Yes, I know what The Lincoln Project is, but they keep making good videos including this one for the holiday...
...and I now give you the latest installment of "This Day In Doomsy History" (more or less) for the big day from 12/23/10 - no message or somewhat topical clip, but only a pretty cool light show...
...and Merry Christmas and all the best of the season from me, Nat and the gang.
(I offer the above item as a seasonal meditation; the message can no doubt be directed at more than a few people in this country as well as the world, actually - more here.)
To being, John and Jayar of The Damage Report tell us about that clown Greg Gutfeld – who Bill Maher thinks is the new “king of late night”...GMAFB! – going off about AOC and Rashida Tlaib speaking out against student loan debt...and I love how “overeducated” is considered an insult by Gutfeld...John really nails it in about the last minute or so here...
...and Trevor Noah of The Daily Show discusses the “debt colonialism” stuff China is pulling in Africa (and yeah, among all of the other stuff in the news, we need to pay attention to the Belt and Road Initiative, people)...
...and Emma V. and Matt Lech of The Majority Report tell us about Gabriel Boric winning election as Chile’s new president – yes, I know I had that GREAT ad from his last week with John I., but there’s a little more substance to what Boric is trying to do as noted here (the history of our intervention in this country is important, particularly so-called “pension reform” under Pinochet, which people forget because that murderous Chilean lunatic that we installed was so awful for so many other reasons – more here)...
...and Ana of TYT tells us about Kellogg’s workers winning a new contract – I guess you could say that THEY’RE GRRREAT!! (sorry, I couldn’t resist...and I wouldn’t agree with Wosny Lambre that the Dems give you nothing; actually, I think he overdoes it in trashing the Dems here, though Lambre makes a good point about our ridiculous defense budget, and the Dems have definitely fallen short overall of course...and by the way, how about giving a little credit to Biden Labor Secretary Marty Walsh along with Bernie who ALSO joined the Kellogg workers’ picket line? And you can also give Biden credit for this and this)...
...and I'm winding down with the seasonal selections - can't forget these tunes, though.
I thought Beau had a really good take here on what a certain Democratic U.S. Senator from West Virginia has done to our economy by opposing Build Back Better (“negative growth implications” for at least 9 months...”The Republicans and Senator Joe Manchin deleted $200 billion of economic growth”...THESE should be the lead headlines instead of all of the bloviating from people working at the news org’s with initials for names)...
...and David Doel tells us here that the UMWA has come our against Manchin for his BBB opposition...
...and Rachel Maddow discusses Wisconsin’s efforts to get their electors to support Mango Mussolini last year despite the fact that Biden won the state in the election...anybody who forged election paperwork should go to prison for a loooong time (and Repug state rep Kathy Bernier is a hero IMHO – more here)...
...and Farron Cousins tells us about a South Carolina Republican city councilman who was attacked by someone in his own party when the councilman said that the Gropenfuhrer actually lost the election last year (the crazy will never stop with some of these life forms unless we find a way to deny them any political power at all, and at the moment, aside from doing all we can to encourage people to support Team “D,” I don’t know how else to do that...and on a somewhat related note, here is a story of a bit of seasonal insanity also...
...and I have a few more seasonal selections left to try and take our minds off this madness for a little while.
This Democracy Now! clip is a little under five months old, but it tells the story of a certain Democratic U.S. senator from West Virginia and his role in basically not doing a damn thing when drug maker Viatris shed a whole bunch of jobs in Morgantown (and yeah, if you want to blame a certain 46th president also named Joe for not doing more, be my guest...just a reminder that Viatris was formed by the merger of Pfizer and Mylan, with the latter being the previous company at the Morgantown plant) ...yeah, I know politicians have limited options, BUT AT LEAST MAKE SOME DAMN NOISE ABOUT IT, PEOPLE! (revealing anecdote about Heather Bresch – I’ve never heard of anybody getting their MBA basically getting taken back – also, an interesting note about how the pharma plant in Tennessee for another company managed to get saved, by an Australian who apparently knows our laws better than our politicians do...and it looks like Gail Manchin, Joe’s wife, is in on the grift too...EVERYTHING about Manchin should be fair game now in light of killing BBB)...
...and Ali Velshi speaks with Juanita Tolliver and Matthew Dowd about the 1/6 Commission taking a long, hard look at the thoroughly odious U.S. House wingnut Scott Perry from our beloved commonwealth of PA (a completely predictable update is here)...
...and it’s time to arrest that POS Jesse Watters for calling for somebody to kill Dr. Fauci – enough of this shit; David Shuster tells us more...I've read people I respect saying that, though they despise Watters, they think he was only speaking metaphorically - uh huh...let me know when AOC takes the stage at a progressive gathering, for example, calls for a "kill shot" against Mehmet ("CALL ME DOCTOR, DAMMIT!") Oz, and the wingnuts extend us a courtesy like that, OK?... ...
...and I now give you the latest installment of “This Day In Doomsy History” (more or less) from 12/21/16, with Chris Hayes telling us about Debo Adegbile, who was previously nominated by the Obama Administration to serve as the Assistant Attorney General for the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, but he fell short of U.S. Senate confirmation when he didn’t receive the 7 Democratic votes mentioned in the clip, including one from a certain senator from West Virginia referred to previously; yes, Mumia Abu-Jamal should be worm food as far as I’m concerned, but even he is entitled to a vigorous defense, and my big issue with him are the facts at trial, not what happened during the penalty phase (where Adegbile successfully made his case that the jury was prejudiced against Abu-Jamal)...
In case anybody still thinks that the Trumpsters somehow aren’t just the latest version of Republican insanity trying to force their agenda on the vast majority of this country, I give you this video from Farron Cousins telling us that certain alleged “thought leaders” in that party like Reaganite Ed Meese and former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint want U.S. House Reps Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger expelled from the Republican Party, presumably because they haven’t shown the proper degree of fealty to Former Dear Leader Combover Caligula (and apparently, DeMint wrote an article - or had a staffer do it for him - with the headline that "Courage is Contagious," which is hilarious when you remember that DeMint bailed from the U.S. Senate to take a cushy gig at a right-wing think tank)...
...and David Doel tells us more about President Manchin saying he can’t support Build Back Better (announcing this on Fix Noise of course...mildly NSFW/H...and I respected Ilhan Omar anyway, but I REALLY respect her after this, more for the “life support” tweet...and apparently some Dem politicos and Bernie Sanders, God bless him, have made the rounds on MSNBC saying that Manchin and Biden are still talking...God, what an utterly pathetic spectacle!)...
...and I don’t think there could be a better transition to the latest Second Thought video about how political “moderates” really serve the right...the last minute or so of this may be the best part...and I’ll bet $10 that that video from AOC was clipped to totally misrepresent what she actually said...
...and gee, maybe we ought to do something about this climate change thing, huh (John I. tells us the latest grim news from Antarctica)...
...and I've got a few more seasonal selections as we get closer to the big day (depending on what you observe of course).
Emma V. and the Majority Report crew tell us that Melania Trump, fresh off decimating the Rose Garden, now allegedly has some new grift – I have to admit that I tried to ramp up as quickly as I could on what an NFT is, but it looks like (as the crew says) another typical Trump bait-and-switch where they’re trying to artificially inflate the value of something and then pull some kind of a “pump and dump” on it (mildly NSFW/H)...
...and this Lincoln Project ad reminds us who “the anti-cop caucus” really is (and by the way, Will Bunch, among others, has been doing a great job with recent reporting making it crystal clear that the Trumpsters wanted to goad Antifa into showing up on 1/6 so the insurrectionists could attack them and the Gropenfuhrer could overthrow the election results, declaring his own “Reichstag Fire” moment - there was even a #DontTakeTheBait hashtag circulating among Antifa around 1/6...if these treasonous monsters behind the 1/6 attack get another shot at this, they’ll try it again and actually make it work this time I’m afraid – can’t find a link to Bunch at the moment, but I’ll keep looking)...
...and I honestly wish I wasn’t on the Email distribution list of Repug PA U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, but somehow I ended up on such a list, and his most recent missive was titled “the true costs of the Democrats’ failed policies” featuring a screaming headline proclaiming that inflation is at its highest level in 39 years.
As much as I hate to acknowledge that Toomey is actually right about something, I should point out that that headline has been borne out by recent news stories (about the 39 years I mean). As for who is responsible, the majority of what I read tells me that this is a consequence of a lot of money (likely from not spending so much while we've been doing the COVID "shelter in place" thing that may never end) suddenly in circulation while our supply chain is restarting (more here). Reasonable people (including economists, a group to which I most definitely don’t belong) can disagree as to what to do about this (and inflation is global at this point, by the way), but I’d like to ask this question in response: does Toomey think it would be better had we not even bothered to do ANYTHING to help people displaced economically by the pandemic and let unemployment soar? I’m sure his answer is yes, which is why he can’t be gone from the U.S. Senate soon enough as far as I’m concerned (and actually, as long as we're talking about employment, how about giving Biden a little credit for this?).
All of this gives me an excuse to show this clip once more...
...and when it comes to helping people who need it for real, kudos to Meek Mill for this (I think YouTube censored the swear words)...
...and yeah, I've got more seasonal tunes all right - here they come.
So now that it looks like President Manchin (here) and Vice President Sinema are going to kill the rest of the Biden agenda, it looks like “winter is coming,” politically, in terms of the Repugs taking over Congress next year and putting our government on the fast track to authoritarianism (and believe me when I tell you how much I want to be utterly wrong about that...the clip discussed by John, Cenk and Farron Cousins is Bernie pretty much calling out the senators from West Virginia and Arizona...and boy, is Cousins right about Biden and the “bully pulpit”...and yeah, MSNBC is a “safe space” for Dems, but I still thought that was kind of a gratuitous shot at Rachel Maddow by Cenk towards the end)...
Update 12/20/21: Surprised he didn't mention this also when he appeared on Fix Noise to announce that he was torpedoing Biden's agenda.
...and Richard Ojeda of Rebel HQ responds to Goober Gohmert complaining about the alleged mistreatment of the 1/6 insurrectionists (cry me a freaking river, you f*cking traitors!)...
...and here are more seasonal selections to try and take my mind off this garbage.
