Hate-Watching the Conention

  Yes, readers, I have steeled myself  - I have resolved to watch and report on all four nights of the Democratic National Convention  The only thing that will keep me from watching  is if yet another one of those increasingly common freak storms knocks out my electricity and/or internet again, preventing me rom watching the freak show.

Meanwhile, corporate media outlets are hyping the show so much that the performances and entertainment are bound  to be a letdown. I mean, we already know that there will thunderous applause and a zillion standing ovations for Joe Biden. That is how relieved the audience will be that they won't have to exert themselves any longer to praise him and damn him in the same hypocritic breath.

If the canned speeches and glycerin tears don't move the audience, there are always the fetishized props. The Republicans had the uniform and gear of the firefighter killed during the Trump assassination attempt. They had Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt. Best of all,  had the oversized blinding white bandage on the Trumpian ear. It contrasted nicely with his spray-on tan, if not with all the faces in the audience.

What do the Democrats have? Well, besides the fetishized prop of a brand new miracle candidate, they have erected a 20-foot high inflated I.U.D. (intrauterine device) named Freeda Womb. 

The sight of this T-shaped inflatable is bound to induce a massive cringe in many a woman who has undergone what really amounts to a minor surgical procedure without the benefit of pain relief and sedation.  Women  have been flocking to their doctors' office to get the device in the wake of the Supreme Court's barbaric decision overturning Roe v Wade. Although the procedure has long been acknowledged to be barbaric in its own right, it has taken years and much pressure from women's health advocates to finally get the CDC to offer mere "suggestions" for pain relief.

So the giant I.U.D. virtue-signaling fetish is also a reminder that they've even abandoned the old Clintonian joke about "feeling your pain." The Kamala fetish is all about women being strong and tough. Even tough enough to allow a genocide. You've come a long way, baby!

What I would like to see erected at the convention is a giant face mask to remind everybody that Covid-19 is still a thing. But the barbaric ruling establishment - and that includes the C.D.C. - no longer encourages wearing a mask , either to protect yourself or protect others.  Because you gotta Freeda Face. Because Americans are tough enough to show their faces to seurity cameras and best of all, to smile though your heart is breaking. If an Olympic sprinter with asthma can win a bronze medal while in the throes of Covid, then so can you!

If it succeeds in nothing else, maybe the convention will succeed in becoming one of those epic superspreading events.

I'm old enough that I remember watching the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, with the networks giving equal amera time to cops busing heads in Grant Park and Dan Rather getting all worked up about it iive on air, and Mayor Richard Daley acting like the fascist dictator he truly was.

Nowadays, the corporate media tends to ignore things like massive political demonstrations occurring right outside political events. But since they can't very well ignore this year's massive anti-genoicide protests, they're making sure to placate the audience by showcasing carefully selected Palestinian and Zionist speakers throughout their festivities. Good luck with that pitiful attempt at diversion. 

It seems that lecturing protesters that if they don't shut up and get with the genocide program they will be responsible for re-electing Donald Trump is falling on deaf ears.

The pundits are flailing between urging Kamala to heed the protesters and urging her to stand firm on Israel's ongoing rampage.

Their framing is not the fact of US complicity in genocide. It's that the protesters are implicitly part of the party machine whether they like it or not, and that their demonstrations are thus  "threatening party unity."

As one recent New York Times editorial so smarmily put it, the issue is not whether Harris should condemn the genocide. It's that Harris should combine telling hecklers to be quiet with going through the motions of listening to them. She should take "divisions" seriously, is all. My published response:

The time to put pressure on politicians is while they are ;campaigning for your votes. If you wait until they are safely ensconced in office, they will have little reason to listen to constituents - other than, of course, the war-profiteering donor class and corporate lobbyists. So I hope that the anti-genocide, anti-apartheid protesters will continue making their voices heard. They shouldn't be cowed into shutting up, for fear they'll be blamed in the increasingly unlikely event that Trump wins this election. I get that nobody wants to risk that. But the hard truth is that both of our war-hungry political parties are in full support of what most of the rest of the world views as crimes against humanity. So what if Kamala Harris offers to "listen" and mouths whole volumes of empty platitudes of how heartbreaking it is that so many tens of thousands of innocent people are being killed by American bombs. Her spokesman just said she supports the continuing transport of these bombs. Put the pressure on her now and throughout the campaign season to take a principled stand against our current foreign policy. Before it's too late. Before any more innocent people die.

Slam, Bam, Killer Kam

When Kamala Harris equates the anti-genocide protest movement with support for Donald Trump, I think it's safe to assume that under her reign, Biden's mindless ironclad support for Israel would continue with a vengeance. The de facto state of Amerisrael will continue as AIPAC money continues to punish the few semi-progressive politicians still remaining in congress and elsewhere.

Kamala Harris's Manichean mindset and her false equivalence didn't seem to upset the crowd at her campaign rally in Detroit on Wednesday. On the contrary: her fans loved the way she tried to infantalize and diminish the pro-Palestinan demonstrators interrupting her spiel.

In its own glowing review of her performance, the New York Times reeprts:

"But as the disruption continued, her patience ran thin. 'You know what?' Ms. Harris said, with the sudden force and  resolve of a parent in the driver’s seat who has had it. 'If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”

 Her threats of either you shut up or no TV sure beats the hapless responses of the doddering Grandpa Biden when protesters screamed "Genocide Joe, you got to go!" practically everywhere he showed up. Kamala Harris, unlike her putative boss, struck quite the contrast,  what with her "set jaw and fixed stare" as the prelude to a tongue-lashing for the ages.

Sadly, the protesters' refrain of "Genocide Kamala" just doesn't have the same alliterative ring to it. The most I can come up with right off the top  of my head is "Killer Kam Don't Give a Damn" But even that moniker is ambiguous, since "killer" is also a synonym for really, really cool . And that is exactly how the Harris campaign and supportive media are marketing her in the absence of any actual platform.

It's all style over substance. That seems to be what voters want - or to be more accurate, what the media tells voters  to want. They want people to remain in their lower station as passive consumers.

The Times as much as admits that it's all performance art:

"The Detroit stare-down was the latest reminder of how Ms. Harris has been able, with an almost theatrical flair, to turn efforts to undermine and rattle her into her own political weapons."

And that's a good thing, the Paper of Record continues, because the worst part of the Israeli government's genocide is that it's dividing the Democratic Party against itself!   The not-so-subliiminal message is that Harris losing to Trump would be even worse than the massacre and starvation of tens of thousands of people of Arab extraction in Gaza, the West Bank and beyond.

Ignoring the fact that the Biden administration has continued Donald Trump's tax cuts to billionaires and that corporations pay little in taxes, Harris shrilled "Look, if he is elected, Donald Trump intends to give tax breaks to billionaires and corporations!"

All the pregnant pauses, all the icy stares, all the finger-pointing  gestures s in the world cannot make up for the fact Kamala Harris is sorely lacking not only in substance but in intelligence.

But when her media cheerleaders review her performance as top-notch courtroom drama that would put Perry Mason to shame, what do substance and intelligence matter? She can act, by golly, as The Times breathlessly concludes:

Finally Ms. Harris delivered her ultimatum. The crowd erupted in cheers, but Ms. Harris remained still, staring down her detractors.

"After 10 seconds, she lowered her chin and her eyes grew wider — yes, she meant it. More than 30 seconds passed before she allowed her smile to return. A chuckle rippled through her body, and she returned to her speech."

I am still trying to figure out how a chuckle can ripple.

All the political world's a stage, and all the men and women in it are being played. And immiserated, degraded, and murdered by the investors and producers paying Kamala Harris a fortune to obfuscate this truth.

Follies of the Oligarchs

In today's exciting episode of canned political soap opera, Kamala Harris anointed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to become her viceroy. The intended message is that Harris has embraced liberal populism, in much the same way she embraced it during her ill-fated 2020 presidential campaign when she co-sponsored Medicare For All legislation with the then-ascendant Bernie Sanders. 

ut if you're the cynical type, her selection of Walz is simply a PR gimmick to attract voters who might otherwise pull the lever for the fake-populist Donald Trump.

To hear the mainstream media tell it, millions of disaffected and younger voters will pivot to the Democrats, all because Walz has so folksily described the Republicans as "weirdos." How cool is that?  It's so much more down-to-earth than the party's failed message of calling Trump an existential threat to "democracy."

It is designed to make the electorate forget all about such existential threats as both political parties being in full support of World War III, most notably of Israel's continued genocide of Palestinians and its provocations of Iran and Lebanon. So if the Democratic side of the duopoly can only put a folksier face on murder and misery, they will manufacture the consent of US citizens.

From all indications, liberals are so relieved to be rid of Joe Bden that they're flocking to Harris rallies and emptying their pocketbooks to support a candidate whose main selling point is that she doesn't shuffle or slur her speech. She enunciates her word salads loudly and clearly enough for everybody to hear, if not to understand.

The real test is whether she will heed the instructions of the Silicon Valley donor class to fire Federal Trade Commissioner Lina Khan if she is elected. So far, she hasn't said. Nor has she returned a recent hefty donation from tech mogul Reid Hoffman, who explicitly demanded that Khan be fired. He has since "walked back" his threat, thus at least temporarily relieving Harris of answering it while she is still only the unelected nominee. The selection of Walz is protective armor for her. Once she is safely esconced in the White House, Walz can be dismissed, policy-wise and influence-wise if not bodily. If he became too much of a renegade populist, they could always pull a Henry Wallace on him.

When an ailing Franklin Roosevelt was running for his fourth term, his advisers moved to replace his prairie populist Vice President Wallace with Harry Truman. And when Wallace decided to defend his office and make an independent run, the Democratic machine actually took the drastic step of cutting the power at the 1944 party convention to prevent a delegate vote from even taking place. Of course there was no internet back then, so they couldn't avoid bypassing democracy by having delegates cast their votes remotely before the physical convention even took place.

So take Kamala Harris's choice of Tim Walz with a very healthy dose of cynicism. Her main advisor is her brother-in-law Tony West, the head legal honcho of Uber and the former Obama Justice Department official who gave Wall Street bankers a slap on the wrist rather than crimiinally prosecute them after the 2008 collapse. West has not resigned from Uber. He is merely taking a leave of absence from this predatory firm.

West and Uber are agents of work force precarity. exploitation and oppression. They are integral players in the Silicon Valley oligarchy which now equals or even surpasses Wall Street in political power.

So the fact that a federal judge has just declared the Google faction of this oligarchy to be an illegal monopoly should give ordinary people a reason to hope that at long last, a preliminary kick has been dealt to the tender butts of these arrogant overlords - the actual existential threats to what is still left of our democracy.

The antitrust ruling is of course coupled with Monday's Wall Street crash, further exposing the inherent corruption of late financial capital for anyone with the awesome ability to wrest their attention from the Coronation Follies show, which itself is competing for attention with the Paris Olympics.Tje crash itself originated in Japan and thenEurope, whose markets were said to be panicking at the latest US jobs report, which showed that late capitalism is not profiting as much as expected from an exploited workforce. The arrogant tech overlords are taking an especial hit, making their tender monopolistic fannies even more sensitive.  What an unexpected shock that A.I. might turn out to be just another big fat greedy bubble ready to burst. It might even put the kibosh on investments in Elon Musk's nascent brain implant franchise.

And that probably means that you and I will be told by Kamala Harris at another inauguration behind barbed wife that we all have to tighten our belts and share the sacrifice with the poor billionaires.

Not as likely to win the support Barack Obama momentarily enjoyed after he won office on that whole hope and change thing.

It's time to cure ourselves of the notion that any politician will ever save us. It's time to stop identifying ourselves as mere consumers and spectators ratherthan as active citizens and iindependent thinkers.

Destroying the Google empire's rotten, censorious search engine and knowledge monopoly will be an essential first step. 

Ain't Democracy Grand?

I was so relieved to learn that Democratic Party investors were so relieved when Joe Biden finally quit The Race. The poor things had been suffering a painful mass outbreak of Donation Constipation, having deliberately withheld their financial effluvia from his campaign receptacle.

Intestinal fortitude does have its limits. So it was good to know that all that bottled-up goodness was freely flowing again this morning to and through the throne of Kamala Harris.

Yes, fellow citizens, it is indeed a coronation in all but name. This is despite the Power Behind the Throne (Barack Obama) suggesting that the coronation be accorded a simulacrum of Democracy via an open convention with actual votes cast by various appointed delegates.

 This is disingenuous.  the fact us that Obama handpicked Harris years ago, when he told  a group of anal-retentive Donor-investors in 2013 that she was the best-looking attorney general in the country. He put her name and her face right up there in lights. She got even more star status when he subsequently apologized for coming off like such a sexist pig. 

This pre-coronation drama came in the aftermath of the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, Obama's bailout of the banks, and the subsequent foreclosure fraud stampede - led by the very same banks that caused the catastrophe in the first place.

I doubt that Donald Trump will ever confront Harris's still-unexplained failure to prosecute Steve Mnuchin, his own former Treasury Secretary. when she had a golden opportunity to do so. You might remember that Mnuchin was the head  of the corrupt OneWest bank when investigators handed over to Harris a batch of about a thousand "fraudclosure" documents which illegally forced underwater mortgagors out of their homes.

Kamala Harris was a newly-seated Senator when that legislative body was mulling Mnuchin's conformation. But just as her political colleagues are protectively and prematurely circling the wagons around her now, so they were in 2017. As then reported by The Intercept, not one of her fellow senators brought up the leaked memo proving that Mnuchin had been in it up to his eyeballs. It might have implicated Harris, who already was being groomed for a  presidential future based entirely upon the identity politics agenda marketed by the party instead of an actual platform to make people's lives better. Even vocal anti-Mnuchin Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, themselves presidential contenders, refused to comment on Harris's refusal to bring Mnuchin to account.

Once we get past the nonstop accolades to the patriotism and selflessness of Genocide Joe by the very same hypocrites who pushed him out once their own cover-up of his mental health was exposed for all the world to see, it'll be interesting to watch, from a bemused distance of course, the next steps of the lockstep Duopoly.

One thing is for certain. With the mythology of democracy exposed as a sham to even to those denialists who didn't or wouldn't believe that billionaire donors are the de facto puppet masters and rulers, perhaps more people will simply refuse to engage in electoral politics to the exclusion of, say, taking to the streets and the corporate boardrooms to "make our voices heard." A mass strike would be nice, although I suspect the misery levels will have to rise a bit higher for that to occur. 

It's telling that Joe the Patriot literally put "the good of the Party" before the good of the country as the basis for his decision to end his candidacy.  It's also telling that despite his decision, he will continue to pretend to run things for the next whole half-year remaining to him as president. An embittered deluded commander in chief can still do a lot of damage in six months. Unless, of course, he is being operated by remote control. And let's hope that the Party at least is giving him a decent bribe parting gift. Maybe a pardon in perpetuity for Hunter. The least they can do is have one of their billionaire donors secretly pay off all those home equity loans he's taken out over the years.

As Simone Weil wrote in "On the Abolition of All Political Parties," the only reason for preserving anything is its inherent goodness.

 "The evils of political parties are all too evident; therefore, the problem that should be examined is this: do they contain enough good to compensate for their evils and make their preservation desirable?"

Joe Biden aw the writing on the Teleprompter. He is too decrepit to any longer "generate the collective passions" in the electorate for his own club/cult to retain its power - the ultimate aim of any cult or club. The good of the all-mighty entity called a country is purely secondary. 

And the good of the earth and all the living things inhabiting it? As far as they're concerned, the planet might as well be in the toilet.

Plan B From Outer Space

Since flattery and cajolery and insipid appeals to patriotism haven't convinced Joe Biden to just go away, Democratic Party bigwigs have now advanced to their idea of a Plan B. 

They're proposing, with less than two months before their nominating convention, to put the gloss of democracy on a really cool alternate selection process.

Party boss James Clyburn of South Carolina is calling it a "lightning primary" an idea which veteran party operative James Carville took up with a column in Monday's New York Times.

Since time is so short and Donald Trump is Enemy Number One, you  didn't actually expect a real primary, where ordinary slobs are actually permitted to vote, did you?

On the contrary. The new version of primary is when former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama get to anoint an octet of worthy Biden replacements to appear at a quartet of town halls on various worthy corporate-sponsored cable channels. Clinton and Obama would be the "facilitators" of these events. To be democratic about it, they  would consult with the nation's twenty-odd Democratic governors to arrive at the final cut of contenders. The actual voting would be done by the pre-selected party delegates after discussions both public and private.

Carville wiggles out of the party's Kamala dilemma by stressing that yes, of course the current vice president would be included among the lucky eight. What more perfect way to get rid of her without appearing to be racist and sexist?

For that matter, what more perfect way of getting rid of Joe Biden? First, they gave him a big premature group hug of an endorsement, thus blocking any challengers. Then, when it is too late to allow real democracy back into the mix, they encouraged a premature debate with Donald Trump. When Joe's ballyhooed knockout punch failed,  they acted all shocked and chagrined that the old geezer had gone senile on them.

Elder abuse is not just in the purview of Jill and Hunter Biden, not by a long stretch. And not only that: the old geezer turns out to be such a mean, cornered, snapping wolverine of a geezer that he's turning into a Donald Trump clone himself, what with bragging in one interview that since he rules the whole world, he alone can defeat his strongman brother under the demagogic skin.

Carville's essay, meanwhile, is nothing if not disingenuous. In the colorful Cajun-speak that this veteran of Clintonism he is known for, the latest item on the party's tasting menu reeks of a nest of bloated rats overdosing on their own swamp gas.

"We’re going to nominate a new ticket in a highly democratic and novel way," the essay wheezily boasts. "Not in the backrooms of Washington, D.C., or Chicago."

Town halls — high-stakes job interviews for the toughest job in the world — would surely attract television and cable partners and generate record numbers of viewers. Think the Super Bowl with Taylor Swift in the stands. The young, the old and everyone in between will tune in to see history being made in real time.

That's quite a stretch, even for a moribund party that still thinks that the show, the spectacle and the "story-telling" are all that the electorate wants or needs. There will be zero discussion from them on such niceties as federal rent control legislation, single payer health insurance, Supreme Court term limits, disease abd oanemic control and climate legislation. Blind allegiance to war and genocide are definite musts, though.

Of course, their contrived emergency timetable also  means that some people will just have to be disgruntled about the "hard choices" which must be made on behalf of Pragmatism. Cue the neoliberal thought collective!

Town halls will give Americans a fresh look at Ms. Harris and introduce them to our deep bench of smart, dynamic, tested leaders. In addition, Democratic delegates will get to further grill and stress-test these leaders in public and private meetings before a formal vote of all the delegates at the Democratic convention.

And naturally, Carville hastens to add, "we've got some folks at the fringes, God love 'em" who will not be invited to the town halls. He was too chickenshit to mention that names Jill Stein, Cornel West and probably Bernie Sanders even though he has remained silent about his good friend Joe Biden. 

 This nifty selection process will, if it comes to fruition,  be a variation on the 2020 primary theme, when Selector Barack Obama convinced all the contenders trailing Bernie to drop out en masse. Elizabeth Warren stayed in so as to bleed progressive votes away from Bernie. And thus was Joe Biden crowned. The pandemic and lockdown were just the frosting on the cake for the Party.

Carville's parting shot in his op-ed was to give a shout-out to "my friend Rahm Emanuel" who is credited with inventing the neoliberal slogan "never let a serious crisis go to waste.," even though Winston Churchill probably said it first.

As Naomi Klein outlined their method in "Disaster Capitalism," it matters not whether the crisis is manufactured by the very destructive culprits who claim to want to put it all back together again.

We've seen this horror movie too many times before to get scared by i, let alone take their script seriously. It'd be laughable, were not the United States of America and Europe (a/k/a NATO) not in Washington this week plotting their insane march to World War III.

Needless to say, there will be no peace candidates on the Democratic stage any time soon. Just imagine Taylor Swift in the stands, and your troubles will magically pack themselves away in the old kit bag.

The Liberal Rich Have an Anxiety Attack

Since you can't parse chaos, I'll be abandoning my old Sardonicky shtick of covering presidential debates by grabbing the written transcript and deconstructing/translating the dialogue. I'd pick out both the most outrageous or humorous lies and unintentioanl bursts of honesty and have some fun with the spectacle.

So since you cannot parody what was essentially a self-parody, let's instead deconstruct the corporate media's lockstep reaction to the "debate" in general, and Joe Biden's performance in particular.

The liberal hive-mind  was shocked, shocked I tell you, that Biden suddenly became senile. This admission comes after months if not years of ascribing his cognitive condition to "gaffes," "folksy tall tales" and their favorite standby" "Joe just being Joe." 

They're unable to cover for him any longer.  As Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes tweeted, they can't make you un-see what you just saw.

Joe's debate performance was like an AI app run amok. The stock phrases  and the platitudes were all there. They were just all mixed up. It was like being trapped in a crowd  of desperate shoppers fighting over the last bits of shoddy merchandise in a bargain basement  jumble sale. The obvious cacophony  in his head translated into such a hoarse vocal slurry that his non sequiturs sounded even more deranged than they actually were.

  He seemed to be in a race against his own brain, rushing to cram in all that over-rehearsed debate prep into each single two minute soundbite.  Thus, when answering a question about inflation, he short-circuited into the hackneyed image of a family sitting around the kitchen table freaking out over the bills into the awful price of unaffordable kitchen tables.

Not so funny was his answer to a question about abortion which veered off into a Trump-like remark about a woman being raped by a migrant. He also seemed to confuse Supreme Court sessions with trimesters of pregnancy.

At one point, he did make a cogent suggestion that the cap on Social Security taxes be raised in order to save our national retirement program. But that has already been drowned out by his boast that he "defeated" Medicare. Well, you have to give him credit for trying. Contrary to what Trump  mendaciously responded, that he is destroying Medicare by giving it to those dreaded immigrants, Biden has been stealthily privatizing the program by handing chunks of its over to the for-profit insurance cartel.

Biden had too much debate prep. He should have been resting his voice during the five days he was holed up at Camp David, Instead, his handlers overwound his clock, and the whole mechanism sputtered and sprung. He should probably fire his debate coach.  Or as one Youtuber joked, maybe he should find a new drug dealer.

Of course, the media's "aghastitude" is totally misplaced. How shocking, how sad and how tragic the Biden has lost his timing this late in his career. They're reluctantly urging him to withdraw from the race - not because of his dangerous  and reckless, policies,  but because of his feeble performance on the debate stage. It's not the genocide and the proxy war on Russia and his enthusiasm for more nuclear weapons that bother them. It's that his physical and mental health are inexorably declining.

A guy seemingly on the verge of actual death himself is not the best salesman for the  marketing and the subsequent explaining-away of all the violent deaths of others at the hands of the US hegemon.

One thing that does merit specific deconstruction is the unctuous New York Times editorial which urges Biden to step aside in the interests of said US hegemon.  ("good of the country.") As with other examples of the uniform concern trolling narrative on display by the liberal media hive mind,  the editorial board goes overboard with the flattery.  Genocide Joe is a good man,  a decent man, and a good if not great president. They act as though a politician who's actually been a maniac for the whole past half-century in power developed Alzheimer's overnight. They act as though he is just your standard harmless grandpa with one too many fender-benders and it is now their painful duty to relieve him of the car keys. Or more accurately, to politely request that he voluntarily relinquish his keys for the safety of all the other luxury car-owners traversing the private road.

And if he refuses, they hasten to add that they'd sooner Biden get behind the wheel again rather than let other souped-up geezer-mobile of a Trump hog the road again.

If the race comes down to a choice between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, the sitting president would be this board’s unequivocal pick. That is how much of a danger Mr. Trump poses. But given that very danger, the stakes for the country and the uneven abilities of Mr. Biden, the United States needs a stronger opponent to the presumptive Republican nominee. To make a call for a new Democratic nominee this late in a campaign is a decision not taken lightly, but it reflects the scale and seriousness of Mr. Trump’s challenge to the values and institutions of this country and the inadequacy of Mr. Biden to confront him. 

What is really needed, says the Times, are "fresh voices" as opposed to fresh policies to make people's lives better. The editorial admits that it's poliitical style that really matters - not political substance. Biden can't even fool a few of the people some of the time. 

The Paper of Record's lead news story today was not about the thousands of anti-genocide protesters massed outside Biden's latest campaign fund-raiser in New York City on Friday evening, let alone the many arrests by police in riot gear. 

It was about the angst of rich Democratic donors over whether their multimillion-dollar iinvestments in Biden may be wasted.

In Silicon Valley, a group of megadonors, including Ron Conway and Laurene Powell Jobs, were calling, texting and emailing one another about a situation they described as a possible catastrophe. The donors wondered about whom in the Biden fold they could contact to reach Jill Biden, the first lady, who in turn could persuade her husband not to run.

 As if every one of the billionaire donor class did not have Jill Biden on speed dial. They're just too cowardly to be the first one to call. It's easier to whisper to the New York Times, where Jill can read about their very pressing concerns. That way, they can hedge their bets on the off-chance that Joe is, in fact, re-elected. They hate to risk their State Dinner invites, not to mention international junkets on Air Force One.

Here's my theory. Joe will not drop out because without the power to commute his son Hunter's sentences on gun and tax convictions/charges, the young prince may not only end up in prison, but the money spigot supporting the whole family will dry right up.

The Bidens have always been about what's good for the Bidens. Jill and the rest would probably prefer the Joe die in office rather than live out a few more good relaxing days on the beach.

Some Thoughts On Julian Assange

Assange is free, but journalism seems more shackled than ever.

With his coerced guilty plea this week  to one felony count under the archaic, repressive, anti-democratic Espionage Act, the United States has essentially declared adversarial journalism to be a crime. To say that the plea deal will have a chilling effect on what is still actually left of independent reporting in the public interest is an understatement, given that such reporting already has been frozen out of existence.

From the news deserts resulting from the mass closures of local newspapers and radio stations and thousands of reporters losing their jobs in the process, journalism has largely morphed into a consolidated corporate behemoth whose main function is not to inform, but to indoctrinate and propagandize. Noam Chomsky called it the "manufacture of consent."

But failing at this task, as evidenced by the polls revealing unprecedented distrust in mass media and with the growing numbers of people out in the streets and on social media protesting everything from wars and genocide to capitalism-engendered climatate catastrophes, to the manufacture of consent has been duly added the manufacturing of fear and polarization.

Take the coverage of Julian Assange in the New York Times. The headline in today's "news analysis" of his release from prison casts him not as a journalist and a publisher, but as a "hacker and polarizing figure."

One of the main duties of our six or seven polarizing media giants  is to divide people for the benefit of the conquerors. Rather than address the inconvenient truths and crimes exposed by the likes of Assange,  the default position is to shoot the messenger. It's easier to accuse people that they consider dangerous to the status quo of having personality disorders or malign ulterior motives,  Assange, the Times sniffed, became nothing but a "sideshow"  before becoming "a ghostly throwback to another time."

For a media outlet that's been so obsessed with promoting a sideshow called Trump Derangement for at least the last decade, that epithet is pretty weak. Then again, classic Freudian projection is one of the  few weapons they still have left in their propaganda arsenal.

Only a hack would ever call Assange a hacker, given that he did not personally download or  steal the emails of the rich and powerful which he published in Wikileaks. Chelsea Manning accessed the initial trove of emails related to Iraq and Afghanistan.

And despite the oft-repeated claim that "Russia" hacked the Podesta emails showing that the Democratic National Committee manipulated the 2016 primaries to boost Hillary Clinton - among other embarrassments - officials have readily admitted in sworn testimony that there is no concrete proof that Russia was involved in the theft. But nonetheless, the Times persists to this very day in claiming that Assange was in cahoots with the Kremlin, and by extension, the Trump campaign.

Clinton, who published an op-ed lauding her Broadway production cred in the Times on the same day of Assange's release. had once suggested, while she was Obama's secretary of state "droning" the Wikileaks founder. She went on to pontificate about the sideshow known as the Trump-Biden debate, scheduled to air on the CNN behemoth tonight.

And in today's Times news analysis, the reporters even went so far as to imply that any "chilling effect" has been not on journalists, but on poor Hillary herself. To wit:

As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton had to apologize to foreign leaders for embarrassing details in cables sent by American diplomats to the State Department. In one case, the foreign minister of a Persian Gulf nation refused to allow note takers into a meeting with her, for fear that his comments would be leaked.

Fear is the keyword here. Assange inserted an unaccustomed fear into the hardened hearts of  the rich, the powerful and the secretive. Disclosures of their crimes and lies robbed them of that power, permanently. Those shackles they've devised show signs of rusting out, at least among independent writers and broadcasters. That "chilling effect" on journalism that the Assange persecution engendered could, paradoxically, be the very stimulus required to thaw our minds right of the propaganda deep freeze. That is my hope, anyway. The only ting we have to fear is their fear, itself. Cornered predators can be very dangerous indeed.

The eyes of the whole world were opened thanks to Assange and Wikileaks. And they'll remain open despite the best efforts of the overlords to tape them shut, right along with our mouths.

The sideshow is them, and the reviews are pouring in. And they're devastating.

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I will be watching the CNN sideshow tonight and writing it up either tomorrow or Saturday. Meantime, if any of you would like to weigh in sooner, please use the comment section. Blow-by-blow, minute-by-minute reactions as the action happens are more than welcome.