Looking for a film to stream?

Stan reviewed MOVING ON back in May.  If you haven't seen the film yet, make a point to.

MOVING ON is a must-see and first-rate film

I don't think there was a movie I wanted to see more this year than MOVING ON.  So, of course, it had a limited release and was apparently not interested in playing in my area.  Today, it's on sale at AMAZON.  I think it's $12.99 or $14.99.  I don't remember because I wasn't that concerned about the price.  I wanted to see this movie and I bought it.

It's a great movie, everything I could have hoped for.  It's a dark comedy.  A woman has just passed away.  She was married to Malcolm McDowell.  Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin were her best friends (Lily was also her lover).  Malcolm is not a nice person and neither Jane or Lily are fond of him.  Jane shows up at the funeral -- we're talking the first ten minutes -- and tells him she's going to kill him.

The rest of the film is addressing why she wants to do that and will she do that.  

Lily Tomlin is amazing.  This is the actress, please remember, who made even Miss Jane come alive in THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES.  When given a real script, she can do even more (see NASHVILLE, THE LATE SHOW, THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING WOMAN, 9 TO 5, SHORT CUTS, ALL OF ME and many more).  She is amazing.

And yet . . . she may be upstaged.  Jane Fonda burrows into her character.  The eye brows seem different but that's not all.  She's playing a completely vulnerable character -- someone who doesn't want to bother anyone (not even her grandkids to get them to say hello to her).  It's a character role and she digs so deep into it.  The character's a little out of focus -- not Jane's performance, the character herself.  And so when she does seize on something, like killing Malcolm, she zooms in on it.  

This is a great film.  The actors pull you in -- along with Lily and Jane, Richard Roundtree deserves applause and so does a woman who Lily's insulted that tells Lily off.

Paul Welz previously worked with Lily on GRANDMA and she should have been nominated for an Academy Award there.  She's just as good here.  But Jane is a masterpiece.  She should be nominated for Best Actress.  This is a character like none she's played before and she nails it.

She's having a strong year with 80 FOR BRADY, MOVING ON and, up next, BOOK CLUB II.  But even if it was just MOVING ON, she has accomplished something.

I can't get over the character she's created.  It's so real and so different and reminds you that she's one of the finest film actresses our country has ever produced.

Make a point to check out MOVING ON.

 

Going out with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

 

Tuesday, May 2, 2023.  The US government releases a religious report looking at other countries, the effects of climate change in Iraq are there for anyone to see, Robert Reich oversimplifies what's taking place with the hate merchants today, and much more.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom notes:

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) today released its 2023 Annual Report documenting developments during 2022, including significant regression in countries such as Afghanistan, China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, and Russia. USCIRF’s 2023 Annual Report provides recommendations to enhance the U.S. government’s promotion of freedom of religion or belief abroad.  

USCIRF’s independence and bipartisanship enables it to unflinchingly identify threats to religious freedom abroad. In its 2023 Annual Report, USCIRF recommends 17 countries to the State Department for designation as Countries of Particular Concern (CPCs) because their governments engage in or tolerate “systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations” of the right to freedom of religion or belief. These include 12 that the State Department designated as CPCs in November 2022: Burma, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan—as well as five additional recommendations: Afghanistan, India, Nigeria, Syria, and Vietnam. For the first time ever, the State Department designated Cuba and Nicaragua as CPCs in 2022.

“USCIRF is disheartened by the deteriorating conditions for freedom of religion or belief in some countries— especially in Iran, where authorities harassed, arrested, tortured, and sexually assaulted people peacefully protesting against mandatory hijab laws, alongside their brutal continuing repression of religious minority communities.” USCIRF Chair Nury Turkel said. “We strongly urge the Biden administration to implement USCIRF’s recommendations—in particular, to designate the countries recommended as CPCs, and for the Special Watch List, or SWL, and to review U.S. policy toward the four CPC-designated countries for which waivers were issued on taking any action. We also stress the importance of Congress acting to prohibit any person from receiving compensation for lobbying on behalf of foreign adversaries, including those engaging in particularly severe violations of the right to freedom of religion of belief.”

The 2023 Annual Report also recommends 11 countries for placement on the State Department’s SWL based on their governments’ perpetration or toleration of severe religious freedom violations. These include two that the State Department placed on that list in November 2022: Algeria and Central African Republic (CAR)—as well as nine additional recommendations: Azerbaijan, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. USCIRF is recommending the State Department add Sri Lanka to the SWL for the first time due to its deteriorating religious freedom conditions in 2022.

Iraq is a country that they recommend for the State Dept's Special Watch List:

Background
Iraq’s population is approximately 95–98 percent Muslim, with 61–64
percent Shi’a and 29–34 percent Sunni. Christians—consisting of
Catholic, Orthodox and Assyrian Church of the East, Protestant Evan-
gelical, and others—comprise approximately one percent, although
accurate figures are obscured by frequent displacement both within
and beyond Iraq’s borders.
Iraq is unique as a Shi’a-majority Arab state. It has ties to both
the Sunni-majority Arabic-speaking world and Iran, a non-Arab Shi’a
country. Iraq is also home to numerous ethnic and religious minorities
such as Kurds, Yazidis, Sabean Mandaeans, Kaka’is, Shabaks, and
Turkmen as well as members of Assyrian, Chaldean, Syriac, Armenian,
and other Christian churches. In 2022, at least 2,763 Yazidi women and
girls kidnapped from Sinjar by ISIS were still missing, many potentially
hidden within northeast Syrian camps detaining ISIS fighters and
their families. Yazidi Iraqis welcomed the international community’s
additional steps toward accountability and justice, such as a German
court’s judgment in July convicting a repatriated German ISIS member
of genocide.
Article 2 of the federal constitution establishes Islam as the offi-
cial religion and affirms “the full religious rights of freedom of belief
and religious practice to all individuals such as Christians, Yazidis and
Mandean Sabaeans.” However, the penal code contains blasphemy
statutes, and since 2016, the Law of United National Identity requires
non-Muslim minors to convert to Islam if one of their parents becomes
Muslim, as in the ongoing legal case of an Assyrian child.
In the years since the 2003 collapse of Saddam Hussein’s
regime, sectarianism has flourished, with political power in the IFG
distributed along religious lines among dominant Shi’a political

parties, a Kurdish president, an Arab Shi’a prime minister, and an
Arab Sunni president of Parliament.
Other Religious Freedom Issues in the IFG and KRG
Within weeks of the new administration’s emergence in October,
IFG agencies issued eviction notices to Christians in a displacement
settlement in Baghdad’s Zayouna district, leaving the families—many
of whom ISIS had displaced from their Nineveh homelands in 2014—
facing homelessness during winter. The evictions were completed in
February 2023.
Community members from other religious minorities, including
Sabaean Mandaeans, Shabaks, and Kaka’is, have communicated their
intentions to lobby international bodies for minority protections and
the new IFG administration for constitutional and other legal safe-
guards for religious and ethnic minorities. These activists note that,
for example, Article 125 of the federal constitution sets forth “admin-
istrative, political, cultural, and educational rights” for minorities but
lacks mechanisms of enforcement.
Political representation remained an important concern for reli-
gious minorities, with communities pointing out flaws in both the IFG's. 

and KRG’s quota systems for elected representatives from minority
religious backgrounds. Some minority advocates suggested both
the IFG and KRG amend their existing quotas to ensure minority
representation is effective and meaningful rather than symbolic and
vulnerable to dominant religious groups’ political appropriation
of minorities’ seats. In February, the Iraqi Federal Supreme Court
further limited the political representation of Yazidis, Shabaks, and
Feyli Kurds, forcing those minorities to campaign within the already
severely circumscribed Christian and Mandaean components. In
March, archaeologists criticized both IFG and KRG leaders’ ongoing
sectarianizing of cultural heritage sites, finding it amounts to cultural
heritage predation. In the IFG, confessional political and religious
groups leveraged the ethnic and religious political quota system, the
Iraqi Constitution of 2005, and a collection of later laws, including
religion-specific endowments, to misappropriate and alter the char-
acter of religious heritage sites. Meanwhile, the KRG’s “land grabs”
of indigenous Christians’ villages and sites constituted a form of
targeted demographic change, prompting continued displacement
and migration.
In May, the Iraqi Parliament passed a Sadr-proposed law criminal-
izing Iraqis’ and foreigners’ ostensible attempts to normalize relations
with Israel. The law did not address Judaism and set forth exceptions
for Iraqis’ “religious visits” to Israel as preapproved by the Ministry
of the Interior. However, it not only potentially “promot[ed] an envi-
ronment of antisemitism” but also reflected Iraq’s rampant political
sectarianism, with Shi’a parliamentary blocs advancing the legislation
in part to distance themselves from Sunni Kurds’ and Arabs’ perceived

receptivity to normalizing ties with Israel.
Key U.S. Policy
The administration of President Joseph R. Biden continued to prior-
itize Iraq’s stabilization and economic development in U.S. relations
with both the IFG and KRG.
In July, the United States condemned an attack on a resort in
Duhok that killed at least eight civilians. The IFG attributed the strike
to Turkey, which frequently carries out airstrikes in northern Iraq in
ostensible pursuit of members of the terrorist-designated Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK). The strikes have contributed to the abandon-
ment of nearby Christian villages, threatened already traumatized
Yazidis in Duhok’s displacement camps, and inhibited Yazidis’ return
to Sinjar. The United States maintained its “strong support for Iraq’s
sovereignty and its security, stability, and prosperity, including that
of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region.”
The United States Agency for International Development
asserted its commitment to providing financial assistance to help
enable the approximately 1.67 million displaced Iraqis’ return to their
homes. In November, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Alina L. Romanowski
redeclared a disaster in Iraq for fiscal year 2023 “due to the ongoing

complex emergency and humanitarian crisis."

And they offer:

RECOMMENDATIONS TO THE U.S. GOVERNMENT
■ Include Iraq on the Special Watch List for
engaging in or tolerating severe violations
of religious freedom pursuant to the Inter-
national Religious Freedom Act (IRFA);
■ Use diplomatic channels and multilateral
engagement to encourage the IFG and the
KRG to expedite processing the return of
kidnapped and displaced Yazidi genocide
survivors and assist them in reintegrating
into Iraqi society; to resolve conflicts over
disputed areas per Article 140 of the Iraqi
constitution, while including all religious
and ethnic minorities in the process; and

to comprehensively implement the Sinjar
Agreement with full inclusion of the Yazidi
community in particular;
■ Impose targeted sanctions on additional
PMF leaders responsible for severe vio-
lations of religious freedom by freezing
those individuals’ assets and/or barring
their entry into the United States under
human rights related financial and visa
authorities, citing specific religious free-
dom violations; and
■ Continue to assist Iraqi religious and eth-
nic minorities in rebuilding communities

devastated by ISIS and in advocating for
their own interests, including opening a
broad discussion on holding fair and free
elections to select their own local leaders as
well as representatives to the IFG and KRG.
The U.S. Congress should:
■ Incorporate religious freedom concerns
into its larger oversight of the U.S.-Iraq
bilateral relationship through hearings, let-
ters, and congressional delegations and by
appropriating funding for development pro-
gramming to strengthen religious freedom.

A lot of people spent yesterday -- Norman Solomon shows up all over -- with worthless articles about yesterday being the 20th anniversary of Bully Boy Bush's "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" moment.  I didn't see any that were cleverly written nor did I see any that said anything that hadn't been said when the same people wrote them on the 1st anniversary of Bully Boy Bush's idiotic moment.  He's a War Criminal and the crimes continue -- even though those writing the pieces all appear to have checked out on Iraq around 2008.

We're not wasting our time on noting that.  We will point out that  Steve Hanley (CLEAN TECHNICA) notes:

21-year-old Ali Julood, a native of Rumaila, Iraq, was scheduled to speak a the BP annual meeting on April 27, but he couldn’t. Ali died on April 21, a victim of leukemia likely caused by flaring near his home. His father, Hussein Julood, spoke for his son instead via a webcam.

Through an interpreter, he told the meeting, “From my door, you can see the black smoke from gas flaring 24 hours a day, and you can smell the toxic chemicals from these flares. Sometimes it’s so bad, breathing is difficult, and oil rains from the sky. Cancer is so common here, it’s like the flu.” Hussein told the BP meeting that Ali “loved nature — his favorite place in the world was his garden. And he wished that children could enjoy playing and breathing freely outside.”

Ali was one of several people interviewed by the BBC last year for a documentary entitled “Under Poisoned Skies” that examines the activities of the oil and gas industry in Iraq. The BBC found that areas near gas flaring sites contained high levels of chemicals and pollutants, with rates of leukemia and other cancers among the local population notably higher than in other parts of the country.

In Rumaila, where Julood lives, flaring occurs less than 2 km from the family home, despite Iraqi law requiring a minimum distance of 10 km from residential areas. Ali’s phsician told the BBC that his leukemia was likely caused as a result of his proximity to those chemicals and pollutants. A report leaked to the BBC showed rates of the cancer in the area, which is located south of the city of Basra, have increased by 20% in the past five years.

The BBC investigators found evidence that millions of tons of emissions from gas flaring had failed to be declared by major Western oil and gas companies working in Iraq. In its report, it named BP, Eni, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell as companies that are contributing to the egregious level of pollution in the area.

Maybe if the insta-writers had tied in that or other actual issues that Iraq has to deal with it -- fallout from the Iraq War -- they could have written something meaningful?  They could have noted how the war ravaged country is now a climate disaster, for example.  Sinan Mahmoud (THE NATIONAL) reports:

Farmer Saadoon Abdul-Sahib Jabr has been in the agriculture business for decades.

In that time, he has seen it all, from droughts and heavy rains to failed crops and deteriorating soil quality.

But these past few months, he said, have been particularly challenging.

Mr Jabr, 58, inherited 1,000 dunams — or 247 acres — of land from his father in the town of Al Maimouna, in Maysan province south of Baghdad. He planted 80 dunams with wheat and barley.

This year’s season for winter grains, beginning around October and ending as late as May, got off to a very rough start for farmers, with little rain and dwindling water levels in the rivers.

“The situation was very tough,” said Mr Jabr. “The drought this year was the most severe one.”

Known in ancient times as Mesopotamia or the Land Between the Two Rivers, Iraq is said to have been the site of the biblical Garden of Eden.

Today, the UN classifies the oil-rich nation as the fifth most vulnerable country in the world to climate change. Its severe water crisis has been gradually worsening for decades, negatively affected by climate change, mismanagement and pollution.

Iraq’s two main sources of water, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which account for more than 90 per cent of the country’s freshwater reserves, have significantly declined over the years. Construction of dams and diversion of water upstream in Turkey and Iran has exacerbated the situation, leaving downstream nations like Iraq with less water.

THE  NATIONAL further notes:

Of the 17 most water-stressed countries in the world, 11 are in the Middle East and North Africa, making it one of the most affected regions in the world.

Over the years, a lack of fresh water resources has been compounded by climate change, population growth, poor management and — in some places — conflict. It has reached a stage where it affects the daily lives and health of millions.

As the climate crisis accelerates, water scarcity in the region home to 360 million people is expected to worsen and disrupt economic growth. A report from the World Bank found that climate-related water scarcity may lead to economic losses of up to 14 per cent of the region’s total GDP over the next 30 years.

[. . .]

The UN has identified Iraq as the fifth most vulnerable country in the world to climate change.

One of the most affected sectors by water scarcity in Iraq is agriculture, which makes up less than 4 per cent of the country's annual GDP of 208 billion (as of 2021) but is the main source of income for at least a third — or 14 million — of the nation's 44 million population.

Iraq’s two main sources of water, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which account for more than 90 per cent of the country’s freshwater reserves, have significantly declined over the years. The construction of dams and the diversion of water upstream in Turkey and Iran have exacerbated the situation, leaving downstream nations like Iraq with less water.

Mismanagement and pollution have also contributed to the crisis.

Some farmers have begun turning away from centuries-old irrigation techniques to more modern systems that reduce water use by almost half.

The government provides some support but farmers say not nearly enough to cover their needs.

In other news, KURDISTAN 24 notes, "The U.S. State Department announced on Sunday that Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Barbara Leaf, will visit Baghdad and Erbil over the next few days."  MEHR NEWS AGENCY reports:

Turkish airforce has bombarded several villages in Metin Mountain located in Dohuk Province in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, media sources reported on Wednesday.

An eyewitness said that Turkey has been bombarding the region for the past week, stirring panic among the local people in the region.

From time to time, the Turkish military carries out air strikes on alleged PKK positions, which is listed as a terrorist group by the EU, US and Turkey.

Robert Reich.  Not a fan, not an enemy.  George Washington University's transphobe Jonathan Turley had a hissy fit over Robert's GUARDIAN column last week.  Remember, Turley wants opinions to be freely expressed . . . except when he doesn't agree with the opinions.  

But here's why I'm so apathetic towards Robert:

For a second week, Montana Republicans have blocked Democratic transgender lawmaker Zooey Zephyr from participating in a debate over proposed restrictions on transgender youth.

Zephyr, a first-term Democrat from Missoula and the first openly transgender woman elected to the Montana legislature, hasn't been allowed to speak on the state house floor since last Tuesday, when she told Republican colleagues they would have "blood on their hands" if they banned gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth.

On Monday, her supporters brought the House session to a halt, chanting, "Let her speak!" from the gallery before being escorted out. Seven were arrested for criminal trespass. Republican leaders describe the disruption as an "insurrection."

[. . .]

  It's tempting to dismiss all this as just another outcropping of crazy right-wing bigotry.

And it's tempting to be appalled at such blatant prejudice but believe there must be more important issues to worry about. According to the Pew Research Center, only 1.6% of U.S. adults are transgender or nonbinary (that is, their gender differs from the sex they were assigned at birth).

Yet let me remind you: Bigotry against minority groups based on sexual orientation or gender Identity, such as the trans community, is a way fascism takes root.

As the world tragically witnessed in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, the politics of sexual anxiety gains traction when traditional male gender roles of family provider and protector are hit by economic insecurity. 

That's from his COMMON DREAMS column.  Robert misses so much.  That's why I'm neutral on him.  While I can agree with his COMMON DREAMS column, I'm also aware that he's left out so much.  It's not all economics.  It's about power and it's about a right-wing element that feels powerless.  It goes beyond wages and goes to the pandemic.  That left so many feeling so powerless.    Look at Marjorie Taylor Greene attacking Randi Weingarten last week (see Friday's Iraq snapshot).  They're insecure and they're paranoid and they feel powerless as a result of the pandemic. 

Wages?  That's part of it.  Inflation certainly is.  But Reich's not a social scientist, he's just an economist and can only go there for every explanation.  For every explanation and the only explanation.  That's why I'm neutral to him.  His vision is too limited for me.

New content at THIRD:

• Truest statement of the week
• Truest statement of the week II
• A note to our readers
• Free Robert Pether
• Media: Commencement
• Roundtable
• Is this how you stand next to your work colleague?
• Books (Isaiah, Ava and C.I.)
• 2023 passings
• Tweet of the week
• Books
• Video of the week
• The hate merchants
• Paul Kupperberg's DIRECT CONVERSATIONS
• Wally weighs in on the state of his state of Florida
• This edition's playlist

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Media: Corrupt Court, Corrupt YOUTUBE

If a politician is just a whore without the desire to please a customer, what's a YOUTUBER?  

 

 

That's an answer we'll get too slowly.  We're still limping from the wounds of last week.  Those who felt 2017 was a bad year have learned now what a bad year really is.  It was as though we'd awoken in QUINN MARTIN'S TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED and were trapped in episode seven with no way to move  towards the eighth and final episode.  It was a horror show as a runaway, activist Court tossed aside precedent and custom and delivered one devastating blow to democracy over and over.  

 

The John Roberts Court has proven to be as illegitimate as it is crooked.  The appalling corruption revelations regarding -- among others -- Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuc and Samuel Alito -- though still disgusting, are no longer as shocking due to the fact that the Court has abandoned any pretense of dispensing justice in one ruling after another over the last two weeks.

Hassan Kanu's "US Supreme Court shows indifference to wrongful convictions" (REUTERS) probably summed up the Court's June 22nd ruling in MARCUS DEANGELO JONES V DEWAYNE HENDRIX:

 

But in Jones' case, the Supreme Court held 6-3 that he couldn't raise his innocence claim because he had filed an earlier, separate motion to vacate, based on ineffective assistance of counsel, rather than arguing that he is legally innocent. The justices said the “inadequate or ineffective” exception applies only in exceedingly rare circumstances, like if the sentencing court were to be dissolved by Congress, for example.

 

AP noted:

 

In dissent, the three liberal justices wrote that the decision produces “bizarre outcomes” and “disturbing results.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that the ruling, coupled with other recent limits on appeals imposed by the court, have transformed “a statute that Congress designed to provide for a rational and orderly process of federal postconviction judicial review into an aimless and chaotic exercise in futility.”

 

In other words, America's chief Court ruled that guilty or innocent does not matter to the court system -- a rather novel concept of justice. 

As depraved as that ruling was, it's only getting worse.  Last week, the Court ended affirmative action for college applicants.  It's a post-racial world where all problems have been fixed apparently.   Or that's what the conservative majority wants to pretend.  Sherrilyn Ifill (SLATE) noted:

 

[. . .] Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Court striking down the use of race-conscious admissions at Harvard and UNC was no less devastating for being expected. The destructive force of the majority opinion is not only that it removes the ability of critical institutions of our democracy to directly recognize the significance of race as they build educational communities where students can learn from and about one another’s experiences and perspectives. The majority opinion’s shattering destruction, its cruelty even, lies in its cynical ahistoricism, the weakness of its analysis, its manipulation of precedent, all in service of the completion of a project undertaken by conservatives—and begun on this court decades ago—to dismantle the legal framework that supports even the most modest efforts to level the playing field for those who have been most marginalized in our country.

 The court is on a mission, and the more transparently it betrays the aims of that mission, the more we must confront the danger in which this democracy finds itself. This court is also reckless in its zeal. This means that the methods it uses in furtherance of its mission are crude, shortsighted, thin, and thus easily exposed to charges of illegitimacy. The scope of the court’s hubris is breathtaking. It supplants its judgment over that of the most prestigious educational institutions in the country, as well as 74 major American companies that filed amicus briefs to the court, including Microsoft, Verizon, Starbucks, and American Express.

 

Dahlia Lithwick (SLATE) observes:

 

If the past year has taught us anything at all, it’s that some of the justices on the current Supreme Court really don’t live under the same sky as everyone else. Some of them use private planes to travel to better, bluer skies. And some, like the chief justice, simply insist that nobody has a right to question or comment on judicial doings because these justices really do live under a separate sky. So, it’s hardly surprising that in their dissents in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson offer what is more or less a guided tour of the skies under which everyone else in America is still forced to live, every day, without respite. As they lay it out, one man’s “color-blind” is another man’s “blinkered.”

Which reminds me: The word blind appears 73 times in the 237-page opinion for Students for Fair Admissions. It is deployed most frequently by Justice Clarence Thomas for the proposition that the 14^th Amendment is a colorblind directive; “that requires the government to, at long last, put aside its citizens’ skin color and focus on their individual achievements.”

In her dissent, Sotomayor accuses the majority of imposing on Thursday “a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society.” 

 

The Center for Constitutional Rights explained, "With this decision, the Court grotesquely co-opts and distorts the reasoning of Brown v. Board of Education and its heroic advocate, Thurgood Marshall. Brown and its progeny were designed to end what the Court now calls race neutrality –  known at the time as “separate but equal.” No amount of gaslighting by the right-wing ideologues who have captured this Court should obscure the fact that the aim of Brown and Reconstruction was to produce race-conscious justice. To suggest, as this Court does, that taking race into account to help those that society has historically repressed is the legal or moral equivalent of using race as a reason to repress is confusing the medicine for the disease. Integration is not segregation."

 

As the country was still reeling from that inequity and muttering, "This is not America," the corrupt Court handed down a decision in 303 CREATIVE V ELENIS.  This decision they handed down also was segregation.  Mark Joseph Stern (SLATE) recapped the ruling:

 

On Friday, the Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination laws, carving out a First Amendment exception any time a law “compels” a business to “express” a message about sexual orientation with which it disagrees. In the words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, the opinion “is, quite literally, a notice that reads: ‘Some services may be denied to same-sex couples.’ ”

The case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, was manufactured by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian law firm that opposes LGBTQ+ equality in all walks of life. 303 Creative is a for-profit Colorado business owned and operated by Lorie Smith, who opposes same-sex marriage. No same-sex couple has ever tried to hire Lorie Smith to create a website for their wedding. Represented by ADF, however, she filed a preemptive lawsuit demanding a First Amendment right to turn away any same-sex couples who request a wedding website. So the case is built entirely on hypotheticals, and there is no real record to speak of.

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s 6–3 opinion for the court got around this problem by insisting that Smith faces a “credible threat of enforcement” because Colorado acknowledges that it will enforce its civil rights law. He went on to declare that “Colorado seeks to compel speech Ms. Smith does not wish to provide,” speech that would be “celebrating marriages”—those of same-sex couples—of which she does not approve.

 

The Center for Constitutional Rights pointed out, "Together with yesterday’s decision invalidating affirmative action, this ruling lays bare the values of this Court. In six justices’ view, the Constitution says it is just fine for a business to exclude someone on the basis of their protected status (LGBTQI+), but it is unconstitutional for a university to include someone on the basis of their protected status (race). This is bigotry masquerading as law. And, in so ruling again, this Court continues to advance a Jim Crow jurisprudence in which the white, male, Christian insider’s freedom is made meaningful only through the subjugation of vulnerable populations. For this conservative movement, as for John Calhoun or George Wallace, discrimination fuels their feelings of freedom. These six individuals somehow retain the power to impose their 18th Century values on a democratic majority that believes in equality and fairness. The Court has little legitimacy left."

 

It did a lot worse than that.

 

We now, again, have two legal classes of citizenship.  The Civil Rights Movement did a great deal to end that system -- a system enshrined by a racist Supreme Court in decisions such as 1896's PLESSY V FERGUSON -- which ruled barring equal access was not discriminating against Black people as long as they had access to something similar -- it was 'separate but equal' -- a laughable concept then and now.

LGBTQ+ persons -- and this can be expanded out to other groups, grasp that, this Court is just getting started -- are not full citizens anymore.  Full citizens have legal protections and rights.  Period.  No question mark, no qualifier.  A gay man now?  He has legal protections and rights as long as it doesn't offended some religious nut.

Clue to the Court: Freedom of religion means the rest of us don't have to suffer from your religious delusions that call for hatred and discrimination. 

 

When the ruling came down, we flashed on two things -- fetish porn and a NETFLIX documentary.  Sadly, we aren't joking.

 

Benjamin Cantu's ELDORADO: EVERYTHING THE NAZIS HATE is a documentary that started airing last week on NETFLIX.  It deals with the rise of Nazism in Germany and the way it rose by targeting groups of people.

 

And it echoes in the US today because, as one person points out, "Even now you can have these liberties and they can be taken away from you."

 

As The Proud Boys -- little boys in mannish bodies -- have spent the last months showing up at drag events -- obviously horny and envious -- with guns and threats, bigots like Jonathan Turley have ignored this while freaking out over ANTIFA repeatedly.  He's a Nazi, Turley is.  And his Proud Boys are the SA in Nazi Germany.  As historian Ben Miller explains in the documentary, "The SA is the Nazis' paramilitary.  They do the dirty work.  They destabilize democracy.  They fight other people on the street.  They beat people up outside events."

Yeah, that's The Proud Boys.

 

Miller also explains, "The SA is a really huge part of the Nazi's plan to take control of Germany and to establish a racially pure empire, free of Jews, free of Communists, free of disabled people, free of Roma and Sinti people, and free of queers."

 

Are you getting what's happening right now?  

 

These are not isolated incidents.  This a path that certain people want to take this country down.  

 

Let's move over to the fetish porn.  Back in May of 2021, we tackled it in "Media: Gay Rights and Gay Wrongs," and we especially called out a porn favorite of Glenneth Greenwalds -- Miles Striker.  As we noted then, the porn industry should not be supporting Striker with awards when he was making garbage like GAY RIGHTS REVOKED -- something we're ever closer to now.  They shouldn't have given any award.  He's a fat, small dicked man.  We know he's small dicked, we've seen the videos.  It's small and it's thin.  "Pencil dick" would be praising him.  And he's fat.  And he's pretty much hairless.  And he's short.  And he's ugly.  But somehow, he's convinced himself that he's catnip to gay men.  He was celebrated and by idiot straight people who brought this loser on to their radio programs and their YOUTUBE nonsense.  What were you people thinking?

Disgusting.

Again, he's Glenneth's boy -- probably even more so now that the Widow Greenwald tries to get through the lonely nights and the crippling guilt for not being there for his husband when his husband was dying.  

 

Glenneth is the self-hating gay.  If you need to tie him in with the documentary, he's Ernst Rohm. The documentary explains that Rohm, who was gay, flew up the Nazi hierarchy and did so while being with other men, aspiring to ''hyper masculinity" and wanting only to be around men because he found women "disgusting."

 

That pretty much nails Glenneth down, doesn't it?  He's a sexist pig and we've noted that for years.  He flits about online from man to man.  And he's convinced that other right-wingers, like himself, have accepted him even though he's gay.  They never really accepted Rohm.  They went along with him, they used him, they took what they needed from him.  Then they arrested him, tried to get him to kill himself and, when he wouldn't, they executed him.

Hopefully, it won't get that far in America.  However, if it does, and the hate merchants chop off Glenneth's penis then maybe feed it to him?  Don't make cow eyes at us, Glenneth, you've brought it all on yourself while doing real damage to non-self loathing members of the LGBTQ+ set.  He mocks transpeople all the time and now he's taken to rushing over to right-winger Brad Polumbo to trash the entire LGBTQ+ community.  Along the way, he's celebrating the demise of affirmative action in higher education.

 

These are disgusting people.  

 

They are not your friends.  They are grifters and they are liars.

 

Some of you were upset when Katie Halper revealed her true colors last Friday.  We weren't  No longer did we have to leave her unnamed when calling out idiots who brought Cornel West on their programs because they loved and respected him so much despite . . . not knowing how to spell Cornel.  ("Cornell" in Katie's case.) No longer did we have to avoid saying who it was when we were talking about an idiot announcing Cornel was the Green Party's presidential candidate.  She corrected it, after we called it out, she did.  But what an airhead, right?  The Green Party's going to select their presidential candidate at their convention in the summer of 2024.  Not until then.

 

Where could she have heard otherwise . . . Oh, that's right, she's friends with liar and serial plagiarist Chris Hedges.

 

If you missed it, last Friday, faux feminist Katie Halper and her boss Aaron Matte (yes, we know it's spelled Aaron Mate, we just don't care -- we also pronounce the name as it was pronounced on DEMOCRACY NOW! for years, not as the pipsqueak wants it pronounced today) interviewed and promoted Scott Ritter.  That would be convicted pedophile and registered sex offender Scott Ritter -- not that Katie and Aaron told their audience that.

 

 Good.  She's trash and we don't have to pretend anymore.  She's not a feminist.  She's a grifter and, if that surprises you, maybe you've missed all the recent USEFUL IDIOT videos that were lucky to average 4,000 views (some have barely hit 2000).  Pedophile Ritter's appearance did get the right wingers on board and did inflate their numbers finally.  But the pattern was that the numbers were low.  The glory days of their podcast are long over.  They're hoping this reach out (reach around?) to right wingers we'll help them return to their past glory.

 

But it's doubtful.  The right-wing already has a lot of podcasts.  

 

The left was fleeing USEFUL IDIOTS.  Original co-host Matt Taibbi is now an exposed transphobe.  And Aaron and Katie?  They don't cover LGBTQ+ issues.  They hang out with Matt and with Glenneth.  People started putting two and two together and coming up with: Whore.

 

Friday, Mike said to us, "A politician is just a whore without the desire to please a customer."  We told him that was funny and congratulated him on it.  He replied he was quoting us.  We wrote it in 2012, the day after the presidential election.

 

Let us expand on that to now include YOUTUBERs as well.  They love to beg for money, they just don't like to work.

 

Katie and Aaron waste everyone's time pretending they have something to say each Monday as the trot out the same old tired nonsense of how they watch the Sunday chat & chews so you don't have to.  That was maybe funny 18 years ago.  It's not now.  And the reality is, you're not watching them for anyone but yourself.  If someone wants to watch, for example, MEET THE PRESS, they're going to watch it.  You're not saving anyone anything.

 

But, hey, whores have to claim they're a great lay, right?  Otherwise, how would they stay in business?

 

Katie has two platforms: THE KATIE HALPER SHOW and USEFUL IDIOTS.  She's made clear that abortion really isn't an issue to her on either.  She's made clear that the LGBTQ+ community does not exist in her eyes.  She's made clear that she doesn't want to talk to women.  So what if they make up 50.4% of the US population, she's only got time for them to be on 3% of her episodes.

 

She was never a feminist.

 

Last Friday, she finally stepped out of her Phyllis Schlafly closet.  

She needs to be her true self because she's got nothing else.

ROLLING STONE isn't hiring her back.  THE HILL fired her as well.  JACOBIN hasn't been interested in her since the whole explosion that saw Katie's former co-host of THE KATIE HALPER SHOW abandon ship and stick with JACOBIN RADIO, USEFUL IDIOTS is sinking in streams . . .  Professionally, she's become the daughter her father can't marry off.

 

At last, some symmetry between her work life and her personal life.

 

She showed you who she really was on Friday.  You should be thankful to be free of the illusion that she's on your side.  She's not.  Aaron Matte isn't, Glenneth isn't and Matt Taibbi isn't.  They're a bunch of hate merchants -- some are just more honest about it.

As you grasp that, you should grasp something else.  

They're covering a Green Party candidate (though not a member of the Green Party).  Why is that?

They don't usually do that, do they?

No.  But they're doing it now.

Katie's chicken fat face may fool some people, but she's over forty.  She popped onto our radar back in 2008.  She was Spencer Ackerman's roll dog and she was part of the trash Hillary crowd.  She went around trashing Hillary and promoting Barack.

Do we need to draw a picture for you?  She doesn't give a damn about Cornel West or about Marianne Williamson.  This is about defeating Joe Biden.  That's what it's about for her, what it's about for Matt, what it's about for Aaron -- for all those grifters.  

Her whole point is to defeat Joe Biden.  To take him down.  

This election cycle we will be voting Democrat for president.  Regardless of who the nominee is.

Well that's not true.

If the nominee is Robert F. Kennedy, we won't be voting Democrat.  But then, there's now no chance in hell that it's going to be Robert.

 

Last week, Marianne found her voice.

Good for Marianne, good for her campaign, good for the country.  

 

She might end up with the nomination.  We'll be glad to vote for her.  We'll be glad to vote for Joe.

Robert can go f**k himself.

Excuse us, Junior can go f**k himself.

Not even the Court's decision could prompt Junior to say the word "gay."  He's a choir boy in The Church of DeSantis these days -- emphasis on boy.

And his apologetic Tweets where he objects to the affirmative action decision -- but apologizes for objecting?

Pathetic.  

Little Junior.  Little boy going through life too scared to stand up and be a grown up.  Just a little boy named Junior.  Never be a big man like Daddy, right, Junior?

The country doesn't need a mannish boy as president.

We wanted to support RFK Jr.  But he refused to be authentic.  And he refused to be a man.

Here's the thing.  We do our piece here and that's fun, usually.  But what we really do is speak to groups and speak to the press.  So what we'll be talking about this week is RFK Jr.'s Daddy and Uncle fixation.

That's what he's running on, his name.  And if he wants to invoke RFK and JFK, invoke them.  And let's all invoke them together.

For example?

RFK and JFK both used and brutalized Marilyn Monroe.  They did that to so many women.

 

Let's talk about that.

Let's talk about JFK and same-sex relations.  We can do that, right?  It's 2023.  We don't need to pull out Peter Lawford's letters for that, do we?  There's one stapled in a 1983 journal volume explaining how Jack and Robert Stack used to see who could sleep with what woman first and used to see which woman they could get in bed with for a three some and, when there weren't any women around, would pleasure one another.  Peter's very descriptive about walking in on that.  The biggest mistake the Kennedy family ever made was exiling Peter and treating him like a leper.  All that did was make sure he told all the secrets. Are we letting a cat out of the bag?

There are so many many cats in so many bags.  Maybe it's time for the country to know not just how JFK was killed in full detail but also how he lived in full detail and how his brother Bobby lived as well.

You want to run for office on Daddy and Uncle?  Okay.  Talk about them.  Talk about the above.  Talk about how they both worked overtime to halt the Civil Rights Movement and to halt Dr Martin Luther King Jr.  Need a starting point?  How about this from REUTERS:

For both Kennedys, King meant trouble -- a distraction from the things, like managing the Cold War or the American economy, they'd come to Washington to do. "Until the end of 1963, every big demonstration or turmoil that Martin King led was a problem for the president, so that affected the way Bob Kennedy would look at it," Robert Kennedy's key deputy at the Justice Department, Burke Marshall, later said.

 

Don't want to delve into that?  Then how about RFK's work on McCarthyism?  Is Baby Junior too nervous to talk about that?  Let's help the baby out, from PBS' AMERICAN MASTERS:

But RFK honed his anti-communism working side-by-side with the nation's leading red-baiter, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

A Kennedy family friend, McCarthy vacationed with the clan on Cape Cod, and even dated two kennedy sister, Pat and Jean. When Bobby needed a job in 1952, after working on his brother Jack's successful Senate campaign, his father Joe Kennedy picked up the phone. By January, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had a new lawyer.

He would last barely six months, done in by a rivalry with McCarthy's chief deputy, Roy Cohn, as well as disenchantment with their overzealous style. But the months with McCarthy would follow Kennedy for the rest of his life, helping define the "Bad Bobby" that many liberals could never quite forget.

That's your daddy, Junior.  That's Daddy!

FAIR notes:

Naomi Klein (Guardian, 6/14/23) documented that Robert Kennedy has turned against some of his own policies on fighting climate change, has embraced free-market solutions on the environment, and is enthusiastically supportive of the Israeli government. The founders of Heal the Divide, a new Kennedy Super PAC, "have a deeply pro–Donald Trump bent -- including ties to arch-MAGA officials such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos and Herschel Walker" (Rolling Stone, 6/23/23).

That's on top of the big business support behind RFK Jr. that betrays his populist facade. Former Twitter boss Jack Dorsey is backing Kennedy (The Hill, 6/5/23), while venture capitalists/podcasters David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya are planning to hold a Bay Area fundraiser for him (Axios, 6/8/23). CNBC (6/21/23) reported that Kennedy "has another wealthy backer in his corner: veteran Wall Street executive Omeed Malik."

 

Junior's gone over to the dark side and, unlike some people, we're not here to coddle him. 

Even as his polling has dipped, even as his negatives rise, he doesn't want to be a Democrat.  He doesn't want to stand up.  His father eventually found a backbone.  And he did so before the age of 69.  

Little Junior needs a nap and a diaper change.   

We're voting for the Democratic nominee.  That might be Joe Biden, that might be Marianne Williamson, it might be someone who has yet to emerge.  And we're doing so because of the corrupt court and the rise of the hate merchants and the similarities between now and Germany during the rise of the Nazis.  

You vote for who you want -- whether it's who we vote for, a Green Party nominee, a Trump-DeSantis ticket, whatever. We're not going to tell you who to vote for, that's not our role and it never has been.  

Unlike a number of YOUTUBERs, our role is also not to try to trick you.  We believe in imparting knowledge and tools so you can make your own decisions -- even if those decisions disagree with our own.  We're not Chris Hedges working behind the scenes to install a presidential nominee and then lying to you about it.  We know how we're going to be voting and we're telling you that so you can factor that into everything you read by us between now and the election.  That's because, unlike Katie Halper, we do believe in disclosure.  Katie, speaking with Brie-Brie, revealed that, since she's an opinion journalist, she doesn't believe she has to disclose things.  That's a funny interpretation of journalism ethics and one that any editor of a newspaper or periodical would disagree with -- as would most columnists. 

A politician is just a whore without the desire to please a customer,  Or to be honest with a customer.  That's something that the Katie-Matt set have in common with politicians. And these days, it's also something they have in common with the Supreme Court.  Yes, the Roberts Court will now be an ugly mark on history and John Roberts' own legacy will be that of discrimination.  We're stumbling through the age of corruption.  Hoping the whole times that we'll be able to emerge from it -- otherwise we'll be buried under it.

 

 

----

 

Jim note: Ava and C.I. wrote this and they're now going to crash.  I'm reading over it and it's too good to hold.  They think when they get back from a nap, we're going to work on an edition.  No.  This is going up now.  It's too good to wait. And too important.  I could just post this but it would result in e-mails [I'm going on vacation so e-mail common_ills@yahoo.com so Martha and Shirley can route your e-mail to someone] of people asking who made the decision, are the rest of us mad, blah blah blah.  I made the decision and this is strong enough and important enough to serve as an entire week's edition.