Let’s not go traveling, shall we?
May 19 2020
Cartnoon
May 19 2020
The Breakfast Club (Opinions)
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History
Actress Marilyn Monroe sings a sultry ‘Happy Birthday’ to President John F. Kennedy; Black militant Malcolm X born; Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis dies; The Who’s Pete Townshend born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
May 18 2020
Purging
I want to talk with you about vomiting blood. It’s not very pleasant. First of all you are, by definition, nauseous and you probably have a headache because of the anemia but that’s not the interesting part.
Your vomit comes out kind of black until it hits the toilet water where it turns a spectacular crimson.
You need a Doctor. I waited until the Admitting Nurse said, “You walked in here?! Last time I saw numbers like these they’d been shot.”
In retrospect not my best idea, but despite Medical advice I’m still kicking. In case you’re wondering I have chronic anemia of unknown origin and ulcers, my condition has considerably improved since I have de-stressed and if Markos knew he’d probably reinstate me (third time’s the charm) because he’s a bastard.
And since then I’ve had regular “Lower Endoscopies” (“Looks like we’ll have to use the big one”) which is it’s own kind of purge. Follow directions, you don’t want your Doctor to scold you.
But the one I’m kind of going for here is the Stalin style purge-
The Great Purge or the Great Terror (Russian: Большой террор) was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936 to 1938. It involved a large scale repression of wealthy peasants (labeled as “kulaks”), genocidal acts against ethnic minorities, a purge of the Communist Party and government officials, and the Red Army leadership, widespread police surveillance, suspicion of saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries, imprisonment, and arbitrary executions. Historians estimate the total number of deaths due to Stalinist repression in 1937–38 to be between 680,000 and 1,200,000.
Who in the room thinks Coronavirus is going to stop at 100,000? It’s 83,000 last time I checked.
I always thought “Inspectors General” were a bad idea in the first place. They’re Institutionalists drawn from the ranks of the Agencies they’re supposed to regulate and fall in the normal Chain of Command that which means any negative findings will be punished if shame is no obstacle.
Coronavirus is no different.
May 18 2020
Pondering the Pundits
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Robert Reich: America’s corporate elite must stop treating coronavirus as an obstacle to profit
It’s up to CEOs to rise above their arrogance and place the health of their workers before revenues
As America reopens for business, you might expect Jeff Bezos, the richest man in America, and his Amazon corporation, the most profitable corporation in America, to set the standard for how to protect the health of American workers.
Think again.
Amazon’s warehouses have become Covid-19 hot spots, yet Amazon has repeatedly fired workers who sound the alarm – including, just recently, a warehouse worker in Minnesota who spoke out against unsafe conditions, and, earlier in the pandemic, a worker who led a walkout at Amazon’s huge JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island after several employees tested positive for the virus. [..]
At Amazon’s AVP1 fulfillment center near Hazleton, Pennsylvania – under federal investigation because of an early surge in cases – workers say Amazon stopped sharing information about Covid-19 cases, so they started their own unofficial tally, which at last count was 64 and rising. [..]
Amazon doesn’t even provide hourly workers paid sick leave. It had allowed warehouse workers with pre-existing conditions to take leave without pay if they feared infection, but that policy expired last Thursday.
The company now says anyone who doesn’t return to work will be fired, and it’s about to eliminate an extra $2 per hour hazard pay it had given warehouse workers.
Why have Bezos and Amazon set the bar so low for the rest of corporate America? It can’t be the cost. Amazon can afford the highest safety standards in the world. Last quarter, its revenue surged 26% and its profits soared to $75.5bn. Since March, Jeff Bezos’ net worth has jumped $24bn.
So, what is it? Perhaps it’s the arrogance and indifference that comes with extraordinary power.
Jamelle Bouie: Trump Is Following in Herbert Hoover’s Footsteps
And we know how that worked out.
Additional economic assistance is the only thing that can keep the U.S. economy from falling into a second Great Depression, and with interest rates near zero, the government has all the fiscal capacity it needs to borrow the trillions necessary to relieve the pain. But Congress, or rather congressional Republicans, won’t budge. After backing the $2 trillion CARES Act in March, they believe they’ve done enough for now. [..]
And President Trump appears unmoved by the prospect of economic devastation, except insofar as it affects his chances for re-election. The White House halted talks with Congress over any further stimulus.
All of this — the passivity, the indifference, the refusal to embrace the tools at hand for ideological reasons — is reminiscent of Herbert Hoover, who also presided over a catastrophic economic downturn, the mismanagement of which plunged the United States into a crisis that tore at the seams of American society. [..]
It would be nearly four years after the stock market crash in 1929 before the federal government, under Roosevelt’s administration, began to do anything to meaningfully alleviate the pain of the Great Depression. By then, nearly a quarter of working Americans were unemployed and tens of millions of people struggled to find food and shelter.
Not only are we not that far gone, but we have a chance to remove our modern-day Hoovers before they can lead the country to further disaster. With luck, we’ll make good on that opportunity in November.
Michelle Goldberg: Obamagate Is a Fake Scandal. Rick Bright Described a Real One.
“The darkest winter in modern history” may soon be upon us, while Trumpists are obsessed with a new conspiracy theory.
Recently people on the right have started pushing a ludicrous pseudo-scandal they’re calling Obamagate. It holds that investigations by Barack Obama’s administration into Russia’s attack on the 2016 U.S. presidential election were a form of illicit sabotage of Donald Trump and his team. The story doesn’t really make sense, which is why, when asked about Obamagate, President Trump couldn’t describe it. But at the heart of the conspiracy theory is “unmasking,” the routine practice by which national security officials find out the names of Americans who appear on intelligence intercepts of foreign actors. Trumpists have tried to turn this into a sinister and portentous term.
Obamagate exists to rewrite the history of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference to make Trump the victim, rather than someone who actively sought Russia’s help and then took steps to reward the nation’s president, Vladimir Putin, for providing it. Trump often accuses others of misdeeds that he is guilty of; recall his sputtering response to Hillary Clinton calling him a Putin puppet in a 2016 debate: “No puppet! No puppet! You’re the puppet!” In Obamagate, he is accusing his opponents of politicizing intelligence because of a political vendetta, which is what his administration is currently doing. [..]
This sub-Benghazi conspiracy theory could be cropping up now because the right hopes to use it against Joe Biden, who as vice president requested one of the unmaskings that turned up Flynn’s name. It’s even possible that Trump’s lawless attorney general, Bill Barr, might use Obamagate as a pretext to open an investigation into Biden. But Obamagate is also a way to distract at least some segment of the country from a very real and very grave scandal: Trump’s calamitous mishandling of the coronavirus crisis, exemplified by suspected political retaliation against Dr. Rick Bright, one of the government’s foremost vaccine experts.
Paul Waldman: Michael Flynn isn’t a martyr. He’s a crook and a crackpot.
For anyone with a memory that stretches all the way back to 2016, it is positively bizarre to see Republicans suddenly claiming that Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, is a martyr. It’s obvious why and how they’re doing it: In an effort to distract from Trump’s spectacular failure on the coronavirus pandemic, they are attempting to create a new fake “scandal” that will send us all down an endless rabbit hole chasing absurd lies and conspiracy theories.
But Michael Flynn? He’s the one they want to portray as a victim? What’s next — Jeffrey Epstein was framed? Bernie Madoff was a humanitarian? Al Capone was misunderstood?
Here’s the truth: Flynn should never have been allowed within 10 miles of the White House. He was a dangerous, dishonest and shady operator who was also kind of a loon. For a moment, it appeared that everyone in the Trump administration realized it, which was why he was booted from his position as national security adviser after only 24 days on the job.
Yet now they’re treating him like a hero. [..]
Trump has always gathered around him the most morally repugnant people he could find, an endless collection of grifters, liars and thieves. Flynn fit right in, even if he was discarded when he became an embarrassment.
But the real problem is that he was ever given a position of responsibility in the first place. As you watch Republicans make the ludicrous claim that he’s the victim of an anti-Trump conspiracy, keep that in mind.
Gretchen Whitmer: States have taken the lead in fighting the coronavirus. Now we need aid.
Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, is the governor of Michigan.
Since the first positive cases of covid-19, Michigan has been aggressive to slow the spread of the virus. Governors in other states such as Ohio, Illinois, Maryland, Wisconsin, New York and many others have also taken the lead, and our actions are starting to pay off. But this crisis will damage states’ budgets for years to come, threatening everything from education to public safety to health care. Neither the virus nor the economic distress stops at state or party lines. The nation’s governors, Democratic and Republican, have worked tirelessly to protect our people. Right now, we need our partners on both sides of the aisle in Washington to come together and pass a plan to aid states in our recovery. [..]
Recent estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities show that state budget shortfalls alone could total $650 billion over the next three years. Right now, we need our federal partners to provide sufficient and flexible aid to mitigate the economic crisis that every state is going through. None of us can afford for this to devolve into a partisan issue. President Trump called this a war, and it is exactly that. So we must act like it. In World War II, Americans dropped everything they were doing to build planes and tanks. They rationed food and took care of one another. They worked together and sacrificed until we had beaten the enemy.
Now, we are called again to act, put aside political differences, protect our families and loved ones, and beat this virus.
May 18 2020
Competitive Face Slapping
May 18 2020
Cartnoon
Well, I suppose there are worse Heros to emulate.
The show follows secret agent Angus MacGyver, played by Richard Dean Anderson, who works as a troubleshooter for the fictional Phoenix Foundation in Los Angeles and as an agent for a fictional United States government agency, the Department of External Services (DXS). Educated as a scientist in Physics at Western Tech (“Hell Week“), MacGyver served in the U.S. Army Special Forces as a Bomb Team Technician/EOD during the Vietnam War (“Countdown“). Resourceful and possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of the physical sciences, he solves complex problems by making things out of ordinary objects, along with his ever-present Swiss Army knife, duct tape, and occasionally matches. He favors non-violent resolutions and prefers not to handle a gun due to a gun death of one of his friends when he was 12.
His main asset is his practical application of scientific knowledge and inventive use of common items. The clever solutions MacGyver implemented to seemingly unsolvable problems— often in life-or-death situations requiring him to improvise complex devices in a matter of minutes— were a major attraction of the show, which was praised for generating interest in the applied sciences, particularly engineering, and for providing entertaining storylines. All of MacGyver’s exploits on the show were ostensibly vetted by consulting scientists for the show’s writers to ensure a basis on scientific principles (even though, the creators acknowledged in real life one would have to be extraordinarily lucky for most of MacGyver’s ideas to succeed).
May 18 2020
The Breakfast Club (Coronavirus Rhapsody)
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History
Mt. St. Helens erupts in Washington State; The U.S. Supreme Court upholds racial segregation; Pope John Paul II born in Poland; Movie director Frank Capra born; ‘Les Miserables’ ends its Broadway run.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
May 17 2020
Graduate Together: America Honors The High School Class Of 2020
No. This Is not a rant. This is for the High School Graduating Class 2020 who cannot have proms or formal graduation ceremonies that are part of their proud achievement and transition into adulthood. Congratulation and Well Wishes from myself, TMC, ek hornbeck, BobbyK and the staff at The Stars Hollow Gazette and Docudharma. Go forward and continue to learn and grow.
To honor you, here is the repeat of your graduation ceremony.
May 17 2020
I do not fear the dark side as you do.
I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security to my new empire.
What Liberals Don’t Get About Trump Supporters and Pop Culture
By DEREK ROBERTSON, Politico
05/16/2020
When President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, triumphantly invoked the “Star Wars” universe to liken the president’s reelection effort to the “Death Star,” all but ready to “start pressing FIRE,” it was both a standard display of MAGA braggadocio and a brief respite from the unrelenting, bleak coronavirus discourse.
Well-meaning liberals instantly took the bait and flooded Parscale’s replies to let him know he had, supposedly, missed the point — “Didn’t make it till the end of Star Wars, huh?” tweeted the Daily Beast’s Molly Jong-Fast. NBC legal analyst Barb McQuade plaintively (and quite reasonably) asked, “Who chooses to portray themselves as the Death Star?” (Spoiler alert, for the uninitiated: The Death Star belongs to the bad guys. The bad guys lose.)
It was the latest in a pattern of baffling-at-first-glance pop culture references from Trumpworld. The president has favorably likened himself to the vile Captain Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty. He earnestly approved a scene from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” that otherwise mocks the MAGA phenomenon as a brotherhood of aggro white dudes. An official Trump campaign Twitter account posted a video with the president’s head bizarrely photoshopped onto Thanos, the genocidal alien despot of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Each instance elicited the same response from a certain set of liberals: Don’t they get it? Don’t they understand they have it all wrong?
Implicit to those questions is the assertion that either the Trump campaign and its supporters are so oblivious to “Star Wars,” the most ubiquitous pop culture phenomenon of the past 50 years, that they don’t know how it ends, or so incomprehensibly illiterate as cultural consumers that they don’t understand George Lucas’ fictional Empire is meant to be the baddies.
The real explanation is much simpler and more believable: When Parscale and his ilk approvingly identify themselves with pre-redemption Darth Vader, or Thanos, or even Dr. Evil, they surely understand those characters’ morality perfectly well. It’s not so much that Trump, et. al actively identify as “villains,” but that the behavior that makes one a “villain” in fiction—deceit, wanton rule-breaking, a willful disregard for collateral damage—is, in real life, more likely to get one branded a “winner,” provided one plays their cards right. Enron executives? Elizabeth Holmes? The steroid-juicing baseball heroes of the 1990s? Winners all—at least until they got caught
Through that lens, everything from the Justice Department dropping charges against Michael Flynn post-guilty plea, to the president’s continued enrichment from his various hotels and business entities (to much worse) is as justifiable as the destruction of Alderaan. Rule-bound critics across the ideological spectrum can cry and moan as much as they want; the Trump administration has the power, is #winning and will do as it pleases, until they’re similarly caught red-handed. (To the extent that remains a possibility—the insulation from accountability provided by such magnificent power as the presidency is, of course, one of its most enjoyable perks.)
Of course, Trump’s opponents have a different idea of how power should be used. The defining ideological conflict of the Trump era isn’t between conservatives and liberals. It’s between those who embrace Trump’s gleefully anarchic, ends-justify-the-means bashing of “the establishment” and those who would protest, to quote another Larry David creation, that “we’re living in a society.” By reversing the polarity of a simple morality play like “Star Wars,” the MAGA camp isn’t missing the point at all. On the contrary, they’re killing two birds with one stone: expressing their philosophy with a wink and a nod while getting in some good-old-fashioned trolling.
And as Trump’s attention shifted over the past decade from his business and entertainment empire to a nationwide ideological project, his pet cultural signifiers have scaled up to match. “Star Wars,” or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or “Rocky,” are useful first and foremost in their ubiquity; to invoke them is to amplify what would otherwise be ho-hum partisan mudslinging.
Almost uniformly, this is to the chagrin of the creators of those stories invoked with a smirk by Parscale and company. In December, when the Trump campaign sent the Thanos tweet, the character’s creator (and Marvel Comics legend) Jim Starlin compared the experience to “being violated.” George Lucas himself, a dyed-in-the-wool 1960s radical who envisioned the original “Star Wars” as a pro-Viet Cong parable, consulted on an anti-Trump ad from former Senator Bill Bradley’s Super PAC before the 2016 election.
But it’s hard to imagine the average Trump supporter — and certainly not the man himself — caring about such a thing. Through the MAGA lens, the creative impulse behind those characters isn’t something to be respected piously, or parsed earnestly for sociopolitical relevance. In fact, Trumpworld’s relationship with something like “Star Wars” might ultimately be slightly more reasonable than that of your humble author: as nothing more than a trivial entertainment that might occasionally serve as a shared reference point or shallow reflecting pool.
Recall Trump’s advice to Charles Foster Kane, the protagonist of “Citizen Kane,” a favorite film of his. When the documentarian Errol Morris asked the future president in 2002 if he would give any advice to the fictional Kane, a man torn apart by hubris and his obsession over his own work and legacy, Trump’s response was simple: “Get yourself a different woman.” Trump couldn’t have been less interested in psychoanalyzing Kane as a proxy for Orson Welles, or a metaphor for unchecked power and ambition. Kane merely served as a lens through which Trump could implicitly present himself as the savvier, ideal version of the fictional tycoon. (After all, he’s followed his own prescription for Kane twice now.)
The best example of the Trumpian ethos in pop culture, and how the president’s fans bear it with pride, is one that mostly passed without remark. As the Democratic-controlled House prepared for its impeachment inquiry last September, Parscale warned that he would “laugh this much when everyone figures out how much @realDonaldTrump played @SpeakerPelosi,” followed by a frequently used gif of Leonardo DiCaprio’s exaggerated laughter as the penny-stock scoundrel and convicted fraudster Jordan Belfort in 2013’s “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
…
The gif is taken from the film’s climactic scene, in which Belfort’s foil, a mostly glum, by-the-book FBI agent played by “Friday Night Lights” star Kyle Chandler, boards Belfort’s palatial yacht to question him as part of a securities fraud investigation. Chandler’s agent gets Belfort cold on tape attempting a bribe. The laugh that Parscale appropriated comes right after Belfort is threatened with the seizure of his treasured yacht, and immediately before he launches into a panicked, self-aggrandizing tirade — “Good luck on that subway ride home to your miserable, ugly fucking wives… you guys want to take some lobsters for your ride home? Fucking miserable pricks, I know you can’t afford them!” He finishes up by tossing $100 bills, or “fun coupons,” at Chandler and his partner as they walk away, defiant in the self-justifying nature of Belfort’s excess.The philosophy on display in Parscale’s “Wolf of Wall Street” tweet is very simple, and it’s the same one that’s revealed in the Trump team’s gleeful, impish identification with far more fantastical villains like Darth Vader. Victory is defined by the extent to which one is enjoying the spoils. Following the rules is for suckers and schoolmarms.
Belfort, on the other hand, is a real person who ultimately served real prison time for securities fraud and money laundering (and is now, as Martin Scorcese’s film points out in its mordant conclusion, a successful motivational speaker). He’s also a Trump supporter.
If Trump’s camp is trolling the world with its Machiavellian embrace of fictional villainy, it might reflect even another level of self-awareness — a hard-won acknowledgment that occasionally, despite everything, the rule-followers eke out a win.
May 17 2020
No Sports?
What? Turn Left Bumper Cars in Flaming Chunks of Twisted Metal and Bundesliga? Do you even know who Borussia Dortmund is?
World Fencing Championships- Budapest 2019
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