‘Faithless electors’, another sign of dysfunctional US electoral system

 

‘Faithless electors’, another sign of dysfunctional US electoral system

They didn’t teach us about faithless electors in grammar school seventy years ago, but they should have.

Since then I learned that I’m not really voting for Tweedledum or Tweedledee when I mark my ballot. I’m voting for Mr. or Ms. Nobody, a party functionary who promises to vote for my pick at the 50 state Electoral College elections roughly 5 weeks later.

Good system right?

Not exactly. No power in the Constitution, which set up the Electoral College to prevent direct democracy and to entice slave states to ratify the Constitution, requires those Nobodys to vote for my pick. And while 29 states and DC have laws requiring electors to vote for the state winner, they have never prevented a single faithless elector from voting for the state loser, or Donald Duck for that matter.

This convoluted system is not just an imaginary annoyance. It has occurred 157 tomes since Samuel Miles became Faithless Elector No 1 in 1796. Sam voted for Tom Jefferson instead of state winner Johnny Adams. Why? Because he could.

The last time this happened was just 8 years ago when 2 electors bailed on The Donald and 5 deserted Hillary.

What’s the big deal one might argue since the 7 faithless electors did not change the 2016 election? In a close Electoral College vote it could take just a few faithless electors to change the presidential winner. Just a single faithless elector could prevent either candidate winning, throwing the presidential election into the House of Representatives when the new Congress is sworn in late January. Good grief.

They’re still not teaching America’s future voters about faithless electors in civics classes today, if they even teach civics anymore. Maybe that’s a good thing after all. It might be too much craziness about America’s electoral process for the little tykes to process. Let them enjoy their electoral innocence for a while before discovering how dysfunctional the self-proclaimed ‘world’s greatest democracy’ really is.

After election, will progressives recognize and oppose US genocide in Gaza?

 

After election, will progressives acknowledge and oppose US genocide in Gaza?

 

During the current US election cycle, many progressives have recoiled from addressing the 13 month long US enabled Israeli genocide in Gaza.

 

They are singularly focused on pushing Kamala Harris to victory, saving democracy from the unhinged authoritarian Trump. As a result they’ve banished the word much less the reality of the genocide which the US enables.

 

That is deplorable. Every day dozens, hundreds, possibly a thousand Palestinian civilians die in the worst genocide this century. All financed, publicly supported and weaponized by their beloved Biden/Harris administration.

 

When the genocide in Gaza is brought up for discussion, too many progressives are ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.’

 

When asked to push back against US weaponizing, publicly supporting, financing the genocide, progressives come up with the darnedest excuses

 

‘There is no genocide in Gaza, just a defensive war against Hamas.’

‘Don’t dare say anything that will jeopardize Harris’ chances.’

 

‘The destruction in Gaza will be much worse under Trump.’

 

‘The United States has no influence on the government of Israel.’

 

‘President Biden and Vice President Harris are working night and day to achieve ceasefire in Gaza.’

 

‘People have been fighting each other there for thousands of years and nothing will change that.’

 

Maybe these otherwise fine progressives will open their eyes and souls to ongoing destruction of Gaza once the election ends and decide to resist it passionately.

 

Alas, with both candidates locked in ironclad support for sending endless billions for Israel to ‘finish the job’, they just might shrug and continue ignoring the most greatest moral dilemma of their lifetime

Bill Clinton working hard to defeat Kamala in Michigan

 

Bill Clinton working hard to defeat Kamala in Michigan

 

Has former President Clinton lost his political mind besides his moral conscience?

 

He stumped in Michigan on behalf of fellow Democrat Kamala Harris this week. He may also have stomped on Kamala’s chances to win Michigan with his outrageous comments supporting Israeli genocide in Gaza. This in a state with a large Arab and Muslim population who withheld their Primary vote from Kamala over her overt support for the 13 month long genocide destroying any semblance of decent life for 2,300,000 Palestinians in Gaza.

 

Israel, Clinton remarked “has been forced to kill civilians” because Hamas is indistinguishable from the tens of thousands o Palestinian moms and kids begin obliterated by the Biden/Harris 2,000 lb. bombs.

 

Clinton went further in appearing to justify the genocide by proclaiming “I got news for Hamas…Israelis were there first in Palestine, before their faith existed.”

 

Arab- and Muslim-American leaders blasted Clinton’s comments. Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of America’s first Arab-majority city, Dearborn, said. “When you see the remarks of former President Bill Clinton, talking about how Israel is forced to kill civilians … it gets extremely frustrating,”

 

Robert S McCaw, director of government affairs at the Council on American-Islamic Relations charged “Bill Clinton’s callous and dishonest attempt to justify the Israeli government’s attacks on civilians in Gaza was as insulting as it was Islamophobic.”

 

According to Amer Zhar, a Palestinian American school board candidate in Dearborn, Michigan, “It’s hard to imagine anything more insulting than what Bill Clinton said about us. He invoked the oldest Zionist tropes in some bizarre effort to convince us to vote for Kamala Harris,”

No surprise Trump’s polling numbers are up among Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan.

 

President Clinton was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Muslim world with his life degrading sanctions on Iraq during his presidency. A quarter century on he’s inexplicably supporting the worst genocide this century. In the process he may be sabotaging Kamala Harris’ White House bid, allowing a return of Trumpism.

Maybe UN could help Kamala differentiate between war and genocide in Gaza

 

Maybe UN could help Kamala differentiate between war and genocide in Gaza

 

 

During her campaign for president, Kamala Harris has been loath to comment on the ongoing 13 month Israeli genocide in Gaza. But when interviewers or protesters raise the genocide issue, Harris is quick to say she’s ‘doing everything I can to achieve a ceasefire in the ‘Gaza war.’

Bunk. She fully supports her boss sending over 50,000 tons of death weapons to obliterate any semblance of life in Gaza’s mere 139 square miles. Schools, universities, hospitals, water and sewerage facilities, most housing gone. She calls that weaponry ‘self-defense in Israel’s war against Hamas.’ She promises to continue her boss’s genocide policies in Gaza if she becomes president, tho she’s erased the G word from her vocabulary and moral conscience.

 

 

Sure would be helpful if Kamala would peruse the new UN report titled “Genocide as colonial erasure,” detailing how Israel seeks to “eradicate the very existence of the Palestinian people in Palestine. This genocidal project, is now metastasizing to the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

The report was issued by Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. Albanese makes an urgent appeal to the international community to impose a full arms embargo and sanctions on Israel until the genocide of Palestinians is halted. She calls on Israel to accept a permanent ceasefire. She demands that Israel, as required by international law and U.N. resolutions, withdraw its military and colonists from Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

 

 

Albanese seeks reactivation of UN’s Special Committee Against Apartheid to address the situation in Palestine including possible suspension of Israel’s membership in the U.N.

Her report doesn’t’ just charge Israel with genocide. It reveals it in excruciating bloody detail. One of the most ghoulish is Israel’s forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into 3 safe zones, but once there begins attacking them and demanding they move to new safe zones. That’s a death march that dwarfs the Japanese Death March of US POW’s on Bataan in WWII.

 

 

Last May Israel invaded Rafah, driving nearly a million Palestinians into uninhabitable wastelands of raw sewage, rotting bodies and endless rubble.

 

 

Over 90% of Gaza’s 2,300,000 Palestinians have been displaced under “horrendous conditions.”

The report details nearly a hundred Israeli massacres.

 

 

The report describes how Israel uses “indiscriminate aerial and sniper fire”to repeatedly attack critical aid distribution sites, tent encampments, hospitals and markets.

 

 

Hundreds of aid workers and journalists have been murdered to keep aid from starving, sick Palestinians and keeping the genocide out of public view.

 

 

There’s more, much more in the UN report that Kamala should read before she makes another grotesque pledge to keep arming Israel with the weapons she terms merely defense after she enters the White House.

 

 

Of course, at the rate US weaponry, UN vetoes protecting Israeli genocide, and endless proclamations of total Israeli support, all 2,300,000 Palestinians in Gaza may be dead and gone by the time a President Harris is inaugurated next January 20.

Young Republicans and Democrats agree…end US support of Israeli genocide in Gaza

 

Young Republicans and Democrats agree…end US support of Israeli genocide in Gaza

 

For 13 months President Joe Biden has been gifting Israel with the firepower to utterly destroy life for 2,300,000 Palestinians in Gaza. That amounts to over 50,000 tons of death weapons costing over $18 billion of our precious treasure. Instead of using that treasure to uplift the Homeland, Biden is using it to flatten Gaza, burying thousands of Palestinian moms and kids under the rubble caused by 2,000 lb.bomb Made In USA.

 

While on domestic issues Republicans and Democrats agree on nothing, they are coalescing around opposition to US weaponizing Israeli genocide in Gaza.

 

This is particularly true in the 18 to 29 age group. Young Democrats favor cutting off weapons to Israel by a whopping 41% (62$% to 41%). Young Republicans are not far behind their fellow Democrats, opposing continued weapons 52% to 36%. Independents oppose more weapons as well to obliterate Palestinians from Gaza 47% to 34%.

 

Overall the 18 to 29 age group resoundingly opposes Biden’s weaponizing genocide in Gaza 55% to 29%.

 

Yet, the presidential nominees Harris and Trump try to outdo each other in fueling the destruction of Gaza as a habitable 139 square miles for the most beleaguered people on Earth. Harris says her support for Israel is “ironclad”, she’s merely supporting Israel’s “defense” and she has no intention of “changing Biden’s Israeli policies”.

 

Trump is even more evil if that’s possible, ghoulishly demanding that Israel “finish the job”, conveniently omitting the obvious, cleansing Gaza of all 2,300,000 Palestinians to promote Israeli settlement of valuable oceanfront property.

 

Nether Harris nor Trump give a damn about the opinion of America’s future leaders when it comes to stopping the worst genocide this century. Their focus is on placating the Israel Lobby and the weapons makers, both of whom lavish campaign donations on pro Israel, pro war candidates and policies while burying pro Palestinian and antiwar candidates under a blizzard of campaign cash.

 

Corporate media plays along with both candidates ignoring America’s youngest voting block. They have largely self-censored discussion of the greatest moral dilemma looming over any presidential election on our lifetime. They, like the candidates , follow the money.

That’s the sad tale of 2024 American electoral politics…money talks, and moral public opinion walks.

Biden to Bibi: ‘OK to continue Gaza genocide till after election’

 

Biden to Bibi: ‘OK to continue Gaza genocide till after election’

On October 14, President Biden sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu giving Israel 30 days to allow more aid of food, water and medicine into Gaza’s 139 square miles being utterly destroyed by Israel for the past year. It’s noteworthy that the 30 day time limit ends 9 days after the US election.

Biden’s letter is brilliant politics and grotesque governance. Biden, who has been funding, supporting and enabling the yearlong genocide in Gaza, desperately needs to appear peace loving ahead of the election. He knows a majority of his Democratic voters are horrified by his genocide enabling. They want him to end the so far 50,000 tons of weapons he’s already given Israel to demolish Gaza.

The letter, designed to promote his concern for the devastation he’s enabled, will do nothing to end the genocide in Gaza. Netanyahu has ignored every one of Biden’s pleas for supplying life sustaining aid there. The letter doesn’t even state Biden will cut off aid to Israel. It merely implies that if US demands aren’t met, the US might consider enforcing foreign assistance laws. Those laws forbid the US from sending weapons to any nation committing wholesale destruction of civilian populations. But not one word about actually cutting off those weapons destroying Gaza.

Every day dozens, hundreds, even a thousand or more Palestinians die in Gaza, obliterated by Biden’s 2,000 lb. bombs, or killed more slowly from disease or starvation. Biden does not care. His toothless letter begging for more aid to the 2,300,000 Palestinians will do nothing to alleviate their suffering. But it may mollify his antiwar critics enough to help achieve Democratic victory Election Day.

Win or lose November 5, Biden is unlikely to do anything substantive to end the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza. It goes against everything he’s believed in and supported about Israeli colonial domination of Palestine for his entire 52 year governmental career. But it will ensure he descends into historical infamy for enabling the worst genocide of the 21st century.

Release Menendez brothers….impose death penalty on life imprisonment

 

Release Menendez brothers….impose death penalty on life imprisonment

 

It’s good to hear LA District Attorney George Gascon recommending Erik and Lyle Menendez be released after serving 35 years of a life sentence for killing their parents in 1989.

"I believe that they have paid their debt to society," are words one never hears from top prosecutors in heinous murder cases. But it’s about time. Society squanders billions of scarce public treasure to become essentially a nursing home for aging murderers who are no longer a threat to society.

 

Indeed, the Menendez boys, just 19 and 21 when they shot gunned their parents to death, may have been acting from extreme parental abuse that was prevented from discussion during the retrial that convicted them in 1996.

 

DA Gascon understands that the unallowed evidence may have resulted in a prison term lower than the actual 35 years they have now served. Gascon believes the two are no longer a threat to society at large, if they ever were.

 

The Menendez case should reemphasize the need to abolish life sentences including its noxious corollary, ‘without parole.’ They are a throwback to unenlightened times when the goto punishment for murder, if not the death penalty, was life in a prison cage. But life sentences have nothing to do with punishing wrongdoing and protecting society. They are primarily a reflex revenge action that hinders rather than improves society.

 

Over 200,000 of America’s 1,400,000 prisoners are serving life. Some cannot safely be released till they’re to infirm to no longer threaten society. But many thousands have been rehabilitated, indeed have become decent persons after long incarceration, justifying their eligibility for parole.

That certainly applies to the Menendez brothers. A couple of hundred thousand more deserve their chance at improving the American system of justice thru parole as well.

Harris admits US/Israeli genocide in Gaza….then says ‘Never mind’

 

Harris admits US/Israeli genocide in Gaza….then says ‘Never mind’

 

At a campaign stop in Milwaukee, Kamala Harris was confronted by a protester who charged the Biden administration “invested “billions of dollars in genocide in Gaza that has resulted in massive child casualties.”

 

Before Harris could consult her scripted genocide denial playbook, she blurted out “What he’s talking about, it’s real. That’s not the subject that I came to discuss today, but it’s real.”

 

Mainstream news didn’t cover Harris’ US genocide agreement comment. But just to be safe her campaign issued a statement that Harris “doesn’t agree with defining the war as a genocide, and she has not expressed such a stance in the past, as this is not her position.”

 

Perhaps the guilt of participating in the most grotesque genocide in this century is beginning to weigh on the conscience of Kamala Harris. If so campaign protesters, keep holding up the mirror of Biden/Harris genocide enabling in Gaza to Kamala at every campaign stop. She must be constantly reminded she cannot escape the depravity into which she has sunk to achieve the US presidency.

President Biden’s depraved last 15 months enables Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza

 

President Biden’s depraved last 15 months enables Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza

November 7th marks 52 years since Joe Biden was first elected to national office as Senator from Delaware. During that time as Senator, Vice President, President, he’s supported every US military intervention sowing havoc around the world from Vietnam thru Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Yemen, Syria, Libya and Ukraine to name eight.

He’s also been a self-proclaimed Zionist. On October 21, 2023 he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin in Israel and told him "I don't believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist." This was at the beginning of Netanyahu’s scorched earth policy of genocidal ethnic cleaning to remove all 2,300,000 Palestinians from Gaza.

Biden pledged America’s military treasure for Netanyahu to complete his decades’ long dream of expelling Palestinians from Gaza for Israeli settlement. Of course, Biden was careful to couch the so far $17.9 billion in US weaponry as purely defensive to complete the destruction of Hamas following their October 7, 2023 attack.

But in the ensuing year, Netanyahu has used our treasure to utterly destroy Gaza as a habitable land. He’s dropped Biden’s 2,000 lb. blockbuster bombs to obliterate most of Gaza’s infrastructure including schools, hospitals, water and sewage treatment facilities along with tens of thousands of Palestinians moms and kids. The death toll likely exceeds a hundred thousand with virtually every remaining Palestinian suffering starvation and illness from Netanyahu’s preventing most food, water and medicine from reaching Gaza.

All of this grotesque carnage is financed and enabled by President Joe Biden.

What Biden calls defense, the Israelis call Palestinian Removal. Was he even aware of this week’s Israeli conference on Israeli resettlement of Gaza titled ‘Preparing to Resettle Gaza’ organized by Netanyahu’s government and settler organization Nachala? The topic was not defense against Hamas. It was about removing the remaining 2,200,000 Palestinians trapped in the moonscape created by Biden’s bombs. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir told attendees “We will encourage the voluntary transfer of all Gazan citizens. We will offer them the opportunity to move to other countries because that land belongs to us.” What Ben Gvir didn’t articulate was that those not leaving voluntarily will be killed.

Joe Biden has been a career long supporter of Israeli colonial Apartheid control of the Palestinian people. He’s never taken a significant action to advance Palestinian statehood much less recognize Palestinians’ humanity. But in his last 15 months as president, he’s gone over the abyss into depravity, enabling the most grotesque genocide in this century.

Alas, Joe Biden is not leaving the presidency on a high note.