Baseball Drama

Seattle begins a big series tonight against the Houston Astros, leaders of the American League West by 4-games over the Mariners.

Both teams are struggling a little as of late, with the Astros dropping four straight, including a sweep by the last-place Texas Rangers in Houston.

Here is an opportunity for the Mariners to close the gap on Houston, with the Athletics nipping at their heels.

Want tighter races?  Check out the National League.  The drama will be heavy up to and including the final days in all three divisions, but particularly in the West where the Padres are the lone team out of it.

But for now the dog days are upon us, a little early this year with the intense heat blanketing the country.  Tired legs and mental errors begin to add up now.

Throw in a little dissension and frustration, backtalk and spit, crotch-scratching and cussing, and you have the picture.


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Facts of the Matter

It has nothing to do with the mythical “free market” capitalism that neoliberal politicians claim to uphold. It’s about the rich using the state to make themselves richer and to thereby—since wealth is power and pull—deepen their grip on politics and policy.--PS

Paul Street's excellent weekend piece at Truthdig.

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Movie

I took Paterson out of the library last week and finally got around to watching it.  It's a nice little movie.  I've always enjoyed Jim Jarmusch's work.

I don't understand America's love for the Marvel blockbusters. Superheroes, explosions, car chases, elaborate stunts and special effects, cheesy "moral" statements, wtf?

The good guys versus the bad guys.  Sounds like the winnowing national dialogue we're all suffering through.  Not bored enough, got to watch and listen.

The blockbusters amount to pure escapism, I guess.  People must be desperate to escape if they watch that crap. It's like being captivated by the Trump reality TV show playing out in the deadness of our days.

Small movies make sense.  It's not often that movies explore poets and poetry directly, though the best movies resonate with poetry in their making.  Nebraska was another small, poetic  movie I liked.

I haven't seen "Neruda" yet.  Hope to find it soon.


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Whose Narrative?

I find it sad and sickening that most Americans, and the corporate media that shapes them, are more concerned about the effects of Russian "meddling" on our "democracy" than they are about our own home-grown oligarchs, who are not only meddling, but have bought Congress and turned this wonderful democracy everyone thinks we have into a joke--an anti-democratic cesspool.

In my book, the Koch brothers present more danger to the U.S. than Putin could ever dream of.  Christ, when are people ever going to understand that the real danger is home-borne; all nations fail on their own accord--it doesn't take meddling from abroad when the cards are stacked against the oppressed in their own nation.

People watch too much TV.  It's sad they don't understand how duped they are by corporate media.

A mass uprising against the American oligarchs would leave Putin with nothing.  After all, his American friends are our real enemies. Trump doesn't even register, because he's a dumb shit flailing in the wind. Paul Ryan counts.  Mitch counts.  They're Koch friends and benefactors, and business with Russia counts for them. They're all for it.

You simply cannot demolish the wall of obfuscation that surrounds us now, filtered through corporate media.  With the party elites fighting each other over the "spoils of globalization" and the press-release media following along, the situation is untenable for ordinary men and women who cannot keep up with the cost of housing, education, health care and a Sundae at the local deli.

But don't take my word for it:

The claim that all that is wrong with America is due to the malignant machinations of Putin is the most blatantly false, potentially disastrous bucket of bullshit ever inflicted by the matrix on this ignorant, credulous, propagandized people.--PE

Come on, don't resist--read it.



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Football Journal

I finally have a usable draft of my football journal in order.  Sent it to a critic who might comb over it and give me a hint as to WTF I'm into, because I don't have a clue.

To all of my critics, I say be tough.  I'm a pussy cat who can be tamed by reason.

I'd like to publish this baby as the college football season commences in Sept.  If I can make it readable, ha ha.


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Road to Nowhere

The misguided corporatist loyalty of the U.S. political establishment did not begin with the Trump presidency. Defense contractors and infant formula corporations are just two examples of the abuse of unaccountable institutional power in which both Republican and Democratic parties have been complicit for decades. Not all Republican and Democratic politicians are willing corporate shills, but the dynamics of the political process force most of them to fall into line with corporate interests—especially at the national level.

The political establishment’s sellout to corporate interests is reflected in every aspect of policy from military, to health care, to financial regulation, to education, the environment and much else. And the sellout is not exclusive to the Republican Party. We experienced it as well with the Clinton and Obama administrations—which explains why so many didn’t trust Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.--DK

Essay of the day.


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Shit Clown of the Week

Could lead movement to impeach Trump, but won't because he's a stupid shit clown of the highest order--the leader of the House of Shit Clown Representatives.


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Baseball

I think baseball is like an old girlfriend I shouldn't have quit on years ago. 

There was love there I couldn't deal with.

For some damn reason, maybe because I'm an old man with nothing else to do, I'm enjoying baseball again for the first time in years.

It's actually a game where people of all sizes can excel.  The players are youngsters in their twenties, and grizzled old vets in their forties, a generation difference.  That's pretty cool.

I remember that time the Griffeys, father and son, played together in Seattle.  Better than cool.

Part of it is that it's damn easy to stream these days, and it does have its own poetry, an appealing rhythm.


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Going After Assange

If Julian Assange is jailed it will be because his media organization, WikiLeaks, exposed the brutality of the illegal U.S.-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.

War crimes reportage instigated by Assange was dispensed throughout the corporate  U.S. media and enthusiastically reissued by the major-media masters--yet they are not the prized target of the belligerent ruling class.

Trump did not start the war on the media with his bellicose asininity.  It has been operative since the founding of a free press, and while historically announced with subtler clarity, as demonstrated by the Bush and Obama administrations, the intent remains the same--silence and the ruin of dissent.

If Assange goes to prison, we all go to prison.


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Dear Bernie

"I was absolutely outraged by his behavior in Helsinki," Sanders told CBS's Margaret Brennan. "And it makes me think that either Trump doesn't understand what Russia has done, not only to our elections, but to cyberattacks against all parts of our infrastructure. Either he doesn't understand it, or perhaps he is being blackmailed by Russia because they may have compromising information about him or perhaps also, you have a president who really does have strong authoritarian tendencies and maybe he admires the kind of government that Putin is running in Russia."--JJ

This is sad.  Sanders has been right about so much so often, particularly in the domestic realm, that you tend to lose sight of his imperial streak--and how badly he can fuck up when he--rarely--addresses foreign policy issues.

His "unity" ploy with Clinton helped close out the end of his "revolution" in '16--a huge mistake if your aim is to separate yourself from the "billionaires."

Dear Bernie, what the hell did the DNC do to your campaign?  It "meddled" you idiot! But fuck it, you don't care.

You're as much an apparatchik of the Military Industrial Complex as anyone else in the Senate.

Bernie, it's time to pass the torch to your underlings.  Please retire.  And please stop soliciting money from me.  You're toast.

BTW, as an aside, how in the hell else did liberals and neocons (the duopoly) expect the orange terrorist to behave in Helsinki?  Was he supposed to all of a sudden brighten up?

Christ, he's a moron, like his allies in Congress and his base.  Either impeach him or conjure some answers.  You're giving me a headache.


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Memorial: Homeless Street Corner News Vendor, Andy Howard

Andy Howard sold Street Roots newspapers daily at the corner of  SW 10th and Jefferson, in front of the neighborhood Safeway.  He was 57. OD.


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Weekend Choices

Just another Friday, swimming upstream against the current of hysteria and ultra-nationalism that is intimidating good sense in this good land.

Everyone battles stasis differently, and you know my routine by now.  I get doped up on the good shit.

What else can you do but punch your way out of the nightmare?

It's all about policy, baby, and you and I have nothing to do with policy. 


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Weekend Read

Waited a month but finally got a copy out of the library.

Something to do this weekend. Sit in the shade and read a book that should please my journalism side, particularly with so much trash out there these days.





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Get Real

The crisis of neoliberalism — with its financial ruin for millions, its elimination of the welfare state, its deregulation of corporate power, its unchecked racism and its militarization of society — has to be matched by a crisis of ideas, one that embraces historical memory, rejects the normalization of fascist principles and opens a space for imagining that alternative worlds can be brought into being. While the long-term corrosion of politics and the emerging fascism in the US will not end by simply learning how to read critically, the spaces opened by reading critically creates a bulwark against cynicism and fosters a notion of hope that can be translated into forms of collective resistance. That is why reading and thinking critically is so dangerous and is so necessary. Thinking critically and acting courageously in dark times is not an option, but a necessity.--HG

It's good to hear from Mr. Henry Giroux again.


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Young Poet Waits

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Where's My Impeachment?

God knows where we go from here. It’s hard to believe the ruling classes can keep teasing liberals, and other Trump-obsessives, over and over and over like this, without eventually impeaching or shooting the guy … but then again, maybe they can. Perhaps they intend to continue conducting this experiment all the way up to 2020, just to see how paranoid and mindlessly conformist they make the majority of the Western public. In any event, if they decide not to impeach him, and then try him for treason, or just kill him, or whatever, the Democrats at least have a new campaign slogan that they can use in 2018 and beyond … “NEXT TIME VOTE FOR WHO WE TELL YOU TO, YOU RUSSIA-LOVING NAZI SCUM!” It kind of has a ring to it, doesn’t it?--CJH

In this absolutely brilliant piece, playwright CJ Hopkins nails the meaning of the Helsinki Hysteria that swept across our great nation for approximately 24-hours before blinking out with a fresh new mainstream media news cycle.

Edward Bernays is smiling from his grave.

As for me, I've felt for years that my democracy is gone, or never really existed.  I don't know what was said behind those summit closed doors, but I do know what is said daily in the halls of the U.S. Congress, and if Helsinki was as bad as that we really are in some deep doo-doo.


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Dog Bone

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Hedges Rolls Out the Truth

But did Russia, as the Democratic Party establishment claims, swing the election to Trump? No. Trump is not Vladimir Putin’s puppet. He is part of the wave of right-wing populists, from Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson in Britain to Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who have harnessed the rage and frustration born of an economic and political system dominated by global capitalism and under which the rights and aspirations of working men and women do not matter.

The Democratic Party establishment, like the liberal elites in most of the rest of the industrialized world, would be swept from power in an open political process devoid of corporate money. The party elite, including Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, is a creation of the corporate state. Campaign finance and electoral reform are the last things the party hierarchy intends to champion. It will not call for social and political programs that will alienate its corporate masters. This myopia and naked self-interest may ensure a second term for Donald Trump; it may further empower the lunatic fringe that is loyal to Trump; it may continue to erode the credibility of the political system. But the choice before the Democratic Party elites is clear: political oblivion or enduring the rule of a demagogue. They have chosen the latter. They are not interested in reform. They are determined to silence anyone, like Assange, who exposes the rot within the ruling class.

The Democratic Party establishment benefits from our system of legalized bribery. It benefits from deregulating Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry. It benefits from the endless wars. It benefits from the curtailment of civil liberties, including the right to privacy and due process. It benefits from militarized police. It benefits from austerity programs. It benefits from mass incarceration. It is an enabler of tyranny, not an impediment.--CH

I find Chris Hedges a delight, an antidote against the anti-Russian hysteria propagated by the increasingly desperate liberal/centrist class and the flag-worshiping, racist pukes coughed up by the American fascist/right. The ultranationalism on all sides is stunning.

It's been quite a show, and of course it will never end. There can be no peace.  That would be bad for business on every front.


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The Plan

Contempt for diplomacy with Russia is now extreme. Mainline U.S. journalists and top Democrats often bait President Trump in zero-sum terms. No doubt Hillary Clinton thought she was sending out an applause line in her tweet Sunday night: “Question for President Trump as he meets Putin: Do you know which team you play for?”

A bellicose stance toward Russia has become so routine and widespread that we might not give it a second thought -- and that makes it all the more hazardous. After President George W. Bush declared “You’re either with us or against us,” many Americans gradually realized what was wrong with a Manichean view of the world. Such an outlook is even more dangerous today.--NS

I'll be the happiest person in the whole wide world when Trump is impeached and that paragon of American Christian virtue, Veep Mike Pence, finally emerges from the ether and returns the U.S. to its senses; because it is clear as dead bones now that any sort of open alliance with Russia is absolutely verboten--or should be--because like, you know, Russia is dangerous to our "interests," whatever they are. (Hint: arms deals and energy resources.)

We have the warheads.  Let's use them and get rid of the dastardly Bear now.

At the very least, Pence will bring the enemy to its knees.  And shortly after that, we can return to usual business--oligarch on oligarch, sworn enemies giving each other golden showers and enjoying the arrangement.

My bad satire aside (sorry), this is a better read.


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The Stupidity of Oregon's 2nd District Congressman, Greg Walden

Trump’s pardon was based on lobbying by Oregon Congressman Greg Walden who characterized the Hammonds as “responsible ranchers” and portrayed them as victims of government overreach.

Walden sought to minimize the multiple crimes the Hammonds have committed by suggesting they had merely burned a bit more than a hundred acres of public land, something that he tried to compare to normal everyday range management by federal agencies. So what’s the problem? The problem is that Walden is ignoring decades of violations committed by the Hammonds.--GW

The real story of Walden's ranchers.

Walden's blathering, tear-stained, pathetic drivel (warning: it's dull and long and, finally, an embarrassment to anyone with good sense).

The historical context of the Hammond debate.

The dismantling of public lands is in full bloom, and you can thank this Oregon shill for Trump and the minerals-extraction industry.

It's gonna get ugly, folks, as scarred as the Alberta Tar Sands.



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Oligarchy Flow Chart

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Catching Up with Larry

Lawrence Ferlinghetti will have a new book published on his 100th birthday next March 24th.

The co-founder of City Lights in San Francisco is of course one of the seminal characters in the history of modern American arts and letters.

Here is one of my favorites of his many works.


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Instant Classic

Best sign ever, and the mainstream runners-up.


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Main Street

When federal politicians finally did intervene in health care with the passage of Medicare in 1965, the insurance company model had been developing for decades. Government agencies simply could not match the private economy’s organizational capabilities. So, grudgingly, the health care reformers and progressive politicians behind Medicare built their program of government-funded health policies for the elderly around the insurance company model. Medicare’s architects also appointed insurance companies to act as program administrators, to operate as intermediaries between the federal government and hospitals and physicians, a role that they have to this day.--TC

This is some sick shit, and now I am entangled in it.

Another version.  I'm not there yet, but the path is well-lighted.  It's notable that MM's doc was produced well before the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) came into being.  Everyone is aware now that the ACA was another con job of the political establishment, a plaything of special interests, insurance and Big Pharma companies, compliant pols, and wacko right-wingers determined to stop "socialized medicine."

About the struggle.


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When Will They Ever Learn?

When Pop spoke to the masses.

Alt-Everything: A Brief History of the Counterculture.


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Survivors

Soon to be a major motion picture, no doubt.


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Protests

He'll spin it into a celebration of his presidency.  Above average rating for potential violent confrontation.


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Oily Scumbag Quits

About time, shithead.

The final straw?


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The Cosmic Joke

I'm having a lazy July 4th holiday, midweek, in the USA.

This is a terrible holiday, as corporate jingoists across the spectrum continue to conflate the American Revolution with today's American imperial wars.

Support the troops?  Are you serious?

No less an 18th century luminary than Thomas Paine would have laughed, finding the irony deep, indeed.


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EATS!

Brats (grilled w/olive brine)
Corned Beef (crock cooked)
New England Special (secret seasonings)

Up with Revolution!


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Our Time

The two political parties are one party—the corporate party. They do not debate substantive issues. They each support the expansion of imperial wars, the bloated military budget, the dictates of global capitalism, the bailing out of Wall Street, punishing austerity measures, assaulting basic civil liberties through wholesale government surveillance and the abolition of due process, and an electoral process that has cemented into place a system of legalized bribery. They battle over cultural tropes such as abortion, gay rights and prayer in schools. We elect politicians based on how we are made to feel about them by the public relations industry. Politics is anti-politics.--CH

Okay, take it from the top. Ah one and ah two...


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"Joy on the Left"

All Tite's side offered in attack over the first 20 minutes was a drive by Neymar that Guillermo Ochoa flapped away, but they settled and soon became the more threatening side. Neymar began to have some joy on the left, with one weaving run resulting in a sharp save from Ochoa. The goalkeeper later parried a Gabriel Jesus effort after fine work from Neymar and by the break, there was a sense Brazil looked broadly in control.--NA/ESPN

Say what?

No, seriously, I love the English football vernacular.  This writer's match tidbits are lively and spry and make me think of afternoon tea at me Nana's lodgings across the hedgerow, before the Silicon Raj colonised the West Coast of the United States, broadly situating us in our present ordeal on the world's pitch, i.e., down 2-nil at 89'.


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Tactics

When you see pictures like this one of the police control of Patriot vs. Antifa clashes in downtown Portland, or anywhere else for that matter, there is always some big goon-of-a-cop smashing the protester's face into the pavement or sidewalk. Just grinding away like the protester is a murderer about to escape the clutches of justice.

I guess they have two choices; this or just shoot the fucker like they do black people and suicidal madmen.

Another favorite method, we shouldn't forget, is the ever-reliable choke hold like the one used to murder the notorious cigarette peddler Eric Garner.


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