Third Estate Sunday Review

The Third Estate Sunday Review focuses on politics and culture. We're an online magazine. We don't play nice and we don't kiss butt. In the words of Tuesday Weld: "I do not ever want to be a huge star. Do you think I want a success? I refused "Bonnie and Clyde" because I was nursing at the time but also because deep down I knew that it was going to be a huge success. The same was true of "Bob and Carol and Fred and Sue" or whatever it was called. It reeked of success."

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Truest statement of the week

Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke. And by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people.

-- Jane Fonda accepting the SAG Lifetime Achievement Award.

A note to our readers

Hey --

Monday.

Let's thank all who participated this edition which includes Dallas and the following:

The Third Estate Sunday Review's Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess and Ava,
Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude,
Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man,
C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review,
Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills),
Mike of Mikey Likes It!,
Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz),
Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix,
Ruth of Ruth's Report,
Wally of The Daily Jot,
Trina of Trina's K itchen,

Marcia of SICKOFITRDLZ,
Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends,
Isaiah of The World Today Just Nuts,
and Ann of Ann's Mega Dub.

And what did we come up with?

Peace.

-- Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava and C.I.

Whose presidency is it anyway?

Good question.

Alien Musk and Donald Chump -- not a brain between the two. Headed for a show down and judging by their past relationships with other men, the break up will not be pretty.

Illustrations are Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "White House Service: Donald Tries To Please His Man" and "The Tongue Bather In Chief"

Media: Musk a purveyor preying on children

Some things seem obvious to us. For example, ZERO DAY -- the new Robert De Niro mini-series on NETFLIX. Like Meryl Streep, we've never really been impressed with De Niro's acting (creepy and odd like in too many films including STANLEY & IRIS and FALLING IN LOVE). By contrast, we love the work of Al Pacino and find him exciting and experimental even in bad project. AMAZON's HUNTERS lasted two seasons and we don't think it should have lasted even one episode -- it certainly wasn't worthy of Al. So when we heard The Water Cooler Set was hissing and sputtering about ZERO DAY, we couldn't wait to watch and to call out De Niro.

The mistake we made was in watching because there went all our plans of going to town on Robert. ZERO DAY is a tense thriller and melodrama. We hate binge watching but we got pulled in on that first episode and watched it all the way through. Not only was it worthy of praise but so was De Niro, some of the finest acting he's done in years. And as producer, he also deserves some of the credit for the outstanding performances of Angela Bassett, Mozhan Navabi, Joan Allen and Clark Gregg who all demonstrate shadings and levels that you just don't see from a TV cast that often.

Some things seem obvious to us like the fact that ZERO DAY is quality television that captures the viewer.

Some things seem obvious to us like the GOP today will turn their back on any supposed core belief, they will embrace what they have claimed to hate and that's most obvious when it comes to Convicted Felon Donald Chump's co-president.

That, of course, is South African born Alien Musk. The media likes to present the racist as the person behind Telsa (sales are tanking and a self-driving model crashed into a light post) or the person behind the disaster that is SPACEX (debris crashing in Poland, debris falling on populated islands in the North Atlantic Ocean). Alien's considered a successful businessman. That's in part due to the fact that (a) journalists write bad books that avoid the topic of his government welfate that the US has pumped into his companies and (b) because people don't tell the truth.

Let's deal with the government welfare first. IO Dodds (INDEPENDENT) explains:

Elon Musk is on a crusade against government spending. Unless, apparently, it's going to him.
"If action is not taken to curb the deficit, America is in deep trouble. No different than a person who gets into too much debt," said the DOGE boss on his social network X in December.
[. . .]
Yet according to federal data analyzed by The Independent, Musk's own companies have been promised or awarded nearly $21 billion by the U.S. government since 2008.
The cash was still flowing as of Feb 17, with another $76.7 million promised since Donald Trump's inauguration.
So how much of money is the American taxpayer forking over to each of Musk's companies, and what is it all for?

$21 billion in US tax payer dollars. We think most people in America would be billionaires . . . if the US government gave them $21 billion. $200 million pounds from the UK. $1.4 billion from the Chinese government. The list goes on, but we'll stop there. Musk is the original and definitive Welfare Queen.

And yet he's been made, by Chump, someone in charge of deciding who remains a federal worker and who doesn't. He has no skill in that. And that's become increasingly clear.

RAW STORY notes:

In just a few short weeks, the Trump administration has brought drastic changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and public health. Beginning with the removal of websites and key public health datasets in January 2025, the Trump administration has taken actions to dismantle established public health infrastructure as part of its second-term agenda.

In addition, the administration has begun a widespread purge of the federal public health workforce. As of Feb. 19, around 5,200 employees at the CDC and the National Institutes of Health had been let go. About 10% of the CDC’s staff have been removed, with plans for additional firings.

And it's never just one mistake, mind you. Week after week, day after day, Alien Musk keeps screwing up. Christine Peterson (MOTHER JONES) notes:

A President’s Day weekend swept by fear and grief from the sudden termination of thousands of federal employees in the US Forest Service and Department of Interior left chaos and uncertainty after the latest assault on the federal workforce by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

For people on the ground in mountain communities, small towns and rural areas, the cuts were nothing short of devastating. They came with no explanation, warning or discernment, and the impact on public land and wildlife, observers say, will be felt for years.

“It’s pretty hard to fathom,” said Claire Thompson, 35, a trail leader who was fired Friday afternoon after eight years with the US Forest Service. “It feels like they’re punishing the people who least deserve it. We have chosen to stay in careers working for so little money. We are literally the boots on the ground, physically working all day.”

Jobs cut included park rangers and interpreters, National Environmental Policy Act coordinators, endangered species biologists, trail crews, maintenance staff, and wastewater treatment operators.

This is one of many 'planned' actions by Alien that had to be fixed afterwards. Why? You can't have summers in the national park for Americans if you don't have the workers. He didn't think of that because he's not that smart. ATLANTA BLACK STAR NEWS observes:

If anyone should’ve felt safe in their government jobs, you’d assume it would be the 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, charged with oversight of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Never assume.

In what the White House is now calling a mistake, a large swath of NNSA employees were fired last Thursday before the Trump administration realized they had cleared out the wrong agency. By Friday, they were scrambling to rehire these essential workers. All but 28 employees had their dismissals rescinded, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Exactly. And after Alien Musk 'acted,' it was yet again realized that these workers needed to be back on the job. But, oops, they didn't get contact info for the people they fired.

Isn't that something Chump and his flight attendant Alien Musk should have figured out and known before the plane left the runway? Certainly before the two headed off the toilet to join The Mile High Club. Forget partisanship, that -- and other examples -- say to the American people, he's just destroying things -- our things, the possessions of the American people. Musk doesn't know what he's doing.

Musk and Chump don't know what they're doing and they keep lying. ABC NEWS reports:

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, in their hunt for "fraud, waste and abuse" in the federal government, are falsely implying millions of dead Americans are receiving Social Security benefits, experts told ABC News.

It started in the Oval Office last week when Musk -- facing reporters for the first time since the Department of Government Efficiency began its aggressive overhaul of the federal government -- said he found "crazy things" in the Social Security system, including, he said, people who are "150 years old."

[. . .]

Social Security policy experts and economists told ABC News that they are getting it wrong, contending Musk is misreading the agency's records system.

The Social Security Administration (SSA) has multiple databases, including one that gets sent to the Treasury Department each month outlining who is receiving payments.

According to agency statistics, of the 67 million people who receive Social Security benefits, only 0.1% are over the age of 100.

"So, when they're throwing around numbers like tens of millions of dead people are getting Social Security, well there's only 67 million total. What are they talking about? Half the people are actually dead? The numbers are so ridiculous. It's not true," said Kathleen Romig, the director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

SSA does make some improper payments, but they are not widespread (roughly 1%) and most of the mistakes made are overpayments to living beneficiaries, according to a July 2024 inspector's general report. That report found from 2015 through 2022, the SSA made $71.8 billion in improper payments. The agency issues $1 trillion in benefits every year.

How many lies do they get to tell and who the hell still believes Alien Musk knows how to provided any form of oversight?

Day after day, we find Musk 'overseeing' an agency he has no knowledge of. He doesn't know what he's doing and he doesn't care. This isn't his country, after all. That's why he's a citizen of two other countries -- Canada and his birthplace South Africa.

It's creating chaos and creating huge numbers of people who will be added to the unemployment rolls. Yet it continues, just like their lying continues. Edith Olmsted (THE NEW REPUBLIC) explains:

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency may be trying to inflate the numbers of its spending cuts.

DOGE published an itemized list of canceled government contracts Monday accounting for an alleged $16 billion in spending. Almost half of those savings were attributed to a hefty $8 billion contract for D&G Support Services to provide “program and technical support services” to the Office of Diversity and Civil Rights at the the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

There was just one problem: The DOGE website included a screenshot of the award, which showed that it was only worth $8 million, not $8 billion, as was the amount listed directly below the image.

Chump and Musk keep lying. And so do others. Greg Abbott can't stop praising Musk. Here's a typical Tweet -- and again, we don't provide links to Twitter:

Greg Abbott

@GregAbbott_TX

Elon Musk, making Texas proud.

Is he making Texas proud? Abbott's the fool and prude in the governor's office in the state of Texas.

If you don't know, he's having a war on porn. Possibly due to his inability to get erections -- that's what we're told, paralyzed from the waist down, he's always attacking porn. Is there another governor who, in the last four years, who has issued more press releases on porn than Greg Abbott? He's issued over eighty in the last four years.

Doesn't he seem a little obsessed?

As a general rule, we don't care about porn.

But Greggy does and so do other Republicans and they preach family values and they pretend to call out what they label as sin.

So we're confused.

I'm a real traditional man

My folks got a real rich legacy

They passed on the birthright

So it ain't about you and me

You've been saying you want it

And I believe you do

Just don't to running

At the moment of truth

You've got a nice little chocolate a**

And I got a ten inch White c**k

Then I bend you over

It ain't over till I stop

I know you bow to White men

Just like a n**ger should

I don't know if you're ready for all this White wood

I love taming n**ger boys

Ain't nothing like it

To be clear, those are some of the lyrics to a song -- a song that plays on a video on Twitter, a video of a White man raping a Black man. It's posted by Intimately Colonized whose handle is @propertyofyts. There are also videos at that account where White women abuse Black women.

Is that why it's okay, Greg? Because it's racist porn? Does that make it okay for you?

We really wonder what a hacker might find if they got into Greg Abbott's personal computer.. We fear it would be even more disgusting then the above.

"Race play." That's what those into the racist fetish call it.

There is no real protection for children on Twitter.

As FAMIGUARD notes this month:

Twitter's platform includes a secure search filtering option for all accounts. This will conceal sensitive information (including sexual content, graphic violence, and so forth). However, your children will be able to switch off this function at any time without your permission.

That's not good enough for Greg Abbott when it comes to, for example, PORNHUB. But somehow he's fine with it when it comes to Twitter.

But Greg's war on porn was supposed to be all about protecting children. He's been exposed as a hypocrite.

Is there a reason that today's Republican Party feels the need to hug and glorify a porn merchant?

That's all Alien Musk is.

It's obvious to us. Is it not obvious to others because they're being willfully blind or is it not obvious because the media has spent far too much time glossing over Musk's actions and far too little time noting his role as a purveyor of porn?

Books (Jess, Ava and C.I.)

1summerread

As we did in 2021 and 2023 and 2024, we're attempting to again increase book coverage in the community. This go round, we're talking with Jess about his " ." Joan Rivers was a stand up comic, an actress, a TV host, a screenwriter and an author. So, Jess, you recommend the book.

Jess: Absolutely. It's a very funny book and that's what we ask of a humor book. Someone might try explaining that to Paul Reiser.

In your review, you say it's more scatter shot like Joan's DIARY OF A MAD DIVA.

Jess: Yes. It's kind of moving chronologically but it doesn't have the organization that I HATE EVERYONE . . . STARTING WITH ME has. That's not an insult. The scattershot manner works for the book.

You like humor books, how would you compare this to other humor books?

Jess: Good question. I think I'd compare it to EDITH ANN: MY LIFE, SO FAR. Edith Ann is the character Lily Tomlin created and brought to audiences via LAUGH-IN. Jane Wagner is Lily's spouse and longtime collaborator. For EDITH ANN: MY LIFE, SO FAR, Jane Wagner zoomed in on a series of episodes in Edith Ann's life. And that book also had illustrations. I'd say that it's a similar approach.

You wanted to give us an example of a typical passage in the book.

Jess: Right. Reading this part in:

The last time I visited Heidi she'd already had quite a few husbands, a couple of them her own, and had been involved in more undercover operations than the CIA.

It had been a long time, but the moment she opened the door I knew it was her. Despite that Frederick's of Hollywood exterior, I could still see the old trash for cash girl, the tramp I'd grown up with, the woman whose body language would never consist of more than four0letter words.

She as the only person I knew whose idea of a formal evening as putting sheets on the bbed.

She was thrilled with the No Pest-strips I'd brought. She thought there were just enough to make a skirt.

The place she was living as above an army recruiting center near Larchmont, New York. The decor of the apartment could only be described as Tart Deo. I mean, we're talking Slut City. There were more electric appliancesin the bedroom then in the kitchen! On an average night she could cause a brownout as far north as Buffalo.

She was living there with her son, who had evidently been named after his father. The kid's name was Trick.

Jess (Con't): If you found that funny, I did, this is a book you'll enjoy reading.

------------------------------

Previous book discussions:

"Books (Stan, Ava and C.I.)"

"Books (Trina, Ava and C.I.)"

"Books (Rebecca, Marcia, Ava and C.I.)"

THE LIFE AND HARD TIMES OF HEIDI ABROMOWITZ (Jess)

Joan Rivers passed away in September of 2014. The comedian was 81 years old and at a high point in her career. She hosted a program on E at the time, she had multiple YOUTUBE programs and she had two bestselling books: 2012's I HATE EVERYONE . . . STARTING WITH ME and 2014's DIARY OF A MAD DIVA. They were both humor books and very funny ones at that. While I knew she'd written other best selling books in her career, I was unaware she'd completed two other humor books in the decades prior.

1984's THE LIFE AND HARD TIMES OF HEIDI ABROMOWITZ is a humor book revolving around the life story of Heidi -- a childhood friend of Joan's who was known for being a tramp.

Childhood friend? That's what she writes. I have no idea if Heidi existed -- or if she was a composite of several women Joan knew -- or if she was Joan's alter ego.

However, she existed onstage. Joan was forever telling jokes about Heidi in her stand up. Heidi also pops up in the best TV movie of all time (my opinion), 1973's THE GIRL MOST LIKELY TO . . . which stars Stockard Channing and Ed Asner with Susanne Zenor playing Heidi . . . Murphy. It's the same mentally stunted Heidi.

It's a funny book, pretending to tell Heidi's story. It even includes a PLAYBOY interview with Heidi. There are illustrations. You can read it for Heidi's tale or you can substitute Nicole Shanahan everytime you see Heidi's name and it's just as funny.

More loosely structured than I HATE EVERYONE . . . STARTING WITH ME, THE LIFE AND HARD TIMES OF HEIDI ABROMOWITZ is more scatter shot, similar to DIARY OF A MAD DIVA.