(Not that every day the Amerikan zeitgeist isn’t increasingly colored blue and purple by the political class Court Jesters in service to out rulers…) (p.s. I’ve asked for, but haven’t yet received permission to (ahem) steal this material. Thanks, Jeffrey; you’re a treasure.)
From his March 31 Roaming Charges:
+ Saudi Arabia has launched 90,000 airstrikes in Yemen since 26 March 2015. That’s 123 airstrikes every day, one every 12 minutes. (Weapons supplied by the US.)
+ The head of US Africa Command, Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, is begging Trump to authorize offensive airstrikes on Somalia. Why more bang-bang against one of the poorest countries on the globe? If we don’t bomb now, Somalia may invade the US later…
+ The US State Dept. condemned the arrest of 100 protesters in Russia. I must have missed the department’s condemnation of the brutal treatment and arrest of Standing Rock protesters. Can someone please forward?
+ Anti-Iraq War President Trump, like his predecessor anti-Iraq War President Barack Obama, now brags about US forces “fighting in Iraq like never before.”
+ US airstrikes in Mosul killed more than 200 civilians. In its defense, the Pentagon claims, without a shred of evidence it must be admitted, that the women and children were being used as human shields by the bad hombres of ISIS. Maybe when Trump said he opposed the Iraq War, he was actually talking about “war.” Totally cool with killing 100s of civilians….
+ The Trump Administration is dropping human rights considerations as a precondition for arms sales to Bahrain. I can see the logic here. If you’re looking for a nation to bomb civilian targets on your behalf, why sell weapons to one that troubles itself about human rights?
+ Not so long Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg helped run a defense contractor called Cubic Global Defense, Inc, a company that Kellogg left in order to take the post of Trump’s chief of staff on the National Security Council. This week Kellogg’s former firm was awarded a $17.5 million contract to run a simulated war on North Korea.
+ Whenever there’s a “bi-partisan” investigation, you know there’s something really nefarious, usually involving an intelligence agency, that needs to be deeply buried.
+ It’s hard for the White House & GOP to whine with authenticity about privacy violations in the unmasking of names of Trump associates in NSA documents on the very same day they enacted a law giving away all of our browsing data…
+ Just how dumb is Rep. Devin “High” Nunes? He burned a highly sympathetic columnist, Eli Lake, by lying to him, a lie Nunes surely had to know was going to be unmasked within a few days. Lake shot back, fatally. (Lake, by the way, has raised important questions about domestic surveillance that few others are talking about.)
+ Just how dumb is Trump to want “High” Nunes leading his quickly unraveling cover-up?
+ Tim Kaine being Tim Kaine: “We can make health care better by lowering costs, improving the stability of the markets, & expanding access. GOP & Dems must work together.” Sorry, Tim, “markets” and health care are antithetical…
+ Trump issued an executive order (which Obama waited until August 2016 to enact) this week abolishing federal anti-wage theft laws. Why? His blue-collar worker base begged him to?
+ Trump has spent 1 out of every 3 days since he’s been in office at one of his own properties: Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago or Trump International Golf Course in Virginia. This is how Trump goes to church.
+ Roger Daltry on HRC: “Let’s put it this way: when you say that middle America and the Democrats lost it, but Trump didn’t really win it — because Democrats threw it away by putting Hillary Clinton up. A dead dog would have won it against her.”
+ Roger Daltry on Trump: “His fucking haircut! He needs it cut and as my mother would say, ‘Wash your fucking mouth out.’”
+ Sen. Susan Collins, the mod Republican from Maine, inquired at the Senate Intelligence hearing on Thursday: “Were the Russians involved in Occupy Wall St.?” Of course they were, Susan, but in a less prominent way than their complete manipulation of the Standing Rock protests and Moonlight‘s shock win at the Oscars…
+ It looks like Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn has been turned by the FBI. Wait until Tiffany snitches on Daddy…
+ Flynn in September 2016: “If you’re given immunity, it probably means you’ve committed a crime.”
+ I really feel deflated that Alexander Cockburn and Gore Vidal aren’t around to witness this singular moment in American politics. They would both be exultant at the prospects of both parties self-destructing simultaneously.
+ A report by the New America Foundation concludes that white Americans are the biggest domestic terrorist threat. This comes as no news to the Mohawk or Lakota, who know well that they always have been.
+ According to the FBI, white supremacists are infiltrating law enforcement agencies. Infiltrating? I thought law enforcement had been recruiting white supremacists since at least the days of the Slave Patrols?
+ Dick Cheney emerged from the shadows to pronounce his opinion that alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election might “be considered an act of war.” Clinton / Cheney 2020? Or perhaps Kamala Harris / Cheney 2020, since the new senator from California, a rising star in the dim firmament of the Democrats, favorably quoted Cheney’s “casus belli” remark during the Senate Intelligence hearings on the “Russian Connection©”…
+ I always read Justin Raimondo’s columns at Antiwar.com. This week Justin boldly asserted: “How stupid does the Birkenstock-wearing brain-dead bourgeois Democratic base have to be to fall for this Russian conspiracy crap? Pitiful.” Birkenstocks? More like Jimmy Choos….
+ Even the fanatically anti-Putin Masha Gessen thinks Dems & liberal media (MS-DNC) have gone off the Deep End….
+ Before he read Hegel, Engels or Marx, Lenin was radicalized by Goethe, Shakespeare and Pushkin. See Tariq Ali’s fascinating account of the young Volodya’s literary bookshelf.
+ Gallup, Presidential Favorability Ratings:
Nixon Watergate Hearings – 36%
GW Bush post Katrina – 40%
Reagan during Iran/Contra – 46%
Ford pardons Nixon – 50%
Trump today – 35%
+ Carly Fiorina is now calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the “Russia Connection TM”. Blowback for Trump saying “Look at that face!”
+ The whale-killing season will begin in Norway on April 1st. Over the next few weeks, 900 whales will be killed, 90 percent of them female, most of those pregnant. If the slaughter of pregnant whales doesn’t curdle your conscience, what will?
+ Ezra Klein on the prospects for passing Trumpcare: “Paul Ryan is good at this kind of thing.” To be a world-class commentator, like his idol David Gergen, Ezra has to state the obvious over and over again without ever letting reality intrude.
+ Apparently more and more impoverished rural Americans, destitute and jobless, are filing disability claims to get them through the misery of long-term unemployment. Wait until Trump cuts off their disability checks to finance his border wall or makes them piss into a drug test tube to cash them…
+ For years, people have said that “Coke tastes like shit.” Finally we know why.
+ Still bitter over the fact that she lost her position as head of the DNC after she was exposed sabotaging Bernie Sanders’ campaign, Debbie Wasserman Schultz lashed out at Sanders this week, claiming ridiculously that “the Democrats are already a grassroots party.” Debbie, your roots are showing. Time for another dye-job.
+ In order to fulfill a Trump/Pence PR scam, the cash-strapped State of Indiana just forked over $7 million to Carrier, a reward for killing 1,500 jobs. That’s how corporate welfare works in God’s Country.
+ Forget Pizzagate, TSA is the real perpetrator of legalized child molestation…
+ Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is now threatening to end all federal funds to police forces in sanctuary cities. This would a salutary move by Sessions, especially if it also ends funding for the Gestapo-like “Joint Terrorism Task Forces.”
+ The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental “Protection” is suing two small towns that banned the drilling of fracking water wells. The message: you either agree to poison yourselves or goddammit we’ll do it for you…
+ Speaking of child abuse, Huma Abedin is reportedly considering a reunion with her disgraced husband Anthony Weiner, who engaged in a sexting exchange with a young woman while his young son sat on the bed. Huma can’t help herself. She’s a Democrat. They always return to failed strategies, like this one: Democrats Double-Down on Suburban Mom Strategy that Doomed HRC Campaign…
+ Four out of five kids in Oklahoma City apparently can’t read time by the hands on analog clocks. Don’t fret. Betsy DeVos will fix this appalling situation by forcing all schools to use digital clocks! As my friend Geoff Kirk noted it’s all about keeping the kids safe. “Real bloodbath potential when you say, ‘Look out! Grizzly at 11 o’clock’ to a group of young students.”
+ Thomas Hodgson, Sheriff of Bristol County in Massachusetts, has called for the arrest of leaders of Sanctuary Cities. I feel conflicted about this. Certainly many mayors deserve to be arrested, but not for protecting undocumented immigrants.
+The anonymous punks of smear at ProporNot have now started throwing slanderous mud at Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, demanding that their stenographers at the Washington Post investigate whether Taibbi is “receiving Russian money.” If the Post wants to rehabilitate its own tattered credibility, it should instead reveal the source of PropOrNot’s funding.
+ Mike Pence has vowed never to dine alone with a woman other than his wife. That must explain the male-only meeting on the future of Planned Parenthood chaired by Pence. There is some speculation that Pence was placed on marital parole after attending a party in the FoxNews room…
+ Trump has no detectable sense of humor. So it’s hard to tell if he’s joking, as in this quip on Friday during the presser on “trade crimes”: “I will tell you one thing, [Pence] has one hell of a good marriage going.” Pence cringed, but then he cringes at everything.
+ Sean Spicer’s press briefings are beginning to resemble gestalt sessions on the psych ward. Randle Patrick McMurphy where are you?
+ I was pleasantly reading a relatively informative piece on the legal definition of “Civil War” then skidded to a stop at this sentence: “David Armitage, the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard…”
+ Speaking of stopping in mid-sentence, there was a perfectly bland profile of Steve Bannon’s 25-year old mercenary Julia Hahn (now a special assistant to the President) in the Washington Post, which contained this description of one the cruelest purveyors of global economic misery: “It’s fair to say that nothing about Hahn’s time at Harvard-Westlake, a top prep school in Los Angeles, nor at the University of Chicago, one of higher ed’s great temples of liberalism…”
+ For the first time in 100 years, a wolf has been sighted in Nevada. Roam wild, buddy, but watch your ass, they’ll be gunning for you.
+ Stephen King’s It was one of the five scariest books I’ve ever read, along with Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Clive Barker’s Damnation Game, Tom Holland’s Lord of the Dead (featuring Byron as a very temperamental vampire) and, of course, In My Time by Dick Cheney. Whether the long-awaited film stacks up remains to be seen…
+ Gregory Corso:
I am a great American
I am almost nationalistic about it!
I love America like a madness!
But I am afraid to return to America
I’m even afraid to go into the American Express
—(From “The American Way”)
+ I’ve always loved the Texas blues queen Ruthie Foster. Now I love her even more….
And from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ answer phone message today:
“You have reached the Russian embassy, your call is very important to us. To arrange a call from a Russian diplomat to your political opponents, press one.
To use the services of Russian hackers press two.”
“To request election interference, press three and wait until the next election campaign. Please note that all calls are recorded for quality improvement and training purposes.”
Don’t most MSM headlines read like the Onion?
And finally (okay, it’s from two days ago…)
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
bless his cotton pickin’ heart, i just heard back from jeffrey st. clair. he said “sure”.
ah the gropenators at TSA that trump has unleashed on us that never did this stuff before. love the way the pervie uncle type goes back again at the end, in case he missed a spot on the kid’s privies. they should mix hernia tests, prostate & breast exams, pap smears, etc. w/keeping us safe. “no ma’am. we didn’t find any lumps on your breasts. but why was your husband carrying this cellphone in his rectum? trying to sneak a Samsung 7 on board?”
big grin. ad ‘ouch’ on the rectal samsung 7. he had so many good roamings it’s hard to choose, but i loved ‘randle patrick mcmurphy where are you?’
also, the fun satire from the russian foreign ministry, swear to goddess, the western tweeters went wild: ‘it’s a gag, right????
oh, yea, and tsa: those probes some states require before a woman can get an abortion? raping to see a fetus. but sessions, pence, et.al. will limit funds to clinics who provide them. back to coat-hanger days, or abortifacient herbs, i reckon. see margaret atwood: “wanna bet?“
I hope the DMT Elves are getting paid overtime for all the orders they issued this week. Maybe that’s why Trump wants to repeal the anti-wage theft bill….
well, now, amigo: not having had a clue about what dmt elves might be about, i had to some searching. whoosh; finally found long tracts concerning terrence mckenna, psychonautics, and wot? machine beings? lol.
zounds; what a fascinating traveler he was.
but had you seen op-eds akin to: if robots take our jobs, shouldn’t they pay taxes? but thanks for all the images you’ve sparked, cynical seeker. ;-)
Yes, I love McKenna, but that was a reference to Alex Jones’ hilarious rant on how the elites are all taking orders from the DMT Elves. You should check it out, it’s priceless. One of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
As was this diary, though I’m shaking in my boots about the upcoming Somali invasion. ;-)
“…Somalia may invade the US later…”, lol but srsly, didn’t bubba’s r2p somalia turn out be kinda in quest of some strategic mineral or other?
OMG. is this it? the clockwork elves? holy crow, i didn’t last more than a minute or two. his voice should be put on trial and hung, eh?
but yeah, yesterday T man was all: “if china doesn’t warn north korea, we’ll do it ourselves!” i guess the only saving grace these days is that it’s all so crazy that it’s hard to get depressed. just gotta ride it out as best we can and be in service to those whose needing a bit of help who cross our paths.
different groups are gearing up for actions ahead of may day. i get the popular resistance newsletter, some stuff’s a yawn, others…not so much.
the sign-up sheet. BAR newsletter sometimes has events, movements, but pop resistance is geared totally toward that. remember, zeese and flowers were Oct?2012 before those pesky kids went to zuccotti park and kinda…took the steam outta their movement? ;-)
You have to watch the entire rant to get the full experience. It’s about ten minutes long. His voice is awful I agree, as well as his “conspirotainment” style but he really goes over the edge with this one. I wish I knew how to link in this phone. I can’t remember where I saw it. Rigorous Intuition, I think.
Yes, definitely Rigorous Intuition but you have to go about a page down in the comments section to get the whole thing. It could be classic performance art of delusional obnoxiousness.
so the one i’d linked to wasn’t the one you’d meant? i had to bingle ‘rigorous intuition’; several hits, but rigint/truthseeker? sorry to be lost; i’ve spent most of the day in VZ fukkery by the imperium, and then all of a sudden a boatload of personal emails came in.
speaking of which, do you sign up for emails on the various threads on which you comment? kinda helps. i answered you twice on davidly’s, you may not have seen them. the comment list at least shows ‘talking avatars’. ;-)
Very worrisome. Yes, we have to ride it out and help others. I’m letting a couple of homeless people sleep at my house right now. They are very nice and they both got jobs and are helping me with housework.
Between the insanity on the far right and milquetoast left, who seem to be discovering their inner fascists, I see little hope for the immediate future. It will be a miracle if we avoid nuclear war, let alone address global warming. It’s times like these I try to look inward, pray, meditate, try to be kind and help others. Do you think people will wake up en masse when things get really bad? Or is Bannon such a Machiavellian genius he will succeed in misdirecting and scapegoating?
how kind of you to consciously commit “active love” for those folks. thing is, what we learned as hippies is those loved in such ways learn to pass it on, yes? and that reminds me, of course, of…a song.
your one sentence on what you do when times are hard is like a book title a friend sent me: ‘eat, pray, love’, iirc.
dunno, cynicalseeker, about people waking up when things get even worse. of course if they do, it will likely be a time for various demagogues to rise up. how many will go w/ the machiavellian ones? how many have already? it used to be said that when the price of food got so high… (think the breadwives in paris), or ‘nothing left to lose’…would be those tippig points, whether to peaceful revolution or the nonviolent kind.
i read periodically at another leftish site, and most T supporters are backing away from their earlier convictions. but still, there seems to be an undercurrent concerning which bad actors should be taken out. thing is, there are always bad actors, but srsly, say w/ death by gmo and big ag chemicals: who do you target? and there are always bad guys to take their places. in the end, imo, it’s the whole goddamed capitalist system that needs to have a nail stuck in its heart. and i think that truth hasn’t dawned yet for many amerikans. globally? yes. and if revolution comes, most esp. a non-violent one, it will be a global version of a peasant/rabble revolt.
climate change i do see as locked in, and the only help for that might be something like visitors from another world stopping by to blow all the co2 and methane out of the atmosphere. unh-huhn. ;-)