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The Final Countdown – 1/10/24 – Germany Faces Serious Disruptions over Railroad and Farmer Protests

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Ted Rall

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall cover breaking news from around the globe, including the railroad and farmers’ strikes in Germany. 

 
Tyler Nixon – Counselor-at-Law
Scottie Nell Hughes – Host of 360 View on RT 
Camila Escalante– Journalist 
George Szamuely -Senior Research Fellow at the Global Policy Institute
 
In the first hour, Tyler Nixon, counselor-at-law, discusses the scandal involving Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor in the election case against Trump. 
 
Then, RT Host Scottie Nell Hughes shares her perspective on Former U.S. Ray Epps’ sentencing for his involvement in the January 6th riots. 
 
The second hour begins with journalist Camila Escalante who breaks down the wave of political violence in Ecuador. 
 
The show closes with Dr. George Szamuely, a senior research fellow at the Global Policy Institute, to weigh in on the railroad and farmers’ strikes in Germany. 
 

When the Constitution Threatens Democracy

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Ted Rall

            The Supreme Court faces a quandary: It must choose between democracy and the Constitution.

            Compared to Trump v. Anderson, the notorious case of Bush v. Gore was a straightforward affair: it should not have been heard. Because elections are administered by the states, the Florida Supreme Court’s 2000 ruling ought to have been the last word. The recount should have continued. Setting aside the noxious optics of a party-line court deciding an election, the Supreme Court’s decision to hear Bush in the first place was unconstitutional.

That view is bipartisan. Sandra Day O’Connor, the justice who cast the tie-breaking vote in the 5-4 decision, eventually conceded that she regretted her partisan hackery. The court declined to officially publish Bush so it can never be cited as a precedent, a tacit admission that it made lousy case law. Chief Justice John Roberts, who subsequently spent much of his nearly two decades on the bench trying to restore the court’s tarnished reputation, never wanted his court to hear another election dispute.

            With attempts to remove Donald Trump from the ballot on the ground that he’s disqualified under the 14th Amendment’s prohibition against insurrectionists holding high office spreading from Colorado to Maine to dockets in 14 other states, the Roberts court has no choice but to weigh in. States need the guidance of an across-the-board standard issued by the nation’s legal referee.

This train wreck reminds me of how, as late as the 1970s, European beachgoers were occasionally still getting blown up by mines placed during World War II; old and forgotten doesn’t always mean dead and gone. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment should have been repealed 150 years ago. Sadly for the Republic this legal time-bomb, long hidden in plain sight, is finally going off.

Ratified in 1868 just after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on citizens who had participated in insurrection or rebellion from holding high office was soon rendered obsolete, a legal version of the human appendix, by the postwar Ulysses Grant Administration’s blanket Amnesty of 1872. In a bid to reunify a fractured nation all former officers of the Southern government, including notorious figures like former Confederate President Jefferson Davis and John C. Breckinridge, the U.S. Vice President from 1857 to 1861 who became the Confederacy’s Secretary of War, received pardons.

The forgiveness was real. Nine former Confederates were elected to Congress including Alexander Stephens, the former Confederate Vice President. President Grant encouraged Breckinridge to reenter politics but he declined.
            For all practical purposes, Section 3 died at the age of four. (Which is why there’s no helpful case law.) Yet, like the New York “blue law” that makes it a crime to carry an ice cream cone in your back pocket in public on Sundays, this historical curio has remained on the books since the era of the horse and buggy, forgotten until some enterprising attorneys for some plaintiffs in Colorado resuscitated this legal relic for their novel assault against Trump.

            Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a former constitutional law professor, argues that the 14th Amendment can’t isn’t undemocratic because it’s in the Constitution: “If you think about it, of all of the forms of disqualification that we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic because it’s the one where people choose themselves to be disqualified.” Slavery was in the Constitution too.

Trump has such a commanding lead in the primaries that he will almost certainly be the Republican presidential nominee. We have a two-party system. You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to see that knocking one out of two of the major-party presidential candidates—who happens to be ahead in the polls—off the ballot is inherently undemocratic as well as a perfect recipe for political unrest.

The last time a major presidential candidate didn’t appear on some state ballots was Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Trouble ensued.

Trump probably deserves to be disqualified. But this is not about him. Disenfranchising tens of millions of his supporters would be deeply destabilizing to democracy. How better to feed into Trump’s narrative that our elections are rigged than to deprive voters of the basic choice to vote for or against him?

The plain language of the 14th Amendment does not offer much hope to Trump and the Republicans as they argue before a Supreme Court dominated by originalists. The Colorado Supreme Court was probably correct when they determined that the offices of president and vice president were originally intended to be covered by the provision. There is a strong argument that January 6, 2021 qualified as an insurrection or rebellion as the amendment’s drafters understood those terms in 1866. Section 3 appears to be intended to be self-executing, meaning that appeals to due process are unlikely to prevail; like it or not, a secretary of state or state supreme court can simply look at Donald Trump and declare: I see an insurrectionist. Section 5, which allows Congress to make such a determination, describes a non-exclusive right.

If the Roberts court follows Section 3 to the letter, Trump will be disqualified.
            Theoretically, Congress could solve this dilemma. A two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate would allow Trump to remain on the ballot. Democrats could declare that they value democracy so much and have so much confidence in American voters to do the right thing in a fair election that they would provide the necessary support. But such an extraordinary gambit would require statesmanship, risk-taking and putting patriotism above party, traits in short supply on Capitol Hill.

We Americans venerate the Constitution. But Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is a nightmare. Given the choice between correctly interpreting the original intent of its Reconstruction-era drafters and allowing the 2024 election to proceed as normally as possible given the advanced ages of both frontrunners and the legal perils faced by Trump, the Supreme Court construct a convoluted rationale for, say, why the presidency isn’t a government office or how the 14th contains an implied right to due process.

The Supreme Court should ignore the Constitution, gin up a BS justification to keep Trump on the ballot and choose democracy.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

The Final Countdown – 1/5/24 – Iowa Caucuses Becomes Last Stand for Some Republicans

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Ted Rall

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall talk about current events domestically and globally, including the Iowa Caucuses. 

 
Steve Gill – Attorney
Scottie Nell Hughes – RT Host  
Mitch Roschelle – Media Commentator 
Mohamed Gomaa – RT Journalist 
 
 
In the first hour, attorney Steve Gill joins The Final Countdown to discuss the Iowa Caucuses, the Republican race, and presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s latest flub. 
 
Then, RT Host Scottie Nell Hughes joins to discuss a new poll that reveals that 38 percent of Americans believe the FBI was involved in Jan. 6, and Trump’s fight for state ballot access. 
 
The second hour begins with media commentator Mitch Roschelle weighing in on the New York City subway collision and the state of U.S. cities’ public transit. 
 
Lastly, RT journalist Mohamed Gomaa joins to share his perspective on the latest attacks on Lebanon and Iran as tensions rise in the Middle East. 
 

DMZ America Podcast #130: Another Ivy League President Fired, Israel Gone Wild and America’s 250th Birthday

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Ted Rall

In the first DMZ America Podcast of 2024, editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) discuss the world in politics and current events.

First, Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University after drawing criticism for failing to clearly condemn antisemitism at a Congressional hearing, and then being exposed as allegedly having plagiarized dozens of times in her academic career. Right-wing conservatives are celebrating having claimed a scalp and dealt a blow against DEI, but should liberals mourn her departure?

Second, Israel claims responsibility for the drone assassination of a leader of Hamas in a suburb of Beirut, Lebanon. On the same day, two bombs killed over 100 people attending a memorial service for an Iranian general assassinated by an American drone in 2020. Are the two events linked? Will there be repercussions in the form of a larger regional conflict?

Finally, we are coming up to the 250th anniversary of America. It’s anybody’s guess what it will be called.

Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast here.

Ceasefire in Gaza, An Offer Israel Can’t Refuse—Yet It Is

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Ted Rall

            The Left is doing something right.

            And it’s something that I initially disagreed with, even though I didn’t comment in a public space.

            When Israel overreacted to Hamas’ October 7th attack on western Israel with a brutal saturation bombing campaign against the Palestinian civilian population of the Gaza Strip, defenders of human rights, antiwar activists and supporters of the Palestinian liberation movement demanded a ceasefire.

            To me, that felt like yet another example of the Left settling for too little, negotiating against itself. Ask for the stars, I usually advise, and you might settle for the moon. Ask for the moon and you might wind up with nothing. A ceasefire isn’t an armistice, much less a peace agreement. It’s merely an interruption in a war. What kind of antiwar activist doesn’t ask for an end to a war?

One of the most famous examples is the Christmas Truce of 1914, when German and British troops crawled out of their trenches and met in no-man’s land to exchange presents, play soccer and celebrate the holiday together. A day or two later, however, World War I resumed. It’s a cute story that changed nothing.

            Israel owes the people of Gaza nothing less than an immediate cessation of hostilities and official acceptance that the current conflict is a war crime for which top Israeli governmental and military officials should be prosecuted. The IDF should withdraw. Israel should pay to rebuild everything it destroyed and compensate the families of dead and wounded Palestinians. It should house everyone it has displaced on Israeli territory, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem if need be. It should recognize a free and sovereign Republic of Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital, within 1967 borders along with a safe corridor to connect the currently non-contiguous borders. The 700,000 settler-colonists should leave the West Bank and return to Israel.

            A ceasefire seems so tiny by comparison.

            Which is why it’s proving effective as a demand.

            When people confront two parties engaged in a conflict, one of their first reactions is to try to assess which, if either, is right (or at least more right). This determination is affected by such cognitive biases as whether one side looks or acts more like the person making the assessment. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some Americans have baked-in personal allegiances because they are Jewish or Muslim.

            Which leaves the other 97% of the population. Citizens of the United States are notoriously ignorant about politics and cultures beyond their borders. To the extent that they pay attention to the Middle East conflict, there has been a historical bias in favor of Israel, a fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ally President Joe Biden relied upon at the beginning of the war in Gaza. As we have seen in the past, however, Israeli overreaction has prompted the public to take a closer look and, following the usual practice, led them to a “pox on both of their houses” stance. Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland repeated that trope in 2020 when she claimed on Fox News that in “…the Middle East, they’ve been fighting for 4,000 years. It’s been an ethno-sectarian battle and psychodrama, and they’ve been killing each other for millennia. Their normal state of condition is war.” (This is not even a little bit true, but let’s leave that for another time.)

            20,000+ dead Palestinians into the latest episode of the conflict, the Gaza war has become a catastrophe too big to ignore or dismiss with glib inanities. Day after day, as Americans’ social media feeds fills with bloody images of dead Palestinian babies, initial public sympathy for Israel has given way to a feeling that the Palestinians of Gaza are victims at least as much as the Israelis of October 7th. Choosing sides is no longer easy. But one thing is clear: the carnage has gone on too long and, even if a long-term conclusion like a two-state solution is impossibly elusive, the bombing simply has to stop.

            By mid-December, three out of five American voters—with few differences between political parties—supported a ceasefire, up significantly from October. The public had caught up to the pro-Palestinian activists. By not asking for much, the Left appears moderate and reasonable.

            Meanwhile, voters keep reading headlines in which the Israeli government is refusing a ceasefire. To the contrary, Netanyahu says the war will continue for “many more months.” Israel is framing itself as rabid, overreaching and bloodthirsty.

            Because it is out of sync with public opinion, good will for Israel is ebbing like the pulse of a man bleeding to death from a gunshot wound. Although older voters still tend to support Israel, a mere 28% of voters between ages 18 and 29 told the latest New York Times/Sienna College poll that they believed Israel was seriously interested in a peaceful solution. On the other hand, half said the Palestinians do want peace.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Victimhood or Vengeance? Israel Wants, But Cannot Have, Both

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Ted Rall

Victimhood or vengeance: choose one.

You can’t have both.

Israel is about to learn that. Supporters of Israel’s government (as opposed to Israel writ large, which includes millions of Israelis who distrust their government) ask: Why are so few people still talking about October 7th? “It is striking and in some ways shocking that the brutality of the slaughter has receded so quickly in the memories of so many,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken remarked in early November.

Hamas’ attack was vicious, claimed many victims and was so recent—how can it be that those pitiful “kidnapped” posters are falling so flat so soon?

Blame Netanyahu and his co-conspirators.

They chose vengeance over victimhood.

They had a choice. Instead of gleefully indulging themselves in an unseemly orgy of destruction and murder after Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took 240 as hostages, Israel’s far-right government might instead have embraced the role of victim: Weep. Express confusion. Witness the personal stories of the dead and the lost. Beg Hamas to return the people it had kidnapped.

No bombs, no invasion, no psychotic rants about “human animals” or officially-tolerated banners genocidally screaming “Zero Gazans” hanging from a bridge in Tel Aviv.

Turn the other cheek.

Precise violence would have been acceptable. A raid against Hamas’ leadership, say. A hostage rescue attempt.

Had Israel not attacked Gaza in a wholesale campaign so devastating that historians have already declared it one of the most destructive in the history of warfare, it would continue to enjoy the sympathy and support of a world which, before the IDF saturation bombing campaign began on October 8th, had abandoned the Palestinians and forgotten the brutality they’d endured at the hands of the Zionists. U.N. resolutions would currently be directed against Hamas, not Israel. The Palestinian liberation movement, theretofore dormant and close to dead, would be a non-entity. America would be as festooned with Israeli flags as it was with Ukrainian ones a year ago.

Victimhood comes with downsides. Like, you can’t ethnically cleanse a couple of million Palestinians you’ve always hated and whose land you’ve long coveted. You look weak.

Look, I get it. War is fun. It keeps you in office even/especially when you’re facing prison time for corruption. Not to mention 141 square miles of beachfront real estate—that’s a land grab far too tasty to pass up.

But vengeance too, Israel is learning, is not without its own costs.

Israel has the right and the duty to defend itself, but this is not that. We’re hearing this linguistic construction a lot, notably from careful politicians and pundits whom, pre-war, would have omitted the qualifier phrase. Even allowing for the president’s imprecise command of English, Joe Biden’s complaint about Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” (using mostly American bombs) was remarkable.

Israel has used 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs to kill 20,000 Gazans and make 2 million homeless by transforming their territory into a wasteland, all while penning them inside a death zone subject to typhoid, cholera and mass famine because Israel refuses to permit food trucks to enter the territory which they have occupied and subjugated for decades. If October 7th was a horror, what Israel has wrought since is that horror hundreds of times over. There must easily be least 100,000 Palestinian bodies buried beneath countless piles of rubble.

We didn’t forget October 7th. Israel eclipsed the Hamas attack, erased it, sacrificed its survivor-hostages to its war so thoroughly that it intentionally shot three of them when they managed to escape. We’re following Israel’s lead.

The U.S. made a similar call after 9/11. I wouldn’t call it a mistake as much as a conscious decision. For the most part, with the exception of the mawkish “never forget” yellow-ribboned grief porn still adorning some police stations and oversized pickup trucks driven by a certain type of right-winger, Americans accepted the erasure of their 3,000 dead in exchange for the mindless purposefulness of Bush’s Global War On Terror, deployed in the post-Cold War period to justify everything from invading Afghanistan to arming Yemen against the Houthis.

Unlike our whiny Israeli allies, we Americans know better than to ask why the world forgot 9/11. We forgot 9/11. We made our choice and we kill with it. “We are all Americans,” Le Monde editorialized the day after; we replied thanks but no thanks, we’ll kill anywhere and everywhere and Freedom Fry you wimps. That much grace and class, we have: we own our thug life and we’re totally good with the fact that the world hates us more than ever.

Meanwhile, that giant ripping sound is Israel’s blank check being torn up.

The whining is what happens when you keep doing the same thing while the world is changing all around you and then complain about it.

Since 1948 Israel has had Big Bad Sam across the ocean to fund and arm them while running interference for them at the U.N., no matter how much Palestinian land they stole or how many Palestinians they killed. After October 7th they assumed they could keep doing whatever they wanted. Biden confirmed their assumption.

Nice run. It’s done now.

Israel no longer controls the narrative. It no longer matters that Al Jazeera is censored by American cable companies because its Gaza footage is now available on social media.  Israel is no longer admired as a safe haven for Holocaust survivors because they are almost all dead and gone; for Millennials and Zoomers Israel is just another country, albeit an anachronistic, uncomfortable vestige of the settler-colonial era with a major stank of apartheid. Israel’s star is sinking.

Sympathy for the vengeful peaked out in the “Dirty Harry”-“Death Wish” 1970s, when violent retribution was expected, accepted and even admired following an unprovoked wrong. Lashing back is now as passé as old white men on a college campus.

Israel is a young country and like a teenager it wants to have things both ways, both to be loved and feared. Now that it has destroyed Gaza, love is off the table. If it is lucky, it will retain a few of its former allies as tolerant frenemies.

If you want to be admired now, you need to get yourself some victimhood status. Consider affirmative action, the politics of transgenderism and income tests for government benefits unrelated to poverty—societal benefits accrue to those perceived to have been oppressed, repressed, tortured, traumatized and brutalized by those with power, wealth and strength—the very definition of nuclear-power Israel’s status in the Middle East. After Palestinians exchanged their retributive PLO of the 1970s for an impotent PA under occupation, the global Left began to embrace their cause. October 7th, a shocking throwback to Munich and the Achille Lauro, might have shifted victimhood back to the Jewish state, at least for a time, had Netanyahu’s gang not rejected self-restraint in favor of ultraviolence and opportunism.

Israel, a nation whose architecture, general aesthetics and fashion is stuck in the 1970s, is paying the price for its failure to grasp 21st century reality:

It’s better to have people feel sorry for you than to be afraid of you.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

The Final Countdown – 12/21/23 – Jack Smith Bolsters Legal Team with Renowned Supreme Court Expert for Trump Investigation

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Ted Rall
On this episode of The Final Countdown, host Ted Rall covered topics from around the world, including lawyer Jack Smith adding a Supreme Court specialist to his legal team. 
 
Dan Lazare – Independent Journalist
Steve Gill – Lawyer and Political Commentator
Dr. George Szamuely – Senior Research Fellow at The Global Policy Institute
Esteban Carrillo – Editor for The Cradle 
 
In the first hour, The Final Countdown hosted Dan Lazare to continue the discussion on the news from Colorado, after Trump got nixed from the 2024 presidential ballot. 
 
Later in the hour, Steve Gill joined the show to discuss lawyer Jack Smith adding a Supreme Court specialist to his legal team in the case against former president Donald Trump. 
 
To begin the final hour, The Final Countdown spoke to Dr. George Szamuely, sharing his perspective on the French Senate’s new immigration bill. 
 
The show closes with Editor for The Cradle, Esteban Carrillo, weighing in on the latest out of Gaza, and the skepticism over a new hostage exchange deal between Israel and Hamas. 
 

DMZ America Podcast #129: Trump Dumped from Colorado Ballot, Biden’s Record-Low Polls, Will Anyone Care When Gaza is Gone? (with guest Rob Rogers)

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Ted Rall

In the latest DMZ America Podcast, editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) are joined by their colleague Rob Rogers, editorial cartoonist formerly of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

First up: The political world reeled after the Colorado state Supreme Court issued a stunning ruling declaring Donald Trump an insurrectionist under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, thus making him ineligible to appear on the ballot in the upcoming state Republican primary. 13 other states are facing similar lawsuits so the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to weigh in on whether Trump can appear on the ballot. Will judges decide our next president?

Second: President Biden is suffering from the lowest poll numbers of his presidency, bottoming out at 34% in one survey. He is even losing voters aged 18 to 29, an important part of his coalition back in 2020. Now he’s between a rock and a hard place on issues like Gaza. Is there any way that he can possibly turn this dismal situation around, given the fact that no one who his position has gone on to successfully be re-elected?

Finally: Most of the world now agrees that Israel overreacted to the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas. Gaza has been flattened. Will the attention of the world move on after the bombing stops? Or will images of shattered millions of Palestinian refugees living in the Egyptian desert prove to be a political game changer during the election next year?

Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast:

DMZ America Podcast Ep 129 Sec 1: Trump Dumped from Colorado Ballot

DMZ America Podcast Ep 129 Sec 2: Biden’s Record-Low Polls

DMZ America Podcast Ep 129 Sec 3: Will Anyone Care When Gaza is Gone?

 

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