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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Happy Weekend!

What are you doing here reading this crap when you could be here reading the stuff that counts?

I'm too tired to have a good weekend, but that shouldn't stop you from having all the fun your incredible shrinking brain is capable of conjuring up.

Seriously, break both legs on your way to the exotic foods specialty shop.

Have fun.


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Circus

What exactly is the god damn point of the circus in DC?

The retrograde swine on the judiciary committee are going to pretend to listen before mumbling a few inanities about how they support and respect women, and then tell us that we've all seen a teachable moment, a remarkable thing, but that we (they) must move on.

The halfwit will be seated on the court.

That has been our American reality since Clarence Thomas showed Anita Hill his porn collection.

As Chomsky is fond of pointing out, the Republican Party is the most dangerous terror organization on the planet.

Yet people refuse to believe the truth.


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Fatigue

I feel I may be slowly gaining.

For the past two weeks I've been dog-sick, tired, out of it and generally wiped out by something like the flu.

Tired beyond belief.  Hard-to-walk tired. Tired with mortal fire. Never experienced it before.

Slow comeback?


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Providence Advantage Plus (my ass)

I literally had to tell my new doctor, whom I met for the first time this morning, three or four times that the reason I've seen so many doctors in the past five years is because I regularly went to Good Sam's clinic in Northwest Portland. Residents there are run through on a conveyor belt for educational purposes.  I rarely saw the same doc twice, unless I was being treated for my shingles and subsequent facial neuralgia, or some other malady.

Even then I think I had three or four residents through the long course of step, missteps, etc., in my neuralgia treatment.  Fortunately I had a good nursing assistant who more or less took over the therapeutics and put me on the road to recovery.

None of this impressed the asshole, my new doc.

My new doc acted like I was putting him out.  I was an obtrusive parasite.  Even after I reminded him that my original HMO went out of business and I lost Good Sam in favor of Providence, and the new HMO hasn't been able to hook me up with a PCP, he grumbled on about it.

Then, remarkably, he actually said, "Why didn't you talk to any of them about your health?" meaning the residents at Good Sam.

This is where I turned on the bitch. This is where I almost set him on fire and destroyed his golf game.

Because dumb-ass, this is a sudden new problem.  And because Providence is so inept I've been without a doctor for 4 fucking months. Got it, finally?

Thanks to a dumb-as-rocks Medicare Agent who blundered my first efforts to find a Providence associate. Thanks to the HMO itself, which is better quite honestly at promoting Portland Soccer than providing health care--and can't seem to organize its way out of a wet paper bag.

Stupid fucking fucks.

Everywhere.


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The Race

What a difference a month makes.

In early August Seattle rolled into Houston like a team on a mission.  The Mariners were sitting 5 or 6 back with the A's, both looking up at the Astros, but with a real chance to make a move.

Lo! Seattle took four from Houston and looked like it was making the mother of all moves into real contention in the AL West.

But then, as is the fate of Seattle every season, the fade started. Meanwhile the A's and the Astros kept the pressure on.

The dog days bit Seattle plenty hard.

The Mariners get their last crack at the Astros tonight in Houston, and the scenario is different this time.  Houston is playing to keep Oakland at bay.

Seattle is looking for pitching from its minor league system.


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Orgiastic Weekend

Trump is not the problem. Think of him instead as a summons to address the real problem, which in a nation ostensibly of, by, and for the people is the collective responsibility of the people themselves. For Americans to shirk that responsibility further will almost surely pave the way for more Trumps — or someone worse — to come.--AB

My favorite retired general in the whole wild world does some heavy lifting here.

The regular CP crowd puts it all down here, fat with gem after gem. If you really want to know the truth it's all a little too much for me.  I've already shot my wad three, four times, and it's not even noon yet on Friday!


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Some Like It

A fast-moving thunder storm just moved through Portland and left a boom behind like none I've ever heard before. Sudden and loud, it crept upon us like a mega-IED and made me go to the window and survey the cityscape for hijacked aircraft.

Nothing like it before, it frazzled my nerves.

Earlier today a squall moved in dumping an inch or two of rain in a very short time. Good times.


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