Spring Ahead

Don't forget to set your clocks ahead tonight, so that one more hour of your time can be extracted in the name of capitalism. But don't worry. It usually happens while you're asleep. You won't even feel a thing. Unless, of course, you get into a car accident on the way to one of your precarious jobs because you or a fellow motorist is exhausted as well as broke, hungry, and road-raged.

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Speaking of rage, did you catch the Benito Trump Cancelled Rally last night? I watched it unfold on MSNBC as the ridiculous Chris Matthews did the play-by-play. He is shocked, shocked that Fascism has come to America right under his very elite nose. He is clueless, clueless that nonstop coverage of Trumpism and the presidential horse-race spectacle by his and other networks have led citizens to believe that politics is an infotainment sporting event sponsored by the WWF. He pretends to not understand that the corruption extends not only to his profession but to his own family circle. His guests and fellow-commentators are heavy contributors to wife Kathleen's multimillion-dollar congressional bid, one of the most expensive in lower House history.

As far as the "unrest" at the Trump arena went, it was pretty tame compared to, say, Ferguson and Baltimore. For one thing, police presence was very scanty -- too many white kids. Rahm Emanuel didn't send out the troops because he didn't want a repeat of 1968, when the Democrats ended up losing to Nixon.  So the Trumpenproletariat and the protesters were asked to leave. And aside from a few made-for-TV scuffles, they did. From what I saw,  most of the kids seemed more interested in taking selfies than rioting and beating each other up.

 If you were there and able to get close enough to snap a pic of a black guy and a white guy screaming at each other, then you made the producers of what passes for participatory politics very happy indeed. The media/political complex relishes the "divisiveness" of the lower orders as they flatter themselves that  "bipartisanship" is the highest virtue known to humanity.

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Speaking of selfies, did you happen to catch Barack Obama at the SXSW conference? Just as the scuffles were breaking out in Chicago, our prescient president was warning us to not to "fetishize our smart phones." As long as the government can already "rifle through your underwear," he said,  you are very silly to keep defending the privacy of your electronic devices. You are all child molesters or terrorists until proven otherwise.... not that they'll ever bother proving otherwise.

From the New York Times:  

“If, technologically, it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system, where the encryption is so strong that there is no key, there is no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer?” Mr. Obama said. “How do we disrupt a terrorist plot?”

If the government has no way into a smartphone, he added, “then everyone is walking around with a Swiss bank account in your pocket.”

And Chris Matthews thinks that Trump is the only charismatic face of totalitarianism?

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Speaking of terrifying cluelessness, Hillary Clinton has again attempted to revise history, this time claiming that the Reagans were warriors against the HIV epidemic back in the 80s, -- when, in fact, the Gruesome Homophobic Twosome went out of their way to ignore it. In later admitting her mistake, Hillary said she'd confused AIDS with Alzheimers, the latter of which Nancy publicized only because it affected her directly. I suppose we should forgive Hillary, though. When  Nancy was First Lady of the Land, Hillary was First Lady of Arkansas and probably too busy supervising her prison convict slave help to pay much attention to an epidemic affecting gay men.

Or. she might have experienced a Reagan moment and thought she was a contestant on Jeopardy rather than having a friendly funeral chat with Mrs. Alan Greenspan (Andrea Mitchell) on MSNBC. "I'll take 'Diseases That Begin With A' for $675,000, Alex!"

Hillary always brags that she's been tested. Is she sure about that?

Whether it's President Trump or President Clinton, we can expect another long slog of psychopathology and stupidity on top of the ingrained insanity.

Hopefully it will be neither. The words and actions of these candidates just yesterday alone is all the more reason to vote for Bernie Sanders. At his own rally on Friday he called for inclusiveness among the classes and the races and the generations.

Unlike Obama before him, he didn't smarmily call for cooperation between Republicans and Democrats, between red and blue states, among establishment elites. He called for solidarity among people.

That is not at all sending a giant thrill up Chris Matthews' leg. It is, however, sending a giant chill up the spineless spine of the Closet Fascist Collective, for whom dividing and conquering the electorate is not only their main governing strategy, it is the only governing strategy that they still have left.

Keeping Fear Alive is their only motto.