I Can't Breathe

 

The Onion

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No Direction Home--The Ruse

The corporate media and Democratic Party are celebrating Joe Biden’s incoming cabinet as “the most diverse in US history,” proclaiming that the appointment of women, African Americans and Latinos to key cabinet positions is a sign of tremendous social progress.

In reality, Biden’s rainbow coalition of imperialist reaction encapsulates and exposes the right-wing essence of identity politics.--WSWS

The story, which you should read, is at the World Socialist website.

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Love Pissarro

But hate the new Blogger.

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Jim Carrey

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Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil Say Bidenheads

 

I don’t feel like I’m being hyperbolic here and I don’t see the concept of the lesser evil as being merely symbolic. We are literally advocating choosing evil. One has to look no further than any two major party candidates in the last century. Hell, one has to look no further than Joe Biden and Donald Trump. We are taught that it is perfectly morally acceptable to choose between a man who served as an architect of the modern day slave trade that is the post-Clintonian prison industrial complex and a man who imprisons children at the border in glorified concentration camps. These are both clearly evil human beings. Your average American recognizes this fact, and yet it remains perfectly mainstream to not only advocate giving one of these beasts a popular mandate for their crimes but it’s downright traditional to bully and humiliate anyone with enough of a conscience to refuse to play along.--NR

The source per usual. 

Every election, different words and expression, since FDR compromised his way to The New Deal, and foiled the actual Left, when America had the real deal. Even he held a bastard side, of course.

My mother always said Delano "saved us," meaning my family's lives.

Biden doesn't have it in him.  Neither does Kamala.  

So no no no.

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What Goes Around...

Donald Trump is no different to me than any other stranger who is also a tyrant responsible for mass suffering. I really do not give a shit about him or his rather vile family members. If I am being honest, I will admit that, having been subjected to his Public Domestic Abuse for four years, I was not the slightest bit sorry to learn about his illness. Why should I be sorry? It’s not like my feelings about the matter caused his illness. Indeed, his own irresponsibility caused it. And surely caused many others around him to also become ill. He is a despicable man, and he deserves nothing more than he has given to others. It is normal and legitimate for those whose lives have been disrupted and threatened by a bully or a tyrant to feel some exultation when the tyrant suffers.--JCI

Righteousness in a perilous time.

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Once I...

 

Business as usual.

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America

 

Jesus, what a mess!!

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Debate? What Fucking Debate?

Biden will babble and Trump will lie.

What more need you know; that this show

Is put upon us by the lowest of the low?

BTW, if you can stand listening to these 

Rat fuckers, you are a  better person than I.

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Brilliant

 

Source: Common Dreams

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What's Going On?

Listen to this, listen hard.

I know people personally who ideologically despise Assange.  Liberals mainly.  I do understand why they're such goofs, but I refuse to take them seriously.

There is no excuse for what is happening to Assange other than a full embrace of American fascism.

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Triple Whammy

This bit of silliness from the Onion is a welcomed respite from the damned real world of fascist politicians, forest fires and plagues.

The latter two could hardly exist without the corrupt ineptness of the first grouping.

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9/11

TOPEKA, KS—Feeling helpless in the wake of the horrible Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that killed thousands, Christine Pearson baked a cake and decorated it like an American flag Monday.--the Onion

Nineteen years and a sinking-boatload of wars later, America remains befuddled.

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Happy Family

There has been much reluctance on the American “left” to discuss Trump’s electioneering efforts, and his politics more generally, with reference to the threat of fascist politics. Most Americans assume “It Can’t Happen Here,” drawing on the famous title of Sinclair Lewis’s seminal novel about the rise of fascism in a country that historically prides itself in democratic politics. U.S. media discourse routinely downplays talk of fascism, preferring terms like “authoritarianism,” or the more innocuous sounding “populism” to describe Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies. For example, in the first six months of 2020, a search of the Nexis Uni database reveals that the New York Times included the terms “fascist” or “fascism” alongside references to the Trump administration in 56 articles, compared to 161 articles referring to the Trump administration within the context of “authoritarian” politics or “authoritarianism,” and 193 articles referencing Trump alongside discussions of “populism” or “populist” politics. [1] Similarly, my review of the iPoll database, which is a clearinghouse for national polling data, finds that, for the professional polling organizations operating in the U.S., not a single group or poll bothered to ask Americans between 2016 and 2020 about their opinions of the “fascist” or “fascism” question, at all or in relation to the Trump presidency.--AD

The rest of DiMaggio's story.

The whole enchilada.


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Brutal

(Rachel Peters for the Oregonian)

So stunning, yet so tragic.  This is outside Canby, Oregon, near Portland.

My good friend RP Thomas lost his house as another fire roared through his subdivision in Talent, Oregon near the Cali border.

Talent and nearby Phoenix were both burned out.  Closer to Portland again, Molalla, with 8,000 folks, has been evacuated and may end up like the two southern Oregon towns.


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Update:  How Molalla was saved.  Read it.

Pilger on Assange

I had never heard a publisher or an editor invoke morality in this way. Assange believes that journalists are the agents of people, not power: that we, the people, have a right to know about the darkest secrets of those who claim to act in our name.

If the powerful lie to us, we have the right to know. If they say one thing in private and the opposite in public, we have the right to know. If they conspire against us, as Bush and Blair did over Iraq, then pretend to be democrats, we have the right to know.

It is this morality of purpose that so threatens the collusion of powers that want to plunge much of the world into war and wants to bury Julian alive in Trump's fascist America--JP

The great Aussie journalist defends one of his own.



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The Angels of Anarchy

“Anarchist Jurisdiction” is one of the great oxymorons in the Age of Great Oxymorons…

Anarchist Jurisdiction is the best band name since Suicidal Tendencies and they will probably cover many of the same songs, though each band member will play in a personal time signature and  in a key of their own choosing…--JSC

So much for anarchy!


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Into the Streets...Again

It doesn’t look great for Slow Joe Biden, belatedly rising from his basement while the Orange Malignancy takes its white nationalist hate show on the road.

Donald Trump is in fighting shape, throwing out one fascistic jab and neo-McCarthyite hook after another. The Orange Menace looks cocky. He’s relishing the fight. He’s mangling truth and distorting reality with reckless abandon. He’s ready to rumble.

He’s calling Biden names like a towel-snapping locker-room bully boy. “He doesn’t know what day it is,” Trump says. “He doesn’t know what state he’s in,” Trump snorts, planting another towel snap on Biden’s basement-softened buttocks. Take that, “Sleepy Joe,” you “Trojan Horse of Socialism.”

Trump knows what he’s doing and where he is. This is what he’s about. This is where he excels.--PS


Street implores us to play the game...then get the fuck out, and into the streets.  As usual, he makes good sense.

This time you should vote the "lesser-of-two-evils," obviously.  Cast aside one stooge, then go after the corporate clown in time.


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Seven Bullet Holes

The Mystics of the WNBA. 


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The Conformists Have Their Daze

Fifty-years after its making I’m yet convinced that Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist is not only among the greatest films of the director’s career, but one of the greatest films period.

No film speaks louder or more succinctly, in my estimation, about where we are, unsurprisingly, today.

Bertolucci (1941-2018) began his career in revolt, lashing out at the injustices of capitalism and the blinding middle-class decadence he witnessed as a young man. The son of an affluent and highly regarded poet, he was born in Parma, Italy. As a young man, Bertolucci fell under the spell of family friend Pier Paolo Pasolini, who gave him his first job in cinema and became his mentor.--TS


The complete story from CounterPunch.


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Something New

I may have a new piece in CounterPunch tomorrow.  So watch for the weekend long format with 30 or more articles.  It'll be my first published article in many months.

There are reasons for this, which I won't get into.  But they're very real.

The topic is conformity, something dear to Americans.


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Keeping it Real at the WSWS

Claiming that the Democratic party had embraced “progressive” ideas such as universal health care and free public education, Sanders declared, “Many of the ideas we fought for that just a few years ago were considered radical are now mainstream.”

This is a ridiculous fraud. Joe Biden was the Senator from Delaware, the corporate tax evasion capital of America. His entire life has been dedicated to the defense of the social interests of Wall Street, consummated by his stint as vice president under an administration that funneled trillions to the banks, declared crooked bankers “too big to jail” while it allowed millions of families to lose their homes. Harris is a vicious ex-prosecutor and California Attorney General who dragged non-violent drug offenders to prison and presided over the nation’s largest prison population.--PM

Come on, man.  You know what the DNC is dishing is complete bullshit.

Over and over again, it's a damn farce.


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Dead Man Walking?

On 11 August, Biden ended months of media speculation that had been intensified by his advanced age and clear signs of cognitive decline. Of course, Harris might end up serving out the remainder of his term should he die or otherwise become unable to fulfill his functions as president. Biden has even himself spoken of being “a transition candidate”, which implies he doesn’t expect or perhaps even intend to serve a full four years should he win.--PB

Do tell.


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The Righteously Pissed Off Jimmy Dore

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Prove You're Not a Pile of Shit

Funny, I got a MAGAC fundraising letter yesterday.  How in the hell they pulled my name out of the hat I don't know. 

I've never signed on to anything Republican.  I fucking hate Republicans a lot more than I hate stupid Democrats.

Biden is a stupid Dem.  There are plenty of those guys and dolls running the country aground in D.C.

There will be no winning here.

I guess they're just throwing darts, seeing if one will stick.



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Main Street

Biden’s offensive right-wing idiocy is just endlessly stunning. It is such an insult for the corporate Dems to be running this clown. It is sad to watch liberals and progressives feeling compelled (to) run behind his big leaky adult diaper with desperate fake-progressive pooper scoopers.--PS

Paul Street has a new book coming out from CounterPunch.


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14 Points

The Good Retired Soldier lays out 14 points for Grampa  Joe Biden.

I have little faith that Biden will listen to or acknowledge this sage advice.

First, he's a fucking neoconservative; second, he is essentially brain dead.

This election is going to be a fiasco like none other. The DNC ought to be drawn and quartered for slapping these circumstances on us.

It's a shame.


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Max and Jimmy I

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Max and Jimmy II

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The Beginning of the End of Biden

 
Okay, the first part of my prediction nailed it.  I said, Kamala Harris would be Biden's running mate.  She's just conservative enough to please Biden's pigheadedness, and liberal enough to please the Democrats who talk change but never act.

We'll see about part II; or how long before Biden quits for the good of the country.  I said within two years.

Biden is a sick man, brain dead, and like Trump is poised to inflict heavy damage on the populace. Or try to: he is a puppet of the DNC at this stage.


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Urgent Care

I've been sick the last few days.

Hoping to be tested for the virus tomorrow.

But have you ever tried to get a doctor's appointment in the U.S. when everyone one else is thinking the same thing?

So I looked around when my regular doctor said he was too booked for me.  Now I have a plan.  Hope it works.


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Lucinda Wiliams - "Lake Charles" [Live From Austin, TX]

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Portland

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Bob Dylan

It never ages like the artists.


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Jackass

Who is this dumb shit again?  Oh, yes.  Billy J. Williams.

Clown ass.





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Before the Flash Bangs

Portland crowd.


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Whoa...

Probably the biggest protest since Bush the Younger's invasion of Iraq. The police and Trump's goons are overwhelmed by now.  What do you do with that many dissidents?


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Sam the Man

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In B & W

This one hits hard at the complacency of black congressional members who cannot bring themselves to support a revolutionary movement in the U.S.

The Black Lives Matter protests scare the shit out of  them, just as they do congressional whitey.

Their black caucus are Biden folk, and Joe ain't nothing but a lying fool, so brain damaged that he can't speak a coherent sentence, much less formulate a complex thought.

That in itself is sad, a Biden familial ordeal. It shouldn't be ours.

Our ordeal is something else, a crisis of the polity; the work of the DNC henceforth is to disallow dissent, while  the continued rightward drift of the GOP takes no prisoners.

No winners in that duality.

Trump is just one iteration of the ongoing American tragedy. Another will soon be exhibit Z in the big fail of  U.S. discourse, the entrenchment of further disaster capitalism, the look-the-other-way vision of  Biden and his supporters and handlers.


Word: young blacks don't buy Biden either.  It is a small hope, as tiny as Trump's hands. As small as a community protest like the ongoing "battle for Portland," where the law is practicing for something larger, I guess.



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Bernie/Biden Task Force Ends In Extreme Failure

Righteous anger here.


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Maneuvers/the clown version

It was June 20th and we antiwar vets had traveled all the way to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the midst of a pandemic to protest President Trump’s latest folly, an election 2020 rally where he was to parade his goods and pretend all was well with this country.--DS

The good ex-soldier whips it around.


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These Times

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Bad Cop

This is a movie for our times, the 1993 classic "Bad Lieutenant."

If you haven't seen it, check it out.

Associated prose.


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Without Trump

Thanks to RP Thomas.  I hadn't seen this before.  Enjoy the day.


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Looking Ahead

The conventional wisdom on presidential politics nowadays was described a century ago by William Butler Yeats: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

“The best,” in this case, would be voters gearing up grudgingly to vote for Joe Biden; “the worst” would be supporters of Donald Trump.

The conventional wisdom is right or rather it would be right if instead of lamenting the absence of conviction among the best, it focused instead on their absence of enthusiasm.

Biden supporters are not lacking in conviction when the issue is sending Trump and his miscreant underlings packing. However, few, if any, of them are gung-ho for Joe. How could they be? There is no there to enthuse over.--AL

Andrew Levine is such a good writer and thinker I find it amazing.  I still think Kamala Harris will be our new prez by 2022.

Strange times.


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Bill in Tulsa

Strange times. No Hillary? Bathroom break?


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Change You Can Believe In--For Real This Time

If the prospect of the Trump – Biden presidential election fills you with horror and despair, you might give some thought to not just replacing both candidates but the presidency as well, at least as we now conceive it.

For some time now, but maybe since the Kennedy administration (which ended in a hail of voter-suppressed gunfire), I have been thinking that one of the biggest problems with American democracy is the presidency itself, the idea that the chief magistrate of the country should be one person elected every four years by a few swing voters in Ohio, North Carolina, or Florida.

What good can be said of an office that regularly is awarded to the likes of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush, and that this year, for its finalists, has Donald Trump and Joe Biden, men who otherwise would not be eligible to coach Little League teams or lead Scout troops (pussy grabbers and hair sniffers need not apply).--MS

I like a lot, not all, of the thinking in this essay.  It's somewhat outside the box and something similar ought to be the focus of a new constitutional convention, which I think is key to fixing this holy mess.

Could it happen without more massive repression and violence against our citizens, while deriving a new consensus?

There's always risk; ask the ghosts of our first revolutionaries.


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The Boxer

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Art

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Guessing Games

Trump is a product and sign of U.S. capitalism’s exhaustion. The long, cozy governmental alternation between GOP and Democrats after the trauma of the 1930s Great Depression had achieved its purpose. It had undone FDR’s redistribution of wealth from the top to the middle and the bottom. It had “fixed” that problem by reversing the redistribution of wealth and income. The ideological cover for that “fix” was bipartisan demonization of domestic socialism combined with bipartisan pursuit of Cold War with the USSR. The major GOP vs. Democratic Party dispute concerned the modes and extents of governmental support for private capitalism (as in Keynes vs. Friedman, etc.). That minor squabble got raised to the status of “the major issue” for politicians, journalists, and academics to debate because they caved to the taboo on debates over capitalism vs. socialism.--RDW

It's not us versus the GOP.  It's us versus the Democrats and the GOP.  Driving that point through the thick skulls of some people is a formidable challenge. Because there is no real choice among candidates that might appeal to the left, we're given the "no option" election as usual.

It's fairly clear that Biden knows his role among the D-side's pols, AKA, the party's power-elite.  If he beats Trump in the GE his purpose will have been rendered.  If he can beat Trump, which is the wager of the century, his handlers (he's not capable of a coherent thought himself) will enact the soft coup.

Biden, all in on the strategy, will have served his purpose.

Soon thereafter, he will resign for health reasons and his VEEP choice will take over.  Given the times, and not logic, I'm guessing Kamala Harris.

All of this is predicated on Biden's supposed electability, of course. Is that part of the miasma even real?


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The More Things Change...

Body-cameras and street documentation have not slowed the use of violence among those sworn to serve and protect.

That is because the police themselves are protected by a higher authority--an institutionalized, radicalized and acculturated sense of power given them by governing elites, i.e., the caretakers of the wealthy.

Will that change very soon?  Of course not.


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Embarrassed Enough

Okay, enough about Brees, but for this.

Funny, isn't it?

No?  Okay, back to the drawing board.


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Shit--Eating Grins and All

A Cold Brees is blowing through the sports world today after a white NFL quarterback, who is a multimillionaire many times over, says something really stupid and irrelevant to the situation at hand in the U.S. today--race relations.

To Drew Brees it's all about the flag. At least one of his teammates with the New Orleans Saints has spoken out. Other sports pros around the country have also questioned his statement.

And of course everyone has a right to an opinion; it's just that some speech is recklessly degenerate and misbegotten--and plainly stupid.

The guy attended Purdue University.  I wonder if he ever cracked a U.S. History book?

Maybe he's brain damaged.  We can't rule it out.  It is after all football, and he's played the game for many years.

Here is a relevant piece I wrote several years ago. If your concern is optics, Colin Kaepernick looks really good right now.



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Perfection

You can't say it isn't a fact.


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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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