Any time will do

"Belle Soirée Sur Andernos" by Christine De Segonzac

Juan Cole, "Israeli Opposition Unite to Oust Netanyahu: Why proposed new Israeli PM, extreme-right Naftali 'I've Killed a Lot of Arabs; Bennett, is even worse for Palestinians than far right Netanyahu In a prime time address on Sunday evening, right wing extremist Israeli politician Naftali Bennett announced that he intended to join a government of national unity, including left wing and centrist parties, which would unseat long-serving Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The coalition was mainly put together by Yair Lapid of 'There's a Future' (Yesh Atid) Party, but Lapid is willing to have a rotating prime ministership and is willing to let Naftali take the first turn, for two years. Netanyahu himself went on an unhinged Trump-like rant on television calling Bennett a sham for being willing to go into coalition with the Left (which Netanyahu has often done). The move would allow Israel to avoid a fifth election in a little over two years this summer. Bennett had been under pressure from some in the Israeli right wing instead to make a coalition with Netanyahu, but several right wing leaders, including Avigdor Lieberman, have developed a visceral hate of the current prime minister, and refuse to work with him. This split in the Israeli Right is therefore in large part about personality rather than ideology."

"Joe Manchin: Deeply Disappointed in GOP and Prepared to Do Absolutely Nothing: The centrist Democrat believes, despite it all, that bipartisanship is still possible. 'I have to say, keep the faith in this damn Senate,' he told The Daily Beast. When the Jan. 6 commission became the latest casualty of Republican obstructionism on Friday, most Democrats weren't surprised. Joe Manchin was."

"Joe Manchin Can Name 12 Logical Fallacies Preventing Him From Supporting Voting Rights [...] Is it particularly surprising that Joe Manchin is voting against the For the People Act? Of course not. That's what he does. He's a scorpion and that's just his nature. But the way I figure it, if he is going to write an entire article titled 'Why I'm Voting Against the For the People Act,' he should at least have the decency to explain why he is voting against the For the People Act. He does not. In this op-ed, Manchin spends lots of time explaining why he's opposed to ending the filibuster, but the only explanation he gives for why he opposes the For the People Act is that it's 'partisan.' [...] The For the People Act is huge. There is a lot in it. And yet, Manchin does not manage to name one single specific item in the bill that he can say is explicitly "partisan." He may as well have said that he found the bill "derivative" or claimed that it "insists upon itself." It means nothing. Given that this is a major piece of Democratic legislation, one would think he could do us all the favor of being a little more specific. Which aspect of the bill does he find "partisan?" Which part of it does he think would be unfair to Republicans? I think we'd all be happy to hear him out were he able to make that known. Rather than explaining what about it he finds specifically objectionable, Manchin simply assures us that if the bill were good, it would have support from all of the wonderful Republicans in Congress who deigned to agree that the president encouraging a bunch of cafones to storm the Capitol building was maybe bad. [...] It may seem partisan to Manchin simply because it is commonly held wisdom that the more people are able to vote and the easier it is for them to do so, the more likely it is that they will vote for Democrats — but that isn't really a reason for those people to not be able to vote. I'm just saying, if we're gonna arrange things that way, then why go through with elections at all? Why even call them elections? We might as well just dispense with this charade entirely. If we're arranging elections to make it easier for Republicans to win due to fewer people voting, then how is that not just an appointment? Democrats winning elections because everyone is able to vote easily and Republicans winning because it is harder for certain people to vote are not equal scenarios. If Republicans can't win elections with everyone voting, that seems like more of a "them" problem than an "us" problem, no? Am I wrong here? Am I losing my mind? Manchin's main point of contention seems to be that the Act is simply unfair to Republicans because they did not help to write it. It is unclear, however, who it was that was stopping them. Two Republican House representatives in fact proposed amendments to the bill, and yes, they were voted down, but that's how things work. Some amendments proposed by Democrats also failed, because that is also the way things work. Republicans could have participated more, they chose not to. Once again, that is a "them" problem."

Someone actually interviewed the workers, and also employers who have no sympathy with the whiners who are claiming that they can't find workers because unemployment benefits are too generous. "'Breaking Point': Restaurant Workers Push Back Amid Unemployment Benefit Crackdown [...] Weil has sparse sympathy for those in his industry who have changed little since the pandemic hit. 'Look, 90% of restaurant employees were terminated in mid-March last year,' he said. 'They didn't get on unemployment because they're lazy. They got on unemployment because they were fired.' Neither has Weil seen any of the business owners complaining about unemployment payments reject Paycheck Protection Program funds. 'These establishments chose not to use that PPP money to rehire workers for hybrid models, or to-go models — the revenue stream has been so enriched, and yet there's still no willingness to adapt and be competitive,' he said. 'Industry workers didn't opt out of work. They were all terminated by places that were happy to operate without them, until the pandemic was over.'"

"Wrestling With the New Deal: The programs Roosevelt put together may not have met a Platonic ideal of modern progress, but they saved American democracy itself. In 2014, an up-and-coming writer named Ta-Nehisi Coates made a landmark case for reparations in The Atlantic, which took aim at, among other targets, one of the most revered figures in the liberal pantheon: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Detailing the failures of New Deal housing policy for Black America, Coates told readers that 'Roosevelt's New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow.' Cardi B was nonplussed. 'I love Franklin Delano Roosevelt,' the multi-platinum rapper told GQ four years later. 'He helped us get over the Depression, all while he was in a wheelchair — if it wasn't for him, old people wouldn't even get Social Security.' American intellectuals obsess over FDR because, as historian Eric Rauchway demonstrates in his admirable new book Why the New Deal Matters, he saved the American project itself, for better and for worse. The Great Depression that Roosevelt ended was not merely a collapse of gross domestic product and employment figures; it was a full-blown political crisis that toppled regimes around the world and called into question the very legitimacy of democratic governance. Under FDR, Rauchway writes, 'democracy in the United States, flawed and compromised as it was, proved it could emerge from a severe crisis not only intact but stronger.' When we fight over the New Deal, we are really arguing about the very meaning of America. [...] But the New Deal meant more to Black America than housing policy. Had it not, Roosevelt would not have inaugurated the titanic shift in Black voting away from the party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Even after President Herbert Hoover's disastrous navigation of the Depression, Roosevelt lost the Black vote by roughly 2-to-1 in 1932. After four years of the New Deal, he won the Black vote by nearly 3-to-1 in 1936. This was the beginning of a political realignment that persists to this day."

"Video of police abuses and the NYPD trampling the Constitution reveal inefficacy of 'reform': The people we represent are often subjected to brutal police violence. But perhaps most telling is that all of this is playing out while the world is watching. [...] This week, a video went viral showing the arrest of a young trans woman during a protest. The 18-year-old woman was tackled in broad daylight and then rushed into an unmarked van by plainclothes officers, echoing the terrifying events we've watched play out this month in Portland, Oregon, and paralleling the forms of police brutality we, as public defenders and civil rights attorneys, know happen every day in the communities of those we represent. But this is only the latest in a string of videos that have clearly documented the tragic shortcomings of police reforms that had supposedly been previously adopted by the NYPD."

"When Nice Things Do Cost Too Much [...] "American infrastructure is this costly because of immense, endemic, universal public-private corruption—systems of both direct and financialized graft at every stage of infrastructure development, from the planning to the ribbon-cutting to the use of deferred maintenance to ransack public transportation budgets for cash, year after year, after which the responsible authorities claim that fixing the century-old signals is just too damn pricey. This system of legal fraud begins with the bevies of project consultants, continues through ludicrous private contractor and labor costs, and continues when, years later, high-paid administrative fixers and new armies of consultants and contractors arrive to fix what broke because it was never maintained. It is a system of tolerated kleptocracy that may be the only thing that America still does better than anyone else in the world. It is baked into every assumption about building for the public benefit."

"White House admits CIA involvement in 'War on Corruption' which jailed Lula and elected Bolsonaro: In a White House 'Background Press Call by Senior Administration Officials on the Fight Against Corruption', a Biden administration official admitted that the CIA and other parts of the U.S. intelligence apparatus were involved in assisting the 'War on Corruption' which jailed former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and elected Jair Bolsonaro."

"No, Obama Wasn't Mad About Bailing Out His Wall Street Donors: The former president is now trying to pretend he was a finance industry critic, even though he was Wall Street's biggest cheerleader and enabler. Former President Barack Obama wants you to now believe that he was actually mad about giant Wall Street handouts that he voted for, then arm twisted lawmakers to expand — and then rescinded when some of the money might have gone to help homeowners. Obama's foray into pure fiction is not only absurd — it is a reminder that history can repeat itself if we allow reality to be memory-holed. [...] Obama doesn't seem to grant interviews to anyone who might mention these inconvenient facts — he seems only to give access to pundits and news outlets whose obsequiousness guarantees that they'll never dare ask a single follow-up question. On that score, Klein loyally held up his end of the bargain, allowing Obama to pretend he was an enraged bailout opponent, even though he was the driving force behind the handouts to a finance industry that bankrolled his political career. The result here is an economic version of the Iraq War, where all the facts and the lying and the greed are erased, with elite media playing the role of the brain-wiping machine in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind."

"Despite the Headlines, the Gates Foundation Has Evaded Scrutiny: Allegations of financial misconduct against Michael Larson, who manages the foundation's money as well as a portion of Bill and Melinda's personal wealth, should prompt a closer look. Following weeks of allegations that Bill Gates has acted inappropriately toward female employees, The New York Times last week reported that the Gates Foundation's money manager also stands accused of sexual misconduct—as well as bullying and racism. [...] But buried in the Times story is also an allegation of financial misconduct that governance and tax experts say should trigger official investigations into the foundation, and prompt us to rethink governance rules over billionaire philanthropy. [...] Judith Chevalier, a professor of finance at Yale University, says that when billionaires give their money to a private foundation, it no longer is their money—but rather part of a charitable trust that is required to be spent for philanthropic purposes. That the Gates family has continued to exercise such tight control over the foundation's money, Chevalier says, should have raised questions a long time ago. 'They haven't really diluted their control over it in a way which is customary,' Chevalier notes. 'It's just good practice to have a substantial and independent board of directors.'"

Matt Stoller wrote this before the bill in question actually passed, but now it has. "New York State to Revolutionize Antitrust: The Amazon H2Q fight in 2019 woke up the anti-monopolists in New York. Now they are moving forward with a new stronger trust-busting law. Today's issue is about a ground-breaking antitrust bill - New York Senate Bill 933 - that is likely to be voted on in the New York state Senate this week. SB933 is probably the most significant legal challenge to big tech monopoly power in the country, and would overturn the big business-friendly way we currently interpret antitrust law. As the New York Times Dealbook noted last week, with this bill, 'New York may change how America does antitrust.' In this issue, I'll both explain the legislation and do an interview with the sponsor of the bill, New York Deputy Majority Senate Leader Michael Gianaris."

If we can put one billionaire in space, why can't we put all billionaires in space? Especially since he's going on our dime.

There was plenty of real-time reporting on the ground with first-person accounts from the victims when a church was aggressively cleared with flash-bangs and tear gas just in time for Trump to do a photo op. But suddenly the headlines are going the other way with the release of a report by an inspector general at Interior saying the Park Police didn't clear the area just for Trump's photo-op. Which not only contradicts what the White House itself said at the time, but conveniently refers only to the Park Police, who were not the only cops on the scene. "Skepticism Mounts Over IG's Report on Lafayette Park Attack on Protesters [...] The 41-page report by Inspector General Mark Lee Greenblatt, an appointee of Trump's, stated that U.S. Park Police (USPP) did not force protesters to leave using violent methods on June 1, 2020, for the former president, but rather did so in order to install anti-scale fencing to deter property damage in the park."

Alan Grayson is running for the Senate again, and the bad guys have revived The OTHER False Grayson Smear [...] First, looking at the incident in question from 2014, here are the facts of the case. His ex-wife, Lolita Carson-Grayson, did submit a handwritten statement with the allegations that she later withdrew completely. Actual video from the scene provided to police only showed her hitting him, and on a 911 call made after Grayson left, she said she wanted to report Grayson for disturbing her peace. When asked to clarify, she said 'he came over to my house,' and when asked if there was an altercation or if he hit her, she replied that she hit Grayson. An affidavit from Grayson's daughter also stated Alan never hit the mother of his children. The video was widely disseminated demonstrating that the allegations were false from Grayson's perspective, as filmed by another witness. But more than that, Lolita Carson-Grayson publicly recanted the allegations a day later and issued a written apology. Eventually, the domestic violence case was dismissed. In the divorce case, Lolita Carson-Grayson was subsequently held liable for Grayson's attorney's fees, and the judgement included reference to the false domestic violence allegations made. More recently, the judge sanctioned her and she was ordered to pay $200,000 in legal fees by the court." This one keeps cropping up from people who should know better. That doesn't mean there are no issues around Grayson, but they aren't the ones that have been used to smear him.

"Even Wall Street Shills Understand Why the Democrats Failed: A new autopsy of the Democrats' 2020 electoral underperformance supports the Left's arguments about the weaknesses of the party's strategies. The only surprise is where the report came from: Wall Street—funded neoliberal think tank Third Way. [...] More broadly, just as in 2016, Democrats 'leaned too heavily on 'anti-Trump' rhetoric without harnessing a strong economic frame.' The report quotes officials and campaign staff complaining that 'it was the lack of an economic plan that really hurt,' and that leaning on nothing but 'Donald Trump sucks' led to Biden/Republican ticket-splitting around the country, with the GOP painting the party as out of touch with economic concerns. This overlaps with the findings of a Navigator Research survey of three thousand voters, which found that the majority of Biden-Republican ticket-splitters put a higher priority on the economy (and actually tended to side with progressive positions on economic policy)."

"The Great 'Awokening' and Ruling Class Uses for Racial Grievance Discourse [...] This brings us to the second reason this cynical racial grievance discourse is being pushed by the left flank of capital and the centrist Democrats. Such racial grievance posturing is being tolerated to ensure that Blacks en mass do not join the Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders faction of the Democratic party and enter the fight for more public goods government policy. Therefore, the reason why even though the Sanders faction of the party offers the agenda most needed by poor and working class Blacks who are the majority, the Black Political class and it's class acolytes will deem the Sanders coterie as 'class reductionists,' who don't care about racism even though we know this is cover for the fact that the Black political class is wedded to the centrist Democrats for its 'fatback and biscuits' patronage."

Current Affairs, "Biden Is Not Doing Nearly Enough: Democrats need to realize they are in a fight for their lives. Without transformative accomplishments, the right will soon be back in power—and it will be ugly."

From The Roosevelt Institute, "Five Reasons Why the CBO Underestimates Federal Investment: As policymakers invest in infrastructure, jobs, and solutions to the climate crisis, many will be looking at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and its methodology for determining the benefits of public investment. The methodology the CBO uses, like all economic models, has strengths and weaknesses depending on what kinds of questions need to be answered. For many things, such as the projected costs of straightforward spending programs, these methods are sound and have a good record of success. In general, we hope that any assumptions in economic modeling will tend to balance out. But when it comes to investments, especially in climate measures, the methods the CBO uses have a strong bias against public action,.."

"Take Me to Your Leader: The Rot of the American Ruling Class: For more than three centuries, something has been going horribly wrong at the top of our society, and we're all suffering for it."

"America's Cancer Within: Billionaires... And The Politicians They Own: — Nothing you don't already know, but billionaires are making America into a poor country.

"Warren Buffett and the Myth of the 'Good Billionaire' [...] There is no way to be a billionaire in America without taking advantage of a system predicated on cruelty, a system whose tax code and labor laws and regulatory apparatus prioritize your needs above most people's. Even noted Good Billionaire Mr. Buffett has profited from Coca-Cola's sugary drinks, Amazon's union busting, Chevron's oil drilling, Clayton Homes's predatory loans and, as the country learned recently, the failure to tax billionaires on their wealth. [...] In a long statement last week, Mr. Buffett defended himself by pointing to his long advocacy for a fairer taxation system, and then he immediately told on himself by undermining the very idea of taxes in the same letter. 'I believe the money will be of more use to society if disbursed philanthropically than if it is used to slightly reduce an ever-increasing U.S. debt.' In other words: I believe in higher income taxes on people like me, but I'm highly organized to avoid having income to report, and I don't really believe in taxes because I think I should decide how these surplus resources are spent."

RIP: "Patrick Sky, Folk Singer and Bob Dylan Contemporary, Dead at 80" Back in the day, I used to do "Separation Blues" just for fun, and, occasionally, "Nectar of God". And I always loved his performance of "Ira Hayes", still the best version by my reckoning.

RIP: "'Hooked on a Feeling' singer B.J. Thomas dies at 78." Yes, most other headlines named "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head," but it was written for him so B.J. Thomas was the first to record "Hooked on a Feeling" (with the original, uncensored lyrics) way back in the dark ages. He also introduced a generation of pop fans to Hank Williams' music with his rich rendition of "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", his first hit.

RIP: "Clarence Williams III, The Mod Squad and Purple Rain Actor, Dead at 81: Actor also appeared in Half Baked, Deep Cover, Twin Peaks and Tales From the Hood. Clarence Williams III, the actor who portrayed Linc Hayes on TV's The Mod Squad as well as played Prince's father in Purple Rain, has died at the age of 81. Williams management confirmed the actor's death to Variety, adding that Williams died following a battle with colon cancer.The New York City-born Williams, the grandson of jazz great Clarence Williams, made his acting debut on Broadway and other theatrical productions in the mid-Sixties before he was cast in The Mod Squad, the influential counterculture police series that ran for five seasons on ABC. 'Mod Squad broke new ground,' Living Colour's Vernon Reid tweeted Sunday. 'Clarence Williams III broke new ground. You can draw a direct line from Clarence Williams III to both Denzel & Idris. It's his MF moody blood running through The Kid in Purple Rain that's the furnace of his pain & genius.'" Oh, and I hadn't realized he'd played Jelly Roll Morton, too. "Roger Ebert" (Matt Zoller Seitz) wrote a highly-appreciative obit where he said: "His ferocity burned holes in the screen, and filmmakers took advantage of that, casting him in roles that shook up the main character's preconceived notions, rattled their complacency, and otherwise pushed their buttons. Williams' performance as a devoutly religious policeman in Bill Duke's classic crime drama "Deep Cover" is a knife in the heart of the film's hero, Laurence Fishburne's cop-posing-as-a-drug-dealer John Hull. There's no irony or doubt in the performance, no self-awareness. The character doesn't just think he's God's instrument, he actually is. The imposter syndrome that the protagonist experiences in scenes opposite Williams' character is indistinguishable from an actor's insecurity at facing a performer who can tuck a scene into his back pocket and walk away with it before his partner can realize what just hit him."

RIP: "F Lee Bailey, celebrity lawyer who defended OJ Simpson, dies at 87" — Eventually he went through a phase of teaming up with B.B. King and visiting prisons where King would do music and Bailey would answer inmates' legal questions, which is kinda cool.

"Just How Rigged is the 'Rigged Game'? The Division of Light and Power, the new book by Dennis Kucinich, is an epic chronicle of American corruption: Dennis Kucinich has always been ahead of his time. It's both his distinction and his curse. As a presidential candidate in the 2000s he was ridiculed for backing tuition-free college, single-payer health care, ending the Iraq war, withdrawal from NAFTA and the WTO, same-sex marriage, legalized weed, slashed defense budgets, and a long list of other policies later deemed uncontroversial. When that Kucinich said he would happily nominate a gay or transgender person to the Supreme Court, Jon Stewart guffawed: 'Yes, yes, all rise for the honorable chick with dick!' By 2020 most all of Kucinich's positions were orthodoxy among Democratic voters, yet he remains an outcast to Democrats nationally. In fact, he's been frozen out of blue-state media for the better part of a decade, and welcomed during the same time to a five-year stint as a Fox News contributor. What gives? If even the Washington Post concedes that their former object of ridicule turned out to be 'the future of American politics' — the politics of their own readers — why does the national political establishment continue to keep him out of sight? The answers can be found in The Division of Light and Power, Kucinich's enormous new memoir about his time as the Mayor of Cleveland, and his battle against Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, or CEI. The book is a surprising tour de force on multiple levels. First, it should immediately take a place among the celebrated ruthless accounts of how American politics really work, recalling jarring insider confessionals like Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets or Robert Caro's illusion-crushing portrait of municipal politics, The Power Broker. Second, it's very skillfully written. Kucinich, always a voracious reader, turns out to be a born writer, with a gift for pace and detail." Matt's also got an interview with Kucinich about the book.

"If you think you're sure the GOP has never hacked an election, then you don't know the saga of Don Siegelman, Alabama's last Democratic governor [...] Siegelman rushed to his office where he was informed that the Baldwin County probate court had quietly posted a different set of returns to its website after telling the media and party observers to go home. According to the time stamp, it was posted at 11:06 p.m. The new results had deleted about 6,000 votes from Siegelman's total, throwing the election to Riley. Baldwin county claimed that Siegelman's earlier results had been inflated due to a computer 'glitch' that had supposedly affected only his race and only his total in only one precinct. Siegelman was concerned. The closest friend of a racist probate judge in a rural county had once told him that they sometimes held back a precinct until the end of the night so that they knew how many votes they would need to fix the result." So yes, they stole the election - and then they put him in jail on false charges to keep him from being able to run again.

"The Trouble with Diversity Management [...] In short, the trouble with diversity management is that it helps to protect the power and legitimacy of the most powerful people in organizations: the bosses. Whether your primary issue in an organization is structural/institutional racism or the capitalist social order, the reality is that diversity management does not pose any risk to the people who primarily determine the culture, policies, and budgets of organizations. As a consequence, it is unclear how the corporate solutions provided by the diversity management industry will lead to the eradication of problems in the workplace."

"Extremely rare, spectacular film about London during WW-II in color [A.I. enhanced & colorized]"

I love this drawing, done with a ball-point pen on paper and looking absolutely photo-real.

And I had no idea how big the Crayola boxes could get now and how many colors they are. (Hex and RGB codes included in this chart!)

"Premakes: The Empire Strikes Back (1950)"

1958: Forrest J. Ackerman, Fritz Leiber, and Bjo Trimble star in the 8-minute short, The Genie.

Clare Torry and Pink Floyd live, 1990, "The Great Gig In The Sky"