I was recently asked; what do you think about the Dave Chappelle controversy? Without explanation, I knew the questioner was referring to his recent Netflix comedy special “The Closer.” I must first confess that I am a big fan of Mr. Chappelle. His now-defunct late-night sketch comedy show, his stand-up,...
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There is no doubt that the year 2020 has been tumultuous, to say the least. With a global pandemic, nationwide protests against police brutality, and a presidential election to top it all off, the year will definitely go down in history. But the history making did not end with 2020....
New Federal indictment of another group organizing actions at the 1/6 insurrection. “Police chief turned OC yoga guru turned capitol rioter/ III percenter.” Two of them, Alan Hostetter and Russell Taylor, were seen a day before the riot with Roger Stone. These charges are separate from the 16 members of...
If it were a perfect world, I would like to think that the most recent attacks on young black millionaires are just a coincidence. In a perfect world, the success of blacks would be applauded as a plus for the country. Unfortunately, American history is littered with incidents of racial...
The US calls it “forced diversion” and the EU uses “State Hijacking”. Belarus’s Lukashenko regime resembles a successful 1/6 with rogue international behavior, martial law and questionable elections, complete with client relations resembling the Soviet era. The latest is interfering with air transport to arrest a dissident journalist. RIGA, Latvia — European leaders...
Here’s the latest news today out of Pennsylvania: Lou Barletta, the Republican Party’s Donald Trump-endorsed nominee for U.S. Senate in 2018, is running for governor of Pennsylvania. Barletta, 65, becomes the most prominent figure to enter a 2022 governor’s race that Republicans have won every time in the past half-century...
Marcy Wheeler is showing how lawfare is not helping Rudy Giuliani as the Daily Beast now indicates that Trump may be cutting Rudy loose, perhaps explaining why there may be no “pocket pardon”. Trump has blown off Rudy Giuliani's pleas for help as the feds circle: According to three people familiar...
He’s got a new book, so a conservative Niall Ferguson appeared on TV this morning whitewashing the Trump administration’s competence, or lack thereof, as if the fault lies with more systemic faults, despite the deliberate Trump sabotage of Obama-era pandemic planning. Catastrophes of politics, in pricey Ted-like talks. As if there no...
Because Hawley’s whines about Big Tech while promoting sales of his book on Amazon, the epitome of …. Big Tech. “Democrats are eyeing a comeback in Missouri, believing the Capitol riot hurt Republicans in the state, not least because of Josh Hawley’s prominent role.” “Don’t try to censor, cancel, and silence...
If you take a moment and listen to the so-called moderate wing of the Republican party, they are as extreme as the rest. This weekend Utah Senator Mitt Romney was roundly booed by members of his party at the Utah GOP convention. The crime that elicited the verbal censure from...
Received this e-mail from Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley’s (D. OH) gubernatorial campaign: x We don't need some hedge fund millionaire like @JDVance1 claiming to speak for working families who are struggling to get by. In Dayton, we passed universal pre-k and the results have been incredible both for kids and...
Francisco Franco is still in Madrid waiting for his COVID shot, but previous guy seems full of the usual disinformation. He’s drawing attention away from his failure in Georgia and trying the same scam in Arizona, only this time, it’s “a group of conspiracy theorists running a sham audit.” Apparently election audits can be...
A new book suggests now the necessity of reexamining the historical materialist project of Walter Benjamin recognizing those moments of historical contact as acts of recognizing the constructed historical object. “Historicism tends to be hermeneutic because it values cautious, rigorous, and contextualized interpretation of information; or relativist, because it rejects notions of universal, fundamental...
Apparently the spree killer in Indianapolis was also a “Brony”, a follower of My Little Pony as reported by the Wall Street Journal. We are in our pandemic (l)anguish, even more confused by a sad shape for online culture. Not unlike the infantile imagery used by Boogaloo Boys, racism and sexism filter into...
Minnesota law enforcement, at its based level exhibits some intersectional issues often represented in fictional culture products like Fargo. Their police forces haven’t learned very much since the death of George Floyd. So many examples of bad faith below:
The Trump administration—the malignant milieu of racism, bad ideas, and bad, racist ideas—had, for the past two-plus years, limited the use of consent decrees in holding police departments accountable for abusive (read: racist) behavior. Now, Attorney General Merrick Garland is reversing that Trump-era policy.
So much still unresolved from the Trump era installed in 2016, and continued through 2020, a Russian intelligence operation. Hard to tell whether it ranks with Robert Hanssen, Aldrich Ames, or even Operation Pandora, the plan to foment a US race war in the 1960s, although the Trump win could...
Anand Giridharadas wrote a piece for The Atlantic asserting that Biden has been moving leftward. This may only be a short term impression only because the GOP is trying to find its way after the previous guy is gone and before he may be indicted. The real problem lies with...
Structural change needs to happen, because in community policing, community should precede policing. The paramilitary trend should not be seen as a burgeoning conflict between armed militias, one more official than the other. We need a de-escalation whose goal is the diametric opposite of the 1/6 insurrection. The problem isn't...
The CEO of YouTube just announced that Donald Trump will be let back on the platform. Bloomberg News reports that Facebook is likely to lift Trump's ban as well, allowing him to once again push his lies and racist conspiracy theories all over the Internet. — Don Winslow (@donwinslow) April...
Actually, had Spielberg reduced the running time, the film 1941 might have been a classic. The classic film history teaching exercise would be to edit it down to 2 hours. Craig Lindsey’s article argues for the Pogo conclusion that the enemy is us when we allow fear to take over. 2020 did that...
Caravan with a drum solo, perhaps Trump will go to the border to help frame what is appearing to be deliberate GOP orchestration of migrant issues at the southern border. As if the Trumpian chaos never existed for four years, with declared emergencies, veiled threats of terrorists, and then that...
Not a victory for cancellation as perhaps poorly vetted stereotypes best left for an era when Bruce Lee couldn’t be chosen for the lead of a TV series. Dav Pilkey, whose Captain Underpants has its own issues but remains popular, agreed with the withdrawal of his latest ‘graphic novel’ by its...
Remember Infrastructure Week? It’s coming back—this time without an infrastructure weakling deflating the promise of a newly rebuilt America. Joe Biden is set to unveil his sweeping $3 trillion infrastructure plan, and according to Axios, top economists are simply “giddy” about its prospects. Of course, Republicans understand Keynesian economics as...
Like Martin Luther objecting to Pope Leo X selling indulgences to raise money for a variety of excesses, the environmental costs of carbon markets far exceed the benefits. Austerity would have denied us Renaissance art which is less at risk in an age of non-fungible tokens. Today the consequences for the planet...
The stuck ship does tell us something about the fragility of global trade and the flow of capital. Fungible Space Logistics, that concept popularized by United Parcel Service is also about the spatial problems of concrete versus abstract global networks. x Everyone is talking about the big ship getting stuck...
Assuming Jason Miller is a real person and not a failed Soviet-era experiment to cross the human genome with the formula for Axe Body Spray, he appears to be in some trouble. According to The Guardian, the former former-guy spox, who impregnated another Trump campaign adviser while engaging in an...
Concealability had nothing to do with Monday’s massacre in Boulder, Colorado, but the details tell us more about the marketability of semi-automatic firearms using high-capacity magazines. Discussing open-carry regulation may have been rendered irrelevant with the death of the police officer although some details will be important: was he carrying his “patrol rifle” and...
Truly a tool, as the Inspector General reports are coming and Previous Guy’s going to be in the barrel. Donald Trump was a tool in a long-running Russian campaign to weaken the United States. That’s been documented in Republican-led investigative reports, and now it has been updated with new evidence, thanks to the U.S....
Remember when Brett Kavanaugh was embroiled in controversy during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing and we all thought the powerful and seismic testimony of Christine Blasey Ford would move the needle, but then Lindsey Graham started screaming his head off like an absinthe-besotted wood elf, Kavanaugh did his whole oppressed...
Steve Bannon’s path to a pardon included appeals to a range of RWNJ groups including some dangerous proto-fascist cults. “The Fourth Turning” by Strauss & Howe returns to our attention, because of Bannon. But are we shifting to a more liberal era or are we on the brink of a greater series of disasters....
After Joe Biden’s speech to the nation last week, conservatives were their usual snowflakey selves, wondering where all the plaudits for Donald Trump’s maladministration were. To be fair, Trump did launch Operation Warp Speed. Or, rather, his administration launched it … and came up with a cool nickname. That said, the...
“The universe has been to them.” (Resident Alien) Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what...
In Thursday night’s Biden speech, it was simply good not to listen to the narcissistic blather which we have had to endure for four years. “I promise I will do everything in my power, I will not relent until we beat this virus, but I need you, the American people. I need...
Everybody’s favorite cultural caricatures came out from beneath their rocks because they have nothing to contribute while we wait for the final chapter in the Trump era. The same idiots who hate the French and ignorantly rebranded French(sic) Fries “Freedom Fries” now want to mock the contextualizing of cultural products...
Perhaps as a coda to the Trump era, the repression of journalists in a democracy got at least one setback. An Iowa jury acquitted a journalist on Wednesday in a highly unusual trial of a reporter who was arrested last spring as she covered a protest against racism and police...
Letting a cabal like Council for National Policies choose the tropes: “Buy Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head because it’s the end of an era. It is the end of freedom in America”. Because of course you learn gender roles from potatoes, your ideology from conservative lobbying groups, and then there’s...
Ron Johnson and a core number of GOP senators does the bidding of Russia for what seems to be the reasons that Kevin McCarthy attributed to Dana Rohrabacher and Donald Trump: Putin pays them. Russia seemed to be on Riley Williams’s mind when she indicated that she wanted to sell...
Likely there will be Daniel Dale or Aaron Rupar to tweet about the Trump blather. As for the insurrection, it was as if it had never happened. It will shock you how much the it never happened. Tom Cotton inveighed against anti-cop mobs—but only in the context of Portland and without seeming to...
Darn those class commitments, aligning us to our political choices in a democracy, made worse by all those folks who knew they were in that Gilded Age. “If the future of the Democratic Party is in the rich suburbs, the future of American politics is another long Gilded Age.” Matt...
Violence is not the only way political voice is uttered in a democracy, but the GQP wants it to leverage their reclaiming power. Trump’s acquittal has paved the way for more political violence https://t.co/3Y33P6U3zl — Mother Jones (@MotherJones) February 20, 2021 Last week, the Senate voted to acquit former President Donald Trump...
Scientists have successfully cloned an endangered black-footed ferret from the genes of an animal named Willa that had died over thirty years ago. After Willa died, her remains were frozen and sent from Wyoming to San Diego Zoo Global that maintains a bank of frozen tissues for over 1,100 endangered and...