Third Estate Sunday Review

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

From The TESR Test Kitchen

Can Twinkees taste good if they're not Twinkies?

That's the question that sent us running into The TESR test kitchen yet again.

We had three new samples. These weren't the golden Twinkies of yore, no. They weren't the bright, yellow sponge cake.

Well, one was. Fudge Covered Twinkies is the yellow sponge cake we know but it's covered with . . . fudge. You might think that would be a good thing. You would be wrong. It's like the Keebler Elves set out to deface the taste of Twinkies.

Elsewhere?

Chocolate Peanut Butter Twinkies. It's too much peanut butter, way too much. Reeces Peanut Butter Cups have just about the right mixture. These just tasted like peanut butter and the chocolate -- and the sponge cake -- suffered.

Finally, Chocolate Cake Twinkies. These are Twinkies with a chocolate sponge cake and, yes, they do taste like Zingers. Apparently that's what they were going for.

But it wasn't what we were going for and we rate all through awful. Letter grade? F across the board.

Aretha

Look at our past playlists and you'll see that we, like a lot of people, were big Aretha Franklin fans. Her passing last week was a very sad moment.

In addition to her string of hits, Aretha offered many things including a better world. Marcia pointd out in "The Queen is dead:"

Kat reviewed ARETHA SINGS THE GREAT DIVA CLASSICS-- which was Aretha's last studio album. Kat noted:

Being Aretha Franklin can be a lonely thing.
As Lady Soul, she's one of the gang, a highly talented member of the crew, but one of the gang. Elevated, due to her talent, to the Queen of Soul, she's suddenly the target of one pot shot after another and, since Natalie Cole's emergence in the early seventies, one artist after another has showed up eager to knock her off the throne.
When everyone's gunning for you, it's easy to turn bitter.
But Aretha's latest album demonstrates she's anything but.
Leave it to Lady Soul to honor her female peers.

That's Aretha. The Judy Collins of the world do albums saluting men. They claim to be feminists but they aren't. Aretha of "Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves" fame just did it because that's what you do when you're a leader.

Aretha recorded an album saluting women because, while she was the Queen of Soul, she was no queen bee. And that was another reason to love her.

The Goody Whore

‏ @raymcgovern

Russiagate drivel dominates p1 of NYT & Wash Post. David Sanger is co-author of Times lede re “New Russian Hacking”https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/us/politics/russia-cyber-hack.html?rref=collection%2Fissuecollection%2Ftodays-new-york-times …
In 2002 Sanger reported http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/29/world/us-exploring-baghdad-strike-as-iraq-option.html …
WMD in Iraq as flat fact. Amy Goodman dutifully "headlined" Sanger's latest Russ hack lede.

7 replies76 retweets112 likes

There was a time when so many of us trusted Amy Goodman.

Every year, more and more wake up.

It's really time for PACIFICA to create their own hourly, public affairs show that airs Monday through Friday -- one that they actually own.

Somehow (Leslie Cagan and a board of corrupt others) Amy Goodman ended up owning DEMOCRACY NOW! She went from one of the hosts -- just one, there were more than her -- to, a few years later, the owner. And suddenly PACIFICA was to pay her millions.

PACIFICA is paying millions of dollars to Amy Goodman for DEMOCRACY NOW! and they don't even own the program. She now owns it.

That's now how public radio is supposed to work.

Amy's a fake ass who has gone on to promote the war on Libya, the war on Syria, neoliberalism, you name it.

Know your enemy.

Read a book?

Readers have e-mailed us asking for more book coverage at community sites. We've passed this request on.

So far, the book coverage includes:

"HELLO GORGEOUS by William Mann"

"CLEOPATRA: HISTORIES, DREAMS AND DISTORTIONS" -- Mike.

"Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's and the Dawn of the Modern Woman Paperback" -- Ann.

"No one Peter Bogdanovich knows is ever gay" -- Marcia.

"Seymour Hersh meanders throughout REPORTER: A MEMOIR" -- C.I.

"Dusty (by Karen Bartlett)" -- Marcia.

"Media critiques -- Nora Ephron's SCRIBBLE SCRABBLE" -- Mike.

"Judy Garland (the biographies)" -- Kat.

"JEAN HARLOW: TARNISHED ANGEL" -- Betty.

"UNCOMMON TYPES: Let's kill whomever taught Tom Hanks to type" -- Elaine.

"THE YELLOW WALLPAPER" -- Marcia.

"Anne Sexton: THE COMPLETE POEMS" -- C.I.

"Charlotte Chandler's MARLENE" -- Elaine.

"A sexist woman writes She's a Rebel and distorts music history" -- Ann.

"barbara ehrenreich's 'natural causes'" -- Rebecca.

"Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook" -- Trina.

"IN SEARCH OF OUR MOTHERS' GARDENS" -- Elaine.

"Blackfish City" -- Marcia.

"THE CHICKEN CHRONICLES by Alice Walker" -- Ruth.

"Harry Belafonte" -- Mike.

"THE SAME RIVER TWICE (Alice Walker)" -- Isaiah.

"Elaine Weiss' THE WOMAN'S HOUR: THE GREATEST FIGHT TO WIN THE VOTE" -- Ruth.

"Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II" -- Ann.

"Dancing with Demons: The Authorized Biography of Dusty Springfield" -- Marcia.

"Good for Jimmy Stewart, bad for readers" -- Stan.

"Conversations with Toni Morrison" -- Marcia.

"Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream" -- Ann.

"He Ran All The Way" -- Trina.

And we'll also note Ann's "How a book store could stay alive in today's economy" about the book business.

This edition's playlist

1) The Cowboy Junkies' ALL THAT RECKONING.

2) Alicia Keys' HERE.

3) Sting and Shaggy's 44/876.

4) Janet Jackson's UNBREAKABLE.

5) Tori Amos' UNREPENTANT GERALDINES.

6) Sam Smith's IN THE LONELY HOUR DROWNING SHADOW EDITION.

7) Sam Smith's THE THRILL OF IT ALL.

8) Aretha Franklin's ARETHA SINGS THE GREAT DIVA CLASSICS.

9) The Beatles' LET IT BE.

10) Dusty Springfield's DUSTY IN MEMPHIS.

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Truest statement of the week

This month the House and Senate passed the reconciled version of the 2019 Pentagon budget on to the White House. On TV and establishment media they call it a defense budget, but that’s branding too. The second world war which ended in 1945 killed 60 or 65 million people, after the first world war claimed 30 million only a generation earlier. This sort of gave war bad name. So in 1948 they changed the name of the US Department of War to the US Department of Defense. With the stroke of a pen, wealthy merchants of death as they were widely known, the war contractors, all became patriotic defense contractors. The US Secretary of War became the US Secretary of Defense, and the US war budget, by far the world’s largest, became the defense budget. And so it’s been for seven decades.
Early this month, the House and Senate passed the reconciled version of the US war budget to the president for signatgure. It’s the earliest in the budget cycle Congress has done a military budget since 1996 or 1997, when a Democrat in the White House and Democrats in Congress were anxious to assure Republicans that they were all on the same side.
They call this year’s atrocity the John McCain National Defense Authorization Act, worth a record $716 billion. This total doesn’t include the budget of the Afghan war, which lives somewhere else, or the budgets of several other known programs, and there are secret budgets for more or less secret programs as well. Nobody really doubts that actual US military spending has hovered around a trillion a year for several years now.
So how did the resistance perform? In the Senate the vote was 87 to 10, three not voting. Only 8 Democrats resisted. Among them Liz Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand. Dick Durbin of Illinois also voted against the Pentagon bill. This is purest theater, because Durbin since 2005 has been Democratic Whip in the Senate, the man responsible for lining up the votes of his fellow senators. If this meant anything to him, why did only 7 other Democrats vote with their supposed leader?

In the House the vote was 351 to 66, with 139 Democrats voting yes, 49 voting no, and 5 not voting. So the resistance was really the assistance, voting almost 2 to 1 to continue spending as much on US wars around the world as the next nine or ten countries put together.

-- Bruce A. Dixon, "When The Resistance Is Really The Assistance" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).

Truest statement of the week II

Let’s begin in the realm of the fanciful.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the intelligence community and in politics worried that a wildcard Trump presidency, unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable practices. Disrupt long-established money channels. Reveal secret machinations that could arguably land some people in prison.
He would have to be marginalized at every turn. Strategies would encompass politics, the courts, opposition research and the media. He’d have to become mired in lawsuits, distracted by allegations, riddled with calls for impeachment, hounded by investigations. His election must be portrayed as the illegitimate result of a criminal or un-American conspiracy.
To accomplish this, bad actors in the intel community could step up use of surveillance tools as a weapon to look for dirt on Trump before his inauguration. They could rely on dubious political opposition research to secretly argue for wiretaps, plant one or more spies in the Trump campaign, then leak to the press a mix of true and false stories to create a sense of chaos.

-- Sharyl Attkisson, "What would the intelligence community's 'insurance policy' against Trump look like?" (THE HILL).