Friday Stuff

(And by the way, happy recent 75th birthday to Tommy Lee Jones.)

Emma V. and the crew from The Majority Report tell us about this Grant Stinchfield character utterly losing it when one of our vets helping to get people out of Afghanistan shows the temerity to actually criticize Dear Leader Trump on this issue – God, is Stinchfield a snowflake or what ("lost his Stinch" - heh)...



...and maybe with Stinchfield and characters like him in mind, Beau gave us this great commentary on the media and people in entertainment (comedians mainly) voicing their opinions, with Beau pointing out that NOBODY is truly objective (“It’s hard to maintain objectivity and profitability” – damn straight!)...



...and this Now This clip tells us that the fencing has gone back up around the U.S. Capitol building in anticipation of another treasonous insurrection tomorrow (and one of these days, Mango Mussolini will be in jail for real I firmly believe, and that day can’t come soon enough, and this is one of a multitude of reasons why)...



Update 9/18/21: Too damn funny...

...and Thom Hartmann brings us an interesting lesson on why health care isn’t a right in the U.S. and how that’s pretty much been “baked in,” if you will, since the 1940s (and leave it to the Germans to figure out why that’s wrong – I say that because the EU and Nordic countries overall pay more attention to quality-of-life stuff like this than we do in this country...the video is a little choppy...I’m pretty sure what Thom said was “12 former slave states refused to extend Medicaid”...more on Frederick Hoffman, who Thom discusses, is here, and this is a related topic)...



...and in a sane country, where people responsible for the deaths of thousands would be incarcerated, FL governor #DeathSantis might be housed somewhere with Combover Caligula while actual adults with brains would go about the business of fixing the COVID messes created by these two cretins, but alas, we are where we are...



...and in the latest Second Thought video, we learn more about how conservative our major political parties actually are (and the “ratchet effect”...not quite as despairing of the Dems as the narrator, and he doesn’t take into account the hold Trumpism now has on the ”party of Lincoln,” but he does make a lot of good points...I realize he’s coming at this as a Democratic socialist, which I think is fine, but as infuriating as the Dems are at times, they’re our best shot in this rigged political game)...



...and turning to sports, this More Perfect Union video tells us about minor league baseball players treated not much better than cattle – I’m sure the answer is a union, but good luck with that in our COVID-wracked economy...



Update 9/18/21: A related item is here (including our home team).

...and I’ve been hanging onto this selection since including it means that summer is all done for yours truly (sniff), but with the autumnal equinox coming up next week, I guess it’s time to move on until next year – c’est la vie.

Thursday Stuff

I’m sure nobody really cares what former PA State Senator Scott “Stomp On Tom Wolf’s Face With Golf Cleats” Wagner (here) is up to, but it looks like he’s doing something typically pointless and stoo-pid as usual, with still more ridiculous billboards for drivers to have to cringe at while driving through Pennsyltucky (more here and here...he could have been our governor instead of Wolf, people, and we would have been in worse shape than Florida by now)...



...and speaking of “The Sunshine State,” Sam and Emma tell us that #DeathSantis stood by and said not a damn word as some FLA loon said the COVID vaccine changes your RNA...God, the idiocy never ends with these life forms...



...and Francesca and Jayar of The Damage Report give us their take on the stuff with Gen. Mark Milley from “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa (unintentionally hilarious to hear people blaming Gen. Milley instead of all of the Repug sycophants like the U.S. senator here who chose to do NOTHING while our Insane Clown *President posed a threat to the whole damn world...surprised by Lt. Col. Vindman’s criticism here, to be honest)...



...and yeah, when it comes to the “party of Lincoln,” this damning video calls them out in unsparing terms which is totally deserved (timed a bit for this, and kudos to the brave women noted here)...



...also, RIP Norm MacDonald (I was hot and cold on him to be honest, but we need all the people who can make us laugh that we can get – sympathies to family and friends of course...and I realize I didn’t say anything about this legendary Philly funnyman who had a hard road at the end of his life too, but what a gift of laughter he gave to people as MacDonald did also)...



...and I like this newer tune, also dedicated to somebody who also departed too soon as noted here (sorry to be a bit maudlin...I'll try to be more upbeat next time).

Wednesday Stuff

(I know I was moving around videos a lot yesterday for anyone paying attention so I could get stuff featuring Larry Elder in CA, who we can now just call a failed Trumpist nut and nothing more as noted here – I’ll try not to move stuff around like that again in the future.)

Robert Reich tells us more about what’s going on with the $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill...so damn many reasons to “fight like hell” for this against the usual corporate criminals and their bought-and-paid-for politicians, as Reich correctly points out...



...and John and Benjamin Dixon tell us about the statue of Robert E. Lee coming down in Richmond, VA and the subsequent wingnut caterwauling that followed, with Mango Mussolini crowing that Lee would have led us to military victory in Afghanistan, aided by Laura Ingraham’s historical revisionism of course...



And as far as Lee’s postwar legacy is concerned, I give you the following from here...

After the war, Lee did advise defeated southerners not to rise up against the North. Lee might have become a rebel once more, and urged the South to resume fighting—as many of his former comrades wanted him to. But even in this task Grant, in 1866, regarded his former rival as falling short, saying that Lee was “setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized.”

Nor did Lee’s defeat lead to an embrace of racial egalitarianism. The war was not about slavery, Lee insisted later, but if it were about slavery, it was only out of Christian devotion that white southerners fought to keep black people enslaved. Lee told a New York Herald reporter, in the midst of arguing in favor of somehow removing black people from the South (“disposed of,” in his words), “that unless some humane course is adopted, based on wisdom and Christian principles, you do a gross wrong and injustice to the whole negro race in setting them free. And it is only this consideration that has led the wisdom, intelligence and Christianity of the South to support and defend the institution up to this time.”

...

Publicly, Lee argued against the enfranchisement of black Americans, and raged against Republican efforts to enforce racial equality in the South. Lee told Congress that black people lacked the intellectual capacity of white people and “could not vote intelligently,” and that granting them suffrage would “excite unfriendly feelings between the two races.” Lee explained that “the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.” To the extent that Lee believed in reconciliation, it was among white people, and only on the precondition that black people would be denied political power and therefore the ability to shape their own fate.

...and boy, did I have issues with this recent column from former Dem PA lieutenant governor Mark Singel saying that departing U.S. Senate Repug Pat Toomey from our beloved commonwealth of PA deserves respect from both sides of the aisle, as it were, presumably because Toomey voted to convict Trump in the latter's second impeachment...talk about setting the bar low...so many reasons to take issue with this (including this, where Toomey defended Trump during his first impeachment), as well as Singel saying that Repug U.S. House Rep Dan Mueser (sp?) was a “credible candidate,” even though, as noted here, Meuser once said that the “liberal left” is a greater threat than ISIS.

Oh, and there’s this too of course...



Update 9/26/21: I should ask Singel if Toomey deserves "respect" for this also (more lying BS about Toomey's beloved "tax cuts").

Update 9/30/21: Toomey is a thoroughly worthless worm, but we knew that already didn't we? (here).

...and David Pakman reminds us here about Dubya’s 9/11 speech over the weekend where Number 43 found the proverbial nut linking the 9/11 attackers to the 1/6 domestic terrorists...and finding the nut ONLY ON THAT...



...and yeah, it looks like the wingnuts were apoplectic over AOC’s “Tax the Rich” dress at the recent Met Gala (yeah, don't you hate it when high-profile women make political statements through their clothing?)...



I have only this to say in response...

...and guitarist Ed King (of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Strawberry Alarm Clock – now there’s a combo!) would have been 72 yesterday.

Tuesday Stuff

(And just as a reminder for anybody in CA, today is the day to Vote NO on the recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom...more here.)

Farron Cousins is here to give us the latest on the attempts to hide COVID data in FLA under Gov #DeathSantis, and quite rightly blaming the rest of Florida's utterly wretched Repug political contingent from that state – yeah, just don’t issue any updates when the news is particularly bad...



...and this Now This clip tells us about the Tennessee student testifying in favor of mandatory masking in schools...God, the adults are idiots, including that black-haired woman with the black-framed glasses who laughed when she heard the student mention that his grandmother had died from COVID...and believe me when I tell you that PA doesn’t have anything to brag about either...that guy yelling about child support was truly a wackadoodle too...



...and a lot of the reason why COVID is still raging out of control is because of total BS from wingnut media, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau quite rightly took them to task in his country here...



...and returning to our own homeland, as it were, Robert Reich explains how the U.S. Senate filibuster actually violates the Constitution...



...and returning to the CA recall, here’s Repug Larry Elder saying he would have voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act...



...and here’s Elder pre-emptively complaining about voter fraud – yeah, it’s as pathetic as it sounds for the reasons David Shuster explains...



...and Chris Hayes speaks with Dahlia Lithwick and Elie Mystal on Amy Coney Island Baby Barrett’s no-video-cameras speech over the weekend at the McConnell Center (wink, wink) where she said the SCOTUS shouldn’t be too partisan (wink, wink...Mystal in particular is fire here)...



...and happy belated 80th birthday to David Clayton-Thomas of Blood, Sweat and Tears.

Monday Stuff

It looks like David Doel found the clip of U.S. Senate “Democrat” Joe Manchin claiming last January that he didn’t care about the price tag of the infrastructure bill Congress is trying to pass, but now (big surprise), suddenly he cares about it (and Manchin’s sucking up to departing U.S. Senate Repug Roy Blunt is pretty disgusting also...Mehdi Hasan found this clip first as Doel notes...mildly NSFW/H)...



...and Rachel Maddow speaks with Dem State Rep Ilana Rubel of Idaho, which is basically preforming health care rationing at this point (“crisis standards of care” does indeed sound pretty extreme...and they just appointed this Trumpster Ryan Cole as the senior health care officer in the state - "needle rape," huh?...any remaining doubts at this point that the GOP is nothing but a death cult?)...



...and Brian Tyler Cohen brings us a clip of Chris Wallace of Fix Noise telling Stephen Colbert how Wallace deals with lying idiots from the “party of Lincoln” (I think Wallace speaks a bit with a forked tongue, you might say, here, but when going over prior clips of his interviews, he has done a lot of good work to be fair...also mildly NSFW/H)...



...and I’m sure one of the people Wallace refers to in the prior clip (when it comes to not putting up with crap) is Josh Mandel, currently seeking the Repug nomination for the U.S. Senate seat Rob Portman is vacating from Ohio (with Brett Erlich, Cenk and Caroline Johnson...Biden’s “gestapo” showing up at your door, and “you know what to do,” huh? What a freaking loon!)...



...and given that yesterday was the first full day of the new NFL season (which I know technically started last Thursday), it looks like “Maniac Megyn” is back to complain about that league's attempt at social justice outreach – I guess you could call it that (and of course, her take is bogus – big surprise I know)...



...and I don't know is there's some kind of a "replicas" thing going on in this clip or not, but it's definitely a good tune (once again, very mildly NSFW/H).