Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

What the United States government is doing to Chelsea Manning is absolutely disgraceful.  First off, what she did, the crime she served so many years in jail for, was actually an act of extreme heroism.  Does anyone think we should not have known that American soldiers were murdering Iraqi civilians for shits and giggles?

But, they threw her in jail for it.  Obama did eventually do the right thing by pardoning her, although he sure waited long enough to do it.
Now, she’s back in jail.  Groups monitoring this say she’s back in solitary confinement, which is horrifying.  I’m surprised she hasn’t suffered brain damage by now, she’s spent so much time in solitary.
This time there isn’t even a charge except, I guess, contempt of court maybe, because she’s refusing to testify in the Wikileaks case.  I don’t understand why she doesn’t agree to testify and then be real forgetful on the stand.  Major league politicians have huge lapses of memory when they are up on that stand, and most of them did NOT spend years in solitary confinement.
I suppose she has a high standard of principles and honor.  Higher than me, at any rate.  I sit here and right a blog, but I’m not risking jail time.
Secondly, WHAT Wikileaks case?  Wikileaks is not located in the U.S., so the U.S. has no jurisdiction, and they  are a news source, meaning they shouldn’t have to give up their sources.  In addition to that, Wikileaks are the good guys.  It’s the U.S. government that’s behind all the killing.
The main thing that bothers me about this case, though, is that it’s clearly double jeopardy, which is illegal.  She’s served time, she’s been pardoned, that should be an end on it.  Yes, I know, she’s not actually charged with a crime this time (which makes it worse, not better), they’re just holding her until she testifies.  Technically.  It’s still all about Wikileaks, and it’s nothing but pure shit and vindictiveness.

I’ve been watching OA with the wife, and it’s a trying experience.  First, I’m not sure if I like the show or not.  I do find it sort of compelling, but it’s the slowest goddamned development I’ve even seen in a TV show.  I started watching because the blurbs said ‘other dimension’ and that is a theme with serious potential.  It was done, very badly, in Sliders and ever since then I have thought “That had the potential to be a good series if it hadn’t starred that puke Jerry O’Connell and the fat British dude who just seemed to have wandered onto the wrong set.  And, if the writing wasn’t shit.”  Well, The OA is about as different from Sliders as it’s possible, I’ll give it that.
They don’t actually start jumping dimensions until season two, and then they do it by means of that ridiculous 5 movement chicken dance, which the writers may have hoped people would pick up and it would be a thing, but it’s just the dorkiest looking thing in the world and, apparently, it not only can help you change dimensions, it can also cure Lou Gehrig’s disease, bring people back from the dead, and prevent school shootings.
It’s fascinating, but there is just too much time spent on people looking depressed and angsty, while the music plays.
Also, Helena keeps asking questions.  I give her the best answer I can, and she asks another.  She asks again, and my answer gets a little sharper, and then she’s like “Stop yelling at me!”  But, at least we’ve found a program we can watch together.  She refuses to even look at Star Trek.

We will never see the Mueller Report, so perhaps it’s a bit presumptuous of me to write about it, but that is true of everybody writing everywhere, and this is something that needs to be discussed.
It’s over, it has been submitted to the Attorney General, and there is no proof that Trump colluded with Russia to help him win the election.  On that score, Trump is completely vindicated, and the people hollering “Collusion!” all look like fools.
Of course, the results of the report are available to congress, and I hope that some eagle-eyed congresspeople (and I do hope that it’s more than just Ocasio-Cortez – she is awesome but she can’t truly be expected to do everything on her own) look through it and find some grounds for impeachment they can make stick.  Using the presidency for personal profit, general incompetence, insanity, whatever.
But, as far as Mueller and the DNC are concerned, I suspect they have achieved their true goal.  That’s because I suspect that their goal, from the beginning, was twofold:  to give Hillary Clinton an excuse for having lost the most unloseable election ever, and to delay impeachment for long enough that Nancy Pelosi and others could say “There is no need to impeach now.  The next election is right around the corner.”
I’m sure their calculations included the length of his term – we’re just a couple of months shy of the halfway mark – and the Democratic primary schedule.
I imagine it’s the reason Elizabeth Warren announced her candidacy so early.
It could be I’m being paranoid and drawing lines between dots where there need be no lines, but nonetheless, this is where we find ourselves.  No actual charge of treason, and a Democratic party that doesn’t want to impeach for anything less.

There are one issue candidates, and there are candidates who have policies on all the issues, and then there is Andrew Yang.  I guess he just got tired of being known as the UBI candidate, since nobody knows what he’s on about, even though it’s simple.  The government gives everybody free money.  I’m not opposed to it.  I think it should be a really big amount, like everybody gets a million dollars.
Still, somehow the issue has not gained traction.  Sure, his followers have a catchy name. The Yang Gang,  it’s sort of like Bernie Bros but not as original.  He’s had his name in the news, and he sometimes gets 3 or 4% in polls, which is better than a lot of the announced candidates.
So, he’s branching out.  He’s got a new issue, and this is a game changer.  He is anti-circumcision.  Here’s a link to an article about it.
I don’t know.  I think he’s just lost all credibility, and there will be an endless series of dick jokes (Yang rhymes with Wang).  It will be like Anthony Weiner all over again.

But, I have misjudged public opinion before.  What if there is a huge number of people who are rabidly against circumcision (would that make them anti-semitic?)  What if they are as ubiquitous as lovers of cats, and we’d never realized it before because the subject never actually came up.  Could he surge to the nomination on the anti-circumcision vote, the way Trump won his nomination on promises of building a rather ludicrous wall?

Actually, it probably won’t make much of a difference either way.  If Andrew Yang doesn’t want to talk about Medicare for All, and a Green New Deal, and getting money out of politics, then he is running in the wrong year.

There was a woman recently who was speaking at a Trump rally and said something along the lines of “I never thought I’d support a dictator, but if there is one, I hope it’s Trump” which is kind of incoherent if you analyze it, but if you don’t it’s real clear what she meant.  And the crowd cheered.

Trump was absolutely right when he said he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and he wouldn’t lose votes.  There is nothing these people won’t accept from him.  Take his recent comments about John McCain, for example.

“I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted, which as president I had to approve.  I don’t care about this. I didn’t get a thank you. That’s O.K. We sent him on the way, but I wasn’t a fan of John McCain.”

How much is wrong with this statement?  A lot.  Pretty much everything, really.  Let’s take it point by point.

“I gave him the kind of funeral he wanted.”  Trump didn’t give anything to anybody.  He didn’t even attend.

“, which, as president I had to approve.”  No, he didn’t.  The National Cathedral, where the funeral took place, said immediately that that’s not true.  No presidential permission was required, asked for, or given.

“I don’t care about this.”  Whenever somebody says “I don’t care about this” you can be damn sure they care about it a lot.  The things people really don’t care about, they don’t even mention, because they don’t care.

“I didn’t get a thank you.”  Well, of course he didn’t.  McCain, being already fucking dead, could hardly thank him for the lovely funeral.  Or perhaps Trump was expecting a thank you from Cindy McCain, or Meghan.  Maybe they could have thanked him for not attending, I suppose.  That was kind of a favor.  In any event, even if somebody has arranged a funeral (which we have already ascertained Trump did not), it would be kind of tacky to complain about not being thanked.  The family has other things to think about.  Let it go.

“That’s O.K.”  See “I don’t care about this.”  Same thing.

“We sent him on the way.”  Now, there’s a cheerful euphemism.
“But I wasn’t a fan of John McCain.”  Well, actually, neither was I.  But he’s been dead for about 8 months now, and I almost never even think about him.  I certainly wouldn’t go out of my way to criticize him (and his family).  Compared to Donald Trump, he was a goddamned paragon of virtue.

It was an absurd statement on every level.  But, will he lose votes over it?  Probably not a single one.  He could stand in the middle of 5th avenue and kill the first person to pass by and he wouldn’t lose votes.  His supporters are just that deluded.