Sunday, November 13, 2016

Truest statement of the week

Donald Trump didn’t win because of some mysterious upsurge of racism and nativism. He won because Hillary Clinton’s campaign was even less inspiring and less competent than his own, and worked hard to snatch its own defeat from the jaws of victory. America might not deserve President Donald Trump. But Hillary Clinton didn’t deserve to win,


-- Bruce Dixon, "America Might Not Deserve Trump, But Dems and Hillary Deserved To Lose" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).













Truest statement of the week II

On the foreign policy side, the Clintons pioneered Washington’s “humanitarian” military intervention doctrine, later refined by Barack Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bill Clinton set in motion the worst genocide since World War Two, a holocaust that has killed at least six million people under three US. administrations, and still counting. Humanitarian intervention, or Responsibility to Protect (R2P), became Obama’s favored instrument of aggression, a more domestically palatable alternative to George Bush’s massive boots-on-the-ground fiasco in Iraq. Islamic jihadists were enlisted en mass as U.S. imperialism’s hellish foreign legion in the Muslim world. Together, “New” Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton turned Syria and Libya into maelstroms of slaughter and moved towards nuclear war with Russia.


-- Glen Ford, "The Democratic Debacle - The Day After" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).







A note to our readers



Hey --




Sunday.


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

What did we come up with:



Another one for Bruce Dixon.
Another one for Glen Ford.
She really, really did.  And this is a topic we'll return to if her pimps and liars keep spinning.
Ava and C.I. take on TIMELESS.
Debra Messing is an idiot.  She really is.  A few people should be glad we focused on her.  We'll focus on another next week.
Ava and C.I. explore the shallow pool of celebrity Tweets (and thought).
Be proud.
Talking music.

Some of the music mentioned.
Repost of Ava and C.I. from the morning after the election.
Repost of UK SOCIALIST WORKER.






Peace,






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







Editorial: War Hawk Hillary deserved to lose

Oh, how stupid they were.

Because they thought Hillary Clinton would win last Tuesday?

No, because they thought she deserved to win.



  1. Today America rejects bigotry, misogyny and hate. Today America embraces inclusiveness, decency and love. Today America makes history. HRC!!



If America was going to reject bigotry, they wouldn't go with the woman who declared war on Muslims.

That would be Hillary Clinton.

Whether you're Iraqi, Palestinian, Syrian or Libyan, she has made your life a living hell.

Rejecting bigotry?

Donald Trump, we're told, is awful because he plans to deport immigrants.

But that's not what he's planning.

He's planning to deport immigrants who legally should not be in this country and who have broken laws.


Do you not like that?

Then you never should have supported Hillary.

How is what he proposed any different from what Hillary has long advocated?  It's not:

A vow to give the boot to criminal aliens has become an almost daily part of the New York senator's presidential campaign spiel on overhauling the immigration system.
"Anybody who committed a crime in this country or in the country they came from has to be deported immediately, with no legal process. They are immediately gone," Mrs. Clinton told a town hall meeting in Anderson, S.C., Thursday. On Wednesday, she told a crowd in North Bergen, N.J., that such criminals "absolutely" need to be deported. A day earlier, she told a rally in Salinas, Calif., that aliens with criminal records "should be deported, no questions asked."

What we've seen over and over in the last years is that what a Republican does, we on the left are aghast at but we will torture ourselves into pretzels to try to justify it when a Democrat does it.

Hillary never should have been nominated.

She was a lousy candidate.

There was the belief that she could put Iraq behind her.

But Iraq was problematic to her in 2016 than in 2008.

In 2008, there was relief that she'd finally called her vote for the Iraq War a "mistake."

From 2009 to 2012, she had the chance to make up for that as Secretary of State but she did nothing to improve the lives of the Iraqi people.

Worse, she began to expand on her "mistake" and it always involved that she would have put more troops on the ground than Bully Boy Bush.

Her mistake, she would insist in this period and beyond, was to trust him.

But he, she would insist, didn't listen to the generals.

So her "mistake" was no admission of wrong doing on her part.

The entire country knows the Iraq War was based on lies.

But that wasn't an issue for Hillary.

She was a lousy candidate.

She deserved to lose.

Did she deserve to lose to Donald Trump?

As WikiLeaks made clear in the release of the Podesta E-mails, Hillary and her campaign wanted Trump for the GOP candidate because they thought he would be the easiest to beat.

If you're unhappy that Trump is president, blame Hillary.

She was a lousy candidate and her campaign worked overtime (with the media) to build up Trump.






TV: NBC scores the season's weekly erosion 'hit'

COVERT AFFAIRS was nothing but a confection and there was nothing wrong with that.  It ran for five years delighting audiences.

abtv

It's hard to imagine NBC's new series TIMELESS running for two seasons.

It's all confection as well but seems to believe it can trick viewers into thinking it's a hearty meal and not a tiny cupcake.

The show has four main stars.

The only one that actually succeeds is Matt Lanter.

What's he doing on the show?

No writer appears to have ever asked that question.

But just as Lanter made his role on STAR-CROSSED believable, he makes the even less fleshed out sketch of Wyatt Logan appear real.

Goran Visnjic doesn't have it so easy.

As Garcia Flynn, the man who is both a criminal and someone who wants to change history, Goran is stuck playing a character the writers have overthought and it's to his credit that he rises above the laughable scenes he's forever stuck in.

Garcia has stolen a time machine.  He has possibly kidnapped Anthony Bruhl (Matt Frewer) or possibly Tony's working with him.

If you can't figure it out, don't worry.

It doesn't appear that the writers have yet either.


Using a second time machine, Wyatt, Abigail Spencer's Lucy (a historian) and Malcolm Barrett's Rufus pursue Garcia.

It should be exciting, at least the time travel.

Instead, it's plodding and dull.

The only thing that's been less thought out than characterization is storylines.

If you had a machine for time travel, what would you do?

Let's say you were a Barack Obama supporter.

You might want to go back to August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, wait around the hospital and make sure photos are taken of Ann Dunham and newborn Barack leaving so that the myth of him being in born in Kenya never has a chance to get started.

Or maybe you want to try to influence the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton -- either to stop the House from impeaching or to see the Senate remove him from office -- and you'd use the time machine for that.

Possibly you want to go to Brentwood for the night of August 4th and the morning of August 5th to figure out what really happened and how Marilyn Monroe died.

Instead, the show goes to the Hindenburg crash and the assassination of Lincoln.

They do make time to go to Las Vegas, when JFK is screwing Judith Campbell.

Historian Lucy sees Judith Campbell -- who slept with JFK and mob dons Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli -- as a breakout woman.

If any of this makes sense to you, the show's for you.

But it's not for most people.

That's obvious from the ratings.

Over 12 million viewers watched the first episode.

Every week has seen a fall off in viewers.

The episode where they went to the Alamo?

Only 9.11 million viewers watched.

Apparently, the viewers patience isn't timeless.

And you don't need to hop into a time machine to know where this is headed.







Debra Messing -- our so-called defender of LGBT rights

Driven by her hysteria and long known envy of gay men, the aging, one-time minor TV celebrity Debra Messing, self-declared town crier for the state of America,

debs

For those whose memories don't go back to 1998, Debra was the least famous, least popular and least liked member of the cast of WILL & GRACE.  It's no real surprise that she told MORE in 2013 that she'd turned down the role at first, "I didn't want to be, for a lack of a better word, a f** hag."

Keep it classy, Debs.

Since the 1998 sitcom that brought her attention, she's had a failed film career and 3 failed TV shows.


Having no career, no significant others and no actual friends, she takes to Twitter pretty much 24-7 in an attempt to push the country to a state of hysteria over the election of Donald Trump to US President.

In order to push the hysteria, she pretends she speaks for LGBTQ (she doesn't, see Marcia's "Debra Messing, I am not your accessory").


As the voice of LGBTQ, she insists Donald Trump is a first rate danger to the rights of LGBTQ.


The story of 2016?

We agree there were many.


But since Debra's set herself up as the voice of LGBTQ America, it's interesting how she's silent on whistle-blower Chelsea Manning.

Just last week, Jeremy Scahill authored "The True Scandal of 2016 Was The Torture Of Chelsea Manning" (THE INTERCEPT).

Debra's surprisingly silent on Chelsea -- surprising only if you don't realize that Hillary Clinton was also against Chelsea.

Debra's an airhead who never learned to think but she can be a knee jerk reactionary for elements of the powerful who oppress.


Donald Trump, she insists repeatedly, is the greatest threat to the lives of LGBTQ.


What was she talking about?

Those of us who did not make our lives about the duoply's fight for a coronation this year scratched our heads.

To be fair to Debra, we went to the weakest of all LGBTQ organizations: The Human Rights Campaign.


There we found "2016 Republican Facts" about Donald Trump and the threat he represented.

It conveyed the belief that Trump would overturn marriage equality.

He would do this, we were informed, by appointing judges who would not support marriage equality.

Hmm.

How stupid are the Debra Messings?

Do they not know that the Supreme Court exists to create precedent?

Do they not know how hard it is to overturn a Supreme Court decision?

Marriage equality is now the law of the land.

That makes it hard to overturn.

Add in that it would effect many families.

How exactly do they see a new decision on this issue coming about?


They don't see it because it's not logical and neither are they.


Equally true, Hillary Clinton was against marriage equality until recently.





She was against it when she ran for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 2008 (and when she supported the 90s so-called Defense of Marriage Act).  It would be April 2015 before Hillary would publicly support marriage equality.    If this is news to you -- maybe like Debra Messing, you never valued reading -- then you can refer to Robert Samuels report for THE WASHINGTON POST.


So Donald Trump has an inconsistent record on marriage equality -- but the reality is that it's the law of the land.

What else does HRC (Human Rights Campaign, not Hillary Rodham Clinton) tell us?

That Donald would rescind Barack's executive orders.

And?

That's no different than any presidency, first of all.


Secondly, many people concerned with rights and liberties -- including us -- have long been opposed to Executive Orders because Bully Boy Bush used them to go around the law.

The only other thing HRC really has is the issue of "religious liberty."

We support religious liberty -- including the liberty to be free of religion.

We also believe a business can refuse to cater, for example, a same-sex marriage.

They can do that.

That should be their right.

But that right also includes the response which would be many people refusing to grant them business.

You have the right to publicly refuse to cater a wedding because you don't believe two people of the same gender should marry.

And those of us who disagree with you have every right to respond by refusing to use your services ever.

When the will of the people puts you out of business, the country will be a lot better place.

Those are the issues HRC emphasizes.

We don't see the end of the world in any of that.

Nor do we see homophobes benefiting from any of this.



Oh, wait, there's one more section that HRC offers:



Prior to becoming a candidate, Trump said that Pat Buchanan’s anti-LGBTQ rhetoric was disgusting, and he said that LGBTQ groups were glad he was hosting the Miss Universe pageant in Russia to challenge the status quo. But he launched ad hominem attacks on Ariana Huffington and Bette Midler, and he defended a CEO who resigned after opposing Proposition 8 and an NFL player who criticized Michael Sam.



He launched ad hominem attacks on Ariana Huffington and Bette Midler!!!!

Dear heavens.

How could he.

On Ariana and Bette!!!!

First off, it's Arianna Huffington -- two "n"s in Arianna.

Secondly, it's not the end of the world or even reason worth mentioning.

It actually is embarrassing -- even for the weak ass HRC.


We went with the weak ass HRC for a reason -- Debra's equally weak ass.

But that's it, that's the reason we're all supposed to be shocked and opposed and feeling the sky has fallen in -- with regards to LGBTQ rights, that's it.

Forgive us for not being as paranoid and doomsday embracing as the Debra Messings.



































Celebrity thoughts (Ava and C.I.)

Maybe Alyssa Milano needs to pipe the hell down if she also wants to be paid by Atkins to promote their products?

She's being paid to promote their products and to drive interest.

She's being paid to be non-controversial.

No one forced Alyssa to be a whore to a corporation.

She prostituted herself.

Having done that, she owes it to the corporation that pays her to be non-controversial.


It's hard for so many to grasp.


But then the election's been so hard for so many.  Ronan Farrow, for example gained 15 pounds.


It's funny to read the celeb Twit accounts where they alternate preaching love with tearing apart people.


And  calling people you disagree with "beasts" isn't the way to win them over.  Have you checked your Twitter feeds from the last month as you pretend you've high roaded it?


When a number of you rushed to shame various female celebrities for not Tweeting about Hillary -- is there a reason you never shamed Justin Timberlake?


Guess The Debra Messings only go after women.


They certainly went after Oprah.


Everybody take a deep breath! !





Did that Tweet really deserve any of the attacks it received?


Remember, America, White celebrities want to speak for African-Americans.

When African-Americans speak for themselves, as Oprah did, it's White American celebrities job to slam African-Americans.

Because, of course, Debra Messing -- a White woman -- knows better than African-American Oprah what it's like to be a person of color.


And here's another thought maybe celebs shouldn't try to educate about that which they know not.

Here's British born tart Minnie Driver (star of ABC's fading sitcom SPEECHLESS).



They did vote -overwhelmingly for . Check your constitutional knowledge and understand the biased power of the electoral college.





If people wanted her so badly, Bethann correctly states, they should have voted for her.

Minnie, your popular vote is meaningless.

You're the idiot lecturing about that.  They didn't vote overwhelmingly for Hillary where it mattered which is why she lost the electoral college.

Wisconsin Democrats in the know blame Hillary and her campaign for Russ Feingold's loss.

She knew she had to have Wisconsin but she didn't want to listen to what the people in the Democratic Party there stated.  So she took the state for granted.

That didn't just effect her.

It effected politicians who actually matter like Russ Feingold.

It's cute the way that these celebs rush to prop up Harry Reid, by the way.  Forget all of his personal problems that are open whispers.  There's the fact that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, while she was House Majority Leader, explained to THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE that she and her House Dems were trying to address the Iraq War but Harry was where the issue fell apart.


Also it's so sweet of you to prop up sexist Aaron Sorkin.


You can check out Tom Mendelsohn's 204 "You don't need to read Aaron Sorkin's leaked emails to realize he's a sexist -- just watch The West Wing" (INDEPENDENT).

Or Maureen Ryan's 2012 "The Newsroom: Women Problems Abound about in Aaron Sorkin's HBO series" (HUFFINGTON POST).


Ruth Spencer's 2012's "Are Aaron Sorkin's women: silent bearers of sexism'?" (GUARDIAN).

Or Margaret Lyon's 2012 "The Newroom Is Incredibly Hostile Towards Women" (VULTURE).

Sarah Hughes' "Does Aaron Sorkin have a women problem?" (NEW STATESMAN).


Or you could have just read our own "TV: White Man Talking (and talking and talking)" -- way back in 2006 -- because as trail blazing feminists, it's our job to lead the way, not glom on the topic after others make it safe:


The only one who succeeds is Amanda Peet. She succeeds in spite of the writing and in spite of Water Cooler Critics grabbing bits she thought up for her character and crediting Sorkin for them. Sorkin's put no thought into her character -- she's a female, he has no interest. For those who missed that obvious fault, West Wing started filming without a First Lady -- a look at the White House with no First Lady? The character Stockard Channing would bring to life was an after thought to Sorkin -- so it's no surprise that Peet's getting by largely on her likeability. There's no character for her to play so the show's very lucky that someone as likeable as Peet is in the cast.



So maybe we should be thrilled by all the interest in Jill Stein?


Ethan Cohen and Martha Plimpton and Debra Messing are among those trashing Jill.

What's Jill's crime?

Running for president.

Good for Jill.


After gaining ballot access in 12 more states—thanks to petitioning and election wins—the Green Party is now on the ballot in 21 states!








That's how you build a future.


But it's too much for some.


This is heartbreaking. If you threw your vote away on , do me a favor: don't tell me. Self(ish)-destruction.







Eric, do us a favor, get an acting coach.

Pronto.

Every role is the same with you.  Every line reading is the same.  You don't create a character, you don't work too hard at all.

Talk about selfish destruction.

By the way, sexist Eric, is there a reason you went after Jill?

She's a woman, right?

Gary Johnson got more votes than Jill did.  But you don't mention him, do you?

You do trash the woman.


And her ticket.


The ticket, by the way, the only ticket with a person of color on it.


A fact you seem unaware of -- one that never registered in your rush to history.

It's funny how that didn't matter.

Until you grasp that a bunch of White assholes set the agenda to begin with based on 'we know best.'

They didn't then, they don't now.






Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
 
Poll1 { display:none; }