Is Donald Trump Howard Beale?

If Donald Trump continues to make a lot of noise, most importantly if he continues to arouse the Trumpsters, the Council of Foreign Relations will have a little talk with Donald Trump (if they haven’t already) similar to the talk Mr. Jensen had with Howard Beale [in Network]. Mr. Trump will be told he needs to change his message. Just as Mr. Jensen told Howard that there are no Arabs, no Third World, so Mr. Trump will be told there are no Mexicans, Muslim terrorists or even Americans. There are only corporations. Trump will no longer be allowed to rabble rouse, just as Howard Beale stopped rabble rousing.
    -- Bruce Lerro 

network-40-years-later

Wavy Gravy

On May 22^nd, about three thousand gathered to celebrate all things Wavy for his 80^th Birthday.
wavy-gravy-turns-80

Pre-crime

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has revealed that the major television networks plan to call the Democratic primary for Hillary Clinton during the day on June 7th — hours prior to the close of polls in California.

So let’s dispense with all these arcane DNC rules about what a “super-delegate” is and when and where and how they vote and say what we all know is true: Hillary has clinched the Democratic nomination, and all these upcoming primaries and caucuses should be canceled to save those states’ taxpayers their hard-earned tax dollars. Also, since the super-delegates vote on July 25th but also apparently on June 7th, it seems silly to have a convention in Philadelphia on the 25th of July when we can just declare July 25th to be June 7th and hold the Democratic National Convention in MSNBC’s studios in New York on that date. There’ll be less room for dancing, but equally good catering, I’m told.
    -- Seth Abramson

clinton-clinches-democratic-nomination 

Toast!

Hillary Clinton and her top aides failed to comply with U.S. State Department policies on records by using her personal email server and account, possibly jeopardizing official secrets, an internal watchdog concluded in a long-awaited report (pdf) on Wednesday.
clinton-email-scandal-much-worse-expected

debate this!

sort of unprecedented.....bring it on
"I hope... [Trump] doesn't chicken out on this,"
sanders-trump-lets-debate-biggest-stadium-possible

the scope of our failure- Andrew Bacevich

You’ve written a remarkable book. It’s original in treating the Middle East and surrounding regions as unitary in American strategic thinking since 1980......To my knowledge, no one has treated the past 36 years as a single phenomenon. Am I wrong?

No, I think you’re correct. One of the aims of the book is to persuade Americans, persuade readers, that to consider U.S. military involvement in this part of the world as “one damn thing after another” is to miss the true significance of what we have been attempting to do and to misapprehend the scope of our failure. It’s a problem in our politics to focus on the most recent episode, the ongoing episode, and to ignore everything that came before.

1 the_scope_of_our_failure
2 this_will_stop_only_when_the_american_people_get_fed_up

gotta potty

throwing chairs

"Ignorance of ongoing American political violence through national, class or racial privilege hardly erases its facts from those who experience it.....Use of this ignorance as a political wedge by posing a few angry Democratic convention delegates in Nevada as the ugly underbelly of American politics is as cynical as it is ignorant of life as it is lived by most people. The U.S. destruction of the Middle East, with Hillary Clinton as prime mover in recent history, is ugly political violence. The mass incarceration which the Clintons helped engineer for political gain is ugly political violence. The jobs lost through Bill Clinton’s passage of NAFTA is ugly political violence. A few righteously pissed Democrats in Nevada doesn’t rise to the level of a bar fight, let alone a political debacle for those involved."

   --Rob Urie

hillary-clinton-and-political-violence

guy clark

the Trump electorate

“If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.”
   --Donald Trump, People magazine, 1998

“Could it be possible that this man, once derided as the quintessence of national excess and shame, now charms values voters with such blatant, classless appeals to the lowest common denominator of the dipshit moron voter?.......the answer is a resounding yes! Campaign ploys painstakingly designed to strike every stereotypical chord with aging white conservatives resonate not only with the largely male retiree target audience, but also with that electorate’s beleaguered, long-suffering wives. One of the three or four groups most disadvantaged by the dipshit moron worldview, white women born in the 50s and 60s have every reason not to goose-step along to their menfolk’s tyrannical tune. Yet they stand there permatanned, bleached blonde, and delirious, urging them onward unto Armageddon." 

   --Jonathan Brunson

values-viewers

What Is An Anti-Capitalist To Do?

To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/717812

 “To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.”
   ― Murray Bookchin

To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/717812

To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/717812

"There is no substitute for understanding the historical forces of capitalism that has brought us to the edge. The logic of capitalism is grow or die, and we are all being dragged towards the die part. We need targets of accountability, and we need remedies for the dispossessed. There is a biological debt that must be paid by the most rapacious among us."

   --Chris Burnett

what-have-i-done?

america drinks and goes to hell

“The song filtered into my conscience this morning after reading about Budweiser's temporary renaming their rice-besotted swill, "America". Seems Trump has taken credit for the idea on Fox and Friends. InBev, the Belgian swineherders, have the gall to quote Woody Guthrie on the label. This land is your land, indeed. I feel like buying a case and publicly pouring it down the drain. As the lovely RaeAnn puts it: Vote for Trump, America - pour your decency, your creditability, your very soul, down the drain.”

   --R. Beatty

The Trouble with Normal
   --Bruce Cockburn

Strikes across the frontier and strikes for higher wage
Planet lurches nto the right as ideologies engage
Suddenly it's repression, moratorium on rights
What did they think the politics of panic would invite?
Person in the street shrugs -- "Security comes first"
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse

Callous men in business costume speak computerese
Play pinball with the Third World trying to keep it on its knees
Their single crop starvation plans put sugar in your tea
And the local Third World's kept on reservations you don't see
"It'll all go back to normal if we put our nation first"
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse

Fashionable fascism dominates the scene
When ends don't meet it's easier to justify the means
Tenants get the dregs and landlords get the cream
As the grinding devolution of the democratic dream
Brings us men in gas masks dancing while the shells burst

The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.

He was delighted as it stiffened

Father Vivian O'Blivion
Resplendent in his frock
Was whipping up the batter
For the pancakes of his flock
He was looking rather bleary
(He forgot to watch the clock)

'Cause the night before
Behind the door
A leprechaun had stroked, yes . . .
The night before
Behind the door
A leprechaun had stroked (he stroked it) . . .
The night before
Behind the door
A leprechaun had stroked . . . his . . .
Sma-ah-ah
Ah-ah-ah
Ah-ah-ah
Ah-ah-ah
Ah-ah-ah
Ah-ah-ah
Ahhh (stroked his smock)
Which set him off in such a frenzy
He sang LOCK AROUND THE CROCK
An' he topped it off with a . . .
An' he topped it off with a . . .
An' he topped it off with a . . .
WOO WOO WOO
WOO WOO WOO
WOO WOO WOO
As he stumbled on his [?]
He was delighted as it stiffened
And ripped right through his sock
Oh, Saint Alfonzo would be proud of me

The sociologist Kassia Wosick estimates the global porn market at $97 billion, with the U.S. accounting for between $10 and $12 billion.  According to one estimate, there are nearly 25 million porn sites worldwide making up 12 percent of all websites. Xvideos, the biggest porn site on the web, receives 4.4 billion page views (pvs) and 350 million unique visits per month.

jon stewart

from the Daily Bern

Interesting. If you have been following along, recently Sanders' message was beginning to sound like he was expecting a Hillary nomination, and his role would become leading the fight for "platform change". It sounded like he was preparing us for his concession, or at least that was my take on it.

Now this, fresh off the daily Bernie email machine......

"Then we’re going to have a contested convention where the Democratic Party must decide if they want the candidate with the momentum who is best positioned to beat Trump, or if they are willing to roll the dice and court disaster simply to protect the status quo for the political and financial establishment of this country."

I like the sound of that.

Philly Bern- 7/25/2016

To those of us among the 500,000 who were in DC in '70 or '71 for the Vietnam war protests; well, we need something like that again.....


Philadelphia -- You wouldn't know it from reading or watching or listening to the corporate media, or even, incredibly, to most of the alternative media, but a huge grass-roots campaign has sprung up promoting a mass four-day demonstration in Philadelphia during the July 25-28 Democratic Convention. The promoters of this campaign so reminiscent of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago are backers of Bernie Sanders who totally reject the idea of seeing their candidate, Bernie Sanders -- or themselves -- just rolling over at the end of this year-long effort and endorsing Hilllary Clinton.
to the street! 

The FU vote

Donald is riding the “Fuck You!” movement. He is the choice of millions and millions who are simply so sick of the political establishment–what I call (but they don’t) the Bipartisan Oligarchy–that they just want a grenade to roll under its tent. They want to frag both political parties, as in alienated angry US soldier fragging (killing) their gung ho young officers to express their feelings about service in Vietnam. (Better Google that, youngsters.)

Let’s call them Trump’s FU Voters. They are huge in number, hate politicians with a passion, don’t give a rat’s ass about the Koch Brothers or MoveOn, might not even like The Donald, but see him as a statement of rage and discontent, as way of giving the finger, a huge middle finger, to all the hacks and flacks and whores and pimps of both the Republicans and Democrats who have delivered America into the hands of the 1%, the professional political class who are perceived as the enemy.

   --John Stauber

Europe Nation- no more windmills

....once again, following economic catastrophe, fascism is crawling back onto the surface of European politics because a dissolving common currency has made the politicians trying to save it economically impotent. Add to the economic fire an influx of refugees and let the scapegoating begin.

In the Netherlands Geert Wilders’ ironically named Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom) is leading in the polls for the upcoming 2017 parliamentary elections. The PVV’s platform includes, among other things, “the abolition of the senate, shutting down of all Islamic Schools, withdrawal from the EU, the abolition of the European Parliament and no cooperation in any EU activities, repeal of the carbon tax, taxes on the Islamic headscarves and prohibition of the Koran,” and “no more windmills” or funding for durability or CO2 reduction.”

welcome-to-fortified-europe

Stupidity

Why do you support?

"Why do you support? Or will you refuse to give your support? Will you say, "No"? These are the paramount questions at this moment in history, and in the life of the United States. We all must answer them. Our honor, our humanity, and our souls lie in the balance."
   --Arthur Silber

"You can either choose to participate in the game, and in so doing know that you have actually gone out and chosen to put in power a person who is going to help destroy, or seriously damage, the lives of you and your family, and a lot of other families, for no good reason whatsoever … or you can choose not to participate, because your principles, or your intelligence, or your soul won’t let you."
   --C. J. Hopkins

choice 

what about Lonnie Mack?

Wolf Blitzer and the other CNN anchors mourned Prince for three solid days.....but no-one on the airwaves shed Tear One for Lonnie Mack, who died the very same day.
the-death-of-prince-and-the-death-of-lonnie-mack