Farron Cousins tells us all about Trumpsters stonewalling subpoenas from the 1/6 Commission...Cousins is right; it is long past time to stop playing games with these cretins and “lock ‘em up” (more typical garbage is here)...
...and related to the assault on our democracy, this Now This clip tells us about Anderson Cooper of CNN calling out former VP Mike Pence for his “steely-eyed lies”...
...and David Pakman tells us that, according to a great report from Reuters, OANN is practically 100 percent funded by AT&T; good excuse to drop them as a telco provider if you’re able to do so...
...and Jayar and Adrienne Lawrence of TYT tell us that Idaho Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin added an anti-masking requirement to Gov. Brad Little’s anti-vaccine mandate order when Little left town to go to Texas to screech with other Republicans about the border, and she also apparently tried to send the state’s national guard to Texas also; yeah, I know the whole damn thing is stoo-pid and wrong, but at a certain point, all you can do is sit back and watch the train wreck (“Little did you know” – LOL Jayar)...
...and Robert Reich tells us all about expanding the child tax credit and the benefits of doing so, which of course is venomously opposed by the "forced birth" political party that claims to "love our children"...
...and once more, I give you a spot-on video from Second Thought, this time discussing the importance of “revolutionary optimism”...
...and happy upcoming birthday tomorrow to Jackson Browne...
And with that, I’m taking my leave of you again for about 10 days or so; definitely need to recharge the batteries. I’ll plan to get this going again sometime around the 19th.
Hey, did you know that South Dakota (land of Kristi Noem and the Sturgis super-spreader COVID rallies) is a leading tax haven, along with the Cayman Islands and other offshore places? Well, you learn something new every day I guess...
...and I don’t know what the latest is with the infrastructure/Build Back Better bills or if they’ll ever see the light of day, but at a minimum, we should continue focusing of “Curtsy Kyrsten” and Manchin for their awful obstruction, and this More Perfect Union video brings us some “receipts” on Sinema...
...and this Rebel HQ video with Ben Carollo shows Bernie Sanders taking the necessary-but-still-extraordinary step of calling out Manchin and Sinema on their obstruction...
...and Texas’s typically horrible “forced birth” law is halted for now, as John I. and Michael Shure tell us...
...and Beau gives us another take on “The Battle of Hayes Pond” (the Charles Graham ad which apparently is pretty accurate...and the way I interpret what Beau says at the end is that we’re in a dark place in this country where we have to re-fight battles over the Klan and white supremacy that shouldn’t have to be fought any more...but that’s just me I guess)...
...and here is the actual ad - should include it as long as I'm commenting on it...
...and David Doel tells us the story of Josh Archibald of the Edmonton Oilers, whose playing days may be effectively over all because he decided not to get “the jab” (unless he has a health issue we don’t know about, what a prized moron to piss away an NHL career)...
...and on this day in 1989, Jefferson Starship performed a concert, and the price of admission was a donation to a San Francisco-area food bank...nicely done.
Ali Velshi tells us more about the debt ceiling nonsense from Sen. Mr. Elaine Chao, who pretty much wants to drive our economy over a cliff over paying for debts THAT HAVE ALREADY BEEN INCURRED (no end to the shit show when you vote for Republicans...and with this in mind, Manchin and Sinema should just make it official and switch parties...and yes, I know what that would entail, but those two are pretty much stopping everything anyway – I’d REALLY like to know why, at this point, what passes for Democratic leadership chooses not to make every waking moment of Manchin and Sinema’s lives utter hell, without following them into bathrooms of course)...
Update: And how much do you want to bet that that death eater from Kentucky will be back to play this game all over again in a couple of months (and believe me when I tell you that I want to be wrong – here).
...and staying with Republican congressional a-holes, this video from Ben Carollo of Rebel HQ tells us about Matt Gaetz, trying to deflect from his own legal issues by claiming that China’s Wuhan lab started COVID, which of course isn’t borne out by, y’know, actual, verifiable facts and reality...
...and this Lincoln Project ad tells us just how beholden Glenn Youngkin is to Combover Caligula (with Youngkin being the Repug running for Virginia governor; to help Youngkin's Dem opponent and former governor Terry McAuliffe, click here)...
...and John and Cenk of TYT tell us about the Facebook whistleblower who claimed that the site amplified right-wing extremism as noted here (timed for the system outage last Monday...interesting but clear-headed response from Cenk here, and I reluctantly have to agree with him pretty much; as much as I despise Zuckerberg and his site, which has a lot of good stuff but also has a lot of vile trash, it’s also largely a reflection of people’s tastes, and, like every media web site in the world, FB is chasing the almighty buck...I don’t know how you clean up FB without getting people to use their brains and common sense, and unfortunately, you can’t pass a law mandating that)...
...and I think this topic deserves some more discussion, and I thought this was an interesting take from Thom Hartmann (to piggy-back somewhat off of what he says, in 2016, that story about Trump supposedly being endorsed by the Pope was sent to about 800K people in PA before anybody knew what had happened, and you can't overestimate the impact of stuff like that working in tandem with a presidential campaign that poorly served Clinton IMO, her own mistakes, the Comey nonsense and BUT HER EMAILS!!! garbage, etc.)...
...and Farron Cousins tells us that, according to the recent tell-all book from Trumpster Stephanie Grisham, someone needed to play the theme from “Cats” to get Our Treasonous Orange Pustule to calm down before he started potentially lobbing nukes at anyone he didn’t like...on the one hand, kudos to the “music person” who made sure 45 didn’t have a typical hissy fit that could have led to disaster, but on the other hand, as soon as Grisham knew about this, she should have gone right to Congress or the Joint Chiefs and let them know instead of waiting to write a book and make $$$ off it...
...and I now give you the latest installment of “This Day In Doomsy History” (more or less) from 10/7/14...around now is the 15th anniversary of the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (killed pretty much on Putin’s birthday; that and more is noted here and here...I’ll let you figure out what kind of a message was sent with that one...I keep waiting for our thoroughly bought-and-paid-for corporate media in this country to write about the parallels between Putin clamping down on reporting and the attempts by the Trump gang to do the same thing, though I’ll admit that the Trumpsters haven’t gone as far as inflicting violence fortunately as far as we know, aside from that clown Greg Gianforte in Montana)...
...and I thought this was a catchy newer tune (can’t remember the last time I saw a guy with dual man-buns).
Sam, Emma V. and Nomiki Konst of The Majority Report talk with a caller from AZ who tells them that there are ads all over the place in that state in support of “Curtsy Kyrsten,” and yeah, it isn’t hard to see who’s behind that (just look at the pic)... and I saw a tweet somewhere pointing out that we can’t get too hung up over how awful Sinema is (though she is that) at the expense of Mark Kelly, who’s running for re-election next year...clip leads into an interesting discussion about the Sturm und Drang, if you will, between moderate and progressive U.S. House Dems...
...and staying with “The world’s greatest deliberative body” (please), I guess wingnut Repug U.S. Senator John Barrasso gets a pass so often party because he’s clear across the other side of this country, not quite to the “left” coast, but here he is, damning the Biden agenda which is, as Brian Tyler Cohen tells us, VERY popular...
...and it looks like sh*t is about to get real for Matt Gaetz in FLA (about time), seeing as how he’s hired a bunch of lawyers specializing in sex crimes, as Brian Tyler Cohen tells us...
...and speaking of legal stuff, Farron Cousins tells us that subpoenas are going out all over the place from the 1/6 U.S. House Commission (and kudos to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan for this)...
...and Robert Reich reminds us that 70% of our economy is driven by spending, and of course, most of the productivity gains have gone to the top 1% (with those two facts operating in diametric opposition to one another), which is probably committed to everyone’s collective memory at this point...or at least, anybody who reads dumb blogs like this one...
John and Brett Erlich of The Damage Report tell us more on the damning money trail following Dem U.S. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia of course...love the bit where people are trying to negotiate with Manchin on his yacht...have to go a looong way to find more awful optics than that one...Manchin should have said “let them eat cake” and lobbed packages of paper towels at them...but of course, our thoroughly bought-and-paid-for corporate media will give Manchin a pass and continue their idiotic and inaccurate framing of the ongoing negotiations over the infrastructure and BBB bills as some kind of “war” between reasonable moderates and those oh-so-nasty progressives...
...and this Now This clip tells us what AZ voters think about “Curtsy Kyrsten,” including people who worked for her senatorial campaign...but for God’s sake, please don’t follow her into the bathroom (here) – I believe filming in a bathroom is illegal anyway...and man oh man, the woman interviewed at the end of this clip has been brainwashed up and down by our already-mentioned corporate media...SINEMA IS DOING WHAT THE HELL HER DONORS WANT!! SHE’S NOT “THINKING CRITICALLY”! SHE’S NOT “THINKING” AT ALL!!!...
Update: OK, now an airplane or just about any other public space is fair game (here); I have no issue at all with making Sinema's life utterly miserable for her disgusting, contemptible actions.
Update 1 10/5/21: I’ll admit that I have a hard time imagining someone to have a worse karmic thread with other than “The Last Honest Man” (here).
Update 2 10/5/21: I hope Sinema enjoys living the rest of her life under a microscope (here).
Update 10/6/21: Yeah, I knew about the winery thing, but I agree that it should have been a bigger story (here).
...and Jim Acosta of CNN is back to tell us about “Fox replacement theory” (here)...
...and Chris Hayes tells us about sociopathic RNC mail solicitations against COVID of course...what we know as the conservative movement really took off through the emergence of talk radio after The Sainted Ronnie R got the Fairness Doctrine removed as well as through direct mail (good job by Hayes to “connect the dots” on all of the garbage groups behind this crap)...
...and with all of the hateful nonsense going on with Republican governors, lunatic U.S. House Reps from the “party of Lincoln,” “Cancun” Cruz, Hawley and a whole bunch of other U.S. Senatorial frauds including perhaps the two worst Democrats of all time previously noted, let’s not forget how RoJo in Wisconsin is playing his constituents, as this video tells us...
...and time for another belated happy birthday; this one goes out to Gordon Sumner (#70).
(Yeah I know Kennedy, Scalia and RBG are in the cartoon, but I still think it applies.)
Chris Hayes tells us about the recent SCOTUS media whining about how the High Court is supposed to be impartial or something and “above the fray” or whatever, which of course is total BS based on their rulings and public actions overall...make no mistake that “Strip Search Sammy” Alito was the driving force behind Citizens United, while Hangin’ Judge JR wanted to keep the final ruling a lot more narrow, as discussed by Adam Winkler in this great book, and of course “Almost Silent” Clarence Thomas’s wife has been a conservative activist for awhile, and we’re supposed to believe that that doesn’t play into Thomas’s rulings...Poppy Bush did some good things and some bad things too of course, but Thomas may end of being 41’s worst overall legacy...
...and David Doel brings us a 2018 campaign ad from “Curtsy Kyrsten” in which she claims that she wants to fight high drug prices, which of course is yet another lie from her; all politicians are shameless, but she takes it to an unbelievable new level...
...and Cenk, Jayar and Adrienne Lawrence tell us that Alex Jones lost bigly, you might say, with a default judgment against him in the case of the Sandy Hook parents suing him for defamation...I’d forgotten about the abuse some of the grieving parents had to endure from Jones’s rabid nut-job followers – a shame these life forms can’t face criminal proceedings, though that may be pending I realize (they SHOULD anyway...GREAT point about that nut Jones trying to sue TYT and realizing that, yeah, me suing them means I DO know what culpability is)...
...and I know I had a More Perfect Union video highlighting how Dem U.S. House Rep Kathleen Rice sold out her constituents on the ability of Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices, and the other of the three reps, Dem Scott Peters, gets his “turn in the barrel,” you might say, here...I hope a video against Kurt Schrader is coming next – we’ll see...
...and this new Second Thought clip tells us why terrorism is a dangerous word (the only minor issues I have with this otherwise spot-on clip are that there was a time in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s where groups like the Weather Underground, which was a radical split-off group from the SDS, bombed ROTC offices and other government facilities during the Vietnam War, but wrong as that was, that is FAR in the rear-view mirror at this point when it comes to violence and lefties...also, good job to mention COINTELPRO, which could easily be the subject of a whole other video...however, citing MOVE as strictly an example of government terrorism run amok is DEFINITELY MISSING THE POINT...yes, the city overreacted, but it’s not as if the alleged adults living on Osage Avenue in that compound didn’t have the much simpler option of doing the right thing, which they definitely chose NOT to do...also, good job to mention South America and the role of United Fruit in creating unrest, with the company having ties to the Dulles Brothers during the Cold War)...
...and happy belated 76th birthday to Don McLean...and this year marks the 40th anniversary of a McLean concert I attended at Temple University’s Ambler Campus (great show...he got halfway through “American Pie,” messed up the lyrics, then did it all over again and nailed it, and I think he did this tune also which I find often fits nowadays, sadly...by the way, speaking of Temple Ambler – a soft spot for your humble narrator – it got hit pretty hard with the remnants of Hurricane Ida...if you can help them out, please click here).
