Another day in the continued campaign of Convicted Felon
Donald Trump's race for the presidency or, as I like to think of it,
WHO'S THE BIGGEST LOSER? Day after day lately, it's Mr. Trump. Zachary Folk (THE DAILY BEAST) reports:
A
new federal grand jury returned a superseding indictment against former
President Donald Trump—charging him with the same four criminal counts
related to his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential
election, despite a recent Supreme Court ruling which found that
presidents have some immunity from prosecution.
Special
Counsel Jack Smith returned the new indictment on Tuesday. The revised
charges come only days before the deadline D.C. District Court Judge
Tanya Chutkan set for both prosecutors and Trump’s defense attorneys to
submit reports on how the July Supreme Court decision would impact the
case. The next status conference is currently scheduled for Sept. 5.
Earlier this month, Chutkan rejected a motion from Trump’s defense attorneys to fully dismiss the case.
A
new grand jury, who had not previously reviewed the evidence against
the former president, charged Trump with conspiracy to defraud the
United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding,
obstruction of an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights—the
exact same charges listed in the original indictment handed down in August 2023.
According
to a notice filed by Smith on Tuesday, the new indictment “reflects the
Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s
holdings and remand instructions in Trump v. United States.”
Good.
Mr. Trump is not above the law no matter what the crooked Supreme Court
or the depraved liar Jonathan Turley says to the contrary. Charles R. Davis (SALON) observes:
In
its immunity ruling, the Supreme Court’s six right-wing justices
asserted that a president’s “official” conduct was off limits to
prosecutors, meaning that someone — Donald Trump, for example — could
order their underlings at the Department of Justice to break the law,
perhaps by trying to overturn what they knew to be a free and fair
election, and no one could ever charge them with a crime.
That
July ruling from the nation’s highest court was seen as a death knell
for the cases against the former president, the conservative majority
having effectively legalized “criminal and treasonous acts,”
per liberal dissenter Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The consolation was that
special counsel Jack Smith would at least get to air all his evidence
in the D.C. court of U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, an appointee of
former President Barack Obama who would get to decide what if any of it
could withstand the Supreme Court’s novel new standard.
But
Smith, who has charged the former president with conspiring to defraud
the United States and obstruct the certification of the 2020 election,
himself decided to start over instead. Having seated a new grand jury,
on Tuesday Smith returned a fresh 36-page indictment of
Trump that maintains the same core charges but with a freshly
emphasized framing: these were criminal acts that the former president
undertook not in his official capacity but as a private citizen running
for public office.
“Even
the very first paragraph of the indictment now refers to Donald Trump
not as the 45th president of the United States, but as a candidate for
president in 2020,” noted Barbara
McQuade, a former U.S. attorney who teaches law at the University of
Michigan. Appearing on MSNBC, she predicted that Trump’s legal team
would certainly maintain anything he did while president was an
“official act.”
But McQuade argued that Smith had effectively purged the original 45-page indictment of
any conspicuously official conduct, the special counsel now stressing,
for example, that Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021, was at a privately
funded campaign event — and that the ex-president, whose legal team
organized a plot to recognize “fake electors” from the likes of Arizona
and Pennsylvania, never had an official role in certifying state
elections.
“I
think this threads the needle,” Ty Cobb, a former White House lawyer
under Trump, told CNN, describing the new indictment as a “forceful
document” that drives home “the crimes that Donald Trump actually
committed.” Smith wisely chose to avoid the moral victory of what legal
experts had termed a “mini trial,”
publicly fighting over what could survive in the previous indictment,
Cobb said. But that also guarantees that there won’t be any sort of
trial before voters cast ballots in the presidential election.
Good.
He needs to be in prison for what he did on January 6, 2021. In other
news, CNN has a Trump scandal. MEDIASTOUCH MEDIA has done several
reports on this. C.I.'s reposted the videos at THE COMMON ILLS but
added "CNN scandal" in front of whatever title MEDIAS has used.
It is a scandal. They created a false narrative.
Thursday
of last week, they had a group of undecided voters on to watch Vice
President Kamala Harris deliver her acceptance speech. I believe all
but one was moved to vote for her. The one who was not?
On air, he was an undecided voter as presented by CNN.
In reality, he was a Donald Trump supporter and had been for several years as evidenced by his social media posts.
He says he told CNN he was a supporter and that he was not undecided and they told him to go on and pretend otherwise.
So
he lies that he is impressed with her speech but just does not feel
that she has the experience and so he will be going with Mr. Trump.
A lie. A lie that CNN amplified and then the right-wing and FOX "NEWS" got ahold of it and ran with it. Here is one of the video reports MEDIASTOUCH MEDIA posted about the scandal.
Yet, a political commentator has spotted an emerging pattern where news anchors attempt to rationalise Trump's tirades as soon as they conclude.
Journalist
Aaron Rupar has even coined the term 'sane-wash' to describe the
efforts by reporters and pundits to decipher the intent behind Trump's
disjointed monologues.
Rupar's
latest objection was directed at Fox News' coverage of Trump's address
to the National Guard Association's conference in Detroit on Monday.
Anchor Martha MacCallum suggested that Trump was "hitting three big
themes consistently" - crime, the economy, and immigration, reports the Express US.
This
interpretation came despite Trump's talk of establishing a 'Space
National Guard', his desire to 'fire' those responsible for the
Afghanistan withdrawal 'like The Apprentice', and his claim that the US
is out of ammunition.
[. . .]
Not
only Fox News has been slammed with the accusation, as Kristen Holmes
from CNN also faced criticism for 'sane-washing' Trump's words.
Following his campaign rally in Michigan last week, Holmes commented that Trump "was clearly trying to stay on message."
Rupar took to Twitter, stating: "CNN sane-washes an incoherent and unhinged Trump speech for the second straight day."
Wednesday, August 28, 2024. Voter suppression and intimidation is
taking place in Texas and we should all be calling it out but most left
sites and YOUTUBERS aren't even noting it, Mark Zuckerberg lies again,
Gaza supporters need to take a look at themselves because a number of
you are hurting your cause.
Starting with the efforts of the GOP to Rig The Vote in 2024. Ken Paxton is the Attorney General of Texas. He has
launched a series of raids targeting Latinos for being . . . pillars of
the community. These are solid citizens who do more than is required.
They give back to the community through unpaid public service such as
voter registration. At a time when Democratic Party presidential
nominee is polling very well in Texas as is Senatorial candidate Colin
Allred (also a Democrat), the Republican Paxton sends armed officers to
search and rummage through the homes of Latinos in what appears to be an
attempt at armed intimidation.
The
League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), one of the nation's
oldest Latino civil rights organizations, is asking the U.S. Department
of Justice to investigate a series of raids ordered by Texas Attorney
General Ken Paxton that have targeted Latino voting activists and
political operatives, The New York Times reported.
Paxton,
a Republican who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election,
ordered the raids be carried out as part of a larger inquiry against
alleged voter fraud. In a statement last
week, he said that the raids were part of an “ongoing election
integrity investigation” into allegations of election fraud and vote
harvesting, a specter raised by former President Donald Trump as an
excuse for his 2020 loss.
But
LULAC and other civil rights organizations and activists said that the
raids disproportionately targeted Democratic leaders and volunteers,
suggesting that they are meant not to uncover actual fraud but to
suppress Latino voters.
Officers
conducting the raids seized cellphones, computers and documents from
people's homes, including the cellphone of Cecilia Castellano, a
Democrat running against former Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin for a state
House seat. Castellano told the Times that the raid on her home last
Tuesday was "very frightening" and she did not know why she was
targeted. “This is all political,” she said.
Another
raid brought officers to the home of Manuel Medina, a consultant for
Castellano and the chair of Tejano Democrats, a group that advocates for
greater Latino representation in the Democratic Party. “I have been
contacted by elderly residents who are confused and frightened,
wondering why they have been singled out,” Rosales told the Times. “It’s
pure intimidation.”
In a letter first
obtained by CBS News, LULAC requested that the Justice Department
investigate Paxton's office for Voting Rights Act violations. The
organization is accusing Paxton's office of carrying out illegal
searches premised on voter fraud.
[. . .]
"Attorney
General Paxton is using his position of authority to harass and
intimidate Latino non-profit organizations like LULAC, Latino Leaders
and LULAC members," Juan Proaño, LULAC's CEO told CBS News, calling the
state AG's effort "point-blank" voter intimidation. "It is evident
through his pattern of lawsuits, raids, searches, and seizures that he
is trying to keep Latinos from voting."
Proaño
said one of those targeted was Lidia Martinez, an 87-year-old who lives
in San Antonio. Martinez has been a LULAC member for over 35 years and
works to expand voter registration among seniors and veterans in South
Texas.
She
said that last Tuesday, there was a knock on her door in the morning,
and she was greeted by nine officers in tactical gear and firearms who
said they were executing a search warrant. Martinez was questioned for
over three hours about her voter registration efforts in Texas.
Law
enforcement seized Martinez's phone, computer, personal calendar, blank
voter registration forms and her certificate to conduct voter
registration, according to Martinez.
"This is a free country, this is not Russia," Martinez said Monday during a press conference denouncing the raid.
Lidia
Martinez, a volunteer and great-grandmother in her 80s, was woken up in
the early morning hours on Tuesday. She said nine law enforcement
agents searched her home and questioned her for hours.
"After
two hours of questioning, they took me outside in front of all of my
neighbors for half an hour while they searched the living room where I
had been sitting. They continued to question me, asking about LULAC
members," Martinez said. "I said, 'what do you want from me? I am an old
lady, all I do is help the seniors."
Martinez
said she's been politically engaged since she was a little girl growing
up in San Antonio. She never imagined to be trapped in such activity.
“I
said I feel like I’m in Russia," Martinez said. “I asked them why they
were there and they said because of voter fraud. And I said I’m not
guilty of that.”
Paxton,
who has vowed to investigate "every credible report we receive"
pertaining to criminal activity tied to elections, argued that citizens
have the ability to register to vote when renewing or registering for a
driver's license with the DPS, "so there is no obvious need to assist
citizens to register to vote outside DPS offices — calling into question
the motives of the nonprofit groups."
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott
announced on Monday that the state has removed roughly a million people
from its voter rolls since he signed a legislative overhaul of election
laws in 2021.
“Illegal voting
in Texas will never be tolerated. We will continue to actively safeguard
Texans’ sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our
elections from illegal voting,” he said.
However,
election experts point out that both federal and state law already
required voter roll maintenance, and the governor’s framing of this
routine process as a protection against illegal voting could be used to
undermine trust in elections. The National Voter Registration Act of
1993 already governs how states should keep their registration rolls accurate and up-to-date, and also includes protections to avoid the inadvertent removal of properly registered voters.
“Year after
year, people are taken off the voting rolls for all manner of innocuous
reasons,” said Sarah Xiyi Chen, an attorney at the Texas Civil Rights
Project.
[. . .]
In 2019, Texas officials flagged 95,000 voters
whom they identified as “noncitizens” and accused broadly of voter
fraud. After review, it turned out that many of the people identified on
the rolls were naturalized citizens. The scandal resulted in the
secretary of state resigning. The state abandoned the effort after numerous lawsuits, which resulted in the state setting new guidelines for future voter roll clean-ups.
ACLU of Texas
attorney Ashley Harris points to the 2019 incident as an example of the
state's lack of transparency about how it collects this data.
Signed into law on May 20, 1993, by President Bill Clinton, the National Voter Registration Act opens a new window, also known as the NVRA opens a new window,
revolutionized voter registration across the country establishing voter
registration requirements and policies to facilitate those
requirements. The NVRA required each state to:
It is because of the NVRA that eligible voters can register to vote
at their state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) earning the law the
nickname “Motor Voter”.
It is also why eligible voters who submit an application by their
state’s deadlines can vote in the upcoming election because it required
states to process applications in a timely manner. The passage of the
NVRA made registering to vote more accessible.
Why is making voter registration more accessible important?
Voter registration is the first barrier to voting. Even with the NVRA
and policies like online and automatic voter registrations in some
states, approximately 25% of eligible voters remain unregistered to
vote, according to 2020 U.S. Census data. The registration gap is
greatest among young people, particularly young people of color, young
Natives, young people with disabilities and young people from low-income
backgrounds. Every year, millions of eligible voters find themselves
unable to vote because they miss a registration deadline, do not update
their registration, or are unsure how to register.
How did Rock the Vote contribute to the passage of the NVRA?
In the early 1990s, Rock the Vote launched a major national campaign
to support the passage of the NVRA. We partnered with the Recording
Industry Association of American, MTV, Rolling Stone, major artists and
actors of the era, and elected leaders to record and broadcast PSAs, testify at Congressional hearings opens a new window, and conduct public media interviews.
The
whole point was to make it easier for people to vote by making
registration easier. That's why at any county fair in the fall you will
find a table set up for voter registration. We say we want more voter
participation but the actions of the GOP make clear that they do not
want greater participation. That's probably due to the fact that the
statistical model shows that greater turnout tends to mean Democratic
Party victories.
This
is a major story. I didn't want to write about it. Because I'm not
there, I didn't know the whole story and I'm tired and didn't want to
learn. So when I learned of it Monday night, I thought, "Okay, I'll
grab coverage. There will be in depth coverage from DEMOCRACY NOW! and
from IN THESE TIMES and from . . ." And there's really nothing.
What
Paxton is doing is outrageous. He's abusing his governmental power to
order raids on citizens' homes in an effort to scare them off of voting
and voting registration. This should land him in hot water.
But
apparently our left can't see beyond Gaza. Yeah, I went there.
Because I'm out there talking to groups of people and I'm hearing over
and over the same message of anger and frustration that a US election
can't be addressed with US issues but instead needs to be framed in
Gaza.
I warned over a
month ago that if you want to help the Palestinians you better pay
attention to your presentations. But too many aren't. That's true on
YOUTUBE and it's true in our left media.
We'll come back to it.
Paxton's
a liar, a crook and an idiot. He reads closeted and self-loathing gay
man so if that emerges, I wouldn't be at all surprised. But what's already emerged is scary enough:
Paxton was indicted in 2015 on state securities fraud charges
relating to activities prior to taking office; he has pleaded not
guilty. The case was delayed over various procedural issues, but in
October 2023 his trial was scheduled for April 2024.[12][13][14] In October 2020, several high-level assistants in Paxton's office accused him of "bribery, abuse of office and other crimes."[15][16] Paxton
was impeached with bipartisan approval in May 2023 by the
Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives by a vote of
121–23, leading to his suspension.[17] The
articles of impeachment included allegations that Paxton gave
preferential treatment to a political donor who bribed him, misapplied
public resources and made false statements against whistleblowers,
obstructed justice in the securities fraud trial against him, and made
false statements regarding his financial interests.[21] In September 2023, the Texas Senate voted to acquit Paxton of all articles of impeachment, ending his suspension from office.[22][23] Paxton is separately being investigated by federal prosecutors for the same legal issues on coinciding federal statutes.[24]
We
could go into all of his raging homophobia but, again, he reads gay and
he especially reads bottom with humiliation kink. I'm not interested
in helping him get off.
Paxton
himself has little, if any, credibility for any of the allegations he
makes. He has piggybacked on the right-wing anti-trans panic by calling gender-affirming health care “child abuse.” His raids against Texas Democrats follow punitive measures even against Republican critics. And then there’s the fact that his own party tried to impeach him last year. If anything, Paxton taking up the “Democrats are getting noncitizens to vote” myth gives it even less credibility.
Mark
Zuckerberg says he regrets that Meta bowed to Biden administration
pressure to censor content, saying in a letter that the interference was
"wrong" and he plans to push back if it happens again.
Meta's
CEO aired his grievances in a letter Monday to the House Judiciary
Committee in response to its investigation into content moderation on
online platforms. Zuckerberg detailed how senior administration
officials leaned on the company to censor certain posts about Covid-19,
including humor and satire, and “expressed a lot of frustration” when
the social media platform resisted.
FACEBOOK started as garbage. Sorry, I never had a FACEBOOK account. But you do see the lie don't you?
Ruth
posted "There are numbers and then there are the fake numbers in Trump's crazy head" last night. Convicted Felon Donald Trump -- a worm
apparently eating what was left of his brain -- was raving like a nut
that in 2020 Joe Biden's White House was having him censored. Joe
wasn't in the White House. Donald was.
Twitter
Inc., Facebook Inc. and Google’s YouTube have all removed posts shared
by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for including coronavirus
misinformation that violates the social media companies’ rules against
posting harmful content.
So
FACEBOOK was censoring post on COVID in March 2020. Per Mark's
testimony -- if you believe the liar -- that's due to the White House.
Again, Joe Biden wasn't president in 2020. He's sworn in January of the
following year.
Facts is
hard for garbage like Zuckerberg. He wanted to endorse Donald a few
months back but he was told it would be bad for the shares in the
company -- so he claimed he wasn't endorsing despite calling Donald "bad ass."
This is his way of endorsing him: Lying to Congress that FACEBOOK only
censored COVID posts due to Joe Biden's White House.
In
2019, before the pandemic began, Facebook announced that they were
looking to reduce the influence of anti-vaccination posts on their
social media platform.
“We
will reduce the ranking of groups and Pages that spread misinformation
about vaccinations in News Feed and Search. These groups and Pages will
not be included in recommendations or in predictions when you type into
Search,” stated Facebook at the time.
“When
we find ads that include misinformation about vaccinations, we will
reject them. We also removed related targeting options, like ‘vaccine
controversies.’ For ad accounts that continue to violate our policies,
we may take further action, such as disabling the ad account.”
Again,
Joe was president in 2021. However, he wasn't president in 2019. That
was Donald Trump. So if Zuckerberg was having his arm twisted to
censor by a White House, in 2019 that would have been Donald.
Under
mounting pressure to counter misinformation around the COVID-19
pandemic, Facebook is increasingly dictating what its users should see
and think.
Facebook
already downgrades any posts it doesn’t like the look of regarding the
virus, but it’s apparently concerned that some of its users might still
interact with the wrong content. It’s not Facebook users’ fault, you
see, they’re just hapless plebs with not critical faculties of their
own. Thankfully Facebook is on the case.
The social media giant’s VP of Integrity (an Orwellian job title if there ever was one), Guy Rosen, recently provided An Update on Our Work to Keep People Informed and Limit Misinformation About COVID-19.
“We’re going to start showing messages in News Feed to people who have
liked, reacted or commented on harmful misinformation about COVID-19
that we have since removed,” said Rosen.
Again, that would be when Donald Trump was president.
Legal idiot Jonathan Turley felt the need to Tweet:
Fox
posted my column on Mark Zuckerberg's admission that Facebook did
censor Americans under pressure from the Administration. He wants
people to know that they are really regret now their role. It is the
feigned regret that comes with forced exposure...
No,
you fool, the censorship began under Donald -- as we took the time to
document above. Jonathan, you're a damn liar and a bigger disgrace and
disappointment than even Robert Kennedy Junior. Matt Taibbi and
Glynneth Greenwald are equally stupid.
Deliver us from the idiots, please.
Again,
Zuckerberg made statements that are being spun as truth but it is
public record that the censorship began long before Joe was president.
I know Jonathan, Glynneth, Matt and FOX "NEWS" love to spin and lie. But facts are facts.
The
actions of technology companies became a centerpiece of right-wing
criticism, without a countervailing defense in the public conversation
from the left. It is probably not surprising, then, that on Monday
Zuckerberg responded to a request from the hard-right-Republican-led
House Judiciary Committee with a letter broadly ceding the debate.
In his letter,
Zuckerberg addressed three issues: Facebook’s approach to covid
misinformation, the decision to limit sharing of the story about Hunter
Biden’s laptop and the foundation’s contributions to the Center for Tech
and Civic Life (CTCL) aimed at backstopping resources for elections
administrators.
On
the first point, Zuckerberg criticized the Biden administration for its
efforts to get Facebook to address coronavirus misinformation — a
political win for his Republican critics.
“Ultimately,
it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our
decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our
enforcement in the wake of this pressure,” he wrote. “I believe the
government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more
outspoken about it.”
The
line between what Zuckerberg describes as “pressure” and that the
decisions were ultimately Meta’s will be blurred. What’s more, the
Supreme Court recently rejected the
idea that the administration had crossed an unacceptable line. But this
is almost exactly what Republicans wanted him to say.
[. . .]
It’s ironic: To alleviate pressure he’s felt from government actors, Zuckerberg once again sought to give them what they want.
Black women have long understood the assignment in organizing for a
cause, especially when the stakes are high. And we’ve always ensured
that movements are a multigenerational and multiethnic effort;
collective organizing is our superpower, especially when we are
outnumbered and outspent.
Which is why as the unsung heroes of the Democratic Party, Black women
didn’t miss the opportunity to showcase our fortitude and influence in
Chicago last week. After all, Black women not only set the stage for
Kamala Harris’s rise; the policies we have long pushed for are now an
integral part of the national conversation.
When rumors first swirled about who would replace President Biden if he stepped down, Black women, who have consistently voted for Democrats,
warned leadership within the party to not pass over Kamala Harris. Fast
forward to July 21 and Biden immediately followed his announcement that
he was dropping out of the race with an endorsement for the vice
president. Within 12 hours of that announcement, Win with Black Women
(WWBW), an intergenerational network of Black women leaders in the
United States, kickstarted a new model for digital organizing for the
newly announced Harris campaign. With more than 40,000 attendees present
at its weekly meeting, WWBW not only changed the meeting capacity
limits of Zoom; it also set off a cascade of fundraising calls across
the nation among other affinity groups. To date, other groups that have
organized around the campaign include White Women for Harris, White
Dudes for Harris, Republicans for Harris, and Latinas for Harris—all
groups critical for the Democrats to win up and down the ballot in
November. In just one month, the Harris-Walz campaign raised a record-breaking $500 million, demonstrating the level of excitement and joy swirling around the vice president.
The enthusiasm has only become more infectious in the past two weeks. After Harris announced her running mate,
Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, both have continued to build momentum
and electrify audiences across the country. Their big test as a joint
ticket was the Democratic National Convention—a natural crescendo on
their journey to November and another opportunity for Black women to
show up and show out for Kamala Harris.
Supposedly,
Black women are valued on the left. Supposedly. Racism and sexism
aren't supposed to exist on the left. But they do. And whether its a
student group, a woman's group or an elderly group that I'm speaking
with -- and I'm doing a minimum of six groups a day (that extends into
the evening) every day and will be doing that up until the day before
the election, I'm hearing over and over the reality: That a very vocal
part of the left wants to steal people's joy.
Those
old enough to remember Barack Obama's two runs for the presidency point
at how the left rallied around Barack. They include the whore Jill
Stein in that. She never called out Barack and when he was on the ropes
in 2012, she immediately attacked Mitt Romney. Today, she attacks
Kamala Harris non-stop.
People are excited by Kamala and by what a Kamala presidency could mean.
And Americans are getting damn sick of everything needed to run through the Gaza Purity Filter.
You're
overplaying your hand and you're pissing off the people you're going to
need after the election regardless of the outcome.
You've
become a group of spoiled brats because you're highly uneducated and
fail to grasp that not everyone's as ignorant as you.
The
country does not need another YOUTUBE video on the 'poor' -- ugly faced
-- state official who is Palestinian-American that was 'denied' from
the DNC stage.
You're really stupid for pimping that to begin with.
Reality, you don't wait until weeks before a convention to push for someone to speak.
And
if you're going to push for someone to speak, they are either a rising
star or an established one. Otherwise, they're not getting on the
stage. Barack got on the stage in 2004 because he was a rising
political star.
He also got on because he was a man.
Or do you idiots not know the story as you pimp for Polly Palestinian to be on the stage?
Hillary
Clinton spoke at the 2004 convention. She was a US senator. She was
the party's biggest fundraiser. And in December of **2003**, it was
announced she wouldn't be speaking.
Why?
Because
she was a woman. Let's not play around. We don't have the time. She
was a nationally known figure, she brought in tons of donations and she
wasn't going to be allowed on stage. So the push began. And the DNC
after a bit said she could introduce her husband. And the push
continued and Hillary became an official speaker.
That took months and months of pressure.
And, again, Hillary was a political star. She brought in the donations. She was in the US Senate, she was nationally known.
And
you crazies thought you could wait until a few weeks before the
convention to start tossing out names. And then you thought that less
than two weeks of work on this political nobody was going to get her and
your pet issue on the national stage at the DNC?
One e-mail Ty passed along had a good question: "So are you saying people shouldn't dream?"
No, that's not our intent and my apologies if it came off that way to anyone.
We can't create a better world without dreams.
But
you need to know what's possible to expand past that. And you need to
grasp that most change is incremental. If people knew just the 2004
story regarding Hillary, they would have known how difficult it was
going to be to get anyone up on that stage. They could have then
shifted to someone nationally known -- didn't have to be a politician --
and spend a couple of months advocating and making the case. The DNC's
dates didn't change. The nominee did.
The assault on Gaza didn't start in June.
These are things that should have been aware and working on for months.
And there is growing sense of outrage over the attacks on Kamala Harris.
It's not what we've seen before. And it's even worse than it was for Joe Biden.
And maybe you're so gleeful in your attacks that you don't realize that your attacks are coming off sexist and racist.
But now she's supposed to ignore her country's needs, her own needs and just vote based on what some zealot for Gaza says?
As
she points out, she's a woman, she's Black and she's a lesbian. She's
the first one Donald and Project 2025 are going after. And where is
that understanding or recognition in Katie Halper's garbage or any of
the rest of the crap ass YOUTUBERS?
The crap ass set all broadcasts as though they're straight White men and only understand straight White men.
Maybe that's why you don't get how much damage you're doing.
Marcia's
an out and proud lesbian and she didn't let the homophobia of a lot of
Gaza supporters stop her from calling out the genocide.
But as she votes to protect her wife, her marriage, her family, these jerks aren't going to support her?
Again, you're destroying your cause.
You're attacking Kamala but you're destroying chances for Palestinians.
This
was a once in a lifetime moment. For the first time in large numbers,
Americans got what the Palestinians went through. And that was
something to build upon. Instead, you're destroying support and,
honestly, this has gone on so long that the average person was already
looking for a reason to check out on it. Fatigue had set in.
But apparently no one told you -- either they were too lazy to or they preferred you ignorant.
I
had hoped to cover Gaza (despite e-mails to the public account, the
attack you're speaking of in your e-mails did not take place in Gaza --
and Gaza supporters, there's something you can work on -- educating
people that the West Bank is not in Gaza) and to cover James Carville's
latest (greatest?) stupidity as well as Iraq. We'll try to pick those
up tomorrow. But voter suppression and the refusal to note the very
real differences between Kamala Harris and Donald are stories that are
not getting covered in the US left media..
The 2024 Democratic National Convention pulled in a massive TV and
online audience across all four days of programming as Democrats brought
the story of the Harris-Walz ticket out to the American people. The
fourth and final night of the convention featured Vice President Kamala
Harris, who told her own story from the stage of the United Center and
laid out her vision for a New Way Forward.
“While Donald Trump obsesses over his (low) primetime ratings,
Democrats built a convention that prioritized reaching people where they
are. For the first time in history, we used vertical streaming, digital
clippings, and content creators to share our story and expand our reach
to households across the country,” said Matt Hill, Democratic National Convention Senior Communications Director.
“This week, tens of millions of American voters heard the story of how
the Harris-Walz ticket is fighting for their families, freedoms, and
future — eclipsing the audience that tuned into the RNC to hear the
story of Trump’s extreme and unpopular Project 2025 agenda that would
take the country backwards.”
Broadcast:
On TV, the final night of the DNC pulled in an estimated 26.2 million viewers across 15 networks.
The DNC outrated the RNC on all four nights with a total estimate of 87.2 million viewers over the course of the week.
Streaming:
Across DNC/Harris-Walz online platforms, the Democratic National Convention racked up 21.3 million views over the course of four days.
Digital Content:
The convention garnered 350 million views – and counting – on partner-created content across the four days of convention.
The 2024 Democratic National Convention credentialed over 200
content creators to cover the convention in person and hundreds of
others to cover remotely, reaching a combined following count of 500
million.
More than 400 users used a microsite, including 206 creators and 64
main stage speakers, to download and use DNC content on their own
platforms.
Throughout the week, creators used more than 3,000 pieces of content, the most downloads and shares compared to any other group.
Democrats are reaching new audiences and taking the message of the
Harris-Walz ticket to the American people, everywhere they get their
information. As part of our work to expand our reach to voters across
the country, the Democratic National Convention offered Americans more
ways to watch and engage than ever before, streaming on over a dozen
platforms. For the first time in convention history, the convention also
hosted vertical streams across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, in addition to the convention being streamed online on
a variety of platforms including Amazon Prime Video, TV device apps
such as Apple TV and Roku TV, and traditional television broadcasts.
Trump
has long insisted that he is a remarkable ratings magnet. During the
2016 campaign, for example, he regularly gave the impression that his
show “The Apprentice” was a consistent ratings winner. In reality, it
was the top-rated show in the country only once,
in its premiere season. The idea that ratings were both a measure of
his popularity and something at which he excelled seems nevertheless to
have taken root.
On
Thursday, it didn’t seem to do much for Fox. Trump has 7.6 million
followers on Truth Social, a group he was encouraging to join him as he
posted about the Harris speech in real time. The increase from 10 p.m.
to 11 p.m. was about a half-million people; the increase from 9 p.m. to
11 p.m. a third of that.
There’s
a better indicator that Trump might not be a Ratings Machine than these
metrics, mind you. If Fox News thought that Trump would draw viewers
like a magnet, they wouldn’t have tried to cut him off. Instead, they
transitioned quickly to Greg Gutfeld’s joke-related show, letting the
Ratings Machine presumably get back to his customers at his club.
“Zuckerberg
admits that the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP
STORY (& much more!). IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
WAS RIGGED. FoxNews, New York Post, Rep. Laurel Lee, House Judiciary
Committee.”
(That post has a quotation mark at the beginning but nowhere else, making it unclear where the quote ends.)
And in response to a screenshot of The New York Post’s cover story, Trump wrote: “This is what everyone’s been waiting for — THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED!”
That
headline reads: “Zuckerberg admits Biden admin pressured Facebook to
censor COVID content, says it was wrong to suppress The Post’s Hunter
laptop coverage.”
Zuckerberg’s letter to Chairman Jordan is clear.
He
writes that in “2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration,
including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to
censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire…”
The election was in November of 2020.
[. . .]
But Trump’s posts appear to miss that he was President in 2020.
Responding
to Chairman Jordan’s Judiciary Committee’s posting of Zuckerberg’s
letter, The Atlantic’s David Frum asked, “who was president of the
United States in the year 2020?”
Israeli forces have arbitrarily detained Palestinian
healthcare workers in Gaza since hostilities began in October 2023,
deported them to detention facilities in Israel, and allegedly tortured
and ill-treated them, Human Rights Watch said today. The detention of
healthcare workers in the context of the Israeli military’s repeated
attacks on hospitals in Gaza has contributed to the catastrophic
degradation of the besieged territory’s healthcare system.
Released
doctors, nurses and paramedics described to Human Rights Watch their
mistreatment in Israeli custody, including humiliation, beatings, forced
stress positions, prolonged cuffing and blindfolding, and denial of
medical care. They also reported torture, including rape and sexual
abuse by Israeli forces, denial of medical care, and poor detention
conditions for the general detainee population.
“The Israeli
government’s mistreatment of Palestinian healthcare workers has
continued in the shadows and needs to immediately stop,” said Balkees Jarrah,
acting Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The torture and
other ill-treatment of doctors, nurses, and paramedics should be
thoroughly investigated and appropriately punished, including by the
International Criminal Court (ICC).”
From March to June 2024,
Human Rights Watch interviewed eight Palestinian healthcare workers who
were taken by the Israeli military from Gaza between November and
December 2023 and detained without charge for between seven days and
five months. Six were detained at work following Israeli sieges of
hospitals or during hospital evacuations that they said had been
coordinated with the Israeli military. None of the healthcare workers
said they were ever informed of the reason for their detention or
charged with an offense. Human Rights Watch also spoke with seven people
who witnessed Israeli soldiers detaining healthcare workers carrying
out their duties.
Human Rights Watch sent a letter to the Israeli
military and Israeli Prison Services with the preliminary findings on
August 13 but has not received a response.
All the healthcare workers interviewed provided similar accounts of
mistreatment in Israeli custody. After being in Gaza, they were deported
to detention facilities in Israel, including the Sde Teiman military base in the Negev desert and Ashkelon prison, or, forcibly transferred to the Anatot military base
near East Jerusalem and the Ofer detention facility, in the occupied
West Bank. All said that they were stripped, beaten, and blindfolded and
handcuffed, for many weeks on end, and pressured to confess to being
members of the Hamas movement with various threats of indefinite
detention, rape, and killing their families in Gaza.
A surgeon
said he was “wearing scrubs and Crocs” when Israeli forces detained him
during their siege of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, Gaza, in
December. “We were 50 healthcare workers, including nurses and doctors,”
he said. “The soldier on the microphone ordered men and boys over 15
years old to evacuate the hospital.... When they took us out of the
hospital, they told us to undress and stay in our underwear.”
One paramedic said
that at the Sde Teiman detention facility he was suspended from a chain
attached to handcuffs, electroshocked, denied medical care for broken
ribs caused by beatings, and administered what he believed was a
psychoactive drug before interrogations. “It was so degrading, it was
unbelievable,” he said. “I was helping people as a paramedic, I never
expected something like this.”
Healthcare workers also reported
being punished in detention for moving or speaking, and collectively
punished if other detainees spoke. “Sometimes if one spoke, they
[soldiers] punished the whole warehouse [at Naqab prison],
collectively,” one healthcare worker said.
The Gaza Health Ministry reported that Israeli forces have detained at least 310 Palestinian healthcare workers since October 7. Healthcare Workers Watch-Palestine,
a nongovernmental organization, documented 259 detentions of healthcare
workers and collected 31 accounts describing torture and other abuses
by Israeli authorities, including the use of stress positions,
deprivation of adequate food and water, threats of sexual violence and
rape, and degrading treatment. Healthcare Workers Watch-Palestine helped
Human Rights Watch interview released healthcare workers.
The
prolonged arbitrary detention and mistreatment of healthcare workers has
exacerbated the health crisis in Gaza, Human Rights Watch said. Since
October, over 92,000 people in Gaza have been wounded, functional
hospitals have fewer than 1,500 inpatient beds, and yet the Israeli
authorities have allowed only 35 percent of nearly 14,000 people who
requested medical evacuations to leave Gaza, the World Health
Organization (WHO) reported on August 5.
The Israeli newspaper
Haaretz reported on June 3 that the Israeli military was conducting
criminal investigations into the deaths of 48 Palestinians in Israeli
detention facilities since October 7. These include Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, a surgeon and head of orthopedics at al-Shifa Hospital, and Dr. Eyad al-Rantisi, the director of a women’s health center at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia.
Common
article 3 to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, applicable to
hostilities between Israel and the Palestinian armed groups, provides
that “[p]ersons taking no active part in the hostilities … shall in all
circumstances be treated humanely.” “Cruel treatment and torture” and
“outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading
treatment” are prohibited at all times. Those wounded and sick “shall
be … cared for.”
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention,
applicable to occupied territories, prohibits individual forcible
transfers within the occupied territory as well as deportations of
civilians from occupied territory to the occupying power’s territory,
regardless of the motive. Serious violations of Common article 3 and
article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention committed with criminal
intent are war crimes.
Human Rights Watch has found that Israeli authorities for decades have
failed to provide credible accountability for torture and other abuses
against Palestinian detainees. According to official Israeli statistics,
between 2019 and 2022, 1,830 complaints
of abuse were opened against Israeli Prison Services officers, with
none resulting in a criminal conviction. Israeli authorities have not allowed independent humanitarian agencies access to Palestinian detainees since the start of hostilities.
Governments
should support international justice efforts to address Israeli abuses
against Palestinian detainees and hold those responsible to account. The
United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other countries should
press Israel to end its abusive detention practices, which form one
aspect of systematic oppression underlying Israeli authorities’ crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians.
The
ICC is considering arrest warrant applications against senior Israeli
officials for grave international crimes and should ensure that its
investigation addresses abuses against Palestinian detainees. Israel’s
allies should press the government to urgently allow independent
monitoring of detention facilities.
“The torture of Palestinian
healthcare workers is a window into the much larger issue of the Israeli
government’s treatment of detainees generally,” Jarrah said.
“Governments should publicly call on the Israeli authorities to release
unlawfully detained healthcare workers and end the cruel mistreatment
and nightmarish conditions for all detained Palestinians.”
Humiliation, Ill-treatment, and Torture
The
healthcare workers interviewed all reported humiliation, ill-treatment,
and torture, including being stripped and beaten, with prolonged painful
stress positions, near-constant cuffing, and blindfolding. Some said
they were threatened with sexual violence and by attack dogs.
Abuses During Deportation, Detention
All
eight men reported being forced to strip publicly immediately after
being taken into custody and remain kneeling for extended periods,
exposed to the cold, and at various times throughout their detention.
Photographs and videos that Israeli soldiers shared online and that Reuters verified show Palestinian detainees unclothed or in underwear. Publishing such images online is an outrage on personal dignity and posted sexualized images are a form of sexual violence, which are war crimes.
“We
were forced to strip in the street and remain in our boxers, one by
one,” said Osama Tashtash, 28, a doctor at the Indonesian Hospital in
Beit Lahia who was arrested in early December at his home nearby. “For
an hour and a half, we were on our knees.” He said that during that
period, he and other detainees were exposed to danger from Israeli
military operations in the area. He said shrapnel fell on them as
Israeli soldiers threw grenades at nearby houses and set them on fire.
Dr.
Khalid Hamoudeh, 34, was arrested on the morning of December 12 at
Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia. A photograph circulated late that
evening by the Israeli broadcaster Channel 12 shows Dr. Hamoudeh
shirtless alongside four other men he identified as fellow healthcare
workers. The photograph shows the men standing in a row in front of an
Israeli soldier holding a light panel, illuminating the detainees.
Dr. Hamoudeh said they were photographed, then designated for release
or detention. Behind them the photograph shows hundreds of men sitting
in a large pit with at least 18 Israeli soldiers guarding them. A
detailed analysis by the investigative TechJournalist identified several detainees with their hands tied behind their back, including Dr. Hamoudeh.
The
image, whose site was identified first by the open-source researcher
FDov on X, formerly known as Twitter, and later confirmed by Human
Rights Watch, was taken approximately half a kilometer northeast of the
hospital. Dr. Hamoudeh said that about 50 healthcare workers sitting
together separately from internally displaced people. He said he was
told to undress and stay in his underwear and was then blindfolded.
The
healthcare workers described beatings and physical abuse after being
detained, including being punched, kicked with steel-toed boots,
slapped, and beaten with assault-rifle butts by Israeli soldiers.
Eyad
Abed, 50, a surgeon at the Indonesian Hospital who was detained during a
coordinated evacuation of the hospital in November, said:
Every
minute we were beaten. I mean all over the body, on sensitive areas
between the legs, the chest, the back. We were kicked all over the body
and the face. They used the front of their boots which had a metal tip,
then their weapons. They had lighters: one soldier tried to burn me but
burned the person next to me. I told them I’m a doctor, but they didn’t
care.
Abed said that he had broken ribs and a broken
tailbone as a result of the physical assault by Israeli soldiers during
his arrest and detention, which two months later still had not healed.
An
ambulance driver who asked not to be named said while he was being held
with dozens of other men in large a metal “cage” near the Israel-Gaza
border fence, he saw guards beat to death two men, one of whom he
recognized, with metal bars.
The healthcare workers all described
ill-treatment during their deportation from Gaza to detention facilities
in Israel, including beatings, sitting in prolonged painful stress
positions while blindfolded and cuffed by the hands and feet, being
“stacked above each other like sheep,” pepper sprayed, and denied
water.
Abuses in Detention Facilities
The
healthcare workers said that Israeli authorities abused detainees at
detention facilities inside Israel. Four said that when they arrived at
detention facilities, the authorities forced them to wear adult diapers
and denied them access to toilets.
The ambulance driver, who was
detained for five months, was first transferred to a prison in Ashkelon,
where guards interrogated him daily for a week, during which time they
bound him in his underwear to a chair for between 10 and 15 hours a day
in a room with a blasting air conditioner. He said he had been badly
beaten and that sitting caused extreme pain in his spine. He said the
authorities denied him access to a toilet, forcing him to urinate on
himself, and refused to provide him any food or water. He was then
transferred to the Ofer military detention facility in the Occupied West
Bank, where at night, the guards threw cold water on him and on his
mattress.
A paramedic, Walid Khalili,
36, said that when soldiers removed his blindfold at the Sde Teiman
facility, he saw he was in a large building “like a warehouse,” with
chains hanging from the ceiling. Dozens of detainees in diapers were
suspended from the ceiling, with the chains attached to their square
metal handcuffs. He said that personnel at the facility then suspended
him from a chain, so his feet were not touching the ground, dressed him
in a garment and a headband that were attached to wires, and shocked him
with electricity.
Two doctors held at Sde Teiman said that other
detainees came to them to seek care for wounds inflicted by Israeli
authorities. When detainees “lifted their shirts, I saw signs of abuse
and physical beatings,” one doctor said. The other said, “I saw [men]
who had cigarette burns on their arms, it was very clear. One had a dog
bite on his stomach.”
As punishment for moving or speaking,
detainees would be forced to stand, sometimes for hours, with their
cuffed hands held above their head or fixed to a fence, detainees said.
Detainees could hear the screams of other detainees being beaten nearby.
One said that after he asked a question, an Israeli officer forced his
fingers through a chain-link fence, he “told me to shut up and not say a
word,” and pressed downward on the detainee’s fingers for several
minutes, causing severe pain until the detainee could no longer feel his
fingers.
Three healthcare workers reported soldiers using
military dogs to intimidate detainees. “They would threaten to shoot us
and start loading their weapons,” one doctor said. “This felt like
horror. They brought in military dogs. I screamed, that was the worst
moment in my life, because I was still cuffed and blindfolded, not
seeing where the dogs are coming from.” Another doctor said dogs were
brought in late at night to wake and terrify detainees.
Threats and Acts of Sexual Abuse
Three
healthcare workers said that Israeli authorities threatened them with
sexual assault. Khader Abu Nada, 30, a nurse at Beit Hanoun hospital in
northern Gaza, said that when he denied any Hamas affiliation during his
first interrogation at a military base in Gaza, the commander
threatened to rape him with an “electric stick.” When Abu Nada continued
to deny any Hamas affiliation, soldiers beat him until he was bleeding
from his nose, hands, and mouth.
Abu Nada said the commander then
asked him where his mother was and threatened to bring her from the
checkpoint where he was arrested and strip her in front of everyone.
“When I heard this, I was psychologically broken. I felt humiliated,” he
said. He said he was threatened with rape again prior to his release.
A
detained paramedic who was transferred to al-Naqab prison after 20 days
in Sde Teiman, said that a man who was visibly “bleeding from his
bottom” was brought in and placed next to him. The man told the
paramedic that before he was placed in detention, “three soldiers took
turns raping him with an M16 [assault rifle]. No one else knew, but he
told me as a paramedic. He was terrified.” In addition, a doctor said
while he was detained in a military base, a detainee, “in his late 30s,
crying hard … told me he was sexually assaulted during the strip
search.”
Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Conditions
All
the healthcare workers described horrific conditions in detention.
Abed, the surgeon, said the food was “horrible” and inadequate, and that
he lost 22 kilograms during a month and a half in detention. The
bathrooms were “not even fit for animals.” The mattresses and blankets
were thin, and the cold nights were “unbearable.” In the cells, water
for toilets and for drinking was only available for one hour a day, with
a “disgusting” stench emanating from the non-flushable toilets. “They
gave us a bag for the garbage. We used to fill it with water and drink
from it later. It smelled horrible but we had no choice,” Abed said.
For
detainees’ meals at Sde Teiman, soldiers “emptied tuna cans into a
garbage bag and gave it to me,” said Dr. Khalid Hamoudeh, whom soldiers
ordered to distribute food to detainees. “One time I saw a soldier spit
in the bag. Many [detainees] were starving and telling me they were
hungry.” A nurse detained at Anatot said, “We got two meals [a day]. It
was terrible food. I would just drink water, there were no fruits, not
even apples. They gave us food just to survive the day.”
Khalili,
the paramedic, said that at one point when he was detained in Sde
Teiman, an Israeli news crew arrived, and a detainee who understood
Hebrew told him that a prison official told the journalists, falsely,
that the detainees were members of a unit of Hamas’s armed wing
responsible for the October 7 attacks. The next day, the paramedic said,
soldiers brought food and set it in front of the detainees, ordered
them not to eat it, took photographs, then took the food away.
Prolonged Cuffing and Blindfolding
The
healthcare workers said that they were cuffed almost constantly
throughout their detention. They said Israeli authorities often ignored
detainees who complained about the tightness of their cuffs or tightened
their cuffs as punishment for complaining. In a public letter, an
Israeli doctor working in the military field hospital at Sde Teiman wrote
that in a single week, “two prisoners had their legs amputated due to
handcuff injuries, which unfortunately is a routine event.”
Abu Nada, the nurse, said he was arrested at the Kuwaiti Roundabout
in Gaza on November 22 while evacuating from the north with his family.
Soldiers ordered him to strip, cuffed and blindfolded him, then took him
for questioning. He said his first interrogation ended with an Israeli
military commander punching him in the face and kicking him all over his
body, then ordering another soldier to tighten his cuffs and drag him
to an open field, where he waited on his knees for an hour.
“My
wrists hurt so much, they felt paralyzed and numb. I cried so much, I
couldn’t take the pain,” Abu Nada said. When he asked a soldier to
loosen his cuffs, he said the soldier repeatedly kicked his head
instead. “I told him, ‘Kill me I can’t take it anymore, kill me
already.’” Israeli soldiers ignored or beat him in response to his
multiple requests to loosen his handcuffs.
Abu Nada said his
wrists later turned black, and he feared his mistreatment may have
caused permanent damage: “I still feel pain in my hands. My hands are
weak, and I have no strength to hold or carry anything. Also, there’s
still pain from my shoulders all the way to my fingertips. I have severe
neck pain from the pressure on my head when they kept pushing our heads
down.”
As Physicians for Human Rights Israel has reported, prolonged physical restraint causes
intense pain and can result in permanent nerve damage that interferes
with using the hands and in extreme cases can lead to death.
The healthcare workers also all reported prolonged, near-constant blindfolding. According to Physicians for Human Rights Israel,
“blindfolding can, even with short-term use, induce visual
hallucinations in healthy individuals. Over extended periods, prolonged
use of blindfolds can contribute to the onset of anxiety disorders,
depression, substance abuse, and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)
in the medium to long term.”
"The Israeli government's mistreatment of Palestinian healthcare
workers has continued in the shadows and needs to immediately stop," HRW
acting Middle East director Balkees Jarrah said in a statement. "The
torture and other ill-treatment of doctors, nurses, and paramedics
should be thoroughly investigated and appropriately punished, including
by the International Criminal Court (ICC)."
"The torture of Palestinian healthcare workers is a window into
the much larger issue of the Israeli government's treatment of detainees
generally," Jarrah added. "Governments should publicly call on the
Israeli authorities to release unlawfully detained healthcare workers
and end the cruel mistreatment and nightmarish conditions for all
detained Palestinians."
[. . .]
Meanwhile at the ICC -- which is also located in The Hague -- Prosecutor Karim Khan is
pushing
the tribunal to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three
Hamas leaders, at least one of whom, former political chief Ismail
Haniyeh, has been assassinated by Israel.
Why is anyone urging the ICC?
They
got a huge outpouring of respect and praise when they did the little
that they did months and months ago. And nothing has come from it.
The prosecutor of the International
Criminal Court stressed the court had jurisdiction to investigate
Israeli nationals and asked judges to urgently decide on arrest warrants
for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister,
Yoav Gallant.
In court filings made public Friday, prosecutor Karim Khan urged judges weighing the arrest warrants sought against Israeli officials and Hamas leaders to not delay. "Any unjustified delay in these proceedings detrimentally affects the rights of victims," he said.
Khan
has to ask and urge. He works for the ICC. The rest of us don't. The
ICC has been inactive and derelict in their duties. You don't beg that
kind of agency. You protest, you shame it, you make sure that the
judges see that you're on to their inaction and that the ICC is becoming
nothing in the eyes of the world. Maybe then they'll take some
action. Maybe they won't -- but if they don't, it'll be after we've
exposed them as the useless body they are becoming.
It
is almost September. And the paperwork for arrest warrants was
originally filed in May. And the iCC has refused to respond to that
paperwork. It's been almost four months. Is there anything else as
prominent and ongoing taking place on the world state as Gaza? Is there
any excuse for going even one month without responding?
There's
not. There's never been. Let's all wake up and grasp that the ICC
judges are doing nothing and that this is not a mistake on their part,
this is the actual choice of (non) action that they have chosen.
Meanwhile, Wafaa Shurafa and Samy Magdy (AP) report, "One of Gaza’s last functioning hospitals has been emptying out in
recent days as Israel has ordered the evacuation of nearby areas and
signaled a possible ground operation in a town that has been largely
spared throughout the war, officials said Monday." It's al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in deir al-Balah. ABC NEWS adds, "Out of the 650 patients in Al-Aqsa Hospital, only 100 remain in the
hospital that are being treated, the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health
said." ALJAZEERA notes:
The
director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya says Israel wants to
“destroy the health sector” by preventing fuel from reaching the Strip.
Giving an update on the situation at the hospital, he said
most people who arrive wounded by Israeli attacks die due to poor
conditions and lack of medical services.
He also said Gaza is facing a “germ war” and demanded the institution of a vaccination programme.
Earlier this month,
the Health Ministry in Gaza reported that it detected the first polio
case in the besieged enclave after United Nations officials called for a
pause in the fighting to enable a vaccination campaign for children
against the virus.
After six sewage samples taken in Gaza in late June tested positive for poliovirus, World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that it was “just a matter of time” before the disease reached thousands of Palestinian children.
At the time of his warning in late July, cases of acute flaccid paralysis,
a symptom of poliovirus infection, had been flagged in the area where
the samples were taken. Just week’s later, Gaza’s first polio case in 25
years was confirmed in an unvaccinated 10-month-old.
Now more than 1.2 million oral polio vaccines have arrived
in the Gaza Strip, with millions more expected in coming days. The aim
is to vaccinate about 640,000 children under the age of 10 with two
doses each.
But a cease-fire or a
pause passed off as a 'cease-fire' is needed for the doses to be given.
And there's still no pause in sight.
THE NATIONAL reports on the shrinking space in Gaza in the video below.
Gaza remains under assault. Day 325 of the assault in the wave that began in October. Binoy Kampmark (DISSIDENT VOICE) points out, "Bloodletting as form; murder as fashion. The ongoing campaign in Gaza
by Israel’s Defence Forces continues without stalling and restriction.
But the burgeoning number of corpses is starting to become a challenge
for the propaganda outlets: How to justify it? Fortunately for Israel,
the United States, its unqualified defender, is happy to provide cover
for murder covered in the sheath of self-defence." CNN has explained, "The Gaza Strip is 'the most dangerous place' in the world to be a child, according to the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund." ABC NEWS quotes UNICEF's December 9th statement, ""The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.
Scores of children are reportedly being killed and injured on a daily
basis. Entire neighborhoods, where children used to play and go to
school have been turned into stacks of rubble, with no life in them." NBC NEWS notes, "Strong majorities of all voters in the U.S. disapprove of President Joe
Biden’s handling of foreign policy and the Israel-Hamas war, according to the latest national NBC News poll.
The erosion is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom
believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza." The
slaughter continues. It has displaced over 1 million people per the US
Congressional Research Service. THE NATIONAL notes, "Gaza death toll rises to 40,476, with 93,647 wounded." Early on, Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) pointed out, "Academics and legal experts around the world, including Holocaust scholars, have condemned
the six-week Israeli assault of Gaza as genocide." Months ago, United Nations Women noted,
"More than
1.9 million people -- 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza --
have
been displaced, including what UN Women estimates to be nearly 1 million
women and girls. The entire population of Gaza -- roughly 2.2 million
people -- are in crisis levels of of acute food insecurity or worse." Months
ago, AP noted, "About 4,000 people are reported missing." February 7th, Jeremy Scahill explained
on DEMOCRACY NOW! that "there’s an estimated 7,000 or 8,000
Palestinians missing, many of them in graves that are the rubble of
their former home." February 5th, the United Nations' Phillipe
Lazzarini Tweeted:
April 11th, Sharon Zhang (TRUTHOUT) reported, "In addition to the over 34,000 Palestinians who have been counted as
killed in Israel’s genocidal assault so far, there are 13,000
Palestinians in Gaza who are missing, a humanitarian aid group has
estimated, either buried in rubble or mass graves or disappeared into
Israeli prisons. In a report released Thursday, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that the estimate is based on initial reports and that the actual number of people missing is likely even higher."
After the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies denied that Joe Biden had won. To this day, election deniers
refuse to accept that Trump lost the election. Efforts to thwart Biden
from becoming president, including the Trump-inspired insurrection at
the Capitol on January 6, 2021, were ubiquitous. Trump’s supporters
filed dozens of lawsuits to stop the certification of Biden’s win, none
of which was successful.
One of the tactics the election deniers used was the refusal of local
officials to certify the results of the 2020 election, based on the
false claim that there was widespread voter fraud.
Fortunately, safeguards built into state laws held, and they prevented Trump from stealing the election from Biden.
During the 2022 midterm elections, “several rogue local officials” in
multiple states “refused or threatened to refuse to certify valid
election results based on false claims of widespread fraud. All of these
efforts were unsuccessful,” Lauren Miller Karalunas, counsel in the
Brennan Center’s democracy program, told Truthout.
In this interview, Miller Karalunas explains the mandatory duty of
election officials to certify the results. She details what would happen
if the 2024 election results are not certified by the constitutional
cut-off date, the legal remedies available to protect certification of
the results of the election, and whether the strategies of the election
deniers to undermine the outcome could be successful.
Yesterday,
Thom Hartman spoke with investigative journalist Greg Palast about
former candidate and forever fool Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
