Robert Reich Vs. Chris Hedges On How Bernie Sanders Supporters Should Vote

Robert Reich, who was Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor working for progressive reform in spite of most of what Bill himself believed, debates reporter and activist Chris Hedges, on Democracy Now! Here's the short version:

Hedges: vote for the Green candidate because there's no substantive difference between Trump and Hillary.

Reich: vote for Hillary because there would be a chance under her presidency to continue the political revolution Bernie started, while a President Trump would have a real opportunity (e.g., through judicial appointments) to establish the actual fascist state that Hedges is rightly worried about.

Bates: does no one remember Nader the Spoiler? A vote for the Green presidential candidate is virtually always a de facto vote for the Republican candidate, and if you're reading this site, you probably agree with me that a Republican in the White House is always a catastrophe for America.

I used to admire Hedges, and there is still much to admire in his person and his political philosophy, but I have to list him as one more lefty who is willing to sacrifice America to save America. Sorry; I'm not that kind of lefty.

Tuesday Cat Porting; Chris Hedges Interviews Lynne Stewart

We are headed out in this awful weather to take our kitty Esther to... get this... an ophthalmologist. The problem with going to a high-priced veterinarian is that they feel free to refer to high-priced specialists located far from home. But it's Stella's kitty and Stella's decision. I'm along for the ride to comfort the cat, and of course Stella.

Lynne Stewart

While I'm gone (most of the day), please read Chris Hedges's article/interview of famous civil liberties/rights activist lawyer Lynne Stewart, who is just recently out of jail after four years of a ten-year prison sentence, released because she has terminal breast cancer. Bluntly speaking, she was imprisoned for doing her job, defending her client in the face of impossible odds and in the face of the PATRIOT Act. She failed to win her case in 1995, but after the infamous 9/11/2001 that was not good enough for John Ashcroft, George W. Bush and their unsavory crew when they came into office: Stewart's client was "Omar Abdel Rahman, an Egyptian Muslim known as 'the Blind Sheikh,' who was convicted in October of that year for alleged involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center."

Stewart's crime, in short, was mounting a vigorous defense of Abdel Rahman when the government was determined to put him away for life... which they did. Stewart was sentenced to 28 months. When Barack Obama was elected president, "a federal appeals court under the Barack Obama administration demanded that the district judge reconsider her sentence. She was handed a new sentence by Koeltl—10 years." Message received: the right to trial by jury no longer extends to everyone, and if our government dislikes the accused, they have no problem taking revenge on his attorney. In this case, the government even used taped conversations between Stewart and Rahman as evidence against Stewart, a practice now legal but previously considered a blatant violation of attorney-client privilege.

This is a story to make you despair for the legitimacy of the judicial system in America. And when the courts become a tool of the executive, there is no more separation of powers... and we have no nation as our founders conceived it.