John Bezzini, author of Buzz’s Beatles Book Blog, recently brought to our attention a rare recording and book involving The Iveys, the Apple Records band that eventually was renamed Badfinger. The book was titled “Young London: Permissive Paradise,” a look … Continue reading
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The evil genius of clown politics George Santos (if that is his name) is more than a Strangelovian political farce. More than a Republican “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Bum.” Merely laughing at him, writes The Atlantic‘s David Graham, is missing the darker implications for our politics. Do not let your amusement, he warns, “eclipse the horror of such a candidate reaching office and the consequences for Congress and the American political system’s remaining shreds of repute.” Yes, Santos (if that is his name) duped voters in his district. Yes, he ought to be investigated for laws he may have broken in running. But the fact of his being elected just two years after a violent insurrection instigated over bogus allegations of a stolen election adds an element of tragedy. The fact that Santos (if that is his name) ran and won election to the U.S. House as an even phonier business success than Donald J.
Remember the fuss over a different one? The twice-impeached, much-investigated instigator of the Jan. 6 insurrection was in North Carolina on Saturday for the memorial service of Ineitha Lynette Hardaway, a.k.a. “Diamond” of the right-wing political duo Diamond and Silk. The memorial service at Fayetteville’s Crown Theater was not the political rally for himself that Donald Trump had hoped. Size matters to him. He didn’t get it. The Fayetteville Observer reports that just over 150 people attended the event in the theater that holds 2,400. Donald Trump’s audience was smaller and the event took longer than he’d expected. Still, the memorial service did resemble a Trump rally. Yes, the pillow guy was at Hardaway’s funeral … to praise Donald Trump. Trump’s eulogy had plenty of his usual shtick. Those of a certain age will recall what a fuss Republicans and conservative pundits raised in 2002 over the memorial service for Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota.
For those of you who remember the embarrassment of the Times coverage of the “Whitewater” scandal, it must seem like déjà vu all over again. It does to me. The paper’s editors are trying, and I mean really trying, to make the Biden classified documents issue a thing. And I mean a grave thing. The stage was ably set by the subject line of the email I received blasting out their latest deep dive on the story: “Inside Biden’s 68 days of silence.” It’s this like a Gabriel García Márquez homage? I mean good lord. Are we really doing this again? Of course we are. It’s how they roll. I took the liberty of a short set of annotations. That’s from Josh Marshall who does an excellent job of analyzing the rapidly escalating hysteria around Joe Biden’s classified documents. I, of course, remember Whitewater as I’m sure quite a few of you do too.
The right wing media is making a huge deal out of Chief of Staff Ron Klain’s resignation, insisting that it has something to do with the document pseudo-scandal. The mainstream media hasn’t gone there yet, merely juxtaposing the two events in ways that insinuate without saying it. As a matter of fact, Klain had said he was resigning some months back and then they agreed that he would stay on for a while longer. It has nothing to do with the documents. And let’s be clear about something, if we’re going to compare Biden and Trump, take a look at the turnover, particularly how many of his top staff resigned under pressure, in the first two years of his administration: Set out below is a list of the senior level departures from the executive office of the president since the beginning of the Trump administration (each of the 65 “A Team” positions is only counted once toward the turnover rate, thus, this chart only includes the first person to hold/depart a given position).
How can we respond to a world of cascading disasters? Over the past past few years we’ve had to deal with all sorts of new or resurgent evils, including climate catastrophe, Covid and the global assault on democracy. That’s been made harder by the fact that our political leaders (and plenty of their supporters) have […]
This piece in the NY Times discussing the abortion bans is depressingly predictable. Even where there are exceptions written into the law they won’t perform abortions: Last summer, a Mississippi woman sought an abortion after, she said, a friend had raped her. Her state prohibits most abortions but allows them for rape victims. Yet she could not find a doctor to provide one. In September, an Indiana woman learned that a fetal defect meant her baby would die shortly after birth, if not sooner. Her state’s abortion ban included an exception for such cases, but she was referred to Illinois or Michigan. An Ohio woman carrying triplets faced a high risk of dangerous complications, including delivering too early. When she tried to get an abortion in September through Ohio’s exception for patients with a medical need, she was turned away. The abortion bans enacted in about half the states since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June do not prohibit abortion entirely. Most make exceptions in certain circumstances, commonly to protect the health or life of the patient, or in the case of rape or incest.
Earlier this week, Tucker Carlson cheered on the House Republicans’ decision to allow smoking in the Capitol again, as you can see above. I know he’s just trying to be cutesy transgressive and own the libs but it’s sick anyway. It appears that this is going to be a new crusade: That’s not just about “freedom” to kill yourself with cancer. He’s portraying it as good for you. Even the vaccine and mask deniers don’t suggest that getting COVID is fun. But hey, why not get everyone using meth or cocaine.? Of course they don’t give other people cancer which I guess Tucker thinks must be one of the “fun” aspects of it. Enjoy your cancer folks! Is it just me or is he sounding crazier and crazier? I honestly think that the number of people who want to re-introduce smoking cigarettes into our culture is pretty small. Only 12% of population smokes now. Way more people use cannabis. WTH is this??
This is why it’s not something you should want. We don’t know anything a out the Special Counsel in the Biden case except that Trump appointed him as US Attorney. And this is not reassuring: At the Justice Department, Hur worked with Rosenstein on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the former deputy attorney general told CNN. Hur “was my point person and he had biweekly meetings with Mueller’s team and then briefed me on the progress of the Russian special counsel investigation,” Rosenstein said. “So he has seen that firsthand and he knows that you need not to be influenced by politics and make decisions based on fact and the law and the Department of Justice policy, and I think we can count on Rob to do that.” Rosenstein added: “Rob, like a lot of people I worked with at DOJ, believes it is important to engage in public service and feels a sense of responsibility.
It couldn’t have something to do with the Russia investigation, could it? Many people have wondered if Trump’s document haul had to do with his desire to publish classified information about the Russia investigation. After all, he said he was going to do it. Here’s a scoop from Murray Waas about the Special Counsel investigation: On the eve of Donald Trump’s last day in office as President, Trump sent a memo to his attorney general, and also the directors of National Intelligence and the CIA, directing them to declassify thousands of pages of highly classified government papers pertaining to the FBI’s investigation into the Russian Federation’s covert intervention into the 2016 US presidential election to help elect Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton. But Trump was stymied in his efforts to make the records public, leading the outgoing president to rage to aides that the documents would never see the light of day.