David Doel discusses the mess with Nimarata (“What Do You Want Me To Say About Slavery?”) Randhawa (aka Nikki Haley – more here and here)...man, talk about stepping on the proverbial rake – and no, I have to admit that I didn’t expect this to blow up the way it did either, though I DEFINITELY expected a totally tone deaf answer from Haley...and oh yeah, let’s just accept Haley’s BS excuse that the questioner was “a Democratic plant” WITHOUT ONE IOTA OF ACTUAL PROOF OF SUCH AN UTTERLY RIDICULOUS CHARGE!
Yeah...a “Democratic plant” at a Repug town hall in New Hampshire...wanna try selling me a bridge to one of the five New York boroughs while you’re at it?...
...meanwhile, as far as I’m concerned, if you REALLY want to go after Haley for something, try all of the anti-union BS that Brian Tyler Cohen (and More Perfect Union) get into here...and yeah, as far as I’m concerned, there’s a straight line between that and the generally poor overall quality of life in “the Palmetto State”...
...and turning to the “fourth estate,” Chris Hayes debunks the myth perpetrated by Fix Noise (among the usual right-wing suspects) about “organized shoplifting,” timed for the holidays of course...didn’t see the follow-up segment on trying to undercut Biden on the economy...
...and the Hayes clip is probably a nice transition to this one, where Robert Reich tells us about the three things our corporate media should do when reporting on the ’24 election...
...and in the milestones department, I forgot to note the 70th birthday of Philly’s own David Ricketts of David and David on November 16th...
As Brian Tyler Cohen tells us here, it looks like Bo-Bo-Boebert is switching from running to defend her seat in Colorado’s third district to taking a shot at the CO-04 seat left open when Ken Buck decided not to seek another term...yes, as Cohen tells us, the 04 seat is about “R plus infinity” and 03 is about "R plus 9," which should be good enough for Bo-Bo, but Boebert’s problem (one of them) is that a bunch of her same-party playmates are taking a shot at the 04 seat also, and to say that Boebert is in for a bruising primary is an understatement; the Repugs sure know how to play hardball against each other as well as in the general...this is pretty much the political equivalent of a “Hail Mary” pass in football because Boebert’s internal polling is apparently awful...
Update: To help Dem Ike McCorkle in CO-04, click here.
...and if you want a reminder as to how Boebert got into this fix (aside from that handy business with her then-boyfriend at the “Beetlejuice” concert...and the vaping when a pregnant woman asked her to stop didn’t help either), this video “brings the receipts”...first, she gets in a snit saying the Constitution isn’t evolving, or something, and comparing herself to Our Lord...yep, big time wackadoodle of course ...as Eric Swalwell points out, if the Constitution didn’t “evolve”, she wouldn’t be able to vote (David Shuster and others provide commentary including Mondale Robinson...and even though Boebert isn’t running in CO-03 anymore, please click here to help Dem challenger Adam Frisch)...
...and as far as the leader of the “Trump Party” is concerned, Jesse Dollemore tells us about #45’s Christmas “greetings,” wishing his enemies would rot in hell...video also includes a discussion about something on social media from this Derrick Evans character who pleaded guilty to charges related to 1/6, but now that Evans is done with his sentence, any notion of contrition is out the window and he’s fine with tweeting an image of Democrats hung from a Christmas tree, including Kamala Harris of course...but oh yeah, he apologized later and deleted his account on X/Twitter/whatever...wonder how long it will be before this guy recants his latest “apology” and says or does something stoo-pid again?...
...and Mike Figueredo of The Humanist Report plays a Tik Tok video of working Americans talking about the myth of the American dream...kind of echoes what I have on the header of this page...have to admit that I didn’t know about the “silver tsunami” but it tracks, unfortunately...heartbreaking in particular to watch the segment of the woman trying to pay off her student loan, who no doubt did everything she was told to do by the supposedly elite political ruling class in this country...and if you want to blame some Democrats (paging Manchinema, as well as probably Coons and a few others) for letting the pandemic protections lapse such as the child tax credit, pause on student debt, expanded unemployment benefits and school lunch funding, then go ahead, but also MAKE DAMN SURE YOU ALSO BLAME GREEDHEAD FREAKING REPUGS FOR FIGHTING US TOOTH AND NAIL ON ALL OF THAT AND MORE (NSFW/H)...
...and RIP Tom Smothers (hard to believe in this day and age how their show, “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” was once canned for expressing a political opinion, but that was before the right-wing outrage machine had coalesced into what it is now, helped along by “right thinking” liberals...the duo helped kick-start the comedy careers of Rob Reiner and Steve Martin, among others, and the show created a template followed by “Saturday Night Live,” “The Daily Show” and other programs as the Times piece points out)...
...and in another “missed milestone” from the year, I neglected to note the passing of keyboardist John Gosling of The Kinks in August...my bad.
Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur of TYT discuss the obscene wealth accumulated by billionaire heirs of CEOs...and yeah, as Ana sez, to me, the big takeaway here is that the problem of private equity running amok into all kinds of areas of our lives (as opposed to, say, actual public investment) is going to get worse...and Cenk dumps on wealth managers here a bit, which is misinformed at a minimum as far as I’m concerned, though Cenk’s analysis of what private equity does is correct (which Ana pointed out also)...and yeah, the “party of Lincoln” has been trying to get rid of the estate tax for at least 30 years...
...and the Republican Accountability Project reminds us of the threat posed by The Gropenfuhrer, which we should all be aware of at this point, and the most important thing to do in response is to vote for Biden/Harris, even though we may not agree with everything they’ve done and supported...
...because we have to negate at the polls life forms like the guy driving the vehicle with this disgusting bumper sticker.
...and as long as we’re discussing Our Ochre Abomination, I should also present this clip of John and Brett Erlich of The Damage Report criticizing #45 for saying that Biden is coming after Catholics, with SWAT teams in churches or some such idiocy...
...well, for a bit of much-needed levity, Sam and Emma of The Majority Report discuss a clip from ’05 with Sam on CNN paired with some knucklehead named Bob Knight to talk about the “war on Christmas” (not the dead, chair-throwing basketball coach, but the director of something called the Culture and Family Institute, affiliated with the Christian conservative organization Concerned Women for America)...great stuff at the end with Sam pretending to be offended over mentioning Nazis...nice work also by Sam to point out with humor how ridiculously trivial this topic is right out of the gate...
...and in the few days left for 2023, I want to get to some milestones that I missed or didn’t get to for some reason during the year, and I have to admit that I missed a big one on 9/20, which was the 50th anniversary of the deaths of Jim Croce and Maury Muehleisen in a plane crash...I’d like to present the following as a remembrance.
Chris Hayes interviews Jodi Kantor, who co-wrote the piece with Adam Liptak of the New York Times last week on what led up to the atrocious Dobbs decision overturning Roe...and no disrespect to Kantor who is a fine reporter, but I kind of lose patience with the hair-splitting exercise of giving a shred of credibility here to Amy Coney Island Baby Barrett, and “Beer Bong Brett” Kavanaugh acts like the duplicitous fraud he is through and through, and this “de-listing” BS to create the appearance of deliberation and distance when THEY WERE GOING TO DIVE ALL OVER THIS ALL ALONG is another disgusting piece to this awful saga...and the back story on the leaked opinion is pretty interesting, though the whole exercise described here is contemptible on its face (and I still say it was leaked by Ginni Thomas...try proving me wrong)...
...and I know this clip is also a little old, but I think it matters to get “disappointed” Susan Collins of Maine on the record over the case of Kate Cox in Texas, to say nothing of reminding us on how Collins caved for “I Like Beer” Kavanaugh, as well as the fact that The Supremes will hear the mifepristone case necessitated by this ruling from that goofball Trumpist judge in Texas (John and Adrienne Lawrence, who makes a scary but completely correct comment on how this SCOTUS doesn’t give a fig about precedent)...
...and Mike Figueredo tells us more on the rise and fall of Moms for Liberty (and you can’t just say a “whites only toy drive” is an oopsie! and leave it at that...and yeah, more stuff here on the Zieglers in Flori-DUUH!...NSFW/H)...
...and this clip from Eleven Films in honor of #SolidaritySeason presents Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Bob Iger of Disney, among other truly bad corporate actors, basically saying “the rabble” is having it too easy again (Bernie and AOC also are featured “rallying the troops”)...
...oh, and in case anybody was thinking of taking a journey “across the pond” over the holiday break...well, I might think again (incredibly NSFW/H)...
...and this selection from our neighbor to the north means that it's time to conclude our holiday tunes for the year...hope you enjoyed.
I may include this video from The Lincoln Project every Christmas; a terrific timeless message (first added it in 2021)...
...and once more, I give you the holiday light show that I first included here on 12/23/10...
...and here are a couple of items for this day in particular; “Feed the Hungry” in Savannah, GA recently held their own Christmas dinner...apparently they were able to do the same for Thanksgiving, and they had toys for the kids too...just another example of folks stepping up and doing the right thing...
...and here’s a clip of the Make a Wish Foundation flying kids to Italy a couple of weeks ago to enjoy Christmas...good stuff (sorry if the subtitles are hard to read)...
...and all the best of the season from me, Nat and the gang.
I’m going to deviate a bit from the typical fare at this site and present this clip from CNBC about funding for AI, ChatGPT in particular, and how jobs in that emerging development area could be a destination for folks impacted by tech layoffs this year; clip first aired about four months ago...I know on balance that the economic news is good, but as someone who spends varying amounts of time on Linkedin for different reasons, I should note that I’ve seen some horror stories about people looking for work having to deal with multiple phone screens, in-person interviews, presentations, assessments, competency tests, the lot, often only to find that the job requirements for the position changed, funding was eliminated, work was offshored, etc. – I hope the information in this clip can aid job seekers somehow; nothing sucks quite like looking for a job during the holidays, and yes, I know what that’s like (not now, fortunately...and of course, leave it to that puke Jim Cramer to be calling for people to get canned in order to spur earnings on “the big board”)...
...and returning to the political stuff, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe and former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig speak with Ali Velshi about the legal wrangling over keeping Combover Caligula off the Repug presidential ballot in Colorado...clip is deliberate and goes on for a bit, but these two perspectives in particular are really important IMO (and here is some typical idiocy in response)...
...and going even further down the Trumpist rabbit hole, apparently “prophet” Julie Green talked with God about Putin’s 2020 election secrets (uh huh), as Jesse Dollemore tells us (mildly NSFW/H...I can take or leave the phone bit, but I think “arrogant mook” is a correct description)...
...and Trae Crowder returns with holiday greetings (NSFW/H)...
...and we only have a handful of seasonal selections left, but I think these deserve to be included also.
