Democrats court trouble when they use metaphors and comparative thinking. Remember when former President Barack Obama used an old idiom. “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” in a June 2008 fundraiser during his run for his first term as President. Republicans like his opponent John...
2008
In 2007 when former President Barack Obama announced for the presidency, Republicans immediately labeled him a celebrity candidate. Juxtaposed against shots of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears sauntering through crowds, a 2008 campaign ad for his opponent, John McCain, says of Barack Obama, “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world,”...
This is the sixth set of notes for a reading group on Marx’s Capital, and includes a Volume I refresher for further reading of Volume II. There are links to earlier posts and texts that may be useful. Marx is probably too taken with a kind of scientism by proposing...
After being assailed by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, strictly for political trolling points, Dr. Anthony Fauci made it a point to praise the new attitudes of some Republicans endorsing the Covid-19 vaccines. Republican congressman Steve Scalise who has worked as hard as any conservative to destroy anything with the word...
Normally it’s a given that the party that wins the White House will lose congressional seats in subsequent midterm elections. In 2010, Democrats got clobbered after Barack Obama’s historic 2008 victory. And a blue wave took hold in 2018, almost certainly in response to Donald Trump’s 2016 creepy-twins, blood-elevator Overlook Hotel red...
Statistically, the state with the highest black population by percentage in America is Mississippi; or is it? I came of age in Washington, D.C. in the 1970s and at the time D.C. had a predominantly black population, as it does now. The number of black residents has dwindled significantly. At...
Whether it’s soccer teams or sandwich shops, financialization was there before the pandemic, only making some of its supply-chain hijacking yet another example of an impending capitalist disaster. Re-regulation must remain important as crises loom in the post-pandemic recovery. A 2017 interview with UMass’s Gerald Epstein points to the need to...
Some big news today out of North Carolina: Former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory’s career in politics is not over. McCrory, a Republican who served one term as the state’s chief executive and 14 years as Charlotte’s mayor, has launched a campaign website announcing his run for North Carolina’s open U.S. Senate...
If anything a nightly rant by David Letterman about Madoff marked the 2000s, with $65 billion swindled. x T***p surprised some observers by not pardoning Madoff (through brokerage) & by not staging a Kent State massacre of protesters; but he more than made up for these omissions by facilitating the...
The Gallup Poll has results that may seriously rattle everyone’s assumptions of American society and politics. From 1937, the first time they started asking about church membership, to 1999, about 70% of Americans told Gallup they belonged to a church, synagogue, or other house of worship. In the last 22 years the number has dropped by...
Without the strange speculation about how Trump is in decline, it is reasonable to think that Trump is consistently inconsistent in not being able to assemble a successful policy or even a political apparatus to execute policy. For example his insistence on claiming credit for COVID vaccine development also comes with...
Like Chicago gangsters a century ago prosecuted for tax evasion, the Chicago way may catch up to Trump. As Elliot Ness is purported to have said, “no deals”. Cy Vance and Leticia James continue an untouchable investigation into only one aspect of Biglygate. Except, as Mother Jones confirmed, the loan wasn’t sold to Trump,...
Plenty of dimwittedness to share as Trump demands via a cease and desist order that the GOP not use his likeness or name unless they pay for it. Also, Trump threatens to negative campaign against Lisa Murkowski in yet another empty threat. And finally Trump returns to NYC, the reasons for...
The Democratic Party is once again proving that integrity matters. In recent days, the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, has had too very credible charges of sexual harassment levied against him. Couple that with the looming Covid-19 nursing home scandal involving the hiding of data on the numbers of deaths,...
Insurrection part Deux may be coming, but it’s a distraction from an emerging Raw Story report about Russian mobsters and Trump that includes money laundering in Kazakhstan. This doesn’t even touch the tax fraud prosecution. Thank jeebus CPAC is over and that concentrated hate and stupidity is over for another year. Even...
The sparse number of actual carbon capture and sequestration projects plus weak carbon markets amplify the problems of the climate crisis yet to be revisited, post-Trump. Two heartland examples in North Dakota and Texas show how there are several interlocking problems addressing the climate crisis that must be included in future environmental policy. More specifically...
In 2008 when former President Obama was thrust into one of the biggest financial messes since the depression of 1929, his stated goal was to get us out of the ditch. With jobs being lost by some accounts at a rate of 800,000 per month and people wondering where and when...
This is something I have been considering for a long time [10 years or so] and the events of January 6th 2021 are slowly coalescing my thoughts on the subject. Or maybe I’m just slow. An article in the FT written in 2008 The new Russo-Chinese model is authoritarian and...
No one wants to hear about GameStop(gate) even if it’s not really a scandal or a flaw in capitalism. Slavoj “we must end capitalism but won't” Žižek on GameStop is like imposing a libidinal economy on Sudetenland when you take it over. Was the appeasement good for you too? There’s a market...
Apparently Trump leaked the Raffensperger audio to WaPo — how clueless is that, even if the NY Times is reporting that it was taped and released by the GA SOS. Most of the call repeats his contrived logic and numbers ad nauseam, as if to flood the transcript with his disinformation stream. Trump is so delusional...
The neoliberals’ “free market” is not going to sequester enough carbon to save the environment. Even Warren Buffett isn’t willing to take a bet on surviving an impending climate crisis catastrophe, because “the rents are too high”. Existential threats have a critical reality, about which ruthless criticism is entailed. Even...
This continues the diary of two days ago. Nostalgia is a coping mechanism at the place known for its association with William Faulkner. Oxford Mississippi is a place where the nostalgia for a lost cause remains a kind of delusion. When injuries are imagined and retribution seems easy, this happens where...
To be fair, no one can scrub away the Trump stink. No one. Including me. It’s like a raccoon has been living in your car for the past four years. That car is fucked. Let’s just see if we can get it started, stick our heads out the window as...
This had to happen, because I have not laughed nearly enough about Trump’s feckless fraud fucknuttery quite yet. They found fraud! Near Philly! A fake vote for … Donald Trump! x Is this our first documented case of an actual ballot cast in the name of a verified dead person in the...
Yeah, you knew this was coming. And it’s here — until the economy is drowned in a kiddie pool full of crocodile tears or a Republican is back in the White House, whichever comes first! x GOP Sen. Rick Scott today on Fox Business: “We're at $27 trillion worth of debt....
Unlike one of her predecessors, who had numerous connections to the Trump impeachment and its hinky relations with the Russian oligarchs, Jennifer Granholm will combine clean energy policy and economic recovery. Even without explicit support for the GND, this is a direction 180 degrees from the prior administration's kowtowing to...
Ever since the first enslaved Africans stepped off ships, suffering from dysentery, malnutrition, and pleurisy, the marker was laid that race is the predominant politic in America. I highly recommend that if you see slavery as some sort of isolated cruelty, you read the 1619 Project. There has been criticism...
From The Huffington Post: For weeks, the couple had done almost nothing but sell. Loeffler was one of several senators who faced public outrage for unloading millions of dollars in stock before most Americans understood the towering threat posed by the coronavirus pandemic. Then shortly before the CARES Act, a...
Trump doesn’t care whether he loses his security deposit. He just wants the chaos of dying meat processors, conspiracy-driven ICU trespassers, and a quarter-million dead Americans from COVID-19. And in foreign policy, Trump’s inviting skunk, gophers, and groundhogs into the crawlspaces before moving out. Washington (CNN) President Donald Trump's order...
Time after time, succeeding presidents have followed less than stellar Republican administrations feeling obligated to bestow forgiveness. Richard Nixon masterminded a crime, known to every police drama watcher as B&E, breaking and entering. Nixon was disgracefully relegated to the dustbin of history, but that dustbin was a mansion off the...
Accidental IMPOTUS declares 'total landscaping'. Video killed the radio star as he tucked in his shirt. “The term “urban sprawl” was first used in an article in The Times in 1955 as a negative comment on the state of London's outskirts. Definitions of sprawl vary; researchers in the field acknowledge...
WE WIN. Biden will be declared winner because the next state like Nevada after 264 electoral college votes pushes him over the top. x WATCH: The man, wearing a white tank top that read “BBQ, BEER, FREEDOM,” yelled three iterations of “The Biden crime family is stealing the election. The...
How are we all feeling? Judging from my own feelings and observations, “cautiously optimistic” seems to be the prevailing mood this morning. Correct me if I’m wrong. That said, you could cut the tension with Donald Trump’s future prison shiv. But who gives a fuck about that guy? This guy...
Here’s the latest news today out of North Carolina courtesy of Meredith College’s latest poll: x NORTH CAROLINABiden 48% (+4)Trump 44%Jorgensen 1%Hawkins 1%Blankenship 0%.#NCsen:Cunningham (D) 43% (+5)Tillis (R-inc) 38%Bray (L) 4%Hayes (C) 1%.#NCgovCooper (D-inc) 52% (+18)Forest (R) 34%DiFiore (L) 2%Pisano (C) 1% Meredith College, LV, 10/16-19— Political Polls (@Politics_Polls) October...
It is one of the GOP’s tried and untrue slanders, deployed every time a Republican President nominates an anti-abortion Catholic to the federal judiciary. The GOP and its amen corner claim Democrats are waging a “war on Catholics” and requiring a “religious test” for office. This week’s confirmation theater for...
Industry concentration and monopolization have become boring and technical so the exploitation of labor now gets a meme-term from Zephyr Teachout that sounds more like a QAnon conspiracy: chickenization. COVID-19 does have something to do with it considering the acceleration of the pandemic in meat production centers. It involves something more akin...
From The Houston Chronicle: The Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee has raised over $3.6 million in just under three months, a massive cash infusion as the party pushes to take control of the lower chamber for the first time since 2002. The $3.6 million haul, which came between July 1...
Beto O’Rourke, who narrowly lost to Ted Cruz for Texas’s Senate seat in 2018, and Tory Gavito, cofounder of Way to Win, have an op-ed in today’s WaPo urging Biden to fight for Texas’s 38 EVs: Joe Biden can end the drama on election night. All he has to do...
So this bull shit just happened: The Michigan Supreme Court issued a split decision late Friday that ruled against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in a battle over her power to extend emergency declarations used to mandate COVID-19 restrictions. The court's decision throws in to question orders issued by Whitmer related to...
The Trump campaign goes virtual and now may attempt a national address to get more free media even after spreading the Trump virus at a fundraiser Thursday. Contact tracing may go back to the Amy Coney Barrett SCOTUS nominee announcement as the super-spreader event, even as Hope Hicks specifically has been identified....