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Sunday’s Forum
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13 responses to “Sunday’s Forum”
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Bit of a shocker.
Sen. Lindsey Graham dies at 71 after brief and sudden illness
Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who was elected to the Senate in 2003 and was a close political ally of President Donald Trump, has died, his office confirmed early Sunday. He was 71.
Graham died Saturday night “from a brief and sudden illness,” his office said in a statement.
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May Ammit feast on his heart.
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Our own Minneapolis.
Houston protesters call on feds to release more information, and witnesses, to Tuesday’s ICE killing
Hundreds gathered at Houston City Hall’s steps Saturday evening, holding umbrellas in one hand and signs in the other, reiterating demands many have been making for days: answers on what led to the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and to release from immigration detention the three men who witnessed the shooting.
“I would like to see a clear understanding of what happened, of why they believed they had the right to do that to an individual, and for them to be held accountable,” Charles Torres, a 48-year-old Houston resident, said of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
An ICE agent killed the 52-year-old on Tuesday after agents in unmarked vehicles stopped him and three others on their way to work building homes in North Houston. Aside from patchy videos from local businesses along the streets near where Salgado Araujo died, footage of the incident is minimal because the agents were not wearing body cameras.
How convenient.
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I have never bought into the idea that you can’t speak ill of the dead. Dying does not exemptyou from judgment. Lindsay Graham was the worst sort of gutless, bootlicking toady. It’s a shame that Ukraine has lost a Senate ally, but beyond that, what a loathsome little creep.
I’m hoping someone will have an intelligent analysis of the special election that has to take place in SC. Not something I know anything about.
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Most immediately, South Carolina law mandates that GOP Gov. Henry McMaster name a replacement senator who can serve out the rest of Graham’s current term this year.
But Graham was also up for reelection in November. Republicans will have to hold a primary at some point later this summer to replace Graham on the ballot. Graham was set to face Democrat Annie Andrews in the general election, where he was overwhelmingly favored to win in deep-red South Carolina.
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The genocide no one cares about:
Last year, human rights experts warned for many months that a brutal militia was about to overrun a major Sudanese city, El Fasher, and massacre inhabitants.
President Trump and other world leaders mostly shrugged. The militia went ahead and overran El Fasher, slaughtering some 60,000 people in a few weeks.
Now the same militia is besieging another major Sudanese city, El Obeid, which has half a million or more people, and is also threatening populations to the north in the Darfur region. Some inside El Obeid are starving, yet, again, Trump and many other world leaders seem largely indifferent.
Preventing the slaughter would not require military action. It would not even require money. Put aside the arguments over whether humanitarian assistance is worthwhile. (But first, let me say that I believe the billions spent on the Iran war would have been better allocated to $2 bed nets to save children’s lives from malaria.) It may be that all we need to do to avert atrocities in Sudan is to speak up.
The backdrop: Sudan is probably the world’s worst humanitarian crisis right now. The country is caught in a civil war between the army and a largely Arab militia, the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., and while both sides have behaved viciously, the R.S.F. is particularly notorious for savagery, including for killing and raping members of several Black African ethnic groups. While reporting on the Chad-Sudan border in 2024, I interviewed survivors who described the R.S.F.’s systematically killing men and boys over the age of 10 and gang-raping many women and girls.
“We don’t want to see any Black people,” one woman quoted an R.S.F. leader telling villagers before the militia slaughtered the men and boys, among them her five brothers.
Who is financing this genocide? The UAE. Our ally, the UAE. Trump family sugar daddy, the UAE. Have we had even a single post about this at OTB? Haven’t seen one. Why does no one give a single fuck? Is it because it’s Black people dying? Or because the killers aren’t Jews? A little of both?
We should have the fortitude to speak up about human rights outrages whether the responsible party is Russia, China, Israel, America or the Emirates; if you care about human rights in only some places, you don’t actually care about human rights.
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Have we had even a single post about this at OTB? Haven’t seen one. Why does no one give a single fuck? Is it because it’s Black people dying? Or because the killers aren’t Jews? A little of both?
@Michael Reynolds: Why the insulting tone?
Seriously. Why?
As to why there have been no posts:
Time and attention are finite. God knows that I do not every get around to all the things I would like to write about.
News coverage of Africa is sparse (a relevant reason for a site driven by the daily news).
My personal expertise is such that the region I know the least about is Africa. It tends to diminish the probability that I will write about that area.
(Also: one of my least favorite criticisms is: why haven’t you written about X?)
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I read about this not long ago. Thought of you.
To be most accurate, “Or because the killers aren’t Jews?” Should be “Or because the killers aren’t Jewish or Palestinian?”
Why does nobody seem to give a fuck that Dubai, a location glamorized by social media, was built on slave labor?
The simplest answer: Israel plays a larger role in our politics than Sudan or any of the Emirates.
In fact, Israel plays such a large role in our foreign policy that it materially affects our domestic elections.
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And it is in the news daily, to one of my points above. And even given its prominence, the last time it appears I mentioned Israel was in April (which was in the context of the Iran war), and the last time Gaza came up (apart from a post about American electoral politics earlier this year) was back last fall by James.
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