Long Time Comin'

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Killer Cops in MinnyTown

He has a pathological stare.  His eyes show fear and hatred. Dude murdered an unarmed black man.  Will he be punished to the fullest extent of the law?  In America today?  Take a wild guess.


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The Big Con

To hear Democratic Party propagandists and anti-Trump Republicans on the cable networks tell it, Nancy Pelosi is the shrewdest, most politically savvy Democrat in living memory. MSNBC is the worst, and Rachel Maddow is the worst of the worst, but, in effect, they all speak with one voice, and they all agree that the woman is a genius.

Maybe, they are right. Just not so as you can see it.

Pelosi and her cohort of corporate Democrats led the sixty percent or so of Americans who hate Trump’s guts into the G-man Mueller era and then into the impeachment era. They did a good job at a tactical level. And yet, Trump not only survived their efforts, but actually advanced in the polls.

One would therefore expect that the consensus view by now would be that their strategic thinking is not quite up to snuff. However, just the opposite is the case.--AL

You and I know.  This is a first-rate essay by the master, Andrew Levine. Read it as often as you can.  It'll help your mind in the time of the virus.  You will come out a better man or woman.  You will see the light.  Tell your friends you saw it here first.


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Sad Clown

He looks very very sad.  If he is so great--a stable genius--why does he cry like a sad clown?


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Druggie

WASHINGTON—Explaining that the 800 mg tablets he’s been crushing up and snorting were no longer doing the trick, President Donald Trump was reportedly driven to buy black-tar hydroxychloroquine off a drug dealer in a D.C. metro station Tuesday due to his growing tolerance for the prescription medicine. “Come on, Randy, man, don’t give me those baby hydroxies—I need that pure shit,” said the pallid, twitching commander in chief as he frantically scratched at his rash-covered body, begging the peddler to sell him some of the sticky, highly concentrated form of the anti-malarial medication in a dark corner of D.C.’s McPherson Square Metro Station. “I went through 30 or 40 pills this morning and I’m not even having any heart palpitations or dizziness. The stuff is like baby aspirin. Come on, man, I’ve maxed out all my prescriptions and I’m fuckin’ jonesin’ for a big hit of that sweet Roxy. I can handle it, I swear.” At press time, the drug dealer had knocked President Trump unconscious and thrown his body on the train tracks.--Onion

The prez is a drug-addled goofball.  What next for our poor union?


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An Ugly Business

The mendacity of Donald Trump is without parallel in the history of American presidential politics.  His lies, as tabulated by the Washington Post’s fact checker, number in the thousands.  U.S. truth tellers have become Trump’s favorite targets as Inspectors General, federal judges, intelligence officers, and the nation’s media face constant punishment and harassment from the White House, and the charge of “fake news” has created doubt and cynicism within the American populace.  For these reasons, it is troubling to see the most prominent member of the mainstream media, The New York Times, highlight stories that turn on presidential lies while minimizing the seminal statements of whistleblowers who take great personal and political risk in testifying to the ignorance and corruption of the president of the United States.--MG

The New York Times seems helpless to clean up its act. Big media, more than any other institution in the U.S., helped elect the Orange Dog by normalizing the fascist's entire shtick. Is the Orange Headache still such a moneymaker that the Times remains compelled to prop him up while ignoring the truth?


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Subscribe Now

Virus heads plotting the fleecing of  the world economy.


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Out of the Fire

Mark Lanegan is one of the best musicians to come out of the Seattle "grunge" scene of the 1990s. He is also a survivor, obviously, still working after taming the same suicidal tendencies that destroyed Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley and, most recently, Chris Cornell.

You could say something in the collective mind (or water) trapped many of the city's musicians in a kind of heroin pandemic, if that is the word of the day.

You might ask of all the Seattle survivors, what came first, the hard drugs or the depression?

The Seattle bands were friends and enemies of each other, depending on their gigs and the quantity and quality of the drugs at hand.

Lanegan first gained notice and some success with The Screaming Trees.  That  band did not blow up like Alice in Chains, Nirvana, or even Cornell's first serious effort, Soundgarden, but Lanegan had the vocal chops to negate that and carry on.

His solo work and stripped down sounds, heavy with plausible lyrics and meaning, transcended the youthful work of "grunge," whatever in the hell that was beyond grinding guitars and the polar forces of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

Lanegan has published a memoir of those riotous Seattle and Screaming Trees years.  I haven't read it yet, nor am I sure I ever will, but the reviews have been sterling.

And I'm a long-time admirer of his voice.


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Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me?

Mick Jagger is now 76. Yet he and his band are still performing, most recently last weekend for the “One World: Together At Home” concert, when they performed an accomplished version of ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want” from their separate mansions.

Observers could note that the four core members of the band each presented themselves in time-honoured style. Jagger, looking not a day older than 60, still has a powerful vocal range and impressive charisma and presence; no need for a walking cane, although he did have to have much-publicised heart surgery last year.--AL

The end is near for the old rockers. For most of them age 64 was long ago.


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American Dystopia

The full-blown pandemic has revealed in all its ugliness the death producing mechanisms of systemic inequality, deregulation, the dismantling of the welfare state, and the increasingly dangerous assault on the environment. Beneath the massive failure of leadership from the Trump administration lies the long history of concentrated power in the hands of the 1 percent, shameless corporate welfare, political corruption, and the merging of money and politics to deny the most vulnerable access to health care, a living wage, worker protection, and strong labor movements capable of challenging corporate power and the cruelty of austerity and right-wing policies that maim, cripple and, kill hundreds of thousands, as is evident in the current pandemic. The brutality of neoliberal fascism, with its hyped up version of Social Darwinism, is now openly defended in the call to reopen the economy by restricting or eliminating protective measures that would slow the pace of the virus. Most at risk are those populations who have been considered disposable such as Blacks, undocumented immigrants, the racially incarcerated, the poor, and the working class. These populations are now told to sacrifice their lives in the interest of filling the coffers of the corporate elite and the political zombies that rule the United States.--HG

There simply must be a political and economic response to the virus that is inclusive of everyone in American society.  In other words, capitalism must respond, as it was forced to respond to the Great Depression.

Imagine that you are a capitalist under corporatism and all of your workers, the people you depend on to make and create your wealth, all begin to perish in the streets.

What then, motherfuckers?


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Must Read from Street

I would like to nominate the “Public” Broadcasting System’s (“P”BS) “NewsHour” and its economics reporter Paul Solomon for the 2020 Piss Down Our Backs and Tell Us Its Raining Prize in broadcast journalism.  Last Thursday, “P”BS “NewsHour” viewers got to see the show’s longtime economics correspondent (Paul Solomon) give a chilling account of how newly unemployed people are disastrously losing their health insurance in the middle of a pandemic.--PS

This evisceration of PBS' NewsHour is inspired sarcasm/satire. Read it for its tragic/comedic reality.


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Ambition

Reports of at least two positive coronavirus cases among White House employees in recent days illustrated how easily Covid-19 can spread in enclosed workplaces, even when workers are being tested regularly—deepening concerns about the likely effects of President Donald Trump's aggressive push to reopen the U.S. economy even as the pandemic shows no sign of containment.

Vice President Mike Pence's press secretary, Katie Miller, tested positive for the coronavirus on Friday. One of Trump's valets, who has served the president meals without wearing a mask, also tested positive for the virus last week. The diagnoses followed reports that at least 11 members of the U.S. Secret Service had contracted Covid-19.--JC

It's only a matter of time before the virus is crawling up the bung holes of Trump and Pence, where it will settle in for a long stay--or for as long as it takes to expel their mythologies.


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Take Another Hit

The detestable rationalizations liberals make for sticking with Biden despite Tara Reade’s convincing story can’t come as any surprise. It’s the same ritual contortions they’ve made about the Iraq war, fracking, abortion, the drug war, Anita Hill, social security, segregation, climate change, health care, deportations, a living wage, student debt, the Patriot Act, pipelines, the Libyan coup, climate change. To be a Democrat is to live in a constant state of denial, self-contradiction and moral hypocrisy.--JSC

St. Clair goes off.  You don't want to be the opposition when he rolls it out.  You're gonna look silly.

Da a a a amn.  Read all of it this weekend.  Such brilliance is rare; it's also brave and, well, good common sense, which seems to be disappearing like so many species from the planet.


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XR/Hedges

When Chomsky (age 92) goes to heaven Hedges will inherit the badge of America's number one public intellectual, or perhaps the honor will go to both Hedges and Nader, 1A and 1B.


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Long Play/ George Carlin

Carlin was 69 when he granted this long interview on cable radio. Two years later he died of a heart attack and sealed his epitaph:  I was here a moment ago.


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Sticks

Just look at these two stooges.

Aren't you sad and mad about having to put up with them?

You could pick up two sticks at the beach and find brighter minds therein.

If you're not disgusted you're already dead.



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Tin Soldiers: Fifty Years On

If you are old enough, you will recognize that snippet from a song by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.  If not, I am here to tell you that on May 4, 1970, four students were shot to death by members of the Ohio National Guard on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio.  Nine others were wounded.

The students weren’t doing anything wrong. Actually, they were doing something right. They were peacefully assembled to protest the U.S. war on Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia.  They were part of an eruption of nationwide campus protests that followed President Nixon’s announcement that the United States had launched a bombing offensive of Cambodia.--FJ

I was a brainwashed freshman at Southern Oregon College on May 4, 1970.  But like the author's fence-sitting friends, I was jolted awake by what happened at Kent State.

Even I could see then that the Kent State Massacre was an atrocious exercise in corrupt power.  I was a frosh, a kid from the sticks of Oregon, devoid of anything like an actual education.  But there I was in college, just aware enough regarding the war to realize I wanted no part of it.

My logic was self-serving.  Like Ali, I didn't "have nothing against no Viet Cong."

Ali was the best teacher to my ears.  His words would cost him the best years of his career. He was brave.  The Ohio National Guard gunmen were cowards; our police apparatus in its burgeoning form has grown bolder and increasingly violent over the ensuing 50-years.

Things have only worsened since then.  Remember that Eric Garner couldn't breathe.  His killer could not have given a fuck.

His killer was fired 5-years after the murderous encounter, but he avoided guilt or jail, like the tin soldiers of the Ohio National Guard.


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Apropos of Everything

American philosopher.


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