Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

"He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn't."

-Roger Stone, implying that he could spill the beans, mere hours before Trump decided to commute his sentence.

More acceptance of their criminality leads to more contempt of us.

It's all very nice to tear down, burn and shatter the statues of dead traitors and racists but what about the living ones? America has a hell raising, lawless, traitorous devil of a president who viciously attacks the country by siding with its enemies, teargassing and steamrolling its citizens, shredding its Constitution, and laughing at the very idea that there are laws of any kind. All the political leaders of the so-called opposition to Trump and his republican troopers bring pencils, manicure knives, and erasers to the fight when the only effective countermeasure would be to have leaders that give like for like. Yeah, I know we allegedly still have a legal system to take care of these things but how did that work out with Impeachment-lite? A legal system is no good when one side soft pedals it against the other side that laughs at it dismissively with unrelenting cruelty and psychotic actions. In short, our legal system has atrophied and died for lack of use and nourishment. The commutation of Roger Stone's already ridiculously lowered sentence is just the latest example of that. Trump and his cronies get away with everything because they know they can. The countdown to shooting people on Fifth Avenue is well underway.

The leaders of the Democratic Party see this battle as a battle of just words and tedious do-nothing Impeachment-lite, mixed with half-hearted (at best) hearings and court cases full of endless parsing and posing. They refuse to call this situation what it really is and act accordingly. We are at war. The Civil War not only never ended, it has always simmered and flared from time to time. Now it has flared up anew, like never before. This war knows no borders. It's propaganda is broadcast nationwide 24 hours a day by people who are a virus all by themselves. The Republican Guard's armed militia parade in the streets, fire off their guns like their crazed middle eastern counterparts, and take over state houses as their Dear Leader tweets encouragement and talks up violence. Can you imagine if, in 1942, we had invited the troops of the Axis powers over to fight it out with loyal Americans here on our streets?

Our Democratic Party "leadership" can't even put together advertising that resonates and people want to see. They leave that to a small handful of disgruntled Lincoln Project republicans who have a long term agenda of their own. Instead, the best we can do is milquetoast semi-dweebs like Adam Schiff who act all nice and civil when we need a hell raiser of our own. You don't win a fight by keeping your hands at your side and trying to polite your opponent to death. The voters are no better. Apparently the American public would look at Idi Amin eating their fellow citizens and ask him, "would you like fries with that?"

As readers know, I've often compared what we now have in the White House to comic book villains. Lex Luther is generally my go-to villain of choice but I have used both The Joker, and The Penguin. Trump in a tux in particular reminds me of The Penguin. That's about how he walks and stands. Sadly though, the brutal comedy-tragedy we are living in demands attention, not escapism. What Trump is doing is real life villainy. He may not be manipulating the fabric of space and time but he is destroying what's left of our fabric of law and order and therefore the fabric of society itself. It's all very psychotically deliberate and planned of course, and if you think deliberately encouraging the chaos of the spread of a plague isn't part of it all, then you are a fool on your best days.

Giving Roger Stone a Quid Pro Quo "Get Out Of Jail Free" card mere hours after he implied that he might talk and employing a traitorous Attorney General to wreak havoc on The United States Of America is exactly what all those Republican House members and $enators so eagerly voted for when they voted not to impeach Trump and not to remove Trump from the White House. Instead, they willfully voted for the death of untold American citizens and the death of this country itself, all for the payoff of confirming a hundred federal judges and getting millions in Russian rubles and corporate dollars. The Trump cabinet is no better. They all kiss the rings of The Orange Menace and our nation's adversaries with enthusiasm in their hearts and the cash in their pockets. They do it in plain sight. If Sam Giancana or Vinny The Chin Gigante were in the White House, it would be the same. It is the same, and that is how they want it. Donnie The Chin.

Donnie The Chin is the stuff of Cosa Nostra chronicles. He and his crew of $enatorial earners and House wiseguys are what The Bush Crime Family dreamed of. They are also what we get for not demanding or choosing better candidates from our political parties and not demanding that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, be at the least, sent to The Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity. Scooter Libby got his sentence commuted too and what he did led to people dying. The voters shrugged.

Barack "Too Much Mr. Nice Guy" Obama's relative silence about Russian election interference and Moscow MItch's bought and paid for part in that silence also helped lead us to where we are today, of course. Now, we have a president who is the stuff of third world dictatorships and we are on our way to being a third world country. And while I'm at it, let's definitely not forget that Trump's traitorous goon of an Attorney General was also Attorney General under George H.W. "Poppy" Bush and did legal work for Ronald Reagan. Clearly, he has an affinity for really bad presidents. We let the Bushes and their operators off the hook and sent a message that all is permissible with that and the acceptance of Poppy's pardons of his and Reagan's Iran Contra schemes and schemers, all on top of the ignored criminality of the October 1980 surprise. We turned a blind eye to Nixon's death dealing Paris treason and overall treachery, and we didn't demand that Gerald Ford be dragged off to prison for pardoning him and sentencing him to a full pension and life on a California beach; talk about your obstruction of justice! The seeds that bore the fruits of accepting criminality or not paying attention were sown long ago.

What I Learned Last Night

In 1879, Fyodor Dostoevsky, gave us "The Grand Inquisitor"-- a poem within The Brothers Karamazov-- widely considered one of the greatest pieces of literature in history. This week, James Inman wrote "If Jesus came back today and saw Notre Dame he'd say, 'Fuck your church. What is this stained glass bullshit? Back in my day we worshipped God out in a field. Oh you saved my crown of thorns? Whoop-de-fucking-do!' Then you'd plot to kill him again for speaking the truth." Same-same-- just a shorter and less ambiguous version.

An out-of-town friend asked me to meet him at Crossroads (on Melrose), my favorite vegan restaurant. There was no traffic so I got there really early. Across the street is a small office building and the pot shop I used when I needed CBD oil after chemo is-- or was-- in that building. But I didn't know about the "was." So I figured I'd stop there and get some CBD balm for my neuropathy. But there'll gone. So how to kill half an hour at 8pm?

Three blocks away my former favorite non-vegan restaurant, Ink, had closed down but was replaced with a lovely-looking shop called Cookies. Hmmm... maybe they have sugar-free cookies, I thought. I decided to walk over there and take a look. But gee, there was a helluva lot of security in from of the store. Maybe it was a grand opening. I'll just make like I belong-- the way Paul Kantner taught me to-- and slide right in. It seemed to work; I got right through the door. It was bright and shiny and modern and kind of nice. "Can I see your ID?" asked the lady inside the front door. I took out my driver's license and she did some kind of high tech picture of it. And then I noticed the smell. It was a nice smell, but very strong. Pot? Was I actually in a pot store? I was. She asked me to wait til as associate could come over and show me around. I said I could show myself around. "Nope," she said. The associate was fantastic. He showed me around a really large cannabis emporium with more products than I could have imagined. I bought some of the balm. They charged a huge tax for this stuff. I was shocked. I complained. They said, "Oh, we have a senior discount." It was 10% and I was happy-- happy to pay less and happy to know that seniors pay less for cannabis in the 21st Century.

So, I can't say who my out-of-town friend was. Because he (or she) told me something in strict confidence. "Please don't put this on your blog." I asked if I could but without his (or her) name on it. A role of the eyes was immediately accepted by me as an OK. Here's what I learned: After the GOP started their jihad against Ilhan Omar, senior Democrats by and large refused to publicly back her. Jerry Nadler was a conspicuous exception. Eventually someone pulled a very half-assed defense out of Pelosi. But... and here it comes... while this was raging in the media-- including death threats against Ilhan-- the #2 Dem in the House, Steny Hoyer was workin' it hard behind the scenes. Workin' what? Oh, yeah... working to get Ilhan kicked off the House Foreign Affairs Committee. After all, no one is supposed to be on there without being pro-Likud anyway. right? By the way, a progressive woman named Mckayla Wilkes is primarying Hoyer. We'll be talking about her more, of course, but meanwhile... please consider giving Ilhan a hand by tapping that thermometer on the right.





And one more thing! The folks at Now This who put this clip together should all get a Pulitzer for something. Remember when we had a real president and when Fox News was the disloyal opposition, instead of the state propaganda arm? Well this clip is meant to show you what Fox would sound like if they were covering Señor Trumpanzee the same way-- the exact same way in fact-- they used to cover President Obama. In their own words:

Trump Accuses China Of Intellectual Property Theft... While He Applauds His Own Campaign's Intellectual Property Theft

Politicians on both sides of the aisle beat up China for stealing American intellectual property-- in other words, using it without paying for it. Trump has been particularly vocal about it. Trump, however, has consistently been stealing intellectual property, getting caught and reprimanded and then doing it again, and again, and again. The ominous-sounding Trump campaign video is anything but uplifting. There's an underlying ugliness to it-- primarily an invocation of danger and fear through the prominent music track in the background. It's very a very effective use of the music from a Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. Trump loved it. He tweeted it out to his followers. Unfortunately, his campaign didn't bother asking permission to use it, let alone pay to use it.

Warner Brothers issued a cease and desist order and the Trump campaign had to withdraw the ad.

I spoke to one of my old colleagues from Warners who told me that politicians generally have no respect for copyrights and no respect for musicians' rights. "They think they can use our music for free and that no one will care or notice. Both sides do it," she told me. "The complaints that come in are about 99% about Republican theft though... maybe a little more than 99%... Zimmer's 'Why Do We Fail' composition was a smart choice by Trump's campaign folks. They should have paid just like everyone else does."

This one, using music and footage from Bollywood smash Bajirao Mastani, is still up on YouTube but is no longer embeddable. This is what you get when you try to watch it on a non-YouTube site, as we found when we went to watch it again on a Sunday night DWT post. Watch it full screen.