SUPERMAN AND LOIS

First off, YOUTUBE TV users go to THE CW for this week's SUPERMAN AND LOIS.  My daughter and I sat down to watch the latest episode this evening -- it aired last night -- and couldn't.  It's not there.

Rebecca watches DYNASTY and she's had a problem with those episodes showing up in her queue on YOUTUBE TV.  I remembered that she said she streamed via THE CW when that happened so that's what we did (because I knew last night was supposed to be a new episode).

It was a very good episode.

Let's start with Kyle because he's probably my third favorite character on the show.

1) and 2) (tie) Clark and Lois

3) Kyle

4) John

5) Lana

6) Jonathan

7) Natalie

8)Tal-Rho

9) Jordan

10) Chrissy

11) Sam

12) Tag

 

Tag may be back on, by the way.  He was mentioned this episode.  I like everyone but Lucy Lane.  It has nothing to do with her being Channing Tatum's ex.  It has nothing to do with  Jenna's acting.  She nails the part.  It's just I hate Lucy and I really hated her this episode.

 

Back to Kyle.  So Sarah shows her  mom Lana the video Kyle took on his phone while she was performing (last episode).  At first, Lana's thrilled.  She wishes she could have been there but understands when Sarah says her dad put the whole thing together as a surprise.  Lana loves Sarah's singing and the song -- that Sara wrote.  Then she notices it's the bar where the woman Kyle slept with works.  Sarah assures her mom that the woman wasn't there but Lana doesn't care at this point.

Sarah went to talk to her father and found him in a grocery store parking lot -- he and the fire fighters he works with were stocking up on supplies.  She explained what happened and said she was sorry but he told her this wasn't her fault and he'd go speak to Lana and make everything right.

Meanwhile, Jordan's speaking to Lana.  He wants her to know he can protect Sarah.  She stands by her decision that the Kents cannot have anything to do with her family.  She says she's protecting Sarah and brings up how Tag kidnapped her that time to get back at Jordan.

Jordan's upset but agrees.

Then Kyle shows up and notes Lana's got her worried leg twitch.  She says she's hurting everyone and feeels like she's making the wrong choices.  He tells her she is a good person and a great mother.  He gts her to agree to go to dinner with him and Sarah and their other daughter.  After she agrees, he notices that she still has a photo of them in her office.  Remember, Kyle's been under the impression that Lana was dating.  (She wasn't.  She was dealing with the news that Clark is Superman.)

So they had their dinner and it went smoothly.

Jordan got taken to the Fortress of Solitude by Clark who wanted to sharpen his son's flying skills.  Jordan was doubtful but pulled it off.  He was thrilled.

They went home thrilled to encounter Jonathan who learned they'd been off to the Fortress without telling him and told them, glumly, not to worry, he'd done all the farm chores.  

John found out about Natalie's power suit and was upset and demanded that it be destroyed.  She told him she builds things, she doesn't destroy.  So he tried to destroy it only to learn that he couldn't.  This made him face up to the reality that Natalie was growing up and more accomplished than his fear of her safety was allowing him to see.

Chrissy and Lois are talking.  The lie for Clark being gone while he was at Bizarro World is that he was working on a report.  Chrissy knows about the cover because she's been asked about it.  So Clark is working for them?  Lois lies that he's working on a report and he thinks Chrissy will love it.

They're interrupted by Sam who needs Lois.  He explains Lucy Lane (his daughter, Lois's sister) has been found.  He wants Lois to go with him.  Chrissy insists upon going as well.  Sam makes her wait in the car.  Lois tells her that if they're not back in an hour to notify the Defense Dept.

They talk to Lucy.  Sam even handcuffs himself to Lucy.  Lucy is a spoiled brat who never grew up and we have to listen to all of her complaints about Lois.  Lucy is worthless.  Despite them telling her that Ally is killing people and that she's dangerous.  Lucy won't believe them.

Ally shows up and wants Superman there.  Lucy uses her father's beacon to bring him there because she's a stupid idiot and a character who needs to die.

Ally's harming Sam in front of her and she does it anyway.  Ally continues harming Sam and Superman arrives and she starts draining his power.  Meanwhile, Chrissy saw Superman fly by and she realizes there's trouble so she summons the DoD.  John's Artificial Intelligence tells him DoD has been summoned by Sam.  He asks to where.  He and Natalie suit up.  They see Ally draining Superman.  Sam says he'll take care of Ally and for Natalie rescue Superman.

Ally attacks John.  Then she's gone.  Natalie meanwhile is over Superman who's not breathing and she sees -- with her computer programming -- that his heart is not beating.

She tries to revive him and eventually does.

They're at the DoD hospital and Lucy acts so sorry but I didn't give a damn and neither did my daughter.  We both hope she dies.  Sam forgives her.  We don't.  John tells Lois that Superman doesn't have his powers.  They were able to take a blood sample.  He's normal.

She and John tells the boys and Natalie points out that they need Superman more than ever.

 

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

Wednesday, June 7, 2022.  Make a plan and watch the universe laugh as your plan is quickly destroyed.

So in a few hours I'll be having surgery -- again -- on my eyes -- again.  I had different plans for what I'd do here.  But then I see nonsense.

Let's start first with what I was going to do.

Last week, Sabby Sabs took on David Sirota in a weak ass and embarrassing manner.  I wrongly too the blame.  I'm so very good at taking the blame.  If only, I lamented in a snapshot, I'd gone over what happened back in the '00s . . .

Back in the 'oos, Tina Richards, mother of Iraq War veteran Cloy Richards, confronted US House Rep David Obey about his weak ass efforts to end the Iraq War.  This was public, very public.  A lot of news coverage.

David Siorta, a humorless sort that Al Franken used to tease/mock on his AIR AMERICA RADIO program, was out of sorts and deterimed to attack Tina and what she stood for.  He wrote a piece of garbage that went a lot of places.  

I saw it at INFORMATION CLEARING HOUSE and I called it out.  Not only because David was wrong to attack Tina but also because David lied.  Yes, it is lying to write a column attacking Tina for her confrontation with Obey if you don't reveal in the column that you worked for Obey.

Disclosure is very important.  David would learn the hard way a fews years later when he tried to syndicate a column.  Again, he forgot to disclose in the column his connection with David Obey.  This time, I noted it here, I went to where it hurt: his wallet.  I called friends at outlets that carried that garbage column and explained the lack of disclosure.  That hurt David because it hurt the syndicate and the two parted.

He was furious about that in an e-mail but unlike the one years earlier, at least he didn't say he was going to sue me.

Was he ever going to sue?

My honest opinion was that he thought he could frighten me or he got off bullying women or both.

You can sue someone for anything.  But had he done so, he would have been launching a frivolous lawsuit and the courts don't look kindly on those.

David came up with the story for that bad NETFLIX TV movie DON'T LOOK UP.  It was pure garbage.  That might not have been his fault, he didn't write the screenplay.  But he did get nominated in the screenplay category for an Academy Award.

I thought about how undeserving that whole film was and I thought about what he did to Tina and I thought about his bullying e-mails to me over the years.  David needed to stay in his lane.  But he'd veered off into mine.  Which is why print outs of those e-mails made the party circuit in the lead up to the voting.  I used every thing I had to derail his chances of winning.

Now other than that, I think I've been kind to him.

I've noted him over the years if he got something right -- even though it meant I'd hear about it in e-mails from community members who felt he should be banished forever.

I've got more important things to do and, had he not tried to 'branch out' into my industry, I would have left him alone.  

Now we did discuss it here -- many times -- even included it in the 2007 year in review.  

The plan was to publish those outrageous e-mails and have an easy snapshot that I could work on ahead of this morning so that I wouldn't have to work hard this morning when I had more important issues on my mind (surgery).

What changed it?

HARD LENS MEDIA, SABBY SABS and countless others.

There's a public stoning of Ryan Grim taking place.

I don't like Ryan Grim.  I'm on record here stating that.  I think he's a bad journalist and point to his Tara Reade coverage as a good example of that -- he failed her, he failed that story, he failed to connect dots, when Alyssa Milano was yammering about how she knew the truth about Tara she was referring -- as we noted in real time -- to what Time's Up was spreading.  Ryan could have had that story, he was even tipped off about it by a friend of mine.  He ignored it.  The truth about Time's Up didn't emerge until the New York governor had his scandal.

I think he's a lousy reporter.

He's a better TV host.  I love that they all want to talk about what Ryan said as they rush to defend Jimmy Dore but none of them want to discuss Jimmy Dore (and others) bringing on a convicted pedophile as an expert on Ukraine and not inform their audiences that Scott Ritter was arrested three times for this, was convicted of it, was sent to prison for it, and after he got out was forced to register as a sex offender.

This is not a minor issue.

Rachel Maddow landed on my bad side when she brought on an Iraq War veteran that she glorified and praised -- even after she found out that he beat his wife.  I still have all the UNFILTERED message boards.  She was informed of that on the board during the show.  Not only did she not change tactics but she invited him back for the Friday show.  

I don't tolerate that.

I don't tolerate hosts who lie to cover up the crimes of their guests.

I would love to see Sabby Sabs explain how that was appropriate, how him bringing the pedophile on was appropriate.

Ryan Grim made a stupid statement where he thought Jimmy was misunderstanding what David Sirota Tweeted.

Let me stay with Ryan for a moment.

I'd rather watch his program because he's not bringing on convicted child molesters.  He, Kim and Bri have that standard at least.  His show at THE HILL also covered some important topics that the other ones weren't covering.  They seem awful brave now but the reality is that Ryan and his co-hosts led on a number of issues a few months ago.

Krystal Ball is left-lite.  She will never be a radical.  She will always cave to the Democratic Party in the end.  But RISING will address serious issues.  And we will highlight them as a result and as a result of the fact that they're not bringing on convicted pedophiles.

I think all the programs would do better to stop telling people who to vote for and to instead just cover issues.  

So David Sirota and Jimmy Dore are in conflict -- again.  And Ryan Grim's trashed.  

Ryan's really not that important.  I certainly don't think he or this non-issue deserved 13 minutes from HARD LENS MEDIA, and  from Sabby Sabs, and from . . .

Do you not see what everyone else sees?

You keep claiming you're creating an independent media.

You're not and I'm not going to play along.

I was kind in the '00s even though I warned as far back as 2005 that all that was happening was they were cutting off Cokie Roberts' head only to have a million new ones sprout.  

David Weigel we're now supposed to gather around.  That's the ass who was part of JOURNOLIST, please remember.

Oh, that's right, most YOUTUBER hosts are too stupid to remember.

It's not that I didn't talk about David Sirota in real time, turns out I did, it's that idiots don't want to do the work required.

People need to learn to research. 

Reading will be your friend.  It will take you to other notions and concepts, it will expand your knowledge base.  

I am so sick of the non-readers who weigh in on events and think they've made some great discovery.  As Stevie Nicks sings, "Who in the world do you think that you are fooling?  Well I've already done everything that you are doing."

I am so sick of this refusal to be aware of and acknowledge those who came before.  You haven't read Gore Vidal, you haven't read Michael Parenti, you haven't read Cedric Robinson, Nancy Fraser, Judith N. Shklar, Asad Haider, Manning Marable . . .  And what about the writers publishing in political journals currently?  I've been very intrigued by the recent work of Tanika Raychaudhuri, for example.  

You have no knowledge and yet you pontificate on and on.  You've never done the required reading and you want to talk about historical topics when you just aren't up for them.

You bring on a John Nichols but ignore a John Stauber and then you wonder why the country is so screwed up on the left?  Because you're bringing on whores, lying whores.  

I'm really tired of your stupidity.

You're not going to create anything by being stupid.  

You need to inform yourselves.

You are not doing the work required yet you think you're in a position to lead.

Ryan Grim is not the problem.  But you certainly circle-jerked him, didn't you?

Do you really think you look like independent media as you all rush to devote lengthy segments calling him out and defending Jimmy Dore?

Is Jimmy so damn weak that he needs all of you defending him to begin with?  (I don't think so.)

Why can't you focus on real issues?

Iraq's not on your radar at all.  You're not doing a daily piece on Ukraine in which you track the over $50 billion the US government has already committed to giving it.  

What do you think you are accomplishing?

Because I'm not seeing it.  You've got platforms and you use them for something so trivial.

The ongoing wars do not exist on most of your programs but you, these days, weekly make time to defend Jimmy Dore on air at length.

Betty's "Sabby Sabs, leave the plantation already" went up last night and her "Black YOUTUBERS please stop promoting Jimmy Dore" went up weeks ago.  She is exactly right.

Jimmy's show isn't welcoming to people of color.  Outside of one professional athlete, I can't think of an African-American he's had on his show.  So why do Sabby Sabs and REVOLUTIONARY BLACKOUT have to do so much work for him.  Is he their boss?

It's pathetic.  

And this circle jerk is not building independent media.  Nor is it building trust.

So I guess we can expect a year or two more out of you YOUTUBERS pretending to care and then you'll sell out like the ones before you did.

Who didn't sell out?

Glen Ford, Bruce Dixon, Margaret Kimberley and John Stauber are four who didn't.

Now Glen and Bruce have passed.  

Margaret and John?  If you're truly wanting to build independence and get people to think for themselves, they should be on your programs weekly but the reality is that only REVOLUTIONARY BLACKOUT brings Margaret on.  No one brings John Stauber on.

You're whining about what happened to David Weigel (I don't care if that last name is spelled correctly or not).  David not only lied to his interview subjects, he lied to his readers.  That's why he was fired from THE WASHINGTON POST pre-Jeff  Bezos.  

But you who can't cover Iraq are now going to waste time on defending DW?

That's who you prefer to stand with -- not Margaret, not John.

A lot of us have worked for years on issues of representation.  We wrongly hoped that the internet would provide a different world.  That didn't happen.  Instead a number of White men -- with the help of CJR -- policed who was included and who wasn't.  We're now past bloggers and into YOUTUBERS and enough complaining and protesting has resulted in a tiny bit of difference.  A small sliver.  So I am with Betty on this, REVOLUTIONARY BLACKOUT and Sabby Sabs, if you don't have enough self-respect to stop whoring for White man Jimmy Dore, have the respect for your audience.

It's disgusting to watch you ignore real issues and rush to constantly praise Jimmy Dore.  He's not doing s**t for you and he never has.  He might if you stopped acting like his servants.  Instead you want to kneel before him.

It's disgusting to watch.  

He may be a big politics ally but he is not an ally to any community of color and let's stop pretending he is.  He's perfectly fine with doing his all White show for his all White audience.  

Considering how many years -- decades -- the MSM has shut out voices of color, if you've got a platform in 2022, it is your responsibility to diversify your guests and your topics.  

Jimmy Dore's made no effort to do that.

Yet every week -- as SPAR AND BRAWL has taken to noting -- it's another drama from Jimmy Dore.  

I really do think that, for example, Black America has more important issues to address than who hurt Jimmy's feelings this week.

And when you're all filing the same segment, stop pretending that you're creating independent media.  

You're doing exactly what David Brock did.  And that led us nowhere -- at least not anywhere worth going.  

David Sirota's politics are a problem.  He's fakery is a problem.  

Whether he got Jimmy Dore's joke or Jimmy got his or knock-knock who's there are not issues and they don't require lengthy segments.

When are US troops going to leave Iraq?

And when are YOUTUBES going to find the time to be concerned about that?

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Isaiah, Graham Elwood, Lee Camp and Mickey Z

If you like music, Kat's "Kat's Korner: Party at HARRY'S HOUSE" went up over the weekend and covers Harry Styles new album HARRY'S HOUSE.  Love it and can't stop listening to that album.  Also going up over the weekend was Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "The DUI explained."

Now here's Graham Elwood with Lee Camp.

Mickey Z has a new piece at DISSIDENT VOICE so be sure to check that out.

I hope you've already checked out C.I.'s snapshot today (I'll post it below in just a minute).  My two cents?  The DSA is fake ass and was created to be that.  It's neither democratic nor socialist.  It's a bunch of fake asses with their heads up the asses of the CIA and doing the work of the US empire.  That's been the case since the beginning.  

Idiots have trusted  the DSA and trusted them for decades.  That's a huge mistake and explains why the government has repeatedly moved to the right over the last decades.  

We can't afford to believe fake asses. 

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

 Monday, June 6, 2022.  A British man gets 15 years for theft in Iraq and we look at how there's a historical aspect to sheep-herding for the Democratic Party and if you're not addressing that, you're not addressing anything.

And you try to tie together some connections

You get some ribbons and some bows

And get back out on the road again

-- "Juliet," written by Stevie Nicks, first appears on her THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR

 

The DSA -- Democratic Socialists of America -- has a nasty history.  Michael Harrington was a reactionary, red-baiting piece of trash who did not encourage young activists (he attacked Tom Hayden and Alan Haber for their seminal Port Huron Statement).  Back in 2013, Joe Allen explained it at SOCIALIST.ORG:

What did the tradition that Harrington championed represent during the Vietnam era?

The Socialist Party that he had joined by the end of the 1950s was increasingly distinguished by shrill anti-communism on issues of U.S. foreign policy. Norman Thomas, the leader of the SP at the time, was a founding member of American Friends of Vietnam, along with Sen. John F. Kennedy and Cardinal Spellman of New York. The group became known as the "Vietnam Lobby"--and spent the '50s pressing for greater U.S. military and political assistance to the Diem dictatorship in Vietnam and its crusade against "communist aggression."

When a new generation of young activists, politicized by the civil rights movement, emerged in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and very gingerly challenged the suffocating anti-communist consensus, they were met with utter hostility. Harrington led the attack on the authors of SDS's founding document, the Port Huron Statement.

Sunkara writes that this was "an error that Harrington would later recognize and lament." But why did Harrington take the position in the first place? Because it was the logical product of his tradition's support for anti-communist crusades at home and abroad. This attitude was why people who became radicalized during the 1960s and early '70s viewed the old social democrats--among which Harrington was one of the youngest--as redbaiters from the left edge of the liberal establishment.

Harrington may have had his regrets about how he responded to SDS and the New Left, but he never dropped the anti-communism that underlaid that response.

Did Harrington support the Vietnam War? It's true that he never said in so many words that he backed the U.S. war in Southeast Asia. What he did do--over and over again, even as it placed him more and more at odds with the growing antiwar movement--was echo the chief ideological justification of the U.S. war: anti-communism.

"I am anti-communist on principle," Harrington declared in 1965, "because I am pro-freedom." Such a declaration at that particular political moment was, at the very least, a huge concession to the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy throughout this era, used to justify all sorts of criminal behavior in the world, from "police actions" in Korea and the Dominican Republic to CIA-sponsored coups all over the place.

Harrington's stated position on Vietnam was support for negotiations to end the war. But the antiwar movement of that era more and more came to identify this as a pro-war stance. For one thing, it accepted the legitimacy of U.S. imperialism playing a part in determining the future of Vietnam and Southeast Asia. For another, it accepted the continuation of the war effort while negotiations took place.

In the introduction to a 1965 book titled We Accuse, a collection of writings, speeches and other documents from opponents of the war, James Petras explained the antiwar movement's growing rejection of calls for negotiations in favor of demanding immediate withdrawal. Referring to a 1965 debate between Hal Draper of the Independent Socialist Clubs and pacifist Robert Pickus, speaking for the "negotiated peace" position, Petras wrote:

To oppose American intervention in Vietnam, as Hal Draper pointed out in his debate with Pickus, is to call for the immediate withdrawal of the U.S. To call for it "later" (under whatever pretense) is to legitimize violence in the here and now--since one cannot impose utopian dreams on what the U.S. Army does in fighting a war of conquest. One would not be too irreverent to refer to this type of "peace" approach as "War now--Peace later."

Whether or not one agrees with this characterization, it can't be denied--and Sunkara agrees on this score--that Harrington was deeply and wrongly hostile to the radicalizing antiwar movement. R.W. Tucker, a contemporary of Harrington's, recalled a 1970 convention of the Socialist Party where Harrington, as chair of the convention, "presided over a spurious expulsion of the entire Wisconsin delegation, consisting of 22 antiwar delegates, and then bullied through a resolution on the war that in effect supported it."

Episodes like this put Harrington, it seems to me, on the wrong side of the divide between pro-war and antiwar.

---

THERE'S A lot more to say about Harrington that neither Sunkara nor I have even brought up yet. For example, Harrington spent much of his later life trying to create what he called the "left wing of the possible." He argued for leftists to orient, whatever their criticisms, on the Democratic Party as the only realistic vehicle for achieving political change.

Such an orientation has a powerful practical appeal, particularly for newly radicalizing activists. It certainly did for me. It seemed to combine both the realism necessary to deal with U.S. politics and the idealism of fighting for socialism. But does it work?

Whatever doubts might have lingered for me about the question were cleared up by a debate between Harrington and Peter Camejo during the 1976 presidential election campaign, when Camejo was running as the presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party.

I read the transcript of the debate when it was published by Pathfinder Press several years after it took place. Harrington and Camejo were both in top form. Harrington was subtle and nuanced. But I thought Camejo, arguing for the importance of socialists remaining independent of the two capitalist parties in the U.S., won the debate.

I wasn't surprised by Harrington's pitch for a "lesser evil" vote for Jimmy Carter over the incumbent and unelected Republican President Gerald Ford, but I was struck by one particular point. Harrington said, "The conditions of a Carter victory are the conditions for working class militancy, and the militancy of minority groups, and the militancy of women, and the militancy of the democratic reform movement. We can actually begin to make victories on full employment, national health and issues like that."

I knew from my own experience of the Carter years that none of this happened--the mass movements didn't advance because of a Democratic victory. And if we replace Carter with Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry or Obama, can we say any different? This strategic "engagement" urged by Harrington weakened the left terribly during the post-Vietnam war era.

Sunkara believes that once Harrington's writings are understood in their context, "some value can be gleaned from his work"--and this is certainly true, as it is for many other political figures.

But it's also true that Harrington's political career demonstrates pitfalls for the left on critical issues, including its relationship to the Democratic Party, the tradition of anti-communism among some socialists, and confusion, at best, about opposition to U.S. imperialism. Hopefully, the left we seek to rebuild today can learn the negative lessons of Michael Harrington's legacy, too.

In 2000, historian Kimberly Phillips-Fein wrote a ridiculous piece for IN THESE TIMES rationalizing Michael Harrington's many failures but even that enabler couldn't avoid the basic truth: 

He opposed Communism in the ​’50s, and in the ​’60s he did not support the anti-war movement. He never held a position of influence in any large institution. The Other America is a moving book, but Harrington’s reputation as ​“the man who discovered poverty” is wildly overrated, and his actual influence on the War on Poverty legislation was negligible.

Right now, REVOLUTIONARY BLACKOUT, Sabby Sabs, Katie Halper, BLACK AGENDA REPORT, Jimmy Dore, THE CONVO COUCH and others act as though they can't understand why certain toy radicals keep sheepherding people -- this is the reason.

This is what to pay attention to.  It's why the feminist movement went from active and accomplishing things to pathetic.  Gloria Steinem was a failure as anything but a token for the press.  Little doll for the press to play with and support.  When she had a true rival, Betty Friedan, Gloria fought.  She fought unsuccessfully (see Miami, 1972) but she fought.  Germaine Greer disagrees on that and you can refer to HARPER'S for her piece "McGovern, the big tease" (October, 1972).  Germaine may have been right.  But what she did in 1972 compared to how she whored in 1976 looks like fighting for 1972 to me.  I may be grading on a curve or being too easy -- I certainly made that mistake in the past with Gloria.  By 1976, having vanquished Betty Friedan, Gloria was elevated by friends in the press to a leadership role that she used to weaken the movement (see Veronica Geng's "Requiem for the women's movement," the November 1976 cover story of HARPER'S).  That might have been because she's pathetic and weak herself.  REVOLUTION FROM WITHIN makes that case as her idea of 'success' for the feminist movement is a front cafe that she runs where, in the shadows, a few women gather to learn about feminism.  But the movement went from active and making demands to submissive and begging.  

If Sabby, Margaret Kimberley, and others want to show America where just going along blindly with the Democratic Party leads, they can look at pre-Gloria feminism where women occupied the offices of magazines to demand better representation and coverage, for example, and to today where ROE V WADE may be overturned.  It's the cowardice of Gloria.  (Some would argue its her CIA ties.  Since we're discussing DSA we should note that DSA has always been willing to collaborate with the CIA because of shared goals and the makeup of the CIA.)  

ROE V WADE may no longer be the law of the land.  If that happens, abortion may become illegal in certain states.  If that happens, plans to transport females across state lines for abortion in other states would be illegal acts -- a fact that weak-ass feminists don't want to tell you right now.  (Not all feminists are weak-ass.  This is not an attack on feminism.  It is, however, an attack on where some feminists have led us.)  This is a very sad moment and I see Feminismt Majority, for example, at least trying to raise issues but I don't see Gloria popping up, do you?

She was there when needed.  Right?  By whom is the question.  She showed up to justify women voting for Joe Biden.  That's when pathetic drew her ugly face back in front of the cameras, went on a little press tour to justify Joe's grotesque grabbing of women.

And the bitch passed it off as feminism -- groping, the new consciousness-raising!!!!  

I wrongly defended Gloria for too many years and thought her ineffectual nature was a phase she would grow out of.  It is her core state and she has betrayed women over and over.  And I'm not in the mood to defend her anymore.  When THE NEW YORK TIMES wrote about her CIA work as fact -- because it is -- I was again asked to defend Glroia.

Let me explain defending Gloria to you, that means we use our personal friends in the media and ask them to intervene for her sake.  Seems we all spent much more time doing that than we ever did focusing on advancing women.  Gloria was always a distraction and, in hindsight, a disappointment.

To be clear though, I never took part in her organized efforts to smear or silence Redstockings.  I did take part in efforts where she was under attack from men.  They knew better than to ask me to defend her against other feminists because everyone knew how disappointing I found Gloria.  

We're moving on, I can talk about her at length another time.

The point is feminism was alive and vibrant and women were taking action and making demands and accomplishing a great deal.  Then Gloria eases Betty out (I hope Susan Faludi would write differently about that now then she did in BACKLASH -- it was a bit more than the media loving a young blond) and we're done.  We have no major victories that we fight for.  We're encouraged to do pathetic actions that are nothing more than begging for crumbs from the Democratic Party.

And that's where we are today in terms of the left.  It's the point Margaret makes, it's the point the late Bruce Dixon and Glen Ford made.  It's a point that needs to be made and it's something we need to grasp that is not just happening.  

Take the Dem party over from inside!  

That's Michael Harrington, folks.  Too stupid and lazy to build something, he wanted to take it over.

But they don't, do they.  What they really do is use the Democratic Party to elevate themselves, to keep themselves front and center as useless voices.

And when you call out, say, Bill Fletcher for it -- as we did in 2008 -- he goes on COUNTERSPIN and insists that you're "red-baiting."  When I'm not a red-baiter.  When, unlike DSA, I'm not in fear of Communism.

But I do believe people have a right to know the political plan that's taking place whereas DSA  believes they can trick their way into power.

DSA, like any organization, probably has some caring members.  Probably people are wonderful at a lunch or party.  But the organization itself has nothing to be proud of.  They're a bunch of opportunists who think they can trick and deceive and that tricking and deceiving is a-okay because they are working for a larger good.  

Eric London (WSWS) reports today:

At a recent panel event hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) chapter for the state of Maine, Vladyslav Starodubstev, a leader of the Ukrainian pseudo-left Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement), put forward the chilling perspective that “the war creates the possibility for a push of socialist ideas in Ukraine.” The panelists and DSA moderators stated their agreement with the speaker and demanded the US government deploy more tanks, missiles, and howitzers to wage war against Russia, regardless of the risk of nuclear holocaust.

This was the outcome of an event cynically titled “Ukrainian, Russian and Polish socialists speak out for peace,” moderated by DSA member and former International Socialist Organization (ISO) leader Todd Chretien.

It is a strange kind of “peace” meeting that calls for deploying American weapons, praises NATO and the Pentagon, explicitly opposes any negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine and urges “solidarity” with a government dominated by neo-Nazis.

Starodubstev got right to the point:

“The Ukrainian people have a right to fight,” he said, “Left-wing people can support Ukrainian people to fight to be Ukrainians. To support this fight, people need to voice their opinion for sending weapons to Ukraine and for limiting the military possibilities of the Russian regime, by pushing also for sanctions. This is my main point. Diplomatic solutions won’t work. To have a diplomatic discussion, to negotiate something, one needs to have power.”

Beyond Starodubstev, the event also featured Zofia Malisz, a representative of the Polish pseudo-left party Razem. Malisz echoed Starodubstev’s call for expanding the war.

“We should deliver weapons to Ukraine,” she said. “You strangely find yourself in a situation where you may actually agree in practice with the US State Department. You suddenly find yourself in alliance with whatever NATO is doing.”

In reality, there is nothing “strange” about this. The DSA and its international associates represent a section of the upper-middle class whose material interests correspond with Wall Street’s drive for world domination. They “agree in practice” with American imperialism because they share the same social interests. For its entire history, the DSA has formed a part of the State Department and imperialist apparatus. DSA founder Michael Harrington said, after all, that the organization would play “a pro-American, Cold War, State Department kind of role.”

If the left wants to get real in the US, that's going to mean knowing your history.  That's going mean using your brain to make connections.  For those thinking I'm soap boxing, I'm not.  I didn't use my brain for years.  I didn't know Gloria was DSA until I was online here.  It had never come up.  I don't ask people their group orientations.  I work on issues and I work to build bridges.  And that allowed me to mistake Gloria for both a friend and ally.  By the 90s, I was repeatedly apologizing for her behavior as she made one promise after another to people in need and then failed to keep these promises.  By the '00s, when it was women from Afghanistan making these comments to me, I moved privately away from her.  I took the break public when, due to being online, people began educating me on the reality of Gloria -- a reality I wasn't prepared to deal with prior.  

Point being, we all need to learn.  

When the US government pushed for war with Russia through the proxy Ukraine, we saw the DSA at work.  Some were surprised by what they were seeing.  Don't be surprised.  CODESTINK has always been DSA.  Why are you in bed with them?

Because you're both working on the same issues?  I've been there.  But the reality is, you're not working on the same issues.

________, you're not working on the same issues with CODESTINK.  You think you are because they're supposed to be about peace.  But there they are championing Ukraine, pushing propaganda (Ann Wright, how could you?) to jusitfy war.  It's the same stuff John V. Walsh and Justin Raimondo called CODESTINK out on at the end of the '00s when they decided to call for the US to stay in Afghanistan, remember?  

This is the group that made their name opposing the Iraq War.  That would be the ongoing Iraq War, the one they stopped caring about ending when Barack Obama was elected.  

I do not have shared goals with CODESTINK.  I thought once that I did.  But they don't pursue anything -- they drop every cause if something else comes along.  They're not about winning peace.  They are a bout being used by Jodi to elect Barack -- again, her being a bundler for Barack and her using her minions to 'birddog' other candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2007 and 2008 exposes CODESTINK for what they really are.  She owed, the group owed it to make honest disclosures.  They  are fake asses.  If you're going to pretend along with them, you're just running in place and you're not helping anyone advance.

(_____ has called them out in the past -- and done so publicly -- but felt the need to 'reteam' with them in 2020 and wrote me here to defend the decision.  There is no defense for it.  Especially if you are currently calling out sheepherding and efforts to settle for far less than what this country needs.)

Here's John Stauber (he's not the writer I'm referring to in the parentheticl above):

The phony #Dem peace-posing #progressives like

@NicholsUprising

#Bernie and #TheSquad are now all-in for war on #Russia. Such cowards. They and/or their organizations and partners enjoy receiving

@georgesoros

money. Pigs at the trough.

7:38 AM · May 28, 2022

Back before Twitter did their 'blue check' nonsense, we could copy and past John's Tweets into a post -- just grab his Tweets from the last 24 hours.  The blue check move meant that no longer worked -- a large black X would obliterate the Tweets.

And since John doesn't appear to write much beyond Twitter these days, we don't note him very often.  But he's an important voice and someone who has repeatedly chosen truth.  Not just this year, but for decades.  And it doesn't matter that some fake voices then attack him.  He still chooses truth.

I don't know why he doesn't write more.  I do wonder why he's not asked to come on YOUTUBE programs.  You want to know about politicians selling us out, tricking us, about sheep hearders deceiving us?  John Stauber's your guest for the hour.

Let's deal with some nonsense: 

Our father is facing the death penalty in Iraq. #FreeJimFitton - Sign the Petition! https://chng.it/NyxMSkmP via

@UKChange

change.org

Sign the Petition

Our father is facing the death penalty in Iraq. #FreeJimFitton

11:44 AM · Jun 6, 2022

Your father?  And you just Tweeted this minutes ago?

If it's really your father, you should have known he's not facing the death penalty.  This was reported    hours ago:

A British citizen was sentenced Monday by an Iraqi court to 15 years in prison after being convicted of attempting to smuggle artifacts out of the country, in a case that has attracted international attention.

The verdict handed down to retired geologist Jim Fitton, shocked the court in Baghdad, including his defense attorney. He and his family have argued that Fitton, 66, had no criminal intent.

“I thought the worst case scenario would be one year, with suspension,” Fitton’s lawyer Thair Soud, visibly shocked, told The Associated Press.

A German national tried with Fitton was found not to have had criminal intent in the case and will be released.

Judge Jabir Abd Jabir found that, according to the government’s investigation, Fitton had criminal intent to smuggle the artifacts that he had picked up and intended to transport them out of the country.

You're saying your his family, let's take you at your word.  The Iraqi judicial system is harsh, at best.  But you didn't care, did you?  You were fine with that up until it was your father.  You're very good at self-interest and being selfish.  You're just not much of a human being.

Maybe that's reflecting your father's influence in your life.  You presented him to the press as the modern day Indiana Jones.  Yeah, it did appear that way in one regard, he was 'rescuing' artifacts - which is also known as theft.

According to you, he was smart and didn't mean to do anything wrong.  If he knew anything about anything, he knew there was a long history of the west stealing Iraq's historical treasures.  He had no business taking anything other than pictures -- did he not have a camera or a camera on his cell phone?  He wanted to steal and he got caught.  And he made the mistake of being a westerner who stole from Iraq -- after Hobby Lobby and others had gotten slaps on the wrist from their own governments.

All things considered, he got a pretty fair deal in that court judgment.

Now he goes off to an Iraqi prison?  I guess, you, his family, are now concerned about that.  It's a shame you couldn't have been concerned before hand -- Iraqis have spent years being disappeared in prisons, being tortured.  Maybe you'll learn from this, as a family, that there's a great big world outside of your bubble and that we're not going to drop everything to suddenly focus on the plight of prison in Iraq for . . . a British man.  

Again, Iraqis have faced for years what your father's about to.  Some of us called it out and pointed out that Nouri al-Maliki had started it.  

Your dad stole and he stole in Iraq.  Now he's facing justice -- or what passes for it -- in Iraq.

If the UK government decides to insist upon his release?  I would love that because that strengthens the case for Julian Assange's release.  Otherwise?  Not interested, sorry.  Not interested in helping your father get away with theft.

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