Bernie Sanders And Killer Mike Campaign Rally Speech In Atlanta, Georgia 11.23.15
* Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins on Ring of Fire: Bernie Sanders: Finally A Candidate With Common Sense Foreign Policy
"Sen. Bernie Sanders Meets With Picketing WMUR Workers, Helps Broker A Deal To Reopen Negotiations" - But, uh oh, "There is still the looming issue of whether or not Sanders and Hillary Clinton - who has previously voiced her support of the WMUR union members - will boycott the WMUR debate or if the DNC will pull WMUR's debate completely if the contract dispute is not resolved by the December 19th debates."
Hm, Hillary Clinton blew off MoveOn, that won't go down well. (Er, no puns intended.)
You won't believe why N.H.'s top paper endorsed Christie
Vote Now: Who Should Be TIME's Person of the Year?
Cover-Up in Chicago - Gosh, it sure does look like Rahm interfered with this investigation in order to protect his re-election chances. But it might just be enough to finally get rid of him in the end.
* Chicago Top Cop Fired, But Demand Grows for Mayor Emanuel To Be Next
* Rahm takes heat from black lawmakers
* Pierce: "Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel Is Throwing Anyone Within Arm's Reach Under the Bus"
* Rahm Emanuel's Next Scandal? Chicago's Public Housing
* Department of not knowing when to keep your mouth shut: "Clinton still confident in Rahm Emanuel"
Pfizer Buying Allergan So It Can Pretend To Be Irish In Tax Scam
Another Shooting Death at Another Women's Center: This One is In Texas
T. R. Ramachandran's family lives in a city in India that is flooding out under the worst recorded rainfall in history. So he started to wonder how it's going elsewhere, and learned that 19 US cities have had record-breaking rains this year. And that's not all.
Five Ways Sanders Could Democratize the Financial Sector That Clinton Won't Touch
More like Reagan than FDR: I'm a millennial and I'll never vote for Hillary Clinton
David Dayen in The American Prospect, "Bring Back Antitrust: Despite low inflation and some bargain prices, economic concentration and novel abuses of market power are pervasive in today's economy - harming consumers, workers, and innovators. We need a new antitrust for a new predatory era." You can thank Robert Bork for all this, by the way. Dday talked to Sam Seder about this on The Majority Report.
Pierce: "Scott Walker Bankrupts Wisconsin Food Banks - Just in Time for Christmas!: "It is becoming increasingly likely that, come Christmas Eve, Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, will be visited by three very angry spirits - the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost Of Christmas Present, and the Ghost Of Let Me Hit You With This Croquet Mallet."
David Dayen in The New Republic: "The Real Roots of the Rising Right: Financial crises always result in a far-right political bump, a new study finds. But Democrats made this one worse."
Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuckerberg's are really bad
* Wealthy philanthropists shouldn't impose their idea of common good on us
* "How Mark Zuckerberg's Altruism Helps Himself: Zuckerberg set up a limited liability company, which has reaped enormous benefits as public relations coup and will help minimize his tax bill. Mark Zuckerberg did not donate $45 billion to charity. You may have heard that, but that was wrong. Here's what happened instead: Zuckerberg created an investment vehicle."
The Dangerously Limited Foreign Policy Discourse of the Democratic Candidates
"Fox News, liberal-baiting and the politics of populist fear: Here's where it all began: The roots of our modern nightmarish politics can be found in Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon's early campaigns "
Chris Hedges and Sheldon Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist?
UK porn laws a year on: A porn actress and a dominatrix on destroyed businesses and censorship
The debates about military action in Syria remind me a lot of the "debate" over the invasion of Iraq, which had a lot of people raising legitimate reasons why it would do more harm than good (which turned out to be right) and the other side adamantly refusing to answer with anything of substance. Same again. The Onion, naturally, got it right: "This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won't."
Syria's climate-fueled conflict, in one stunning comic strip
* But that may be oversimplifying.
"I'm a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing"
Macy's Imprisons Minority Customers and Extorts Them for Bogus Fines: Suit
Muslim Woman on a Train: Mr. Sideshow was struck by two stories he saw on the same day with contrasting outcomes, one in Boston, the other in Newcastle.
G-String lawyer cleared after bedroom break-in
xkcd interviews Canadian astronaut.
I missed this last summer but just stumbled across Dennis Waterman's eulogy for George Cole. Brought a tear to my eye, it did.
Doctor Who Adventure Calendar, 2015 - "A seasonal selection of videos, galleries and much more. One unlocked every day!"
Billy Joel - Library Of Congress Gershwin Prize For Popular Song 2014, full concert and award presentation with an all-star cast - and Kevin Spacey on harmonica.
Thanks, all this war on Xmas from the RWNJ promises coal for all our stockings, and the most for the neediest.
ReplyDeleteAnd the common denominator twixt the Nixon and Reagan administrations (and the assassination of John Lennon)? Dick foking Cheney.
ReplyDeleteFor the ninth time I posted Imagine this morning, but I fear I have lost the sentiment, can no longer imagine all the people living life in Peace. As I fear I disagree that violence is the last resort of the inept, it is simply the last resort. All we were asking was to give Peace a chance, and look at where we are.
Now's the time for you and me, gotta' Revolution, Got to Revolution!
Amnesty report: ISIS armed with U.S. weapons
ReplyDelete~
Here's a data point for whether OSHA should require musical instruments to be marked with "Left" and "Right." [LINK]
ReplyDeleteMaybe not on any of the topics of this particular post but certainly on the topic of an issue The Sideshow takes up regularly, via Brad DeLong [LINK], here are three arguments with which commentators on the left should be well versed:
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[LINK]
(And this one which needs a little more work, perhaps.)
[LINK]
To these, update and add in this Krugman golden oldie. [LINK]
Back to the topics of this post, namely "Chris Hedges... [a] porn actress and a dominatrix..." here's a trilogy from one of them on a subject that concerns the other two:
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[TRANSCRIPT]:
Excerpt>>>
Hedges: ...I get very angry at liberals on the left over their refusal to condemn pornography. Why is it morally indefensible to physically abuse a woman in a sweat shop in the Phillipines or in southern China but somehow it's an issue of free speech when it's done by the sex industry in the United States? When I started interviewing these women who came out of the porn industry, having suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder [myself], I instantly, after a minute or two said all these people have PTSD....
[LINK]
[WITH TRANSCRIPT]:
Excerpt>>>
HEDGES: Well, you write about Australia and Germany. And there are a couple of things that surprised me. One is that it is no dent in terms of--there's legal and illegal. But, I mean, of course, Germany now, it's industrial prostitution with multistory brothels. I can't remember the figures, but it was like--
Rachel Moran: Twelve stories high.
HEDGES: --12 stories high. What is it? A million men a year or something are serviced. These women are mostly trafficked in from Eastern Europe and Asia and other places. But that doesn't put a dent into what is illegal prostitution. And you explained why. Why is that?
Moran: Well, in Germany you have an estimate--and I believe it's a very conservative estimate--of 450,000 women and girls prostituting. Forty-four of them have stepped forward to sign as registered. So here we have a situation where the whole world believes that prostitution ought to be regulated, legislated, and all of this, but the reality of what's happening in Germany is only a pitiful handful of women were prepared to register and get the benefits that go along with that, the social security and health benefits and all this, because the bald reality is we don't want to be labeled prostitutes.
Women don't want that whore stamp, as I call it, on us forever. And the illegal trade absolutely booms anywhere where you legalize, because what happens immediately is that demand massively increases. We've seen it in New Zealand, in certain states in Australia, and just all over the place, anywhere that has legalized or decriminalized...
continued...
...continued
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[WITH TRANSCRIPT]
Excerpt>>>
Lee Lakeman: ...So you have people like Carol Leigh, who was a fundamental player, who--she invented the term sex work as far as we know. And when I met her, she was already pimping, and continues to be a pimp, and makes no bones about that. But those were never feminists. They thought they could take the term and use it--and with that credential themselves--as doing something other than participating in sexual slavery.
But for me there's another part, which is that you have to be a pretty thin leftist to not recognize the imperialism and the colonialism in prostitution. You have to be working at being stupid to not get that connection, it seems to me.
HEDGES: Well, let me read this great quote from Edward Said--and maybe I'll get Alice to respond to this--when he defined sexual exploitation as a fundamental feature of Orientalism, which he said was a "Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient."
Orientalism, Said wrote, views "itself and its subject matter with sexist blinders. (...) [The local] women are usually the creatures of a male power-fantasy. They express unlimited sensuality, they are more or less stupid, and above all they are willing." Moreover, he went on, "[w]hen women's sexuality is surrendered, the nation is more or less conquered." The sexual conquest of indigenous women, Said pointed out, correlates with the conquest of the land itself.
ALICE LEE: Well, I think this quote is right on about imperialism and colonialism in that it takes over a country's culture and redefined the worth of women in that culture. And I think with neoliberalism it's worse for women of color, indigenous women, because now a sort of--they use an excuse of subjugating women and the exploitation of women of color and indigenous women almost as if it was a viable option for women--that's the only thing that we're good for. So it really puts us to being not human, in a way that it dismisses us and all the contributions that women make in those countries.