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ken taylor's avatar

And every moment should be one of "moral clarity". But as you report,after speaking for 25 hours everything remained the same.

Moral clarity remains confused when what is moral is defined this way and that way. I wish I could define moral clarity for myself. The only thing I can try to say, if something hurts another it's immoral. Ask forgiveness, even if there was no intent to hurt.

Try to take it in and not commit the same offense. Be not so proud the other is wrong; take responsibility for every thing you are responsible for.

It is difficult to do; the tendency is to self-justify. And then we have wandered onto the road that lacks most moral objectives, and we achieve little.

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Jean-Luc Szpakowski's avatar

It's not that laws shiould not be enforced, it is the selective application of laws that is the problem with the Le pen case. Christine Lagrande was convicted in a case of 300 million dollar payout to a businessman, but was allowed to be in office and run IMF. When Erdogan makes his main opponent inelgible to run due to corruption charges, liberals complain., unlike ijn the the Le Pen case. In Romania, the Eu makes Georgescu ineligible because of Russian influence, when investigattive journalists found out the campaign was funded by the ruling party, not Russia, to take votes away from their opponents. There's always some law that you can find that was broken -- dictators always find a law to justify blocking their opponents .

And further, they could have held her ineligibility untiafter all appeals werre exhausted. At least Melanchion, head of France's far left party, had the integrity to call out Le Pen's ineligibility as a transgression agaoinst democray --let the voters decide (and not just when they vote in yourt favor).

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Manqueman's avatar

Booker’s performance was, well, a performance, an infomercial. The text asking for 💵💵💵 came shortly after he finished.

A reminder, too, that Booker’s almost as much a Wall Street puppet as Chuck and, in my ignorant opinion, surely Chuck’s heir apparent.

Until such time as the party commits to ending being a corporate, alt-Republican party and *commits* to ending private finance of campaigns, the sole plus they offer is not being the Party of Trump.

Dunno but you, but I have the hardest time remembering that.

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Thomas Neuburger's avatar

From Medea Benjamin:

"Senator @CoryBooker, in another moment of “moral clarity”, just voted to send 35,000 more bombs to Israel to kill children in Gaza."

https://x.com/medeabenjamin/status/1907881054603473109

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Jean-Luc Szpakowski's avatar

Exactly --Cory Booker not one of the 15 senators votingto dtop bombs to Israel. His speech was a pure performance.

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BrianM's avatar

Trump seems to be driven by:

25% revenge

25% what's in it fo Trump

20% what do the oligarchs want

15% what does the base want

15% 🤷

The last being a mix of the last things he heard or saw or read, his current mood, hunger, lunar cycle, who knows?

The trouble people have is identifying which of these things is driving the bus at any given time. Sometimes, after the fact, the driver is obvious. But in the moment, and much of the time after the fact, it's hard to impossible to actually determine his actual drivers. This drives a lot of people, on every side of every issue, bat sh*t crazy.

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Suti's avatar

LePen's conviction isn't final, there will be an appeal's sentence within a year and a half or two. Therefore there's no need for an immediate suspension from public office.

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Thomas Neuburger's avatar

Thanks for the update, Suti. I'll follow that.

Thomas

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Feral Finster's avatar

The fact that LePen supporters would cheer for the removal of Macron (not that it matters, he'd lose a race to the Herpes virus right now) doesn't mean it isn't lawfare.

Of course it's lawfare.

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the suck of sorrow's avatar

There is another component to Booker's performance: the subcommittee for which he is the ranking minority member held a hearing on antitrust issues with regards to big tech firms during his soliloquy. Consequently, Booker was absent. Conveniently, as he is the largest beneficiary of big tech firms campaign donations.

Le Pen is guilty. That law has been in force for decades as well as the proscribed penalties. It's minor, but the law is the law, or so I was told in my youth. Le Pen would no more be a savior for a constituency savaged by neoliberalism and corporate capitalism than Trump is proving for his.

For us residing in the US it is too damn bad that the Biden administration did not do the hard work in proving the conspiracy to overthrow the election results on January 6, 2020. To do so would have required implicating and prosecuting leading Republican figures as well as Trump. Petty lawfare did not work out so well for us. Too, the bungling of the Georgia election interference case was stunning incompetence.

If I could be granted two wishes in the twilight of my life: first, any politician that voted for the Iraq war, both resign and refrain from any public comment ever; second, the many authors of comments on certain contrarian blogs (you know who you are) who employed the derisive term, Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) also STFU permanently.

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Mark Oglesby's avatar

Booker's nothing but a tool for the wealth class, a farse and a clown! The darling Democrats of my upbringing, how sad, but for the record, the Dems were never really the dems, study the history, it sordid.

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