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Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Graham Elwood and Kevin Reed -- plus hate merchant Candace Cameron

Opening with Graham Elwood.

We got money for everything except what really matters. The government wastes our tax dollars on wars but won't use our money to provide for our actual needs. It's disgusting.

Speaking of disgusting . . .

Ugly freak Candace Cameron is back in the news as she continues to peddle hate. She went on a podcast and insisted she was being persecuted for her beliefs and her girth, She said something like, "It's hard no matter what. Especially when you are a hateful person and you have a lot of hate to spew. But it's important that we spread lies, with hate. It's important we don't back down from our hate."

Oh fatty, the only thing uglier than your outsides is your insides. Take your hate and go away, roll in the gutter another day.

It must be hard for her. She's overweight. She's ugly. She's aging out of the few acting roles she could have performed. Now she's got nothing. Which, by the way, is exactly what she deserves.

As my Mom recently wrote, don't pin your hate on Jesus.

Jesus was about love. You take your hate and you take the blame for it, don't you dare try to pin that on Jesus.

I feel sorry for Valeri Bure. His homeland (Russia) is being torn apart and he has to go home to Candice, to that freakish face and that fat body. Poor Valeri. Remember, divorce is much more common in the US and then in your homeland. You can abandon her -- the same way you did your father.

At WSWS, Kevin Reed has a piece on the Super Bowl:

The annual Super Bowl is the world’s most expensive and most inflated sports entertainment spectacle. Even though the FIFA World Cup, which takes place every four years, has a larger global audience—more than one billion viewers—it lags behind the Super Bowl in both the scale of production and the amount of money involved.

According to the latest available figures, from 2021, the NFL team owners generated a combined $17.1 billion from 272 games played between 32 teams over 24 weeks, starting in early September and ending on Super Bowl Sunday in early February. By comparison, the 2022 FIFA World Cup, held in Qatar, generated an income of $7.5 billion from 64 games played between 32 teams over 29 days in November and December.

Average ticket prices for the Super Bowl were above $5,000, while tickets for the final game of the World Cup sold for $1,000.

However, as the 2022 figures show, the FIFA competition is gaining ground on the NFL, and this is a matter of concern for the NFL team owners and their elite associates in the US financial and political establishment.

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

Tuesday, February 14, 2023. The 20th anniversary to a massive global protest is tomorrow, a faux action loses their convicted pedophile speaker but still remains too toxic for most people to get on board with, toxic is what Iraq's become as a result of the never-ending wars, and much more.

Dr Gideon Polya (COUNTERCURRENTS) reports:

On the weekend encompassing Friday 14 February to Sunday 16 February 2003 in Australia, coordinated mass protests against the impending Iraq War occurred around the world in over 600 cities. This global mass protest was described as the largest protest event in human history. According to the BBC 6-10 million people protested in a total of about 60 countries. In Italy the Rome protest involved about 3 million people, and in Spain the protest in Madrid involved 1.5 million people.

On Friday 14 February the protesters totalled 150,000 people in my city Melbourne (I and family were there with highly visible black on white STOP WAR placards). On 16 February 250,000 people protested in Sydney, and 100,000 in Brisbane. About 600,000 demonstrated against the impending Iraq War in cities around Australia [1-5]. Between January 3 and April 12, 2003, 36 million people across the world globe participated in some 3,000 protests against the Iraq War [5].

(A). The ongoing carnage anti-war demonstrators unsuccessfully tried to stop in 2003.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq War was conceived by the war criminal Americans as part of the absurdly named post-9/11 US War on Terror that in horrible reality became a genocidal War on Muslims from West Africa to South East Asia. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was presaged by 13 years of crippling Sanctions and US, UK and Apartheid Israeli bombing that devastated Iraq in the period 1990-2003. The US had “greenlighted” the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 but as soon as the invasion occurred the serial invader America and its allies turned on Iraq – 200,000 Iraqis perished in the 1990-1991 Gulf War and an estimated 1.7 million Iraqis (mostly children ) perished under genocidal Sanctions that devastated a formerly prosperous Arab country that had a secular administration.

The “excuses” for invasion of Sanctions- and bombing-crippled Iraq in 2003 were utterly false. No Iraqis were involved in the 9/11 atrocity in 2001 according to the “official lying Bush conspiracy theory about 9/11”. However the US and UK governments presented their people and the world with utterly false assertions about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda terrorists (the opposite was true, with the secular Iraqi regime being opposed to Islamist terrorists), and with falsely alleged Iraqi possession of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMDs) that after the conquest of Iraq were simply not found. The invasion of Iraq by US, UK and Australian forces formally commenced on about 20 March 2003. The already economically and militarily devastated Iraqis having no air force, no navy and no defence industry were quickly defeated by the genocidal US Alliance “shock and awe” tactics.

Nevertheless Indigenous resistance continued. The Iraqi leader Saddam Hussain was hunted down and killed (the same fate befell Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi after the France-UK-US (FUKUS) Alliance invaded and destroyed Libya) [6, 7]. The US Alliance mostly left devastated Iraq in 2011 having installed a Shia-dominated government to their liking. The subsequent Sunni revolt gave rise to the Islamist ISIS and thence the excuse for the return of the US Alliance to further devastate Iraq, and to also wreck and Balkanize Syria [6-20]. Fallujah (the City of Mosques) was destroyed in the Iraq War but was again besieged and devastated a second time by the barbaric Americans in the subsequent war on the barbaric ISIS insurgents [17-19]. The western half of the huge city of Mosul was destroyed by the US Alliance together with the lives of 40,000 of the residents (pre-war Mosul population 2 million) [19].

The Iraq War and the Syrian War continue. The US has a large number of temporary military bases in Iraq, mostly a type of forward operating base (FOB), plus 2 major airbases [21]. In January 2020, the Iraqi PM, the Iraqi Parliament and the Speaker demanded that the US Alliance forces leave Iraq. The US, UK, Australia, Canada and Germany rejected the Iraqi Parliament’s Quit Iraq demand, with the US threatening to instantly collapse what was left of the Iraqi economy by a banking freeze if Iraq insisted on US Alliance withdrawal from its territory [22]. Syria is largely held by the Syrian Government with the help of Russia. However Turkiye occupies a northern strip, US-backed rebels occupy a north western enclave, Kurdish forces occupy a north eastern region, ISIS remnants still exist, Apartheid Israel has illegally annexed the Syrian Golan Heights, and the US illegally maintains a major base in Syria. The active and passive killing of Iraqis and Syrians by the US and Apartheid Israel continues. Despite the immense earthquake horrors in north east Syria, the US and its allies maintain deadly sanctions against war- and earthquake-devastated Syria. Apartheid Israel continues to routinely bomb Syria and Iraq. Indeed Apartheid Israel tried to broker a Ukraine-Russia peace deal to bolster Russian cooperation over Israeli warplanes in Syria but this was scotched by the genocidal US [24].

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the massive, worldwide protests against the Iraq War. You had people taking to the streets and making a huge statement. You had people like Janeane Garofalo, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Jane Fonda, Ani DiFranco and many others speaking out and being attacked for it. And Meg Ryan. She got trashed by Al The Pig Franken. His embarrassment of a radio show needed guests because Randi Rhodes was outdoing him daily on AIR AMERICA. So he gets Meg to be a guest while he's doing a show on a college campus. Meg calls out the war and says the troops need to come home. Al grins and chuckles and as soon as she's gone explains on air that she's just too stupid -- unlike him -- to know about stuff like war. He was a piece of filth ahead of the war, by the way, urging Democrats in Congress to vote for the authorization.

Hans Blix, Clare Short and Tony Benn may be names from the past for many people in Britain but the wider world has not moved on from the war they tried to prevent in Iraq, says the filmmaker Amir Amirani, and neither has he.

After spending nine years interviewing such people for his film We Are Many, about the global anti-war marches on February 15, 2003, Amirani is still engrossed in the topic: working on a release in America, thinking of writing a book, and developing an offshoot project he is keeping under wraps for now.

Tim Stickings (THE NATIONAL) reports:

There were many brave people speaking out -- most are forgotten especially by the idiots propping up registered sex offender Scott Ritter. I hit campuses starting in February of 2003, one month ahead of the war, filling in for a friend who got a more prominent campus speaking gig and needed to do that to reach a larger audience. I was asked to fill in and I did that for years and years until the pandemic hit. My point in raising that now is I never even heard of Scott Ritter until long after the war began. He was not the brave voice everyone thinks he was. He wasn't, for example, Katharine Gun -- but don't they try to rewrite history and make him that.

And on the rewriting of history: Sy Hersh. I have a long history of him and I noted that when I reviewed his bad book here. If you're late to the party, you can read Elaine's "Seymour Hersh" for a primer. And, yes, I know it and Coretta knew it, that Sy was feeding information about us and others to his government sources in exchange for tidbits. He's a snitch. And I love how his 'greatest hits' being listed currently never acknowledge the reality that he had many, many 'scoops' implode over the years. He's only as good as his source because he's just a stenographer. The JFK book really damaged his legacy -- but don't expect the political equivalent of twinks to know about that. We should all know that he pimped the narrative that Seth Rich was murdered not in a robbery but for leaking to WIKILEAKS.

Was Seth murdered by the DNC or the government? I have no idea but my guess would be no. Until Sy starts appearing on shows dropping crumbs here and there. The fact that he's doing that means it may be true. Or it could be a bad source. Again, Sy is not an investigative reporter. He writes what he is told. That's all he's ever done. Some sources are solid and some are not.

It's a shame that the shallow are so shallow yet so convinced that they learned something.

Real actions took place 20 years ago today.

The Scott Ritter fan club is not holding a real action in DC.

Black Alliance for Peace issued the following:

The Final Deathblow to Imperialism Will Only Come Under The Leadership of The Organized Colonized Masses

Efforts to marginalize, disregard, and erase the presence of radical Black-, Brown-, and Indigenous-led anti-imperialist organizations, as well as our political positions, is proving to be endemic to the politics of too many who consider themselves radical anti-imperialist and anti-war activists. For this reason, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) reiterates that the peoples who bear the brunt of the brutal and lethal practices of U.S. imperialism are at the forefront of the struggle to dismantle the global system of white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism.

The colonized within the U.S. settler state see more clearly than the privileged the holistic nature of the system as well as the interdependencies between our domestic repression and U.S. wars abroad. Some forces that claim to be anti-war have an unsophisticated understanding of peace.

We understand that peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement, by popular struggle and self-defense, of a world liberated from the interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament, and unjust war. A condition for real peace is the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy and white supremacy. Anyone with genuine concern for the well-being of humanity and the planet should be deeply concerned that some supposed “leftist” forces consider it easier to find common cause with right wing libertarian forces than with the Black radical movement, as BAP Coordinating Committee member Jacqueline Luqman writes in this Black Agenda Report piece.

And as Chair of the BAP Coordinating Committee, Ajamu Baraka points out:

“The white left in the U.S. is deeply delusional. Elements of the left actually believe a radical movement leading to revolutionary change will be led by white activists with Black & colonized people as backdrops. #AntiWarSoWhite”

We cannot afford any confusion, complicity, silence, or outright collaboration with some “liberal/left” forces on armed intervention into Haiti, the reactionary role of NATO, the intensification of state repression in the United States, the plight of the working class being subjected to an induced recession, and austerity. For BAP, all of these contradictions reaffirm why it is absolutely necessary for colonized people to be organized or face an inescapable subjugation and eventual annihilation. The comfortable will dismiss this as hyperbole.

We—the colonized, the exploited, the oppressed—are in the midst of a war. It is clear that the colonial-capitalist rulers will continue to deceive, mislead and co-opt to maintain their dominance. Our responsibility in opposition is to keep the focus on the imperialists and not be confused by the machinations of their supporters. That task and responsibility will continue to inform our work in 2023.

At SOCIALIST ACTION, Jeff Mackler also called the faux action out.

It's amazing to look at these people -- THE CONVO COUCH, for example -- and note that they've been willing to spend years now rescuing the right-wingers, defending the hate merchants to build up to this moment. They claim to be left but that time wasn't used to defend transgender people, for example, or to reach out to the left. Mabye tht's because they'd need to do real work for that. And, check out RT when Fiorella's on and you'll see she does no real work. She just goes on air, Russia's own Judith Miller, and 'reports' by saying, "Russian intelligence has learned . . ."

Get your cash however you can, Fiorella, but be a smart whore: Get it up front. Customer's always going to want to pay you less after he shoots his wad.

"Russian intelligence has learned"?

What a propagandist.

And I've defended her. She has every right to work for RT. But when that's what she's 'reporting' -- spitting back out what a government -- any government -- has fed her? She's a propagandist and I look at her with the same disgust I would if she were reporting for a US channel and saying, "The CIA has learned . . ."

They're idiots, this group of people.

They aren't going to sway anyone with her being seen as Tokyo Rose and registered sex offender Scott Ritter being their cause celebre. Yes, at the end of last week, Scott Ritter finally took a hint and dropped out. Though there are rumors that he will show up and speak as a 'surprise guest.' Parents, protect your daughters.

But this is what it came to. Fiorealla and other embarrassments and they're going to do something major. No.

They're bringing on homophobes, on a FOX NEWS personality who FOX fired because of complaints from young men that the judge was harassing them, they're a disgusting group of people.

And no one's going to take you seriously when you're putting on a White man convicted and sent to prison for being a pedophile.

White privilege is what kept Scott out of prison the first two times he was arrested for being a pedophile. He was able to whine to the people he met while working for the UN and they wrote character letters insisting that Scott was wonderful and this was a momentary lapse of judgement.

The third arrest didn't work out for him.

No man of color would have been able to avoid prison on two arrests for pedophilia but White Scott Ritter did.

And maybe that glorification of Scott by the group is really the glorification of White which is why it's a White Power 'action.'

You're putting people on the stage who attack Civil Rights, who attack LGBTQ+ persons, who attack women's right (including with regards to reproductive health) and you want to build that coalition. It's not going to build for you. Even if you hadn't spent weeks promoted pedophile Scott Ritter, it still wouldn't work. Hate merchants are not the answer, they never are.

But the Jimmy Dores can't get accepted among the left so they'll be a face of the left for the extreme right. That's how they'll earn their bread and butter, as trained monkeys doing the tricks that they were taught.

Tara Reade will be there -- in all her girth and non-glory. Marcia noted last night, "In other news, the ultimate Karen -- Tara Reade -- is now reTweeting Marjorie Taylor Greene. Tara, we knew you were ugly and fat, we just did not know you were also a homophobe."

There's a reason that the so-called left speaking at this event don't speak out against the hate campaigns the extreme right launches -- they agree with them. They would rather be around their friends and fellow-thinkers than defend the LFBTQ+ community. Tara has destroyed her own reputation. Some day they should make a movie out of her -- it would be a non-stop laugh riot.

We'll wind down with this from THE BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL:

The combination of destroyed health care infrastructure, medicine shortages, limited resources, high levels of heavy metal contamination, and poor sanitation is likely to blame, they argue.

Antibiotic resistance, or AMR for short, is rising globally at an alarming rate and is expected to cause 10 million deaths a year by 2050, if nothing is done about it, point out the authors.

Largely attributed to the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, attention is now turning to other factors, such as heavy metals and disinfectants containing quaternary ammonium compounds (QACs), which are widely used in the health care and hospitality sectors.

War has been implicated in the emergence of AMR as far back as the 1940s, but has received little attention, say the authors.

Iraq is a stellar example of this neglect, as the country has experienced a sequence of conflicts since the 1980s that have coincided with the emergence and spread of pathogens with specific patterns of antibiotic resistance, they highlight.

The following sites updated:

Monday, February 13, 2023

Graham Elwood -- and what's wrong with Megyn Kelly this time?

First up, Graham Elwood.

Now?

What is wrong with Megyn Kelly? I thought she liked Black people. She certainly loved wearing Blackface, after all. But she's got her right wing rear in a tither over the Super Bowl. It was just way too woke for sleepy Megyn. MEDIAITE reports:

On the Monday edition of her SiriusXM radio broadcast, The Megyn Kelly Show, Kelly was joined by former Fox News reporter Rick Leventhal.

“Can I tell you, like, it wasn’t as bad as it’s been in years past, but it was a woke Super Bowl and it was annoying,” Kelly began.

“Why did we need the all female flyover, which they — Fox I mean, even on Fox, they were showing highlights. ‘It’s an all female flyover.’ Oh, okay. All right. Thank you for reminding me that women can be pilots. I didn’t know that,” Kelly said sarcastically.

She turned her attention to the performance of the Black National Anthem by Sheryl Lee Ralph.

“And then of course, we had to have the Black National Anthem in addition to the regular national anthem, which is totally divisive. There is no reason to have a Black National Anthem sung before the Super Bowl,” Kelly said.

Okay, so Megyn doesn't want to know if an all female flyover takes place. I guess it makes her feel inadequate. She thought she'd leverage harassment into a network show but then her Blackface comments ended that and left her on YOUTUBE and radio. It's a tough life for the wanna be.

And, of course, an additional song was just way too much for her. She must hide behind the couch when The Grammys air.

Go read Ava and C.I.'s "Media: The Problem."

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

Monday, February 13, 2023. THE NATION is so broke and corrupt, it's using interns to churn out bad copy and we're all suffering as a result.

ADDED: MARCI E-MAILED TO REMIND ME THAT I FORGOT TO NOTE ROSEANNE BARR'S COMEDY SPECIAL DEBUTS TONIGHT ON FOX NATION. THANK YOU, MARCI. (SEE "Libya, Roseanne.")

A little over 90 minutes ago, THE NATION published a piece by Zurie Pope:

If a State of the Union Address holds any real purpose, it is for the president to amplify his past accomplishments while giving a preview of what’s to come. Although President Joe Biden largely accomplished that goal on Tuesday, some topics were, of course, given more time than others. Biden rightly used his speech to alleviate concerns about inflation and corner Republicans on Medicare. But, unfortunately, as the right’s crusade against queer people intensifies, LGBTQ rights were scarcely mentioned.

Though the address lasted more than one hour, the totality of Biden’s comments on the subject could be found in two lines: asking Congress to pass the Equality Act, to ensure that “LGBTQ Americans, especially transgender young people, can live with safety and dignity,” and referencing the recently passed Respect for Marriage Act. “While the legislation was intended as a buttress against right-wing attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, activists have criticized the Respect for Marriage Act for writing Republican religious liberty exemptions into law and focusing on an issue that impacts only a small and wealthy portion of the LGBTQ+ community,” wrote Theia Chatelle in The Nation last month.

We've already called out Joe for those two sentences -- and we noted them when we covered the State of the Union Address. We didn't, like Theia Chattelle, play a dumb bitch.

Marriage equality does not just effect "a small and wealthy portion of the LGBTQ+ community." What a stupid ass thing to write. We were kind when it was posted and ignored because it was so stupid. It's very telling that idiot Theia didn't write of the same legislation that it only "impacts a small and wealthy portion of the interracial marriage community."

See, the bitch is stupid, but she's not that stupid.

And maybe an undergraduate at Yale is the last person to talk about anything in terms of history or, for that matter, in terms of wealth. In other words, zip up your pants, Theia, your dangling wealth and privilege are hanging out.

Entitled and stupid, that's Theia -- a PUFFIN FOUNDATION winner on top of everything else. The entitlement reeks off Theia like body odor.

I was on the phone with a friend at THE NATION who had e-mailed saying, "Please highlight" the article we linked to and that THE NATION was finally going to take LGBTQ+ issues seriously.

Bout damn time but THE NATION's still not quite there.

Maybe that's the problem when you highlight the immature?

First off, Joe Biden made a huge mistake in the SOUA by refusing to seriously take on the attacks on the LGBTQ+ community. It was the victory lap that he took for the 'meaningless' (to Theia) that helped his polling (briefly) climb. Then came more stupidity from Joe with the classified documents being mishandled and people slowly grasping that the original claims put forward and attributed by Joe's lawyers were not accurate. That brought Joe back down to his low polling numbers.

The speech could have influenced the numbers if Joe had spoken seriously about the LGBTQ+ community. No, it wouldn't have won over the right-wing or the Jimmy Dore and Aaron Mates who hate gay people. You're never going to win those freaks over. But there is the segment of middle America that does not condone hate, that rallies against attack on LGBTQ+ people.

They recoil in disgust when they read a report like this one by Daniel Villarreal (LGBTQ NATION):

A Catholic school teacher says the local archdiocese fired her after seeing a photo of her kissing her same-sex partner.

Maggie Barton wanted to share values from her religious upbringing with future generations, so she became a technology and media teacher at the All Souls Catholic School in Englewood, Colorado. For six years, she taught kindergarten through 8th-grade classes. She called the school community her “second family.”

She was fired after someone sent the archdiocese an image of her kissing her same-sex partner. The image was taken from the partner’s social media account, Barton said. While the archdiocese said it won’t fire Catholic school teachers for having same-sex attraction, it apparently will fire them for acting on it.

“The school found it necessary to conclude the teacher’s employment because she did not honor the commitments she agreed to in her contract with the school,” the archdiocese said in a statement to CBS Colorado.

In Barton’s employee contract, she agreed to “personally exemplify the characteristics of Catholic living” and “[refrain] from taking any public position or conducting … herself in a manner that is contrary to the teachings of the Catholic church.” Her relationship violated that agreement, the archdiocese said.

Of course, she disagrees.

“I don’t think that being in a same-sex relationship or someone’s sexual orientation hinders your ability to [embody Catholic values],” she said. “It is hard for me to wrap my head around how these issues are still possible and things like this can still happen.”

This stuff took place all in the time in the past. Lillian Hellman's THE CHILDREN'S HOUR was first staged in 1934, after all. And Americans were bothered by it then -- not the lesbian teacher, but how she is treated because of who she is. And Americans today are bothered by the firing of the teacher.

Last week, when AOC noted the attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, she rightly said of the GOP, "This is the party that cannot pick on anyone their own size." (Words are easy for AOC. We haven't seen any follow up or action from her.)

Joe was seen as fighting for something important -- unless you're the dismissive Theia who doesn't know about life because she's so immature -- and Americans liked that and the polls registered it. When giving a State of the Union Address, a smart president plays to their strengths. Joe didn't. And no one cared. The phony talk of how he landed a home room or accomplished anything were revealed, within 24 hours, as hollow lies. The rating weren't there, the people just didn't care enough to tune in the way they had the year before.

That's on Joe. He had a home run with the legislation and he failed to capitalize on it.

Newsflash to THE NATION, I don't need to hear from mental midgets in their sophomore years of college about LGBTQ+ history. You damn well better believe that I had lived and I had read before I started weighing in on feminism. The ahistorical approach doesn't cut it for me. Nor does having to put in the work by myself. Yes, after we hit over and over for two weeks here on the reality that the ludicrous 'grooming' charges were a revival of Anita Bryant's hate mongering in the 70s, we did see some people begin to work that into their own writing. But honestly, as always, I'm still thinking, "If I was smart enough to bring it up -- me, the dumb one -- how stupid is everyone else?"

I do not understand why this issue is being farmed out to glorified interns. I do understand, at this moment and time, when we need to grasp history and roots, THE NATION employees useless (and elderly) writers like Joan Walsh and Kattha Pollitt but can't find anyone 30 or over to write about LGBTQ+ issues?

Because those are our issues. I say "our." I'm not a lesbian. But these issues impact my life, impactmy understanding of democracy and equality.

And I don't some little simp who thinks they're being brave by knocking something like marriage equality and claiming its only for the rich. You stupid idiot, you deeply stupid idiot.

Rights are fought for and won and it allows other rights to emerge.

I shouldn't keep calling these children stupid. Clearly the stupid people are the one who waived these juvenile pieces of writing into print and online publication.

The article that I linked to by Pope is less stupid than the one he cites by Theia. But it's still deeply stupid. He wants to talk about how gay voters can't or won't go anywhere else with their votes. That's not really the issue even if we're talking solely campaign politics -- which is all the young and stupid can conceptualize because that's all the left media offers as action (voting).

Even if you're going to stay on his tiny island of a topic, the reality is that the Dems don't fear losing the votes. What they fear is losing the money. And they do lose money.

In 1988, a Dukakis staffer was speaking to me and two other women -- all of us donors. She elected to tell us about this 'ridiculous' woman she met the other day and how that woman wanted to help and how that woman volunteered to do this and that and this and that and . . .

It was all so ridiculous, we were told, because the woman was clearly a d**e.

And the staffer (also a woman) then paused for the laugh.

None was forthcoming. As I again introduced the staffer to the woman on my left, I added, "You may have missed it but she's an out lesbian."

Yeah, the party's learned over time that they can't get away with that.

Because lesbians like my friend won't let them and because allies like myself won't let them.

THE NATION needs to stop farming out serious work to interns. If they have no other choice, they need to ensure that they are editing the pieces. The ones that THE NATION have aren't smart enough -- not informed enough, not analytical enough -- to write for a national magazine not named SASSY. That I have to point that out, is really sad. Then again, I may be the only one who bothered to read their work.

Zachary B. Wolf (CNN) notes:

Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, after trying for 10 years, is on the cusp of getting Congress to repeal the authorizations that led the US into war against Iraq in the early ’90s and again in the early ‘00s.

Along with a Republican, Sen. Todd Young of Indiana, Kaine has support from the White House and a bipartisan coalition. He and Young told CNN’s Jake Tapper about their proposal on “The Lead” on Thursday.

Ten years. Ten years and they can't end the authorization. Let alone bring US troops back home.

Kat's "Kat's Korner: Carly Simon LIVE AT GRAND CENTRAL" went up Sunday. The following sites updated:

Thursday, February 09, 2023

SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK, THE GOLDBERGS, WOLF PACK, and more

No post last night. Sorry. We were doing family stuff -- the whole point of going to my folks for the week. It's Thursday and usually I write about THE GOLDBERGS. I didn't last Thursday and I won't today. Louie e-mailed asking if last week's episode was so bad that I was ignoring the show? Nope. There was no episode last week. They did a 50 year anniversary salute program for SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK. I didn't watch. Not because I didn't like it as a kid but because I just had other things to do. We had it on videotape. I don't know that it even aired by the time I was a kid. But at some point, my folks got the VHS for us.

"I'm just a bill, oh, I'm only a bill . . ." I knew all of those back in the day. Figure 8? Where they woman would skate on ice into the number 8. "We the people in order to form a more perfect union . . ." They were little spots -- about the length of a commercial -- that would provide education via animation and music. I don't think they do anything like that today. They did it back then because the government required X number of hours of children's programming to be educational.

I never understood how educational the how-to-make-popsicles with fruit juice, toothpicks, saran wrap and an ice tray qualified as eductional, but whatever.

As for last night? Remember that awful show JANE THE VIRGIN? Well the woman for that thought she was going to be a big movie star and someone was stupid enough to hire her for a lead in a film. It bombed. She's back to television. Film's benefit is our torment. She's now in a very bad sitcom. ABC aired two episodes of that Wednesday night -- no GOLDBERGS.

My older brother (I have three older brothers -- my brother who's gay) and I hung out this afternoon. He had a dentist appointment and came over after that. (Over, in case anyone needs to know, means my folks' home in Boston. We're here for at least a week.) We popped some pop corn and watched WOLF PACK because he'd read Ava and C.I.'s "TV: Now the hate mongers come for WOLF PACK." WOLF PACK airs on PARAMOUNT PLUS. There are three episodes so far -- a new episode goes up on Thursdays. We really loved it. Last time Sarah Michelle Geller did a horro/sy-fy show, she took on vampires (BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER) but this go round, she's surrounded by werewolves.

I like the werewolf theme. I haven't seen a show with a werewolf in it since BEING HUMAN. I loved the British version and I loved the Canadian version.

Back to WOLF PACK, it's so far looking a lot like KILL BILL. The part where Uma Thurman's in the hospital. It's got that kind of lighting.

And I like the stunts and the acting. And the script keeps rolling with surprises. When we finished up, we'd just learned that two of the teenagers (Harlan and Luna) -- how to put it? Their father had them go to the shed -- risking an attack from a wolf -- to get a rifle. They get it and then they use it but they also find it holds silver bullets. They later ask their dad (adopted) about it and he admits he made the bullets. They then ask the obvious question: To use on them? Yep. And that's the episode ends.

Anyway, we loved it.

On the political front, what C.I. says in the snapshot -- every word -- I gladly cosign.

I expect Democrats to conduct themselves better than Republicans and that's why I identified as a Democrat. They were appalling in yesterday's hearing. And if I hear the pre-agreed upon term 'weaponized' again, I'm going to lose it. I think the House was weaponized twice with the nonsense of impeachment. Talk about time wasters. Two impeachments in the House but the Senate didn't vote to remove from office? Maybe take responsibility for that 'weaponization.'

I'm sick of it and I agree with C.I. that we don't need this garbage from Democrats in office or from the media.

Most people are not going to fall for it and you look petty and unwilling to do your job which does require -- demand -- oversight.

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

Thursday, February 9, 2023. Today we look at truth, partisanship, lies and more.

I'm not a fan of the Twitter dumps. I don't see them as reporting. They're Tweets. They're not reporting. I've also noted that if a deal is made with Elon Musk to have access to the Tweets in the first place, that deal can't be private. Basic journalism has always made that clear.

With that in mind, let me now call out the embarrassing AOC at yesterday's House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing entitled Protecting Speech from Government Interference and Social Media Bias, Part 1: Twitter's Role in Suppressing the Biden Laptop Sotry. Republicans are now in control of the House so the chair of the Committee is James Comer -- a man who needs to buy a comb. (Although, scary, I was told yesterday that he's actually going for that look. You're a fifty-year-old man in Congress, you're not playing Amanda Woodward on MELROSE PLACE, lose you're very bad attempt at 'bed hair.') Jamie Raskin is the Ranking Member. As the Republicans on the Committee noted in a press release, "Under the leadership of former Twitter employees Vijaya Gadde, James Baker, and Yoel Roth, Twitter coordinated extensively with the FBI to disproportionately target Republican leaders, conservative activists, and certain media outlets. In October 2020, Twitter censored the NEW YORK POST's story about the Biden family’s business schemes based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, despite the article not violating any Twitter policies." That sentence is probably the least controversial -- and truest -- of any remarks made about or during the hearing.

But we can't deal with reality. I'm about to call out a number of Democrats and before someone whines that the Republicans also obscure and spin, yes, they do. They do it very often and if I was a fan of that, I would be a Republican.

I'm not a fan of it and I do not like organized attempts to lie. I don't like organized attempts to trick people.

Something truly disgusting happened when THE NEW YORK POST was censored. But instead of working for We The People, Democrats on the Committee and the White House tried to turn it into a football match. I'm so sorry to break it to you but democracy is much more important than any Superbowl ring. The only 'side' that anyone should aspire to is truth. But instead, Democrats worked from a playbook to attack the hearing itself and to avoid the reality of what was done.

For example, AOC idiotically huffed, "A whole hearing about a 24 hiccup in a right-wing political operation! We could be talking about health care, bringing down the cost of prescription drugs, abortion rights, voting rights, civil rights, but instead we're talking about Hunter Biden's half-baked laptop story."

Cool your jets, Entitlement Barbie.

First off, all you do -- all you have ever done -- is talk. You're all talk. You take no stands. You not only wouldn't take part in Force The Vote, you then claimed that calling you out for that was a physical attack, a threat. When you wonder why more young people aren't in Congress, look no further than AOC whose vast immaturity does no one a favor.

The hearing is not a waste of time. The oldest daily paper in the United States was censored. That's worth looking into.

I'm not a fan of THE NEW YORK POST. It's slightly above garbage. But it was only slightly above garbage when Dorothy Schiff owned and mis-ran it all those years, serving those stupid roast beef sandwiches to various leaders -- the ones who were Democrats would get raves in her paper. Rupert Murdoch did not destroy the paper, he just had it do more of the same.

THE NEW YORK POST, ahead of the 2020 election, broke the story on the laptop. And it was censored for that. And it was attacked for that. THE NEW YORK TIMES, for example, invested no money, no resources, no reporters into investigating the laptop. They did put resources and money into the hit job they did on THE POST where multiple anonymice were given space to attack THE POST and we were told that the newsroom was in an uproar over the publication of the story.

Lies.

It was never true.

The article was suppressed. Some are insisting that another report is being suppressed and that we are part of a group suppressing it.

COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW has an article about how Russia-gate was lies and how THE NEW YORK TIMES and THE WASHINGTON POST. Why, oh, why, are we ignoring it, e-mails ask.

First off, we never spread the lies, we called them out in real time. So we don't need to do a corrective.

Secondly, those hailing the article are idiots with no knowledge at all.

I don't scapegoat Asian-Americans.

If that doesn't explain why we're not highlighting the article, how about this: Jeff Gerth wrote it.

The liar Jeff who destroyed Wen Ho Lee's life. I'm sorry that you don't know history. I'm sorry you are so stupid that you glorify a presstitute like Gerth who not only nearly got Wen Ho Lee tossed into prison with his lies and bad reporting but it could have led to Wen Ho Lee being executed.

No, this is not a site that's ever going to praise Jeff Gerth. And, no, I'm never going to offer an apology for not highlighting the writing of a man who trafficked in lies and stereotypes to convict an innocent person in the press. Were Wen Ho Lee not Taiwanese-American, he wouldn't have been the target.

So, no, not interested in promoting The Garbage That Is Gerth.

We didn't spread lies about Russia, so there is no reason for us to offer Gerth's article. And it's not being banned on FACEBOOK and Twitter. People are sharing it -- people who want to. It is not the same thing as the government working to suppress a newspaper article. And the government did work to suppress it.

It should be remembered that the article didn't just emerge out of nowhere. Already questions were being raised about Hunter's dealings. Sarah Chayes had rightly called out the unethical nature of Hunter's business dealings. Joe was going around saying A) His son did nothing wrong and B) His son did nothing illegal. His son clearly did something wrong. Legality is a matter for the courts. Into this world, THE POST broke their story. And it was a valid story. But instead of exploring the facts, it became attack and silence THE NEW YORK POST.

In September of 2020, at THE ATLANTIC, Sarah Chayes wrote:

Let’s start with Hunter Biden. In April 2014, he became a director of Burisma, the largest natural-gas producer in Ukraine. He had no prior experience in the gas industry, nor with Ukrainian regulatory affairs, his ostensible purview at Burisma. He did have one priceless qualification: his unique position as the son of the vice president of the United States, newborn Ukraine’s most crucial ally. Weeks before Biden came on, Ukraine’s government had collapsed amid a popular revolution, giving its gas a newly strategic importance as an alternative to Russia’s, housed in a potentially democratic country. Hunter’s father was comfortably into his second term as vice president—and was a prospective future president himself.

There was already a template, in those days, for how insiders in a gas-rich kleptocracy could exploit such a crisis using Western “advisers” to facilitate and legitimize their plunder—and how those Westerners could profit handsomely from it. A dozen-plus years earlier, amid the collapse of the U.S.S.R. of which Ukraine was a part, a clutch of oligarchs rifled the crown jewels of a vast nation. We know some of their names, in some cases because of the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office: Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, Dmitry Rybolovlev, Leonard Blavatnik. That heist also was assisted by U.S. consultants, many of whom had posts at Harvard and at least one of whom was a protégé of future Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

Burisma’s story is of that stripe. The company had been founded by Mykola Zlochevsky, who, as Yanukovych’s minister of ecology and natural resources, had overseen Ukraine’s fossil-fuel deposits. When Hunter Biden joined Burisma’s board, $23 million of Zlochevsky’s riches were being frozen by the British government in a corruption probe. Zlochevsky fled Ukraine. The younger Biden enlisted his law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, to provide what The New Yorker describes as “advice on how to improve the company’s corporate governance.” Eventually, the asset freeze on Zlochevsky was lifted. Deripaska defeated U.S. sanctions with similar help from other high-profile Americans.

Recently, Hunter Biden told The New Yorker that “the decisions that I made were the right decisions for my family and for me” and suggested Trump was merely using him as the “tip of the spear” to undermine Joe Biden politically. There are no indications that Hunter’s activities swayed any decision his father made as vice president. Joe Biden did pressure Ukraine’s fledgling post-Yanukovych president to remove a public prosecutor—as part of concerted U.S. policy. So did every other Western government and dozens of Ukrainian and international pro-democracy activists. The problem was not that the prosecutor was too aggressive with corrupt businessman-politicians like Hunter Biden’s boss; it was that he was too lenient.

Attention had been on how Hunter had used his father's influence -- without Joe's knowledge or participation, Joe insisted back then -- and here was Hunter's abandoned laptop with various details on it.

The response was to attack.

Why?

They didn't want Donald Trump re-elected. I didn't want that to happen either but we covered the laptop here because it was news. And because I trust people to be mature enough to vote for who they want to vote. The only wasted vote is a vote you don't believe in. I don't mean years later, I don't think we're a nation of psychics. That's the only wasted vote. And not voting is also a vote. Sorry, poli sci major as an undergrad (double majored as an under grad, triple majored in grad school). We are not the USSR so I'd never be proud of a 100% voter turnout or even a 90%. We're a democracy where we have the right to vote. And if someone earns your vote, you'll vote for them -- provided you can jump through all the hurdles which include registration, changing locations, understaffed locations, etc, etc. I'm all for a voting holiday -- a national holiday. Even then, I wouldn't expect 100% voter turnout or see that as a good thing. 100% of the people aren't following the issues and shouldn't be voting. Again, the USSR had huge voter turnout. I never thought that was a good thing or actually reflective of the people's belief in that system.

'Oh, no, you critiqued the USSR!' I critique all governments.

A major story emerges immediately before an election and the corporate press -- and the trashy beggar media like THE NATION, et al -- work to silence the story.

If that doesn't bother AOC then she is even more stupid than I thought she was.

This was an attack on the freedom of the press. It was also the press picking who they wanted to spin for. And Donald Trump supporters aren't the only ones bothered by it. But, yes, Donald's supporters are bothered by it -- as is Donald himself -- and he and his supporters have every reason to be upset. AOC wants the press to treat her like a national celebrity but she doesn't want to be a national politician. If she did, she'd stop offering lies and grasp that whole groups of people will never listen to her or trust her because of garbage like ""

"A whole hearing about a 24 hiccup in a right-wing political operation! We could be talking about health care, bringing down the cost of prescription drugs, abortion rights, voting rights, civil rights, but instead we're talking about Hunter Biden's half-baked laptop story" -- she declared. It's not an either/or. You can talk about those things and pursue what took place with regards to the laptop. Is she afraid it might make her late to The Met. Does she have another trashy outfit to put on? Exactly what is the hearing keeping her from that's so important?

Nothing.

She's lying and dismissing because she doesn't like the reality of the laptop. By attacking and dismissing, she can distract others and possibly avoid dealing with it.

Corruption needs to be called out. And if she doesn't get that Congress is obligated to provide oversight with regards to potential corruption, that bad hair dye she's been using must be leaking through her scalp onto her brain. I'm always amazed by someone who will spend a fortune on an outfit but, when it comes to her hair, goes for something out of the box that she can do at home. Not knocking anyone who has no choice in the matter due to economics but AOC doesn't have budget issues.

I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the dishonesty.

I don't like members of Congress who mistake our lives as their partisan fight. I'm tired of all the spinning. Again, if Liked spinning and lying and partisan fights, I'd be a Republican.

Hunter Biden used his father -- his father's name and, yes, access to his father -- to make money. That's unethical. It's a real issue. And since we now know Joe knew about it, it also goes to corruption above Hunter.

US House Rep Barbara Lee is a constant embarrassment and this continued today as she insisted -- offering no proof -- that this hearing was going to allow people to get a pass on using speech that incites. I'm not sure that 76 year old Barbara understands, first off, the internet and, second off, how Twitter works. Everything on there is basically inciting something. That is how Twitter works -- or doesn't work. We've always had laws on the books -- laws that still exist today -- to address any truly inciting speech. And I'm not sure that Americans want to turn over the censoring tools to the likes of Barbie Lee.

She's bothered, she insisted, by the treatment of the poor Twitter employees.

Why doesn't she deal with their actions. I don't give a damn about Yoel Roth's 'hard times.' He did actions at Twitter that he shouldn't have. Does that mean he should have been smeared as a pedophile? No and we called that out here in real time. But don't confuse two responses: Harsh critique and response from the people over his role in the censorship and then a response from people who always run crazy on every topic.

Eleanor Holmes Norton. Is there a reason that stupid and elderly woman (85) is still in Congress. I know she's got no real power, she's the DC delegte, but she's an idiot and she's a liar. In late 2009, I lost all use for her. She'd been lying to the press for months about something that on the face of it was obviously a lie. And then a Barack appointee comes before the Committee and Eleanor goes into the lie and thee man stops her and correct her. Later that day, she's back before reporters repeating the lie as though the expert witness from Barack's administration hadn't just corrected her on the claim she's been falsely making. (It was a lie that Matthew Rothschild pimped at THE PROGRESSIVE as well. They were heavily invested in the lie.)

Eleanor decried that the hearing was about partisanship while . . . making the hearing about partisanship.

It was "a match to a powder keg," she insited looking like the senile, old fool she's always been.

The playbook the Democrats were working from was to distract from reality and to try to get a 'win' for the new gipper Joe Biden.

They weren't working for the people -- despite the House long being seen as the people's House.

And it's disgusting.

THE NEW YORK POST was censored. The laptop has been 'vetted' by THE NEW YORK TIMES, POLITICO and THE WASHINGTON POST. Yes, they and other outlets waited years to do so but we all know -- unless we're liars like AOC -- that the laptop is for real.

Who did AOC, Eleanor and others think they were reaching?

They sat there raving about Joe Biden's snazzy wardrobe while most of the country already knew the emperor had no clothes on.

They just lied. And the lie had already been exposed as a lie long before the hearing. So they worked from a playbook that made a large part of the country yesterday see them as liars -- see them as they really were, I guess.

I don't see how that is good for the Democratic Party but I know it's not good for democracy.

Donald Trump, while president, asked Twitter to censor. That emerged in the hearing.

Good, call that out. It needs to be called out. It needs to be expanded on.

We need to know all the censorship that has taken place.

Which is why more hearings are necessary.

But grasp that when you sit through a hearing attacking a known fact repeatedly and then your ears perk up over Donald also doing something wrong -- no one sees you as trustworthy or fair. And, thing is, you're not a star in a reality show, you're a member of Congress and, as such, you need to have some integrity. When you demonstrate -- when you sport -- your whorish side in front of the people, don't expect anyone to show you any respect. Whores get money, whores get gifts, but they don't get respect.

"There's a peace action coming up and you're not promoting it!"

No, I'm not promoting that 'peace' action. THE VANGUARD did a great job in the video below covering the problems with that action.

At the end of last month, we wrote "David Swanson finds his Maddie Albright moment" at THIRD:

With 935 words, you'd think David Swanson could make a point. You'd think.

"How Dare I Oppose War with Libertarians" is how you find the column but, grasp, even if you find the column, you'll never find the point.

He's getting complaints, he writes, for announcing he'll be speaking at an anti-war rally with Libertarians.

Which Libertarians is the obvious question.

This isn't just about the government's war, a fact that escapes David.

A lot changed on June 24, 2022. Prior to that, we could easily speak with non-leftists against the war. There were rights and legal protections.

Then DOBBS was handed down and ROE V WADE was struck down while Justico Clarry Thomas made clear in his concurring opinion that he now wanted to take on birth control rights (do away with them), to take on marriage equality (do away with it) and to take on what two adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom. Justico Thomas -- a huge consumer of porn -- suddenly sees himself monitoring every bed room.

No, we're not going to stand next to anti-abortion crazies, homophobes or people who want to terrorize trans persons.

Is that who David is going to be standing with? We have no idea because, despite using 935 words, he never names any speaker he'll be appearing with on stage.

That does make us wonder: Is he doing that intentionally? Does he grasp that he has to cover these people up or he won't get support?

We have no idea but without knowing who he is standing with, in the climate we now live in, he's on his own and he made it that way.

We found out who he is standing with and it's homophobes and it's registered sex offender Scott Ritter and so many other disasters.

Aaron Mate, did you read the comments to THE VANGUARD segment? One of your fan bois is hoping you would never stand with Scott Ritter. They missed the part where you already had stood with him, had brought the convicted sex offender on your program THE GREY ZONE and promoted him (and never noted his conviction).

THE VANGUARD didn't really go into that. I think they were being kind. But a lot of people on the left who were participating and have now dropped out because of the backlash? They've been embracing Scott Ritter for the last year. We've been calling them out for that right here.

THE VANGUARD wrongly praised BLACK AGENDA REPORT for calling the faux-test out. One article that didn't mention names called the faux-test out . . . for being White. The reality is that BAR's Danny had Scott Ritter as a guest on the LEFT LENS over five times in the last six months of 2022 and that BAR published Scott Ritter as 2022 was winding down. Margaret Kimberley reTweeted him.

Too many people have decided to get into bed with a pedophile. That's on them. But don't make the mistake that THE VANGUARD did of thinking people have called Ritter out when they haven't, when instead they've promoted him.

The following sites updated: