Friday, January 22, 2021

Idiot of the Week

First, Jimmy Dore.


Now it's time for . . . Idiot of the Week.  There were a lot of potential 'winners.'  But in the end, I think Lady Gaga beat out everyone.  The freak that Hollywood doesn't want to hire isn't an actress and, check her sales figures, she's not really anyone with impact on the recording industry.  She's a faded celebrity.  And she took that tarnished image and trotted it out onstage this week to celebrate mediocre Joe Biden getting inaugurated.


Now a lot of dim bulbs did that.  But Gaga, remember, claims to believe all survivors and claims to care about abuse.


But there she was whoring for a man who raped Tara Reade.  And she thinks we're all going to look the other way?  


What an idiot.  As pathetic as Katy Perry was, Gaga was even more so and truly earned this week's 'honor' as Idiot of the Week.

 

This afternoon, more bad news.  Glenn Greenwald Tweeted:

 

"Facebook has shut down the accounts of one of the biggest left wing organisations in Britain, the Socialist Workers Party...The SWP Facebook page posts in support of Palestine, Black Lives Matter & against Boris Johnson’s Covid policies." Congrats to all who urged this system

 

 

That's a good set up for the Iraq snapshot this morning, here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

Friday, January 22, 2021.  Silencing of dissent led to many things, including the Iraq War.  Today, we focus on the efforts to silence dissent further in the US.


Starting in the US.  In Shirley MacLaine's book WHAT IF . . . A LIFETIME OF QUESTIONS, SPECULATIONS, REASONABLE GUESSES AND A FEW THINGS I KNOW FOR SURE, Shirley writes:


What if a state of war and terror is used to make populations change their sense of democratic freedom without their ever recognizing that it's happening?  Can fear of terrorism make an entire population embrace values it would normally reject?  Would a population even realize it was becoming more and more entrenched in and comfortable with institutions that ignore the Constitution in favor of the rule of law?

Just go to an airport and stand in line at the security checkpoint.  Make people afraid enough, they will submit to anything.


The passage above from Shirley is even more pertinent as US lawmakers push for more 'terror' laws to 'protect' the United States.  Caitlin Johnstone notes:


The US political/media class have been pushing hard for more authoritarian policies to stave off the threat of “domestic terrorism” in the wake of the Capitol riot. President Biden, who was already working on rolling out new domestic terror policies well before January sixth, confirmed after the riot that he is making these new measures a priority. Political internet censorship is becoming increasingly normalized, anti-protest bills are being passed, and now we’re seeing liberals encouraged to form “digital armies” to spy on Trump supporters to report them to the authorities.

And an amazingly large percentage of the US population seems to have no problem with any of this, even in sectors of the political spectrum that should really know better by now.

“What else can we do?” they reason. “What other solution could there possibly be to the threat of dangerous fascists and conspiracy theorists continuing to gain power and influence?”

Well there’s a whole lot that can be done, and none of it includes consenting to sweeping new Patriot Act-like authoritarian measures or encouraging monopolistic Silicon Valley plutocrats to censor worldwide political speech. There’s just a whole lot of mass-scale narrative manipulation going on to keep it from being obvious to everyone.


Many religions feature a belief in 'treat others as you would like them to treat you.'  And if you were lucky to grow up with some form of a caring parental figure, you heard variations on this.  The reason is because when you do something nasty or rude to someone else, you don't have much right to complain when, as Cher sang in "My Song (Too Far Gone)," "what I did to many men was finally . . .  done to . . . me."


That is what happens.  And when laws are created to penalize those you disagree with, you better grasp that those same laws will, sooner or later, come after you.


The golden rule.  We'd hope everyone would follow the treat others as you'd like to be treated maxim out of kindness but, if nothing else, let's hope that they'll follow it for their own self-interest.   Again, to quote Cher, "What I did to many men was finally done to me."


It's already starting, the censorship.  Katie Halper Tweeted two days ago:


The Livestream That Youtube won't let me post is here with the controversial content cut out. But I'm going to keep contesting it.
@youtube
@NHKWORLD_News
@cspan
patreon.com/posts/46458646
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Yesterday, Jimmy Dore noted the way the corporate media is promoting censorship.



And he did another segment.  This one was with Jordan Chariton.  




File it under Cher's "what I did to many men was finally done to me," in Jordan's case.  As the comments note, Jordan's been calling for the censorship of people for years.  And he's not noted here for his program due to his attacks on THE CONVO COUCH.  Maybe Jordan will learn a lesson from this?  Probably not.  But standing up for freedom of speech often means standing up for speech you don't like or speakers you don't like.  


You do that because you grasp the Constitution and you grasp the importance of freedom of speech.  Instead of re-programming centers for people AOC doesn't like, maybe we should be advocating to send the woefully undereducated AOC back to college to learn about the Constitution?


The politicians are not defenders of free speech.  The tech giants are not defenders of free speech, as Jimmy Dore and others note.  This is surprisingly to you only if you're new to this topic.  The week of August 12th, 2013, this was noted on LAW AND DISORDER RADIO:


Michael Smith:  The subtitle of your new book Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power and Public Resistance  -- talk to me for a minute about corporate power.

Heidi Boghosian:  We know that 70% of the government's intelligence operations are conducted by private business.  They have a very co-dependent relationship in which Boeing, a lot of other military operations develop equipment specifically to conduct surveillance.  And the US government actually depends on them for analysis of data that is gathered and for setting up the internal communications system, for example, at the Pentagon.  So it behooves business, it helps their bottom line to create more sophisticated and intricate technology that the government depends on.  You must also realize that business is immune from Constitutional stricture so that they can in many cases spy free from liability and the government has given the telecommunications industry immunity from lawsuits so it really shows the extent that not only do we give them latitude but President Obama has a panel of corporate CEOs who advise him on policy. 


Heidi also addressed the issue on an August 16, 2013 broadcast of COUNTERSPIN:


Peter Hart:  Now we're talking about government spying and that's been the focus of so much one of the Snowden coverage.  One of the lessons of the book is that private companies are very much involved in this on a number of levels.  They're contractors with the federal government.  They're also hired guns on activist groups -- things that the government probably couldn't do legally but you can hire a private company to do these things.  Talk a little about the role of private companies and how they blur the distinction between government surveillance

Heidi Boghosian:  In many ways, private corporations have become the long arm of the government, doing -- as you say -- things that the government could not legally do because they're bound by the strictures of the US Constitution.  Our officials take an oath to protect the Constitution.  And, as we mentioned, some protections were set in place.  They've eroded over time but I think most Americans would be offended if they knew the level of surveillance and they're getting a hint of that now.  Corporations conduct approximately 70% of the US government's intelligence functions. We've seen a shift so that, in many cases, well trained staff move from the public sector into private jobs because they're much more lucrative.  What happens, however, is that there is no oversight and no accountability in a lot of these actions so that even members of Congress are largely in the dark about how these corporations act.  And, as you mentioned with activists, a large part of what corporations do is guard against any outside criticism of their policies so that, for example, in addition to entering into contracts with the government, they may have their own internal intelligence units that collect data, photographs, they spy on activists who are outspoken -- many times, successful activists who've actually changed policies of, say, Burger King or, you know, work that the group PETA has done to raise awareness about how we treat animals.  So environmental activists, animal rights have been deemed top domestic terrorist threats by the government and really, I think, playing into fears people have about another terrorist attack unfortunately by branding US citizens and other people who are merely exercising in most cases their First Amendment right to free speech and free activities, the right to assemble and take grievances to the government, they're being punished, labeled as terrorists, vilified and this has what we call a chilling effect on the exercise of free speech.



And as Lily Tomlin long ago noted in the seventies, big business protects big business.  Some very dangerous things are being proposed.


Glenn Greenwald (SUBSTACK) points out:

The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting “terrorism” that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This trend shows no sign of receding as we move farther from the January 6 Capitol riot. The opposite is true: it is intensifying.

We have witnessed an orgy of censorship from Silicon Valley monopolies with calls for far more aggressive speech policing, a visibly militarized Washington, D.C. featuring a non-ironically named “Green Zone,” vows from the incoming president and his key allies for a new anti-domestic terrorism bill, and frequent accusations of “sedition,” “treason,” and “terrorism” against members of Congress and citizens. This is all driven by a radical expansion of the meaning of “incitement to violence.” It is accompanied by viral-on-social-media pleas that one work with the FBI to turn in one’s fellow citizens (See Something, Say Something!) and demands for a new system of domestic surveillance.

Underlying all of this are immediate insinuations that anyone questioning any of this must, by virtue of these doubts, harbor sympathy for the Terrorists and their neo-Nazi, white supremacist ideology. Liberals have spent so many years now in a tight alliance with neocons and the CIA that they are making the 2002 version of John Ashcroft look like the President of the (old-school) ACLU.

The more honest proponents of this new domestic War on Terror are explicitly admitting that they want to model it on the first one. A New York Times reporter noted on Monday that a “former intelligence official on PBS NewsHour” said “that the US should think about a ‘9/11 Commission’ for domestic extremism and consider applying some of the lessons from the fight against Al Qaeda here at home.” More amazingly, Gen. Stanley McChrystal — for years head of Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and the commander of the war in Afghanistan — explicitly compared that war to this new one, speaking to Yahoo News:

I did see a similar dynamic in the evolution of al-Qaida in Iraq, where a whole generation of angry Arab youth with very poor prospects followed a powerful leader who promised to take them back in time to a better place, and he led them to embrace an ideology that justified their violence. This is now happening in America….I think we’re much further along in this radicalization process, and facing a much deeper problem as a country, than most Americans realize.”

Anyone who, despite all this, still harbors lingering doubts that the Capitol riot is and will be the neoliberal 9/11, and that a new War on Terror is being implemented in its name, need only watch the two short video clips below, which will clear their doubts for good. It is like being catapulted by an unholy time machine back to Paul Wolfowitz’s 2002 messaging lab.



We stand up to efforts to curtail our rights or we accept what is imposed on us.  The PATRIOT Act was never overturned despite various politicians -- liars all of them -- insisting they were opposed to it.  Remember when Barack Obama was a candidate for president and he'd grand stand on the issue but then he went along renewing it over and over.  And don't pretend like the PATRIOT Act was a surprise or that it took years to realize the harm it was doing.  In 2002, the Center for Constitutional Rights' Nancy Chang's SILENCING POLITICAL DISSENT: HOW POST-SEPTEMBER 11 ANTI-TERRORISM MEASURES THREATEN OUR CIVIL LIBERTIES.  She wrote:


 

The antiterrosim measures discussed in this book have placed our civil liberties in jeopardy.  And because the "war on terrorism" -- of which these measures form a part -- is likely to become a permanent feature of American life, the task of reclaiming our civil liberties in the post-September 11 world will not be an easy one.  We must exercise our constitutionally protected rights of free speech and political association to protest antiterrorism measures that infringe on political and personal freedoms, organize public education campaigns, engage in grassroots, organizing, build broad coalitions, reach out to people of faith and immigrant communities, participate in voter education and registration drives, alert the mainstream and alternative press to our concerns, write letter to the editor for publiciation in our local newspapers, and seek information from the government under the Freedom of Information Act.  In addition, we must call upon the judiciary to serve as a check against executive and lesgislative measures that violate the Constitution.  And we must call upon Congress to play an oversight role over the executive branch, pass corrective legislation where needed, and appoint judges who are sensitive to the Bill of Rights.  

Our efforts must be directed not only at the federal level but at state and local governments as well.  Since September 11, more than a thousand antiterrorism measures have been proposed in state and local jurisdictions across the nation, and already a number of them have become law.  These measures threaten to criminalize speech and protest activities, limit the availability of public records, expand government surveillance powers, and promote participation in acts the legislature deems patriotic.  


People like Chip Pitts helped organize local efforts where We The People would attend city council meetings and attempt to get resolutions passed to oppose the government's seizure of your private information from public libraries.  There were many ways to fight back.  Few chose to fight.  This is an important issue and that's why we are focusing on it right now.  Before they pass more laws that destroy our rights, we need to be focusing on what's going on.


In her book WHAT IF, Shirley MacLaine notes:



More important than any of the aforementioned, what if the ''security'' measures have never been predominantly about security, but more about the purposeful dumbing-down of Americans, making us subservient to control and authority?  What if the point of amplifying fear is to render the population cooperative with its own individual captivity?  Fear breeds handing over control, and handing over control breeds cooperative dumbing-down/  In the name of protecting freeom and democracy, we've become prisoners of our own induced obedience.



The following sites updated:









Why do politicians have such a poor reputation?

First up, here's Jimmy Dore.



The internet will not be the internet once certain politicians -- AOC, for example -- have succeeded in destroying it. 

This is from Glenn Greenwald:

 

So many Senate Democrats - including arguably the most influential on such matters, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island - vowed in 2017 when they gave waiver to James Mattis (so he could stop Trump) that they would never give one again. Do you think they're keep their word?

 

 Use the link prior to find out but, here's a hint, Jack Reed's a hypocrite.

 

Do they not realize there is a public record?  Or are they just counting on AOC to dismantle the internet and hope no one remembers?

 

Politicians  have a lousy reputation because they earned that reputation.

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

 

Thursday, January 21, 2021.  Bombings slam Baghdad, US media gushes over Joe Biden.


This morning, Baghdad is slammed with bombings "in a busy commercial area near Baghdad’s al-Tayaran Square."  




Ghassan Adnan and Justin Malcolm (WALL STREET JOURNAL) report, "Twin suicide bombings ripped through a crowded marketplace in Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least 32 people and wounding at least 75 others in the first such attack in Iraq’s capital in more than two years."  The writers insist that "the explosions shattered a period of relative calm."  It hasn't been relatively calm in Iraq but it does provide cover for your outlet that's ignored the ongoing violence -- especially the violence aimed at the protesters -- when shocked readers see the story.  As XINHUA points out, "sporadic deadly incidents still occur in the war-ravaged country as IS remnants have since melted into urban areas or deserts and rugged areas, carrying out frequent guerilla attacks against security forces and civilians"  Samya Kullab and Qassim Abdul-Zahra (AP) note, "Blood smeared the floors of the busy market amid piles of clothes and shoes as survivors took stock of the disarray in the aftermath." The first bomb helped draw the crowd, the second one then went off.  Martin Chulov (GUARDIAN) explains, "The interior ministry said the first bomber had claimed he was ill and when crowds gathered to help, he detonated his bomb."  Aqeel Najm, Jomana Karadsheh, Kareem Khadder and Tamara Qiblawi (CNN) add:


Security forces say they pursued the two attackers before they blew themselves up. It was the first suicide attack to strike Baghdad in nearly two years.
The first bomber entered the marketplace and, pretending to be sick, asked for help, causing people to gather around him before he blew himself up, according to officials and state media. The second bomber then drove to the scene on a motorbike before detonating his explosive vest.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, though it bears the hallmarks of Sunni jihadi groups who have carried out numerous similar attacks in Iraq. Double bombings were common in the country during the height of its sectarian war between 2005 and 2007. 


ALJAZEERA's Abdelfattah Fayed states, "The injured were rushed to the nearby hospitals. Local reports suggest that the number of fatalities will rise as the large number of those injured are in very critical condition."  Ramadan Al Sherbini (GULF NEWS) notes, "Photos carried by Iraqi media showed bodies lying on the ground in the aftermath of the attack."  XINHUA reports:


Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul-Gheit on Thursday condemned in the strongest terms the twin suicide bombings at a crowded commercial area in Iraq's capital Baghdad.

"That terrorist attack is a heinous act that came at a very important time. It undoubtedly aimed to hinder Iraq's efforts to restore the country's security and stability and achieve the aspired economic reform," Aboul-Gheit said.


MIDDLE EAST MONITOR offers this context, "The latest bombings come just days after the government unanimously voted to postpone the country's general elections to October this year. They were scheduled for 6 June. Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi had pledged to hold early elections after taking office last year, to appease anti-government protesters demanding a reform of the country's political system and an end to rampant corruption and poor public services."


Among the many hideous moments on US TV yesterday?  The efforts to turn Bully Boy Bush into someone worthy of admiration.  The War Criminal is beloved by those who whore for corporations.  Hannibal Khoury Tweets:


Children are still getting blown-up in Iraq but CNN and Stephen Colbert want you to know what a cute and cuddly grandpa George Bush is
Red heart



 







Corporate whores are happy.  They spent yesterday ooh-ing and ahh-ing over aged debutante Joe Biden's coming out party.   The rest of the world?  Not so much.  Kooky | Destroyer of Mayo notes:


Palestine is not celebrating today Venezuela is not celebrating today Iran is not celebrating today Syria is not celebrating today Iraq is not celebrating today Cuba is not celebrating today Bolivia is not celebrating today Yemen is not celebrating today

Chile is not celebrating today Afghanistan is not celebrating today Honduras is not celebrating today


I'm not letting liberals enjoy this. There is nothing to enjoy, only the continuation of capitalist terror and hegemony

Also a preemptive response to liberals finding this: I'm Syrian, ask me about the Obama years

Victory hand


Yeah the new president is a war criminal who has terrorized the places I listed. Take your smart comments to other places


Joseph Kishore (WSWS) reports of the inauguration:


President Joseph Biden’s inaugural address yesterday was significant above all for its banality. Amidst an unprecedented political, social and economic crisis of the entire capitalist order, Biden delivered remarks filled with cliches, incoherent non sequiturs and the emptiest of abstractions.

One would not, of course, expect Biden to deliver a socialist speech. He is a capitalist politician assuming the position of “commander-in-chief” of the most powerful imperialist country. However, in the tradition of American politics, the inaugural address of the incoming president used to be an occasion for speaking in some form to the political situation and the policy of the incoming administration.

[. . .]

The poverty of Biden’s remarks is not just an intellectual failure. He knows full well that any hint at a significant shift in policy would spark a sell-off on the markets. As it was, the markets rose during his speech. In the minds of the political establishment and the media, this is the main factor in concluding that the speech was a great success. They were all somewhat richer at its conclusion than at its beginning.

Moreover, the political representatives of the ruling class, and particularly the Democratic Party, are acutely aware of the fact that any serious examination of reality—including the political and social forces behind the rise of fascism in America and the bipartisan policies that have produced the catastrophic spread of the pandemic—risks a social and political explosion that will threaten the entire capitalist order.

Biden’s appeal to “unity” is, ultimately, a desperate effort to cover over a massive social chasm. This chasm does not separate the Democrats from the Republicans, who, whatever their differences, both represent the same oligarchy. It is the unbridgeable division between the capitalist ruling elite, on the one hand, and the working class, on the other. It is the fear of the open eruption of this conflict that drives Biden to his abstractions.


 

Margaret Kimberley offered:


Every 4 years I suffer. I watch many people who I respect shed tears over a democrat winning or the first black president or Trump is gone and Harris is a woman, etc. But I don't care because I want a different society altogether.


ADDED: Glenn Greenwald Tweeted:


"The commentary from TV broadcasters across the board, all day long, was at times embarrassingly complimentary" -- The Washington Post's , with great understatement on yesterday's festivities and how the media covered them.


The following sites updated:



 

  • Thursday, January 21, 2021

    If they got this excited over his standing up to be sworn in . . .

    . . . imagine how giddy they're going to be when he has a bowel movement -- especially at his age.


    :D


    Credit to C.I.  She said that in the round-table for the gina & krista round-robin.  We all laughed.  I told her I was going to use it in my post.  


    And she's right, the press is acting like Joe Biden is the second coming of Christ.  It's appalling.  They're fawning over him and it's disgusting.


    Here's Jimmy Dore.



    Donald Trump didn't pardon Julian Assange.  He should have, but he didn't.  


    And if you're not getting just how bad things are and will be, grasp this, we had a glimmer of hope that Trump might pardon Julian.  We don't have any false hopes that War Hawk Corporatist Joe will pardon Julian -- or that he'll drop the pursuit of Julian.


    Joe Biden's no change.  He's more of the same and more of what destroyed the country.  


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

     Wednesday, January 20, 2021.  Donald to leave today, Joe to be sworn in.


    Today, Donald Trump's presidency ends.  It was four years of turmoil and nonsense -- from the press and from Donald.  He came into office a petty man and he leaves it that way as well.  Despite repeatedly insisting he was a menace to the world, Nancy Pelosi and Congressional Democrats were more than happy to back any war funding or corporate give aways while pretending there was a significant difference between themselves and Donald.


    He did cut the official number of US troops in half in Iraq.  The official number is now 2,500.  Other than that, not much can be said for President Donald.  Not much can be said that's nice.


    The key word for Donald remains "petty."  


    He never rose above petty.  In fairness to him and his egomania, he never rose to the level of Great Satan that so many 'faux' resistance persons -- among the people, in Congress, in press -- tried to insist he was.  


    And he created jobs.  


    Take Carl Bernstein, a vile and disgusting man (I say that as a friend of the late Nora Ephron's) who got to pose and preen as some sort of journalist.  Watergate was decades ago.  Bernstein did one article on the CIA infiltration of US media after that and then moved on to writing bad prose (and having fits that his ex-wife's novel was turned into a film).  Garbage Bernstein wasn't interested in truth then, no.  He didn't want the children to know how disgusting and unfit their father really was.  But the Trump presidency allowed Bernstein to show up regularly on MSNBC and be treated seriously -- as long as he toed the party line and claimed that each scandal -- real or imagined -- was, wait for it, worse than Watergate.


    No, they weren't.  And that only demonstrates what many have long known -- and what the film DICK parodied -- Carl didn't know a damn thing about Watergate.  Bob Woodward took him along for the ride.  He was the Oates to Bob's Hall, the Andrew to Bob's George Michael.  Carl clearly has no grasp of what Watergate was.  It wasn't just a break-in.  It was a conspiracy, an enemy's list and a hell of lot more.  It was government persecution of the American people.  


    But, again, Carl's not very smart and he has no life so he needed to be on TV.


    And if you ever needed to be on TV, Trump hatred was the way to go.  Failed comic Tom Arnold was a 'resistance' hero.  Remember that?  Michael Avenatti was a 'resistance' hero.  James I-Lied-To-Congress Clapper was a 'resistance' hero . . .


    So many scoundrels, so much cable TV time.


    The four years ended like a really bad DC superhero movie -- in the end, the villain never lived up to the build up.


    But he certainly was a wonderful distraction, wasn't he?


    Allowing for members of Congress to grandstand and preen -- while they told the American people that, in a pandemic, corporations were entitled to billions but the American people only deserved about $150 a month -- that's what the only stimulus check that arrived prior to December 25th averaged out to.  It allowed them to desecrate the Constitution and continue wars around the world while pretending that they had some moral standing and/or ethics.  


    Now Donald's leaving and it's 'time to heal.'


    How stupid do they think his supporters -- which includes nearly 75 million Americans who voted for him -- are?  There was no 'time to heal' after the 2016's election.  There were obstacles and hatred tossed out immediately.  The "honeymoon" period every new president traditionally gets?  Denied to Donald.  


    And now you have various whores ready to dance for their master.  Dickless Bruce Springsteen will trot around on a leash for Joe.  So will Jennifer Lopez.  I'm sorry, who in the world thinks Jennifer is a singer?  She was a dancer with a weak voice who had chart hits -- years and years ago.  As one desperate celebrity after another rushes to bow to empire, it becomes clear that the United States really needs some celebrities to announce that they won't perform at any presidential inauguariton -- no matter who is the president, no matter which party has the White House.  They whore themselves out.


    Donald has millions of admirers to this day.  But he never managed to win over anyone not already for him.  That's because he's so damn petty.


    He issued so may pardons -- including yesterday -- but not one for Ed Snowden.  Not one for Julian Assange.


    Ed?  I'd argue history will judge him a hero.  


    Julian?  There's no arguing.  He needed to be pardoned -- both for himself and also for what a possible US trial could mean to the press -- destroying a free press.l


    Had Donald the guts to pardon Julian, he would have had one historical note to applaud.  


    Instead, he's just a petty man who has no real accomplishments.  Cutting the troops in Iraq in half (officially, anyway)?  That's not getting all the US troops out of Iraq.


    He's got nothing.


    One historical moment -- and pardoning Julian would have been one -- would have allowed for some reconsideration of his presidency in the future.  How could he be so right about one thing (Assange) and so wrong about other things?


    That would have led historians to look at the way the media treated him -- unfairly and it wasn't journalism.  But for a deep dive like that to take place and matter, there would be a need for historians to explore.  And Donald's pettiness ensured that they had no reason to explore what he did have to face.  


    Will Joe Biden face that?


    It doesn't appear so.  The 'independent' press spent 2020 either ignoring Joe's scandals (the credible allegations made by Tara Reade; Hunter Biden under federal investigation) or dismissing them -- and usually dismissing them with what the campaign told them to say.


    Today, Joe Biden gets sworn in.  And we're supposed to be grateful that a War Hawk who is responsible for the slaughter of the Iraqi people is going to be president -- someone who in severe cognitive decline is going to be president.


    He's not going to seriously address the environment.  Possibly due to having one foot, an ankle, a calf, a knee and a huge portion of his upper leg already in the grave, Joe doesn't feel that climate change is an urgent issue.  


    His history of racism is appalling and maybe that'll take him down.  Barack Obama has repeatedly called out 'woke' culture and there's a reason for that: He himself couldn't have survived it had it been around when he was president.  His attacks on African-American fathers, for example, would have been loudly rebuked.  Can Joe survive "woke" America?


    He already has his defensive line up, doesn't he?  People like Ryan Grim (glad you paid attention to the hair tip, Ryan, you almost look like a real boy), Betsy Reed, Naomi Klein and assorted others.  And right behind them, in the second ranks, you've got the nutless Kyle Kulniksi who will scrape and bow before power because that's what you do -- if you're a coward and a whore.  Demands?  No, no, no says nutless Kyle.  (Nuts does not invoke power in this paragraph -- I don't use that metaphor and never have.  I'm referring to Kyle's endless podcasts about his balls.  And after awhile, you have to start wondering if he can't stop talking about them because he really doesn't have them?)


    The corporate press will likely go back to sleep and just spout the usual lines from government officials as fact -- the way they did long before Donald.  


    ADDED at 1:25 PM EST on 1/20/21 David Sirota Tweeted:


    NEWS: Biden's new health care plan lifted its proposals from insurance lobbyists' letter - it would provide lucrative subsidies to insurers that pumped cash into the 2020 election. It avoids a promised public option & Dem legislation to expand Medicare.


    Nothing really changed in the last four years -- Barack's points and plans were upped by Donald Trump.  Nothing really change in the last four years except a lot of innocents were murdered and harmed and a lot of time that could have been spent addressing climate change got wasted.


    That's all that happened.


    But garbage like Paul Mulshine serve up nonsense like "Donald Trump’s legacy: He turned Washington, D.C., into Baghdad, Iraq."  No, he didn't.  The riot that took place does not compare to the slaughter in Iraq.  The slaughter that continues today or the slaughter that left corpses in the street or the slaughter when the US backed the Shi'ite death squads that set out to 'cleanse' Baghdad.  Paul Mulshine is garbage because he wants to pretend that DC is Baghdad.  He has no idea what Baghdad became due to the US-led invasion.  It's insulting to the Iraqi people to pretend that DC has been turned into Baghdad.  


    But drama queens need their drama, don't they?  Sad because what journalism is supposed to offer is perspective and context.  We all survived without it for the last four years so maybe we'll make it through four more?


    ADDED at 1:25 pm 1/20/21, Glenn Greenwald Tweeted:

    If you're in the national press and will be on TV at any point today and being to feel the need to weep joyously, just hold it in until you find a private place. Nobody is expecting any adversarial coverage over the next 4 years, but it's just a matter of personal dignity.
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    Ava and I did our TV piece on Sunday.  We didn't have time to update it.  We'll look over it at some point today and if it needs a note "This was written Sunday" we'll add that.  The following sites updated: