Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Trump fantasizes about a lot of things, not the least of which are being on the cover of TIME Magazine and/or being Hitler. He even has fake magazine covers made so that he can hang them in his offices to impress the parade of vermin that visit him there. So, it's appropriate that other people, those who have a better grip on reality, should make faux TIME Magazine covers too. Who knows? The TIME cover that serves as tonight's meme might soon rightly end up being a real cover. Trump always thinks he should be TIME's "Person Of The Year" so maybe it will be used if that comes to pass. Of course, Trump would complain that the depiction of his idol, Adolf Hitler, is bigger than his depiction but I suppose, Trump could take a Sharpie to it and try to make some adjustments, or maybe he'll just call up Stormy Daniels and pay her another $130,000 to beat his bare butt with it like he had her do with that rolled up copy of TRUMP Magazine. Then, for an extra $500,000, he'll have her beat his orange welt-covered cellulite farm with the very bible he used as a disgustingly sacrilegious photo-op prop the other day. Then he can charge leading republicans like Moscow Mitch, Lindsey the Lisp, and Tucker Tiki-Torch big bucks just to touch or sniff the bible, thus offsetting his costs. They'll happily do it, too.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Here ya go Whiney Little Donnie. Here's your damn Time Magazine cover! Happy now? Stop bellowing.

May I suggest that you start selling MAGA propellor beanies like yours to all of your brainwashed followers?

You Can Count On The Establishment To Sabotage Bernie's Campaign... Obviously, The Status Quo Serves Their Interests

I did a recent survey of Blue America-endorsed candidates. Most of them have told me they would be happy with either Bernie or Elizabeth Warren. Some preferred Elizabeth and some preferred Bernie but no one said anything about backing Status Quo Joe, Mayo Pete or Kamala. One, Kim Williams-- formerly a diplomat during Obama's time in office and now a professor at UC Merced-- is the progressive alternative to Central Valley Blue Dog incumbent Jim Costa (and another conservative opposing him). She told me she had been leaning towards Elizabeth Warren and as she followed the presidential primary more closely came to the conclusion that Bernie is the better choice.

"Like Rep. Omar, I was in Elizabeth Warren’s camp. Anyone who’s ever heard me speak knows that I spend a great deal of time talking about policy. We simply can’t fix the many problems my district faces without bold and detailed plans. But we also need a heart, and we have to show up. And that’s what Bernie Sanders has done here. The three counties in my district are often referred to as the forgotten California. It’s the poorest district in this wealthy state, and one of the poorest districts in this nation, which probably explains why few presidential candidates make their way here. Bernie is the only candidate to have prioritized and invested in the Central Valley. Bernie has not only had the political courage to go against the media and the moneyed interests that have hurt so many working Americans long before anyone else, he has shown a genuine affection for so many forgotten people that are tired of Democrats who only care about them on election years. In his words and deeds, he has shown up, and that gives me the confidence to know he’ll show up in every way that counts as president."

Over the weekend, Time Magazine reporter Lissandra Villa was traveling with Bernie in Iowa. Time is no longer as huge and influential as it was when it had the biggest circulation of any weekly in the world but it's still more important than a ham sandwich. When I was a divisional present at Warner Bros., Time was an integral part of first Time Warner and then AOL Time Warner, always very much a part of the Establishment. When the AOL empire collapsed and Warner shattered into pieces-- the record division being acquired by Russian oligarch Леонид Валентинович Блаватник (Leonid Valentinovich Blavatnik)-- Time wound up in the hands of the Koch Brothers through and acquisition by the Meredith Corporation of Iowa. Last year Mededith sold Time to Marc Benioff (whose hometown Señor Trumpanzee was slandering on Twitter Saturday morning).

Marc Benioff has a magazine

Benioff is a billionaire San Francisco establishment Democrat, who regularly gives tens of thousands of dollars to help prop up the rotten conservative party hierarchy with massive contributions to the DCCC, DSCC and DNC. I found over $750,000 in contributions to those 3 organizations over the last few years. Benioff also donated $50,000 to Ready for Hillary. He tends to give his political money to conservative Democrats-- New Dems and Blue Dogs and their PACs-- and to "moderate" Republicans. So far this year, Benioff and his wife Lynne have made about two dozen contributions to candidates-- each one a max contribution ($2,800):

• February 7- Mark Kelly (D-AZ) x 2
• February 7- Kamala Harris (D-CA) x 2
• February 7- Cory Booker (D-NJ)
• March 2- Jay Inslee (D-WA) x 4
• May 17- Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) x 2
• May 17- Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) x 2
• May 21- Elise Stefanik (R-NY)- $5,600
• May 22- Will Hurd (R-TX) x 4
• May 24- John Katko (R-NY) x 2
• June 30- Elise Stefanik (R-NY) x 2

His company's PAC, which he finances, seems to have given a couple of hundred thousand dollars in small amounts this year-- as little as $78 to John Lewis, for example-- with the big money going overwhelmingly to conservatives of both parties. The biggest single contribution went to Mayo Pete, $29,411. His favorite Republican were the same ones he gave to personally-- McCarthy, Katko, Fitzpatrick, Hurd, Stefanik... In short, the owner of Time is a major donor to the centrist establishment. This weekend, his magazine admitted how undeniably strong Bernie's campaign looks... adding, but can he grown his base? Villa wrote that "in many ways, despite taking time off to rest, [Bernie has] managed to convert the last month into one of the most successful in his 2020 Democratic presidential campaign so far. He’s still polling in the top three, he’s shown he’s one of the strongest fundraisers in the field and he’s got the backing of the likes of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, two of the most recognizable progressive politicians in the nation. But one of the questions hovering over his campaign is whether he can grow his base of support, enough not only to win the nomination, but also to beat President Donald Trump."

Billionaires of every political stripe-- like Marc and Lynne Benioff-- will do whatever it takes to prevent that from happening. His magazine:

In 2016, Sanders performed very well in Iowa, defying expectations when Hillary Clinton just barely beat him. In many ways, it was his competitive run overall that helped pave the way not just for his own candidacy, but for a collectively more progressive field of candidates happy to take up the mantle he turned mainstream. Part of the challenge for Sanders now is keeping the coalition he had in 2016 — and expanding it. That’s a hard feat for any candidate in a still-wide primary field, but possibly especially so for someone who is no longer a fresh face.

“It’s hard to capture the same kind of energy two times in a row,” said Tim Gannon, a former Democratic candidate for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture, of Sanders. “The dynamics are so much different. He’s not as much the insurgent because he ran last time and proved that he was popular and a lot of his ideas were popular, especially among Democrats, so instead of running after a person who was very much the front runner, he’s among … the hunted this time around, and I think that there are candidates who have eaten into some of the support that he enjoyed last time.”

Sanders’s campaign manager has recognized the need for additional voters, telling the Wall Street Journal this week that for a Sanders victory, “he needs a mass mobilization of people who have not voted before.” In a note to Sanders supporters on Friday, the campaign’s Iowa state director Misty Rebik said they had already “collected more commitments to caucus for Bernie Sanders than we had on January 1, 2016.”

This week, Sanders returned to Iowa for an “End Corporate Greed” tour through the state, accompanied by his wife, Jane. In the last several days, he’s also been rolling out local endorsements in multiple states, and he has planned travel to Detroit to appear alongside Rep. Rashida Tlaib (another member of the so-called freshman “Squad” in Congress) with a performance by Jack White, and several other scheduled rallies, including one with Omar. At events in Iowa this week, he often brought up the Ocasio-Cortez endorsement as well. It remains to be seen whether buzz created by such high-profile endorsements will have any effect on voters weighing him as a potential candidate to support.

“I think he’s got a good line of support behind him, and I think he can grow it. That was actually, if I had a chance, I want to know from him … how he plans on maybe trying to get [Republicans] to come over and vote Democratic,” said Eva Garcia, 64, a Waterloo resident who drove an hour to Toledo, Iowa, for a Sanders town hall on Friday. Though Garcia said she caucused for Sanders when he first ran for President, she said she was “maybe” open to supporting someone else.

For many of his backers, it’s Sanders’s decades-long commitment to a message that they point to as his strength and the reason they like him. Some of them also point to it as a reason for picking him over his progressive counterpart, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a close friend and Senate colleague.

“Elizabeth Warren is a neat person in a lot of ways, but she is not Bernie Sanders. Bernie’s got the track record … he’s been consistent all the way through,” said Patrick Bosold, 70, a Fairfield resident wearing a baseball tee with a young Sanders on it that he picked up at a recent campaign event hosted in Iowa’s Field of Dreams. On Friday Bosold volunteered with the Sanders campaign for a press conference in Newton, Iowa, held at a Maytag complex, where Sanders said “it goes without saying” he would support whomever became the Democratic nominee, even it it was not him. (“I hope it’s me,” Sanders added.)

Sanders himself at events often notes how long he’s been singing the same song. Asked at a League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) event on Thursday night in Des Moines how he distinguished himself from other candidates (in a question specific to Latino voters), Sanders relied exclusively on that argument.

“What distinguishes my candidacy from the others is that I have been fighting for the working families of this country for many, many decades. I have walked on picket lines, probably more picket lines over the years than all of my competitors have collectively,” Sanders told an approving crowd, where some supporters sat wearing “Unidos Con Bernie” T-shirts.

After facing criticism in his first run for not reaching out to minorities enough and having a largely white team, the campaign has this time undertaken steps to address both in an attempt to shore up further support. But it will be voters from every corner of the Democratic party that he will have to convince to back him.

“To convince me to vote for someone else, other than Mayor Pete [Buttigieg], would be kind of hard,” said Nancy Sund, 70, a Toledo resident who attended Sanders’s town hall there on Friday. Sund said she supported Clinton in 2016, but after hearing so much about Sanders in the last election cycle, she said she wanted to see for herself whether he could be the right candidate for her.

“I was impressed,” Sund said of Sanders after the town hall. “I don’t know if it was enough to change my mind. It’s early yet.”

Rebecca Parson, the progressive candidate challenging head New Dei Derek Kilmer in Washington state explained how she came to back Bernie. She sounds very much like the other candidates have have come to the same conclusion. "I am backing Bernie because he's the best choice for the working class. He's been saying the same things for decades, even when it was inconvenient, because he believes them. Unlike all other presidential candidates, Bernie supports federal rent control (as a renter myself, this is massive); supports true, single-payer, non-wishy washy M4A; wants to cancel ALL student debt; and can actually beat Trump. And unlike all other candidates, his theory of change is one that will result in a true transformation of this country instead of surface-level reforms. Bernie's theory of change is the 'inside-outside strategy,' and unlike Obama, he won't abandon the grassroots when he's in the White House. For all these reasons and more, I endorse and support Bernie all the way."

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

THE KING OF SLEAZE

We all know how Trump loves to cover his walls with fake Time Magazine covers that promote his ego and tell his visitors how wonderful he is. He cheats reality itself, just like he reportedly cheats at golf. We all also know that he views himself as some sort of elected king. In his very sick head, he even thinks it would be great if he could be president, or king, for life. If that ever happens, the world (outside of his demented party) will pray that his remaining life is very, very short. Trump as a king would also mean that America had tragically come full circle and reverted to the pre-1776 days when we were under the rule of England's King George III who's decrees and actions fell into the category of what was then and still is known as "the madness of King George."

We already have the madness of President Donald, a morally bankrupt, squealing little pig of a man joyfully rolls around in reeking sleaze and daily scandals, and who dreams of being our king. He looks in the mirror, and sees that king, the king of his delusional dreams, the king who praises sleazebag and stark raving mad surrogates like Scott Pruitt, Rudy Giuliani, and his own daughter as they emulate him in multiple ways.

A year and a half into the Trump administration, things are bad enough that Time can publish their new cover and have it not be an exaggerated depiction of our reality but a restrained depiction of it.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

-by Noah

So Señor Trumpanzee says that Time Magazine called and told him he was probably going to be their Man (Person) Of The Year but he would have to do a photo shoot and an interview with them, so he turned them down. Yeah, right. First of all, that's not how it works, and, second of all, he would never turn down an opportunity, a golden opportunity, to have more photos of him spread around or be a featured interview in any magazine. This is a "man" who makes fake Time Magazine covers of himself and displays them everywhere, probably even in his limos and bathrooms. He probably even cuts out little round photos of himself and uses them to replace the mirrors in his daughter's compacts.

Listen, Trump was Time's Whatever Of The Year last year and they took a lot of shit for it, but, there's no rule that says the "winner" has to be a positive force in the world. HItler, Khomeini, and other fellow scum have been Man Of The Year. But, this year, Lord Tiny Hands has about as much chance of being "Man" Of The Year" as a stage 10 malignant tumor. Trump's delusion either stems from his hurt at not being this year's choice or his incessant cry for attention and praise. Either way, it does focus attention on him and not other more important things, like how he is screwing Americans six ways to Sunday.

I also bet that Señor Trumpanzee is pissed that Judge Roy Moore beat him out for Teen Tail's 2017 Man Of The Year.

So just who is going to be Time's Man or Person Of The Year? Putin? Kim Jong-un? Paul "Crazy Eyes" Ryan? Jimmy Kimmel? Elon Musk? The War On Christmas? Hillary Clinton? Gen. Flynn? Robert Mueller? How about Black Lives Matter? Ooooh, I'd love to see the reaction to that one!

Meanwhile, I'd like to announce that the Nobel Committee contacted me about getting the Nobel Prizes for Quantum Mechanics and Astro Biology but I had to turn them down due to scheduling limitations. Regrettably, I've also had to turn down that Pulitzer for Pissed-Off Blog Writing and an offer of $20 Million a year to pitch for the Houston Astros. I think I know just how Señor Trumpanzee feels.

Is America Dooming Itself To Lesser-Of-Two-Evils Presidential Elections Forever?

Crossroads, a series of PACs that have made Karl Rove very very rich as he takes a cut off the top from foolish right-wing contributors, did the above ad comparing Hillary to Nixon. It's not very persuasive and won't do much to move any narratives forward. But I'm sure Rove made some bank from it. With Paul "fresh face" Ryan perhaps taking himself out of contention-- I still don't believe it-- Rove is desperate to assure himself a steady income flow. He was hoping running campaigns to save seats for vulnerable GOP senators like Toomey, Kirk, Ayotte, Grassley, Burr, Portman, and Ron Johnson would be enough. But, as important as some big Republican donors think saving the Senate is-- a near-impossible task at this point-- that's not where the big bucks are. For Rove to really score, he needs to be playing in the presidential big leagues, not some hopeless crusade to keep Russ Feingold from eviscerating Ron Johnson.

Ken Vogel and Eli Stokols floated the idea yesterday that Rove is warming to Trump-as-nominee. He's still attacking him on and off TV as unelectable but he's trying to sucker the big moneymen into donating to Crossroads by assuring them Trump can beat the hated Hillary-- which he can't. Yesterday at the Washington Post Geg Sargent asked his readers to "marvel at these findings: Trump is viewed unfavorably by 67 percent of Americans overall; 75 percent of women; 74 percent of young voters; 91 percent of African Americans; 81 percent of Latinos; 73 percent of college-educated whites; 66 percent of white women; and 72 percent of moderates."

Perhaps Rove thinks he can make Hillary even more disliked. But if that ad above is and indication about how he plans to proceed... good luck, buddy. In a lesser-of-two evils contest between Trump and Hillary, even someone as unqualified for a leadership position as she is, stands head and shoulders above a faker like Trump, who Rove has accurately described as "a petty man consumed by resentment and bitterness” with little gravitas and almost no chance of beating Hillary. Nonetheless, financial considerations are forcing Rove to tellg big Republican donors otherwise-- blatantly lying to them like he did in 2012.

The apparent warming of the American Crossroads super PAC and its sister groups to Trump has become evident in its recent communications with donors, including a Tuesday afternoon “investor conference call,” according to multiple sources familiar with the outreach.

The phone call-- which featured Rove, Crossroads officials and a pollster-- laid out swing state polling and electoral map analysis done by the group showing circumstances in which Trump could beat Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, in a general election, according to three sources briefed on the call.

One source, a high-level operative with the Koch brothers’ conservative advocacy network, characterized the conversation as heralding “a softening of the anti-Trump position” within the big-money GOP establishment. The source added of Crossroads’ stance on Trump, “It's not that they support him, only that if he's the guy, we can do something to stop Hillary.”

And in an email to donors a couple weeks ago, American Crossroads’ president, Steven Law, wrote “our initial review of the data indicates that, because of Hillary Clinton’s toxic vulnerabilities, the presidential contest could be intensely competitive regardless of who our nominee is.”

That type of optimism-- couched as it may be-- diverges sharply from the pessimism shared by much of the GOP establishment about Trump. It mostly sees the prospect of the billionaire real estate showman winning the Republican presidential nomination as a recipe for a potentially historic electoral defeat that could set the party back years.

As word of Crossroads’ recent calibration circulated within the GOP big-money circles, it raised hackles from operatives who are still working fervently to block Trump from the nomination. They fretted that Crossroads’ positioning presaged cracks in the establishment’s anti-Trump front, and could dissuade major donors from giving to efforts to stop Trump-- or worse: Those donors might warm up to the idea of a Trump nomination, and start writing big checks to support him.

...American Crossroads and its nonprofit sister group Crossroads GPS, which Rove and former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie helped created in 2010, for a time were among the most dominant groups on the right. Rove, who rose to acclaim as the political guru for former President George W. Bush, never had a formal role with Crossroads. But he utilized his deep connections to some of the richest Republicans in the country to help the group become a powerhouse during the big money explosion sparked by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. The Crossroads groups spent $325 million during the 2012 election cycle and came to be seen as a shadow Republican Party of sorts. But their fundraising and prominence declined in subsequent cycles as candidates’ allies increasingly started their own super PACs.

In the runup to 2016, the Crossroads team spun off a Senate-focused super PAC closely affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for whom Law once worked. In his email to donors, Law suggested that the group, One Nation, would seek to help freshman GOP senators face overcome the risks posed by “the noisy spectacle of the presidential contest to define themselves independently of whoever our nominee ends up being.”

Crossroads flagship super PAC, meanwhile, has positioned itself as an anti-Clinton outfit.

It’s reported spending only $125,000 against Clinton so far, though late last month it did launch a digital campaign hitting Clinton over past scandals. Billed as the start of a #NeverHillary campaign, the ad was seen as an open plea for other establishment Republicans to aim their fire at Clinton rather than Trump.

...[Crossroads publicist Ian] Prior said the research presented on the call “has largely validated what Karl has been saying about Trump. He has a toxic level of unfavorability and much of the general election support that he has right now is less about people voting for him, and more about people voting against Hillary Clinton.”

But Rove, in his Wall Street Journal column, Fox News hits and other media appearances, has repeatedly suggested that Trump is too toxic to win a general election.

When Rove in February suggested on Fox News that Trump’s support may be plateauing, the billionaire reality television star-turned-presidential candidate lashed out on Twitter.

“@KarlRove on @FoxNews is working hard to belittle my victory. Rove is sick!” Trump tweeted, later adding for good measure “In all of television- the only one who said anything bad about last nights landslide victory-- was dopey @KarlRove. He should be fired!”

Then, late last month, Rove wrote that Trump’s favorability numbers were “staggeringly bad” and told conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt “I don’t think it’s possible” for Trump to overcome those numbers in a general election. “If he wants to change those numbers, he ought to start acting in a presidential manner, whatever he thinks that is, because right now, his numbers are abysmal,” Rove said, pining for an open convention that nominates someone other than Trump and his remaining GOP rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich.

“A fresh face might be the thing that could give us a chance to turn this election and win in November against Hillary,” said Rove.

Meanwhile, a survey of Time magazine readers released yesterday showed Bernie winning the magazine's annual poll, topping not only his rival Hillary Clinton but also a host of world leaders and cultural figures for who Time readers think should appear on our annual list of the most influential people in the world. Bernie didn't just score three times more votes than Hillary, he beat out Obama, Aung San Suu Kyi, Malala Yousafzai, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, and even Pope Francis. Trump was way down the list, tied with Nicki Minaj, Dodgy Dave Cameron and Ta-Nehisi Coates for 0.6%-- and barely ahead of his supporter Caitlyn Jenner. Speaker Ryan scored an unimpressive 0.4%, tied with Kim Kardashian and John Kasich. Ted Cruz did even worse. Time's editors pick the final list, regardless of what their readers say, and that'll come out April 21.

Bernie Trumps Trumpf In Time Person Of The Year Poll-- Also Poll Shows Bernie Is More Electable Than Hillary

This morning, TIME announced that Bernie had won their Man of the Year poll-- and by an extremely large margin. By the time voting ended on Sunday night, he was at 10%, almost double his closest contender, Pakistani girls' education activist Malala Yousafzai (5.2%), and ahead of both Pope Francis (3.7%), who won Person of the Year in 2013, and President Obama (3.5%). Hillary Clinton was way down at 1.4%.

Even though Donald Trump fans mounted an effort to vote him up the list, he was just another loser-- Trumpf (at 1.8%) between fellow entertainers Jennifer Lawrence (1.9%) and Sertena Williams (1.8%). Trump did manage to beat his old nemesis, Telemundo News anchor, Jorge Ramos (1.4%) who he jousted with when he was trying to prove he was the most xenophobic and most racist candidate in the GOP competition-- as well as beating Fox's Megan Kelly (1.1%), who Trumpf used as a prop to show his was the most misogynistic of the Republican candidates. Trump also beat GOP transgender poster child Caitlyn Jenner (1.3%), Syrian dictator Bashar Assad (1.2%) and a gaggle of Republican Party political hacks-- Marco Rubio (1.1%), Paul Ryan (1.1%), Dr. Ben (1.1%), Benjamin Netanyahu (1%), Carly Fiorina (0.6%), Kim Davis (0.6%), Ted Cruz (0.5%), the Jebster (0.5%) and the Koch brothers (0.3%).

I don't think that means Bernie will be named Person of the Year though. Time informed their readers that "Time's editors will choose the Person of the Year, the person Time believes most influenced the news this year, for better or worse. The choice will be revealed Wednesday morning during NBC’s Today show" and they warned that "[n]o presidential candidate has been named Person of the Year prior to the end of the campaign, though a slew of presidential victors from Franklin Delano Roosevelt in (1932, 1934, and 1941), Ronald Reagan (1980, 1984) and Barack Obama (2008, 2012) have earned the distinction." Time, which is proud they chose Hitler back in the day when Time was outwardly fascist, is likely to pick Trumpf anyway. Of Bernie they wrote:

Sanders has said his goal is a political revolution that will reenergize the electorate and push big money out of politics. "A lot of people have given up on the political process, and I want to get them involved in it," Sanders told TIME in a September cover story. "In this fight we are going to take on the greed of the billionaire class. And they are very, very powerful, and they’re going to fight back furiously. The only way to succeed is when millions of people stand up and decide to engage."

A PPP survey of New Hampshire registered voters this morning showed that although both Bernie and Hillary lead all the candidates from the Republican's pathetic deep bench, Bernie does significantly better than Hillary does. He is, easily, the more electable candidate. Hillary is ahead of Rubio by one point (44/43) and ahead of Fiorina by just one point (45/44) and ahead of both Jeb (43/41) and Dr. Ben (45/42) by two points each. Obviously she does best over the dual fascist threats posed by Herr Trumpf (47/41) and Cruz (47/39). But Bernie bests all of them by wider margins, demonstrating his proven ability to win over independents and mainstream conservatives who just will not vote for Hillary, not even to save the country from the fascist threat posed by Trumpf and Cruz.

• Bernie 45% to Rubio 41%
• Bernie 46% to Dr. Ben 41%
• Bernie 48% to Fiorina 40%
• Bernie 47% to Jeb 38%
• Bernie 49% to Trumpf 40%
• Bernie 48% to Cruz 38%

It's worth mentioning that Bernie is the only candidate, from either party, with a positive favorability rating among the overall New Hampshire electorate-- 46/40. Trump has the highest unfavorables of any candidate (59%) but Cruz and Jeb also have terrible favorable/unfavorable ratios-- Jeb 28/55 and Cruz 30/49. Hillary is sorely lacking in this department as well-- 38/55.

Late tonight Bernie addressed the latest deranged, anti-American insanity from Trumpf: "I want to say a few things about Donald Trump and specifically about his comments tonight that we should ban all Muslims from coming to the United States, even American Muslims returning home from overseas. It's fun for the political media to treat Donald Trump like he's the lead character in a soap opera or the star player on a baseball team. But the truth is his language is dangerous, especially as it empowers his supporters to act out against Muslims, Latinos, and African-Americans... The United States is a great nation when we stand together, but we are weak when we allow racism and xenophobia to divide us. So let's send a message that we stand together."

If you'd like to contribute to Bernie's actual presidential campaign, you can do that here on the Blue America ActBlue page for Bernie and the congressional candidates who have endorsed him and are running on the same progressive issues he's running on.

Loser!

Marijuana begins slipping its way into the American mainstream

The dueling pot covers, courtesy of The Cannabist (click to enlarge)

"When American institutions as stolid as Time and National Geographic run cannabis on their covers, without the words 'crackdown' or 'out of control' or 'fear', the ground has truly shifted."

-- Bruce Barcott, author of Weed the People: The
Future of Legal Marijuana in America, in an
e-mail to The Cannabist staffer Ricardo Baca

by Ken

When I opened my mailbox today, there staring out at me was the new National Geographic with the cover you see above, and the giant cover line: "WEED: The New Science of Marijuana." For reasons that some of you may already have guessed, that got my attention.

Marijuana isn't a subject that's ever been of much interest in me. When I was of an age to dabble, and most of the people my age were doing a lot more than dabbling, I was apparently no good at it -- the couple of times I tried to smoke the stuff, all that happened was that I gagged on the smoke, and gagging isn't anything I've ever gone looking for ways to experience. So I've generally taken a pass on heated debates about legalization, suspecting that the fierce opponents are overestimating its downsides and its proponents underestimating them.

Medical marijuana is something else, though, but again it's not something that was an especially personal issue for me. Anecdotal as the evidence for its benefits might be, that evidence seemed to me more than sufficient to outweigh any of the downsides for the sufferers who might benefit from it. This was still pretty abstract, though, until I witnessed at close range -- or as close a range as you can get from 3000 miles away -- the intensity of Howie's sufferings before he finally sought out a trustworthy source and availed himself of it and the kind of relief he has gotten, which he wrote about in a post last week, "How Much Good Can Medical Marijuana Do Patients?"

So I know, first off, how cautiously, how skeptically, he approached it. As he himself has written here, pot once played an important role in his life, and the role it played was something he emphatically didn't want to revisit -- as he told me frequently, he really, really didn't want to get high. What's more, while he was undergoing chemotherapy, his doctor, whom he trusts highly, issued a strict "uh-uh" order. But when he finished those treatments, and was still suffering a host of debilitating side effects starting with really high degrees of neuropathic pain and near-inability to eat or sleep, and he had tried everything else that the medical establishment had to offer, he did find a source who could guide him through the incredibly fraught world of medical marijuana in California, where the overwhelming majority of customers aren't buying for medicinal use and the overwhelming majority of sellers are people you really, really shouldn't want to be doing business with, for any reason, ever, the results were, as again he has written here, both quick and pretty astonishing.

I learned from Howie too that most of what passes for "received opinion" in the medical community, and therefore also what we might call "controlling" medical opinion in the country at this time, comes from older doctors who don't seem to mind that, really, they don't know anything about the actual potential benefits and risks. Perhaps because that "controlling" opinion squares so neatly with the knee-jerk "it's a sin" opinion of our self-appointed guardians of morality, it has been sufficient to all but stifle the kind of research you would figure would normally go into forming some kind of informed opinion on the subject.

So we're in this situation where people who are almost proud to know nothing whatsoever about the subject exercise the power to make it next to impossible for us to learn any more than we know. I suspect that, as with such other matters as abortion and homosexuality which have been held captive by our society's self-appointed moral ignoramuses, a lot more flexibility has come into play when it comes to their own nearest and dearest, which certainly represents a step beyond the categorical "uh-uh, no way." However, from this point it's still generally an arduous process for authorities to connect the dots and begin to lift the curtain for other people.

I should say that I still haven't actually read the National Geographic piece. What I did do right away, though, was to go online and see if I could find a link that would enable you to read the piece. I did, as you'll see, but I found more than that. Above all, I found this piece on the website The Cannabist:

National Geographic, Time both have science-of-pot cover stories this week

By Ricardo Baca, The Cannabist Staff

Have a look at your local bookseller’s magazine rack this week. It might even be worth an Instagram — for history’s sake.

Two of America’s most fabled magazines’ current cover stories are exploring the known and unknown science of marijuana. On National Geographic’s cover: “Weed: The New Science of Marijuana.” On Time magazine’s cover: “The Highly Divisive, Curiously Underfunded and Strangely Promising World of Pot Science.”

That the two magazines, with nearly 210 years of publication shared between them, are coincidentally running these stories simultaneously says something about the ever-shifting national conversation surrounding cannabis.

“Politicians and voters need to wake the fuck up and smell the weed,” wrote Redditor envyxd on a r/trees post about the dueling covers.

Bruce Barcott — author of the book Weed the People and co-author of Time’s piece this week — took notice of the two magazines’ timing in a recent email exchange.

“When American institutions as stolid as Time and National Geographic run cannabis on their covers, without the words ‘crackdown’ or ‘out of control’ or ‘fear’, the ground has truly shifted,” Barcott told me.

So here they are: Hampton Sides’ Science seeks to unlock marijuana’s secrets [you have to be registered for free access, but registration is free -- Ed.], from National Geographic. And [Bruce] Barcott and Michael Scherer’s The great pot experiment, from Time [only a preview is available free to nonsubscribers -- Ed.].

[Time notes: "Portions of (Bruce Barcott's and Michael Scherer's) article were adapted from Barcott’s new book Weed the People, the Future of Legal Marijuana in America, from TIME Books. -- Ed.]

The message I'm getting is that we've reached a milestone in that process of processing the subject of pot based on reality rather than blindly received moral gobbledygook.


WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT --

The Washington Post's Emily Wax-Thibodeaux reports, in "Senate panel backs allowing vets to ask about medical pot for PTSD,":

Veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and other chronic pain issues may be able to ask their VA doctors for a new treatment soon: medical marijuana.
This week, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to back the Veterans Equal Access Amendment. Under the measure, Veterans Affairs (VA) would be allowed to recommend medical marijuana to patients for medicinal purposes for everything from back pain to depression to flashbacks.

Veterans who support the proposal say that it is safer and helps more than the addictive and debilitating painkillers that are often prescribed. They say using medical cannabis can help combat PTSD’s insomnia and panic attacks.

The legislation would overturn VA’s policy that forbids doctors from talking to patients about medical pot use.

And note the party of the senator who introduced the bill:

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who introduced the legislation, argued that forbidding VA doctors from talking about the option of medical marijuana is unconstitutional. He said that First Amendment rights include the right of patients to discuss whatever they want with their doctors.

Senator Daines goes on to say, "They can't discuss all the options available to them that they could discuss if they literally walked next door to a non-VA facility. I don't believe we should discriminate against veterans just because they are in the care of the VA."

The legal issue for the VA is that "the federal government classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, like heroin and LSD," which "means it has no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse." But if I've understood Howie correctly, doctors in California -- which like the District of Columbia allows medical marijuana -- don't seem to be allowed to raise the subject of medical marijuana either, or at least not the ones he's dealt with.

One interesting note in the WaPo piece : "Several studies have shown that states that allow medical marijuana for health purposes also found a decrease in the number of painkiller-related overdoses." Read more onsite.

#

Persons of the Year? But What Year?

by Noah

This is a tale of two men, both stuck in the past, and a magazine that chose one of them as its "Person of the Year." One man's name is Mitt. The other man's name is Barack. The followers of the former think that the name of the latter is "strange." That is just one of the reasons why they voted for their man; another is that their man held out the promise of turning back the clock to at least the 1950s -- or, as comic Andy Borowitz says in this piece, 1912.

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) -- In an extraordinary gesture of recognition for a losing Presidential nominee, Time magazine today named former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney Man of the Year 1912.

In a press release explaining its decision, Time's editorial board wrote, "Even though his quest for the Presidency was unsuccessful, Mr. Romney's ideas about foreign policy, taxation, wealth inequality, and women's rights typified the year 1912 as no one else has."

In giving Mr. Romney the nod, Time said that he beat out such other candidates for Man of the Year 1912 as Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and Edward Smith, captain of the Titanic.
"It was very close between Romney and the Titanic guy, but we gave it to Romney because it took him slightly longer to sink," Time wrote.

Mr. Romney could not be reached for comment, a spokesman said, because he was travelling around the world visiting his money.

Personally, I would say that Mitt would like us to go back another 40 years or so to 1882. He is truly a man of the First Great American Robber Baron age. By any reasonable standard, Mitt is not a man of the 21st century, but neither is Barack. Barack is a man of Washington DC, and Washington DC, its politicians, its lobbyists, and its fawning conservative media such as Politico (founded by Reaganites and Bushies) and all of the local news bureaus of our major media are all obviously unaware that we have not only moved past the 20th century but are now 12 years into the 21st.

I've always worked for corporations, and I've always felt that the people who run corporations are like those who infest Washington. They are the last people in the country that know what's going on in America, or they strive mightily to ignore or subvert it. If they see movements toward progress, they will dedicate their whole being to slowing it down -- all in the service of their personal income potential, whether ethically earned or not.

To the establishment (read "right-wing") media of Washington, Barack Obama is "progressive." To us, he is a center-right politician, not even center-left, as you might believe if you only heard his words but never witnessed his deeds and his incessant desire to cave in, apparently in agreement, to the Republicans. Ask yourself why caving in so willingly comes so easy for Barack Obama.


WHAT DOES BARACK WANT?

The establishment media may sincerely believe that Obama is a progressive, but I can't see it, or they may say it with a wink and we know better. By his own admission he is a New Democrat, a euphemism for Republican. I'll give him credit for knowing or being able to project that he knows that something is going on, even if he, like all politicians, determines this by getting up every morning and sticking a finger in the wind, or consulting the latest polls.

There is a difference between Mitt and Barack. The difference is that Mitt is so arrogant, condescending and downright psychopathic that he refuses to see what we as a nation want or need or even think. Those things don't even matter to people like Mitt. They do matter to Barack, but why, how much, and how far is the riddle. Is Obama the smarter man simply because he sees those things and knows how to skillfully use them? Mitt is devoid of empathy, scarily so. Barack has empathy, but what good is empathy when it's just a marketing ploy? He may edge our society forward, but it seems that he'll do it only as a compromise with our needs, while slowing progress down as much as possible.

A good example would be Obamacare. It's got some progress in it, but it isn't the single-payer plan we need. That just would not do for the corporations he is sworn to protect. Oh wait, I thought it was us! When we needed Bernie Sanders, we got Max Baucus and Rahm Emanuel.

Barack is a man of the late 20th century. Maybe that's why, on his bad days, he so irritatingly comes across to me as a Richard Nixon with better communication skills. Yeah, even though I didn't vote for either Barack or Mitt, I woke up on November 7th relieved that President Obama had won reelection, but only because I think we can survive his faux-democrat/stealth-Republican conservatism and treachery. As he said once in a Florida Univision TV interview, his policies are those of what would have passed for a moderate Republican's back in the 1980s -- or, more accurately, back in Richard Nixon's day. Mitt? Well, he and his backers, such as Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, and the rest of the heavily-invested-in-China crowd, would have let China walk in and rule America without firing a shot.

Some choice, eh?

The bottom line is that President Obama is a bait-and-switch president. This is nothing new. George W. Bush declared in a debate with Al Gore that he didn't believe in nation-building, and it was Bill Clinton who "ended welfare as we know it." Now that President Obama doesn't have to worry about reelection, the man who talks progressive and gets called a Socialist by crazy people is moving to trim Social Security as part of a "fiscal cliff" deal while discussing raising the Medicare age, just for starters. This too should be no surprise. After all, he was the man who formed the Simpson-Bowles commission, and it's little spoken about that Erskine Bowles is a big fan of Paul Ryan. In typical Washington Bizarro-speak, Bowles calls Ryan, a demonstrably blatant pathological liar, "honest" and "amazing."

I can easily imagine that FDR is spinning in his grave at supersonic speed.


THE LAND INSIDE THE BELTWAY IS A DISEASED PLACE

Now, incredibly, Time magazine has named Barack Obama as its "Person of the Year" for 2012, saying --

He has stitched together a winning coalition and perhaps a governing one as well. His presidency spells the end of the Reagan realignment that had defined American politics for 30 years.

Right. Thirty years ago Ronald Reagan took a knife to the social safety nets; now Obama plans on achieving the Republican dream of sticking pins into Social Security and Medicare. And people are known to actually pay money for this rag of a magazine.

Are we talking about 2012, or 1980? The more things change, the more they stay the same. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Whatever. Time magazine may give President Obama credit for seeing the new demographic and societal changes of our country, but is he just the establishment media's man because he is doing a good job of maintaining as much of the status quo as possible in the face of widespread changes in our culture? What else should we expect from a magazine, and a president who still, in 2012, refer to earned benefits as "entitlements"? Sometimes the first step in taking something away is redefining it.


"PROGRESSIVE OBAMA?" CENK UYGUR'S THOUGHTS

#

Luckily for this Zuckerberg guy, the "Time" "person of the year" folks appear to have a very generous definition of "person"

Do you suppose Zucky owes somebody at Time Inc. money?

by Ken

Before I deploy the DWTKenInNY Wrecking Ball, I offer two admissions:

* People for whom I nevertheless still have respect as well as affection think Facebook is a really big deal.

* Even I have fond Facebook useful for reconnecting, or at least having the possibility of reconnecting, with people who've somehow slipped out of my life.

That said, let me put this in the most temperate way I can think of: You know this Facebook thing? I don't get it. (I don't think I need to say any more. People who feel the same way won't need any explanation, and people who don't won't care. It says something that despite my admiraton, bordering on awe, for Aaron Sorkin -- Sports Night, West Wing, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip seem to me among the truly great things done for television -- I still haven't been able to force myself to see The Social Network. I keep meaning to, but I always remember that it's about, you know, the Facebook guy.)

I suppose it's silly to get worked up over Time magazine's "Person of the Year" thing. The list of past recipients is a compendium of the good, the bad, and the whassat?. The only real purpose it serves is to generate some annual buzz for the magazine and maybe even sell a few copies.

Actually, it strikes me as less newsworthy that Julian Assange of WikiLeaks didn't win it this year than that anybody thinks he might ever have. So I found this nugget from Sarah Seltzer on AlterNet so delightful that I couldn't resist sharing it.

Assange Won Readers' Poll, But TIME Chooses Zuckerberg for Person of the Year

Just two days ago, TIME magazine reported that an overwhelming number of its readers had voted for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as their "person of the year": "Readers voted a total of 1,249,425 times, and the favorite was clear. Julian Assange raked in 382,020 votes, giving him an easy first place."

But this morning on the TODAY show, TIME editors unveiled their "Person"--Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a far less polarizing choice to grace the cover of the weekly magazine.

While both men are founders of controversial tech empires which have arguably changed the social fabric, the difference between the two is clear: to generalize, Assange's innovation has targeted government secrecy while Facebook has changed our personal lives.

It's certainly true that Assange--a top runner up along with the trapped Chilean miners and the Tea Party makes the young Zuckerberg look like a docile choice in comparison.

Now of course the chance that the "Time" POTY people would have gone with Assange strikes me unmeasurably close to zero. Can you imagine how bonkers the magazine's advertisers would have gone. I'm imagining it this very moment, even as I type. It's barrels of fun to imagine -- try it!


ON SECOND THOUGHT . . .

I just realized that I forgot to include the Time cover photo. Now that I've done that, and taken a better look, I'm wondering if this wasn't some massive prank by the POTY folks against poor Zucky. How would you like to have that picture of you plastered all over the world? Do you suppose he owes somebody at Time Inc. money or something?


AND SPEAKING OF JULIAN ASSANGE . . .

Further to my report Tuesday:

WikiLeaks Founder Is Released on Bail

The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after being released on bail on Thursday by the High Court in London.

By RAVI SOMAIYA

LONDON — Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was released from jail on $315,000 bail on Thursday, and he vowed in a defiant speech to continue to release classified documents and to fight extradition to Sweden for questioning about accusations of sexual offenses.

After nine days in Wandsworth Prison, Mr. Assange emerged into an explosion of photographers’ flashbulbs and spotlights under the grand arch of the Royal Courts of Justice. “Well, it’s great to feel the fresh air of London again,” he told a cheering crowd.

He closed his brief statement by saying, “I hope to continue my work and continue protesting my innocence in this matter.”

Mr. Assange, looking weary in the dark blue suit and white shirt he has worn through three court appearances over 10 days, left London on Thursday night for Ellingham Hall, a lavish country estate in eastern England, where under the bail conditons he must spend every night and submit to extensive monitoring. . . .

#

As you've probably heard, Sean Hannity went up against reality again, and once again suffered a first-round KO. Really, it can't be easy being Sean

It's official: There's somebody nuttier than Brent Bozell!

"Shocker: The president-elect is crowned Time magazine's Person of the Year; this after Time magazine's D.C. bureau chief accepts a job in the Obama White House. Ah, I'm sure it's a coincidence."

-- the unspeakable Sean Hannity (yes, out loud! on the air!)

by Ken

If you haven't already heard the story (it earned him yet another in an impressive collection of Worst Person in the World awards from Keith Olbermann last night), here's Media Matters' account.

As if that sniveling suckup Jay Carney, the Time Washington bureau chief tapped by VP-elect Joe Biden to be his communications director (I guess that's "a job in the Obama White House," sort of, but isn't that kind of a stretch? I mean, it's not a job working for, you know, Obama), wasn't already a junior member of the Village Boys' Treehouse Club. But no! To argue logically suggests we should take any of this demented fantasy seriously. Really now, is there anybody in the entire world who doesn't understand the selection of Barack Obama as Time's Man of the Year? Apart from the unspeakable Sean, that is.

Fox News' Kirsten Powers tried to bring our boy back into earth's atmosphere: "There's no connection between Jay Carney -- I mean, you don't think he would have been the Man of the Year anyway?" Finally it took Brent Bozell -- yes, wingnut arch-loon Brent Bozell! -- to point out: “I think Time magazine can defend naming him the Man of the Year. They normally name the winner of a presidential election campaign the Man of the Year.”

But you know all of that. Believe it or not, I'm here to defend our Sean. It can't be easy being him. The mere mention of your name sets sensible people to frothing over whether you're the dumbest creature on two legs or a vicious psychopath in need of immediate straitjacketing (and possibly a few thousand volts of therapy) -- or maybe just a gutless bullyboy who'd wet your panties if you had to meet one of the people you lie about face to face.

Think of the burden it must be, day after day, to keep it up: go on the air making up stuff even more cretinous and more insane, not to mention personally scummier, than the bullshit you spewed the day before. But then, isn't that why Fox News pays him the big bucks?

#

PICK THE CHARACTERISTIC YOU'D LIKE MOST IN YOUR POLITICAL LEADERS: FEAR OR COURAGE

One of the premises of Glenn Hurowitz's brilliant new book, Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party, is that voters are attracted to-- even crave-- strong and resolute leadership, even above and beyond issue agreement. "Voters," writes Hurowitz, "continue to look for candidates who will stand up and fight for their principles-- even if they happen to disagree with those principles."

He points to how this resolute image helped a progressive hero like Paul Wellstone, who was widely admired for voting his convictions-- sometimes less than popular convictions-- as well as arch-villain George Bush, who has successfully employed a 7 year multimillion dollar P.R. effort to portray himself as a strong leader even while he is a cowardly, vacillating and weak individual... pigheaded and stubborn but neither strong nor anchored in principle.

Throughout his book, Hurowitz points out how shallow, shifting, fearful Democrats have suffered at the polls by listening to the valueless consultants urging them to abandon progressive principles in a quest or the ever-shifting quicksands of an illusory "middle ground."

Less than half the voters even know where candidates stand on the most crucial issues of the day, and when politicians "seem to be shifting their agenda out of political expediency and not out of conviction, it hurts them when voters are considering whether or not Democrats are 'strong leaders' or 'have integrity, two measures that matter far more than a candidate's issue positions."

This is Hillary Clinton's fatal flaw. Shifting is the exact prescription the corporately-funded DLC is always urging Democrats to do to survive and it is why Democrats have fared so poorly in the last decade.

This week's Time includes a piece by Mark Halperin and Amy Sullivan, "How America Decides," that confirms much of Hurowitz's thesis but points out significant differences between the ways Democratic voters and Republican voters see politics.

As Hurowitz's research proves, both Democrats and Republicans are looking for strong leadership, although Republicans are far more concerned with "strong moral character" than are Democrats, while Democrats are far more concerned with good judgment and in finding politicians who care about people than Republican voters are.

Halperin and Sullivan claim that just over half of Republican voters consider issue agreement the #1 factor in backing a candidate, while they claim-- in direct contrast to Hurowitz's more rigorous and better analyzed research-- that 71% of Democrats are issue-oriented when it comes to deciding on a candidate. Hurowitz shows that voters actually use party identification more than actual detailed knowledge of issue stands.

The Time article claims economic issues are more important to Democrats than to Republicans (46% to 25%) and national security is more important to Republicans (47% to 23%). Democrats care far more about health care, the environment, the Iraq war, employment issues, and our nation's image and influence abroad. Republicans care much more than Democrats about same sex marriage, future terrorist attacks and illegal aliens. (It's very ugly being a Republican.)