Guilty

DURHAM, NH—Blaming those with a differing worldview for sowing rampant discord in society, political scientists at the University of New Hampshire announced Wednesday they had traced the current polarization in American democracy to those fucking idiots on the other side of the aisle...

The rest of the story from The Onion.


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Pass the Popcorn, Please

The efforts by the Democratic Party and much of the press, including CNN and The New York Times, to discredit Trump, as if our problems are embodied in him, are futile. The smug, self-righteousness of this crusade against Trump only contributes to the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. This crusade attempts to reduce a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It is accompanied by a refusal to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. This collusion with the forces of corporate oppression neuters the press and Trump’s mainstream critics.--CH

I hear and read a lot of this from Trump critics. Based on their conviction, one would think that before Trump rose out of the muck America was a sweetheart ideal located somewhere in the West, an idyllic Eden where no wrong was ever attempted, no murder was ever committed, no shackles were ever in vogue, no pain existed or unfairness exploited, no hearts were ever broken or corporate robberies committed, nor evil ever imagined much less acted on.

Following Hedges thesis here, one imagines the wailing anti-Trump noise is itself cultist in nature.

Hey, we get it man.  He's an asshole and lawless president who should have been impeached yesterday.

Keep yelling. It's doing a world of good.


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Post Politics

It’s election season again, that joyous time of the biennium, and you know what that means: a renewal of the perennial left-wing debate over “lesser-evil voting.” Is it wrong to vote for a Democrat, rather than someone on the genuine left, in order to keep a reactionary or a fascist out of power? Or, on the contrary, is it wrong to vote for a leftist who has apparently no chance of victory, thereby denying a vote to the Democrat and so increasing the odds that the reactionary candidate will win? The most famous advocate of “lesser-evil” voting is Noam Chomsky, who argues that the most immediate moral imperative is to prevent the worst possible electoral outcome from occurring. Critics of lesser-evil voting are legion, as a simple Google search indicates.--CW

A sensible argument for LEV, which I can no longer abide by. The duopoly has had its day and will continue to have many more of them in a fraudulent political process that both sickens and embarrasses me. I do not think it my civic duty to support fraud.

I know many people--I should say most people I know--buy Mr. Wright's thinking, if they think at all. Those who do not think an iota are inconsequential, and hence the real problem.

As I've said over and over, the level of political discourse in the U.S. bottomed out long ago.  The U.S. is a police state.

As long as that little problem lingers, whom to vote for hardly matters at all, despite Wright's painstaking argument.

(Picture: Obama's war in Yemen)


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Mr. Fish

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Art Bastards

Louis Proyect goes in-depth on the commodification of art in this compelling piece.


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Hedges Visits Portland's Street Roots

PORTLAND, Ore.—It is 8 a.m. I am in the small offices of Street Roots, a weekly newspaper that prints 10,000 copies per edition. Those who sell the newspaper on the streets—all of them victims of extreme poverty and half of them homeless—have gathered before heading out with their bundles to spend hours in the cold and rain.

“There is foot care on Mondays starting at 8 a.m. with the nurses,” Cole Merkel, the director of the vendor program, shouts above the chatter. “If you need to get your feet taken care of, come in for the nurses’ foot care. Just a really quick shout-out and thank you to Leo and Nettie Johnson, who called up to City Hall this week to testify about the criminalization of homelessness to City Council and the mayor. Super awesome.”--CH

A Street Roots vendor whom I speak to frequently told me Chris Hedges visited the newspaper's Portland office last week.

Here is Hedges' resultant column at Truthdig.

A good read.


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Give

Give to CounterPunch, the best online zine in the world.

My computer was down, finally responded briefly and I heard something like a whine in the fan area.  I slapped the fan encasement a couple of times.  Presto.

Probably not the best fix. We'll see how long it lasts.


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Beyond Alleged Assault

In the hearings, Kavanaugh tried to pass himself off as a regular guy who worked his way up the ladder on merit, not connections: “I got into Yale Law School,” he pointed out. “That’s the number one law school in the country. I had no connections there. I got there by busting my tail in college.”

Nope, no connections. It’s just coincidence that he’s a Yale “legacy” (his grandfather graduated Yale in 1928), that he attended high school at the exclusive Georgetown Prep (his father graduated Georgetown University), and that his father headed a large DC lobbying group representing more than 600 companies (the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association, now known as the Personal Care Products Council). Surely Brett Kavanaugh would have risen to the top of his field even if he’d been born in a public housing project and attended public schools, right?--TK

No silver spoon, right?  Ha ha.

Beyond the "did he do it?" obsession.  Kavanaugh has done plenty, most of it harmful.

Corporate media, television and big newspapers, have America paralyzed with stupidity and sleaze.  Powerful drugs.  So glad I kicked the big-media habit many years ago.

I don't know the next big thing, that is the next pop sensation being manufactured by big money for my salvation, but neither do I walk around with worms in my brain.


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