her cabin until testing negative.

When the newsstand of Giuseppe Trani was swept away by disastrous flooding that devastated the southern Italian town of Casamicciola at the end of November, the 70-year-old man lost everything. Not for long, though, as the townsfolk, who were also affected by the flooding and landslides experienced throughout the whole region, raised the funds needed to help Trani rebuild his kiosk.

Moreover, when a five-year-old Moroccan boy, Rayan Oram, fell into a well in the impoverished northern Chefchaouen province, tens of millions followed the story with trepidation throughout Africa, the Middle East and, eventually, around the world. The fact that the story had a sorrowful ending may have distracted some of us from the realisation that little Rayan had unwittingly united us in hope and prayer, despite our seemingly insurmountable differences.

American football has always been a blood sport.

It needs to change or die.

Tackle must end.  Flags must come.

And they will.

Why?  Because human lives are at stake…and with them, a trillion-dollar industry.

A century ago, football players were maimed and died in droves.  The college game was a cross between rugby, mixed martial arts and all-out trench warfare.

Merciless scrums brought on bloody body piles in which players did their very best to gouge and permanently harm their opponents.  Often they succeeded.

Where helmets were worn, they were virtually useless leather gloves, perhaps functional in keeping cracked skulls from falling apart during a game, but that was about it.  The death toll for a given year of the college game was substantial and undeniable.  Long-term post-season repercussions were undiscussed, unstudied…and permanent.

It’s full steam ahead aboard Aranui 5 to the raison d’etre of this far-flung voyage through French Polynesia’s remotest isles and atolls as we near way off the beaten track Pitcairn. The legacy of and lore surrounding this isolated spot at the end of the Earth has made it one of the most romanticized and fabled islands in history, dramatized, if not celebrated, by bestselling authors and Hollywood blockbusters. Here’s the bare bones outline of what has made little Pitcairn loom large for decades in the zeitgeist as the ultimate getaway and isle of escape, the polar opposite of Alcatraz, that infamous icon of the island as prison.

On December 23, 1787, His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty departed from Spithead, England for Tahiti. The maritime mission’s purpose was to secure breadfruit, which grows in abundance at Polynesia, then sail to Britain’s Caribbean colonies, deposit the starchy staple foodstuff there, and return to England.

After visiting flat atolls of the Tuamotus and then a day out at sea, the appearance on the horizon of the Gambier group, with its high islands, emerges as a sharp vertical contract to the previous days’ horizontal vistas. This remote chain of mostly volcanic isles, located 1,000 miles southeast of Tahiti, is one of French Polynesia’s five archipelagoes that comprise a sprawling watery realm the size of Western Europe, and I’ve never been here before.

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”.