Congressman Jerrold Nadler has called on Barack Obama to fire James Comey over his role in handing the election to Donald Trump. That is, certainly, the least of what should be done to Comey who has earned the title of most corrupt and incompetent FBI Director in its history. I include the rest of those who were forced to resign or who should have been fired and even the founding criminal Director, J. Edgar Hoover. If there were real justice in this country, James Comey would be serving a prison term for violating the Hatch Act, but criminals of his class are seldom if ever punished.
What should happen won't under Donald Trump, Federal Marshals who could be trusted should have been sent in to secure all FBI offices and the records and communications, as they handed subpoenas to relevant employees of the FBI and escorted them to the door. Then there should be a criminal investigation that discovered which agents and officials were working with the Republican-fascists to ratfuck this election. Comeygate is worse than what happened during Watergate, more blatant, more blatantly illegal and a clear act by Republican-fascists in the FBI to defeat the candidate of the Democratic Party.
James Comey will almost certainly escape having to pay for his crimes, he will probably keep his job and the FBI will continue to be an arm of the Republican-fascist party, violating the law to target Democrats and to elect Republicans. If Democrats had won this election they might have done something about it but they didn't and the Republicans won't.
If history is truly told, Barack Obama will not be seen as a strong president, he is one of the weakest Democrats to have held that office. That is largely due to the horrible appointments he made in so many areas of the government. His treasury and financial team is probably the biggest reason that Democrats didn't keep the congress and flourish in the wake of Bush II era incompetence and crime. His appointments at the department of Justice play a role in that, their refusal to prosecute the biggest crooks and swindlers in our history because of their aristocratic class status - the same class that so many of Obama's appointees are in - makes Obama a champion of them, not of the majority of people who put their trust in him eight years ago. He betrayed his own supporters from the start and that is the defining character of his administration. If he had any real understanding of poor people of people who are desperate, he wouldn't have acted in the ways he has. I don't think he has the imagination to really have the slightest understanding or inclination to understand the lives of real people in the economic underclass, including what has become our own, beleaguered, British class system style working class. Things have degenerated that far in the United States that we now have one of those, something which should be seen as the most basic betrayal of our ideals in the United States.
I will have a lot more to say about the disillusionment with Barack Obama and his style of politician in the future. I have no expectation that he will do the right thing and get some measure of justice in the crimes of James Comey, one of his appointees. If he does anything it is entirely too little and it is entirely too late.
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
Monday, November 14, 2016
Late Hate - I'm Trying To Have An Earlier Bedtime Now That The Disaster Is Coming now with an Update
Not that I'd encourage her to try but the reason Freki won't engage me here is because she is a lightweight who can't stand up when pressed to back up her categorical pronouncements and issued fiats. She obviously never even read what I wrote as she mischaracterizes what it said.
Update: You told me that Simps said I'd, somehow, blamed Trump on the C Major scale, I never mentioned the C Major scale. What I excerpted from an interview with Charles Wuorinen had this question and answer at the very beginning.
So at this point, do you think it's intellectually dishonest to write music in C major?
No, but I think it depends on who you are.
Even before it got too complex for the big minds at the Baby Blue Brain Trust, the fine composer Charles Wuorinen said pretty much what the far lesser composer Virgil Thomson said, you can write whatever music you like if that's what you like to write, "It depends on who you are." I know that's way too complex for a semi-literate, washed up pop music writer for a trumped-up ad flyer and his reading public at said "brain trust" but that's what it said.
What I said is that the geezers in the Baby Boom Generation - yeah, you groovy guys, THAT'S US NOW - are who voted Trump into office. Ours that generation that was flattered by Madison ave. marketing to hippies and wannabees and our own peers as "the generation that will save the world" the "best educated generation in history" and a dozen other lines of bilge you'd have to be unspeakably ignorant to have bought. Ours not only contained Trump, it elected him.
One of the most unpleasant secrets of our vaunted generation is that it was 80% white due to, among other things, the racist restrictions placed on immigration by racists of previous generations. Combined with the income bracket that went strongly for Trump, comfortably to upper middle class and above, that's your peers over there at Baby Blue, I'm ashamed to say, mine too. Well, except the income part of it.
Of course, I haven't made those kinds of arguments, I've put the blame where it really belongs with the people who made it so the media could lie us into Republican-fascism, culminating in Trump. The same media, the same First Amendment absolutist created free press - that's hate-talk radio, FOX and the other cabloid liars and fascists, and the rest of the real beneficiaries of the Sullivan Decision, brought to you by The (allegedly liberal) New York Times and the Warren Court, that's what brought us Trump.
And it all started with that Ivy League lawyer class interpretation of the words of the First Amendment that refused to take real reality and the requirements of democracy being possible into account. If someone made the same observations I have in 1964, that the Warren Court's enabling of lying by the mass media - owned by millionaires and their corporations - was going to dupe The People so lied to into electing horrific governments that would make the rich richer and end up oppressing most people, guess what, they'd have been proved to be right. Nat Hentoff, Joel Gora and the ACLU, the New York Times and Village Voice and the Progressive magazine would be proved absolutely wrong. And Hentoff went to work for the fascists. I always said you can't trust a materialist.
Update: You told me that Simps said I'd, somehow, blamed Trump on the C Major scale, I never mentioned the C Major scale. What I excerpted from an interview with Charles Wuorinen had this question and answer at the very beginning.
So at this point, do you think it's intellectually dishonest to write music in C major?
No, but I think it depends on who you are.
Even before it got too complex for the big minds at the Baby Blue Brain Trust, the fine composer Charles Wuorinen said pretty much what the far lesser composer Virgil Thomson said, you can write whatever music you like if that's what you like to write, "It depends on who you are." I know that's way too complex for a semi-literate, washed up pop music writer for a trumped-up ad flyer and his reading public at said "brain trust" but that's what it said.
What I said is that the geezers in the Baby Boom Generation - yeah, you groovy guys, THAT'S US NOW - are who voted Trump into office. Ours that generation that was flattered by Madison ave. marketing to hippies and wannabees and our own peers as "the generation that will save the world" the "best educated generation in history" and a dozen other lines of bilge you'd have to be unspeakably ignorant to have bought. Ours not only contained Trump, it elected him.
One of the most unpleasant secrets of our vaunted generation is that it was 80% white due to, among other things, the racist restrictions placed on immigration by racists of previous generations. Combined with the income bracket that went strongly for Trump, comfortably to upper middle class and above, that's your peers over there at Baby Blue, I'm ashamed to say, mine too. Well, except the income part of it.
Of course, I haven't made those kinds of arguments, I've put the blame where it really belongs with the people who made it so the media could lie us into Republican-fascism, culminating in Trump. The same media, the same First Amendment absolutist created free press - that's hate-talk radio, FOX and the other cabloid liars and fascists, and the rest of the real beneficiaries of the Sullivan Decision, brought to you by The (allegedly liberal) New York Times and the Warren Court, that's what brought us Trump.
And it all started with that Ivy League lawyer class interpretation of the words of the First Amendment that refused to take real reality and the requirements of democracy being possible into account. If someone made the same observations I have in 1964, that the Warren Court's enabling of lying by the mass media - owned by millionaires and their corporations - was going to dupe The People so lied to into electing horrific governments that would make the rich richer and end up oppressing most people, guess what, they'd have been proved to be right. Nat Hentoff, Joel Gora and the ACLU, the New York Times and Village Voice and the Progressive magazine would be proved absolutely wrong. And Hentoff went to work for the fascists. I always said you can't trust a materialist.
Psalm 41 - The Soldier - William Shatner
Young William Shatner in 1962 appeared in a series of short films based on the Psalms produced by Father Patrick Peyton, CSC
We Are Trump's ATM Machine
It is becoming clear that the Trump regime is going to start in more than just an appearance of conflict of interest over his refusal to set up a blind trust for his financial assets. It is clear that people will always have to ask if the Trump family hasn't made the United States into an ATM machine for their various money making ventures, and that's only the level of corruption that doesn't get to what his cabinet does, he will certainly put crooks, gangsters and their enablers into those and every other position he and his den of thieves can manage.
This could be the most obviously, blatantly and in-your-face corrupt administration in the history of the country, we're talking a level of corruption far worse than the antebellum period of the United States, we're talking decadent Roman empire levels of corruption.
And, lest you forget, it was all brought to you from that First Amendment absolutist provided free and unfettered press.
This is going to be epic corruption from which our country may never regain its footing, this is shaping up to be an event like the change, ironically enough, from Republican to Imperial Rome, only we're going from democracy to Republicanfascism. And the mass media is pretending this is normal. We now know what they will do when they can get away with saying what is most profitable to them, their owners, their class and it is an entire betrayal of The People.
I am seeing no evidence that even the elite media really intends to fight against the Trump crime spree, they're too busy striking poses of being shocked at what anyone with the intelligence of an especially stupid fashion writer would know was coming.
It turns out that the privilege of watching democracy die isn't much of a privilege, though now we know what it looks like and it is shocking how used to watching the media lie you can get when you've seen it for half a century.
This could be the most obviously, blatantly and in-your-face corrupt administration in the history of the country, we're talking a level of corruption far worse than the antebellum period of the United States, we're talking decadent Roman empire levels of corruption.
And, lest you forget, it was all brought to you from that First Amendment absolutist provided free and unfettered press.
This is going to be epic corruption from which our country may never regain its footing, this is shaping up to be an event like the change, ironically enough, from Republican to Imperial Rome, only we're going from democracy to Republicanfascism. And the mass media is pretending this is normal. We now know what they will do when they can get away with saying what is most profitable to them, their owners, their class and it is an entire betrayal of The People.
I am seeing no evidence that even the elite media really intends to fight against the Trump crime spree, they're too busy striking poses of being shocked at what anyone with the intelligence of an especially stupid fashion writer would know was coming.
It turns out that the privilege of watching democracy die isn't much of a privilege, though now we know what it looks like and it is shocking how used to watching the media lie you can get when you've seen it for half a century.
We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us, Fellow Boomers
The sad truth for my fellow geezers of the Baby Boom is that, far more than the poor-whites they want to blame Donald Trump on, it is us, bunkies, it is our age cohort who inflicted one of our own on the world. This should make the Geritol and lumbago set at a certain blog reflective, but they, like so many in my self-obsessed generation, aren't big on deep reflection, despite all of their Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen listening. I did happen to read something over the weekend that ties in, an old interview with the great composer, Charles Wuorinen at The New Music Box
FJO: So, at this point, do you think it’s intellectually dishonest to write music in C major?
CW: No, but I think it depends on who you are. I remember—again, I hate to give so many pointless anecdotes from my past, but I’ve reached the age where that’s unavoidable. In the ‘70s, a—at the time—semi-well-known rock musician came to me because he couldn’t read music, and he wanted to learn how to write down his songs. I said, “Well, do you know anything about harmony?” And he said no, he didn’t. He just felt his way around, as I guess they all do. Anyway, I gave him something to read, and he went away. He then called me a little while later and said that he decided instead of studying to hire a secretary to notate his stuff, and I said, “You have made the right choice, because if you knew enough to write down what you’re doing, you would find it unsatisfactory. If you had knowledge, you would be unable to continue with what you’re doing.” And this seems to me to be very much the case with popular music today and has been for a long time.
What’s interesting about that is that it wasn’t always so. In the earlier days of old-fashioned jazz, big bands, whatever it was—I’m not a historian in these things, I don’t know the exact sequence—until sometime around the rise of rock ‘n’ roll, I would guess in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, popular musicians recognized a hierarchy, and tended to look up, or else tended to be defensive about or to be angry with, classical musicians. Everything they did, of course, ultimately derived from classical practice. The harmonic language they used, and still use now, comes from the work of serious composers of an earlier time. Jazz is the same—it’s grafting on via Baptist hymn tunes, diatonic harmony from Western music, and African elements and rhythms. In any case, just to finish this off, there wasn’t necessarily a great profound knowledge on the part of pop musicians, although a lot more than now, you really had to be able to play, you really had to be able to do those arrangements, you had to know what you were doing, to have real instrumental skills, to be a good musician in those genres. They may not have known a hell of a lot, but they knew that there was something there which was worthy of respect. It wasn’t their thing, and they did what they did.
Following that we had—don’t forget—the pronouncements of the students of the late 1960s. In their colossal ignorance about everything, they pronounced themselves the best-educated generation in history; that attitude has continued since then. And you have now pop musicians who really don’t know anything. They regard themselves as moral colossi who are going to tell the world how to live and what’s wrong with everybody else via their immortal poetry, but their musical substance is very, very slim, and there is no recognition of any sort of higher forms of musical discourse or musical practice. That is a very a profound change, and it’s something which, when you then see the pathetic spectacle of certain composers, you know who they are, aping pop behavior as a way of trying to grab an audience that expects not to be pandered to, but to be given entertainment that it can receive effortlessly, without paying very much attention to it. You see that we’re in a very different place than we were at one time.
I have to admit, this is sort of like me taunting Foghorn Leghorn, wacking his ass with a fence slat - hey, it's been a crappy two weeks, I need some fun. Though I don't agree with all of what Wuorinen said there, I absolutely agree with that last paragraph. The fact is a lot of jazz musicians were then and, especially now, quite well versed in what was going on in Classical music. Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Mel Powell, etc. knew a lot about the current classical composition of their days. Mingus, especially, knew it very well, according to the late Gunther Schuller.
Yeah, get used to it, fellow boomers, it was the greedy, self-absorbed members of our generation who inflicted Donald Trump on the world and it's generally with a different kind of ignorance than the one you love to imagine powerless, poor, white people used to put him there.
Do click on the link and notice the COUNTERSTREAM RADIO button at the top. It's well worth listening to.
Update: Well, if you've read the piece above that Simps lied about, you already know he lied about what it said. What he and Freki don't know about music is pretty much everything. What Wuorinen said about pop musicians goes six times for pop music "critics". If you, like most of the Eschatots don't read what they gas ignorantly on about, you haven't seen this either. If Eschaton were significant the comments there would be a good example of how the social media spreads lies.
FJO: So, at this point, do you think it’s intellectually dishonest to write music in C major?
CW: No, but I think it depends on who you are. I remember—again, I hate to give so many pointless anecdotes from my past, but I’ve reached the age where that’s unavoidable. In the ‘70s, a—at the time—semi-well-known rock musician came to me because he couldn’t read music, and he wanted to learn how to write down his songs. I said, “Well, do you know anything about harmony?” And he said no, he didn’t. He just felt his way around, as I guess they all do. Anyway, I gave him something to read, and he went away. He then called me a little while later and said that he decided instead of studying to hire a secretary to notate his stuff, and I said, “You have made the right choice, because if you knew enough to write down what you’re doing, you would find it unsatisfactory. If you had knowledge, you would be unable to continue with what you’re doing.” And this seems to me to be very much the case with popular music today and has been for a long time.
What’s interesting about that is that it wasn’t always so. In the earlier days of old-fashioned jazz, big bands, whatever it was—I’m not a historian in these things, I don’t know the exact sequence—until sometime around the rise of rock ‘n’ roll, I would guess in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, popular musicians recognized a hierarchy, and tended to look up, or else tended to be defensive about or to be angry with, classical musicians. Everything they did, of course, ultimately derived from classical practice. The harmonic language they used, and still use now, comes from the work of serious composers of an earlier time. Jazz is the same—it’s grafting on via Baptist hymn tunes, diatonic harmony from Western music, and African elements and rhythms. In any case, just to finish this off, there wasn’t necessarily a great profound knowledge on the part of pop musicians, although a lot more than now, you really had to be able to play, you really had to be able to do those arrangements, you had to know what you were doing, to have real instrumental skills, to be a good musician in those genres. They may not have known a hell of a lot, but they knew that there was something there which was worthy of respect. It wasn’t their thing, and they did what they did.
Following that we had—don’t forget—the pronouncements of the students of the late 1960s. In their colossal ignorance about everything, they pronounced themselves the best-educated generation in history; that attitude has continued since then. And you have now pop musicians who really don’t know anything. They regard themselves as moral colossi who are going to tell the world how to live and what’s wrong with everybody else via their immortal poetry, but their musical substance is very, very slim, and there is no recognition of any sort of higher forms of musical discourse or musical practice. That is a very a profound change, and it’s something which, when you then see the pathetic spectacle of certain composers, you know who they are, aping pop behavior as a way of trying to grab an audience that expects not to be pandered to, but to be given entertainment that it can receive effortlessly, without paying very much attention to it. You see that we’re in a very different place than we were at one time.
I have to admit, this is sort of like me taunting Foghorn Leghorn, wacking his ass with a fence slat - hey, it's been a crappy two weeks, I need some fun. Though I don't agree with all of what Wuorinen said there, I absolutely agree with that last paragraph. The fact is a lot of jazz musicians were then and, especially now, quite well versed in what was going on in Classical music. Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Mel Powell, etc. knew a lot about the current classical composition of their days. Mingus, especially, knew it very well, according to the late Gunther Schuller.
Yeah, get used to it, fellow boomers, it was the greedy, self-absorbed members of our generation who inflicted Donald Trump on the world and it's generally with a different kind of ignorance than the one you love to imagine powerless, poor, white people used to put him there.
Do click on the link and notice the COUNTERSTREAM RADIO button at the top. It's well worth listening to.
Update: Well, if you've read the piece above that Simps lied about, you already know he lied about what it said. What he and Freki don't know about music is pretty much everything. What Wuorinen said about pop musicians goes six times for pop music "critics". If you, like most of the Eschatots don't read what they gas ignorantly on about, you haven't seen this either. If Eschaton were significant the comments there would be a good example of how the social media spreads lies.
Psalm 11 What can an honest person do when everything crumbles?
11 The Lord is my fortress!
Don’t say to me,
“Escape like a bird
to the mountains!”
2 You tell me, “Watch out!
Those evil people
have put
their arrows on their bows,
and they are standing
in the shadows,
aiming at good people.
3 What can an honest person do
when everything crumbles?”
4 The Lord is sitting
in his sacred temple
on his throne in heaven.
He knows everything we do
because he sees us all.
5 The Lord tests honest people,
but despises those
who are cruel
and love violence.
6 He will send fiery coals
and flaming sulfur
down on the wicked,
and they will drink nothing
but a scorching wind.
7 The Lord always does right
and wants justice done.
Everyone who does right
will see his face.
Contemporary English Version
I hope that a lot of you start to get the Psalms, the entire Jewish Bible, at a much younger age than I started to get them at. I strongly suspect that if I'm conscious on my deathbed that I'll regret the time I wasted on other things, I doubt I'll regret this time of trying to read these deeply.
Presented as "the word of God" they are incomprehensible, understood as the thoughts and cries and joys and hopes of very limited and human humans, their profundity starts to reveal itself. These texts are some which, no doubt, stood out in their insight, their inspiration to those who compiled the books which a fundamentalist, superstitious view of them sees as being a far more unified, far more uniform production. The frequent frustration and the deep questioning contained in them is the exact opposite of fundamentalism. They are an understanding of human experience, of human reality that is incredibly deep and important and far more useful than most of the secular verbiage on those topics are.
In the coming years of overt Republican-fascism, they will be as entirely relevant as they always have been in history.
Don’t say to me,
“Escape like a bird
to the mountains!”
2 You tell me, “Watch out!
Those evil people
have put
their arrows on their bows,
and they are standing
in the shadows,
aiming at good people.
3 What can an honest person do
when everything crumbles?”
4 The Lord is sitting
in his sacred temple
on his throne in heaven.
He knows everything we do
because he sees us all.
5 The Lord tests honest people,
but despises those
who are cruel
and love violence.
6 He will send fiery coals
and flaming sulfur
down on the wicked,
and they will drink nothing
but a scorching wind.
7 The Lord always does right
and wants justice done.
Everyone who does right
will see his face.
Contemporary English Version
I hope that a lot of you start to get the Psalms, the entire Jewish Bible, at a much younger age than I started to get them at. I strongly suspect that if I'm conscious on my deathbed that I'll regret the time I wasted on other things, I doubt I'll regret this time of trying to read these deeply.
Presented as "the word of God" they are incomprehensible, understood as the thoughts and cries and joys and hopes of very limited and human humans, their profundity starts to reveal itself. These texts are some which, no doubt, stood out in their insight, their inspiration to those who compiled the books which a fundamentalist, superstitious view of them sees as being a far more unified, far more uniform production. The frequent frustration and the deep questioning contained in them is the exact opposite of fundamentalism. They are an understanding of human experience, of human reality that is incredibly deep and important and far more useful than most of the secular verbiage on those topics are.
In the coming years of overt Republican-fascism, they will be as entirely relevant as they always have been in history.
Sunday, November 13, 2016
An Answer To Neal Gabler
As a gay man who has lived under the threat and at times the experience of violence my entire life, all I can say to those who feel they are newly under threat due to Trump's targeting of the press is I hope you learn something from it. I have this piece by the excellent writer Neal Gabler tossed at me, as a refutation of my contention that the descent into Trumpism started when the Warren Court issued the Sullivan ruling in 1964, a ruling which gave the media a carte blanche to lie about politicians without having to worry, anymore, that they might be sued for libel or slander. Remarkably, enough, the press flourished before that when they could be sued, it has certainly not maintained higher standards of honesty in reporting in the period after that. You wonder how they managed to avoid being shut down before. Perhaps it was because they were more careful to publish truth that they could back up with citations and evidence whereas now they publish mostly polls, opinions and "it is being said" style rumor mongering.
I will also point out that the media environment before and just after the Sullivan decision saw the pinnacle of liberal achievement reached in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. You wonder how that media, under the burden of telling the truth or risking being sued managed to inform the electorate which produced the administrations and congresses that did that. You can contrast that to those presidents and senates we got starting with the next elections after that ruling and the character which they increasingly took on as the next four decades passed.
I can't see how an honest journalist who wasn't in the business of publishing unverified conjecture, rumors and obvious lies would be so afraid of the truth being required to avoid being sued for the damage that those lies do to people who are lied about.
Of course, as anyone with a vestigial mind could have guessed, the corporate media owned by the stinking rich would gradually and then totally favor right wing, Republican politicians who were more profitable for them and their class of people. The largest loser in the Sullivan decision have been liberal politicians who have been targeted by lie campaigns, not only in the corporate media but, perhaps as much so, direct mail and other venues by political and industry groups.
Gabler cites the terror unleashed by Trump which is being carried on by his thugs around the country and through social media. If it were possible to sue someone for slander and libel, they could sue Trump and with his propensity for lying and publicly calling on his thug to attack people, by name, it is almost certain that they could win and win big. If it were possible for someone to sue for lying about them, Donald Trump would have been bankrupt dozens or hundreds of times instead of the mere six times he has been.
The claim that journalists make, though not directly claiming it, that their lies deserve protection is curious considering the alleged ethics of their profession surrounding the treatment of fact and fact checking. That has become a lost art in the post-Sullivan world. There is no rational reason for lies to be granted protection against the claims of those they damage, it if is an inconvenience for the media to check their facts before they publish them or broadcast them to millions of people, it's a minor one as compared to someone being lied about and targeted by the media or by a piece of slime like Trump using the media to target someone. I deeply worry about Katy Tur and others so targeted, I am as concerned for those who are similarly targeted by the media whose lives can be ruined, who can be subjected to terror and harrassment, who can have a quarter of a century of dedicated public service be turned by the inverted logic of the cabloid media into a thing of shame. I am even more concerned by their destruction of liberal politicians, their careers in public office and allowing some of the worst presidents and politicians in our history to flourish and take those offices through their selective lies.
To the media which even Neal Gabler admits played a large role in the elevation of Donald Trump I say, boo, hoo. You are not the first ones on my list to worry about in the coming fascist terror. Women, Black People, Latinos, Muslims, LGBT people, Jews, etc. get it already and have increasingly gotten it with the encouragment of hate talk radio, cabloid journalism and online media. It's your colleagues who lied Trump into politics, who gave him billions of dollars worth of free promotion and publicity and who vilified Hillary Clinton directly or by passing on lies and rumors and innuendo. Your profession sowed it, now they will reap it along with the rest of us.
I will also point out that the media environment before and just after the Sullivan decision saw the pinnacle of liberal achievement reached in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. You wonder how that media, under the burden of telling the truth or risking being sued managed to inform the electorate which produced the administrations and congresses that did that. You can contrast that to those presidents and senates we got starting with the next elections after that ruling and the character which they increasingly took on as the next four decades passed.
I can't see how an honest journalist who wasn't in the business of publishing unverified conjecture, rumors and obvious lies would be so afraid of the truth being required to avoid being sued for the damage that those lies do to people who are lied about.
Of course, as anyone with a vestigial mind could have guessed, the corporate media owned by the stinking rich would gradually and then totally favor right wing, Republican politicians who were more profitable for them and their class of people. The largest loser in the Sullivan decision have been liberal politicians who have been targeted by lie campaigns, not only in the corporate media but, perhaps as much so, direct mail and other venues by political and industry groups.
Gabler cites the terror unleashed by Trump which is being carried on by his thugs around the country and through social media. If it were possible to sue someone for slander and libel, they could sue Trump and with his propensity for lying and publicly calling on his thug to attack people, by name, it is almost certain that they could win and win big. If it were possible for someone to sue for lying about them, Donald Trump would have been bankrupt dozens or hundreds of times instead of the mere six times he has been.
The claim that journalists make, though not directly claiming it, that their lies deserve protection is curious considering the alleged ethics of their profession surrounding the treatment of fact and fact checking. That has become a lost art in the post-Sullivan world. There is no rational reason for lies to be granted protection against the claims of those they damage, it if is an inconvenience for the media to check their facts before they publish them or broadcast them to millions of people, it's a minor one as compared to someone being lied about and targeted by the media or by a piece of slime like Trump using the media to target someone. I deeply worry about Katy Tur and others so targeted, I am as concerned for those who are similarly targeted by the media whose lives can be ruined, who can be subjected to terror and harrassment, who can have a quarter of a century of dedicated public service be turned by the inverted logic of the cabloid media into a thing of shame. I am even more concerned by their destruction of liberal politicians, their careers in public office and allowing some of the worst presidents and politicians in our history to flourish and take those offices through their selective lies.
To the media which even Neal Gabler admits played a large role in the elevation of Donald Trump I say, boo, hoo. You are not the first ones on my list to worry about in the coming fascist terror. Women, Black People, Latinos, Muslims, LGBT people, Jews, etc. get it already and have increasingly gotten it with the encouragment of hate talk radio, cabloid journalism and online media. It's your colleagues who lied Trump into politics, who gave him billions of dollars worth of free promotion and publicity and who vilified Hillary Clinton directly or by passing on lies and rumors and innuendo. Your profession sowed it, now they will reap it along with the rest of us.
Roger Sessions - Psalm 140
Anne Elgar, soprano
Boston Symphony
Erich Leinsdorf, conductor
140 Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man: preserve me from the violent man;
2 Which imagine mischiefs in their heart; continually are they gathered together for war.
3 They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent; adders' poison is under their lips.
4 Keep me, O Lord, from the hands of the wicked; preserve me from the violent man; who have purposed to overthrow my goings.
5 The proud have hid a snare for me, and cords; they have spread a net by the wayside; they have set gins for me. Selah.
6 I said unto the Lord, Thou art my God: hear the voice of my supplications, O Lord.
7 O God the Lord, the strength of my salvation, thou hast covered my head in the day of battle.
8 Grant not, O Lord, the desires of the wicked: further not his wicked device; lest they exalt themselves. Selah.
9 As for the head of those that compass me about, let the mischief of their own lips cover them.
10 Let burning coals fall upon them: let them be cast into the fire; into deep pits, that they rise not up again.
11 Let not an evil speaker be established in the earth: evil shall hunt the violent man to overthrow him.
12 I know that the Lord will maintain the cause of the afflicted, and the right of the poor.
13 Surely the righteous shall give thanks unto thy name: the upright shall dwell in thy presence.
King James Version
The notes say that this piece has never been published in a commercial recording, I'd never heard it before looking for a setting of this most relevant psalm for where we are after the election.
I've been asked to post a Psalm every day. I'll try, it's a good idea.
Translate This Into American And This Is What They'll Try To Turn The United States Into
Gradisca, the gal in red, that's the great American free press we as good liberals are supposed to care so much about. That's the thing about fascism, it turns the entire country into a brothel.
Update: And in case you think I'm going over the top, Trump is hiring actual fascists to be in his administration.
Charles P. Pierce
Let us be clear. The hiring of Steve Bannon as a WH policy adviser is exactly the same as hiring David Duke. Please don't normalize this.
Elizabeth Warren On The Trump Win
If Barack Obama had not governed in favor of the economic elite, Donald Trump would never have won the nomination, he would certainly not have won the corrupt American electoral college system. Eight years ago Barack Obama promised a kind of change he started walking back during the months before he too office in a manner which might be classier than the way that Trump is walking back his campaign promises that will protect Social Security and Medicare. Trump will walk back any economic populism he dangled in front of the non-racists who voted for him even as he doubles down on the racism and bigotry to solidify his neo-fascist, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, Anglo-Saxon supremacist base.
Elizabeth Warren's speech is, as always with her, full of what needs to be done. If Barack Obama had listened to her and her genuine populism in 2008 instead of those who favored appointments like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner we wouldn't be in danger of full blown fascism now.
Why I Will Not Be Counting On The ACLU To Save Us
The ACLU is announcing that it is going to court to try to shut the barn door after they helped open it up. I wish them luck while pointing out that there is hardly any reason to expect that the politicized, Republican judiciary and the Supreme Court which will, again be completely dominated by the same Republican-fascist majority which has played such a role in establishing Republicanfascist government is more likely to clean their clocks than agree with their Constitutional arguments. If there is one thing Republicanfascists who have been to Ivy League law schools know how to do it is to twist words to permit Republicanfascists to do what they want to and what will cement their federalist-fascist idea of good government into place.
The problem with the ACLU approach is that it depends on things which aren't dependable and they have had an enormous role in preventing the necessary conditions under which egalitarian democracy can happen from being here. Worse, their basic theories, advocacy and action have played a huge role in undermining the necessary prerequisites for their approach working to produce egalitarian democracy. That depends on a line of dependent causation which you would think the legal minds of the ACLU over its existence would have understood, but their actions show that they couldn't predict the entirely predictable results of what they advanced.
- It depends on honest Supreme Court justices with a full belief in egalitarian democracy and their primary responsibility to protect it - something which is certainly not dependable on considering its history. That ideal court has seldom been the court we have, it has not existed in the United States for decades and the court in recent years has been one of the worst we've ever had and the one Trump will produce will certainly be worse.
- Honest Supreme Courts don't just happen, they have to be appointed by a president who also appoints federal judges. The federal courts have, if anything, an even shadier history in their protection and defense of egalitarian democracy than the high-priesthood of the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Courts have corrupted the law even good lower court judges, honest and of good will, will not be able to protect and defend democracy. All of which boils down to the need for the President to be honest, to honestly follow democratic principles on an equal basis. No one with more than a My Picture Book of American Presidents* view of history would claim with a straight face we can count on presidents doing that. The list of those who have been more of a danger to egalitarian democracy is a long one, about to have another one, the very one addressed in the ACLU pdf document.
- Having honest Supreme Court justices also depends on them being confirmed by an honest Senate with a majority if not a super majority of the Senators being honest, faithful to their oath of office and with a sufficient devotion to egalitarian democracy to override party identity and interest and the wishes of their large donors and, often, the prejudice of a majority of their constituents. Anyone who claims history gives reason to feel confident in that happening is too simple minded or addled to take seriously. The history of the United States Senate is full to the top of such things as even being unable to pass laws making lynching a federal crime.
- We have, so far, come to the point where we see having a Supreme Court which will reliably protect and defend egalitarian democracy depends on the people elected to the presidency and the Senate. We now come to the most serious point that it is The Voters who have to put them into office and as Barney Frank pointed out a while back, "sometimes the voters are no bargain either". Frank didn't go as far in his criticism as I'm going to because voters are not and no one should expect they're going to be fully engaged, full time on public policy, carefully gathering facts and analyzing them. If anyone in this discussion, politicians, ACLU lawyers, etc. don't take the bother to understand that you MUST FULLY UNDERSTAND AND TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE REAL LIFE LIVES OF THE PEOPLE YOU ARE AS WILLFULLY IGNORANT AND IRRESPONSIBLE AS HE, RIGHTFULLY, ACCUSES TOO MANY VOTERS OF BEING.
- The People have to rely on others to present the facts to them, they are entirely dependent on the media which dominates whatever is going to constitute the life of the mind of most of them. And I include all of media, the alleged news, the alleged entertainment, the shouting and screaming of opinion as entertainment. That is a fact, that is what is going to inform most people either completely or enough to make them decide who they are going to vote for. It is exactly at this point that the ACLU has played a fatal role in reliving the media from their role in this line, at the very foundation on which the line producing egalitarian democracy and a decent life depends.
The ACLU, using the language that the amateur and aristocratic and, not infrequently, anti-democratic, slave-holding WHITE MEN wrote into the First Amendment have talked the Supreme Court into letting them lie with impunity for their own profit, for the benefit of their largely white-male-oligarchic owners. A class which has never been comprised of people who put egalitarian democracy over their own wealth and power, except in a very few instances and those instances are often people whose background and education seldom leave them with more than a stereotypical conception of the lives of the large majority of people.
We have had two presidents who are products of the media the ACLU freed to lie to voters within the past forty years, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. The Reagan administration and the judges and justices he appointed have done enormous damage to egalitarian democracy, they have undermined and attacked it and their decisions have had no small role in producing the fascist Trump phenomenon and the likely final destruction of democracy. Donald Trump's campaign promises are, as the ACLU is too polite to say, a program of fascism, using racism, gaming the worst superstitions and resentments of a very large number of people, whipping them up into racist fury to get elected but his intention of being in office, that of Pence and the rest of his crew is to steal as much as they can and to prevent democracy from stopping their crime spree this time. The media which created him, gave him billions of dollars worth of free air time, which constantly covered him as it disappeared most of Hillary Clinton's campaign and went with every attempt to destroy her, including the clear violation of law by James Comey and the criminals at the FBI. The ACLU gave us the media that did that through their "free speech - free press" advocacy. That they and their colleagues did it on behalf of media organizations which had a huge financial interest in being free to lie only further demonstrates that their advertised and displayed ideals are empty and refuted by a half century of their actions.
I don't have any confidence in the ACLU, I won't be joining in with those donating to it - the document is issued as part of a fund-raising campaign. I am as not going to be sending them money as I am not going to be sending money to National Public Radio or any of the other institutions who acted to give us Donald Trump. That it may be an unintended consequence of the ACLU dogma of "free speech-free press" changes nothing about the fact that it was an obvious consequence of it and it has been an obvious consequence of it for as long as the media has been using its freedom to lie to defeat liberals and Democrats.
*A title I just invented if it doesn't exist.
The problem with the ACLU approach is that it depends on things which aren't dependable and they have had an enormous role in preventing the necessary conditions under which egalitarian democracy can happen from being here. Worse, their basic theories, advocacy and action have played a huge role in undermining the necessary prerequisites for their approach working to produce egalitarian democracy. That depends on a line of dependent causation which you would think the legal minds of the ACLU over its existence would have understood, but their actions show that they couldn't predict the entirely predictable results of what they advanced.
- It depends on honest Supreme Court justices with a full belief in egalitarian democracy and their primary responsibility to protect it - something which is certainly not dependable on considering its history. That ideal court has seldom been the court we have, it has not existed in the United States for decades and the court in recent years has been one of the worst we've ever had and the one Trump will produce will certainly be worse.
- Honest Supreme Courts don't just happen, they have to be appointed by a president who also appoints federal judges. The federal courts have, if anything, an even shadier history in their protection and defense of egalitarian democracy than the high-priesthood of the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Courts have corrupted the law even good lower court judges, honest and of good will, will not be able to protect and defend democracy. All of which boils down to the need for the President to be honest, to honestly follow democratic principles on an equal basis. No one with more than a My Picture Book of American Presidents* view of history would claim with a straight face we can count on presidents doing that. The list of those who have been more of a danger to egalitarian democracy is a long one, about to have another one, the very one addressed in the ACLU pdf document.
- Having honest Supreme Court justices also depends on them being confirmed by an honest Senate with a majority if not a super majority of the Senators being honest, faithful to their oath of office and with a sufficient devotion to egalitarian democracy to override party identity and interest and the wishes of their large donors and, often, the prejudice of a majority of their constituents. Anyone who claims history gives reason to feel confident in that happening is too simple minded or addled to take seriously. The history of the United States Senate is full to the top of such things as even being unable to pass laws making lynching a federal crime.
- We have, so far, come to the point where we see having a Supreme Court which will reliably protect and defend egalitarian democracy depends on the people elected to the presidency and the Senate. We now come to the most serious point that it is The Voters who have to put them into office and as Barney Frank pointed out a while back, "sometimes the voters are no bargain either". Frank didn't go as far in his criticism as I'm going to because voters are not and no one should expect they're going to be fully engaged, full time on public policy, carefully gathering facts and analyzing them. If anyone in this discussion, politicians, ACLU lawyers, etc. don't take the bother to understand that you MUST FULLY UNDERSTAND AND TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE REAL LIFE LIVES OF THE PEOPLE YOU ARE AS WILLFULLY IGNORANT AND IRRESPONSIBLE AS HE, RIGHTFULLY, ACCUSES TOO MANY VOTERS OF BEING.
- The People have to rely on others to present the facts to them, they are entirely dependent on the media which dominates whatever is going to constitute the life of the mind of most of them. And I include all of media, the alleged news, the alleged entertainment, the shouting and screaming of opinion as entertainment. That is a fact, that is what is going to inform most people either completely or enough to make them decide who they are going to vote for. It is exactly at this point that the ACLU has played a fatal role in reliving the media from their role in this line, at the very foundation on which the line producing egalitarian democracy and a decent life depends.
The ACLU, using the language that the amateur and aristocratic and, not infrequently, anti-democratic, slave-holding WHITE MEN wrote into the First Amendment have talked the Supreme Court into letting them lie with impunity for their own profit, for the benefit of their largely white-male-oligarchic owners. A class which has never been comprised of people who put egalitarian democracy over their own wealth and power, except in a very few instances and those instances are often people whose background and education seldom leave them with more than a stereotypical conception of the lives of the large majority of people.
We have had two presidents who are products of the media the ACLU freed to lie to voters within the past forty years, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. The Reagan administration and the judges and justices he appointed have done enormous damage to egalitarian democracy, they have undermined and attacked it and their decisions have had no small role in producing the fascist Trump phenomenon and the likely final destruction of democracy. Donald Trump's campaign promises are, as the ACLU is too polite to say, a program of fascism, using racism, gaming the worst superstitions and resentments of a very large number of people, whipping them up into racist fury to get elected but his intention of being in office, that of Pence and the rest of his crew is to steal as much as they can and to prevent democracy from stopping their crime spree this time. The media which created him, gave him billions of dollars worth of free air time, which constantly covered him as it disappeared most of Hillary Clinton's campaign and went with every attempt to destroy her, including the clear violation of law by James Comey and the criminals at the FBI. The ACLU gave us the media that did that through their "free speech - free press" advocacy. That they and their colleagues did it on behalf of media organizations which had a huge financial interest in being free to lie only further demonstrates that their advertised and displayed ideals are empty and refuted by a half century of their actions.
I don't have any confidence in the ACLU, I won't be joining in with those donating to it - the document is issued as part of a fund-raising campaign. I am as not going to be sending them money as I am not going to be sending money to National Public Radio or any of the other institutions who acted to give us Donald Trump. That it may be an unintended consequence of the ACLU dogma of "free speech-free press" changes nothing about the fact that it was an obvious consequence of it and it has been an obvious consequence of it for as long as the media has been using its freedom to lie to defeat liberals and Democrats.
*A title I just invented if it doesn't exist.
"...then perhaps that eighteenth century Constitution should be abandoned to a twentieth century paper shredder"
Several times in the past two years, watching the Trump campaign and the media which created and nurtured it, I've remembered some words by one of my great heroes that sounded wonderful and stirring at the time but now sound not only hollow but dangerous. I am referring to the great Barbara Jordan's opening speech at the start of the Nixon impeachment hearings. I am, of course talking about the small snippet that is almost always made meaningless by being taken out of the context of the entire thing just as those few lines from The Reverend Martin Luther King's Dream speech is about the sum total of what he said which people know about.
My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.
Those words, given in the great voice of the great Barbara Jordan are stirring as few others said in the last fifty years. In the context of what followed, that faith was proven, over and over again, to have been misplaced and, unless given in context, dangerously romantic. Given her experience, having grown up in the American apartheid system and having, through massive struggle by other Black People and her own struggle, her view of the Constitution on July 25, 1974 must have seemed quite different from what we have since learned it is. In her defense, she could not have anticipated that Richard Nixon would entirely escape punishment for his massive crimes through the pardon granted by his hand-chosen replacement Vice President, Gerald Ford. She could not have foreseen the campaign by the corporate media and the ever less honorable oligarchs and Republicans to promote Nixonian Republican politics which would, six short years later, produce the Reagan administration which would become, objectively, by actual record, the all time most criminal administration up to that time. The movie and TV star, Ronald Reagan and his handlers managed the media to guarantee that he and many of the biggest criminals in his administration would not only be entirely unpunished for their crimes and that that would only be a temporary point or repose in the use of every weakness and lapse of the Constitution, especially as interpreted in the Supreme Court in the previous decade to further corrupt American democracy and to commit ever more massive crimes.
Before going on, I think it would be good for you to listen to her speech in its entirety, keeping in mind the subsequent history of the next forty-two years.
The speech is a masterpiece of logical argument in which that money quote so often snipped can't be honestly characterized unless you get to the end of the argument. I especially want to call your attention to the conclusion Barbara Jordan reached about what should be done if the Constitution wasn't up to the task of reigning in and stopping criminal behavior by presidents, which we have seen and are about to get the worst lesson in our history, it doesn't.
"If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that eighteenth century Constitution should be abandoned to a twentieth century paper shredder."
With the subsequent events after Barbara Jordan expressed her full belief and confidence in the Constitution, we now know the impeachment provision of the Constitution of the United States along with the First Amendment as interpreted by modern Courts have not only not protected us against the highest crimes and misdemeanors it has enabled them. In the context of free lying in the massively amplified power of the electronic media - effectively under the total control of massive corporations and billionaires, combined with the legal erudition hired to find every weakness in that 18th century document that can be exploited, with the cooperation of judges and justices who play with words to permit their criminality, the Constitution, which must have seemed almost miraculous to someone with Barbara Jordan's experience up to that night, has proven to be a danger to egalitarian democracy, honest government and a decent life for Americans. That very Constitution, due to its 18th century poetic non-specificity contains within it the potential to being twisted to become a tool used by powerful people without honor, without honesty, without a sense of moral obligation strong enough to inhibit their desire to steal and oppress far more than it was the document that Barbara Jordan placed her faith in on the night when she, by virtue, not of the 18th century founders but by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, sat considering articles of impeachment against a twice-elected president for his massive crimes.
The Constitution is no guarantee that the Supreme Court justices which give it its definition at any given time will be honorable or honest or even have any regard for equality under the law. It is no guarantee that corrupt presidents won't get elected by a duped and corrupted people, corrupted by the ubiquitously powerful corporate mass, electronic media that didn't exist in the 18th century. No legal document can guarantee that it won't be corruptly used. The Constitution is no guarantee that Senators, such as those of the Democratic party in the past fifty-years, cowed by the power of that media to attack them and get them removed from office will do their duty, sacrificing their careers and reject nominees who have a record of attacking equal justice, of attacking the very things that, for a short time, made Barbara Jordan, finally able to be elected to Congress from a recently Jim Crow state. Barbara Jordan's 1974 Constitution was made quite a different thing by those laws in the short bubble of time between their adoption and today when the Rehnquist and Roberts courts have gutted them.
With the election of the massively racist, fascist Donald Trump - elected, not by the popular vote but by the Electoral College, another feature of that 18th century document - anyone expressing complete and total faith in it is a fool or a tool of the oligarchs who, through their hired Ivy League class lawyers, gamed it and bent it to their favor. That Constitution whose reverence is taught in rote fashion without any real understanding, certainly not with the deep and nuanced understanding that the full argument Barbara Jordan presented that night, will always carry the same potential risks that have been exploited by men with no honor and complete and total greed for power and plunder.
We are about to reap the whirlwind that was sown by court rulings permitting the media to lie and to become the tool to corrupt The People, their votes and every government institution, including the very FBI which is supposed to enforce the law. The corruption is complete and the elite, Ivy League class lawyers, even those who we elected as Democrats to protect us from them have bought into those same legal theories that produced what we are living through. The corruption is complete and it is done through the many and fatal weaknesses contained in that Constitution, the proof of that unfolds with the Trump presidency. Reality is real and it is the ultimate test of any theory. Only a total fool or a corrupt one will deny that.
My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.
Those words, given in the great voice of the great Barbara Jordan are stirring as few others said in the last fifty years. In the context of what followed, that faith was proven, over and over again, to have been misplaced and, unless given in context, dangerously romantic. Given her experience, having grown up in the American apartheid system and having, through massive struggle by other Black People and her own struggle, her view of the Constitution on July 25, 1974 must have seemed quite different from what we have since learned it is. In her defense, she could not have anticipated that Richard Nixon would entirely escape punishment for his massive crimes through the pardon granted by his hand-chosen replacement Vice President, Gerald Ford. She could not have foreseen the campaign by the corporate media and the ever less honorable oligarchs and Republicans to promote Nixonian Republican politics which would, six short years later, produce the Reagan administration which would become, objectively, by actual record, the all time most criminal administration up to that time. The movie and TV star, Ronald Reagan and his handlers managed the media to guarantee that he and many of the biggest criminals in his administration would not only be entirely unpunished for their crimes and that that would only be a temporary point or repose in the use of every weakness and lapse of the Constitution, especially as interpreted in the Supreme Court in the previous decade to further corrupt American democracy and to commit ever more massive crimes.
Before going on, I think it would be good for you to listen to her speech in its entirety, keeping in mind the subsequent history of the next forty-two years.
The speech is a masterpiece of logical argument in which that money quote so often snipped can't be honestly characterized unless you get to the end of the argument. I especially want to call your attention to the conclusion Barbara Jordan reached about what should be done if the Constitution wasn't up to the task of reigning in and stopping criminal behavior by presidents, which we have seen and are about to get the worst lesson in our history, it doesn't.
"If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that eighteenth century Constitution should be abandoned to a twentieth century paper shredder."
With the subsequent events after Barbara Jordan expressed her full belief and confidence in the Constitution, we now know the impeachment provision of the Constitution of the United States along with the First Amendment as interpreted by modern Courts have not only not protected us against the highest crimes and misdemeanors it has enabled them. In the context of free lying in the massively amplified power of the electronic media - effectively under the total control of massive corporations and billionaires, combined with the legal erudition hired to find every weakness in that 18th century document that can be exploited, with the cooperation of judges and justices who play with words to permit their criminality, the Constitution, which must have seemed almost miraculous to someone with Barbara Jordan's experience up to that night, has proven to be a danger to egalitarian democracy, honest government and a decent life for Americans. That very Constitution, due to its 18th century poetic non-specificity contains within it the potential to being twisted to become a tool used by powerful people without honor, without honesty, without a sense of moral obligation strong enough to inhibit their desire to steal and oppress far more than it was the document that Barbara Jordan placed her faith in on the night when she, by virtue, not of the 18th century founders but by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, sat considering articles of impeachment against a twice-elected president for his massive crimes.
The Constitution is no guarantee that the Supreme Court justices which give it its definition at any given time will be honorable or honest or even have any regard for equality under the law. It is no guarantee that corrupt presidents won't get elected by a duped and corrupted people, corrupted by the ubiquitously powerful corporate mass, electronic media that didn't exist in the 18th century. No legal document can guarantee that it won't be corruptly used. The Constitution is no guarantee that Senators, such as those of the Democratic party in the past fifty-years, cowed by the power of that media to attack them and get them removed from office will do their duty, sacrificing their careers and reject nominees who have a record of attacking equal justice, of attacking the very things that, for a short time, made Barbara Jordan, finally able to be elected to Congress from a recently Jim Crow state. Barbara Jordan's 1974 Constitution was made quite a different thing by those laws in the short bubble of time between their adoption and today when the Rehnquist and Roberts courts have gutted them.
With the election of the massively racist, fascist Donald Trump - elected, not by the popular vote but by the Electoral College, another feature of that 18th century document - anyone expressing complete and total faith in it is a fool or a tool of the oligarchs who, through their hired Ivy League class lawyers, gamed it and bent it to their favor. That Constitution whose reverence is taught in rote fashion without any real understanding, certainly not with the deep and nuanced understanding that the full argument Barbara Jordan presented that night, will always carry the same potential risks that have been exploited by men with no honor and complete and total greed for power and plunder.
We are about to reap the whirlwind that was sown by court rulings permitting the media to lie and to become the tool to corrupt The People, their votes and every government institution, including the very FBI which is supposed to enforce the law. The corruption is complete and the elite, Ivy League class lawyers, even those who we elected as Democrats to protect us from them have bought into those same legal theories that produced what we are living through. The corruption is complete and it is done through the many and fatal weaknesses contained in that Constitution, the proof of that unfolds with the Trump presidency. Reality is real and it is the ultimate test of any theory. Only a total fool or a corrupt one will deny that.
Saturday, November 12, 2016
The Idiotic Satisfaction of Believing Your Opponents Are Stupid Only Hurts You
I made a comment somewhere that an early chance to damage Republicans is in Donald Trump's promise to protect Social Security and Medicare running into Paul Ryan's clear fetish for destroying them, in line with his real God, Ayn Rand's psychotic commandments. I pointed out that a large number of old people were suckered into voting for Trump and this is a chance to point out to them that their choice has real effects in their lives if Trump breaks that campaign promise, which he seems to be ready to.
Well, after making an obvious point I got flack asserting that Trump voters were so stupid they wouldn't know that this wasn't something to do with Obamacare - how they are supposed to mistake Social Security for Obamacare, I can't imagine someone imagining. I suppose the message of the lefties making that argument was it wasn't worth trying to use that as a political weapon, one which could split the Republicans in congress who, I am sure, would not want to face the backlash of angry seniors and others facing the prospect of losing their two major lifelines and millions of their children who know those are the only thing between their parents being somewhat independent and being dependent on them.
I don't know if such people don't know old people but the ones I know - being in that age cohort, myself, know which side their Social Security is buttered on and if there is a way to rouse them to oppose politicians it's by endangering those programs. It might be satisfying in a smug and useless way to believe that older Trump voters are too stupid to know that but it's politically useless and almost certainly wrong.
Democrats have few options for fighting Paul Ryan and the other Republicanfascists and will need to use whatever they can, passing up this chance would be massively stupid.
I will do something! The poor are mistreated and helpless people moan. Psalm 12
12 Please help me, Lord!
All who were faithful
and all who were loyal
have disappeared.
2 Everyone tells lies,
and no one is sincere.
3 Won’t you chop off
all flattering tongues
that brag so loudly?
4 They say to themselves,
“We are great speakers.
No one else has a chance.”
5 But you, Lord, tell them,
“I will do something!
The poor are mistreated
and helpless people moan.
I’ll rescue all who suffer.”
6 Our Lord, you are true
to your promises,
and your word is like silver
heated seven times
in a fiery furnace.
7 You will protect us
and always keep us safe
from those people.
8 But all who are wicked
will keep on strutting,
while everyone praises
their shameless deeds.
Contemporary English Version
I wish I could find or make a comparison between the Jewish scriptures and the pagan and other scriptures for how many times they call for justice to the destitute, the poor, the outsiders, the despised as opposed to being praise or support for the economic, political and religious elites. My guess is that there is a hands-down win for the Jewish scriptures being on the side of the disadvantaged by that measure.
All who were faithful
and all who were loyal
have disappeared.
2 Everyone tells lies,
and no one is sincere.
3 Won’t you chop off
all flattering tongues
that brag so loudly?
4 They say to themselves,
“We are great speakers.
No one else has a chance.”
5 But you, Lord, tell them,
“I will do something!
The poor are mistreated
and helpless people moan.
I’ll rescue all who suffer.”
6 Our Lord, you are true
to your promises,
and your word is like silver
heated seven times
in a fiery furnace.
7 You will protect us
and always keep us safe
from those people.
8 But all who are wicked
will keep on strutting,
while everyone praises
their shameless deeds.
Contemporary English Version
I wish I could find or make a comparison between the Jewish scriptures and the pagan and other scriptures for how many times they call for justice to the destitute, the poor, the outsiders, the despised as opposed to being praise or support for the economic, political and religious elites. My guess is that there is a hands-down win for the Jewish scriptures being on the side of the disadvantaged by that measure.
Under JamesComey The FBI Is Promoting Sedition And Putting Us At The Greatest Risk We've Been In
It should seem like I'm beating a dead horse in bringing up James Comey and his criminalized FBI at this point but, unfortunately, that horse is very much alive and will certainly thrive in its crime spree as it joins in further thwarting democracy in the United States.
Some of the analysis of the election speculates that his letter issued eleven days before the election was enough to swing enough narrow majorities in enough states to give the loser of the popular vote the election. I don't see any reason to assume that is a certainty and, most of all that that wasn't exactly the effect that James Comey and his criminalized FBI agents intended their activities to have.
This is, of course, exactly the kind of behavior you expect to see in a fascist police state, the police power of the federal and local governments being used to benefit the fascist party. And with this election, the real nature of the Republican Party is clear.
James Comey obviously loves to present himself as a true-blue boy scout when he is a sleazy political thug. The media, of course, presents him as he would like, they are part of the con game.
The thing is, this FBI has and will almost certainly support the biggest security risk we've ever had in the highest office of the country, their boss, the man who will appoint people who will run the very agencies of government which would guard against such sedition as his election risks. I don't think we've ever been this vulnerable in our entire history, not even during and after the Civil War. And the FBI under James Comey is entirely involved in creating and endorsing it.
I choose the word "sedition" carefully because what they are doing is the ultimate sedition of undermining democracy. That needs to be a crime and considering how bad it is, it should carry a life sentence.
Some of the analysis of the election speculates that his letter issued eleven days before the election was enough to swing enough narrow majorities in enough states to give the loser of the popular vote the election. I don't see any reason to assume that is a certainty and, most of all that that wasn't exactly the effect that James Comey and his criminalized FBI agents intended their activities to have.
This is, of course, exactly the kind of behavior you expect to see in a fascist police state, the police power of the federal and local governments being used to benefit the fascist party. And with this election, the real nature of the Republican Party is clear.
James Comey obviously loves to present himself as a true-blue boy scout when he is a sleazy political thug. The media, of course, presents him as he would like, they are part of the con game.
The thing is, this FBI has and will almost certainly support the biggest security risk we've ever had in the highest office of the country, their boss, the man who will appoint people who will run the very agencies of government which would guard against such sedition as his election risks. I don't think we've ever been this vulnerable in our entire history, not even during and after the Civil War. And the FBI under James Comey is entirely involved in creating and endorsing it.
I choose the word "sedition" carefully because what they are doing is the ultimate sedition of undermining democracy. That needs to be a crime and considering how bad it is, it should carry a life sentence.
Friday, November 11, 2016
Hate Mail - Imagine a Cynical Old Sophisticate Poseur Like You Turning Out To Have A Head Full of Corn Syrupy Nougat
There is real sentimentality but that's an honest experience that individual people can have about things they've actually experienced in real life and people they've really known, especially their life with their family and friends. Real sentimentality is a private emotion it's not for a mass audience. That's an important part of the distinction. That's not what I'm criticizing, I completely respect that.
There is also an artificial kind of sentimentality that Hollywood movies, television, musical comedy specialize in and that is a cheap, commercialized, cloying substitute for the real thing, peddled to a mass audience. The techniques of that are the bread and butter of many movie composers and virtually all directors. The more accomplished ones can juxtapose that with the equally artificial means of rousing cheap patriotism or cheap faith or cheap sex or any of the other cheap versions of emotions Hollywood has always been in the BUSINESS of creating for a profit.
There is a real distinction to be made between the kind of cheap sentimentalization and watered down emotion of most movie making and the expressive heightening of emotional content and meaning that real art engages in. The one is why I hated the movie that turned the story into a horse-opera and love the real opera that presented the tragedy of Annie Proulx's story with far greater fidelity to her art and also the art of the real composer.
You can consume cheapened, watered down crap if you want to but I can note the difference between that and real art if I want to. It's a free country, for a few more weeks, at least. I'd say, "grow up" but I think it's probably far too late for that.
Charles Wuorinen - Psalm 39 - For I am a stranger with thee : and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.
Thomas Meglioranza, baritone
William Anderson, guitar
I SAID, I will take heed to my ways : that I offend not in my tongue.
2 I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle : while the ungodly is in my sight.
3 I held my tongue, and spake nothing : I kept silence, yea, even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.
4 My heart was hot within me, and while I was thus musing the fire kindled : and at the last I spake with my tongue;
5 Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days : that I may be certified how long I have to live.
6 Behold, thou hast made my days as it were a span long : and mine age is even as nothing in respect of thee; and verily every man living is altogether vanity.
7 For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain : he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them.
8 And now, Lord, what is my hope : truly my hope is even in thee.
9 Deliver me from all mine offences : and make me not a rebuke unto the foolish.
10 I became dumb, and opened not my mouth : for it was thy doing.
11 Take thy plague away from me : I am even consumed by the means of thy heavy hand.
12 When thou with rebukes dost chasten man for sin, thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment : every man therefore is but vanity.
13 Hear my prayer, O Lord, and with thine ears consider my calling : hold not thy peace at my tears.
14 For I am a stranger with thee : and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.
15 O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength : before I go hence, and be no more seen.
Book of Common Prayer
Hate Mail - They Just Hate It When You Diss The Venerable New York Times
There should be a name for the New York Times endorsing Hillary Clinton after decades of publishing Maureen Dowd's mean-girl Hillary hatred, the numerous false articles claiming she was about to be indicted, of spearheading the ridiculous 1990s Clinton "scandals" one after another.
What the pimps for the Republican discrediting of Hillary Clinton, the genteel, respectable spreaders of false rumors and innuendo against her, creating a vague feeling of distrust and disdain that is the sum total of so many peoples' knowledge of her and her career, ... what they did in finally endorsing her against, literally, the worst candidate in the history of modern presidential politics is called
What the pimps for the Republican discrediting of Hillary Clinton, the genteel, respectable spreaders of false rumors and innuendo against her, creating a vague feeling of distrust and disdain that is the sum total of so many peoples' knowledge of her and her career, ... what they did in finally endorsing her against, literally, the worst candidate in the history of modern presidential politics is called
IMPLAUSIBLE
DENIABILITY.
Walter Brueggemann Is About As Good As Anyone On Why And How Things Are Going To Hell All Around Us
You can't say people weren't giving us fair warning about how and why we were on the edge of the disaster we have certainly fallen into.
From 2010, Walter Brueggemann's lectures at Baylor University. Truett Theological Seminary on Prophetic Preaching. While all of them are worth listening to many times, Session Two is especially relevant and powerful,
From 2010, Walter Brueggemann's lectures at Baylor University. Truett Theological Seminary on Prophetic Preaching. While all of them are worth listening to many times, Session Two is especially relevant and powerful,
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