And The Time Is Right for Dancing in the Street

I just had to repost this from September 30, five years ago. I wonder
whatever became of these beautiful young men? Did someone find them,
give them scholarships to dance schools? Start a dance company with
them? Acknowledge their hard work and talent? Such beauty on a rainy day.

Arbeit Macht Frei? It's Beyond Irony.

Pope Francis visits Auschwitz-Birkenau, insisting he do so in silence, because there are no words.  While aspiring to heights of humanism, we must not forget the worst of which humans are still capable, and must identify with conviction the demagogues that lead us to cruelty in the name of "freedom".

Jim Jeffries on Gun Control

If Only...

This just demanded reposting (I last posted it on March 10), as it's so a propos given the seriousness what we've witnessed in Cleveland this week. Please pass it on, not just to dems and independents, but to Republicans you may know. A serious and thoughtful piece of political campaign publicity at a moment in history that called for seriousness on the part of voters. We are, perhaps, laughing a bit too much at what appears to be an absurdist candidacy. We may be laughing at our peril.. 

Would that Hillary could come up with this thoughtful a tv spot, but she'd be too busy trying to cover her bum, as she campaigned for Goldwater that year. To her eternal regret, no doubt.

Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself?

Consider the following, from Steven Thrasher in today's Guardian, a rare journalist who, using words that actually have meaning, can see the forest for the trees, and feels no compulsion, as many american journos do, to spare tender readers  the truth of their denial. He may be right, as Michael Moore recently suggested on Bill Maher, that Trump will be the next POTUS. As we all stop laughing just long enough to hear the terrifying news.
Folks in the know agree, Hillary simply doesn't have what it takes to defeat his calumnious appeal to people's weakness - fear.  What did FDR warn us? We have nothing to fear but...

As a sidenote, there was a noticeable absence of the word "democracy" in Trumph's Mussolini-style speech last night. So... more in common with that smug dictator than just style. Here's Thrasher:

"As Trump was warmed up by a real estate developer, I felt as if I wasn’t living in reality, but inside a virtual reality scenario dreamt up by Ayn Rand. But as I watched Trump bark about “law and order”, obedience, “law and order,” immigration and “law and order” again, it dawned on me how real this was.
I was looking at the next president of the United States.
Trump’s ginormous face glowering down in condescension from the screen above, tackily framed in by gold, made me think of North Korea. Alas, there’s no escaping how American this Trump phenomena is.
Trump had one goal in his speech: to convince a poorly educated and scared population to imagine him as president. He did that. He was helped by the fact that American society is deeply invested in white supremacy, and his speech was the crowning moment of what looked like a four-day white power rally. He drummed up (fake) immigrant fears, stoked (overblown) dangers to police, and went off his prepared remarks to talk about immigrants. He spoke of refugees fleeing wars, yelling: “We don’t want them in our country!”

The crowd loved it, and Trump will win a significant portion of the white vote. The only question now: will that get him to 270 electoral college votes? Mitt Romney won more white votes than Reagan and still lost. Demographics could spare us this bigot."

Et tu, Hillary?

Seriously?

Remember the TV guy....

"Would YOU like to be Queen for a Day??!!"



  I mean... seriously? President of the United States? The guy who hasn't read a book in twenty years? And 40 % of my fellow countryfolk believe he's the man who should control the nuclear launch codes? Or don't they know that comes with the job?

 Just how stupid are we?

Will Trumppence be the new coin of the realm??

And, lest we forget how all this really started... read and consider what a NY Times commenter had to say today.  Not ALL of us are stupid, Hil and Don.

Tim Kane

is a trusted commenter Mesa, Az 52 minutes ago

"In regard to Bush-the-inferior: The American people got it right, by only a wisker, and chose Gore (by 500,000 votes). It was the establishment elites that got it wrong - by blocking votes in Florida, and by voting in the Supreme Court (the elite of establishment elites) for W.

It was the American people that put Lincoln in office, it was the Supreme Court that gave us the Dred Scott decision.

W under-reacted to 5 major warnings concerning terrorism and then over reacted afterwords, in the same way as Wrong-way Nelson. Dry drunk indeed.

We (the United States and we the globe) won't know whether or not we have survived W for perhaps another 75 years.

Almost all the problems of the world today from black lives to white fears to Euroscleroris to Eurosceptics, global warming etc... are the result of or made a thousand times worse by the massive concentration of wealth that began in the U.S. under Reagan but made vastly worse by W.

W. moved over $12 trillion from the 99% (demand side of the economy) to the 1% (supply side) of the economy and covered his tracks with cheap money creating a housing bubble. When the credit ran out, demand cratered.

That kind of wealth concentration has undermined decision making here and in Europe and has created an underclass where once the middle class lived, from West Virginia to Granada Spain.

Meanwhile Bush spends his time painting pictures of his toes as they pop up out of the water at the other end of the bath tub. That's Psychopathy."

Swivel eyed loons everywhere - be prepared to get back in your boxes.

Amen, brother.