Wednesday, November 30, 2016

New poem: WEREWOLF TAKES THE WHEEL

werewolf takes the wheel
of the bus called America
and drives it first
to the Canadian border
yelling over the PA:
get out you sensitive liberals
who keep telling me
I can’t make money off my brand
while I’m President
>
then, after the forcible ejections,
the werewolf locks the doors
and speeds to the Mexican border
and shouts over the PA:
get out you people who aren’t citizens,
aren’t white,
and are those I don’t want to spend time
deciding who’s a good American
and who might be an enemy combatant
>
now that the bus is almost empty,
the werewolf and his wealthy supporters
feast on gourmet frog legs,
take a leisurely journey to New York City,
the new capital of the USA,
since the White House
has been sold by executive order
and will become
superexclusive luxury condos
for the biggest donors
and other people wanting the werewolf
to bite them in all the right ways

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Post-Beatles 70s Love Songs mini-playlist..

1. Maybe I'm Amazed--Paul
2. Out The Blue--John
3. If Not For You--George
4. Only You--Ringo
5. My Love--Paul
6. Surprise Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)--John
7. You--George
8. I Wouldn't Have You Any Other Way--Ringo

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

A deceased-musicians-of-2016-so-far playlist.

1. Starman--David Bowie
2. Sign O' The Times--Prince
3. A Song For You--Leon Russell
4. Already Gone--The Eagles (Glenn Frey)
5. Young Man Blues--Mose Allison
6. First We Take Manhattan--Leonard Cohen
7. Big City--Merle Haggard
8. Green Eyed Lady--Sugarloaf (Jerry Corbetta)
9. Wheel Of Fortune--Kay Starr
10. Set Adrift On Memory Bliss--PM Dawn (Prince Be)
11. Dream Baby Dream--Suicide (Alan Vega)
12. Flashlight--Parliament (Bernie Worrell)
13. Me And Mrs. Jones--Billy Paul
14. My Love--Paul McCartney & Wings (Henry McCullough)
15. The Wayward Wind--Gogi Grant
16. Can I Kick It--A Tribe Called Quest (Phife Dawg)
17. Lucky Man--Emerson, Lake and Palmer (Keith Emerson)
18. Shining Star--Earth Wind & Fire (Maurice White)
19. Somebody To Love--Jefferson Airplane (Paul Kantner)
20. Something In The Air--Thunderclap Newman (Andy Newman)
21. Don't Just Stand There--Patty Duke

Saturday, November 12, 2016

Garrison Keillor on Trump as Bully of the Free World.

Some of Garrison Keillor's column on the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency lapses into the kind of punching down he's done before (when Keillor wrote a stick-tongue-out book about Jesse Ventura's gubernatorial career) plus crotchety "those young people" ranting updated to refer to "electronic  devices" instead of watching television.

But this excerpt is worth repeating here:
Don’t be cruel. Elvis said it, and it’s true. We all experienced cruelty back in our playground days — boys who beat up on the timid, girls who made fun of the homely and naive — and most of us, to our shame, went along with it, afraid to defend the victims lest we become one of them. But by your 20s, you should be done with cruelty. Mr. Trump was the cruelest candidate since George Wallace. How he won on fear and bile is for political pathologists to study. The country is already tired of his noise, even his own voters. He is likely to become the most intensely disliked president since Herbert Hoover. His children will carry the burden of his name. He will never be happy in his own skin. But the damage he will do to our country — who knows? His supporters voted for change, and boy, are they going to get it.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/40218-trump-voters-will-not-like-what-happens-next

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Glenn Greenwald explains last night's defeat of Hillary Clinton.

(1) DEMOCRATS HAVE ALREADY BEGUN FLAILING AROUND trying to blame anyone and everyone they can find — everyone except themselves — for last night’s crushing defeat of their party. You know the drearily predictable list of their scapegoats: Russia, WikiLeaks, James Comey, Jill Stein, Bernie Bros, The Media, news outlets (including, perhaps especially, the Intercept) which sinned by reporting negatively on Hillary Clinton. Anyone who thinks that what happened last night in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Michigan can be blamed on any of that is drowning in self-protective ignorance so deep that it’s impossible to express in words.
When a political party is demolished, the principle responsibility belongs to one entity: the party that got crushed. It’s the job of the party and the candidate, and nobody else, to persuade the citizenry to support them and find ways to do that. Last night, the Democrats failed, resoundingly, to do that, and any autopsy or liberal think piece or pro-Clinton-pundit commentary that does not start and finish with their own behavior is one that is inherently worthless.
Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and scary gamble, that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone and that Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate especially in this climate — are now the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted on ignoring all that data and nominating her anyway.
But that’s just basic blame-shifting and self-preservation. Far more significant is what this shows about the mentality of the Democratic Party. Just think about who they nominated: someone who — when she wasn’t dining with Saudi monarchs and being feted in Davos by tyrants who gave million-dollar checks — spent the last several years piggishly running around to Wall Street banks and major corporations cashing in with $250,000 fees for 45-minute secret speeches even though she had already become unimaginably rich with book advances while her husband already made tens of millions playing these same games. She did all that without the slightest apparent concern for how that would feed into all the perceptions and resentments of her and the Democratic Party as corrupt, status-quo-protecting, aristocratic tools of the rich and powerful: exactly the worst possible behavior for this post-2008-economic-crisis era of globalism and destroyed industries.
It goes without saying that Trump is a sociopathic con artist obsessed with personal enrichment: the opposite of a genuine warrior for the downtrodden. That’s too obvious to debate. But, just as Obama did so powerfully in 2008, he could credibly run as an enemy of the D.C. and Wall Street system that has steamrolled over so many people, while Hillary Clinton is its loyal guardian, its consummate beneficiary.
Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to more efficiently manage it. That, as Matt Stoller’s indispensable article in the Atlantic three weeks ago documented, is the conniving choice the Democratic Party made decades ago: to abandon populism and become the party of technocratically proficient, mildly benevolent managers of elite power. Those are the cynical, self-interested seeds they planted, and now the crop has sprouted.
Of course there are fundamental differences between Obama’s version of “change” and Trump’s. But at a high level of generality — which is where these messages are often ingested — both were perceived as outside forces on a mission to tear down corrupt elite structures, while Clinton was perceived as devoted to their fortification. That is the choice made by Democrats — largely happy with status quo authorities, believing in their basic goodness — and any honest attempt by Democrats to find the prime author of last night’s debacle will begin with a large mirror.
Link to entire article:
https://interc.pt/2ekJt9O

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Summary of how Donald Trump is on track to become President.

From Calvin Woodward article for Associated Press:
To those in Trump country, no boastful, stomach-turning video about women, no "lock-her-up" insult from the stage, no toxic tweet in the wee hours, could peel them away from the man whose crudities only made him more authentic in their eyes. To many of the Republicans who didn't come to the rallies — and to some of the lawmakers who faced the prospect of working with him in Washington — he was a disaster, a Republican Titanic sailing alongside Clinton's Democratic Lusitania. To the country at large, and much of the world, he polarized, repelled, entertained, shocked and fascinated.

Friday, November 4, 2016

Don't throw away your vote on Donald Trump.

A lot of people I grew up with in Wichita County TX (and some of them now live in other parts of the state or other states entirely) believe in the anti-Big Government myth of the Republican Party and are likely to pull the straight-ticket lever out of habit.

Some of them (regardless of religious beliefs) have probably rationalized their need to vote for Donald Trump in this way: "He's not perfect, but, then, he's not Hillary Clinton either."

Donald Trump may be loud and coarse and say incorrect things, but he's not one of you.

Donald Trump isn't going to improve the lives of people suffering from poverty.

Donald Trump isn't going to wave a wand and reverse the dying coal industry.

Donald Trump won't bring back jobs destined to be forever lost--and likely won't support job retraining either.

Donald Trump sees poor people only as a fanbase to wave to from a distance before
he boards a plane with the TRUMP brand and flies to the next town.

Donald Trump won't give you a living wage.

Donald Trump is the imperfect vessel the Republican Party is clinging to--in hopes that a Trump victory will restart the wrecking ball to government and social programs (aka "spending cuts") last seen knocking things over en masse during Ronald Reagan's Presidency.

If you're rich (or very rich), Donald Trump will care about you and see that legislation benefiting only you (and no income brackets below you) will be passed.

In summary, Donald Trump is just a bullying fake using your prejudices, your anger and sorrow over lost jobs and lower income and disappearance of certain "ways of life" to get you to pull a voting lever and, likely, fill the Breitbart empire's mail/e-mail lists with valuable information about you and your beliefs.

Don't let Donald Trump use and discard you.

Don't throw away your vote this Tuesday by falling for a fantasy that does not exist at all whatsoever.