President Musk?

Trump has managed to violate the Constitution by running for government office as a proven insurrectionist, so it makes sense that he would do it again by allowing a foreign-born citizen to serve as President.

Elon Musk, who bought Trump for over $200 million and violated the Thirteenth Amendment by owning someone, has stepped in and is calling the shots with Congress.  As soon as Democrats an d Republicans agreed on a bipartisan stopgap bill to und the government, Musk, the richest man in the world and a major government contractor, denounced the bill as wasteful and demanded that the bill be scrapped.  Trump, acting as his chief of staff, agreed.  The bill camethisclose to going down completely and causing a government shutdown right in the middle of the holidays.  But Democrats stepped in and rescued the bill when it became apparent that letting the GOP twist in the wind wasn't worth the pain that would inflict the country as a result of a shutdown.

Musk is in a position to get whatever he wants in negotiations over the budget simply by telling Trump his demands and using his social-media platform to browbeat congressional Republicans.  He can also direct foreign policy by using his influence for his own personal gain not just with Trump but with other foreign leaders - why else would he have sat in on a telephone conversation between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky?  

This is why the Founders put all of those restrictions in the Constitution - the emoluments clause, the prohibition on foreign-born citizens in the Presidency, the check and balance on the executive branch by giving power to the legislative branch - and it's also why the location of the national capital was based on the approximate center of population (as it existed in 1787) and was placed as far away from business interests as possible.  Technology and the westward centering of the population made Washington, D.C.'s location irrelevant, but Musk, through flattering Trump while flattening his own wallet, has managed to render the constitutional guardrails against his use of power ineffective as well.

Musk and Trump lost this round on the budget, but the outsize influence Musk exhibited means that more chaos is to come.     

Christmas Music Video Of the Week

"Ring Out, Solstice Bells" by Jethro Tull  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

One By One They All Fall

Not too long ago, ABC's George Stephanopoulos (below) showed how tenacious the press could be - "could" here is past tense - in telling the truth about Donald Trump. This past March, on the ABC News program "This Week," Stephanopoulos repeatedly said that Trump had been "found liable for rape" in the civil case brought forward by Elizabeth Jean Carroll.   Even though a jury did not find that Trump raped Carroll, it did decide that he did sexually abuse her, which allowed him to be held liable for battery, even though what he did is pretty much the same thing as rape.  Trump has denied any and all wrongdoing.

Trump responded with a lawsuit against ABC, which everyone believes ABC could have won had it actually gone to court.  Instead, ABC chose to settle, paying Trump $15 million (which will go to his, ahem, presidential library) for daring to tell the truth about him.  Media critic Brian Stelter wrote on CNN's Web site that while "some media law experts believed ABC had a good chance of beating him at trial, given the inherent challenge of proving Stephanopoulos acted with 'actual malice,' he added that "trials also add uncertainty and a risk of severe reputational damage – factors that ABC’s parent company, Disney, is now avoiding."  Some lawyers have wondered if ABC and Disney have settled to avoid discovery, which might have unearthed documents that would cast the network and its news division in an unflattering light.

I hope Disney CEO Bob Iger was not involved directly in this, because it means that, once again, even the highest-ranking corporate officer prefers not to anger Trump as he prepares to retake power next month.  And I'm also sure that Willow Bay, dean of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism - Iger's wife - would not approve.

Having come just a month after former newspaper editor Joe Scarborough and former CBS reporter Mika Brzezinski - who haven't practiced real journalism in over twenty years - went to Berghof-by-the-Sea to lick Trump's boots, this revolting development (as Chester Riley would have called it) is just a taste of what Trump plans as part of his campaign of retribution against the media.  He plans to sue CBS for what he calls a misleadingly edited "60 Minutes" interview that was intended to make him look bad.  The interview was with Kamala Harris.  Also, he plans to sue retiring Des Moines Register pollster Ann Selzer for election interference after she put out a poll showing Harris carrying Iowa by a narrow margin before Trump carried it by a wide one.  More media outlets will likely capitulate to Trump and play nice with him to avoid such lawfare.

It's all part of his plan to silence the media and prevent any negative stories about him during his second presidential term . . . and likely any negatives stories about him or MAGA beyond January 2029 as well.  Trump hopes to make it clear that if you criticize him, he'll sue you and force you into bankruptcy even if he ultimately loses the suit.   

And if that doesn't stop you, FBI director Kash Patel (below) will have the United States Secret Police (currently the Oath Keepers) arrest you.

Correction: The photo above is not of Kash Patel.  The photo above is of Stephen Miller.  I regret the error.

I Beg Your Pardon?

James Clyburn has to go.

 

Yes, he's a veteran of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, he's been a capable legislator in the U.S. House of Representatives, and he's been Joe Biden's right-hand man, as well as one of Nancy Pelosi's top lieutenants, but with Biden on his way out and Pelosi no longer Speaker or House Democratic leader (aside: best wishes to Nancy Pelosi for a speedy recovery from her fall), the days of Clyburn's own political relevance are numbered, and the number is very low.  It wouldn't be as low as it is but for all of the trouble he's caused.

What trouble?  Well, when Clyburn backed President Biden's bid for re-election even when more and more Democrats called for Biden to withdraw from the 2024 campaign, he added that it was only logical that Kamala Harris become the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee because there was no way that Democrats could deny the nomination to the highest-ranking black woman in the federal government and insult black women, the most loyal base of the Democratic Party, and that she should be not only the first choice to replace Biden but the only choice.

Yeah, that worked out just fine.  

But it gets worse.  Now that Harris is a hasbeen (see my blog entry on that here),  Clyburn has suggested that, to clear the air after a toxic presidential campaign and eight years of tumult, perhaps President Biden should pardon Trump.

Pardon Trump?  Pardon me???

This is what happens when a member of the gerontocracy that runs the Democratic Party skips his meds for a day.

At least Biden is stepping down.  Why are Clyburn and Pelosi still in Congress?  

Christmas Music Video Of the Week - December 13, 2024

"Mistletoe and Holly" by Frank Sinatra  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Must Stop Normalizing Bad Cable

I'm done with MSNBC.

After Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski revealed to the world that they had made a journey to visit Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, I stopped watching their morning program, but I continued to tune in to Nicolle Wallace and Lawrence O'Donnell for awhile, as they kept - and keep - continuing to call out Trump effectively.  I also continued to watch some of their weekend programs.  But after a week or two, I got tired of even that, and I started seeking out more alternative independent media on YouTube but kept recording MSNBC programs in case I wanted to go back to them.

I never did.  In that time I was still recording (but not watching) MSNBC shows, I started contemplating how Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski had told viewers how Trump was a fascist and then tried to make nice with him,  how the prime-time hosts had conditioned viewers into expecting a Kamala Harris victory in November, how Lawrence O'Donnell had had Simon Rosenberg on repeatedly to mindlessly reassure us how Harris was winning - "I'd rather much be us than them" - how Michael Steele dismissed Bernie Sanders' call to get big money of of the Democratic Party as irrelevant, how David Frum was kicked off "Morning Joe" for his joke about Fox News, how the Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network received contributions from the Harris campaign before conducting with Vice President Harris a softball interview that was less of an interview than a conversation, how MSNBC pundits who had been praising the Democrats for a great campaign the day before the election suddenly started excoriating the Democrats for a lousy campaign the day after the election, how Scarborough, after having said in the spring that President Biden was at the top of his game, then, after Biden's early-summer debate with Trump, decided that Biden was through . . . and then I remembered that Jen Psaki, President Biden's first White House press secretary,  turned on her former boss after the debate and joined the decades-long Washington parlor game of always writing off Biden when he was at his low points instead of giving him the benefit of the doubt after he blew his debate with Trump.  

That was it.  I not only deleted the backlog of MSNBC shows I'd already recorded, I canceled all future recordings.  It also became apparent that I was not so much getting news from the cable news channel as I was getting commentary that was accurate in pointing out Trump's failings as a human being but dead wrong in conveying the progress of the 2024 presidential campaign and what the voters were concerned about.  Though, I do recommend MSNBC as a new source if you want to get your mind off foreign events.  In 2024, there was barely a mention of the strains in the British economy that led to the Tories' defeat in the elections in the U.K., no coverage of the issues in France that didn't involve Notre Dame Cathedral, and nothing about the economic struggles in Germany.  I also have a feeling that part of the reason I was so surprised by the fall of Assad in Syria was because there hadn't been much talk about Syria on MSNBC.

I've since returned to watching BBC World News America, having sworn off American mainstream legacy media - even the PBS NewsHour, whose arts and culture stories always seem to be about hip-hop and whose Monday pundit panel of Amy Walter and Tamara Keith can't stop laughing and joking about everything - and I get my commentary from YouTube channels like The Bulwark and Status Coup News.  I can't believe anything that American mainstream legacy media says - least of all MSNBC, which had me and others anticipating the a politician - a politician that many in the Democratic Party didn't actually like - making history in becoming the first black female President, only to see Trump become the first former President since Grover Cleveland and the first Republican former President ever to be returned to office . . . and anticipating a California Jew (Douglas Emhoff) becoming the first male presidential spouse to move into the White House only to see the likelihood of another California Jew (Adam Schiff) moving into the big house.

MSNBC can't be spun off from Comcast and wither away soon enough.

Health Karma

I have a health insurance policy managed by UnitedHealthcare, and for reasons too random and complicated to explain, I was already planning to leave the company and go with another provider before last Wednesday, when United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated by a disgruntled customer.

While I do not condone violence, I can understand why Thompson was killed, as his company has expanded exponentially over the years and has produced enormous profits by denying payment of claims at double the industry average, causing many policy holders to die from not being able to receive treatment or go broke from health care bills.  As many as 68,000 Americans die annually from being unable to receive care or being unable to pay for care.

So for Brian Thompson to be shot to death for making lots of money for a company that made a killing off people dying is karma in the truest sense of the word.

The suspect - and likely killer - is a fellow named Luigi Mangione (no relation to jazz musician Chuck Mangione), who apparently had a problem with UnitedHealthcare due to an injury to his spine.  He more or less apologized for making Thompson's kids fatherless (Thompson was separated from his wife), but said the shooting had to be done.

"Frankly," he wrote in a manifesto, "these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the U.S. has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. "United is the [expletive deleted] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but [h]as our life expectancy?  No, the reality is, these [expletive deleted] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it."

Progressives who have been striving for decades for the United States to adopt a single-payer health care system like Great Britain or Canada had been cheering on Mangione, and many people - including progressives - refused to help law enforcement on the manhunt for him, even though Mangione got his frustrations out with . . . a gun.  The biggest irony as that he's a far-right libertarian.

Karma biting back.

Meanwhile, radio host Stephanie Miller can't stop riffing off Luigi Mangione's name, pronouncing it in the most ridiculous Italian accent on her radio show, which only serves to remind me that Italian-Americans - I'm half-Italian - are the last white ethnic group you can make fun of.

Especially if you're a progressive.

And meanwhile, America's god-awful health care "system" goes on.

The Road From Damascus

The Syrian Civil War had been going on so long since it started in 2011 that no one outside Syria noticed it was still going on . . . except for those who noticed it and saw that it was a stalemate at best with President Bashar al-Assad having the upper hand.  

Then suddenly it flared up and the so-called experts said that it wouldn't affect Damascus.  Until the rebels entered Damascus and forced Assad to flee to Moscow.

And Tulsi Gabbard suddenly has a lot less currency. 😃

The Syrian people no have a chance to build the democratic republic that Iraq is still trying to be after twenty years.  The Iranians have lost their base of influence on the Mediterranean Sea.  And Vladimir Putin's sphere of influence, as of now, no longer includes countries that were not Soviet republics.  Putin now needs Doanld Trump more than Trump needs Putin.

Then again, Trump might need Putin in the near future - when he's driven out of office by his own people.  I hope Vlad's dacha is big enough for two world ex-leaders!

MessNBC

Just when you thought the freefall of Joe Scarborough's and Mika Brzezinski's MSNBC morning show couldn't get worse, the couple got themselves in hotter water when they found themselves apologizing to a competitor news channel known for its friendly coverage of Donald Trump.

Conservative author David Frum joked that Pete Hegseth, Trump's pick for Secretary of Defense and the weekend Fox News host with the spell-checker-unfriendly name, has been so drunk that he was too drunk even for Fox News' liking, which doesn't bode well for his fitness for leading the U.S. military.  A producer told Frum through an earpiece that his commentary was no longer necessary, and Mika Brzezinski apologized to Fox News for Frum's flippant remark.  

Since when does an MSNBC host feel a need to apologize to a rival network that's constantly ridiculing her own?  Uhh, when she knows that the incoming President will have your head if she dares let someone bash his favorite "news" channel?    

Frum, who's no dope, published a piece in The Atlantic suggesting that fear of retribution is driving editorial decisions at MSNBC these days, and he suggested that Brzezinski's apology was an extension of her and Scarborough's efforts to mend fences with Trump, which they did by going to Mar-a-Lago on November 15 to lick his boots out of fear.  Scarborough got upset, claiming that he and Brzezinski went to Mar-a-Lago to get a "read" of Trump as he prepares to return to power.

I think they got a read of how he would govern (or something like it) in a second nonconsecutive term by listening to him blather over the past four years. 

Neither Joe Scarborough nor Mika Brzezinski seem to be able to get the Mar-a-Lago debacle behind them, mainly because they can't admit that they did anything wrong.  Scarborough cited reporters from other news outlets - with Brzezinski coaching him by offering examples in a low-register voice, as if she were Nancy Reagan trying to give Ronald sotto voce coaching on what to tell the press - spoke on background with Trump, but to this day neither he nor his wife have offered any transcript or videotape of them talking to Trump.  It wasn't a proper interview.  They went there to smooth his ruffled feathers, and now they're trying to stop anyone on their show from ruffling his feathers again by bashing his favorite news channel or his Cabinet selections.

And what about the fear factor that Frum pointed out?  "Let me tell you something," Scarborough said, "you can talk to anybody that's worked in the front office of NBC and MSNBC over the past 22 years tell you I'm not fearful. You talk to anybody who served with me in Congress, they will tell you - not fearful of leadership. Now? Not fearful." 

Paging Queen Gertrude.  Someone is protesting just a wee bit too much.

Anyway, I've given up on MSNBC largely because of these two.  Yes, there are some commentators on the channel who haven't given up on calling Trump to account, such as Nicolle Wallace, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O'Donnell, but as I said before, it's only a matter of time before either they get cancelled or MSNBC goes down swinging after it's spun off from Comcast as part of a separate company - something that would definitely not have happened if Kamala Harris had won the Presidency last month.  And the sooner Joe and Mika quit or get fired, the better it will be for everyone else involved.  They're dragging down the whole channel, what with other hosts furious with them and with ratings continuing to plummet like a stone.  Maddow is likely to come up with some groundbreaking reporting that exposes Trump as a bigger fraud than we already know he is, but who cares when MSNBC's ratings are so bad that her relatives are the only ones still watching her?

And after Michael Steele's ridiculing of Bernie Sanders on his (Steele's) own show for calling for the Democratic National Committee to root out corporate donors, I'm sort of glad I've found alternative political analysis on YouTube. 

Christmas Music Video Of the Week - December 6, 2024

"White Christmas" by Bing Crosby  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Pardon Me

The Democrats ran a female presidential candidate and lost.  Ironically, they've surrendered their cojónes to Donald Trump.

The Democrats have already expressed a willingness to work with Trump and his henchmen in trying to "reform" government and support "populist" policies in an effort to entrap Trump into making promises he won't keep, even though he'll find a way to deflect blame to others when he doesn't.  But no capitulation to MAGA morons is more blatant than Democratic opposition to President Biden's pardon of his son Hunter of charges of tax evasion and an illegal gun purchase.

Democratic senators such as Michael Bennet of Colorado and Chris Murphy of Connecticut have criticized the pardon as undermining President Biden's own insistence that no one is above the law, which will encourage Donald Trump to put himself above the law once he returns to power - as if he hadn't been planning to do that anyway.  The faux outage among the mainstream media - "Oh, I'm shocked - I'm shocked that the President pardoned his own son! - was just as insufferable,  with the New York Times, MSNBC, and Politico (Round up the usual suspects!)  all declaring Biden's pardon of his son a betrayal of a promise he'd made not to do so that could encourage Trump to pardon January 6 insurrectionists (which Trump had already promised he'd do, and that's a promise he can be counted on to keep!).  Spare me the terminal righteousness.

Let's review.  Hunter Biden was convicted of illegally possessing a firearm and was expected to receive a stiff sentence that - I reiterate - he would likely not receive if his name were Robert Hunter, not Robert Hunter Biden.  He was expected to be sentenced to prison for up to seventeen years for tax evasion, an offense that - again - he would see little or no jail time for if his name were Robert Hunter.  And he was expected to receive this sentence despite having paid his back taxes with the help of a friend.

So why did President Biden change his mind?  Because Kamala Harris lost the election.  And when it became apparent that Trump would install Kash Patel as FBI director - with Patel promising to make Trump's detractors and Biden's relatives pay for their obstinance to Trump.  Hunter would have continued to be harassed not just for the gun and drug charges but for accusations of his dealings with Burisma in Ukraine, a web of innuendo in yo' window so tangled I don't want to revisit it here.  The pardon protects Hunter from prosecution and persecution from any and all crimes Hunter Biden committed or may have committed in the past decade, and as long as he keeps his nose clean (no pun intended on his addiction, he's been clean and sober for years),  Patel can't lay a glove on him.    

And given the number of people Trump pardoned - including Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and too many more to list - Democrats and Republicans have a lot of damn gall to complain about Joe Biden reversing course and pardoning his own son.

Notre Dame Restoration

The most famous Roman Catholic cathedral in Europe outside the Vatican, Notre-Dame in Paris, has been restored to its glory five years after a destructive fire that gutted the structure and risked destruction to numerous sacred items and artifacts (many if not most of which were saved).  French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to have it restored completely by the 2024 Paris Olympics or, failing that, by the end of 2024.  The restoration crews got the job done with 24 days to spare.

The cathedral looks as grand and opulent as it did when completed in 1345, and the restoration crews cleaned and unearthed architectural details and cleaned paintings of grim and dust that had long since accumulated before the fire.  Notre-Dame has more than regained its place as a house of worship designed to make you feel like you are in heaven itself, the whole point of the grandiosity of Catholic ecclesiastical architecture.

President Macron has called Notre-Dame the soul of the French nation, and he told Bill Whittaker of CBS News that the restoration project helped unite France, a country that's as bitterly divided these days as much as the United States.  He also told Whittaker that working for a common goal and recognizing what brings a nation together can be a good way to heal the divisions.

Of course, don't expect anything like this to take place in America, where the most important building in the nation, the Capitol, was crapped in during the January 6 insurrection.  What goal could we stupid Americans set to unite the country?  Certainly not restoring a Catholic cathedral, as that would violate the separation of church and state, and besides, progressives would be incensed at any public works project that gives preference toward a faith known for its patriarchy and misogyny . . . even as these same so-called progressives demand that we respect Islam.

Build a national high-speed rail network?  No, conservatives insist that's an effort to intrude on our freedom of mobility - to go where we want, when we want in our cars.  Eradicate the measles?  No, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as the incoming Health and Human Services Secretary, won't allow the necessary vaccinations.  Get money out of politics?  Don't make me chortle.  We're not likely to get behind a common cause unless the Germans invade us.

But then, the last time the Germans invaded us . . .

. . . we welcomed them with open arms.

The truth of the matter is, for all of the bad breaks France has had economically and politically, the French people know who they are and have known for over a thousand years.  Here in the United States, after nearly a quarter of a millennium,  we still have no idea who we are.  If we have a common identity at all, it's an adherence to the Constitution, which seems quaint as Trump prepares to return to power, or maybe making lots of money.  Other than that, we can't agree on anything.  It should thus come as no surprise that the French would spare no expense to rebuild in five years a masterpiece of medieval architecture dating back to the reign of Philip VI of the House of Valois, a cathedral of stone, wood and lead that has stood for eight centuries, while in United States, took well over a decade to fill the hole in the ground left by the destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, a pair of buildings dating back to the 1970s that were made of steel, aluminum, drywall and spray-on fireproofing held together with spit to cut costs.

Sad.

So it seems somewhat appropriate that Trump has named the money-grubbing and crooked real estate developer and pardoned felon Charles Kushner, father of Jared, as his ambassador to France.

This country needs an enema.

Mr. Blue Sky

I opened an account on the new social-media platform Bluesky just before Thanksgiving.  I officially launched it this past Sunday - symbolically, Sunday the 1st - by posting my first link, a link to my post of that day this blog. 

Bluesky is a social media platform that attempts to be what Mastodon has tried to be - an alternative to X, the Elon Musk-owned social media platform formerly known as Twitter.  Bluesky's membership has grown exponentially since Trump forced Kamala Harris into early retirement, with many people fleeing Musk's X left and left.  the objective is to provide a safe space for anti-Trumpers and liberals of various degrees to communicate with each other without trolling.

Of course, it may not take long for right-wingers to start trolling Bluesky users by opening their own accounts on the platform, but the difference is they don't own it, they only rent accounts like anyone else.  Bluesky is likely to have far more stringent content standards than X currently does, and those who have fled X for Bluesky will guard their safe space like a mother bear protecting her cubs.  Me, I plan to use Bluesky the same way I used Twitter - to post links to my blog and do little else.

And I certainly won't be critiquing black women for their hairstyles. 😉  

Ninety-Five Minutes of Jive

If you need proof that the people running Kamala Harris' presidential campaign were some of the most clueless election campaign professionals in America who did not know how to position their client against Donald Trump and win, by all means watch this 95-minute YouTube podcast video from the mainstream Democratic podcast Pod Save America.  Jen O'Malley Dillon, Stephanie Cutter, and the usual lot of Democratic strategists still coasting on their wins for Barack Obama and Joe Biden pretty much say over the hour and a half and change that they ran a strong and effective campaign but it wasn't strong and effective enough.

That is, they lost.

These folks seem rather happy with their close second-place finish.  Except in this sort of contest, there's no silver medal for finishing second. 

 

Leaving America

I have written in this space incessantly about how the media and the Democrats failed to gain the confidence of the American people and got the 2024 presidential election so damn wrong.  But despite all of that, the fact that Donald Trump is to be the first U.S. President to serve two nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland (and many pundits may find that more interesting than they harmful policies Trump plans to enact in his second term) is ultimately the fault of the voters. 

Look, I know how hard it is for many Americans.  I get it.  Their groceries are too expensive.  They can barely afford their rent or mortgage payments.  Living-wage-paying jobs aren't coming back as quickly as they should.  They wanted answers to these issues from the Harris campaign and she kept playing Beyoncé records at her rallies.  But none of that - not even hearing that horrible Beyoncé song "Freedom" over and over again - is an excuse for putting Trump back into power.

The American voters knew that Trump could, at a moment's notice, suspend the Constitution and declare martial law if demonstrations against him start up in any of America's cities.  They knew that Trump had no liking for women and would likely appoint some of the most misogynistic misfits to his Cabinet.  They knew he had been found guilty of fraud on 34 counts and was a convicted felon.  They knew his policies toward migrants would be cruel.  They knew he planned to roll back environmental and consumer-protection regulations, as he had done that before.  They knew he likely raped a woman.  They knew he blew the national response to a pandemic.  They knew he planned revenge against government officials who had investigated or criticized him.  They knew that his new best friend, Elon Musk, would use his influence for corrupt purposes.  Some of them may have even suspected, as I have, that Musk would help Trump by using his tech savvy to root out average-Joe bloggers like me who bash Trump and a regular basis and have the authorities come after us.  They knew that Trump would appoint someone like Kash Patel to as FBI director - and that's exactly whom he appointed - to go after anti-Trump bloggers and writers.  And they may have suspected, as I have, that Trump would make dissent a crime equal to treason - thus making dissent a capital offense.

But they voted for him anyway.  

Maybe Trump won't have his critics hanged or sent to the electric chair.  Maybe he won't found a secret police in the style of the Gestapo or the Stasi.  And maybe not all Trump supporters are bigots, even as most bigots are Trump supporters.  But the results of this election tell me more about America than I ever wanted to know.  For the longest time, I have grown antipathetic to the United States and I had an increasingly intense desire to separate myself from it.  I think it started with John Lennon's cold-blooded murder in 1980, a murder that could never have happened anywhere else thanks to our lax gun laws.  My frustrations over everything wrong with America and the political and business leaders who have zealously kept the numerous deficiencies of These States in place for the own benefit, coupled with my equally deep frustrations with the stupidity and ignorance of my fellow citizens, had reached a boiling point several times.  But they would simmer down at key moments that gave me hope for the future, like the way the country came together after 9/11, Barack Obama's election to the Presidency,  or the outpouring of demonstrations against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd's murder. But these moments would be fleeting, and America would soon go back to being America.  My last shred of hope rested in the idea that having been President once - and having instigated an insurrection - Donald Trump could only be returned to power in a country with no sense of values and self-worth.  Only a nation of indecent and insane people would want him back in office. 

And here we are.

I wanted to leave the country if Trump was returned to the Presidency.  Now Trump has been returned to the Presidency.  What do I do now?  

I'm actually in a catbird seat to depart for another country because, alas, of a tragic loss.  Since only a couple dozen people follow my blog, I'm not really broadcasting this news to the world, though under different circumstances,  I would not have shared this news, but . . . my mother died this past January.  We'd lived together for over 35 years since I graduated from college.  Now she's gone, and I'm on my own, with my two cats Chico and Claudia as my only company in my childhood house, part of my inheritance. 

My mother despised Trump as much as I did.  Maybe more so.  Having turned 84 in 2023, she hoped to live long enough to see Trump's downfall.  But even before the election, it had become apparent that my mother could have lived to be a hundred and never seen such a thing.  And when the results of the election came in, my mother died a second time. 

It turns out that it's financially and logistically impossible for me to move to another country.  But it also turns out that it's unnecessary for me to leave America.

America left me.

MSNBC: It Was All a Scam

I think MSNBC has jumped the shark.

MSNBC is tanking in the ratings, like most so-called "legacy media" outlets," at the expense of news sources online, some of which barely qualify as sources of news or anything else of value.  But the defections from MSNBC are quite telling.  The fallout from Jos Scarborough's and Mika Brzezinski's November 15 pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to lick Trump's boots is just the tip of the iceberg.

In case you hadn't noticed, MSNBC had been squarely behind Joe Biden's re-election campaign right up to the afternoon of June 27, 2024, before the President stumbled, fumbled and just plain flopped in his debate with Donald Trump that night.  Eager to separate themselves from the train wreck that was Biden's debate performance, MSNBC commentators - including not only Joe Scarborough but also folks like Jen Psaki, who worked for Biden as his press secretary - pleaded with the the President to abandon his bid for another term, certain that he was going to lose.  This was quite different from political pundits like Jonathan Alter and Steve Schmidt (both of whom, in full disclosure, have appeared on MSNBC in the past)  who had been saying long before June 27 that Biden should have stood down from a re-election bid much sooner and allowed a primary/caucus contest to determine his replacement.  You actually saw MSNBC hosts suddenly turn on Biden like a weather vane in a windstorm as if they had never had faith in Biden from the start.  

For the record, I had hoped Biden would decide not to run for re-election right after the 2022 midterms,  but when he went ahead, I trusted that he knew what he was doing - and I never believed that his facilities were rapidly failing and that he was being protected by a power-hungry coterie of advisers, as some pundits had suggested.  I was more disgusted at both pundits and top Democrats abandoning him without even giving him a chance to recover.  And many MSNBC commentators, in a first sign of something being rotten in Denmark, continuously obsessed over Biden's age without considering Trump's clearly obvious dementia.

And then came Kamala Harris.  I already mentioned in an earlier blog post last week how the reporting on the Harris campaign was propaganda, but I didn't know just how insidious the influence of Democratic insiders was until I started listening to podcasts with observations from people who know more about the inner workings of MSNBC than I do about how much in bed MSNBC bigwigs were with the Democratic National Committee and the consultant class that rips off Democratic candidates like Harris for telling them what they want to hear.  But maybe I should have figured it out myself; in spite of various danger warnings throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, Democratic consultant Simon Rosenberg constantly appeared on MSNBC programs, as well as on his own YouTube channel, repeating the same two meaningless mantras over and over - "I'd rather be us than them."  "We're winning, but we haven't won yet."    

If some consultant has to keep repeating the same canned lines, it's likely more wishful thinking than thoughtful analysis.

The positive, optimistic reporting and commentary from MSNBC was clearly erroneous.  There's nothing wrong with being wrong, but, just as Biden went from being an asset to a liability in the eyes of MSNBC personalities on a Thursday night in June, appraisals of the Harris campaign went from faint praise to damnation on a Wednesday morning as MSNBC commentators who had been applauding the Democrats for running a wonderful campaign were suddenly picking them apart for a cluelessly inept one.  It was like someone excoriating Mrs. O'Leary for keeping her cow and her oil lantern in the barn together after the Chicago fire after having told her before the fire that keeping a cow in proximity to an oil lantern was perfectly safe.  

The coverage of the whole campaign was all wrong.  Although MSNBC did a good job in covering Trump's multiple deficiencies as a candidate, as a politician, as a businessman, and as a human being, it failed to do what was necessary in any election - inform the voters on the issues.  Some MSNBC rightfully decried the horse-race aspect of mainstream-media campaign coverage, but its own coverage was more about the stylistic differences between the two candidates than the pocketbook issues affecting the voters.   None of what the voters were concerned about showed up in what folks on MSNBC - especially guests who appear on numerous programs at different times - were talking about.  Voters not savvy about the issues wouldn't have been much enlightened about the issues, but they would have learned about girl dads and McDonald's photo ops.

And as if all of this weren't dizzying and head-spinning enough, we now learn that the Harris campaign donated $500,000 - in two separate transactions of $250,000 - to the Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network nonprofit civil rights group ahead of a friendly interview that Reverend Sharpton conducted with Harris . . . which, by all accounts, would have been a friendly interview even without those donations.

And in case you're wondering why Reverend Sharpton would compromise his journalistic integrity in such a blatant matter, you forget one thing - he's not a journalist.  He's a minister and a civil rights activist.  But he's not a journalist.  He's a public figure who happens to have a show on a cable news channel.

Right, I have to stop watching MSNBC.  In fact, already have.  Like so many others, I have tuned out as I have lost intertest in watching MSNBC for any genuine insight to the mess that is this post-election period.  I'm angry about how the channel's personalities helped push Biden out after having stood by him and I'm ticked off at how they gave Harris such favorable coverage only to turn on her once she lost.   I'm pissed at how their news coverage of the whole damn presidential campaign was in contrast to what was actually happening.  I can't be bothered with them anymore.

Time to go back to "BBC World News America."   

Music Videos Of the Week - November 29, 2024

"Whatever Gets You Thru the Night" by John Lennon and Elton John (studio and live versions)  (Go to the upper-right-hand corner.)

Thanksgiving 2024

 

Smith Is Out

Jack Smith is done.

The special counsel appointed to investigate Trump moved to dismissed the case against the once and future White House occupant after it became apparent that it was useless to continue with his cases against him.  The United States is the only industrialized democratic country that does not allow, as an act of tradition, the prosecution of a sitting chief executive.

Trump got what he wanted.  He delayed the federal trials against him - with a little help from his friend, Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida, who oversaw and dismissed the classified-documents case.  Judge Tanya Chutkan will soon do the same for the insurrection case per Smith's request.  Smith deiced that he'd rather quit the cases rather than allowing Trump the pleasure of firing him himself.

Trump has more up his sleeve, though.  While Matt Gaetz will not be his Attorney General, a former Florida Attorney General - Bondi . . . Pam Bondi - has been taped for that position in place of her fellow Floridian Gaetz, and she has vowed to prosecute and investigate everyone in the U.S. Justice Department who prosecuted or investigated Trump, and if Trump gets his way . . . he will have that act of defiance classified as a crime equal to treason - so the defendants can be executed if found guilty.

In which case, Jack Smith had best make his way back to the Netherlands and the International Criminal Court where he can go back to judging crimes of retribution - before he's the victim of one. 

Jack Smith is indeed done.  So is the rule of law in These States.

The Big Guy

As if the news of the election results weren't bad enough to fill me with pain and sorrow, I learned that the last surviving original member of one of the most criminally underappreciated R&B bands of the seventies just died.

Harry Williams, one of the members of the original lineup of the Kansas City group Bloodstone, was the linchpin for the group's overall sound.  All of them sang lead vocals, but Williams was the only member who did not play an instrument (other than rudimentary percussion).  His main instrument was his voice, which he used to great effect, whether he delivered a tender ballad rendition of the pop standard "Little Green Apples" or a boisterous wail on Bloodstone's cover of Barrett Strong's "Money (That's What I Want)."  He was also a strong songwriter, despite his lack of instrumental ability; he wrote Bloodstone's 1973 single "Never Let You Go," which features a sinuous melody and funky groove.  Here, as a performer, Williams displayed the totality of his vocal range in a song that was better written than even the group's signature hit, bassist/vocalist Charles McCormick's "Natural High," which came out that same year.

In recent years, Williams, who turned eighty this past June, was confined to a wheelchair, but he continued to tour with replacement Bloodstone members Donald Brown and Charles McCaleb.  His massive physique - I called him the Big Guy for that reason - was less imposing in the unusual posture (for a singer) of sitting, but his voice remained strong.  So did demand for Bloodstone's shows on the rhythm-and-blues circuit, even though the band hadn't released an album of new material since 2004  (barring a Christmas record), as it was on the R&B charts and on black-oriented pop-music shows like Don Cornelius' "Soul Train" where Bloodstone found their most loyal fans.

Bloodstone has surely died with Williams, as Brown's only connection to the group has been with Williams and two of the original members, McCormick and guitarist/vocalist Charles Love (Brown replaced guitarist/vocalist Willis Draffen, who died in 2002), and McCaleb, who replaced McCormick when he died in 2022, has barely made a mark on the group.  It's a reminder in these horrible times for popular music that its dearest stars are slowly fading away, as the entire lineups of Thunderclap Newman, the original Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Four Tops, and the Ramones are no longer with us as well.  We still have the records.  Thanks for the memories, Big Guy.  RIP.  

As The Dust Settles . . .

The election of 2024 is a bit farther in the past now, enough to look more deeply into the causes of the Democrats' presidential loss than the superficial snap analyses could - analyses that many people, including myself, have made.  And the Democratic Party looks even more pathetic than in 2016, the last time Donald Trump defeated a female presidential candidate with a running mate named Tim.

Despite President Biden's best efforts to put a more progressive agenda forward, and despite some successes in that sphere, the Democrats have remained the party of corporate donors and political correctness, with an agenda more tuned toward businessmen like Mark Cuban and toward the idea that the best way to advance racial justice is to paint BLACK LIVES MATTER on city streets and rename streets for Martin Luther King, Jr.  ("Yo, when you're on Martin Lither King, you know you're in the worst part of town!" - Chris Rock)  The Democrats, in becoming the party of French wine and French cheese, have forsaken the working class, a population more likely to consume French toast and French fries.  Rather than advance the interests of a working class comprised of white, black, and Hispanic people, the Democrats pay lip service to working-class interests while pursuing niche issues that appeal to particular demographics - voting rights and reparations for black voters, immigration for Hispanic voters, etc.  Sometimes I have to ask myself if the Democratic policy toward child care is aimed less toward blue-collar moms who have jobs and more toward white-collar suburban families who have careers.

The problem isn't Joe Biden.  Heck, Bernie Sanders was one of his biggest allies, and without his help, Biden wouldn't have gotten as far as he did in pursuing an agenda that included infrastructure, the ability of Medicare to negotiate drug prices, the CHIPS Act, incentives for green energy, and pro-labor strike mediation.  The problem is with the rest of the party, be it Joe Manchin standing in the way of the Build Back Better program or Krysten Sinema blocking voting rights legislation.  The result was incremental rather than sweeping change.  Calling Biden the most activist Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson is an accurate assessment, but considering the track records of the Carter, Clinton, and Obama administrations, the bar wasn't exactly set very high.   

Kamala Harris, in running to be Biden's successor, undoubtedly would have made the effort to continue the progress begun under Biden, but it would have continued to be measured in inches rather than miles.  (Certainly not in centimeters or kilometers; even the most rabid progressive activist would consider the metric system un-American.)  With Biden gone and Harris defeated, Sanders, looking at what's left, now knows that reforming the Democratic Party is likely a lost cause.  He's already said so, blaming Harris's loss to Trump on the party being captive to corporate interests and offering an agenda that does not mention policies like universal health care or a minimum wage increase.  

I agree.  And, it turns out, I agreed all along.  Remember, I cast my vote for Harris unenthusiastically, because, as I wrote here on the penultimate weekend before the election, I didn't expect much to change.  I reiterated that point two days before the election.  But change is exactly what people wanted, even if it meant going back to a former President who is a convicted felon, and that is what they ultimately voted for.  And Harris, for all of her political talents, may have contributed to her own electoral demise by saying she couldn't conceive of doing anything different than Biden in her own administration. 

And while it is true that many people voted for Trump because they couldn't stomach the idea of a black female President with a Jewish husband, many people who are not racist or sexist voted for Trump because they didn't see anything for them in the Democratic agenda.

With the election over and three House elections still to be called, the dust of the 2024 campaign is quietly settling.  But come January - or maybe even now, given Trump's lightning-speed Cabinet appointments - expect more dust to be stirred up.  

Not just by Trump, but by Sanders, who's talking about doing what progressives should have done in 2017 - starting a new party. 

MSNBSeeYa!

When MSNBC launched in 1996, the last year a presidential-election day fell on my birthday before this year, comedians and conservative pundits laughed at the number of initials in its name, but the cable-news channel was named with a purpose.  The name was a portmanteau of the Microsoft Network (MSN) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) that symbolized how the channel was a joint venture between the two entities.  MSNBC has long since lost its connection to Microsoft; now it's about to lose its ties to NBC News.

Comcast announced that MSNBC, along with CNBC, USA, Oxygen, E!, SYFY and the Golf Channel, will be launched into a separate company.  I was going to say that spinning off CNBC - which ostensibly stands for "Consumer News and Business Channel" - and MSNBC is like "The Jeffersons" being spun off "All In the Family," but that would be misleading, because at least those two sitcoms had Norman Lear in common as their creator.  And, they both aired on the same network.  This spinoff is nothing like that.  The new cable company will be completely divorced from NBC News, and therefore the reporting end of the channel will no longer be available to the commentariat end.  Comcast is keeping the parent NBC network and its news department.  Cable channels simply don't make money for media conglomerates anymore; streaming is the wave of the future.

I've been listening to numerous podcasts since the election, and there seems to be a sense of schadenfreude over MSNBC's sudden collapse in the ratings, and not just because of the Joe-and-Mika debacle.  The network built up this narrative that Donald Trump was a mere aberration from the ongoing evolution of American politics and that certain demographics - white women, Hispanic men, politically centrist suburbanites, anti-Trump Republicans (the only anti-Trump Republicans, it turns out, were MSNBC guests) - would hold Trump accountable in the 2024 election and that Kamala Harris would prevail.  I myself realized on the morning after the election that this was certainly not the case, and thanks to these podcasters and Comcast's business decision, I have to concede that what MSNBC reported was not reality but the network's interpretation of it - an interpretation as wrong as the parallel universe MAGA Republicans inhabit.   

MSNBC has largely fallen into disarray because it has relied primarily on getting access to the Washington Democratic establishment that saw things the way it wanted to, not as they actually were.  The information its on-air personalities have gotten from establishment Democrats turned out to be based on wishful thinking more than facts on the ground.  In the end, that access is all that mattered, and the alliance between MSNBC and the Democratic National Committee may very well have been the reason both were out of touch with what was going on on the ground with regard to the presidential election in places like, well, all seven swing states.

The conventional wisdom among liberal podcasters is that MSNBC has so long been the television arm of corporate centrist Democrats that those same Democrats, working in tandem with MSNBC's movers and shakers, sabotaged both of Bernie Sanders' presidential campaigns in order to directly help Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.  It's more complicated than that, and this theory dismisses President Biden's progressive accomplishments (building infrastructure, lowering the price of insulin, the CHIPS Act, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma) as well as his own alliance with Sanders.  Given how many MSNBC insiders have framed the trajectory of politics, though, it's easy to see how the channel's narrative favored the mainstream Democratic perspective of the issues and the 2024 presidential campaign, presenting on-camera hosts and guests that agreed with each other without getting the perspective of the average voter.

"We were so [into] Harris propaganda that when she lost, viewers were shocked," an anonymous on-air pundit told  The Daily Beast. "It turned into one giant circle j--k and echo chamber. If MSNBC wants to be of service to its viewers, they can’t keep them in fantasy land."

Now that Trump has won and we see MSNBC hosts bowing to him to stay relevant, it's hard to see how MSNBC itself can stay relevant.  Folks like Nicolle Wallace and Lawrence O'Donnell will continue to call Trump out for his lies and his cruelty, but how much good can they do when the channel will be completely untethered from NBC News and the channel's ratings are already in the toilet thanks to viewers realizing that the idea of President Harris was all a mirage?  MSNBC was pretty much the only network that called Trump out during the 2024 campaign while other networks were "sane-washing" Trump's craziness, but who cares when all that matters now is to tread lightly going forward when Trump is once again going to be in charge?  

MSNBC made lots of money for its parent company delivering hopeful commentary (reporting? No one watches cable news for actual reporting) in the fight for democracy and against Trumpism, but now MSNBC and other Big Media outlets have turned out to be like the Wizard of Oz - look behind the curtain, and you realize that there's nothing there.  Comcast is happy to let go of MSNBC and stop spending so much money for its diminishing returns.  When MSNBC - and CNBC, which is less about consumer news and more of a business channel - re-emerge as subsidiaries of a different company, they will most likely have different names, thanks to their divorce from NBC News.  But they will both likely share the same fate.

Oblivion.

And rather than wait for MSNBC's spinoff and inevitable demise, I might just stop watching it much sooner.  After trying to watch less news earlier in the year, I started watching more of MSNBC over the summer and early fall to keep up with the election campaign.  After months of being told that Trump was doomed and that black was white and up was down, I'm ready to declare myself over and out.  Time to go back to the BBC.

Music Video Of the Week - November 22, 2024

"For Everyman" by Jackson Browne  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

Kamala 2028. NOT!

The margin between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has narrowed to the point where the difference between them is about 1.5 percentage points and three million votes, 239,000 of which in key swing states would have elected Harris President had they gone the other way.  Trump is now going to be a minority President, with less than 50 percent of the vote, despite getting the most votes.  In this environment, some folks are already talking about the possibility of Harris trying again for the Presidency in 2028.  A poll already shows her as the favorite for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.

Sorry.  Ain't gonna happen.

The most obvious reason is the reason I've been bringing up on this blog over and over and over - Democrats don't give losing nominees, whether at the presidential level or down the ballot, second chances.  Harris will be no exception.  Excuses will inevitably be made as to why she shouldn't run again.  Democrats will say that she had trouble connecting to crucial working-class voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan.  They'll say that she carried reliably Democratic states like New Jersey by margins that were too narrow.  They'll point out her ties to President Biden and that the country will demand a clean break from the past in 2028.  

Also, Democrats know that there are too many people in These States who can't accept a woman of color - or any woman - as President.  That remains the clearest reason for Harris's loss.  The Democrats don't want to have to go through that again.  This is why you won't see a woman as a leading candidate for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, assuming that the Democrats are still around in 2028 and opposition presidential candidates are allowed.  Sorry, Gretchen Whitmer.

A white male Democratic presidential nominee with Harris's qualifications would have been sent to ride off into the sunset as well.  How long have Democrats shunned unsuccessful presidential candidates and denied them a second bite at the apple?  How far back do you want to go?  If you look at the electoral history of Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party and its successor, the modern Democratic Party, from 1800 to 1856, you'll see that they won thirteen out of fifteen presidential elections, and the only nominee who never served as President, 1848 nominee Lewis Cass, was never considered again after his loss to Whig nominee Zachary Taylor.  After President Martin Van Buren lost his bid for re-election in 1840, he made two tries to win the party's presidential nomination thereafter; he failed both times.   

Aside from Grover Cleveland (who was elected to his second nonconsecutive presidential term in 1892 in a rematch with Republican President Benjamin Harrison after having won the popular vote against Harrison four years earlier while losing in the Electoral College), Democrats have given additional chances to only two failed presidential nominees - 1896 nominee William Jennings Bryan (nominated two more times, in 1900 and 1908) and 1952 nominee Adlai E. Stevenson II (nominated again in 1956).  Needless to say, neither of them became President.  Democrats simply don't like losers and will move heaven and earth to ensure that losing nominees - presidential or otherwise - don't get another chance.  They'll sow doubts on TV talk shows, discourage donations to losing nominees looking for another shot, and say that want to "look forward."   

Oh yeah, there are rumors that Harris will run for governor of California in 2026 when the term-limited Gavin Newsom steps down.  Good luck with that.  But then again, even a former Vice President from California who loses a gubernatorial election there can make a national comeback.

There's a precedent, and it's been set by a lesser public figure.

Morning Blow

Many political pundits had a 180-degree conversion after the presidential election - not so much toward Donald Trump but away from Kamala Harris.  Before the election, Harris was lauded for her joyful demeanor and her desire to reach out to anti-Trump Republicans, and her campaign received high marks for its positive message and ground game operations.  The day Harris conceded, these same pundits suddenly turned around and lambasted the Democrats for the campaign Harris had led and dissected everything she did wrong.  

Of course, there were warning signs that those of us who were applauding Harris should have seen right in front of our faces.  Elissa Slotkin warned that the Harris campaign was failing to reach out to more voters in Michigan and that the energy on the ground was negative.  Democrats in Pennsylvania complained that the Harris campaign was screwing up with the canvassers they were sending to key counties and cities - like sending Chinese-American canvassers to black neighborhoods.  (Aside: Supermodel icon Paulina Porizkova volunteered for the Harris campaign and canvassed for her in South Philly.  Right.  Send one of the most glamorous and sophisticated fashion models of the past fifty years to canvass in a blue-collar neighborhood dominated by stubborn, ill-mannered Italians.)  And then there was that Trump commercial his campaign ran during NFL games attributing his own policy to provide transsexual surgeries for prisoners to Kamala Harris, which the Harris campaign never refuted.

We were all fooled into expecting a Harris victory.  We failed to see the warning signs right before our eyes.  But on cable TV, many commentators acted like they had actually been expecting a Trump victory all along after actually having bashed Trump regularly, and nowhere was this more apparent than on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." There, host Joe Scarborough, a fierce Trump critic, and his guests, who included Chris Matthews and Donny Deutsch, were excoriating Democrats for giving blue-collar voters short shrift and acting snooty and smug.  And this attitude persisted for the next couple of weeks.

Then the other shoe dropped.  This past Monday, Scarborough and co-host/wife Mika Brzezinski revealed that they had had an audience with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago retreat over the weekend. 

Brzezinski told her and Scarborough's viewers that, in light of Trump's victory, it was necessary to re-open communications with the unscrupulous real estate tycoon, Brzezinski and Scarborough having had a cordial relationship with him before he was a presidential candidate in 2016 and having frequented Mar-a-Lago at the time they began their romantic relationship.

In other words, they were scared stiff of the looming Trump Mark Two administration and went to Mar-a-Lago to seek his mercy.  

Brzezinski said that even though she and Scarborough continue to have "deep concerns about . . . Trump's actions and words," about 76 million Americans did vote for him, so it's "time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him." She insisted that they had told Trump that they would continue to "push back hard" on him when the situation called for it.

"Don't be mistaken: We're not here to defend or normalize Donald Trump," Scarborough said. "We're here to report on him, and to hopefully provide you insights that are going to better equip all of us in understanding these deeply unsettling times."

What's deeply unsettling is that Joe and Mika would go as far as to prostrate themselves before Trump and surrender their integrity.

Scarborough, whom Trump has falsely accused of being involved in a murder, and Brzezinski aren't so much covering Trump as they are covering their rear ends.  What's worse is that they know what they're doing here.  They have backgrounds as journalists that pre-date their MSNBC morning program.  Scarborough ran a local newspaper in his hometown of Pensacola, Florida when he represented it in the U.S. House; Brzezinski had been a reporter for CBS and was in Lower Manhattan on 9/11.  What they did here suggests what would have happened if Edward R. Murrow had been reporting from Paris instead of London during World War II and had sought a conciliatory meeting with Marshal Pétain.  The couple forfeited their obligation to speak truth to power so Trump wouldn't go after them.  This comes after Scarborough had ridiculed Trump for being a loser whose MAGA allies kept losing key elections each year from 2017 on.  It comes after Brzezinski stood up for the rights of women against the misogynistic Trump and reported on the strides of older women with her "Know Your Value" project.  It's a pity she doesn't know hers.

Conclusion:  Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski had to choose between getting into trouble with Trump or dishonoring their profession.  They chose dishonor.  They will get trouble.

And you can count me among they many viewers they've lost.  So what?  Their program, at four hours, is too long, and the third hour is merely a repeat of the first.

Roberta Collins: 1944-2008

Actress Roberta Collins, whose B-movie career you already know about thanks to my posts from this past January, would have turned eighty years old today.

It is impossible to say how her acting career would have turned out had she made it into mainstream Hollywood movies.  But it's possible to imagine how it would have unfolded.  I can certainly imagine a Roberta Collins filmography in which she, not Meryl Streep or Jane Fonda, would have been the star of movies such as Sophie's Choice or Agnes of God, respectively (I'm just throwing out titles at random here), or she might have been the star of a movie that was never made because the studio just couldn't find the right actress for the lead female role.  Collins could have played the mother of a character played by Leonardo DiCaprio.  Instead of playing women in prison, she could have played a deputy consul in a U.S. consulate in Munich or Milan or some other major non-capital foreign city, or some other intriguing role.

Think of all the Oscars and Golden Globes she could have been nominated for . . . and she inevitably would have won a few.  If she hadn't fatally overdosed in 2008, when her career was long since done and her life had become a shambles, she might not only still be working today, she might have been looking forward to the 2025 Oscars preparing to accept a Lifetime Achievement award. 

In some parallel universe - one that includes Kamala Harris as President of the United States - Roberta Collins could be a living legend today, recognized as one of America's finest actresses.  She could have been a great actress in this universe, the one we're actually living in.  But we'll never know.  The world as we know it was not kind or receptive to Roberta Collins or her ambition. 😭

Pictured above is Collins as a prison security officer in 1986's Vendetta - her last film role.  😭

Trump's Clown Cabinet

When Trump started making appointments for his second administration, I started breathing sighs of relief.  He made Susie Wiles his White House chief of staff, followed by his appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State.  So far, so good.  More recently, there was the appointment Doug Burgum as Secretary of the Interior.  Okay, that makes sense - he's the governor of North Dakota, he's dealt with land-use issues, and the Interior Department deals with resource management.

Then came the flooding of the zone.

Trump appointed Pete Hegseth - a Fox News "journalist" with no experience in administrating - Secretary of Defense.

Hegseth is a combat veteran and an a National Guard officer.  Appointing Hegseth to lead the Pentagon would be like appointing the head teller of a bank branch as Secretary of the Treasury.  Oh, great, I might have just given Trump an idea!

One fear is that Trump would nominate Mike Davis to be Attorney General.  Davis is a combative lawyer who has verbally threatened New York State Attorney General Letitia James not go continue to investigate Trump further or the administration will "put her fat ass" in prison.

Instead, Trump named Matt Gaetz Attorney General. 

Gaetz is known for credible accusations against him for having sex with minors, and he's a lawyer who never had a case.  He's also never run anything larger than his own House of Representatives office.

And I'm so supposed to be happy that the Attorney General-designate is not Mike Davis? 

Meanwhile, a son of a former Attorney General is on tap to be Secretary of Health and Human Services - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  An environmental lawyer who would be more useful heading the Environmental Protection Agency, Kennedy is a vaccine skeptic and a conspiracy theorist who thinks he can make Americans healthier with home remedies involving chicken broth, honey, and a calf-liver compress or two - and he apparently believes that the best way to immunize Americans from the measles or the mumps is to have everyone catch them to develop herd immunity.

Kennedy is accused of having no experience with pharmaceuticals.  Not true - he's a former heroin addict!

You're going to need a shot of smack to endure Tulsi Gabbard, who's known for talking smack about American policy in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin's good intentions, in her new role as Director of National Intelligence!

A former congresswoman from Hawaii who was once a progressive and has no experience in intelligence and espionage - except for maybe having watched a James Bond movie or two - Gabbard, who's more of a Bond girl than Bond (yes, I said that), is a woman of Asian and Pacific Islander (AAPI) heritage, suggesting that she would be Trump's token DEI pick.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Cabinet of Trump Mark Two!

Second verse, same as the first.     

Music Video Of the Week - November 15, 2024

"Unholy Rollers" by Screen Syndicate (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Whither Biden 2024?

You know what's depressing about the popular-vote result of the election?  Although Donald Trump got as many votes as he did in 2020, millions of Democrats decide to stay home rather than vote for Kamala Harris.

But what if Joe Biden had remained at the top of the Democratic ticket?

President Biden originally intimated that he would serve only one term, but he never declared his intentions for 2024 one way or the other in the first two years of his term to avoid being seen as a lame duck.  When the 2022 midterm elections turned out to be unexpectedly not awful for the Democrats, Biden took that to mean that he would be in a strong position for 2024.  Also, there was the paucity of serious contenders for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination; too many Democratic rising stars had ended up with brilliant futures behind them when they lost important statewide elections for governor or Senate, and the few Democrats who had the chops to replace Biden at the top of the ticket were handicapped by prejudice or stereotyping.  As I said at the time, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer had just gotten re-elected but still had to deal with her sex as a political liability, given the American people's resistance to the idea of a female President.  There was Pete Buttigieg, but he was too young.  Bernie Sanders, by contrast, was too old.  California governor Gavin Newsom was connected to socially liberal San Francisco, where he'd been mayor.  And the Kamala Harris of 2022 was the same Kamala Harris of 2024 - a black woman whose husband is a Jew.  But any white man with her chops would have been handicapped by simply coming from the San Francisco Bay Area like she did.  And Gavin Newsom clearly was. 

In short, the consensus was that it was either Biden or a houseplant.

So what if Biden had resisted calls to step down and tried to persevere?  We'll never know.  It's all good and fine to suggest that he would have been able to eke out a victory if his own party - and George Clooney - hadn't publicly trashed him this past summer.  Certainly Biden would have done his best to recover from that debate with Trump in a second debate.  Obviously he would have gotten out more in front with the voters, an opportunity the pandemic denied him in 2020.  Clearly he would have talked a lot about economic issues, which would have rung more true from him given his background.  No doubt he would have done his darnedest to make the election about Trump - because if it was about Trump, the Democrats might have gotten an edge.  But the evidence for a Biden victory had he gotten the full support of his party and not had to deal with jokers like Dean Phillips is nonexistent.

So what if Biden had decided not to stand for re-election much sooner?  What if he had decided not to do so in January 2023 and had announced that he would not seek re-election in his February 2023 State of the Union address?  Despite the apparent lack of able contenders to succeed him, there is, to be sure, that someone will make the argument that an unlikely presidential possibility - former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, Kentucky governor Andy Bashear, North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, or someone no one, not even I, has heard of - would have won the nomination in a fair and open primary/caucus contest and gone on to win the general election.  But the case for a dark horse flies in the face of the likeliest scenario - the party would have immediately coalesced behind Vice President Harris, as Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) insisted should happen back in 2022.

But at least, if Harris had become the presumptive Democratic nominee much earlier, she might have been able to get more people to know her better and had much more time to do so that the 105 days or so she did have.

Then again, maybe the American people never really did want as President a black woman whose husband is a Jew, and no difference of circumstances would have changed that.

It is just this sort of second-guessing and pondering what might have been that is going to plague and bedevil the Democrats as they prepare for next year's gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia and the 2026 midterms . . . assuming they're still on under Trump 47.

Trump is already teasing the idea of a third term for himself, which is possible only if he terminates the Constitution.