And I'm all hung up on music

"Data from Bolivia's Election Add More Evidence That OAS Fabricated Last Year's Fraud Claims: The MAS Received More Votes in Almost All of the OAS's 86 Suspect Precincts in 2020 than in 2019. [...] We can't go back to 2019, or erase the racist violence unleashed on the population following the coup. On Sunday, Bolivians showed their courage, and the power of organized social movements, in righting the wrong of 2019. But that victory shouldn't allow us to forget about 2019, or the role that international actors played in overthrowing a democratically elected government. Those 226 tally sheets never showed fraud, as the OAS asserted. They do, however, reveal how the OAS disenfranchised tens of thousands of Indigenous Bolivians in its galling attempts to justify the undemocratic removal of an elected leader."

The thing is, though, the US has been trying to overthrow Morales' government for quite some time. "Bolivian democracy vs the United States: The elusive truth of on armed raid in eastern Bolivia leads Matt Kennard into a major investigation of the efforts by Washington and its local allies to undermine the radical government of Evo Morales."

"After Socialist Victory in Bolivia, Media Still Whitewash Coup: When the Wall Street Journal (10/19/20) reported on the MAS victory, for example, it kept to the usual line (FAIR.org, 11/11/19, 11/18/20) about the previously elected president from MAS, Evo Morales, having been 'driven from power' in November 2019 after 'an election that observers said was marred by irregularities'—avoiding referring directly to Morales' military overthrow as a 'coup.' Instead, the Journal wrote that 'Bolivians rose up against Mr. Morales' after he 'had grown increasingly authoritarian' and already 'ruled' for 14 years."

"Jubilation as Chile votes to rewrite constitution: Chileans have voted overwhelmingly in support of rewriting their constitution, which dates to the dictatorship of Gen Augusto Pinochet. With nearly 90% of the vote counted, 78% of people had voted "yes" in a referendum that was called after mass protests against inequality. [...] The referendum asked Chileans two questions - firstly, if they wanted a new constitution, and secondly, what kind of body they would want to draw it up. A large majority have voted for the new constitution to be drafted by a convention made up entirely of elected citizens, as opposed to one that would also include lawmakers."

"Jeremy Corbyn suspended by Labour leadership in latest outrage during Blairite anti-Semitism witch-hunt: The suspension of Jeremy Corbyn is a vicious and antidemocratic action by the right-wing cabal in control of the Labour Party. The political pretext on which the suspension was carried out, claiming the existence of widespread 'left anti-Semitism' in the Labour Party under his leadership, is a slander not only against Corbyn, but of countless party members. It is a political witch-hunt designed to justify the enforcement of the policies of British and US imperialism in the Middle East, built around the dishonest and illegitimate identification of anti-Semitism with principled opposition to the policies of the Israeli state."

David Dayen, "Sources: Gina Raimondo Being Considered as Biden's Treasury Secretary: The Rhode Island governor would not be a popular selection among progressives or organized labor. Joe Biden's transition team has informed Democratic officials that Gina Raimondo, the centrist governor of Rhode Island, is under consideration as the next Secretary of the Treasury should Biden win the election, multiple sources have confirmed to the Prospect. Raimondo, in her second term as governor, dazzled Biden's campaign in interviews to become his vice president back in June. A former venture capitalist who took the governor's mansion on the strength of millions of dollars in Wall Street donations, Raimondo's name will stir the long memories of union leaders. They have held a grudge with her for years over her tenure as state treasurer, when she cut pension benefits for public employees, while steering over $1 billion in state money to hedge fund investments. But recalling those hard feelings may be the point. One source theorized to the Prospect that leaking Raimondo's name could make Federal Reserve governor Lael Brainard, until now seen as the leading possibility for Treasury Secretary, seem more palatable. Brainard, who worked at Treasury under Tim Geithner, has been attempting to portray a more liberal public image as the decision approaches."

"Quietly Signed Trump Order Denounced as 'Declaration of War' Against Federal Employees: The order sets up Trump's 'cronies to burrow into permanent jobs in the U.S. government," said one critic. After years of complaining that career federal employees are part of the "deep state" and aim to undermine his administration, President Donald Trump this week took a major step toward remaking the federal government as one without nonpartisan civil servants—signing a little-noticed executive order that would strip potentially hundreds of thousands of government employees of their job security. Under the order, signed late Wednesday, career federal employees could be fired with little or no cause, lose their right to due process, and potentially lose union representation. "

Glennzilla quits: "My Resignation From The Intercept: The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles."

"Times Editorial Lets Slip Joe Biden's Latin America Policy: More Obama-Style Coups: Figures on both the right and the left are presenting Biden as a progressive champion, the reality though, is that he has always represented the right-wing of the Democratic Party, and his Latin America policy is no exception."

"10 Ways to Call Something Russian Disinformation Without Evidence: How do you call something 'Russian disinformation' when you don't have evidence it is? Let's count the ways. We don't know a whole lot about how the New York Post story about Hunter Biden got into print. There are some reasons to think the material is genuine (including its cache of graphic photos and some apparent limited confirmation from people on the email chains), but in terms of sourcing, anything is possible. This material could have been hacked by any number of actors, and shopped for millions (as Time has reported), and all sorts of insidious characters - including notorious Russian partisans like Andrei Derkach - could have been behind it. None of these details are known, however, which hasn't stopped media companies from saying otherwise. Most major outlets began denouncing the story as foreign propaganda right away and haven't stopped. A quick list of the creative methods seen lately of saying, 'We don't know, but we know!'"

"Facebook and Twitter Cross a Line Far More Dangerous Than What They Censor: Just weeks before the election, the tech giants unite to block access to incriminating reporting about their preferred candidate. THE NEW YORK POST IS one of the country's oldest and largest newspapers. Founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, only three U.S. newspapers are more widely circulated. Ever since it was purchased in 1976 by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, it has been known — like most Murdoch-owned papers — for right-wing tabloid sensationalism, albeit one that has some real reporters and editors and is capable of reliable journalism. On Wednesday morning, the paper published on its cover what it heralded as a 'blockbuster' scoop: 'smoking gun' evidence, in its words, in the form of emails purportedly showing that Joe Biden's son, Hunter, traded on his father's position by securing favors from the then-vice president to benefit the Ukranian energy company Burisma, which paid the supremely unqualified Hunter $50,000 each month to sit on its Board. While the Biden campaign denies that any such meetings or favors ever occurred, neither the campaign nor Hunter, at least as of now, has denied the authenticity of the emails. The Post's hyping of the story as some cataclysmic bombshell was overblown. While these emails, if authenticated, provide some new details and corroboration, the broad outlines of this story have long been known: Hunter was paid a very large monthly sum by Burisma at the same time that his father was quite active in using the force of the U.S. Government to influence Ukraine's internal affairs. [...] BUT THE POST, for all its longevity, power and influence, ran smack into two entities far more powerful than it: Facebook and Twitter. Almost immediately upon publication, pro-Biden journalists created a climate of extreme hostility and suppression toward the Post story, making clear that any journalist even mentioning it would be roundly attacked. For the crime of simply noting the story on Twitter (while pointing out its flaws), New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman was instantly vilified to the point where her name, along with the phrase 'MAGA Haberman,' were trending on Twitter. [...] The two Silicon Valley giants saw that hostile climate and reacted. Just two hours after the story was online, Facebook intervened. The company dispatched a life-long Democratic Party operative who now works for Facebook — Andy Stone, previously a communications operative for Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, among other D.C. Democratic jobs — to announce that Facebook was 'reducing [the article's] distribution on our platform': in other words, tinkering with its own algorithms to suppress the ability of users to discuss or share the news article. The long-time Democratic Party official did not try to hide his contempt for the article, beginning his censorship announcement by snidely noting: 'I will intentionally not link to the New York Post.'"

"Liberals Are Losing the Journalism Wars: As major media outlets erect paywalls, conservative publishers are flooding the country with free right-wing propaganda paid for by Republicans. The University of North Carolina's Hussman School of Journalism and Media recently released a report titled 'The Expanding News Desert,' which showed that over the last 15 years, more than a fourth of America's newspapers and half of its journalists have 'disappeared,' turning thousands of communities into 'news deserts' no longer served by anyone who can provide a comprehensive and accurate description of what is happening in those communities. Into that vacuum of community news-gathering, other things have flowed." Local news reporting shuts down, big news organizations go behind paywalls, and right-wing money rushes in to fill the internet with right-wing "news" sites, available for free. Not that there aren't Dem-side grifters, but they're small-bore and definitely not left. "The fact that we are all watching, in real time, as the institution of journalism is replaced by corporate P.R. and right-wing propaganda is not a problem in need of solutions from business schools, consulting firms, or Silicon Valley. It is a democratic problem, in need of a democratic solution. The paywall will save The Atlantic. It has already failed to save American journalism."

"Department Of Homeland Security Sued For Chemical Weapons Use: Federal agents employed 'a vast arsenal of weapons,' including toxic smoke grenades, against protestors in Portland. [...] Among the weapons mentioned in the complaint are rubber bullets; CS tear gas; OC spray, also known as pepper spray; and hexachloroethane smoke grenades. As The Intercept reported earlier this month, the U.S. military began phasing out the smoke grenades years ago because of their toxicity. Along with a thick smoke, the grenades release chemicals associated with short- and long-term human health effects, including nausea, vomiting, central nervous system depression, kidney and liver damage, and cancer."

"It is all just a metaphor: The New York Times attempts yet another desperate defense of its discredited 1619 Project: On October 16, New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein issued a new defense of the 1619 Project in which he now argues that its best-known claim—that the year 1619 and not 1776 represents the 'true founding' of the United States—was a metaphorical turn of phrase not intended to be read literally. Further confusion is attributed to an editorial error arising from the difficulties of managing a 'multi-platform' media operation. Published under the title, 'On Recent Criticism of The 1619 Project,' Silverstein's essay is a convoluted lawyer's argument that attempts to palm off historical falsification as merely minor matters of syntax, punctuation, and a somewhat careless use of metaphor."

In honor of Trump's attack on Mr. Rogers, we present, "Thor Meets Mr. Rogers".

RIP: "Spencer Davis dies of Pneumonia at 81: Spencer Davis, whose eponymous group provided a springboard for Steve Winwood's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame career, has died after a bout with pneumonia. He was 81. 'He was a very good friend,' Spencer's agent Bob Birk told the BBC. 'He was a highly ethical, very talented, goodhearted, extremely intelligent, generous man. He will be missed.' Founded in 1963, the Spencer Davis Group reached No. 7 in the U.S. with "Gimme Some Lovin'" in 1966, while topping the U.K. charts with "Keep on Running" and "Somebody Help Me." Winwood, who was only 14 when he first started fronting the group, left in 1967 to co-found Traffic. He later was part of the short-lived supergroup Blind Faith before establishing a celebrated solo career."

RIP: "Richard Lupoff (1935-2020): A longtime fan who worked as a technical writer, or when feasible a full-time sf pro, Lupoff with his wife Pat (and Bhob Stewart) edited the Hugo-winning fanzine Xero. They were among the founders of the Fanoclasts, and of New York's Eastercon. Dick participated in APA-F and the New York Futurian Society. As a pro, he produced 20 novels and enough short fiction to fill several collections. He edited hardcover editions of Burroughs books, wrote a biography of Burroughs, and other nonfiction books drawing on his expertise in pulp, comics and sf history. [...] During that period he also wrote the short story '12:01 P.M.' (1973), adapted as the Oscar-nominated short film 12:01 pm (1990) and the TV movie 12:01 (1993). (Lupoff appeared in both films as an extra.) The major plot device is a time loop, so similar to that of 1993's Groundhog Day that Lupoff and Jonathan Heap, director of the 1990 film, were 'outraged' by the apparent theft of the idea..." Don Thompson and Dick Lupoff's All in Color For A Dime is still always where we can find it easily in our house.

RIP: "Jerry Jeff Walker, Outlaw Country Architect and 'Mr. Bojangles' Songwriter, Dead at 78: Walker's 1973 live album '¡Viva Terlingua!' is a cornerstone of the Austin, Texas, cosmic cowboy sound. Jerry Jeff Walker, the 'Mr. Bojangles' songwriter and a pioneer of the 'cosmic cowboy' sound that would evolve into outlaw country, died Friday after a long battle with throat cancer. He was 78. Walker's publicist confirmed his death to Rolling Stone. Born Ronald Clyde Crosby in Oneonta, New York, in 1942, Walker made his way south, living for a time in the Florida Keys and in New Orleans, where he took his stage name. In 1971, he landed in Austin, Texas, and became a fixture of the local music scene, where artists like Willie Nelson, Doug Sahm, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and Michael Martin Murphey were performing a new progressive style of hippie-country." David Bromberg, who used to play with JJW, tells the story of the song in his own performance of it.

"Why privilege theorists mock poor white people—with five examples

"How Democrats Can Learn Hardball From the Republicans of 1861: Sometimes restoring democracy requires rewriting the rules. If you're looking for a historical example of a revanchist political minority that kept its foot on the neck of a growing and restive majority, look no further than the defenders of slavery in antebellum America. In the interest of keeping Black people in a state of intergenerational servitude, pro-slavery politicians in the antebellum period trampled flagrantly and frequently on the civil liberties not only of Black Americans, but of white people who opposed slavery's expansion. They shut down the right of abolitionists to use the U.S. Postal Service and the halls of Congress to proselytize against the Peculiar Institution. They deployed violence and voter fraud to rig elections. To maintain property in human beings, they perverted the institutions of American democracy. It wasn't until the Civil War, when many of those pro-slavery politicians rebelled to fight for the Confederacy, that the anti-slavery Republicans had their chance to reverse the damage. And they did it by playing hardball."

"Mighty Ira: Ira Glasser, Free Speech and the ACLU - System Update with Glenn Greenwald: For this special episode of System Update, Glenn is joined by Ira Glasser, former executive director of the ACLU from 1978-2001 and the subject of a newly released documentary, Mighty Ira. Glenn and Ira discuss why civil libertarians must defend the rights of those they despise, the apparent abandonment of free speech commitments by some of the liberal left, and the role of the ACLU in US politics -- traditionally and now."

I haven't read it yet, but it warmed my heart to hold it in my hands: "The Return of Hyper Comics Paperback — August 7, 2020: The Return of Hyper Comics, the last project of legendary underground cartoonist and Hugo Award-winner Steve Stiles, who passed away in 2020, is a September release from Thintwhistle Books, a company formed by Steve's widow, Elaine Stiles. Packed with more than 150 pages of Steve's classic work from Hyper Comics, Heavy Metal, Stardate, and a host of other publications, it's an essential part of any cartoon collector's library."

This Dick Cavett interview with Dick Van Dyke took place in 1974. He's talking about his alcoholism, but I just found it fascinating to look at him. And then I realized how long ago that was and he's still amazing today.

"Stevie Wonder Releases First New Music in 15 Years: Hall of Famer unveils 'Where Is Our Love Song' and 'Can't Put It in the Hands of Fate' on Republic Records, his first non-Motown release."

Fairytale cottages

Spencer Davis Group, "I'm A Man"

And the forests will echo with laughter

"Bolivia election: Evo Morales's leftwing party celebrates stunning comeback: Exit polls for presidential election project win for Luis Arce as rival concedes defeat. Evo Morales's leftwing party is celebrating a stunning political comeback after its candidate appeared to trounce rivals in Bolivia's presidential election. The official results of Sunday's twice-postponed election had yet to be announced on Monday afternoon, but exit polls projected that Luis Arce, the candidate for Morales's Movimiento al Socialismo (Mas), had secured more than 50% of the vote while his closest rival, the centrist former president Carlos Mesa, received about 30%. Mesa conceded defeat on Monday lunchtime, telling supporters that a quick count showed a 'very convincing and very clear' result. 'There is a large gap between the first-placed candidate and us ... and, as believers in democracy, it now falls to us ... to recognise that there is a winner in this election,' Mesa said"

"The Unprecedented And Illegal Campaign To Eliminate Julian Assange: Assange would never receive a fair trial in the U.S., but he's not receiving one in Britain either. OVER THE 17 DAYS of Julian Assange's extradition hearing in London, prosecutors succeeded in proving both crimes and conspiracy. The culprit, however, was not Assange. Instead, the lawbreakers and conspirators turned out to be the British and American governments. Witness after witness detailed illegal measures to violate Assange's right to a fair trial, destroy his health, assassinate his character, and imprison him in solitary confinement for the rest of his life. Courtroom evidence exposed illegality on an unprecedented scale by America's and Britain's intelligence, military, police, and judicial agencies to eliminate Assange. [...] The deck was clearly stacked. Assange's antagonists were marking the cards as early as February 2008, when the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center set out, in its words, to 'damage or destroy this center of gravity' that was WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks, from the time Assange and his friends created it in 2006, was attracting sources around the world to entrust them, securely and anonymously, with documents exposing state crimes. The audience for the documents was not a foreign intelligence service, but the public. In the governments' view, the public needed protection from knowledge of what they were doing behind closed doors and in the skies of Afghanistan and Iraq. To plug the leaks, the governments had to stop Assange. The Pentagon, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the State Department soon followed the Counterintelligence Center's lead by establishing their own anti-Assange task forces and enlisting the aid of Britain, Sweden, and Ecuador." Everything from direct violations of his human and civil rights to petty cruelties seems to be the order of the day.

"A dueling town halls upside: Media finally focuses on the wide gulf between Biden and Trump: The nation's top political reporters actually focused on the extreme contrast between the candidates, not spectacle. NBC did a terrible disservice to the public by ceding to Donald Trump's demand to counterprogram Joe Biden's ABC town hall on Thursday night. But the net effect on political journalism turned out to be quite positive. The dueling town halls actually forced several top journalists to directly address the extraordinary imbalance between the two candidates and what they represent, rather than get distracted by the spectacle.

Summing up, Max Kennerly tweeted: "As of the last 48 hours, the Trump re-election platform is:
— Mr. Rogers sucks
— I'm annoyed local TV covers severe weather but not a foreign politician talking about me
— there might be a Satanic pedophile cult, haven't found it yet
— I ordered US Marshals to murder someone"

So, "Is Trump Having American Citizens Murdered Now?" He certainly is claiming to. But there's no question that whoever arranged it, it was murder. "A witness, Garrett Louis, told the New York Times he watched the shooting begin while trying to get his eight-year-old son out of the way. He said the officers began shooting so suddenly that he initially assumed they were criminals gunning down an enemy, not police. 'There was no, 'Get out of the car!' There was no, 'Stop!' ... They just got out of the car and started shooting.'"

Dan Goodspeed did an interesting time-lapse chart of rates of Covid over the course of the last few months according to how "red" or "blue" the states are. The one that keeps getting me is North Dakota — they must be going out of their way to get exposed in such a sparsely-populated state. They're significantly worse than a lot of densely-populated places.

"A Month Before Louisville Drug Warriors Killed Breonna Taylor, They Knew the 'Suspicious Packages' She Supposedly Was Receiving Came From Amazon: The detective who obtained the search warrant cited the deliveries to falsely implicate Taylor in drug trafficking."

"Not News But A Juicy Collection Of Narratives - How The New York Times Failed Its Readers: The New York Times star reporter Rukmini Callimachi had been widely criticized for her exaggerated reporting about the Islamic State and terrorism. But her editors kept supporting and promoting her stories. That finally ended when Canada recently indicted one Shehroze Chaudhry, also known as Abu Huzaifa, for falsely claiming to have been an ISIS member. Chaudhry had made up his blood dripping stories. He had never been with ISIS and had never been to Syria or Iraq. But the unverified stories of Abu Huzaifa al-Kanadi had been the central element of the NYT's ten part Caliphate podcast by Rukmini Callimachi. The failure of her reporting finally was so evident that the NYT had to allow its media columnist Ben Smith to write about the issue. Remarkably his reporting was published in the Business section of the paper."

Dean Baker, "Patent Monopolies in Prescription Drugs Cause Corruption # 43,508 [...] We should be glad that reporters have actively worked to expose the abuses associated with the tariffs Donald Trump has imposed since coming into the White House. But what about the abuses associated with government-granted patent monopolies for prescription drugs? We literally never see a piece pointing out that patent protection creates an enormous incentive for corruption, in fact, one that is far larger than with the Trump tariffs. Just to get some basic orientation, depending on the country and the product, Trump's tariffs were generally between 10 and 25 percent. By contrast, government granted patent monopolies often raise the price of a protected drug by at least a factor of ten and often by a factor of one hundred or more. The impact of this protection is therefore equivalent to tariffs of 1,000 or 10,000 percent." And just think of how this will work for a vaccine..

From Richard Wolff's continuing series on the collapse of "the West", and specifically America, "Global Capitalism: Capitalism's Decline Accelerates [September 2020]".

August J. Pollack says, "LOL: I have lived my entire life in a media narrative that Republicans are simply not supposed to face any consequences for their actions and what we have been witnessing for the last 48 hours is the result of a media completely unequipped to handle exactly that happening. I think that's why there's such a cognitive dissonance between how punditry is reacting to this versus, well, basically the rest of the planet. People are done. They are fucking done with this bullshit. [...] I nearly dropped my coffee cup, like at the end of The Usual Suspects, hearing someone on TV this morning calling this an 'October surprise.' This is the October most expected and obvious thing ever. That's why the media and so many pundits are losing their shit over this now—because there's no spin on this. There's no way, though I know some will try, to blame this on Joe Biden or on Democrats or on the liberal media. Hell, even the folks who want to blame this all on China knows China didn't make 100 people sit shoulder-to-shoulder without masks on."

I know I've complained about this before, but Tucker Carlson's weird populism is an embarrassing scam — embarrassing not just because he's faking it, but because his analysis is one that should be coming from Democrats, with democratic prescriptions instead of whacked-out right-wing nuttiness.

"How Are Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google Monopolies? House Report Counts The WaysIn a sweeping report spanning 449 pages, House Democrats lay out a detailed case for stripping Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google of the power than has made each of them dominant in their fields. The four companies began as "scrappy underdog startups" but are now monopolies that must be restricted and regulated, the report from Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel says. "These four corporations increasingly serve as gatekeepers of commerce and communications in the digital age, and this gatekeeper power gives them enormous capacity to abuse that power," a lawyer for the subcommittee's Democratic majority said in a briefing with reporters. The lawmakers say Congress should overhaul the laws that have let the companies grow so powerful. In particular, the report says, Congress should look at forcing "structural separations" of the companies and beefing up enforcement of existing antitrust laws."

"Why Liberals Pretend They Have No Power: Elite politicians invoke the rhetoric of national emergency only to behave like hapless passengers trapped aboard a sinking ship. [...] This tension underscores a deeper paradox of liberalism that has arguably reached its apex in the Trump era. Since the president's election four years ago, the political and intellectual leaders of America's supposedly reform-minded opposition have issued warnings about the existential threat that Trump poses to democracy. Amid it all, senior Democrats have mostly maintained both the regular operation of government and a standard of congressional etiquette that connotes normalcy more than it does any state of exception: applauding the president's speeches, approving his military budgets, awarding him new domestic spying powers, and even fast-tracking his judicial nominees. A line from one 2019 CNBC report detailing the overwhelming House approval of Trump's marquee NAFTA renegotiation sums up the absurdity of this posture: 'Democrats also wanted to show they can work with Trump only a day after they voted to make him the third president impeached in American history.' [...] Liberalism in the Trump era has thus become a kind of strange pantomime act in which elite politicians deploy the rhetoric of imminent threats and national emergency only to behave like hapless passengers trapped aboard a sinking ship. Although it has certainly found its most potent expression in Washington, this posture of feigned powerlessness has gradually come to infect the broader culture and ideology of American liberalism as a whole. [...] The contradictory posturing of today's most powerful liberals is not fully attributable to the shock and disorientation brought about by the 2016 election; its roots go back to the Clinton era at least—the period (not incidentally) when Democratic leaders formally abandoned their commitment to the New Deal and absorbed key parts of a Republican agenda. [...] This style found its ultimate expression in Barack Obama, who masterfully paired a sonorous rhetoric of optimism with, to paraphrase the political scientist Corey Robin, a 'moral minimalism' that rendered Democrats not so much unprepared for a fight with their Republican foes as indisposed to the very idea of one. Beginning with the hopeful cadence of 'Yes we can!' and ending, after a slew of congressional defeats, with the election of Donald Trump, the Obama era has served to convince many liberals of the need to compromise even further—anything remotely ambitious being doomed to fail on the altars of conservative partisanship and Republican obstruction. (Rampant opposition to Medicare for All from centrist Democrats despite its considerable popularity has been justified on these grounds for years.) [...] It's all well and good to recognize the structural constraints imposed by America's political system, and the difficulty of passing major reforms in the face of organized opposition. But for too many of America's leading liberal politicians, 'realism' has become an identity unto itself, unmoored from any programmatic orientation toward the future or sustained effort to bring about significant change."

Black Agenda Report, "The Politics That Led to the 'Worst Debate': The incoherence of the Biden-Trump debate will be repeated every election cycle until Blacks and progressives break with the corporate duopoly. There is nothing smart or 'strategic' about falling for the same trick every election cycle. The rich man's media are calling it 'the worst debate in modern American history,' but that's because the truth is often painful to watch. The Biden-Trump confrontation revealed, with crystalline clarity, that the real 'genius' of the American electoral process is its total imperviousness to popular demands for a healthier, more just and less economically precarious society and a peaceful, ecologically stable world."

"The Devastatingly Low Bar of 'Official' Poverty: Poverty numbers leave out far too many who are struggling economically. Shouldn't we reach for more than whatever rests just above abject misery? [...] For a more accurate gauge of poverty, some economists have advocated using the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which includes benefits like food stamps when measuring income, and therefore better reveals the extent to which such programs help people—or, conversely, how dire things become when such benefits are slashed or shuttered. Yet even this expanded definition has its shortcomings; as Center for Economic Policy and Research fellow Shawn Fremstad recently wrote, under this measure, 'two adults raising two children in 2019 needed only $28,881 to not be poor (assuming they rented and lived somewhere with average housing costs).' For context, the average cost of a full-time childcare program was $16,000 that year."

"Newport Beach CEO steps down from company after being charged with child prostitution: Newport Beach resident Ian Charles Schenkel, facing charges of engaging in underage prostitution, has stepped down as chief executive of Haliburton International Foods, according to the company. The statement released by the Ontario-based company does not state the reason for Schenkel's resignation. Dan Glick, a management and financial advisor to the company, was appointed as the new CEO. Schenkel, who founded Haliburton International Foods, is no longer listed on the company's website."

Sorkin has made a movie. Rennie Davis himself had things to say about it. "'I was hit and knocked to the ground': the true story of The Trial of the Chicago 7 One of the defendants portrayed in Aaron Sorkin's Oscar-tipped film talks about the 1968 protest and the dramatic trial that followed [...] 'Certainly none of us want to go to prison for many years, so it's not to say we weren't mindful of the likely outcome, but quite honestly this was a group of people, myself included, who really saw the opportunity to basically speak to the country about the Vietnam war. We had different styles and we came from different organisations but, while the movie characterises us as squabbling and fighting a fair amount, it really wasn't the case.' [...] Davis has mixed feelings about the finished product. 'I was the coordinator of the coalition that went to Chicago and I brought back American prisoners of war from Vietnam at a time when places where I was living were being bombed by US military. In the movie, I'm made out to be a complete nerd who's afraid of his own shadow.' He adds: 'Sorkin was seven years old when the trial was occurring and clearly had no understanding of the defendants or, maybe more importantly, the tens of millions of people that were just passionately supporting us.'" I can't tell much from the trailer, but Sascha Baron Cohen does seem reasonably convincing as Abbie, even seems to have the accent. Looks like a good choice for the part.

RIP: Quilt Lady, or "ql" as she signed herself at Atrios' blog, had the keys to Eschaton like I do, except that she posted every morning while I was sleeping through to the afternoon and not checking to see if a new post was needed. I've been lousy about doing that these last few years, but she was diligent. I met her once and felt kinship with her. I'm going to miss her. Atrios wrote "Morning Thread - In Memoriam".

RIP: Mac Davis, Who Wrote Hits For Elvis, and Had His Own #1 Pop Single, Dies, at 78. He had hits of his own with "I Believe in Music" and "Baby Don't Get Hooked On Me", as well as songs hr wrote for Elvis, including "In the Ghetto".

"No, the Nazis Were Not Socialists: The idea that the Nazis were socialists is transparently absurd. Unfortunately, it's also an idea that prominent figures on the Right like Sen. Rand Paul have taken up. So let's all say it together now: no, the Nazis were not socialists. They were, in fact, committed anti-socialists."

"Health Care: The Best and the Rest: Which Country Has the World's Best Health Care? [...] Truman proposed federal grants for hospital construction and medical research. He insisted, controversially, not only that the nation had too few doctors, but that the ones it did have were clustered in the wrong places. And he addressed the 'principal reason' that forced so many Americans to forgo vital medical care: 'They cannot afford to pay for it.' [...] The economist Milton Friedman once described the AMA as 'perhaps the strongest trade union in the United States.' It influenced medical school curriculums, limited the number of graduates, and policed the rules for certification and practice. For the AMA, Truman's proposal not only challenged the profession's autonomy, it also made doctors look as if they could not be trusted to place the country's needs above their own. As a result, the AMA ran a simultaneous campaign congratulating its members for making Americans the healthiest people in the world. The existing system worked, it claimed, because so many physicians followed the golden rule, charging patients on a sliding scale that turned almost no one away. If the patient was wealthy, the fee went up; others paid less, or nothing at all. What was better in a free society: the intrusive reach of the state or the big-hearted efforts of the medical community?"

"We Shouldn't Have to Work So Damn Much—An Interview With Jamie Mccallum: We're working longer hours than in decades. But we don't have to. We deserve a more democratic economy in which we have the free time to develop our talents, hang out with friends and family, and do whatever else we please. [...] However, if you dig into it, you find quite a lot of variation. What I found interesting was that low-wage workers have increased their time the most. We're all familiar with white-collar professionals being overworked, but I don't think that's the most interesting part of the story. So there's a trend toward overwork for everyone, but there is an unequal distribution of that rise in work time among different classes of people. Another dimension is increased unpredictability and volatility of schedules and hours, which is mostly the case for low-wage service-sector workers. In other words, their schedules became increasingly controlled by their managers and by technology. Unpredictable hours are volatile by design, not just happenstance. And they create an incredibly stressful and hectic work life. The last dimension is the rise in people simply not having enough hours, which is connected to the volatility. Because most employers require forty hours of availability to work, even if you only get twenty hours of work, it's hard to find a second job that you can also work out in a reasonable way. As a result, many people are suffering from involuntary unemployment."

Compare this article to the ones we saw about the "BernieBros": "Kamala Harris Has A Vibrant Online Fan Club. But It Also Has A Toxic Side: The KHive aims to amplify and support the Democratic vice presidential nominee, but some of its members have crossed the line from ardent fandom to overt harassment."

Peter Falk's Acceptance Speech for COLUMBO | Emmys Archive (1972), because I needed something to cheer me up.

"Graham Nash's 1960 meeting with the Everly Brothers set the path for his life in music."

"IF DONALD GOT FIRED - Randy Rainbow Parody (featuring Patti LuPone!)"

Heart with Jason Bonham "Stairway to Heaven" Led Zeppelin - Kennedy Center Honors HD — and some proud daddies in the audience.

What hijacked my world that night?

I see a lot of people talking about Trump's Supreme Court nominee's weird and anti-constitutional religious views, but she also seems bent on creating the kind of society that God always liked to "smite" in the Bible. "Barrett Crushed Gig Workers Weeks Before Likely SCOTUS Nomination: In August, the likely Trump nominee delivered a key ruling blocking many gig workers from suing in court when tech companies deny them overtime pay. That ruling was one of a number of cases in which Barrett helped corporate interests prevail over workers. Her highest-profile business-focused actions on the federal bench have limited the enforcement of age-discrimination laws, restricted federal agencies power to punish companies that mislead consumers and reduced consumers' rights against predatory debt collectors, according to a recent report from the Alliance for Justice." She would be the third member of the Supremes to have helped Bush steal the 2000 election, with Roberts and Kavenaugh.

And wait, there's more! Nathan Robinson read all her court decisions and they told him "Why Amy Coney Barrett Should Not Be On The Supreme Court

"If You Think Amy Coney Barrett Is Extreme, Meet Judy Shelton: Trump's nominee to the Federal Reserve has gotten a lot less publicity. But her desire to return the US to the gold standard and eliminate federal deposit insurance could destroy the economy. [...] But Shelton doesn't believe in the idea of a Federal Reserve system, or indeed any power of government to determine the value or supply of money. In her 1994 book Money Meltdown, Shelton argued that the United States should 'repeal all current federal legal tender laws,' (p. 301) which would return the US financial system to its crazy-quilt pre-Civil War status, when states, banks, and companies could all issue their own money. She advocates eliminating the Federal Reserve's open market operations and ending the Fed's ability to hold government debt—the very tools that Powell and previous Fed chairs have used to try to keep and get us out of recessions. All of these extremist views are in service of reinstating a version of the gold standard, in which the dollar is tied to a specific amount of gold (as was the case in the Bretton Woods international financial system, which ended in 1971) and gold coins would be widely circulated. [...] Shelton has also taken the scary position that the US government should not guarantee bank deposits, a confidence-boosting safeguard that dates back to the Great Depression; some version of deposit insurance exists in every major economy in the world. To Shelton, federal deposit insurance 'undermines the integrity of the banking industry in the United States by steering it in the direction of excessively risky loan portfolios.' As for your savings account, Shelton wants to disabuse you of 'the mistaken notion that funds deposited in interest-bearing accounts at banking institutions can be thought of as being safe.'(pp. 305-6) Or at least that's what Shelton wrote in her 1994 book. When questioned during a February Senate hearing, Shelton said 'I totally support federal deposit insurance. We've had it since 1933.' Little wonder that senators accused her of a 'confirmation conversion.'"

"Pelosi Can Save Obamacare With a One-Line Amendment: By repealing the individual mandate, which is now functionally inert, the House Speaker can invalidate a push to eliminate the Affordable Care Act."

"Khaled El Masri stands up to CIA on intimidation, supports Assange during extradition trial: El Masri declared, 'I record here my belief that without dedicated and brave exposure of the state secrets in question what happened to me would never have been acknowledged and understood.' He added threats and intimidation are 'not diminishing but expanding for all concerned.' 'I nevertheless believe that the exposure of what happened was necessary not just for myself but for law and justice worldwide. My story is not yet concluded.' As El Masri noted, he submitted testimony because 'WikiLeaks publications were relied on by the [European Court of Human Rights] in obtaining the redress' he received."

Workers' rights are on the ballot in California — and on the table everywhere. Fascinating interview with Marshall Steinbaum on The Michael Brooks Show.

Thomas Frank is giving interviews on his latest book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, and did a great free-wheeling interview with Sam Seder on The Majority Report, and another with Anton Jäger at Jacobin. I had fun listening to them.

"Gas Companies Are Abandoning Their Wells, Leaving Them to Leak Methane Forever: Just one orphaned site in California could have emitted more than 30 tons of methane. There are millions more like it

"A new report showing that US state-level voter databases were publicly available calls into question the narrative that Russian intelligence 'targeted' US state election-related websites in 2016. [...] In fact both un-redacted and redacted state voter files are obviously widely available on the dark web as well as elsewhere on the internet. Meduza, a Russian-language news site based in Riga, Latvia, published the Kommersant story along with an 'anonFiles' download portal for access to the Michigan voter database and a page from it showing that it is the officially redacted version. The DHS and the FBI both acknowledged in response to the Kommersant story that 'a lot of voter registration data is publicly available or easily purchased.'" I'd wondered about that myself, since I didn't have to sign in or offer any personal information to check my registration online.

"US Poverty Measure Fails to Meet Government Standards of Reliability, Accuracy, Timeliness, and Objectivity There are many reasons why the Census Bureau's statement is utterly unreliable and inaccurate, but here are the two most important ones. The poverty line used by the Census Bureau to produce this figure is 1) much lower than the amount of income most Americans say is needed to not be poor in today's America; and, 2) much lower than any reasonable expert estimate of the goods and services it takes to not be poor today." I believe I've remarked before on how ridiculously low the so-called "poverty line" is.

Craig Murray and others have been doing daily coverage of the extradition hearing of Julian Assange. Day 9: Things became not merely dramatic in the Assange courtroom today, but spiteful and nasty. There were two real issues, the evidence and the procedure. On the evidence, there were stark details of the dreadful regime Assange will face in US jails if extradited. On the procedure, we saw behaviour from the prosecution QC that went well beyond normal cross examination and was a real attempt to denigrate and even humiliate the witness. I hope to prove that to you by a straightforward exposition of what happened today in court, after which I shall add further comment."

"FinCEN Files: All you need to know about the documents leak: Leaked documents involving about $2tn of transactions have revealed how some of the world's biggest banks have allowed criminals to move dirty money around the world. They also show how Russian oligarchs have used banks to avoid sanctions that were supposed to stop them getting their money into the West. It's the latest in a string of leaks over the past five years that have exposed secret deals, money laundering and financial crime."

"Global banks defy U.S. crackdowns by serving oligarchs, criminals and terrorists: The FinCEN Files show trillions in tainted dollars flow freely through major banks, swamping a broken enforcement system."

"Strategic Aims Behind The War On Armenia" — I don't even want to write about this, but you might want to read it. It's all just too depressing.

"No Parks for the Poor: In the face of budget cuts, some land management agencies are ramping up user fees — and betraying the egalitarian promise of public lands. Livingston, Mont.—A while back I was loaf­ing around a camp­fire with a group of friends and strangers on the bank of one of this state's famous­ly beau­ti­ful rivers when the con­ver­sa­tion turned to the over­crowd­ing prob­lems on anoth­er of this state's famous­ly beau­ti­ful rivers. 'Is it too much to ask that we pay a small fee to use the pub­lic access sites on the riv­er?' offered a well-mean­ing and com­fort­ably wealthy retiree. 'I sure wouldn't mind.' Well, I do mind, and I think a lot of oth­er peo­ple do mind, too. Under­stand that it's not because I'm against con­ser­va­tion, or because I believe in human use of land above all else. In some cas­es I sup­port restrict­ing access to pub­lic land if it's cru­cial to pro­tect­ing wildlife habi­tat. What I'm against is con­ser­va­tion or facil­i­ty main­te­nance that depends on weed­ing out the poor."

"Bill Gates' Global Agenda and How We Can Resist His War on Life: Gates' 'funding' results in an erasure of democracy and biodiversity, of nature and culture. His 'philanthropy' is not just philanthrocapitalism. It is philanthroimperialism.

RIP: "Helen Reddy: Australian singer of feminist anthem 'I Am Woman' dies, at 78, "Reddy, who had Addison's disease and was diagnosed with dementia in 2015, spent the last years of her life in a celebrity care home in Los Angeles. She had a string of pop-rock hits in the 1970s, but is best known for the 1972 anthem 'I Am Woman' - which became prominent in the women's liberation movement."

RIP: "Stephen F. Cohen, Influential Historian of Russia, Dies at 81, of lung cancer. His wife, Katerina vanden Heuval, has a more personal tribute at The Nation.

RIP: Ruth Bader Ginsburg: US Supreme Court judge dies of cancer, aged 87." I know a lot of people loved her, and I certainly don't look forward to the GOP getting another one of their lunatics on Supreme Court, but she was a "moderate", which means she was really pretty conservative, and a lot of her votes did harm to America. So, no, I didn't cry when I heard the news. She was no Thurgood Marshall, no John Paul Stevens. Back in 2016, David Kinder wrote a review of Notorious RBG, "The Rise Of The Ruth Bader Ginsburg Cult: How a wizened, middle-of-the-road jurist became a T-shirt icon for millennial feminists," and made a convincing case that she wasn't all that. It's full of tidbits like this: "In Slate, Mark Joseph Stern contrasted Sotomayor's perceptiveness about police and prisons issues with Ginsburg's indifference: 'When it comes to understanding the systemic flaws and violent behavior of America's criminal justice system, there's no one quite like Justice Sonia Sotomayor... Sorry, Notorious R.B.G. groupies, but [Ruth Bader Ginsburg] has a bit of a law-and-order streak.' (This despite Sotomayor being an ex-prosecutor, while Ginsburg worked for the ACLU.)"

"Anosognosiogenesis @pookleblinky on Twitter: "Every heartwarming human interest story in america is like "he raised $20,000 to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine" and then never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists or why you'd need to pay to prevent it from being used."

"The radical mysticism of identitarian reductionism: A sect of liberalism seems to reject any influence of the material economy on human behavior. [...] It is hard to overstate how historically and ideologically bizarre — how breathtaking in its counterintuition and metaphysical ambition — this doctrine of identitarian reductionism actually is. This is not just the usual identitarian claim that there are causal forces in our politics that cannot, ultimately, be traced back to the material economy. This is a second declaration: that somehow, the material economy is not also playing a role in our politics. At all. The fear, misery, and bitterness of poverty; the anxiety over one's precarious standing in the so-called middle class; the insular luxury and jealous ambition of wealth; the concentration of wealth, the evaporation of jobs, and so on — none of this, evidently, plays any role whatsoever in the emergence of demographic tribalism, in interpersonal attitudes, in voting behavior, and so on. This is obviously not the socialist position, but it is not even an ordinary capitalist position. From Adam Smith to Rand Paul to Elizabeth Warren, liberals have always admitted a role for economic 'incentives' in shaping human behavior and political outcomes. 'It's the economy, stupid' was considered a central insight of Democratic politics for more than two decades. On the contrary, the sort of ontology one would have to construct to rationalize an absolute analytical bias against material causality seems to have little precedent outside of certain genres of religious mysticism. As noted, I think that identitarian reductionism is probably best understood as a historical consequence of Clinton 2016's campaign messaging: it is what happens when liberal pundits with massive corporate platforms popularize hardline, hyperbolic criticism of 'class reductionists' out of rhetorical convenience. This is not, in other words, some inevitable expression of liberal ideology — it's even weirder than that. And regardless, we're going to be living with it for a long time.

"Four Steps to Transform the Pharmaceutical Industry and Survive the Pandemic: Dealing with the Covid crisis will require taking the profit motive out of our health systems. Here's how."

At Black Agenda Report, "The Democrats' Supreme Failure [...] The Supreme Court is supposed to be the issue that ends all arguments. The fact that the Democrats mishandled this situation so badly is one of the reasons they have deified the late justice Ginsburg. They have to divert attention from the mess they created. The federal courts would not play such a large political role if the Democrats were serious about winning and keeping legislative majorities. When Barack Obama was president they lost more than 900 seats in state legislatures, the House of Representatives and the Senate. The loss of the Senate was particularly devastating. Ginsburg should have stepped down when Obama still had the Democratic Party control needed to nominate a replacement. Instead, the 80-year old who had already been diagnosed with cancer was supremely arrogant. In 2014 Ginsburg was dismissive of prudent calls for her to retire and said so publicly . 'So tell me who the president could have nominated this spring that you would rather see on the court than me?' Thanks to her hubris, Democrats are now caught in a mixture of panic and overly deferential mourning."

Scary interview (text and audio), "Fool Me Twice: How Democrats Risk Repeating The Mistakes Of The Financial Crisis In The Era Of Covid-19: Economist James Galbraith explains what the U.S. economy will need to get back on its feet.. [...] They believe that what they did in 2008, 2009, and 2010 worked; that they can pull the economy out through a short-term program of stimulus and then shift to retrenchment of one kind or another in the following years." And this is why it has been making me crazy for years to hear people insist that Obama heroically "saved" the economy when, in fact, he screwed the pooch on the financial crisis.

Katie Halper and Matt Taibbi did a terrific interview with Glenn Greenwald on Useful idiots where Glenn makes a lot of great points about the vapidity and unreliability of our discourse. One point worth emphasizing is that the same people who were outraged when the Sanders campaign posted a clip of Joe Rogan (who'd once had the temerity to wonder whether mtf transsexuals could fairly compete with female athletes) saying he was probably voting for Bernie were nevertheless happy to embrace Rick Snyder's endorsement, despite the fact that he is the man who poisoned the water in Flint, MI. Glenn also explains exactly what really happened with Reality Winner and why the version of the story most people have heard is nothing like the truth.

"The Prochoice Religious Community May Be the Future of Reproductive Rights, Access, and Justice: There is a vast prochoice religious community in the United States that could provide the moral, cultural, and political clout to reverse current antiabortion policy trends in the United States. Most, but not all, of this demographic are Christians and Jews. There are also deeply considered, theologically acceptable, prochoice positions and, therefore, prochoice people and institutions within all of major world religious traditions present in the United States, including Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese traditions.1 Taken together, they have vast resources, institutional capacity, historic and central roles in many towns and cities, and cadres of well-educated leaders at every level—from national denominational offices to local congregational leaders, current and retired. This cohort is often measured by reputable pollsters and may actually comprise the majority or near majority of the religious community. Nevertheless, it is not well identified or sought out by the organized prochoice community, the media, and elected officials. What's more, this wide and diverse constituency is insufficiently organized by the prochoice religious community itself. But it could be. This essay will show that this demographic, and the institutions and traditions that inform it, may be the best hope for restoring and sustaining abortion rights, access, and justice in the United States at a time when the Christian Right and its allies in state and federal government are undermining and seeking to eliminate them."

This interview with George Farah, author of No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates is infuriating. Also includes an interview with Steve Silberstein on the fight to get rid of the Electoral College.

From 2014, "How the Rich Conquered the Economy, in One Chart" — The bottom 90% used to take the lion's share of income growth during expansions, but after 1980, this reversed, with the 90% getting a smaller and smaller bite of the growth until we get to the Obama years, when the 90% actually lost ground during the "expansion".

2017 in The Atlantic, "The Lost History of an American Coup D'État: Republicans and Democrats in North Carolina are locked in a battle over which party inherits the shame of Jim Crow. By the time the fire started, Alexander Manly had vanished. That didn't stop the mob of 400 people who'd reached his newsroom from making good on their promise. The crowd, led by a former congressman, had given the editor-in-chief an ultimatum: Destroy your newspaper and leave town forever, or we will wreck it for you. They burned The Daily Record to the ground. It was the morning of November 10, 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the fire was the beginning of an assault that took place seven blocks east of the Cape Fear River, about 10 miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean. By sundown, Manly's newspaper had been torched, as many as 60 people had been murdered, and the local government that was elected two days prior had been overthrown and replaced by white supremacists." Suzanne Mettler revisited this story on Tuesday's The Majority Report with Sam Seder.

The Straw Hat Riot: "A fashion faux pas turned violent in NYC's Straw Hat Riot. A bizarre incident in 1922 when the fashion police were supplanted by fashion vigilantes, out for blood. Like wearing white after Labor Day, wearing a straw boater after September 15 was a faux pas in 1920s America, and it was common practice for teenagers to knock straw hats off people's heads and stomp on them after that date. When, in 1922, a bunch of teenagers decided to start a few days early, things escalated quickly."

Noticed the old link that was there until maybe a few months ago has disappeared, but found a different one for "Operation Ignore".

The Avengers of Oz

Twilight Zone, the Lost Episode, with Jack Benny and Rod Serling.

"Nihilistic Password Security Questions"

Ray Manzarek on creating "Riders on the Storm"

Steve Cropper tells the story of how "Green Onions" came to be. And "Green Onions", 1962.

The Pretenders 2020, "Back on the Chain Gang". Chrissy Hynde was born in 1951.

I'm thinking about the fireworks

Must-listen: I hate making a video the top news item, but Richard Wolff's discussion of what our leaders have planned for us is absolutely terrifying. Not only are we already in a downward cascade, but they're pulling out all the stops on how miserable your life can be made by the same creatures who are no longer dependent on us as consumers since they are now directly funded by the government. Ah, but don't worry, Nancy Pelosi made sure that you get...74¢.Meanwhile, the CPFB has just announced a new rule allowing your dead relatives' creditors to harass you 40 times a week, while our government pours billions into corporations to play in the Big Casino. And neither Democrats nor Republicans are willing to discuss a jobs program. "USA political and economic collapse".

"Despite DNC focus on winning 'Biden Republicans,' poll suggests beating Trump is about Dem turnout: 'So much for going all out to get Republicans and shunning progressives.' Progressives are raising alarm over new poll results from CBS News out Tuesday, which suggest the Democratic Party's courting of moderate so-called "Biden Republicans" while sidelining popular progressive proposals and voices has not so far resulted in a groundswell of support for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden from disaffected GOP voters. In a poll taken between August 20 and 22, after the Democratic National Convention wrapped up last week, CBS found that just 5% of self-identified Republicans said they plan to vote for Biden in the November election; 93% said they were planning to vote for President Donald Trump. The president also led by 10 percentage points among Independent voters, who make up a plurality of U.S. voters. Justice Democrats spokesperson Waleed Shahid tweeted that the poll showed an "interesting dynamic" following a national convention at which the party gave more speaking time to anti-Trump Republicans including former Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Secretary of State Colin Powell than they did to popular progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), as well as largely ignoring a number of key progressive policy proposals. [...] Biden's support within the GOP is now lower than the number of Republicans who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to the CBS poll, as well as those who voted for former President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012."

Remember when Obama promised single-payer advocates a "compromise" of a public option, but it turned out he was just playing 11-dimensional chess against us? Well, "Biden's flexibility on policy could mean fierce fights if he wins: WILMINGTON, Del. — When Joe Biden released economic recommendations two months ago, they included a few ideas that worried some powerful bankers: allowing banking at the post office, for example, and having the Federal Reserve guarantee all Americans a bank account. But in private calls with Wall Street leaders, the Biden campaign made it clear those proposals would not be central to Biden's agenda. 'They basically said, "Listen, this is just an exercise to keep the Warren people happy, and don't read too much into it,"' said one investment banker, referring to liberal supporters of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). The banker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks, said that message was conveyed on multiple calls."

"House Democrats, Working With Liz Cheney, Restrict Trump's Planned Withdrawal of Troops From Afghanistan and Germany: The bipartisan commitment to using Russia for endless war and imperialism remains vibrant. THE U.S. MILITARY HAS BEEN fighting in Afghanistan for almost nineteen years. House Democrats, working in tandem with key pro-war GOP lawmakers such as Rep. Liz Cheney, are ensuring that continues. Last night, the House Armed Services Committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of an amendment — jointly sponsored by Democratic Congressman Jason Crow of Colorado and Congresswoman Cheney of Wyoming — prohibiting the expenditure of monies to reduce the number of U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan below 8,000 without a series of conditions first being met. The imposed conditions are by no means trivial: for these troop reductions from Afghanistan to be allowed, the Defense Department must be able to certify, among other things, that leaving Afghanistan 'will not increase the risk for the expansion of existing or formation of new terrorist safe havens inside Afghanistan' and 'will not compromise or otherwise negatively affect the ongoing United States counter terrorism mission against the Islamic State, al Qaeda, and associated forces.'"

"KY Prosecutors Offer Breonna Taylor's Ex-Boyfriend Plea Deal to Name Taylor in Drug Case: In Louisville, Kentucky, prosecutors reportedly offered Breonna Taylor's ex-boyfriend a plea deal if he named Taylor as a member of an alleged 'organized crime syndicate' in return for leniency on drug charges. Jamarcus Glover turned down the plea deal. Prosecutors on Monday denied naming Breonna Taylor as a co-defendant in Glover's case and argued a document leaked on social media was just a draft as part of early negotiations. An attorney for Taylor's family who posted the photo on Facebook said it was a 'desperate' attempt by prosecutors to justify Taylor's killing. Protests have been ongoing to demand justice for Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, who was fatally shot by Louisville police in her own home in March. The officers involved in her killing have not been charged."

"Elon Musk Thinks His Treatment of Workers Is a 'Trade Secret': A wonky California legislative fight is a test of whether green jobs will be good jobs, too. Leave it to Elon Musk and his ilk to show that paying companies to create good, green jobs is easier said than done. Right now, his companies are opposing a California bill that will allow the public to access data on wages, benefits, and working conditions that they already provide to the state as a condition of public subsidy and procurement contracts. From the Green New Deal to Joe Biden's campaign platform, any measures proposing to pay corporations to create well-paid clean energy jobs would need public oversight to ensure follow-through. But as this tense, wonky fight in the Californian statehouse is showing, even the greenest parts of Corporate America may not be up for such transparency. Until now, companies with state and local contracts in California have claimed that wages, working conditions, and other hiring and employment information constitute proprietary 'trade secrets' exempt from state disclosure rules and the California Public Records Act, or CPRA. Senate Bill 749 aims to close that loophole, making the information companies already provide to state agencies as a condition of public subsidies and procurement contracts subject to public records requests. Opposition to SB 749 has been led by the California Manufacturers Technology Association, a trade lobby including Musk's Tesla, as well as the California Chamber of Commerce, SpaceX, and several defense contractors, including Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. In addition to complaints about making alleged trade secrets public, they've argued through public letters and calls to legislators that such rules could require companies to disclose 'potentially dangerous information related to the supply chains, staffing, and even the location of specific projects with national defense implications,' according to a floor alert about SB 749 sent to legislators by groups opposed to the bill. But the state's public records rules already include several protections against disclosing information with national security implications, which aren't under the purview of the trade secrets loopholes contested by SB 749."

"Appeals court temporarily halts protections for journalists, legal observers in Portland: A three-judge panel on Thursday temporarily halted protections for journalists and legal observers covering the unrest In Portland, Oregon. Last week, federal Judge Michael Simon ruled that journalists and legal observers were exempt from federal officers' physical force, arrest or other treatment if the officers "reasonably know" that a person is a journalist or legal observer. But in a 2-1 decision, the judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, agreed with the government that Judge Simon's initial ruling was too broad. 'Given the order's breadth and lack of clarity, particularly in its non-exclusive indicia of who qualifies as 'Journalists' and 'Legal Observers,' appellants have also demonstrated that, in the absence of a stay, the order will cause irreparable harm to law enforcement efforts and personnel," two of the three judges wrote. "This means that journalists could be subjected to the same physical force as that of the individuals participating.'"

"The Pentagon has ordered Stars and Stripes to shut down for no good reason: Even for those of us who are all too wearily familiar with President Donald Trump's disdain for journalists, his administration's latest attack on the free press is a bit of a jaw-dropper. In a heretofore unpublicized recent memo, the Pentagon delivered an order to shutter Stars and Stripes, a newspaper that has been a lifeline and a voice for American troops since the Civil War. The memo orders the publisher of the news organization (which now publishes online as well as in print) to present a plan that 'dissolves the Stars and Stripes' by Sept. 15 including "specific timeline for vacating government owned/leased space worldwide.' 'The last newspaper publication (in all forms) will be September 30, 2020,' writes Col. Paul Haverstick Jr., the memo's author."

"How millions from Uber and Lyft are funding the harassment of a critic: Veena Dubal has spent much of her professional career examining and writing about the rise of the gig economy and the loss of employment rights by workers in that sector. An associate professor at UC Hastings law school, Dubal has been an outspoken supporter of AB5, the California law designed to rein in those employment abuses, including those by the ride-hailing services Uber and Lyft. She's also a critic of Proposition 22, the initiative funded chiefly by Uber and Lyft aimed at overturning AB5. As a result of her criticism of Uber, Lyft and the gig economy business model, Dubal has become the target of harassment on Twitter, some of it obscene and some of it overtly encouraged by the Yes on Proposition 22 campaign, which is heavily funded by Uber and Lyft. Her home address has been published online, which prompted her local police department to start regular patrols around her home. She has been falsely accused of having written AB5 and having had a 'hand' in the 2018 California Supreme Court decision that led to AB5."

What if Trump could do something to give red meat to his base and piss off the libs - and it would be a good thing? "Trump orders crackdown on federal antiracism training, calling it 'anti-American': Memo directs officials to identify spending related to training on "critical race theory' and "white privilege'" — It would be a blessing to get rid of this stuff, which does nothing but treat minorities as "others" who have to be constantly placated while distracting from the larger issues that make the concrete lives of minorities (and many whites!) miserable.

"What is happening to Portland?: Summer, which was once characterized by waterfront festivals, is now just the time of the year when right-wing provocateurs come here looking for trouble. These demonstrations are planned in advance, many times calling for people to attend from across the nation, and often it is Patriot Prayer who organizes them. Patriot Prayer is a far-right group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as containing 'violent extremists' and, like many other far-right groups that stage these events, most of their members do not live in Portland. Instead, the monthly (and sometimes weekly) far right demonstrations held here are typically full of out-of-town individuals, many of whom are armed with weapons. And once assembled, they shout insults and slurs at nearby locals. And that's on a good day. Many times these events also devolve into violence. If the goal was to recruit and persuade the people of Portland, it is a poor strategy. But that does not appear to be their purpose. Rather, the goal appears to be provocation and intimidation."

"Under Trump the NLRB Has Gone Completely Rogue: An agency founded to defend workers' rights is dismantling them just when workers need them most. [...] The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is a New Deal agency established by Congress to implement and enforce the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the law giving most private-sector workers the right to join together and take action, whether through forming a formal union or not, to improve their pay, benefits, and working conditions. These rights are more relevant now than ever, as demonstrated by the recent wave of strikes and job actions by health care workers and workers at Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and other companies. Workers have taken to the streets, started petition drives, and made bargaining demands in an effort to get their employers to provide safety equipment and institute other measures to protect them from workplace exposure to the Covid-19. Even before the Covid-19 crisis, worker interest in organizing unions was on the rise, with the percentage of nonunion workers saying they would vote for a union if given the chance up 50 percent from a similar poll 25 years ago. The board is currently composed of three white male NLRB members and another white male general counsel (prosecutor)'all Republicans, three with careers representing corporations and one as a Republican Capitol Hill staffer. Both Democratic seats are currently vacant. There is nobody currently on the NLRB with experience representing workers or unions. Through these appointees, an agency that is supposed to protect workers' right to organize has taken the law in exactly the opposite direction. In decision after decision, the NLRB has stripped workers of their protections under the law, restricted their ability to organize at their workplace, slowed down the union election process to give employers more time to campaign against the union, repealed rules holding employers accountable for their actions, and undermined workers' bargaining rights.

"Possible evidence found for life on Venus: The best evidence for life beyond Earth has been found in the most surprising of places — the atmosphere of Venus. A team led by Jane Greaves, who is a professor at Cardiff University, has detected the presence of phosphine gas in Venus' clouds. The intriguing thing about phosphine, which is a molecule formed of three hydrogen atoms and one phosphorous atom, is that on Earth its only natural source is from some anaerobic (i.e., non-oxygen breathing) microbial lifeforms. No known geological mechanism or non-biological chemical reaction produces it on our planet, although it is produced deep inside gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn where hydrogen is plentiful and the temperature and pressure extremely high."

RIP: "David Graeber, anthropologist and author of Bullshit Jobs, dies aged 59: David Graeber, anthropologist and anarchist author of bestselling books on bureaucracy and economics including Bullshit Jobs: A Theory and Debt: The First 5,000 Years, has died aged 59. On Thursday Graeber's wife, the artist and writer Nika Dubrovsky, announced on Twitter that Graeber had died in hospital in Venice the previous day. In a statement, Graeber's publisher, Penguin Random House, said that the cause of death was not yet known. Renowned for his biting and incisive writing about bureaucracy, politics and capitalism, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the time of his death. The historian Rutger Bregman called Graeber 'one of the greatest thinkers of our time and a phenomenal writer', while the Guardian columnist Owen Jones called him 'an intellectual giant, full of humanity, someone whose work inspired and encouraged and educated so many'. " This is a terrible shock, he had sounded healthy and vital in recent interviews and to have him gone at a mere 59 years of age is really distressing. He was a hero for some of us.

RIP: "Diana Rigg, Avengers and Game of Thrones star, dies aged 82: Actor who played Emma Peel in hit spy series and James Bond's only wife was diagnosed with cancer in March." We loved Mrs. Peel and she was wonderful as Lady Tyrell. One great, great Dame.

RIP: Shere Hite, 77, "'She began the real sexual revolution for women': The pioneering feminist Shere Hite, known for her research on female sexuality, has died at the age of 77. She was best known for The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, which has sold more than 50m copies since publication in 1976." She was important, although it didn't exactly answer my prayers to now have guys obsessing on muff-diving in an effort to give me an orgasm. I hate it when guys think they know how to "pleasure a woman", as if we were all identical. Reality is that most guys may like sloppy kisses but some guys don't, and most women don't like sloppy kisses although some women do, and sex is like that all over the place and you can't read a book and know what that particular person is going to like. But bless Shere Hite for telling the world that reproductive sex isn't necessarily the optimal road to female orgasm.

RIP: "Joan Feynman, Who Shined Light on the Aurora Borealis, Dies at 93: Joan Feynman grew up in the shadow of her older brother, the brilliant scientist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. When she expressed interest in following in his footsteps, her mother crushed the impulse. 'My mother warned me, "Women's brains can't do science,"' Ms. Feynman recalled in a 2018 speech at the California Institute of Technology. Despite those discouraging words, Ms. Feynman went on to become a world-famous astrophysicist. She predicted sunspot cycles and figured out how many high-energy particles were likely to hit a spacecraft over its lifetime, allowing the space industry to design satellites and capsules with greater longevity. Her crowning achievement was understanding solar activity and its influence on Earth, including auroras, those dazzling, psychedelic displays of colors — known as the aurora borealis in the Northern Hemisphere and the aurora australis in the Southern — that inflame the night skies."

"People worry that 'moderate' Democrats like Joe Biden are the same as Republicans. Our study suggests they may be right [...] When it comes to addressing climate change, Eric Levitz of New York Magazine argued that 'a major [obstacle] is the tendency of moderate Democrats to mistake their own myopic complacency for heroic prudence'. Political researcher David Adler found that across Europe and North America, centrists are the least supportive of democracy, the least committed to its institutions, and the most supportive of authoritarianism. Furthermore, Adler found that centrists are the least supportive of free and fair elections as well as civil rights — in the United States, only 25 percent of centrists agree that civil rights are an essential feature of democracy. [...] This IDEALS finding is on par with a recent Gallup study encompassing over 29,000 interviews with American adults, which revealed that moderates and conservatives remain closely aligned in their ideological preferences. This raises important questions heading into the election: Is a moderate male candidate a bait-and-switch for Democratic voters? Are they actually casting their votes for a conservative?"

Branko Marcetic on the RNC, "Last Night's GOP Insanity Proves How Much the Two Parties Need Each Other: The lunacy on display at last night's Republican National Convention is what keeps frightened liberal voters satisfied with the meager crumbs of progress offered by the Democrats — and the meagerness of those crumbs is what keeps working-class whites inside an increasingly lunatic GOP."

"The carbon footprint sham: A 'successful, deceptive' PR campaign" — You're not the big polluter, but the big polluters sure want you to think so.

"Michael Hudson: How an 'Act of God' Pandemic Is Destroying the West: The U.S. Is Saving the Financial Sector, Not the Economy: Yves here. Michael Hudson explains how the American fixation on protecting creditors is making our bad response to the coronacrisis even worse. And unlike the 2008 crisis, this time the damage to the real economy is overwhelming, meaning the logic of putting financial firms at the head of the line is even weaker than back then. Before juxtaposing the U.S. and alternative responses to the coronavirus's economic effects, I would like to step back in time to show how the pandemic has revealed a deep underlying problem. We are seeing the consequences of Western societies painting themselves into a debt corner by their creditor-oriented philosophy of law. Neoliberal anti-government (or more accurately, anti-democratic) ideology has centralized social planning and state power in 'the market,' meaning specifically the financial market on Wall Street and in other financial centers."

"Democrats Have Failed Urban Black Americans: The Republican critique of misrule in American cities has some merit, and it's not clear that Joe Biden's party is prepared to meet the need: On the first night of the Republican National Convention on Monday, viewers were treated to a taped speech by Kimberly Klacik, a young, Black candidate for Maryland's 7th House district, which includes a large share of Baltimore. She won't be among the convention's best-remembered appearances, but she did manage to capsulize much of Trump's message for Black urban voters in just two short minutes. 'Let me remind you that Democrats have controlled this part of Baltimore City for over 50 years,' she said. 'And they have run this beautiful place right into the ground. Abandoned buildings, liquor stores on every corner, drug addicts, guns on the street—that's now the norm in many neighborhoods. You'd think Maryland taxpayers would be getting a whole lot since our taxes are out of control. Instead, we're paying for decades of incompetence and corruption. Sadly, this same cycle of decay exists in many of America's Democrat-run cities.' [...] It goes without saying that nothing in Klacik's 300-word platform would solve the deep problems facing Baltimore or any city. Tax incentives that flow largely to well-off neighborhoods and school choice policies aren't going to undo decades of socioeconomic and structural decay in poor communities. We know this because Democrats have tried them; the failures Klacik points to have been efforts to do exactly as she recommends now. We know too that the dismantling of the federal welfare state and mass incarceration failed to revive poor communities and that the Republican Party remains a central obstacle to federal urban investment. The question is what Democrats will attempt now to turn the page."

"The New Face of Union-Busting: Anti-labor strategies with a liberal twist [...] Over the years, the anti-union industrial complex has evolved into a lucrative field unto itself; it's not all brash targeted firings and stuffy, captive audience meetings anymore. Some solutions are quieter, sneakier, and more suited to the image that outwardly progressive or even 'social justice'-oriented organizations seek to convey. Whether it's hiring a very specific kind of law firm, chiseling away at a new union's bargaining unit to lessen its impact, or forcing workers to jump through the hoop of holding a secret ballot election instead of just voluntarily recognizing their union, these more genteel tactics can be just as effective as those wielded by old-fashioned strikebreakers, even if they're no longer quite as violent."

"Larry Flynt: My Final Farewell to the Falwells: When I heard that Jerry Falwell Jr. had resigned the presidency of Liberty University in disgrace, it struck me as the belated ending to a long personal saga with the Falwell clan— and an essential footnote to the role of religion and free speech in America. For those unfamiliar with ancient history, it began in the 1970s, soon after I started publishing Hustler."

This is a few years old from Steve Brust, but it's a pretty sharp retort to the claim that Obama was helpless because of the Republicans. "President Obama's Legacy in his Own Words Except Not."

"Mick Jagger demanded penis apology from Keith Richards as 'prerequisite' to Rolling Stones reunion." It's not really a very interesting story but it was just amusing to have that headline show up on my screen.

"One American Wrote Most of Scots Wikipedia. And They Got It All Wrong. [...] A wiki with tens of thousands of entries in what's supposed to be the Scots language — and they were nearly all written by one, very prolific and very American person. A person — who does not speak Scots. [...] 'This is going to sound incredibly hyperbolic and hysterical but I think this person has possibly done more damage to the Scots language than anyone else in history.'"

Terry Carr's last public appearance at ConFederation, the 1986 Worldcon, in Atlanta.

"The Glorias | Official Teaser

The Pretenders, "Don't Get Me Wrong" (official music video)