Saturday, July 27, 2024

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Gordon Pengilly - Two Plays

Lucky Girl

The Rawhide Hour 

 

These are two more radio plays by Gordon Pengilly,  I've posted them before but  they are really good and can stand a few hearings.   I got into listening to radio drama before there was internet audio-drama from listening to the CBC where both of these were first heard.   Alas, they don't do radio drama at the CBC anymore, which is too bad because they did some of the best I've heard.  Gordon Pengilly is one of my favorites, both listening and reading his plays.  I wish his other plays were available to post and that better transcripts of some of them were available online. 

Barbershop Without Apologies And Not At All Kew-el

I LIKE A LITTLE barbershop quartet now and again,  some of it is very good and clever and a lot of it is fun.   It's more music for singing and doing than it is music to make a career out of.   I do respect the barbershop communities, some of the most dedicated and serious practitioners of group and community  singing in the world.   Their exploration and knowledge of some rather specialized aspects of tonal harmony and practice is as remarkable as that of the medieval music quartet Anonymous 4 and a few other such groups.   Some of the newer quartets are extending the traditions and practices in interesting ways just as jazz musicians have extended the same traditions, going back in recorded music to the ragtime era.   Here's an example from Scott Joplin's Treemonisha:

Lots of the best jazz musicians, especially from the early years participated in quartet singing of the kind that would be called "barbershop" after 1910 when one of the big hits of that year named it.   


That's Bert Williams who first broke a show-biz color barrier by singing that in the 1910 Ziegfield Follies.   Interesting to me is the idiosyncratic identification of barbershop harmony as a "minor chord" when what's called that in barbershop language is an inversion of major dominant seventh with the diminished fifth in a more noticeable position.   That kind of language differing from classical theory in the culture of barbershop . . . well, it's interesting to me and a sign of a vital alternative musical practice.

I think if I'd found three other guys to form a quartet when I was in high school or college and we composed and arranged our own material it would have done me a lot better than any of the "theory" classes I took.   I think I'll recommend that to a kid I know who's talking about majoring in music in three years.   I'll suggest that they go farther than the dominant seventh harmony, though there's nothing but musical good that would come from gaining the level of familiarity with it that practicing barbershop harmony would bring. It would get him a lot more than that usual garage band bull shit would. 

That's enough music major geekery for one weekend, I guess.

Thursday, July 25, 2024

The Newfangled Four • The Barbershop Cliché

 

I'm told I have no sense of humor and lead a joyless life.  

I can live with that. 

Wednesday, July 24, 2024

VIDEO Surfaces Of JD Vance ACCUSING Trump Of Sexual ASSAULT

 


Failing To Notice That Peter Thiel's, Elon Musk's and Vlaidmir Putin's Bitches Intend To Kill People To Keep Power - Hate Mail

Note: Instead of writing a brand new argument to answer a right-wing, white boy-whine about what I wrote here recently, I'm revising and extending a criticism I made of one of the MSNBC lawyer-talking heads a number of months back.  I believe I linked to the Youtube of Ari Melber's commentary when I first posted this but I'm not going to go searching for it again, right now.

ONE OF THESE THINGS
is not like the other, and if The Law pretends it's too stupid to navigate that difference, the worst of those things wins.  And ours does pretend that.

Of course I agree with Ari Melber that the Tennessee drag show ban is wrong and should be overturned as an infringement on something, though I think calling what we choose to wear in public or on stage "speech" is, frankly, stupid and quite dangerous.  I say that even though I've seen a lot of drag acts that are extremely offensive and some that were innocuous fun and a very few which were clever.  Like all kinds of show-biz, it's about 98% crap for 2% good, though drag, like stand up, doesn't reach that high a mark nearly one percent of the time.  If earlier Supreme Court "liberals" felt they had to extend rights to dress or undress in bad taste in public (considering what they wear to work, you might not be surprised if some might) they shouldn't have been so stupid as to call that "speech," opening us up to the flood of media lies which were launched by those with money, and so power, to corrupt American democracy into suicide.  

Democracy has suffered dearly for Supreme Court "justices" wanting to set up legal landmarks so as to make the world safe for those who didn't want strippers to wear pasties and g-strings in Boston.   The danger of calling it "speech" and involving the First Amendment with such issues is that later Supreme Courts used such an distortion of meaning to call dirty campaign cash "speech" thus giving millionaires and billionaires and corporations billions of times more such "speech" and so political power than people without millions and billions of dollars resulting in some of the worst political corruption today.  It is remarkable how devoted the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have been to that distorted "liberal" precedent even as they overturn what is truly important, like Women owning their own bodies, the rights of People of Color to vote.  There's a reason for that and that's the use they can make of such "First Amendment" tripe in the likes of Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United, overturning the clean-elections laws passed in a bi-partisan Congress after the crimes of Nixon and his campaign were exposed.   The role of "free speech" in that legal permission to the worst of dirty politics, with the full participation of the "civil liberties" industry, foremost the ACLU is a history that few dare to tell, such truth-telling is not permitted under our freest-speechiest-press. That such media is corporate is certainly entirely relevant to that reality.  

The results are today when J.D. Vance, the vice presidential candidate of the Republican-fascist Party and an almost certain president if the elderly, demented, obese, drug guzzling Trump is reinstalled, is Peter Thiel's bitch in pretty much the same way that Trump is Vladimir Putin's bitch through  further and ever worse extensions of that line of judicial distortion on behalf of political corruption due to that original seemingly innocuous First Amendment dishonesty about the meaning of words.  John Roberts and his Republican-fascist colleagues were warned they were opening up our politics to intervention by foreign dictators and they did it with open eyes knowing it was their party which would benefit from that.   All of them are Elon Musk's bitches, through his "free money-speech" attempt to buy the presidency for Republican-fascism and American apartheid. 

It would have been less dangerous if the Warren Court came up with some other excuse to allow naughty books to be distributed and dirty dancing on stage to be done. If there's one thing that's clear about past Supreme Court "liberals" it is that they have no clue as to how dishonest and rotten their oligarchy serving brethren are and always have been.  If there is one part of the federal government of which we absolutely need a cold and honest telling of the truth about, it is the courts and, most of all, that foremost venue of corruption, wielding the ultimate filibuster against honesty in law and government and equality before the law, the Supreme Court.  Liberals are the most in need of a knowledge of that corruption being the reality of its history instead of Anthony Lewis, amber tinted romance.  Until then we are their chumps.  

I disagree with Melber's contention that what it's about being a mere demonstration of power by Republican-fascists in a state where their hold on power is probably as secure as it can get due to the remaining power of our most dangerous forms of fascism, white supremacy and male supremacy.  It has nothing to do with the mere power to enforce the law, I think even the Republican-fascist majority on the Supreme Court might strike it down if it's ever enforced, maybe even the Tennessee Supreme Court would.  By the way, it has nothing to do with "hillbillies," There are plenty of poor-white People (not to mention Black People) who live in Appalachia who have a far clearer view of J. D. Vance's self-promoting use of stigmatizing stereotypes of them than prep-Ivy League idiots who control the publishing and media industries and show-biz.  What is wrong in those places is what's wrong everywhere, urban as well as rural, too many people being suckered by such crap.  Our bigotries are the worst weakness of liberal democracy, the reason that egalitarian democracy is the only secure form of democracy.

What it's about is appealing to Republican-fascist and other anti-LGBTQ+ bigots among voters, it's a piece of legal agitprop to encourage them to give campaign money to and voting for bigots, both those running for office and those others who rope in, mainly, cabloid TV watching elders who probably shouldn't have a credit card and an internet hookup without competent guardianship.  It is a stunt-law which has nothing to do with much else.  It's to gull them into voting Republican-fascists into office.  It's like the idiots in the House who Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson put on important committees wasting time by trying to provoke Democrats into voting against saying the pledge of allegiance. Of course, in that case Democrats could reliably be counted on to vote for saying the meaningless thing.  Meaningless because it's certainly never led to a Republican-fascist not giving their allegiance to Putin, billionaires, the fascist dictator of Hungary . . . even as they screw the United States.  And for the ACLU and play-lefties to get their pinafores all twisted up over it, which is mostly about fund raising among another class of gullible people.  The play-left are the biggest suckers in the world for allowing themselves to get fixated on self-defeating entirely symbolic crap like that instead of what's really important, especially keeping Republican-fascists from power AND OFF THE DAMNED COURTS!

In as perfect an example as any of that obsession and misplaced focus, I even more disagree with Melber's EXTREMELY STUPID AND OFFENSIVE citation in his arguments of allowing Nazis to organize, to campaign, etc. because "The First Amendment."  I violently disagree with him because it's not a mere question of "offensive speech" or taking offense at something harmless.

What is far more offensive is comparing cross-dressing to allowing Nazis to organize and getting yet another chance to do what they've done before.  And, in the American context, what our own version of that, white supremacy, not only did in the past BUT DOES RIGHT NOW.  They have had control of a large percentage of state governments for all of our history and the federal government for most of it.  That false comparison results in "NEVER AGAIN" becoming ALWAYS AGAIN.  That is the real result of such ACLU style support of Nazi's and white supremacists in spreading their propaganda and trying to corrupt enough Americans to gain power.  It's not innocuous BECAUSE THEY ACTUALLY DO GET POWER AND USE IT AGAINST THOSE THEY TARGET.  Though affluent, white, straight, male lawyers working in safe places for them like New York and Washington DC probably don't much notice what they do to those they target.  

Nazis openly, always, by self-definition intend TO KILL PEOPLE.  Let me repeat that so you really notice it, THEY INTEND TO KILL PEOPLE.  Our own version of that, white supremacists really do what the history of the United States which proves they are entirely able to do here and now, get power through elections, persuading enough people to do everything from discriminating against people to keeping them from voting to enslaving them TO, YES, KILLING PEOPLE. And to control the laws and manipulate the politics to allow even lynch mobs to get away with that.  EVERY PERSON OF COLOR MURDERED BY AMERICAN, ENGLISH SPEAKING WHITE SUPREMACISTS ARE AS DEAD AS ANYONE KILLED BY NAZIS IN GERMANY, AND THE GOVERNMENT AND LEGAL SYSTEM HAS GENERALLY ALLOWED THAT TO CONTINUE.    Such power held onto by the enemies of equality and democracy IS ALWAYS DONE THROUGH DEADLY VIOLENCE.  The history of the politics of lynch law proves that as certainly as the history of the Nazis in Europe. There's all the difference in the world between Nazis and white supremacists and people who like to cross-dress, whether tastefully and subtly (I've seen a few who you'd never guess until they spoke) or in a parody of Bishop Raymond Burke or Kimberly Gilfoyle, a light-year over the top.

To pretend that we must allow Nazis to do here what we know they did in Europe within just barely living memory and what our native equivalent, white supremacists have done here throughout our history AND TODAY in order that harmless drag performers and cross dressers can do their thing with the cops leaving them to it (I am sure there are cops in Tennessee who enjoy drag shows, even as I'm not exactly a fan just as I'm sure some cops are cross dressers in private*) is something so stupid that I think you need to have had training at an accredited American law school to think that it's impossible to discern and enforce the difference.

Ari Melber isn't naturally stupid enough to believe that Nazis and drag queens are equally innocuous. That stupidity is a product of his legal training, I suspect.  Or maybe you have to be a member of the ACLU or the United States Supreme Court to be that stupid.  His own report using the Charlottesville Nazi thugs proves he knows they're not harmless.

Laws distinguishing and administering and enforcing far more subtle differences than between people who might want to dress funny and OTHER PEOPLE WHO FUCKING WANT TO KILL PEOPLE, to allow one and not the other to try to get an audience are entirely accepted by them. If it came to a matter of ownership of money or property, judges and "justices" can take the most minute care in adjudication in the matter, seeing the most subtle of differences even those invisible to sight or reason.  When it comes to Nazis or the Klan organizing to control the state and put their agenda into effect as opposed to someone who wants to dress funny, no, they claim they couldn't possibly be trusted to make that glaring distinction.  Drag queens might lead their audience to take a stroll on the wild side though I'd expect hardly any do, to try it out, Nazis and white supremacists want their audience to vote the like of the Republican-fascist majority in the Tennessee government into office to do far worse than making cross-dressing illegal.  If you think that's not a real and present danger, what part of the white-supremacists and worse are running things in most of the states and have control of the House and the Supreme Court now don't you get?  If you want other examples, look at how Republican-fascists poisoned People in Flint Michigan, took over local governments where Black People were a majority installing Republican-fascist petty despots in place of elected officials, kept Black People from voting in a myriad of American States in the last election.

To make believe that we have to always, forever, allow our own grotesquely and murderously effective form of fascism, white supremacists and the foreign import of Nazism the chance to gain power and hurt people because a bunch of property-owning white-guys voted into office by property-owning white guys (in many states only Protestant ones) in the 1790s were too clueless to make those kinds of distinctions as they wrote the First Amendment is far more dangerous than any drag show where the worst that can happen is someone might sprain their ankle when their heel breaks.  It's as dangerous as the lynch mobs incited by the free speech of white supremacists, as dangerous as those incited by online hate speech to kill People, as dangerous as those who were persuaded to vote for Trump by lies and appeals to their racism.  Yes, the lynch mobs were formed through free speech, as under our immoral law hate speech is free speech in the same way that dirty political money is free speech.  Free speech is often anything but a moral good under that lack of distinction.  The failure to classify lies as NOT being  "free speech," the moral atrocity of inventing a "right to lie" is the foundation of our indigenous and murderous forms of fascism and the death of egalitarian democracy.  

The lawyers, the judges, the "justices" the media figures who don't want to have to go to the bother to fact-check what they put out even as they don't intend to ever support violence, themselves but who pretend these differences are not real enough, THAT HISTORY OF VIOLENT SPEECH BECOMES MURDER, THAT HISTORY OF LIES DOES TURN INTO THE WORST KINDS OF GOVERNMENT.  Such "liberals" and that kind of journalism should be answerable for thier epic non-feasance, their malfeasance, their mis-feasance and, frankly, their knowing dishonesty on that count.  I'm especially disgusted with those in allegedly liberal media who never, ever seem to learn from the very reporting they've been doing for years, reporting the results of the kind of "free speech" "free-press" that more than just permits dangerous speech and organizing to happen, it helps it gain political power.

As an LGBTQ+ person of the kind who is the target of the Republican-fascists, I really don't want the support of such "civil libertarians"  because their wider agenda is what have led us to where the country is, today.  No thanks, Ari, I've seen what comes of your "free speech" and I want the kind that doesn't come with lynchings and stolen elections and a corrupt voting public.  

An Updated Post Script to another would-be commentator:  I thought about your objection to what I said about those who work on the movies.  I've known about nine people who made a career in Hollywood, every one of them have been amoral assholes, back stabbers and liars.  And what's more, they'd be the first to tell you that their kind is typical in the movie industry.   A lifetime spent in make-believe to make very real money will tend to be like that.  To hell with Hollywood.  

* I was a lot less shocked than many when the highly positioned, straight, conservative Canadian Air Force Commander, serial straight rapist and murderer Colonel Russell Willaims turned out to have a cross-dressing kink, photographing himself in some of the underwear he used to steal from his victims as trophies.  When a good part of your career is based in dress-up, whether in show biz, the military or police, it's not that much of a stretch to get into dress-up in other ways.  I would bet that there's a somewhat higher percentage of that in the private lives of judges and "justices."  Probably even more so among straight conservative males who maintain a far more rigid concept of gender roles than many liberals.  

There is a huge difference between people with a fixed gender identity who enjoy cross-dressing than there is someone who is legitimately trans-sexual, by the way.  The state has little to no legitimate interrest in either issue even when it appears in a stupid or even clever stage act, which should have been the basis of a lot of the "First Amendment" legal blather of the past.  There is a very long history of the most rigid conservatives frequenting such shows, in person or, now, online. Related to that,  Clarence Thomas, as certain a vote on the Court against such stuff as any is a proven consumer of the vilest and crudest of pornography, for example.  The whining by him and on his behalf by his fellow hypocrites on the violation of HIS privacy should always be used against them and their like, today.  "Liberals" who figure they must exercise privacy rights on behalf of the likes of Clarence Thomas and his fellow Republican-fascists, such as those who have covered up for Lindsay Graham and other Republican-fascists on that basis are their useful idiots.  I don't know many gay men other than Republican-fascists who are as stupid as to permit our enemies that kind of privacy even as they violate ours at every turn.  All of them are Peter Thiel's bitches, in the end.   Every in-the-closet gay man or Lesbian who supports anti-LGBTQ+ equality should be now and forever outted, their hypocrisy and lies exposed.  The prim, "privacy" observance against outting them in the media, especially when practiced by straight people is stupid enablement of their lies and hypocrisy at the expense of the privacy of those who aren't guilty of those things.  The idea that such behavior is an example of "journalistic ethics" is ludicrous.  There is no such thing under our current "First Amendment" orthodoxy.   

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

Lying, stupid Republican-fascist billionaires 

are a dime a dozen.

Monday, July 22, 2024

Is There A Bigger Horses Ass Than Aaron Sorkin?

I WON'T GO far into the idiocy of Aaron Sorkin or the perfidy of the pseudo-liberal,  pseudo-democratic New York Times but I will brag that I was making fun of Aaron Sorkin during the first years of the first run of The West Wing, upsetting the blog commentary communities as I pointed out what bullshit fairy stories it all was.  Alas, most of that was in long obscure and unrecoverable comment threads. 

Here's something I can document I said in passing as I made fun of the best and brightest in 2006, one of many times I mocked Sorkin's make believe.

For the Democratic Party in other states and on a national level, you've got bright people making the same STUPID mistake.  I know they are brilliant with real degrees in real subjects from fine universities.  I know they love the feel of those words coming out of their mouths with perfect diction.  I know that if they close their eyes they see C. J. and Toby.  But remember all of those plots where these brilliant, jargon fluent, policy wonks got into trouble when they tried to speak in public?

With the monumentally stupid idea that Democrats should replace a winner of a hard fought presidential election against the very Trump whose ass he beat for a pathetically performing Republican who lost a presidential election, who opposed Trump's nomination only to go on bended knee to him when he foolishly thought Trump would make him his Secretary of State, to condemning him after the January 6th insurrection and voting for his conviction when he was impeached, only to have him not endorse the only candidate who had a chance of preventing his return to power -  Sorkin out-stupided himself and should be forever after a laughing stock whenever he spews anything other than a stupid TV or movie script. 

There may be horses asses as big as Aaron Sorkin is, many from the same make-believe world of TV, movies and writing stage treatments of popular fairy tales like To Kill A Mocking Bird but he's as big as any of them.   He is already something of a joke, even as he back tracks and endorses Kamala Harris, NOW.   Well, the ass could have done that instead of suggesting the perfect Democrat to run against the Republican-fascist is someone who remains in the party even as it is Trump's fascist party now.   The great theologian and writer Susannah Heschel pointed out that there was all the world of difference between someone who joined the Nazi Party before 1930 and left it later and someone who joined it when it was clear after they'd held power and proved what they were.   Romney never left the party, he's still a member and I doubt he's going to leave it, especially during its time in power.   There is no such thing as a "good Republican" now,  the time for them to have left and retained any vestiges of a past goodness are long passed.   There is no room for Sorkinite "bipartisan" romanticism in any morally or intellectually respectable are of American  life in 2024.   He makes me think of P.G. Wodehouse in 1941, only without Wodehouses native stupidity and the dangerous position the Brit humorist had put himself into.  Sorkin has always figured he was way more clever than he really is.  So have those who bought into his easy, appealing unreality.  The West Wing was always hollow and callow and silly.   Not much more real than the "reality TV" that produced Trump. 

It's past time to ask the question,  will Sorkin will ever grow up?   It's 'time to go on to important things though I would guess that wasn't Sorkin's last monumentally stupid scribbleage. 

By the way, I was making a lot of the blog lefties and liberals uncomfortable with slamming the New York Times back in the early 00's,  and the Supreme Court.   I don't expect I'm saying that here for the last time, either. 

Exactly The Same Stereotypes Already Being Used Against Kamala Harris

YOU CAN BE as certain as you could that Maureen Dowd would attack any Democratic Woman who rose to prominence, that the media has already started that kind of attack on Kamala Harris.  That NYT piece of crap is an unreconstructed bitch of the kind that the fascism adjacent* Clare Booth Luce would have written.  The media's asserted liberalism is largely like the Supreme Court's assumed rectitude, an easily refuted myth that is nearly universally believed on the basis of repeated repetition.   It is believed in on the same basis that Trump's cult believes his lies, on the Big Lie basis.  In a population so accustomed to taking in what it believes and mistakenly believes it knows, one so trained by entertainment, infotanement TV and gaudy hate-talk radio and the syphilitic social media, is set up to buy any lie, whether that is whatever unneeded, over-priced, cheapened down consumer product or which ever gangster politician to put into political power or on to the court.

The corruption of democracy into what it is under Republican-fascism is the paramount achievement of the American "free-press," the American media freed to lie for its own purposes with no requirement that it serve the needs of We The People, as a democracy.   It is an achievement of media free to do that under the foolish assumptions of liberal democracy that democracy doesn't have prerequisite moral foundations, one of the most important of those being that The People have the right to accurate information upon which democracy depends.   One which the rapidly dying art of honest reporting of fact used to serve though never as much as was needed and often in ways that refused to filter out lies and self-serving assumptions.  That is best seen by how the media, even at its inadequate best, so often trafficked in the worst stereotypes,  EXACTLY THE SAME STEREOTYPES AS, CERTAINLY, ARE ALREADY BEING USED AGAINST KAMALA HARRIS, RACISM AND SEXISM. 

The other and, I insist primary foundation of democracy is egalitarianism, the moral foundation of democracy along with the need for People to know the truth.   The major defect in 18th and 19th and too much of later liberal democracy was inequality, sexual, racial and economic inequality, though, at least when it came to defaming those wealthy and so powerful enough to hire a lawyer to defend themselves in court, there was that inhibition against lying in public and in the mass media.  It is one of the great ironies of American history that it was even as the highest courts were inching towards equality during the 1950s through the early 70s, that they were kicking the other moral leg out from under democracy by allowing the media to lie with impunity, without regard to whether or not it did that in its own financial and, so political interest.   And with the freedom to lie and turning "free speech-press" into an all consuming idol, the Warren Court set us up for what has brought us here, today.  The First Congress did its part through the sloppy wording of the Bill of Rights, in a moral sin of omission, they didn't specify that there is an absolute right to tell the truth but that there is no such thing as a right to lie.  They compounded that through misidentifying the privilege they gave to a corporate entity, the "press", to publish without the Congress restricting them as a "right" when corporate entities cannot possess rights, only natural beings can.   There is no right for the press to do anything, giving them a privilege to publish without major government interference should never have been given without extracting an obligation to serve egalitarian democracy.   Perhaps if democracy ever gets another chance after the implosion of the early 2000s,  those doing it will do so on a sounder moral philosophical basis than Madison et all did in the 18th century. 

The reason for those in terms of politics and governance, to serve the equality and democracy that were either explicitly stated or implied in the Declaration of Independence which had claimed that the just consent of the governed was the only basis of legitimate government, were entirely left out of the First Amendment which would become foundational law in one of the most important aspects of the law which would govern and, so, deform whatever democracy would develop under it.  That is why the Rehnquist and the most corrupt of all Supreme Courts under John Roberts have used the First Amendment in its demolition of egalitarian democracy, going so far as to destroy a country of laws and not of Republican-fascist men, doing so on behalf of among the very worst of American Presidents, Donald Trump.

Our problems are many and they all stem from the defects in our Constitution and its administration under the power usurping Supreme Court.   At least that is the source of our problems in relatively easily stated and fixed terms.  The greater source of that is the moral corruption that was endemic in the population from before the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written,  racism, sexism, inequality, greed and resentment, and its being inflamed through the media, through lying, propagandistic "news" such as FOX specializes in, for certain, and in the far, far more universally present and watched entertainment media.  Donald Trump is a creation, first and foremost, of the entertainment divisions of our media, the feature sections in the New York Times and other moribund ink on paper sources, on infotanement "news" and hate-talk radio, but most potently in the lying, fictitious "reality TV show" that made his phony act of a great businessman (a gangster, in more honest terms) and sold that as what his fan base wanted in a political leader, the better to deliver on their basest desires of such white men to rule the world and put down People of Color and Women.  Which is the same actual motive of the New York Times, certainly its opinion sections as well as in the kind of reportage that pushes the same biases.

Donald Trump is stupid enough to have briefly and occasionally called for the overturning of the Supreme Court's permission of the media to lie about politicians and celebrities, too stupid to understand that he is the biggest, fattest, stupidest beneficiary of the Sullivan decision.   If that decision had never been made, Donald Trump, that fountain of lies, slander and libel, would have been sued into living rough on the streets decades ago.  There would never have been a Nixon presidency, there would have never been a Trump regime.  I think LBJ would have had a second term and, if he had done what President Biden did, gotten us out of a hopeless war started by earlier presidents, its likely his Great Society would have succeeded even against the media attacks on his attempt to make American democracy egalitarian and there would have been a long line of Democrats where there were Republicans in the history of the past fifty six years. There would have been no Rehnquist Court to ratfuck the election of a Republican president who lost the election in 2000 and there would have been no media lies about one in 2016, giving us another of those uniformly bad Electoral College produced regimes that lack the certification of legitimacy, winning the popular vote.  All of that started with the Courts letting the media lie with impunity as that will continue as the media, from the allegedly most august organs of it, such as the New York Times, PBS and NPR to the dregs of it in the networks, hate talk radio and the social disease of online media and gossip manipulated by billionaires foreign as well as domestic under the Roberts Court distortion of the First Amendment.  

*  The fascist admiring Henry Luce would love the current American political scene as, in deed, it's clear most of the heads of America's "free press" does.   Including the leadership of all of those mentioned here today and yesterday.

Sunday, July 21, 2024

I'm Not Mad At Democrats

for driving Joe Biden out of the race.

This is on the goddamned American media which needs to be vulnerable to being sued when they lie about Democratic politicians and liberal public figures.  

President Biden has been the most effective Democratic president in fifty six years, against all odds, the most effective President given what he's done with what he's been given to work with.