Monday Stuff

I don’t really have anything particularly brilliant to say about the passing of Fidel Castro, except to say that, as nearly as I could tell, he was a brutal tyrant who doesn’t deserve to be remembered fondly by anyone (here). And yeah, I speculated on his death over 10 years ago here, for what that’s worth, and he managed to outlive 10 U.S. presidents, which I guess is no small feat. He was also a master manipulator who was able to parlay our clumsy attempts to undermine him into some kind of heroic image to people who, as far as I’m concerned, didn’t know any better for whatever reason. However, there are a lot of people who, for good or ill, show themselves to be skilled at the same propagandistic bent that Castro employed (Yasir Arafat and “Bibi” come quickly to mind...maybe "Number 45" too...), and I don’t think they deserve any hosannas either.

Oh, and closer to home, just remember that “now is not the time to talk about common-sense gun control” (here - and yeah, he allegedly used a knife and a car too, but I still think my point is valid)…

…also, I thought Thom Hartmann had a really good commentary here on the latest utterly preposterous lie from President-Elect “Donald Drumpf” and how that is used as bait for our corporate media to ignore much bigger issues with this rapacious pirate who, quite probably, will be taking up space in An Oval Office before too long (ugh – good job to link it to Kris Kobach & ALEC)…



…and keeping with the utter misery that will inflict us after 1/20/17 as of now, Rachel Maddow tells us about the popular vote discrepancy in the election…if HRC had won the electoral vote and “Fergus Laing” had won the popular vote, do you want to know how loudly our Beltway courtier media would be SCREAMING at a President-Elect Clinton to appoint a “bipartisan” cabinet? (and by the way, though Rutherford B. Hayes was, for all appearances, an “accidental” president and we had awful labor strife during his term in office, there was more to him in terms of understanding workers’ grievances than meets the eye…more nuance than we’ll ever get out of the person soon to take the reins at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue)…...



…and gosh, color me shocked; Generalissimo Trump’s supposed infrastructure plan is nothing but a scam, as Joy Reid (sitting in for Rachel) and Ron Klain (of “Recount” fame) tell us…



...and K.O. is back with his #3 video in his series "The Resistance" (I once did a report on Benjamin Franklin Bache; can't tell you whatever happened to it – yeah, with hindsight, you can say that President John Adams overreacted, but you’d have to go back and read about what kind of names public figures used to be called back then…stuff I’d rather not repeat here actually)…...



…and yeah, Jimmy Dore has done more than a little to piss me off over the election, but he and Steve Oh are absolutely right here about what’s going on with the police at the Standing Rock protest in North Dakota; I know there are good cops and I’m sure some of these characters were told to do the garbage they’re doing to the protestors or they’re fired, even though that’s still no excuse – tells you how clueless the Hillary Clinton campaign was that they didn’t see this opportunity to show up and lend support somehow just by talking to the protestors…I really don’t think Bernie Sanders would have needed prodding to do that (NSFW of course)…



..and I’ll be the first to admit that this is kind of a clumsy transition to the seasonal stuff (I promise to get back to actual new music one of these days), but between the prior video and the next one, it’s hard to figure out which cops are really acting like cartoons and which ones aren’t.