Is Someone Getting Howard Schultz To Give Up His Destructive Role In The 2020 Cycle By Giving Him A Role As A Targanian In The Long Night?

George Clooney is staying out of the primaries but plans to back whoever the candidate is against Trumpanzee. He feels confident Trump will be a one-termer, although he worries that the Starbucks guy could screw up everything. "The narrow edge he took to get there in 2016 has all gone so yes, I do [think he can be beaten]. We just have to not have third party candidates like [former Starbucks CEO] Howard Schultz... I’m not a fan at all. If [Schultz] wants to run as a Democrat as he says he is then you should run as a Democrat, not try and lead the process before you even got started."

My guess is that Schultz would like a graceful way too get out of this whole mess he created. The problem is that he's hired all these high-priced hookers consultants who are not letting their meal ticket vanish so quickly. Take Bill Burton for example. He worked at the DCCC and parleyed that, eventually, into a big gig as under Deputy White House Press Secretary Obama and an even bigger gig with the Priorities USA SuperPAC. More recently he ran the California operation of a sleazoid Democratic consulting firm, SKDKnickerbocker (owned Mark Penn). Burtion was getting a mega-paycheck at SKDKnickerbocker when Schultz wooed him away with promises of God-knows-how-much loot.

And Burton is just one example of consultants who have attached themselves to Schultz's billions. One of them, not Burton, told me that none of them think Schultz is going anywhere but that the money is great and that there's not much they have to do. And especially now, while Schultz is laying low and "waiting for Biden to self-combust," as that same top Schultz consultant told me.

Yesterday, the Daily Beast reported that Schultz's campaign is basically dormant, if not dead. Burton claims that Schultz is still considering running and that he'll announce his decision "in the late spring or early summer." (My contact in the campaign operation told me they figure Biden will screw up by then, leaving Schultz with a path to victory. I asked him if they were all drunk over there and he laughed, well aware that Schultz issuing strung along by people dependent on him for a paycheck.)

Erin McPike says he's recovering from back surgery and that that's why there's no campaign. Oh.

"But Schultz has also dialed down the elements of his campaign prep that don’t actually require public appearances," wrote Sam Stein. "He has not posted to Facebook or Instagram since April 30. His last missive was on how leaders make decisions 'through the lens of personal beliefs' which included a photo of a chess board, a French press, a cup of coffee and a diary with the phrase 'success is best when it's shared' written in black sharpie marker."

According to Facebook's ad archives, Schultz has not run an ad on the platform since April 23, when his account posted a spot that declared "It's Time To Un-Partisan.” Since Easter, Schultz has tweeted just twice. The first was to promote an op-ed he wrote on his trip to Arizona. That was on April 29. The second, and last, tweet came on Monday, when he tweeted a winky emoji at someone wondering if he was a character in Game of Thrones, after a cup of Starbucks was mistakenly included in a scene of the popular HBO show.

And it’s not just Schultz. Neither Steve Schmidt, his top adviser, nor Burton have tweeted since late January.

“The next president is not going to be decided on Twitter,” Burton said. “I would think if you looked at what he is doing publicly it stacks up with a lot of people engaged in the national conversation.”

That was once true. In the beginning of April, the Schultz media team was sending out statements on various relevant issues and informing reporters about upcoming events like his Fox News town hall in Kansas City, Missouri. After that, Schultz initiated a “Heart of America” tour that took him to Kansas. That same week, his team sent out a statement about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) Medicare for All proposal and sent a dispatch about his travels including information about Kansas farmers’ lives being impacted by Trump trade policies. The tour then headed to Arizona where it appears stopped—at least for now—because of his surgery.

There has been one major development that happened in the 2020 election since Schultz’s trip to Arizona: the formal entrance of former Vice President Joe Biden into the Democratic primary. Biden is an establishment figure with a lengthy record that places him a fair distance away from his party’s ideological left. In short, he’s the very type of candidate that Schultz has said would convince him to ultimately not enter the presidential race. But Burton stressed that the former VP’s presence was not a factor-- at least yet-- in Schultz’s thinking.

It isn't likely that anyone has written Schultz into the final episodes of Game of Thrones but he may have been offered a role in the prequel (set 5,000-10,000 years before the one we're watching now), possibly titled The Long Night. Jane Goldman, Carly Wray, Max Borenstein, and Brian Helgeland are writing it now and one of them could have offered Schultz a role, along with Dixie Egerickx, Denise Gough, George Henley, John Simm, Naomi Ackie, Jamie Campbell Bower, Ivanno Jeremiah, Alex Sharp, Toby Regbo and Richard McCabe. Coffee-drinker and A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin said, "Speaking of television, don’t believe everything you read. Internet reports are notoriously unreliable... We have had five different Game of Thrones successor shows in development (I mislike the term 'spinoffs') at HBO, and three of them are still moving forward nicely... The one I am not supposed to call The Long Night will be shooting later this year." The hope, of course, is that Schultz will accept a role as some minor Targaryen, who can be cut out of the film later, after he doesn't run and doesn't help Trump win a second term.

Howard Schultz Targaryen (of the Night's Watch)

EVERYBODY'S FAVORITE REPUBLICAN NAZI LOSES HIS PRIMARY-- THE INDIANA CONGRESSIONAL PRIMARIES

A couple weeks ago we were all aghast watching Tony Zirkle, an Indiana Republican candidate for Congress celebrating Hitler's birthday at a Nazi Party meeting. He lost his primary today, coming in third-- but still earning 3,566 Republican votes in the second CD. The 3 Republicans together wound up with less than 20,000 votes and Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly, who had no challenger, had almost 85,000 votes.



In the third CD Republican rubber stamp incumbent Mark Souder garnered 26,689, winning his primary, while the Democrat challenging him, Mike Montagano, who was unopposed, had 57,489 votes. It was a similar story in the 4th CD, where GOP incumbent Steve Buyer won his primary-- all 3 Republicans getting around 43,000 votes while Nels Ackerson, the Democratic challenger (unopposed) got over 55,000.

Republican loon Dan Burton had a tough primary but he beat his opponent 25,678  to 18,730. Mary Etta Ruley, the winning Democrat in the district, did better than either of them with 26,662 votes. In the 5th CD there were around 44,000 Republican voters and 46,000 Democratic voters.

The big shocker though was in the 6th District where Blue America-endorsed progressive Barry Welsh took 82,179  votes, as opposed to rubber stamp extremist Mike Pence who only had 38,031 votes.

In the 7th CD Andre Carson, with 7 Democratic primary challengers, won convincingly. He will face Jon Elrod (who had 17,000 votes compared to Carson's 58,000). In the 8th CD reactionary Democrat Brad Ellsworth had no primary. And in the 9th another reactionary Dem, Baron Hill, fended off his primary challengers, including Blue America-endorsed Gretchen Clearwater.

Right now 95% of the votes are counted in Indiana. Clinton has 606,497 votes (50.7%) and Obama has 589,888 votes (49.3%). Gary, Indiana hasn't reported most of its votes and that is Obama territory. They are still counting absentee ballots.

DONNA EDWARDS , NOT EVEN A MEMBER OF CONGRESS YET, IS ALREADY BEING CALLED ON AS A PROGRESSIVE SPOKESPERSON-- TONIGHT: CUBA

-by Matthew Grimm

Dangerous Republican Madman

[Matthew Grimm is a freelance writer, foul-mouthed blogger and musician based in Iowa City, IA. His band, Red Smear, recently wrote and recorded this incredible anthem for Blue America. You can check out more of his compelling writing (and music) at his My Space Page. He watched Donna Edwards with Tweety on Hardball on MSNBC today.]

Castro's largely meaningless step-down from Cuba's helm gave reactionaries, Republican and Democrat, a chance to thump their chests again about "freedom" and "democracy" while continuing to work globally against their actual realization, not to mention raising one of the more odious bits of political triangulation of the Clinton years and its root in America's murderous covert past. And it speaks ill of both sides that it took a humble Congressional candidate, our own Donna Edwards (MD-4), to offer a lone, sensible perspective to the issue today on Hardball, and why we need more people like her to dispense with the triangulating, posturing policies of the 20th century.

Nothwithstanding that Cuba has represented absolutely no threat to the U.S. since Khrushchev scuttled his missiles, braying pols and official U.S. policy have continued to buttress Castro's status as a hemispheric bogeyman, oblivious to all measurable reality, much less simple reason. Sure, we've traded liberally all through the Clinton and Bush years with far more vicious authoritarian regimes, from Indonesia and China to Colombia-- which we've armed to the teeth largely to enable fascist paramility Klansmen to murder campesinos so that U.S. corporations can clear-cut their land -- but bring up Cuba, the notion of even relaxing nearly a half-century of teeth-gnashing hostility and economic strangulation, and you might as well be Neville Chamberlain in Munich. The reason, of course, is simple political triangulation: the much-contested Florida electorate and its population of right-wing Cubans.

The Florida cubano community [somewhat over half a million strong, over a third of all Florida Hispanics], seeded, in part, by the flight of a corrupt, wealthy elite of the island upon Castro's entry into Havana in 1959, has become the AIPAC of Florida; you cross them politically and God help you. The community has long lent True Believers to the most underhanded, chicane American endeavors in Latin America. The survivors of Kennedy's ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion went on to become 
footsoldiers and drill sergeants of subsequent presidents' dirty wars in the region, what Lyndon Johnson admitted to was our "goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean," not to mention the shocktroops of Nixon's Plumber organization. One veteran of both the Bay of Pigs and Reagan's 
illegal contra mercenary operations in Central America, Jose Basulto, went on to found the anti-Castro propaganda organization, Hermanos Al Rescate, which conveniently played the lynchpin roll in re-demonizing Castro for a post-Cold War world. Cuban MiGs shot down two of the organization's leafletting planes curiously, reminiscent of the Tonkin Gulf Incident, just in time to galvanize both Bill Clinton and the Congress to enact the draconian, and until then moribund, Helms-Burton bill.

"Outrage over the shoot-down resurrected the Helms-Burton bill, the most punitive legislation on Cuba since the early 1960s," wrote Professor William Leogrande of American University. "...In addition to assorted sanctions aimed at foreigners doing business in Cuba, the most consequential provision incorporates the US economic embargo into law. Heretofore, the embargo was based on presidential executive orders; it could be tightened or loosened at the president's discretion 
as conditions warranted. Under Helms-Burton, no president can lift or even relax the embargo until Fidel Castro and the existing Cuban regime fall from power. At a time when Cuba's domestic social and economic system is changing at break-neck speed, Washington's 35-year-old policy of hostility has just been chiselled in stone."

Helms-Burton not only codified the long-standing embargo of the island, its Title III is what has American elites drooling today. The provision gives U.S. nationals and corporations the right to sue foreign companies that have made money by way of "property" expropriated from any American entity, including now-American Cuban expatriates, in the wake of Castro's revolution-- essentially a latter-day iteration of the Platt Amendment that robbed the country of economic sovereignty for decades. So, in other words, all the assholes who made Cuba the corrupt laissez-faire hellhole that gave rise to Castro's revolution are champing at the bit to re-neoliberalize the island, including, presumably, the heirs of the Lansky estate.

Even today, Indiana's reactionary senator, Dan Burton, took to Hardball to growl out the usual acrimony towards the Castros, which he insists will continue in the form of the law that bears his 
name, until Brother Raul finds Jesus and The Market. They are "terrorists," Burton brayed, they've maintained their grip on power with naught but an iron-hand and vast Pol Pot-esque Killing Fields, 
and, hell, I don't know, they harvest babies to use their blood in their jacuzzis. Castro's faults are many, but the sheer indignation, the disproportionate demonization, can only be attributed to this long, utterly conditioned mania by America's most fascist elements and the bounty they and their sponsors see in a World Bank-colonized Cuba.

And curiously, Hardball turned to not-yet-even-elected Donna Edwards, of all the Democrats available, to counterpoint Burton. As yet unschooled on the triangulative realities of real politick, herself actually having been to Cuba, Edwards offered the simple admonishments that engaging a society and finding commonalities, versus demonizing them, versus playing global tough guy, might lead to the rudimentary markets and freedoms we'd like to encourage, especially after Helms-Burton had so plainly not worked-- and, by the way, after playing global tough guy combined with neolib trade dogma has nearly broken the damn country. "We need to re-establish relations with Cuba on issues of travel, even family travel," she told Tweety, " [to] establish dialogue on the ground so that when the transition happens, Cubans have information to make their own decision about their economic future."

American reactionaries, however, don't want Cubans making decisions about their economic future. That's a job for Americans, because, as always, Cubans' "freedom" and "democracy" can only be defined by what we dispense to them. Republican or Democrat, that's the kind of unconscionable demagogic thinking that needs to be left on the other side of the bridge to the last century, when Donna and a new wave of better Democrats help us burn the son of a bitch down.