https://www.counterpunch.org/author/jeffrey-st-clair/
~~ recommended by newestbeginning ~~
(this is St. Clair's weekly summary of the freaky things going on in the world. Grab your coffee and sit back - it is a LOT... )
“A populace that is chloroformed day and night by TV stations like Fox News could do with inoculation by poetry. Obviously, poetry can’t be administered like an injection, but it does constitute a boost to the capacity for discrimination and resistance.”
– Seamus Heaney
I gave up long ago on the utility of psychoanalyzing Trump. His pathologies seem so all-encompassing and theatrical as to defy interpretation, even by anti-analysts like RD Laing and Thomas Szasz. But watching Trump in quick succession at the Kirk memorial, the Tylenol press conference and the UN General Assembly, he seemed like a personality in the midst of physical and mental breakdown. Not a crackup, so much as a kind of psychological entropy that is finally beginning to splinter a subject that it’s pawed and scratched the surface of for decades.
The body slumps. The face sags. The loose skin of the throat droops over the collar and onto the tie. The voice speaks in unnatural cadences that don’t harmonize with the often slurred words it tries to pronounce. The volume rises and falls: a blurt, a grunt, a pneumatic whisper. Many of the sentences die out in mid-stream. Others don’t seem to end. More and more often, the thoughts refuse to connect and the voice ends up talking in circles or figure eights. Only the bluster still breaks through. Here’s a narcissist staring into a cracked mirror, no longer sure he’s still in love with the only thing he’s ever really loved: his own image. The mind seems frightened by shadows. Everything is conspiring against him: wife, escalator, Secret Service, teleprompter, ghost of Epstein. Of course, as the Pretenders sang, “It’s a thin line between love and hate.”
Hate is the dominant theme. It spreads through everything Trump says, like the venom of a pit viper. And not just the political hate for his enemies, who he sees behind every corner, that he bragged about at Kirk’s funeral or the person hate that he’s incubated all his life for immigrants, blacks, independent women, academics, Europeans, trans people and greens. But the deeper hate, the hate that is eating him up from the inside and is now showing in his face, his blackening hand, his bent posture, his precarious gait, his tremulous voice, his fraying memory, for the fact that he is only liked by people he hates and hated by the people whose approval he’s desired all his life. His hatred has become self-consuming.
Click here to read Un-Hinged at the UN my annotations of Trump’s speech at the UN General Assembly.
+++
+ Paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep…”The Secret Service is involved!”
+ Ishaan Tharoor, foreign affairs columnist for the Washington Post: “A senior foreign diplomat posted at the UN texts me: “This man is stark, raving mad. Do Americans not see how embarrassing this is?”
+ Even Trump’s eulogies are always about himself: “Charlie did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents. And I don’t want the best for them. I can’t stand my opponents.”
+ As if to prove his point, a couple of days later, Trump went off script during a speech at Mt. Vernon, telling his audience why they shouldn’t have any sympathy for a man with Stage 4 cancer, while he encourages his Justice Department to go after anyone who disparages Charlie Kirk: “Very evil and mean Biden. You know, Biden has always been an evil guy, but he has never been a smart guy. Even 30, 40 years ago, he was stupid. But Biden has always been a mean son of a bi*ch… He’s not doing well right now. So when you start feeling sorry for him, remember that he’s a bad person.”
+ Ned Price: “On a single Saturday in September:
–Trump instructed his AG to go after specific political enemies.
–We learned that his DOJ ended an investigation into his border czar, who was caught on camera taking a $50k cash bribe.
–His Pentagon top brass threatened to expel journalists who report info not cleared by them.
–His WH spoke to a shady deal that will see TikTok in the hands of a consortium of GOP mega-donors.
–Trump threatened “bad things” if we don’t re-take Bagram AFB.
–His most senior counterterrorism official is in a Twitter spat with Laura Loomer.”
+ Politically, Trump’s in freefall and it’s hard to see how his bizarre rants this week will stem the collapse. Trump’s support is crumbling even in some of the reddest of red states. These are Trump’s approval/disapproval ratings in the states that Trump won in 2024, according to a tracking poll by the Economist…
ID +31
WY +19
WV +14
TN + 7
Mt +6
AR + 4
AL +3.8
MISS +3.3
KY + 2.7
UT +1.4
ND +1
OK -2
SD-3.6
LA -4.1
NE -4.2
AK -4.8
SC -6
IN -6.7
FL- 7.4
OH -7.6
IO -8.4
KS -8.9
MO -9.3
GA -10.8
PA -10.8
AZ -11.3
NV -14.1
WI -16
MI -16.7
TX -17.7
+++
+ Edward Hip came to the US from Guatemala 22 years ago and has lived here ever since. Hip is married to an American citizen and is the father of two children, including a 5-year-old girl, who is autistic.
Last week, Hip called his wife from his car and told her he thought he was being followed by ICE. His daughter was in the car with him. Hip drove home, parked the car in the lot and managed to get into his house in Leominster, Massachusetts. But the ICE agents grabbed his daughter and held her hostage, using the frightened young girl as bait to pressure Hip to surrender.
A video of the incident shows the young girl sitting on the curb next to a black ICE van, surrounded by armed immigration agents. She’s holding a bottle. Her mother can be heard saying, “They took my daughter, she’s 5 years old! She has autism spectrum. Give me my daughter back!”
Meanwhile, an ICE agent tells Hip, “Is that your daughter? Come here so I can see those IDs.”
Hip replies: “Hey, I can give it through the door.”
The agent shakes his head and tells Hip, while pointing at the ground in front of him, “You can give it right here.”
Hip’s wife said that “the agents threatened us, that if we did not open the door in 15 minutes, they would enter the house.”
Eventually, the local Leominster police showed up, took Hip’s daughter from the ICE agents and returned her to her mother. Then ICE left the scene.
Two days later, ICE returned to the Hip house. A neighbor, Liz Roman, described the raid: “They used bounty hunters and agents without a court order. They had them cornered. They went out behind the house and they tried to get there through our window.” They eventually abducted Hip and took him to the ICE detention center in Plymouth, where he remains. Hip’s wife told Telemundo: “Officers came out behind my house, arrested him, took him away. We are not criminals.”
+ On August 21, Escobar Molina was walking from his apartment in Northwest DC to his truck, preparing to go to work, when two federal vehicles pulled up near him. Armed and masked agents got out of the cars and grabbed Molina by the arms and legs. The agents didn’t identify themselves. Molina was immediately handcuffed and repeatedly called an “illegal.” The agents didn’t ask Molina for identification, where he lived or even what his name was before they detained him. As they dragged him to one of the ICE vehicles, Molina said, “I have papers.” One of the agents snapped, “No, you don’t. You’re an illegal.” After he was stuffed into the van, Molina said again he “had papers,” proving he was a legal resident. The driver of the van turned toward him and yelled, “Shut up, bitch! You’re an illegal.” Molina was taken to the ICE processing center across the Potomac in Chantilly, Virginia, where he was kept overnight.
A native of El Salvador, Escobar Molina is 47 years old and has lived in DC since 2000. He has an 18-year-old son who is an American citizen. Molina has no criminal record and was awarded Temporary Protective Status in 2001, which gave him the right to live and work legally in the US. The morning after his illegal arrest, the supervisor of the ICE facility in Chantilly realized the arresting agents’ “mistake” and released Molina from custody.
Molina was clearly a victim of racial profiling by lawless federal agents who made no attempt to determine his identity, legal status or ties to the community where he’d lived productively for a quarter of a century. He was just another body to meet Stephen Miller and Tom Homan’s daily quotas. As such, Molina has joined a class action lawsuit challenging ICE’s policy of warrantless arrests in the DC area, many of which take place without probable cause and are based almost exclusively on the target’s presumed race or ethnicity.
+ An ICE agent in Maryland, who’d just tackled to the pavement a man who yelled, “I’m an American!”, aims his gun at people who are filming him violate someone’s constitutional rights…
+ On September 12, an ICE agent shot and killed Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez during an immigration in Franklin Park, a suburb of Chicago. The original story told by ICE was that when federal agents tried to detain Villegas-Gonzalez, he rammed them with his car, hitting one of the agents and dragging him down the street. The agent feared for his life and shot and killed Villegas-Gonzalez, as his car crashed into a cargo truck. ICE officials claimed that the agent who killed Villegas-Gonzales “suffered multiple” and “serious injuries.” Kristi Noem posted on X that”His life was put at risk and he sustained serious injuries.”
But video released by the Franklin Park Police Department from the camera of a local officer who arrived at the scene records the injured officer saying his injury was “nothing major.” His partner is heard saying, the injured officer was “dragged a little bit” and had “a left knee injury and some lacerations to his hands.”
Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez was 38 years old when he was killed. He was born in Michoacán, Mexico and worked as a cook in Franklin Park. He was dropping his kids, who are American citizens, off at day care at the time of the raid. He had lived in the US for more than 20 years and was highly regarded as a good, family-oriented man by his neighbors. Witnesses say he was driving away from, not at, the ICE officers when he was shot.
+ At the Broadview, Illinois, protests against ICE this weekend, this woman was shot in the chest with a “non-lethal” bullet, slammed to the pavement and put in an illegal chokehold by ICE agents in full-body armor, who she posed no threat to…
This show of political ultra-violence is coming soon to a city near you.
+ ICE raided a group of workers replacing a roof in Naperville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The masked agents knocked down the workers’ ladders, leaving at least four men trapped on the roof. One of the men was seriously injured when he jumped down. “Two agents chased one guy down our neighborhood street with guns drawn,” the homeowner said. “This is a home, they surrounded with guns. I have children!”
All five of the men have documents to legally live and work in the U.S.
“All workers were rounded up and just taken away indiscriminately,” said the homeowner. “There was no checking.”
+ New York State Assembly member Robert Carroll urged Gov. Kathy Hochul to use her power to shut off the electricity at 26 Federal Plaza as a way to shut down ICE kidnappings & detainments. Carroll said that if ICE is going to escalate, then people need to escalate against ICE as well: “We need to change the script. We need to escalate this. Because clearly what we’re doing right now is not stopping the inhumane, un-American and illegal activity that is happening in this building.”
+ Last month, ICE agents pulled two firefighters off the line who were battling the Bear Gulch fire on the Olympic Peninsula. After spending weeks in ICE detention, Rigoberto Hernandez Hernandez, 23, a wildland firefighter from Oregon, has finally been released and is back home. ICE has yet to offer a reason for why he was arrested and held for a month.
+ Former Washington Post investigative reporter, Carol Leonig broke a major story for MSNBC this week, which was soon backed up by reports in the New York Times and a couple of days later by her former paper, that Trump border czar Tom Homan was under criminal investigation for potential bribery and claims he would steer federal contracts in the new administration. Undercover FBI agents recorded him accepting $50,000 in cash stuffed in a bag from the Cava Grill. Homan says he did “nothing illegal.”
+ DHS Secretary Kristi Noem pushed hard to land the number two spot on the Trump ticket. Then Noem’s book came out, where she bragged about shooting her puppy, Cricket, in the head and dumping its body in a gravel pit. When Trump heard her account of this act of savagery, he turned to Don Jr. and said, “That’s not good, at all. Even you wouldn’t kill a dog and you kill everything.”
+ Kristi the Puppy Killer appointed 28-year-old Madison Sheahan as Deputy Director of ICE. When asked whether she thought she was qualified for the job, Sheehan responded: “I absolutely think I’m qualified for the job. Because at the end of the day, what really makes anybody qualified for any job?”
+ Federal Judge William Smith ruled on Wednesday that the Trump administration’s attempt to coerce states into complying with its immigration enforcement actions in order to receive federal disaster aid is illegal and unconstitutional.
+ “Do you think the Trump admin should be using Kirk’s death as a way to silence political opponents?”
No: 80%
Yes: 7%Polling USA.
That 7% is carrying a lot of weight in the country right now…
+++
+ Either Trump has now done a complete 180 on Ukraine or, more likely, this is just a screenshot of a split-second in time of a presidential windbag, I mean mill, in rotation…
+ Trump: “We’re actually making money off the Russia-Ukraine war because NATO is buying our equipment.” “War profiteer” used to be one of the worst things you could call someone, now boys raised in the Manosphere will want to grow up to become one…PragueU will probably start offering courses in War Profiteering.
+ Trump wrote on his social media account this week: “If Afghanistan doesn’t give Bagram Airbase back to those who built it, the United States of America, BAD THINGS ARE GOING TO HAPPEN!! President DJT”
+ To the US, again, just as “bad things” have happened to every other country that has invaded (or re-invaded) Afghanistan.
+ Apropos of Trump’s vow to reinvade Afghanistan and seize control of the Bagram Air/Torture Base…
+ Can’t forgive college loan debt of American students or medical debt of sick Americans, but can bail out an Argentina bankrupted by the gonzo libertarian, political weirdo and now welfare queen Javier Milei: “The Trump administration is also willing to provide Argentina with credit via the Treasury’s exchange stabilization fund and to buy Argentina’s dollar bonds, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote Wednesday on X. “The Trump administration is also willing to provide Argentina with credit via the Treasury’s exchange stabilization fund and to buy Argentina’s dollar bonds.”
+ 15 million people are going to be kicked off of Medicaid, hundreds of rural hospitals are closing, but…Scott Bessent on Argentina: “The plan is as long as President Milei continues with his strong economic policies to help him, to bridge him to the election, we are not going to let a disequilibrium in the market cause a backup in his substantial economic reforms.” Gives fresh meaning to “America first.”
+ Nikolas Sarkozy joins Pétain, the Nazi collaborator, as the only two French presidents sent to prison.
+ Now do HRC for turning Libya into a slave-trading state…
Colombian President Gustavo Petro on Trump’s drone extrajudicial strikes on boats in the Caribbean: “Drug traffickers live in Miami, New York, Paris, Madrid, and Dubai. Many have blue eyes and blond hair, and they don’t live on the boats where the missiles fall. Drug traffickers live next to Trump’s house in Miami.”
Forrest Hylton on the fall of Bolsonaro: “The fishermen at Porto da Barra agreed that the verdict was historic and celebrated all weekend. They have been in an uproar over Trump for weeks now. Some of the men who carry umbrellas and chairs down to the beach told me that Brazil’s largest organised crime faction had finally gone down; they, too, talk about how Trump needs to be put in his place. There was much mirth at the thought of Bolsonaro’s life in prison.”
+++
+ Trump on gas prices: “Our pricing is way down. We’re gonna be close to $2 a gallon very soon.”
+ According to the AAA, the national average price for a gallon of regular today is $3.16 a gallon. Here in Oregon, it’s $4.22 a gallon.
+ Will they offer to take the death penalty off the table if the shooter claims he was a card-carrying member of Antifa, who read passages from the Grundisse every night before going to bed…
+ A federal judge has ordered the University of South Dakota to reinstate Philip Michael Hook, a tenured professor who posted criticism of Charlie Kirk on his Facebook page the day of the shooting, finding the action likely violated the First Amendment. A few hours after Kirk was shot, Hook posted this to his Facebook page:
Okay. I don’t give a flying f*** about this Kirk person. Apparently, he was a hate spreading Nazi. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the idiotic right fringe to even know who he was. I’m sorry for his family that he was a hate spreading Nazi and got killed. I’m sure they deserved better. Maybe good people could now enter their lives. But geez, where was all this concern when the politicians in Minnesota were shot? And the school shootings? And Capitol Police? I have no thoughts or prayers for this hate spreading Nazi. A shrug, maybe.
A couple of hours later, Hook deleted the message and made a second post. The second post stated:
Apparently, my frustration with the sudden onslaught of coverage concerning a guy shot today led to a post I mow [sic] regret posting. I’m sure many folks fully understood my premise, but the simple fact that some were offended led me to remove the post. I extend this public apology to those who were offended. Om Shanti.
Two days later, Hook was publicly denounced by the Speaker of the South Dakota House, Jon Hansen, and the Governor, Larry Rhoden, both of whom called for Hook’s firing. That same day, Hook received a letter from his dean, Bruce Kelley, informing him of the university’s intention to terminate his contract. In her ruling, Karen Schreier found that the university’s move to fire Hook over Facebook posts that did not disrupt activities on campus violated his First Amendment right to free speech.
+ The Washington Post’s letter firing Karen Attiah, the last black staff writer in the paper’s once venerable Op-Ed section, is crazy enough to have been dictated by Donald Trump. Perhaps it was…
+ Matthew Segal (Civil Rights litigator): “In my opinion, when companies or institutions cave to Trump despite the law being on their side, they are not misunderstanding the law; they are making educated guesses that the U.S. is heading in a direction where, in practice, the law won’t matter.”
+ In the wake of news that the Orem shooter had a trans housemate, with whom he may have been in a relationship, the Trump administration is moving to crack down on transgender activists, slotting them into the catchall category of “gender ideology extremism.”
+ Even transphobe JK Rowling couldn’t come up with this plot twist…
FOX NEWS: The militant transgender movement, is that a domestic terrorist threat?
JD VANCE: If you are encouraging people to commit acts of violence against the US government or against your fellow Americans, absolutely. You’re involved in a terrorist movement.
+ Trump on why he’s willing to shut down the government:
They want to have transgender for everybody. These people are crazy–the Democrats. So if it has to shut down, it’ll have to shut down. But they’re the ones that are shutting down the government.
+ I don’t much like George Orwell for snitching out so many of his former friends to MI-5 as communists and subversives in 1949, so I usually refrain from mentioning his name in this kind of context. But labeling transgender people as a terrorist threat to the nation is truly an Orwellian reversal of what’s really going on out there…
+ In July, Shane Tamura entered the building at 345 Park Avenue in Manhattan that houses the headquarters of the NFL and opened fire with an AR-15, killing four people before committing suicide. In a note, Tamura said he believed that he suffered from CTE from years of playing football and wanted his brain examined. Autopsy results released this week by the NYPD showed “unambiguous evidence” of CTE in Tamura’s brain tissue. Will Trump, who recently described efforts by the league to reduce such injuries as “sissy football,” now designate former football players with brain damage as “nihilistic violent extremists?”
+ Speaking of political violence…Last week, a Fox host called for summary executions of homeless and mentally ill people. Now Ingraham is encouraging ICE to brutalize Democratic Party politicians…
+ Jeremy Fistel, a white man from Plano, Texas, had some very specific and very depraved fantasies about how he wanted Zohran Mamdani to be killed, including, “I’d love to see an IDF bullet go through your skull.” Pretty sure Mr. Fistel is not a card-carrying member of ANTIFA.
+ Trump proclaimed this week that negative press (about him) is no longer “free speech”: “When somebody is given, uh, 97 percent of the stories are bad about them, that’s no longer free speech, that’s just cheating, and they become members of the Democrat National Committee that’s what they are, the networks, in my opinion. They’re just offshoots of the Democrat National Committee.” Meanwhile, the Pentagon announced that it will require reporters “to pledge they won’t gather any information — even unclassified — that hasn’t been expressly authorized for release and will revoke the press credentials of those who do not obey.” Which begs the question: Are “credentialed journalists, really journalists?”
+ On her book tour, Kamala Harris has taken to saying that she pleaded with Biden to extend the empathy he expressed for Ukrainians to Gaza, but “he couldn’t do it; while he could passionately state, ‘I am a Zionist,’ his remarks about innocent Palestinians came off as inadequate and forced.” Of course, Harris couldn’t do it either, refusing to allow even an elected Palestinian-American from Georgia a speaking spot at the convention. Moreover, Palestinians didn’t need empathy from Biden and Harris; they needed them to simply abide by US and international law and stop the flow of arms to Israel when it became clear Israel was using American weapons to commit genocide.
+ Schumer looks like he’s transforming into an Orc. Maybe he’ll have more fight in him when the transition is complete. He could hardly have less….
+++
+ According to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, teachers are paid 26% less than other professionals with similar levels of education. Teachers were paid less than other college graduates in every state, with teacher pay gaps spanning from -10.0% in Rhode Island to -38.5% in Colorado. The relative teacher pay penalty was at least 25% in 20 states.
+ Last year, the USDA issued a report warning of rising food insecurity in the US. This year, the Trump administration terminated a decades-long report on U.S. hunger, calling it “politicized.”
+ Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins: The hunger survey that USDA canceled recently was one more waste of taxpayer dollars. There are many, many other surveys collecting that data.
Reporter: What other surveys?
Rollins: I don’t have the names.
+ Nixon ordered his AG, John Mitchell, to go after his political enemies, while in the privacy of the Oval Office, with the tapes rolling. Trump sends his crazy memos demanding vendetta prosecutions to the Attorney General of the US via social media…
+ The Trump administration has ordered the National Park Service to begin removing signage about slavery, climate change and the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II. “This is an outrageous assault on our free speech and ability to educate each other,” charged Rep. Chellie Pingree, the Democrat from Maine. “It’s just bonkers to me that the federal government is imposing these kinds of restraints, that we’re taking away valuable information from our citizens who visit this park, and that we are trying to dumb everyone down and pretend real weather events don’t happen by not letting you read a simple sign.”
+ Speaking of rewriting history, Wounded Knee was no “battle.” It wasn’t even a “fight.” The Seventh US Cavalry under the command of Major Samuel M. Whitside slaughtered 300 Lakota in the snow, many of them women and children. It was a massacre.
Is this the “warrior culture” Hegseth wants to instill in the Department of War, the culture of massacres against defenseless women and children, who were being driven by howitzers off their lands? It certainly seems consistent with the “ethic” of droning defenseless small boats in the Caribbean or intervening on behalf of Eddie “the Blade” Gallagher, the Navy SEAL who stabbed to death a wounded Iraqi teenager in Mosul and posed for a photo with the corpse. Will he now award medals to Ernest Medina and William Calley for their bravery at My Lai? Hegseth is really making his mark as the Secretary of War (Crimes).
+ Does anyone recall this statement by Trump on January 20? “I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America. Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.”
+++
+ Trump: “I’ve been saying to Bobby and the group, taking Tylenol is, uh, not good. I’ll say it. It’s not good. With Tylenol, don’t take it. Don’t take it. And if you can’t live, if your fever is so bad, you have to take one because there’s no alternative to that, sadly. First question, What can you take instead? Actually, there’s not an alternative to that. As you know, other of the medicines have been proven bad with the aspirins and Advil and others, right? If you can’t tough it out, if you can’t do it, that’s what you’re gonna have to do. You’ll take a Tylenol, but it’ll be very sparingly … I think you shouldn’t take it.”
+ The last paragraph of the FDA memo urging people to follow Trump’s advice and stop using Tylenol, undermines everything that precedes it…
+++
+ MAGA doesn’t want to take us back to the 1950s or even the 1850s, but the 1650s. Here’s Megyn Kelly on the “curses” the feminist siteJezebe placed on the Kirks: “Erika and Charlie Kirk heard about these curses and that news genuinely rattled Erika in particular. She knew Christian teaching on this subject. She loved Charlie absolutely and she was scared when she heard of the curses that Jezebel had called up. So much so, that she and Charlie contacted a friend, who I believe she said was a Catholic priest, but definitely a friend, and asked him to come over and pray with them over Charlie the night before he was murdered. Eventually, she worked it through and so did Charlie. And as she later told me, “Weapons will form but not prosper. That Satan and those witches have no power.”
In 2017-2018, NBC paid this woman $20 million a year!
+ Meanwhile, over on Fox, this noisome dialogue was going down…
Jesse Watters: You’re married to Stephen Miller. You’re the envy of all women.
Katie Miller: The sexual matador, right?…He’s an incredibly inspiring man who gets me going in the morning with his speeches being like: ‘Let’s start the day, I’m going to defeat the left.’
+++
The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner asked Democratic insider Cass Sunstein why he and his wife, Samantha Power, became so close to Henry Kissinger. His answer (literally, “He liked my book on Star Wars”) sums up the hopeless mindset of the Democratic power elite these days…
+ Hunter S. Thompson on Kissinger: “It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that–but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of these and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end. Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.”
+ Kamala Harris, using some of her clearest language ever, succinctly articulated the failsafe plan of the neoliberal Democrats: “I always believed that if push came to shove, those titans of industry would be guardrails for our democracy.”
+ Alex Soros, head of the Open Society Foundation, fuming about the Sunrise Movement campaigning on Gaza: “What the hell did they do, by the way? We gave them money and now all they do is talk about Palestine? It’s ridiculous.”
+ John Fetterman–who is simultaneously filling both the shoes left by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema–on Democrats’ budget negotiations: “I would love to restore a lot of those healthcare things. That’s the right outcome, but that’s a dangerous tactic if you are going to shut the government down…I think it’s the right thing to extend those healthcare and things, but it is absolutely the wrong reason the wrong thing for a lot of reasons that we’re going to shut our government down.” If you’re not willing to shut the government down to save people’s health care, what will you shut down for?
+++
+ This wins the internet for the week!
+ Though I was a little surprised they were on there to begin with, I was glad to hear that Massive Attack joined Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu, and other bands in pulling their music off Spotify in protest against the company CEO Daniel Ek’s military investments…So many reasons to pull your music from Spotify, so few reasons not to…
+ I caught a few scenes from A Hard Day’s Night and was once again struck by the marvelous exchange between Ringo and the businessman on the train, which offers a pretty succinct depiction of the social dynamics of Cold War Capitalism…
Suit on the train: Don’t take that tone with me, young man. I fought the war for your sort.
Ringo: I bet you’re sorry you won.
No comments:
Post a Comment