Mikey Likes It!: MARVEL AGENTS OF SHIELD

Friday, August 14, 2020

MARVEL AGENTS OF SHIELD

So last night, MARVEL AGENTS OF SHIELD came to an end with a two hour finale on ABC. I watched it today on YOUTUBE TV.

Let me stop there for a second.

Please read Ava and C.I.'s "TV: Who gets to be the focus?" which talks about the streaming services and the lack of diversity.

Especially read "The Troubles With HULU" -- a roundtable Ava and C.I. did with Betty, Stan and Dallas about HULU and it's screw-the-subscribers attitude. Then drop back to Ava and C.I.'s "TV: HULU has a serious problem on its hands" and Dallas' "HULU has "no definite answer" -- or any real customer service" from the week before.

As a result of these issues, we cancelled our HULU subscription. We've switched to YOUTUBE TV instead. It's about ten dollars more a month but it's worth it and our daughter is thrilled with the change because it offers her more children's programming that she did not even know was out there.

I'm not going to pay someone eighty or so bucks a month to disrespect me. (Elaine and I have add-ons, I think the live HULU TV only -- no add-ons -- is like $59 or $69 a month.) Refusing to listen to the paying customers and ignoring them? If that's the HULU model, good luck with that but I'm not going to pay for it.

And I loved HULU -- LOVED HULU. I can remember how much my life changed online because of HULU. I never would have discovered FRINGE (a show I loved) without HULU because I was a teenager and my generation really wasn't going to rush to the TV at this certain hour that the network wanted to play a show. I watched MODERN FAMILY every Thursday morning at breakfast on HULU. I loved HULU. But they didn't want to listen to the customers, so bye.

Back to MARVEL.

I don't want to do spoilers -- stop reading here if you plan to watch the last episodes and haven't yet.

How about I just do impressions? That way anyone who's waiting until the weekend to stream won't be upset? It's two hours dropped in the middle of the week and I do understand that some people might need to or want to carve out time over the weekend for it.

So impressions.

First off, WTF Fitz?

Was he supposed to be an avitraix? However, you spell it. A female pilot from the early 20th century? Or maybe a 'girl motorcyle' rider from the 60s?

What was that ridiculous outfit he had on?

And had he lost too much weight or was he just badly groomed because his face -- specifically eye brow area -- looked ridiculous.

It really pulled me out of the story and I didn't give two s**ts about Fitz by the second episode. He looked so damn weird and freakish.

Jemma, except for the last group scene, didn't really get much to do. I think that they made her victim until the end. Go back and check my comments in earlier seasons, I really hated how it was always Jemma in jeopardy, damsel in distress. It's a shame they couldn't have done better for her in the ending.

Coulson? Always gets on my nerves, always got on my nerves, but the bastard had me pulling for him in the last 30 minutes of the two hour episode. Well done Clark Gregg. Praise for you and you know I'm not someone that easily praises you.

Mack. They let him be the spirit of the team in the last two hours -- why couldn't they have done that all along? Mack was a great character played by a brilliant actor (Henry Simmons). He should have had much more screen time in every episode and shouldn't have been played as a sidekick as they too often did with him. I hope he does another sci-fy show and I hope he's a lead on this one, a real lead, because he's amazing.

Daisy. They did the bare minimum with her. Her ending felt real -- and easy for the writers. I was thinking she deserved a lot more.

May was a surprise throughout the two hours and Ming-Na better do another action show. She was great on ER, but she was really even better on this show.

Yo-Yo. Was there a budget problem? There were at least two times in the two hours that we needed to see Yo-Yo using her powers and we didn't get to. Did they not have the budget? I also didn't understand her ending in terms of where she is -- physically but also in terms of her relationship with Mack -- and where he is.

I'm confused by Deke's ending because of timeline issues. Daniel is also one that confuses due to the timeline. But with Daniel, he's at least in the future. With Deke, he's in the past and what does that mean in terms of the future -- does he get born? I don't get it.

I like Deke. I'm glad they gave a line to Mack near the end about Deke. It made up for his storyline ending. (Deke's storyline ending.)

The show ended better than most of this season was and the two hour finale was better than anything on the previous season.

Still I would've loved to have seen Bobbi and Lance and Ward.

If you haven't watched it but you watched the show at some point during its run, make a point to stream it, I think you'll like it.

And next week, I'll do a recap after I'm sure everyone who wants to watch it has had the time to do so.

Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

Thursday, August 13, 2020. Senator Kamala Harris' record gets some examination from the media now that she's Joe Biden's running mate and Turkey issues a statement saying Iraq had this week's attack coming to them and refusing to acknowledge -- let alone apologize for -- murdering 3 members of the Iraqi military.

Senator Kamala Harris continues to dominate the news, having been selected as Joe Biden's running mate -- Biden being the presumed presidential nominee for the Democratic Party. Dan Conway (WSWS) notes:

Joseph Biden’s selection of the first-term Senator and former state Attorney General from California Kamala Harris as his running mate comes as no surprise and solidifies the Democratic Party establishment’s right-wing ticket for the 2020 presidential elections.

As was the case in her bid for the Democratic Party nomination earlier this year, Harris’s mixed ethnicity—her father is Jamaican and her mother is Tamil—was a significant factor in the calculations behind her selection by Biden. In the remaining three months before election day on November 3, the Democrats are clearly doubling down on race and gender identity politics.

Indicating the consensus behind the Biden-Harris ticket, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders quickly endorsed her selection.

Also at WSWS, Patric Martin points out:

Harris has frequently traded on her status as the first black woman to be district attorney, the first black woman to be state attorney general, the second black woman to hold a US Senate seat, etc., as a political screen to cover the right-wing policies she advocates and the social class that she defends: the corporate elite of multi-millionaires and billionaires.

She has now joined this class herself, thanks in part to her marriage to millionaire entertainment industry lawyer Douglas Emhoff. The couple had an adjusted gross income of $1.88 million in 2018, putting them in the top 0.1 percent of American society.

Objectively speaking, there is little to distinguish Harris, with only four years in the US Senate, from other potential alternatives for the vice presidency. She is not notably more qualified than dozens of other senators, governors or representatives. But in the eyes of the advocates of identity politics, in and out of the corporate media, Harris’s mediocrity and right-wing politics count for nothing compared to her skin color and gender.

In her unbounded opportunism and ruthless pursuit of her own career and economic interests, Harris personifies both the social psychology and class basis of identity politics. It is the politics of privileged layers of the upper-middle class, including but not limited to minorities, that use race, gender and sexual orientation to conceal the fundamental class divisions in capitalist society, channel social opposition behind the Democratic Party, and carve out a greater share of the wealth of the top one percent for themselves. It is organically hostile to the interests of the working class and socialism.

Identity politics was the key to Biden’s own campaign for the presidential nomination, which he based on the mobilization of support from the Congressional Black Caucus and African-American businessmen and Democratic Party operatives, trading on his role as Obama’s vice president. Prior to the Obama administration, he had no significant connection to civil rights struggles and won no significant black support in either of his own presidential campaigns, in 1988 and 2008.

Branco Marcetic (JACOBIN) offers:

Harris’s possible ascension to the White House solidifies what Biden’s nomination already represented: the defeat, at least temporarily, of the left of the Democratic Party by the party’s corporate faction, and the determination of its elites to barrel ahead with the shallow, corporate politics of the Obama era, a politics mainly concerned with lowering the expectations of ordinary people.

Indeed, one of the reasons it was hard to imagine anyone else but Harris ending up on the ticket is that she so snugly embodies the modern Democratic Party — which also means almost everything you’re about to hear about her has little to do with who she actually is.

Far from the “progressive prosecutor” Harris has been masquerading as since angling for a 2020 run, her record bears no resemblance to figures who might actually fit that description, like Larry Krasner or Keith Ellison. Even in a party that embraced Biden- and Clinton-style tough-on-crime policies, Harris stands out for her cruelty: she fought to keep innocent people in jail, blocked payouts to the wrongfully convicted, argued for keeping non-violent offenders in jail as a source of cheap labor, withheld evidence that could have freed numerous prisoners, tried to dismiss a suit to end solitary confinement in California, and denied gender reassignment surgery to trans inmates. A recent report detailed how Harris risked being held in contempt of court for resisting a court order to release non-violent prisoners, which one law professor compared to Southern resistance to 1950s desegregation orders.

Harris loves to laugh. Watching Harris cackling like a cartoon villain about prosecuting parents of truant schoolkids is one of the more bone-chilling things you’re likely to see in politics. Other things Harris found funny? The idea of building schools rather than prisons, and the concept of legalizing pot. Five years later she laughed again, this time while running for president and fondly recalling her pot-smoking days, as she mugged for a younger audience. Extra hilarious was the fact that her office had convicted nearly 2,000 people for marijuana offenses while she was San Francisco’s district attorney.

Harris’s callousness toward the poor and powerless has been matched only by her sympathy for the rich and powerful. Most notoriously, Harris overruled her own office’s recommendation to prosecute the predatory bank of current Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, who later donated to her Senate campaign, then allegedly tried to cover up her inaction.

Responding to the announcement, Ajamu Baraka Tweeted:

Politics in the U.S. is so right-wing that a ticket of two neoliberal pro-imperialist servants is actually being pushed as progressive. Meanwhile, workers are living with uncertainty, fear & desperation while bourgeois politics play politics with providing social protections.

While Liza Featherstone offered:

no, no people, we really don't HAVE to spend any of our too-brief time on earth having feelings about Biden's running mate

At COUNTERPUNCH aka BEHIND THE TIMES, they publish an article this morning about . . . who Joe Biden might pick. Yes, Joe made that announcement two days ago. Shhhh, don't wake them, it's still early. If COUNTERPUNCH is sleeping in, IN THESE TIMES is doing lines of the hard stuff. How else to explain Natalie Schure's laughable article entitled "Now Comes The Difficult Work of Pushing the Biden-Harris Ticket Left"?

I'll snort where she's snorting.

But either she's all out or Natalie doesn't share. Which would explain this sober analysis from Sarah Lazare:

Senator Kamala Harris (D‑Calif.) has not made war and militarism a centerpiece of her presidential campaign. She’s given no major “foreign policy” speech, and she did not respond to a series of simple yes-or-no questions about global politics from FiveThirtyEight (Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg were the only other major Democratic candidates to decline). On her campaign website, Harris’ only statement on “foreign policy” is just over 500 words — and it’s more a screed against Trump (he’s mentioned seven times) than a cogent vision. In the realm of international politics, she’s probably best known for saying in January that “we cannot conduct our foreign policy through tweets,” a statement that conveys nothing, other than opposition to Trump.

But this campaign branding doesn’t mean Harris has no “foreign policy.” Just looking at war (without getting into other critical foreign policy issues, from climate to trade agreements to covert operations), Harris has discernable stances. A close look at her record shows that, to the extent she has taken positions, they are defined by her close relationship with the right-wing lobby outfit American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), bellicose rhetoric toward North Korea and Russia, and reluctance to cosponsor key pieces of legislation aimed at preventing war with Venezuela and North Korea. On issues of militarism, she’s squarely in line with — and sometimes on the right of — a hawkish Democratic establishment.

It’s now less palatable for Democrats to be publicly cozy with AIPAC, due to growing solidarity with Palestinians among the base of the Democratic Party, and discomfort with AIPAC ally Benjamin Netanyahu’s open alignment with Trump. Yet, Harris has forged close ties with the organization, which advocated for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and opposed the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. In March 2017, she told the AIPAC Policy Conference, “Let me be clear about what I believe. I stand with Israel because of our shared values, which are so fundamental to the founding of both our nations.” At the 2018 conference, Harris gave an off-the-record speech, in which she boasted, “As a child, I never sold Girl Scout cookies, I went around with a JNFUSA box collecting funds to plant trees in Israel.” The JNFUSA, or Jewish National Fund, has directly participated in land theft and ethnic cleansing campaigns targeting Palestinians and Bedouins.

In 2019, Harris announced that she’d skip AIPAC’s conference (along with Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and four other candidates) but then, a few weeks later, hosted AIPAC leaders in her office to talk about “the right of Israel to defend itself,” as she put it.

These positions are not just theoretical. As Harris bragged in her 2017 AIPAC talk, “[The] first resolution I co-sponsored as a United States senator was to combat anti-Israel bias at the United Nations and reaffirm that the United States seeks a just, secure and sustainable two-state solution.” She was referring to S.Res.6, introduced by Marco Rubio (R‑Fla.) in January 2017, which objected to a UN Security Council Resolution adopted in 2016 that declared Israeli settlements a violation of international law. By contrast, Sanders and Warren did not cosponsor the resolution. It never came to a vote.

Also at IN THESE TIMES, Marie Gottschalk observes:

When Harris was elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003, the problem of mass incarceration was invisible to the wider public. To her credit, she challenged the idea that prosecutors should “incarcerat[e] people for as long as possible, no matter the crime, no matter how much it costs to incarcerate them, and despite the documented fact that our current prison system rarely prevents offenders from committing new crimes when they come back out.” Early in her tenure, she took a courageous stand not to seek the death penalty in the case of a man accused of killing a police officer, and her office was also less likely than many other jurisdictions to deploy California’s draconian three-strikes law.

These are early bright spots in what is otherwise a troubling record. A judge excoriated her DA’s office for its “levels of indifference” to defendants’ constitutional rights in its failure to disclose information about a scandal in the crime lab’s drug analysis unit that led to the dismissal of 700 cases. A technician had been skimming cocaine and tampering with evidence.

As attorney general, Harris successfully championed legislation to criminalize truancy and punish parents with fines and incarceration. She also sided with Gov. Jerry Brown to stymie implementation of Brown v. Plata, the most consequential prisoners’ rights decision in more than a generation, by repeatedly returning the case to the lower courts. The U.S. Supreme Court had declared that California’s grossly overcrowded prisons were unconstitutional and ordered the state to reduce its inmate population. Andrew Cohen of the Brennan Center for Justice characterized these attempts to “weasel out” of the Supreme Court’s ruling as “nothing short of contemptuous.”

In The Truths We Hold, Harris lauds implicit bias training as her weapon of choice to reduce police shootings of people of color. There are much more effective and proven measures, like stricter use-of-force regulations for police departments and mandated independent investigations of shootings — but they are stridently opposed by many police officers and their unions, and Harris has not forcefully advocated them.

Harris has taken similarly troubling positions on many other key criminal justice issues, including the use of solitary confinement, civil asset forfeitures, the criminalization of sex work, and punitive residency and other measures leveled on people convicted of sex offenses. She resisted key efforts to moderate California’s three-strikes law. Harris periodically has touted herself as a fierce opponent of the capital punishment, but as attorney general, she appealed a federal judge’s ruling that the state’s enforcement of the death penalty was unconstitutional. She continued to come down on the side of the death penalty as the case made its way through the federal courts and took no public position on a 2012 ballot measure to repeal capital punishment in California.

Kate Sullivan (CNN) reports:

Former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin offered advice and congratulations to Sen. Kamala Harris on Tuesday shortly after the California Democrat was announced as former Vice President Joe Biden's running mate.

Palin was on the ticket with Sen. John McCain of Arizona in 2008, the second woman to be on the ticket of a major political party. When Harris accepts the nomination next week at the Democratic National Convention, she will become the third woman and first Black and South Asian American woman nominated for the role.

"Congrats to the democrat VP pick," Palin wrote in an Instagram post. "Climb upon Geraldine Ferraro's and my shoulders, and from the most amazing view in your life consider lessons we learned." In 1984, Democratic Rep. Geraldine Ferraro of New York was the first woman to be on a major party ticket.

Jimmy Dore offers his thoughts on the selection of Harris in the video below.

We'll return to the topic of Kamala Harris in the future, hopefully, tomorrow and, hopefully, we'll include "Oh, no, not Joe Biden."

But in Iraq . . .

Yemen Details Tweets:

#Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, and Jordan express their solidarity with #Iraq and call on #Turkey to stop its violations against the country.

And THE ECONOMIAN Tweets:

JUST IN: France says Turkey's drone attack in Iraq breached the country's sovereignty

If you thought the government of Turkey might share any remorse or regret over killing three members of the Iraqi military, you were wrong. ALJAZEERA notes:

In a statement early on Thursday, Turkey's foreign ministry said the PKK presence also threatened Iraq and that it was Baghdad's responsibility to take action against the rebels, and Ankara would defend its borders if the PKK's presence is allowed.

"Our country is ready to cooperate with Iraq on this issue. However, in the event PKK presence in Iraq is overlooked, our country is determined to take the measures it deems necessary for its border security no matter where it may be," the ministry said. "We call on Iraq to take the necessary steps for this."

HURRIYET covers the statement here.

The government of Turkey violated Iraq's sovereignty and international law, their actions killed three members of the Iraqi military. They issue a statement and it takes no responsibility for the deaths nor does it note regret. It just says, in typical thug fashion, 'you made us do this.' Selcan Hacaoglu (BLOOMBERG NEWS) notes:

Turkey rebuffed Iraqi criticism of its cross-border attacks on autonomy-seeking Kurdish militants, which Baghdad says killed two of its military officers this week. The Turkish Foreign Ministry statement didn’t refer to Iraq’s claim of a Turkish drone attack near their shared border, but told Baghdad it was responsible for taking measures against Kurdish separatists based in northern Iraq.

Read more at: https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/turkey-rebuffs-iraq-criticism-over-cross-border-attacks-on-kurds
Copyright © BloombergQuint

Serge Tweeted:

Turkey is now not only occupying parts of Iraq but also killing Iraqi soldiers. There must be severe consequences for this, otherwise the killing of Iraqi soldiers by Turkey will be normalized as well.

In other news of occupying Iraq, Eric Schmitt (NEW YORK TIMES) notes:

The top American military commander in the Middle East said on Wednesday that U.S. troop levels in Iraq and Syria would most likely shrink in the coming months, but that he had not yet received orders to begin withdrawing forces.

Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, said the 5,200 troops in Iraq to help fight remnants of the Islamic State and train Iraqi forces “will be adjusted” after consultations with the government in Baghdad.

General McKenzie said he expected American and other NATO forces to maintain “a long-term presence” in Iraq — both to help fight Islamic extremists and to check Iranian influence in the country. He declined to say how large that presence might be, but other American officials said discussions with Iraqi officials that resume this month could result in a reduction to around 3,500 U.S. troops.

Despite President Trump’s demand last fall for a complete withdrawal of all 1,000 American forces from Syria, the president still has some 500 troops, mostly in the country’s northeast, assisting local Syrian Kurdish allies in combating pockets of ISIS fighters.

The following sites updated:

Mikey Likes It!

Friday, August 14, 2020

MARVEL AGENTS OF SHIELD

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