One seems to hear words of good cheer

Yes, it's Advent again, and time for "Carol of the Bells" to get us in the mood.

A funny thing happened when two Republicans on the Wayne County, MI board of canvassers refused to certify the election results. A couple of hours later, they changed their minds.

The American Prospect is keeping a Cabinet Watch of "Scoops and analysis on each of Biden's administration picks." And anyone who cares what happens to our country is terrified it's going to be Obama 2.0, but without the smooth comic styling.

"Krystal and Saagar: Biden's Floated Cabinet Is RETURN Of The Clinton-Obama Swamp"

This is a nightmare: "Rahm Emanuel under consideration to become Biden's transportation secretary: Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is under consideration to lead the department of transportation, people familiar with the matter say, a move that would enrage progressive activists if the former Illinois congressman and White House chief of staff in the Obama administration was ultimately nominated to join the President-elect Joe Biden's Cabinet. Emanuel has expressed his interest in the post, telling allies that the nation's infrastructure challenges are so dire that a person with experience from the executive and legislative branch would be an asset."

"Philadelphia Apologizes For MOVE Bombing From 35 Years Ago: Thirty-five years ago, a police helicopter dropped a bomb on a Philadelphia rowhouse in a mostly Black neighborhood. Eleven people were killed. Five of them were children. The bomb lit an inferno that burned down more than 60 other houses, leaving hundreds of people homeless. This is now referred to as the MOVE bombing - MOVE for the Black liberation group by the same name that was targeted. Well, last Thursday the Philadelphia City Council passed a resolution that finally issues a formal apology. Philadelphia City Council member Jamie Gauthier, who represents the 3rd District, where the bombing occurred, helped draft the resolution and joins us now."

"How One of the Reddest States Became the Nation's Hottest Weed Market: Oklahoma entered the world of legal cannabis late, but its hands-off approach launched a boom and a new nickname: 'Toke-lahoma.' [...] What is happening in Oklahoma is almost unprecedented among the 35 states that have legalized marijuana in some form since California voters backed medical marijuana in 1996. Not only has the growth of its market outstripped other more established state programs but it is happening in a state that has long stood out for its opposition to drug use. Oklahoma imprisons more people on a per-capita basis than just about any other state in the country, many of them non-violent drug offenders sentenced to lengthy terms behind bars. But that state-sanctioned punitive streak has been overwhelmed by two other strands of American culture—a live-and-let-live attitude about drug use and an equally powerful preference for laissez-faire capitalism. 'Turns out rednecks love to smoke weed,' Baker laughs. 'That's the thing about cannabis: It really bridges socio-economic gaps. The only other thing that does it is handguns. All types of people are into firearms. All types of people are into cannabis.'"

"Disdain and Disbelief After Biden Claims 'Significant' Progressive Presence in Administration: Leftist politicians, pundits, and people also reacted with indignation after a Daily Beast article claimed progressives are satisfied with Biden's selections so far."

"Don't Get In The Van! Progressives Need An Alternative-- Pronto! I get a lot of crap spam every morning. This morning, I went into my spam folder and found an especially repulsive one. The subject line was "Hanging on for Life" and the header was "Jon Ossoff is pleading with Howie." It was sent by an outfit called the National Democratic Training Committee which was founded in 2016 by Democratic Party operative Kelly Dietrich, in coordination with NGP Van and failed DCCC chair Cheri Bustos. Let me come back to that in a moment. Since it was all about fundraising, I want to remind you that all the losing Schumer-backed candidates for the Senate out-raised their opponents, quite massively, this cycle. Basically, the money didn't do them any good. [...] For years I've been hearing a barrage of complaints about the parent organization, NGP Van. They are a monopoly. (The DNC, DSCC, DCCC and the state parties are constantly trying the blackball Target Smart, the closest thing there is to competition.) They are arbitrary about who gets their data-- usually state party chairs (or Democratic governors) decide. They are extremely hostile to progressives primarying incumbents. [...] Their data is uber-over-priced, way more expensive than the GOP charges its candidates. The data is stale to the point of uselessness. The Van itself is inflexible, especially when it comes to non-federal races,w here they don't even try. It gets worse. In a race between Blue America-endorsed progressive Democrat, John Laesch and Republican Richard Irvin for the hotly contested Aurora Mayoral race in Illinois' second-largest city, the Illinois Dems are openly supporting the Republican."

Whether the Democrats can take the Senate depends on convincing people to vote for someone who really shouldn't have even given this interview: "What Are We Supposed To Do For This Guy? Jon Ossoff's Uninspiring Campaign."

Meanwhile... Turns out the Republicans didn't much attack down-ticket "centrist" Dems with "Defund the Police" or charges of socialism, but for their association with Nancy Pelosi, and for corruption of which they were guilty. So, they weren't "too far left".

Bernie Sanders in the Guardian, "How do we avoid future authoritarians? Winning back the working class is key [...] But one thing is clear. If the Democratic party wants to avoid losing millions of votes in the future it must stand tall and deliver for the working families of our country who, today, are facing more economic desperation than at any time since the Great Depression. Democrats must show, in word and deed, how fraudulent the Republican party is when it claims to be the party of working families."

They say they're just censoring "fake news", Alex Jones, and QAnon, but that's not really who they are suppressing. The censorship is aimed at the left. "Meet the Censored: Andre Damon: Increased content moderation has been sold as a tool to control the far right, but the World Socialist Web Site was among the first to sound the alarm. [...] Many Americans didn't pay attention to new forms of content moderation until May, 2019, when a group of prominent tech platforms banned figures like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopolis. A legend quickly spread that such campaigns exclusively target the right. Long before then, however, the WSWS had been trying to sound the alarm about the impact of corporate speech moderation on dissenting voices on the progressive left. As far back as August of 2017, the WSWS sent an open letter to Google, demanding that it stop the 'political blacklisting' of their site, as well as others. Like many alternative news sites, WSWS noticed a steep decline in traffic in 2016-2017, after Donald Trump was elected and we began to hear calls for more regulation of 'fake news.' Determined to search out the reason, the site conducted a series of analyses that proved crucial in helping convince outlets like the New York Times to cover the issue. [...] At repeated hearings in Washington, figures like Mark Warner and Adam Schiff would demand over and over again that Google, Facebook, and Twitter censor left-wing content. It was all a clear and flagrant violation of the First Amendment, which says that Congress does not have the power to limit the freedom of expression. But here was Congress instigating private companies to do exactly that, and threatening to regulate or fine them if they did not comply."

Mark Steel, "Want a multimillion PPE payout from the government? Apparently, all you have to do is befriend a Tory MP: This year, more than any other, it's been vital to look after our friends and families. That's why it's so touching that the government has done exactly that, by awarding hundreds of millions of pounds' worth of contracts to their friends and families through the pandemic."

Ryan Cooper, with a meaty reaction to Obamaa's latest book in The Week, details the disaster that Obama, Rahm Emanuel, and Larry Summers brought us in "Obama the pretender [...] What went wrong? Obama attempts to grapple with the massive failures of his presidency in A Promised Land, his new memoir describing his rise to power and early presidency, but ultimately the book is slippery and unconvincing. America is circling the political toilet in part because Obama had the chance to fix many longstanding problems and did not rise to the occasion, a fact the former president is still stubbornly unwilling or unable to see. [...] It seemingly never occurred to Obama that responsibly addressing the crisis would have required doing politics instead of acting magnanimous towards a conservative Wall Street banker. Nor did Obama consider the idea that he could have used his leverage to make the bailout better, because Democrats would be making up most of the votes. Reed Hundt, a former Obama fundraiser, got administration economist Austan Goolsbee on the record in his book A Crisis Wasted admitting they could have gotten more concessions. "We could have forced more mortgage relief. We could have imposed tighter conditions on dividends and executive compensation," Goolsbee said. They just thought it would be irresponsible to use that leverage to extract concessions. In reality, it was irresponsible not to use this one chance to cut the banks' profitability and therefore power down to size, so the banking system could be fixed instead of just patched. It is hard to know what to make of all this. Definitely Obama is being dishonest either with the reader or himself in some cases. His record on foreclosures is so horrible that it cannot possibly be defended on the merits. It was morally abominable and politically idiotic. [...] All this blows apart Obama's pat self-justification as being too respectful of norms and traditions to take serious action. He considers and rejects some of the more radical options above, arguing that things like "nationalization of the banks, or stretching the definitions of criminal statutes to prosecute banking executives ... would have required a violence to the social order, a wrenching of political and economic norms, that almost certainly would have made things worse." In truth, letting 10 million people get thrown out of their homes to save a bunch of rich bankers from their own misdeeds did stupendous violence to the social order. Letting bankers get away with an assembly line production of document fraud was a severe wrenching of political and economic norms. It wouldn't have been a "stretch" of statutes to prosecute the thousands of Wall Street crimes — on the contrary, letting banks off with wrist-slap fines blew a ragged hole in the rule of law. It does not preserve our sainted norms and institutions to move heaven and earth to save job-killing financial parasites and then leave John Q. Homeowner twisting in the wind. The false assertion that doing so would have made things worse is straight out of The Rhetoric of Reaction. [...] Obama had a golden opportunity to knit the country back together after a disastrous Republican presidency and a brief moment of Wall Street helplessness. He didn't do so because he couldn't stomach the radical action necessary to heal the nation's wounds and repair the social contract, and instead invented a lot of excuses why he had to sit on his hands and do nothing. The name for such a person is a coward."

Even when he goes long-form, Atrios doesn't go on long, but he's definitely must-read. I'd like to quote nearly every sentence of this one for individual consideration. "I've Got The Feeling That Something Ain't Right: The Trump years have taught me that a lot of powerful people (in various power tracks) don't much believe in the fundamental importance of the consent of the governed. Democracy, I guess you could say. Sure we point at the authoritarian right, but many in the self-appointed Center see pesky voters as an impediment to what they imagine is good governance. They gaze at the militarized racism of the right and a mild redistributionist "social justice warrior" left and declare them to be just the same. Both just different flavors of "populism," you see, which we know is very bad indeed. The core belief of this authoritarian centrism is concern for minority rights. Not the rights of marginalized minorities, but of the elite and powerful. The establishment of a false meritocracy is how they justify it, with legacy admissions to the most elite institutions and widespread basic nepotism the most obvious manifestations of this basic lie. [...] The authoritarian center finds much more common ground with the MAGAs. The joke is they hate socialists more than they hate fascists, but really it's more that they are friendly fascists who tolerate the racists, who ultimately don't threaten them as long as they pipe down a bit, and despise the socialists who do." Really, read the rest.

"Is the Gates Foundation Supporting Child Labor in Africa??" Pretty creepy to see a "sponsored" op-ed in the Guardian in support of the commercial exploitation of children based on the idea that kids learn life skills doing their home chores.

Margaret Sullivan reads Obama's book and remarks on "What Obama gets right — and very wrong — about the media: Everybody's a media critic these days — and Barack Obama is an astute one. But for those who remember certain aspects of his presidency, he's got a bit of a credibility problem. [...] But before we herald the former president as some sort of media visionary, let's cast our minds back to his own administration's record with the press. Here's how I'd sum it up: not great." I was hoping she'd get into it from the other side — not just his lack of serious interviews (he talked to a lot of talk show comics) or even his vicious betrayal of his promise of transparency, but his complete lack of any real push-back on issues. Because he couldn't. Because he had nothing to say. But he was even inept at priming the press in ways that would defend his own policy "triumph", letting the Patient Protectin and Affordable Care Act be called "the Affordable Care Act" and "the ACA" when it wasn't affordable but it did have patient protections, which they should have been emphasizing.

"OPCW cover-ups, Russiagate and US Elections: Polly Talks to Aaron Maté" — I'm pleased to know that Maté won an Izzy Award recently.

RIP: "Diego Maradona: Argentina legend dies aged 60," of a heart attack. Even I, a person who completely ignores all football games, did not confuse him with the singer/actor whose name shares a number of letters with his.

Black Agenda Report, "Biden, the Emcee at the Billionaires' Ball [...] What ordinary people experience as disaster is manna from heaven for the Lords of Capital. 'Disaster capitalism' is only disastrous for those without capital. Every catastrophe consolidates the power of the billionaires, who use these periods to devour the less-rich and reshape the political economy to their further advantage, deepening their dominance of society so that the Joe Bidens of the world jump higher and come quicker when summoned."

"Unlearning the Lessons of Hillbilly Elegy: America's beleaguered poor and working class have a host of problems, but the culture of irresponsibility that J.D. Vance says they're prey to isn't one of them. [...] The problem with those judgments is that you have to erase a lot of history and a lot of experience with policy outcomes to get there. Working-class families and communities are indeed in trouble, but a lot of factors contributed to it. The culprit was not bad choices. It was not lack of personal responsibility or a government that was clueless about how to get to a better economy and society. We are not powerless to address these ills."

"Chris Hedges: The Ruling Elite's War on Truth: American political leaders display a widening disconnect from reality intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by global corporations and billionaires. Joe Biden's victory instantly obliterated the Democratic Party's longstanding charge that Russia was hijacking and compromising US elections. The Biden victory, the Democratic Party leaders and their courtiers in the media now insist, is evidence that the democratic process is strong and untainted, that the system works. The elections ratified the will of the people. But imagine if Donald Trump had been reelected. Would the Democrats and pundits at The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC pay homage to a fair electoral process? Or, having spent four years trying to impugn the integrity of the 2016 presidential race, would they once again haul out the blunt instrument of Russian interference to paint Trump as Vladimir Putin's Manchurian candidate?"

"In Case You Missed It, Reagan Was A Scumbag: America's 40th president was a lot of things: a right-wing talk radio host, a Hollywood actor, a Red Scare monger, a charismatic liar. A great leader wasn't one of them but for some reason Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War seems keen to revive that long-standing conservative fantasy. I can only guess how many hours and how many indie game budgets went into meticulously detailing every weathered crack, mole, and discoloration in Ronald Reagan's 70-year-old face so he could tell a room of CIA spooks in a voice of unwavering, fatherly assurance, to go do crimes in foreign countries." He has a nice recap, but left out of the story are the largest single tax hike on the working classes in history, kicking the struts out from under regulations put in place to prevent another depression, destroying the civics curriculum and making war on free universities, among other things.

"The Case For Tammany Hall Being On The Right Side Of History: Historian Terry Golway has written a colorful history of Tammany Hall, which takes a more sympathetic view of the organization than many historians. He says the Tammany machine, while often corrupt, gave impoverished immigrants critically needed social services and a road to assimilation. According to Golway, Tammany was responsible for progressive state legislation that foreshadowed the New Deal. He writes that some of Tammany's harshest critics, including cartoonist Thomas Nast, openly exhibited a raw anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice."

Dinosaur Comics and tales of Robyn.

John Carlson dollhouse and furnishings, 1912

Steam car

The story of Kris Kristofferson, Janis Joplin, and "Me and Bobby McGee"

Watch the Kinks' new video for "Lola".

"Led Zeppelin: Knebworth August 11th 1979 [Fully Filmed Concert]"

Bring it on home

The Electoral Vote map

And David Dayen talked to Sam Seder about what Biden could do right from the start of his presidency — if he wanted to.

"Why Was Corbyn Suspended From The Labour Party? w/ Daniel Finn" It's amazing how much misinformation there has been about the suspension and the report. The latter pretty much vindicated Jeremy Corbyn and proved that the people who pretended to care about antisemitism did not. The narrative about Corbyn hurt the Labour and made worries about antisemitism sound like some dangerous Chicken Little gaming.

"A Blow for Labor Rights in California: Gig workers were barely scraping by even before companies like Uber spent $200 million on the successful campaign to pass Proposition 22. Now, two paths lie ahead: one paved by corporate cash, and the other blazed by the workers behind the wheel. [...] After Prop 22 won with 58 percent of the vote, Moore said, 'we will absolutely fight it. We will fight it in the courts. We will fight it with new laws. We will fight it the way drivers have been most successful, which is with shoe leather and picket signs. We will continue to have a ground fight.'"

"Bernie Sanders takes aim at 'corporate Democrats' blaming progressives for House losses [...] As Sanders notes, every one of the 112 co-sponsors of Medicare-for-all won their elections, and only one of the 98 co-sponsors of the Green New Deal lost their election. In contrast, the vast majority those who lost their seats did not support those progressive policies. "It turns out that supporting universal health care during a pandemic and enacting major investments in renewable energy as we face the existential threat to our planet from climate change is not just good public policy," Sanders remarked. "It also is good politics." Other progressive policies likewise won big in individual states, namely Florida's vote to increase the minimum wage and measures to legalize marijuana across several states. Sanders' rebuttal comes after House Democrats were projected to lose at least six seats from the House and so far failed to flip the Senate fully in their favor. Some moderate Democrats who narrowly retained their seats blamed "socialism" for the losses; Progressives in turn said the Democratic party needs to organize better to regain a stronger majority."

And here's Bernie's op-ed, in which he also lists some of the progressive referenda that passed, even in states that went for Trump.

But I really wish people would say it plain: The Democrats did not campaign for Democrats. They campaigned arm-in-arm with Republicans against Trump and Trump alone. Pelosi and Biden both kept saying things like, "We need Republicans," and "We need a strong Republican Party." They gave voters no reason to vote for Democrats. They kept pretending that Trump was an aberration when he was not, but rather just what the Republicans wanted. As Grover Norquist said, "We don't want a president who can think, we already know what the top 1% want him to do. He only needs to be capable if signing with a pen!"

It looks like the worst elements in the security state and the corporate shills will design the Biden administration: "In 2018, Olsen went to work for Uber as the corporation's chief security officer. Uber joined with other corporations & spent hundreds of millions of dollars to pass Prop 22 in California. It ensures drivers and couriers are exempt from minimum wage. [...] Olsen has contended what NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed had little to do with privacy and civil liberties, a talking point former officials have repeated to discredit him. [...] MacBride oversaw grand jury investigation against WikiLeaks until he resigned from his position as US Attorney in August 2013. He prosecuted CIA whistleblowers @JohnKiriakou and Jeffrey Sterling (@S_UnwantedSpy). [...] MacBride defended a subpoena issued against NYT reporter James Risen in Sterling case. He argued government should be able to compel a journalist to reveal their confidential sources by threatening them with jail if they don't cooperate. [...] Lederman helped draft 2010 "drone memo" that set out "legal basis" for executing American terrorism suspect without charge or trial—Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. [...] Stroul was part of the bipartisan Syria Study Group that Congress appointed, which plotted out the next phase of US regime change policy in Syria. [...] Chris Lu was deputy secretary of labor for President Barack Obama and cheerleader for Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He was vice chair of 2020 Democratic National Convention Rules Committee. [...] As US Attorney in Michigan, McQuade's office was implicated in racial profiling and intrusive surveillance against Arab, Muslim, & Sikh communities. She faced blowback after it became known Dearborn was labeled by security agency as "terrorist hotspot." [...] As US Attorney, McQuade was in charge of prosecuting officials in Michigan, including then-Gov. Rick Snyder, who poisoned the water in Flint. But no one was charged before she resigned after Trump took office."

"Biden state media appointee advocated using propaganda against Americans and 'rethinking' First Amendment [...] The Biden transition team's selection of a censorial infowarrior for its top state media position comes as a concerted suppression campaign takes hold on social media. The wave of online censorship has been overseen by US intelligence agencies, the State Department, and Silicon Valley corporations that maintain multibillion-dollar contracts with the US government. As the state-backed censorship dragnet expands, independent media outlets increasingly find themselves in the crosshairs. In the past year, social media platforms have purged hundreds of accounts of foreign news publications, journalists, activists, and government officials from countries targeted by the United States for regime change. Stengel's appointment appears to be the clearest signal of a coming escalation by the Biden administration of the censorship and suppression of online media that is seen to threaten US imperatives abroad."

On the other hand, Sam Seder reckons Biden's picked the best Chief of Staff to deal with Covid., and Digby agrees — great analysis of the party's failures in this interview, too.

Samuel Alito is not a Constitutional scholar. "Let's Break Down Every Utterly Bonkers Thing Justice Alito Said Last Night [...] How have we let people claim the mantle 'Originalists' when they have no conception of history before the Reagan administration?"

"New documents show Mueller investigation unable to concoct charges against Assange and WikiLeaks: Previously redacted portions of the Mueller report into supposed Russian interference in the US, released this week, have shown that despite every effort, the Justice Department was unable to concoct evidence of any criminal wrongdoing on the part of WikiLeaks or Julian Assange in relation to their 2016 publications exposing the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton. [...] The contents of the new material shows why the Justice Department was so intent on keeping it hidden. The documents disclose that despite a two-year investigation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller came up with nothing to prove the collusion between WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence that had been trumpeted by the intelligence agencies, the Democratic Party and the corporate media. This is in line with the character of the report as a whole, which was unable to substantiate any of the 'Russian interference' in the 2016 US election that the Mueller investigation had been tasked with identifying. The new pages reveal that one of the focuses of the Mueller investigation was laying the groundwork for criminal charges against Assange and WikiLeaks under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. This was premised on the assertion that the internal Democratic National Committee (DNC) communications and emails of Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta, were hacked by the GRU Russian military intelligence agency before being published by WikiLeaks. In May, it was revealed that CrowdStrike, a cyber security company handpicked by the Democratic Party to examine the DNC servers had been unable to find evidence that documents had ever been exfiltrated from them. In other words, there may not have been any successful hack, Russian or otherwise. This aligned with Assange's repeated insistence that Russia was not the source of the material. It lent weight to the claims of WikiLeaks collaborator and former British diplomat, Craig Murray, who has stated that he has personal knowledge of the source of the DNC documents, and that they were provided by 'disgruntled insiders.' Significantly, even though it is based on the discredited Russiagate framework, the newly-released material from the report concluded that there was no basis for laying conspiracy charges against Assange. 'The most fundamental hurdles' to such a prosecution, it stated, 'are factual ones.' There was not 'admissible evidence' to establish a conspiracy involving Russian intelligence, WikiLeaks and Trump campaign insider Roger Stone. To justify the fact that all of the resources of the American state were insufficient to manufacture evidence of the theory that it had promoted for years, the Mueller report pathetically claimed that one of the problems was that WikiLeaks' communications with the GRU were encrypted. 'The lack of visibility into the contents of these communications would hinder the Office's ability to prove that WikiLeaks was aware of and intended to join the criminal venture comprised of the GRU hackers,' the report stated. This is truly clutching at straws and desperately attempting to save face. Mueller was left to claim that the only possible evidence of a conspiracy was contained in encrypted messages that he and the intelligence agencies had presumably never seen!"

Deutsche Bank, the bank of choice for the world's criminals, is irritated that it's having to pay rent on those long leases for buildings that do not currently house their employees, and have come up with a great idea to deflect the eyes of people who think banks should pay their taxes. "Staff who work from home after pandemic 'should pay more tax': Employees who continue working from home after the pandemic should be taxed for the privilege, with the proceeds used to help lower-paid workers, according to a new report. Economists at Deutsche Bank have proposed making staff pay a 5% tax for each day they choose to work remotely. They argue it would leave the average employee no worse off because of savings made by not commuting and not buying lunch on-the-go and fewer purchases of work clothing. Alternatively, the report suggests the tax could be paid by employers who do not provide their workforce with a permanent desk."

"Unelected Officials Override The President To Continue Wars (But Only Kooks Believe In The Deep State) [...] Some mass media propagandists find it hilarious that the US war machine used deceit to thwart the president's attempts to withdraw from its illegal occupation of Syria"

"Centrists" attacked the left, but it isn't the left that's the problem. "'We're not some demonic cult': Democrats fume over faulty messaging: House Democrats have the majority and are ripping each other to shreds. Senate Democrats fell short for the third cycle in a row, but are only grousing about getting out-messaged by Republicans. The two caucuses are going about their soul-searching a little differently. [...] Jones, the sole incumbent Democratic senator to lose, said both party campaign arms need to change their mission. He said Stacey Abrams' work in Georgia should be a model for the party's work in individual states, while he contends the 'DSCC and DCCC spend too much time investing in candidates and not the electorate. They don't invest in House districts, they don't invest in states.'"

"Ocasio-Cortez Dismisses Centrist Attempts to Blame Left for Dem Losses, Calling on Party to Listen to Progressive Demands: 'The whole 'progressivism is bad' argument just doesn't have any compelling evidence that I've seen.' Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not directly address comments made in Thursday evening's House Democratic caucus call on Friday, but in an extensive Twitter thread the congresswoman discussed multiple reasons for rejecting centrist Democrats' claims that the embrace of progressive policies led to lackluster election results for the party. Support for broadly popular policies like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All and relentless canvassing by progressives in the House—even when Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's campaign declined to campaign in key states—were among the factors which helped unapologetic progressives win elections this year, the New York Democrat tweeted, while centrist candidates lost or came close to losing. [...] Clyburn warned that in congressional elections, if 'we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, socialized medicine, we're not going to win.' In fact, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, the 2020 election results show that the opposite is true in many cases. [...] Progressive victors in Tuesday's elections include Ocasio-Cortez herself; Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who retained their House seats as well as helping secure Biden's victories in their key states; Rep.-elect Cori Bush (D-Mo.), and Rep.-elect Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), both of whom unseated powerful, longtime corporate-backed congressmen. Democrats who lost include Reps. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.), Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), and Abby Finkenauer (D-Iowa)—all of whom oppose Medicare for All and reducing police funding. [...] 'Deep canvassing,' in which candidates and campaigners have in-depth conversations with voters in order to learn about the issues that matter to them, has been shown to be 102 times more effective at garnering votes than typical short interactions during door-knocking operations. Pandering to voters whose top concerns are 'law and order' or avoiding a 'socialist' takeover of the government through the expansion of Medicare to all Americans, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, will only serve to alienate communities of color who responded positively to campaigning by progressives this year."

"Tlaib lashes out at centrist Dems over election debacle: 'I can't be silent': Rashida Tlaib isn't apologizing for wanting to yank money away from bad police departments. She has no second thoughts about her embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement, or for wanting to aggressively fight climate change. House Democrats lost seats instead of expanding their majority, underperforming expectations across the board. And moderates have pounced on liberals like Tlaib, the Michigan congresswoman, accusing them of handing conservatives a set of slogans and policies to scare voters. But Tlaib and other House progressives don't want to hear it. It all amounts to unfair blame-casting designed to shame them into staying quiet, they say, right as Democrats gain control of the White House.

"They Are Trying To Silence AOC, Because Money Never Sleeps: We're all exhausted, but in the 24 hours since the election was called, corporate interests and their allies have already started their war on progressives. There is no rest for the weary. We're all exhausted, and understandably so. It's been an unspeakably horrific year. The election psychologically drained everyone, and we all just want a break. But here's the thing: Money never sleeps, and money is already hard at work trying to make sure nothing fundamentally changes in politics — and if nothing fundamentally changes in Washington, then everything is going to change for the worse in the real world. Since the election was called for Joe Biden, there has been a multitiered effort to blame disappointing election results on progressives, even as exit polls and voting results show that progressive organizing rescued Democrats from the jaws of a presidential defeat. While the country was celebrating the defeat of Trump, here's what the voices of Big Money have been doing since the election..."

RIP: "Baron Wolman, Rolling Stone Photographer Who Captured Rock Gods, Dead at 83, of ALS. "During his three years at Rolling Stone, between 1967 and 1970, Wolman caught the rise of rock & roll as few had during the time: an open-mouthed Jimi Hendrix attacking his guitar at the Fillmore West (a 'money shot,' Wolman called it), Janis Joplin relaxing at home with her cat, Smokey Robinson adjusting the do-rag he wore before shows to keep his hair in place, Grace Slick ironically wearing a Girl Scout uniform, Frank Zappa sitting atop a tractor at a construction site, and Jerry Garcia flashing his missing, chopped-off finger for the first time publicly."

"Today and Forever, Rahm Emanuel Is Garbage: By fighting him tooth and nail for seven years, Chicagoans have established that Rahm Emanuel is garbage. No matter what he does next, that stench isn't coming off. Rahm Emanuel will be remembered as a Chicago mayor who adored rich people and hated everyone else. He has all but handed the keys to the city to corporate heads, tech start-ups, and wealthy developers. He has relentlessly attacked public education and the public sector as a whole. He covered up a brutal police killing of a black teenager. Even mainstream retrospectives on his tenure — written in the wake of his surprise announcement yesterday that he will not be seeking a third term as mayor — tried to sound fair and balanced yet couldn't help but coming off as a long list of giveaways to the wealthy while the city's poor and working class suffer or are pushed out." Oh, and when Rahm tells unemployed people to learn code, what he's really saying is, "We want to flood this sector with lots of unemployed coders to drive wages down. And when he says, "Those jobs aren't coming back," he means, "We've decided those jobs aren't coming back." Just like they decided to get rid of millions of jobs back in the '80s and '90s, and they keep right on deciding not to bring them back.

How Bolivian Socialism Defeated The Coup

"America Can Have A Boom Economy Six Months From Whenever It Gets Serious [...] Further, if you can get it going, it will soon have massive support because it will create a truly good economy for the first time in 50 odd years. People will have better things to do than squeal about red state/blue state bullshit, the era will be like the post-war period: people are making money and kids and politics is, in fact, largely consensus driven because everyone sees that what is being done works."

This is utterly confounding. Why is Tucker Carlson doing this populist stuff, unless it's to try to tie the right-wing to genuine populism? I could imagine any of a dozen or three progressive writer-activists doing something like "Tucker Investigates: What is destroying rural America?".

"Non-Competes and Other Contracts of Dispossession: Employers have used non-compete clauses to deprive tens of millions of workers of the freedom to change jobs or start their own businesses. In occupations ranging from home health aide to journalist and sandwich shop worker, employers have used this legal power to their great benefit. Non-compete clauses reduce worker mobility, help employers keep wages and wage growth down, deter small business formation, entrench potentially abusive, discriminatory, or hostile work environments, and fortify market power to the detriment of workers, rivals, consumers, and broader society."

On Useful Idiots, Matt and Glenn both said some smart and true things about Russiagate that people really need to think about.

How Capitalism Really Works (with Anwar Shaikh)

Eugene Debs Was an American Hero.

The Unlikely Coalition That Made the New Deal (with Thomas Ferguson)

Comic strip, "The Spirit of Compromise" by Matt Bors.

Sam Cook, "Bring It On Home To Me"

You don't represent me so just try to prevent me

You might as well see my avatar's Halloween costume, appropriate all year long.

"San Francisco voters approve first-in-the-nation CEO tax that targets income gap: Wealthy companies whose chief executive is paid 100 times more than their median worker will pay a higher gross receipts tax. [...] The tax will levy an extra 0.1% to 0.6% on gross receipts made in San Francisco for companies whose highest paid executive makes 100 times or more its median worker's salary. The amount levied will increase in 0.1% brackets proportionally to the pay ratio. A company whose highest paid employee earns 200 times more than its median San Francisco worker will get a extra 0.2% charge on its gross receipts. For companies whose CEO makes 300 more, the charge jumps to 0.3% and son on. The tax caps at 0.6%, and only companies with gross receipts over $1.17 million will be targeted. Under the measure, gross receipts and CEO compensation will include money made from stock options, bonuses, tax refunds, and property, a caveat seen by many as a way to target the tech sector where CEOs are often compensated in non-salaried bonuses. Tech is expected to account for 17% of the tax revenues, according to an estimate by the city's chief economist, while retail and financial firms are expected to account for 23% of the revenues each."

"What If Democrats' Message Just Doesn't Matter?: Florida voters backed a $15 minimum wage. So did Joe Biden—and he lost the state. There are important lessons here for the party. [...] Huge percentages of voters support government-sponsored health care, more state intervention in the economy, and more government support for clean energy. We have, of course, just learned some important lessons about the limitations of public opinion polling, but these majorities are too large to be completely dismissed as mere polling errors. That Democrats cannot translate robust support for their central policies into consistent electoral victories suggests that something is amiss in the democratic accountability feedback loop. It is of course true that on many of these issues, like health care, the Democratic Party firmly rejected the left's popular proposals in favor of a confusing and diluted alternative. That is what Democrats nearly always do. Perhaps that is what the electorate punishes them for. But that same electorate also regularly elects Republicans, who are very vocally opposed to all of those fine, popular ideas." Hmm, Biden didn't exactly campaign on $15 or much of anything else.

"Trump should have lost in a landslide. The fact that he didn't speaks volumes: Blaming the voters simply will not do. This is a failure of leadership. Those responsible for it need to be held accountable. Already, there is talk that they need to embrace tax cuts and run away from the 'socialism' label. In other words, double down on what they were already doing. Those who think that is the lesson may simply be 'unteachable' — a word George Orwell used to describe the old British cavalry generals who still insisted on using horses long after the invention of automatic weapons, and could not be persuaded that a horse is not useful against a machine gun. Today's Democratic leaders are like those generals. If 2016 couldn't persuade them that they were wrong, this won't either. Nothing ever will."

When lackluster Dems complained that Republicans were calling them names and it made getting re-elected hard, AOC pushed back. "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ends truce by warning 'incompetent' Democratic party: New York representative denies Movement for Black Lives and Green New Deal cost seats. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has criticised the Democratic party for incompetence in a no-holds-barred, post-election interview with the New York Times, warning that if the Biden administration does not put progressives in top positions, the party would lose big in the 2022 midterm elections. Signaling that the internal moratorium in place while the Democrats worked to defeat Donald Trump was over, the leftwing New York representative sharply rejected the notion advanced by some Democrats that progressive messaging around the Movement for Black Lives and the Green New Deal led to the party's loss of congressional seats in last week's election. The real problem, said Ocasio-Cortez, was that the party lacked 'core competencies' to run campaigns." It's not really accurate to say she "ends truce", though; the attacks started with the "centrists" who made a big point of attacking progressives immediately after the election was called.

"The Green New Deal Didn't Sink Democrats [...] The fight over the role of progressives in sinking (or not) Democrats' chance at a robust unified government began late last week in a call leaked to Politico. On that call, Rep. Abigail Spanberger claimed she almost lost her race in Virginia because she was accused of wanting to defund the police (she does not). House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn reportedly said, 'we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, socialized medicine, we're not going to win.' That's led some progressives to push back; notably, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who pointed out every co-sponsor of Medicare for All won reelection and that Democrats are still running like its 2000 instead of 2020. Earther looked at the Green New Deal, another bête noire of conservatives and Fox News, to see if it sank Democrats chances. The bill has 101 co-sponsors in the House and 14 co-sponsors in the Senate. Of the 93 House co-sponsors who ran for a seat in Congress's lower chamber in 2020, only one lost reelection."

"Bolivia's President-Elect Luis Arce Attacked With Dynamite: On Thursday night, the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) spokesperson Sebastian Michel denounced that Bolivia's President-elect Luis Arce was attacked with dynamite while he was in a meeting at the party's headquarters in La Paz city. No injuries were reported. The authorities of the coup-born regime led by Jeanine Añez have not commented on what happened so far.

"ICE Medical Misconduct Witness Slated For Deportation Is A U.S. CITIZEN, Says Lawyer: In recent weeks, after Alma Bowman became a key witness for medical misconduct at an immigration jail, ICE moved to deport her. [...] Though she was ordered removed from the country on June 4, ICE only took action to begin her deportation in the last few weeks — after the public became aware of allegations of medical misconduct at Irwin. Following the initiation of deportation proceedings against her, a lawyer finally began reviewing documents for Bowman's immigration case and realized that she had documentation indicating her U.S. citizenship. On Monday morning, ICE denied a stay of removal for Bowman, potentially setting up her deportation. On Monday afternoon, Bowman's deportation was halted, for now, and she was to be returned from Arizona, where she was being prepared for her departure, to a detention center in Georgia, her advocates told The Intercept."

"Venezuela coup plotters met at Trump Doral. Central figure says U.S. officials knew of plan.: In a challenge to denials of government involvement, the ex-U.S. special operations sergeant whose security firm took part in a botched Venezuelan coup last May said two Trump administration officials met with and expressed support to planners of Operation Gideon, a Bay of Pigs-type operation that tried to oust Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. It's a story of bungling, bravado and cloak-and-dagger plotting, with plans shared in clandestine meetings in the back of limousines while rolling through Miami, in restaurants and even at dusk on the 12th fairway of the Red Course of Trump Doral, the Miami Herald/McClatchy has learned."

TMBS "162 - Chile Victory, Rural Healthcare, & a Labor GND ft. Meagan Day, Ryan Pollock, & Eric Osgoode: From Jacobin's original series Weekends, Nando Vila talks about the Bolivian elections and MAS's victory and Richard Wolff weighs in on Nando's segment."

"Did You Know That Every Single Blue Dog Candidate Was Defeated On Tuesday-- Even Though The DCCC Spent Millions On Their Races? [...] Beyond backing the crap conservative incumbents who lost their seats, the DCCC's biggest independent expenditures this cycle were done, overwhelmingly, on behalf of conservative candidates backed by the Blue Dogs and New Dems. DCCC and House Majority PAC expenditures are still being reported and it will be another week before we can do an accurate systematic audit but look at these races the DCCC (and Pelosi-- let me just refer to the expenditures of both the DCCC and her House Majority PAC , for the sake of this post, as "the DCCC") chose to spend big in-- at the expense of progressive candidates like Mike Siegel, Julie Oliver, Mondaire Jones, Liam O'Mara, Adam Christensen, Audrey Denney, etc, who they chose to not spend any money at all on."

Unbelievable. For the record, in 2000, Congressional aides illegally flew down to Florida and illegally imposed themselves on the facility where votes were being counted, to intimidate vote-counters and stop the vote. I'd say I can't believe The Washington Post printed this revisionist crap, except that I know they printed Michael Kelly's crap that revised the record even as it was happening.

TMBS: "0:15 / 53:39 Jeremy Corbyn Suspended From Labour Party - Griscom Stream." And speaking of revisionist crap, the leader of the Labour Party is making it up to please the party right-wingers.

RIP: "Veteran journalist and author Robert Fisk dies aged 74: Veteran foreign correspondent and author Robert Fisk has died after becoming unwell at his Dublin home on Friday. It is understood the journalist was admitted to St Vincent's hospital where he died a short time later. He was 74. Fisk was one of the most highly regarded and controversial British foreign correspondents of the modern era and was described by the New York Times in 2005 as 'probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain'. [...] He reported extensively on the first Gulf War basing himself for a time in Baghdad where he was fiercely critical of other foreign correspondents whom he accused of covering the conflict from their hotel rooms. He also covered the US-led war wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and frequently condemned US involvement in the region. Fisk was one of very few western reporters to interview Osama Bin Laden, something he did on three occasions in the 1990s. He also covered five Israeli invasions, the Algerian civil war, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the 2011 Arab revolutions. He worked in the Balkans during the conflict there and more recently covered the conflict in Syria. He received numerous awards over the course of his career including the Orwell Prize for Journalism, British Press Awards International Journalist of the Year and Foreign Reporter of the Year on multiple occasions." It would probably be hilarious now to go over the attacks on him from right-wing bloggers who would make line-by-line attacks on his articles critiquing the Bush administrations lies and war crimes, from which they created the term "fisking". Those articles could be "fisked" mercilessly now that he has so manifestly been proven correct.

RIP: "Ron Cobb, Underground Cartoonist and Influential Production Designer, Dead at 83: Ron Cobb, an underground cartoonist as well as the concept and production designer who helped craft the aesthetics of Total Recall, Alien and Back to the Future, has died. Via The Hollywood Reporter, Cobb's wife of 48 years, Robin Love, reported that he had passed away of Lewy body dementia on Monday — his 83rd birthday — at his home in Sydney. A political cartoonist, Cobb's drawings captured the radical anti-establishment spirit of the 1960s and '70s. His long and varied career brought him from counterculture cartooning to drawing album covers to designing some of the most iconic starships in film history." I can still remember, so long ago, learning to keep R. Cobb and R. Crumb separate in my mind when I first started seeing their stuff in undergrounds. He died in December, but I didn't see it until Langford picked it up (and I got around to reading the October Ansible.).

RIP: "Marge Champion: Actress who was model for Disney's Snow White dies at 101: The actress was also well known for starring alongside her husband and dance partner Gower Champion in a string of MGM musicals in the 1950s. She later won an Emmy Award for choreographing the 1975 TV film Queen of the Stardust Ballroom. [...] When Disney's animation team were working on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, they studied a young Marge's movements on a sound stage in order to make the character move more realistically. From the age of 14, Champion would work with them for one or two days per month for two years, during which time she was paid $10 per day. [...] Champion also served as a model for the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio, Hyacinth Hippo in Fantasia, and Mr Stock in Dumbo."

RIP: Sean Connery, 90. I liked Langford's obit for Connery the best: "Sir Sean Connery (1930-2020), utterly famous and multiple award-winning Scots actor in seven James Bond films — with many more genre credits including Zardoz (1974), Time Bandits (1981), Highlander (1986), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) — died on 31 October aged 90." I really loved that spot in Time Bandits.

RIP: Debra Doyle (1952-2020): SF writer Debra Doyle, 67, died October 31 of a sudden cardiac event at home in Colebrook NH. She was best known for work written in collaboration with her husband, James D. Macdonald, including Mythopoeic Award winner Knight's Wyrd (1992) and the Mageworlds space opera series." Jim Macdonald sent me a bunch of the Mageworld books to read while I was waiting for and recovering from my eye surgery way back when, having talked me down from freaking out about the surgery in the first place, realizing that I wasn't going to be able to do much else beside read during the weeks of keeping my face horizontal at all times, and learning that I'd liked the few of those books I'd read so far. Although I'd never had any contact with Debra Doyle myself, she has a place in my heart for those books, and I was very sorry to hear of her passing.

Cory Doctorow mentions a rarely acknowledged problem in "Trump's electoral equilibrium [...] A transformative politician who turns out the base also flushes out establishment opposition: lavishly funded smear campaigns that suppress your own voter turnout as a necessary cost of heading off voter-pleasing, plute-punishing policies."

George Monbiot, "The US was lucky to get Trump — Biden may pave the way for a more competent autocrat: Only if the president-elect is willing to fight big money and redistribute wealth can he stop the rise of someone far worse than Trump: [...] Obama's attempt to reconcile irreconcilable forces, to paper over the chasms, arguably gave Donald Trump his opening. Rather than confronting the banks whose reckless greed had caused the financial crisis, he allowed his Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, to 'foam the runway' for them by allowing 10 million families to lose their homes. His justice department and the attorney general blocked efforts to pursue apparent wrongdoing by the financiers. He pressed for trade agreements that would erode workers' rights and environmental standards, and presided over the widening of inequality and the concentration of wealth, casualisation of labour and record mergers and acquisitions. In other words, he failed to break the consensus that had grown around the dominant ideology of our times: neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has been neatly described by William Davies, a professor at Goldsmiths College, as 'the disenchantment of politics by economics'. It sees politics as an ineffective or illegitimate means of social improvement. Decision-making should be transferred to 'the market', a euphemism for the power of money. Through buying and selling, we establish a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Any attempt to interfere in the discovery of this natural order — such as taxing the rich, redistributing wealth and regulating business — will inhibit social progress. Neoliberalism disenchants politics by sucking the power out of people's votes. When governments abandon their ambition to change social outcomes or deliver social justice, politics become irrelevant to people's lives. It is perceived as the chatter of a remote elite. Disenchantment becomes disempowerment."

Why this election calls into question whether America is a democracy: At the beginning of the Fight to Vote project, we asked this question. After a year of election battles, voting restrictions and partisan conflicts, we revisit the idea."

Obama Wants Us to Go Back to Brunch After Trump Is Out. That Would Be A Disaster: Democrats are suggesting that we can all tune out and go back to brunch if Joe Biden wins the election. If we do that, we're doomed. [...] To counter Trump's assault, the Democratic campaign this weekend returned to Flint, Michigan — the place the Obama administration left to suffer through a horrific toxic water crisis, exacerbated by Michigan's then-Republican governor (who has since endorsed Biden). During the event, Biden declared that during his last tour of duty as vice president, we 'went through eight years without one single trace of scandal. Not one single trace of scandal. It's going to be nice to return to that.' Biden was joined in Flint by former president Barack Obama, who touted incremental change and preemptively downplayed expectations of economic transformation. 'Government is not going to solve every problem but we can make things better — a president can't, by himself, solve every challenge facing the economy,' he said, adding that under a Democratic Congress 'some folks will get jobs that wouldn't have otherwise had jobs, and some folks will have healthcare that wouldn't otherwise have healthcare.' He also promised that if Biden and Kamala Harris win the White House, 'You're not going to have to think about them every day. You're not going to have to argue with your family about them every day. It won't be so exhausting.' This was the party's flaccid message in the nation's poorest city, a former General Motors manufacturing hub destroyed by deindustrialization and offshoring. The same message was promoted this weekend in the Washington Post by corporate consultant Hillary Rosen, whose firm works for Biden. Rosen told the newspaper that Biden 'is not somebody who is coming in to disrupt Washington. He's coming in to heal Washington.' This is a shrewdly concocted mix of revisionism and expectation management — and if Biden (hopefully) defeats Trump, it sets the stage for a repeat of the events that got us to this horrible moment in the first place. "

2012, "Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy: New documents prove what was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy: totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall — so mystifying at the time — was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves —was coordinated with the big banks themselves. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document — reproduced here in an easily searchable format — shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.

Matt Taibbi on "Glenn Greenwald On His Resignation From The Intercept: The Pulitzer winner founded the Intercept to challenge official narratives and protect editorial freedom. When editors abandoned those principles, spiking a controversial story, he was forced to quit. [...] Greenwald becomes the latest high-profile journalist to leave a well-known legacy media organization to join Substack. You'll be able to read the piece rebuffed by The Intercept at his new site here. [...] It's a long story, but the punchline is that the self-editing journalists at the Intercept somewhere along the line began to fall for what will look, years from now, like a comically transparent bait-and-switch operation. They were suckered into becoming parodies of their original incarnation. In the Obama years, progressive journalists were infuriated by the disclosures of whistleblowers like Snowden and Chelsea Manning, and aimed their professional ire at the federal government for war crimes, drone assassination, and mass abuse of surveillance authority. The bugbears of the day were intelligence officials who ran these programs and deceived the public about them: people like CIA directors Hayden and Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence Clapper. These intelligence community leaders only a few short years ago served an administration that sought a 'reset' with the systematic human rights violator that was Vladimir Putin's Russia, a country then-President Obama dismissed throughout his tenure as a 'regional power' that acts 'not out of strength, but out of weakness.' The consistent posture of the Obama administration — the Obama-Biden administration — was that Russia ranked far below terrorists as a potential threat to the United States. After 2016, however, these officials presented themselves as norms-defending heroes protecting America against the twin 'existential' threats of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Russia, just a few years ago described by Rachel Maddow as a harmless 'gnat on the butt of an elephant,' was now reinvented as an all-powerful foe mounting an influence campaign of unprecedented reach, with everyone from Trump to the Green Party to blogs like Truthdig and Naked Capitalism, to congresswoman and war veteran Tulsi Gabbard, to Bernie Sanders, all potentially doing the bidding of a Cold War foe bent on 'sowing discord' on our shores. [...] As press enthusiasm for the Trump-Russia story widened, progressives began to invite old enemies back into the fold. People like 'Axis of Evil' speechwriter David Frum and Weekly Standard editor and key Iraq War proponent Bill Kristol became regular guests on CNN and MSNBC, while ex-spooks like Brennan, Clapper, Hayden, and a long list of others were given TV contributor deals, now serving as the press instead of facing criticism from it." But Greenwald didn't fall in line. And why should he? Clapper had lied to Congress 200 times not so long ago, and the Russia story kept turning out to have no basis in fact. Glenn's demand for evidence was met with hostility from the Clintonites and increasingly vile attacks on him. He gave up a highly-paid and well-protected position to walk away from The Intercept, something I wish he hadn't done, but people are even claiming, ludicrously, that he did it for fame and fortune. Be that as it may, I wish he hadn't considered the Hunter Biden story important enough to do it over, and I wish he'd stayed to fight his corner.

Ian Welsh, "Seven Rules for Running a Real Left-wing Government [...] Your First Act Must Be a Media Law. Break them up. Take them over. Whichever. Ignore the screams about media freedom from the usual suspects in the West, this is a case of 'freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.' In all three countries, the media conglomerates remained in the control of oligarchs (update: to be clear, Venezuela did eventually expropriate them, but only after many years), and in all three cases, the majority of the media remained relentlessly hostile to the left. This is just as true in countries like Britain, Canada, or the US as it is in Argentina, Venezuela, or Brazil, by the way. There is a reason why the post-war liberal regimes put strict media controls in place—including size limits—and there is a reason why those limits were removed by the neoliberal regimes that replaced them. You can win 'against the media' for a time, but if you leave it in the hands of your enemies, they will eventually use it to bury you."

"Watch the Rolling Stones Tear Through 'Sympathy for the Devil' in 1968: Performance is off newly remastered footage from Rock and Roll Circus"

"40+ Rare Historical Pictures That You Probably Haven't Seen Before

Insect Trust, "Declaration of Independence"