Chump in the White House? Only 28 days since the second inauguration, as Chelsea Handler might say, so why does it seem like we're already in season nineteen of SCANDAL? When he's not bellowing and bullying, Donald Chump's circumventing the law or outright breaking it.
You could argue he's rendered the thriller genre of entertainment unneeded. And yet APPLE TV+ and HULU have both started airing strong and fresh thrillers.
SPOILER: PRIME TARGET is strong show that avoids the
problems of THE NIGHT AGENT by making the character of the male lead gay
or bisexual. THE NIGHT AGENT returned for a less than inspiring season
two. The biggest problem? Though a significant amount of time has
passed since season one, the two leads -- who we rooted for as a couple
-- have to reconnect. Leo Woodall plays Edward Brooks, a grad student,
who studies numbers and is developing a possible cypher that would act
as a decoder for all computer workings. Taylah (Quintessa Swidnell) is a
US spy. She is one of the agents monitoring the UK based college
Edward attends. SPOILER: As Ed and Taylah will both learn, don't trust
your mentor.
Trust really is the key issue for PRIME TARGET.
Reminds us of Jill Stein, the con artist embraced by the Green Party again in 2024.
Six.
And six.
What are those numbers?
The first is the number of videos Green Party 2020 presidential candidate Howie Hawkins has done since the 2024 election.
Six is also the number of videos Howie did in the equivalent period following the 2020 election.
Spoiler: Zero.
That's the number of videos Jill Stein has created since the election. It's also the number of videos she has ever created.
She
was the Green Party's candidate in the 2012 presidential election. And
again in 2016. Then last year as well. She never does anything to
build the party.
When
Zac and Gavin regularly attacked Howie Hawkins in 2023 and during most
of 2024, we tried to remind ourselves that THE VANGUARD boys are
children. They'd slam him over and over. And they weren't the only
ones.
We'd marvel over that
because Howie is the only Green Party candidate who didn't disappear
after an election. Howie spent 2020 through this week trying to build
the Green Party.
Ralph
Nader didn't do that. He didn't even run with them for his 2004 and
2008 presidential runs. Cynthia McKinney barely got a goodbye uttered
before she left the party. Jill Stein doesn't believe in building or
giving back which is why she flitted all over the place like some giant
gypsy moth instead of rolling up her sleeves and working on building the
Green Party.
Following the
2016 elections, Jill insisted Donald Chump had stolen the election and
insisted that she, as a presidential candidate, could bring legal
challenges. The problem, she insisted, was that she didn't have the
money to do so. She
raised over seven million dollars for this recount that wasn't and
she's never been able to explain where over a million dollars of it went.
That same run, 2016, is when the country learned that Jill actually
invested in many companies that didn't meet green standards nor Green
Party standards -- among other industries, Jill profited from the
Defense industry.
That should have been enough to end any future runs for president on a Green Party ticket.
But
Jill is a vengeful failure. Too lazy to do what Howie Hawkins did
following his 2020 run, she never the less loathed the attention that
the videos and the column writing garnered him and the party after his
run.
She teamed with Green Party gadfly and serial plagiarist Chris Hedges to rig the 2024 Green Party primary.
Rigged?
Circumvent.
Chris
had created Cornel West's campaign for president on the People's Party
ticket -- a detail he left out when 'reporting' on Cornel's campaign.
He left so much out of 'reporting.' But that imploded so he and Jill
cooked up a scam to make Cornel the Green Party's presidential
candidate. Old readers know this already but for any new readers, we
were the only ones on the left covering this garbage and telling you the
truth. Aaron Mate? Katie Halper? Go down the list. They lied to you
over and over and told you, in spring 2023, that Cornel was now the
Green Party's presidential nominee. They said it over and over on
YOUTUBE as only worthless garbage liars can.
It
was left to us to note that (a) the Green Party would select their
nominee in the summer of 2024 at their national convention and that (b)
grassroots Greens were responding with "Hell no" to the notion that the
Green Party would throw away the rules to gift anyone with the
nomination. Gifting with the nomination.
Can
we go down a sidestreet for just a moment? HILLARY ROBBED BERNIE IN
2016!!!! That was the cry of THE VANGUARD boyz and Jimmy Dore and so
many others. We never understood that cry because we're apparently
highly allergic to hypocrisy. Please grasp that Jimmy, Gavin and Zac
and so many others kept trashing Howie Hawkins in 2023 and 2024 as they
argued that the Green Party nominee in 2020 should have been Jesse
Ventura.
Did Jesse run for the nomination?
No.
He did say if they gave it to him, he'd accept it.
How kind of him.
Don't
whine that you think Bernie was treated unfairly in 2016 while you also
argue that the Green Party should disregard its rules and gift the
presidential nomination to Jesse Ventura.
Back to the main road, Jill Stein is a huckster, a grifter.
She lied to Cornel and stabbed him the back. Then she was surprised that he would call her out publicly.
Nothing that desperate and craven failure does should ever surprise anyone.
SPOILER:
She got the nomination and spent the entire campaign trashing Kamala
Harris. Amy Goodman (and Juan Gonzalez) never asked her for proof when
she played the martyr insisting means Dems were trying to stop her.
They also let her attack -- Amy even joined in the attacks -- Kamala
while she refused to attack Donald Chump. It took a real journalist
interviewing her, Mehdia Hasan, to note that she attacked Kamala but not
Chump and that she stood no chance of winning and had never held public
office and had no actual solutions or plans if an act of God left her
the only candidate standing and therefore the winner.
What should be the end of her sad tale took place last week when Republicans Against Trump reposted
Jill's campaign manager Jason Call revealing, after the election, that
Jill's goal was always to elect Donald Chump because "Electing Harris
would have been worse. [. . .] As godawful as Trump is, it was the
better outcome." He now expects the left to work with and "organize"
and work on "ending capitalism." He failed two times running for
Congress as a Democrat. In 2024, he switched to Green out of anger at
the pathetic way his life turned out. He ran again for Congress, as a
Green this time, and lost again. SPOILER: Losers like Jill Stein
attract other losers. SPOILER: In PRIME TARGET, the role of Jill Stein
is played (brilliantly) by Martha Plimpton.
The
other thriller worth catching these days is on HULU. PARADISE, like
PRIME TARGET, serves up a new episode each week. PRIME TARGET works out
like that very well. PARADISE? We're burnt out on binge but this is a
show that could have dumped all the episodes at once and we would have
binged it. It stars Sterling K. Brown delivering the best performance
we've seen since the new season started last September. He is a a
recent widow (as far as we know) and father of two. SPOILER: He blames
the president for his wife's death. That would be President Cal Bradford
(well played by James Marsden) and Sterling's Agent Xavier Collins
heads up Cal's security detail. Julianne Nicholson, Jon Beavers and
Sarah Shahi deliver strong performances as well and each episode leaves
you reeling.
SPOILER: An
event is said to wipe out the rest of the earth. Ahead of the event, a
city is built inside a mountain where those selected to live now
reside.
Among other topics, the series deals with treachery, free will and Plato's Noble Lie.
What it mainly does is end any belief you might have had in conspiracies.
SPOILER: There are no hidden hands controlling presidents in real life.
Barack
Obama was beginning his second term when we had a knock down blow out
fight with media dissector Danny Schechter. We had a very public
disagreement with him following the death of Ike Turner and Danny's
public stating that Tina Turner had to forgive Ike. Had to? We have to
forgive a terrorist? Tina was a grown ass woman and didn't need anyone
telling her what to do, for starters. Second, Ike was a terrorist who
beat her. That's what domestic abuse is: Terrorism. That's why
survivors can end up with post-traumatic stress. It changes their lives
but, if they're lucky, they survive.
Danny
got very bent out of shape offline when we made very clear that not
only did Tina not have to forgive him but she didn't. We both knew
Tina. On a friends basis. Danny interviewed her back in the 80s and
seemed to think that one interview allowed him to dictate her life.
We
went round and round on that -- phone calls, e-mails, even a
face-to-face. Danny thought for sure he could force us to agree with
him. He couldn't force us to agree with him anymore than he could force
Tina to forgive the terrorist.
That disagreement, again, was carried out very publicly.
The Barack one, not so much.
Both sides got digs in -- passing blows -- from time to time.
But even Danny had to finally agree with us.
Danny
was a true blue Barack believer. He misjudged Barack's political
identity and didn't want to own that -- both in terms of what Obama
really stood for and what it said about Danny that he got Barack so
wrong.
He was insisting -- to us and at his blog THE NEWS DISSECTOR -- that Barack wanted to do this and to do that but couldn't.
Because of Congress?
We could have agreed with him that Congress wasn't as supportive of Barack as it could have been.
But,
no, Danny was offering nonsense, conspiracy nonsense. Barack wanted to
do all the things Danny believed in; however, he would be killed by the
government if he did.
If elements of the government murdered JFK, we wouldn't be at all surprised.
But
Danny wasn't fretting over the Iraq War (once Barack got sworn in,
Danny lost all interest in the Iraq War). No, Danny was talking about
domestic items. The government, Danny insisted, would kill Barack.
And so, Danny insisted, Barack couldn't act and Barack knew this.
Seemed
like a cop out to us. You invested way too much meaning and trust and
love into a candidate. We don't fall in love with politicians, we're
not that pathetic. We've said that for many years hear. We believe we
started saying it when Danny -- a very smart person -- could no longer
handle reality because of his crush on Obama.
SPOILER: No one's controlling our presidents.
Donald
Chump is attacking the FBI and the CIA currently. He attacked them
during his first term as well. Donald continues to breathe. If our
government was controlled, that would not be the case. If the CIA or
some 'hidden' government agency ran everything, Donald Chump would not
have gotten back into the White House.
SPOILER: Our problems are our own creation and not the result of some hidden control over our government.
Be
great if we could pin the blame on others. Be great if we had a noble
Barack or, in PARADISE's case, Cal who wanted so badly to do the right
thing and to tell us the truth. But these people lived under threat
even as they occupied the Oval Office.
SPOILER:
If the CIA controlled the president, they would have settled Donald
Chump's ass down in his first term and there would have been no
re-election.
Conspiracy
theories are a cop out that excuses We The People from taking actual
control and responsibility for the world we live in. It allows us to
instead wallow in planned helplessness.
