New Poem: BLUE MAGA HAIKU

 vote blue regardless 

 vote blue you no matter who

 vote blue mindless now

Regarding Sen. Katie Britt’s SOTU Response

What I saw of the Katie Britt SOTU rebuttal (couldn’t bring myself to endure the whole thing) reminded me of fundraising appeals that either come from televangelists or hucksters preying on seniors who watch MeTV, Buzzr, etc.

Obviously, it was intended as a soft-sell version of Trump’s standard apocalyptic Hulk Smash bigotry and Bidenphobia.  But it seemed like an audition video for a local TV news anchor position—heavy on smiling while reading copy off the teleprompter.  With the occasional look this is serious face.

THE NEW YORK TIMES gives Donald Trump water wings.

Quote below is from an article by Rebecca Davis O’Brien titled WHY THE AGE ISSUE IS HURTING BIDEN SO MUCH MORE THAN TRUMP.  

“It is the perception of how you communicate,” said Carol Kinsey Goman, a speaker and coach on leadership presence. “When Trump makes those kinds of faux pas, he just brushes it off, and people don’t say, ‘Oh, he’s aging.’ He makes at least as many mistakes as Joe Biden, but because he does it with this bravado, it doesn’t seem like senility. It seems like passion.”

New Poem: MASTODON FIGHT

 get ready once more

 two mastodons enter the stadium

 for more roars and tusk-butts

 >

 the media loves rematches

 even if most of the public doesn’t 

 >

 watch Donald dance away 

 from what he stirred up on 1/6/21

 heh heh, nothing to do with me

 they got overexcited on their own

 you don’t mind if I squash civil liberties next time

 >

 see Joe bark at those who

 dare to bring up Israel and Gaza

 and his failure to distance from Bibi’s slaughter 

 he says look, I cut insulin prices

 and got both parties to agree on infrastructure 

 >

 someone asks why he doesn’t tout the accomplishments 

 instead of always shouting OOGA BOOGA TRUMP

 the crowd boos the question 

 Joe resumes the stump speech 

 this is what we get

 when we don’t have big donor money

 or super PAC clout

 to push for real change

 to keep old men with outmoded methods 

 away from oval offices and nuclear footballs 

New Poem: WE NEED BORING

 hear the conservatives cry

 see them make twisted sad faces

 world heals as they retreat

 into playing familiar culture war games

 moans of they’re taking this away

 >

 thank the good Lord for boredom 

 all hail smooth running competence

 praise the desire to fix what’s broken

 we need boring in our great land

 government letting us breathe again

 

 

Mitch McConnell announces the death of bipartisanship in the Biden era

 Manu Raju of CNN: “...McConnell has privately informed associates that he plans to target President Joe Biden's agenda, with a push to unify Republicans on the grounds that it amounts to liberal overreach, another sign that he sees Trump as in the rearview mirror.”

Democrats should no longer be touting bipartisanship if Republicans intend to repeat the obstruction of the Obama years.

New Poem: CLEANUP ON AISLE USA

 sweep away broken glass

 wipe the inhuman stain off cracked walls

 restock the long-empty shelves

 renew customer service 

 hire new, well-vetted employees

 reopen 24/7/365 for all, not just the few

 

 

New Poem: CAPITOL HILL RAMBLE

 after the deaths and desecration the Democrats and the Republicans are set to agree in their own ways to move on and put the demon back in the bottle so people will get back to consuming, waiting for the vaccine and increasing stock prices after a few days to allow public venting and promises of a post- Presidency Senate trial plus saying pretty pretty please to the malign immovable object still hunkering down in the Oval Office making his pardon list and checking it twice while periodically looking at TV to see if anyone’s still weeping over his being silenced by social media meanwhile agitators whose names we all know refuse to resign on principle (President-elect says vote them out next election) just like the President whose poisonous water they still carry through the moral desert they choose to live in—and please remember 70 million people, some of them wanting nothing more than tax cuts, judges, persecution of immigrants and environmental deregulation, these 70 million who voted for Donald Trump and Michael Pence have to own their role in the deaths (including a Capitol Policeman) that resulted from The Donald trying to stay in office at his pleasure, almost marching democracy to the gallows erected outside 

New Poem: PARDON TRAIN

 get on board

 get on board

 there’s nothing you have to answer for

 such a shame it ended in Year Four

 get on board

 get on board

 you did what you had to do

 use it to raise money for term two

 get on board

 get on board

 count on short public memory

 rewrite your legacy as autobiography 

 get on board

 get on board

 

 

 

Donald Trump’s Greatest Transition-Delaying Hits

 1. The More I Ignore You

 2. Rudy, Don’t Fail (Remix)

 3. Losing Made Me Grey

 4. I’m A Wrecking Machine

 5. Drill Baby Drill (duet with Sarah Palin)

 6. Scott Atlas Shrugged 

 7. My Fans Don’t Want A Concession Speech

 8. You’re Fired!

 9.  I Pardon Myself

Bill Clinton in 1996 Equals Joe Biden in 2020.

This is what fearful, non ambitious centrist triangulation once gave us—and, after last night, gives again. Turning the floor over to Bill Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union address, excerpt here:

The era of big government is over. But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.Instead, we must go forward as one America, one nation working together to meet the challenges we face together. Self-reliance and teamwork are not opposing virtues; we must have both.

I believe our new, smaller government must work in an old-fashioned American way, together with all of our citizens through state and local governments, in the workplace, in religious, charitable and civic associations.

Jelani Cobb on Joe Biden’s Thursday debate stumbles.

Excerpted from THE NEW YORKER:
For most of the evening, the author Marianne Williamson spoke at the periphery of the issues, but she was right about one thing: the coalition of voters needed to remove Trump from office will be drawn to the candidate who reminds them least of who we are at this moment and most of who we aspire to be. On Thursday, that was not Joe Biden. Kamala Harris’s unsparing sharpness and unsentimental willingness to flay Biden onstage only served to highlight that fact.

Nathan Robinson on Joe Biden’s making nice with toxic people.

Excerpts from a GUARDIAN column:

You can be everybody in Washington’s best buddy, or you can move the country toward justice, but you cannot do both. This is because there are powerful political figures standing in the way of justice, and the steps you need to take are going to alienate them. Biden’s career is best understood as what happens when a person who is not actively evil decides to prioritize chumminess and conformity over taking difficult moral stands.

Unfortunately, Biden’s “DC chumminess” has characterized his entire career. He has long declined to take morally necessary stands that might alienate powerful people, preferring to be friends with “everybody.” This is only possible, of course, because Biden has rarely had to encounter the people outside that “everybody” – the Iraqis blown to pieces thanks to his Iraq war vote, the children thrown in prison thanks to his crime bill.


The problem here is not Biden’s “bipartisanship”. Sometimes you have to work with people whose values you find repellent. Finding points of common interest is basic political pragmatism (see, for example, the bipartisan Yemen resolution shepherded through the Senate by Bernie Sanders). The problem comes when you get so close to the powerful, and spend so long around them, that you cease to be disgusted by disgusting things. At this point, “friendliness” just means a lack of moral seriousness. To be chummy with banks is to be cruel to bankrupt debtors. To be chummy with Mike Pence is to be cruel to LGBT people. There come times when you have to take a stand, when you have to give your answer to that old labor question: Which Side Are You On?

Ultimately, the Biden approach to politics is a bankrupt one. If you’re all smiles and flattery, you are not really committed to a set of progressive political values. As Biden himself recently said to a room full of wealthy people, “nothing would fundamentally change” if he was elected.

But we do not need leaders who want to be everybody’s friend, we need leaders who know who their friends are and in whose interest power needs to be exercised. You can’t be everybody’s chum.

Hamilton Nolan on Joe Biden’s latest political life.

Excerpted from THE GUARDIAN:

I am not mad at Joe Biden. He is a type. His type is “The Old Way of Doing Things.” Now that he is in the race, his type is represented. He rounds out the field. Now, Democratic voters truly have the entire buffet of choices, from “True Leftist Insurgent” to “Bland, Winning Young Résumé-Polisher” to “Indistinguishable Ambitious Congresspersons” to “The Same Old Kind of White Guy As Always”.

This is nothing to fear. This is healthy. This is a perfect referendum on where our country is now. Joe Biden, the avatar of the past, believes that he’s well positioned because after the shock of the Trump years, people want to go back to where we were. Wrong. People want to go somewhere new. I fully expect Joe Biden to step out of his campaign headquarters and fall directly into the huge pit that has opened up as America moved tectonically to the left. There is nothing scary about the candidate that represents the political philosophy that produced in the public the deadly cynicism that gave us Donald Trump. This plain fact will never be accepted by the sort of people who believe that Joe Biden is the answer, because accepting it is an indictment of an entire generation of leaders who consider themselves quite successful.

The Republican party has long been a corrupt tool for serving the interests of the rich by lying to the poor; dwelling on their role in bringing us here is like scolding an alligator for biting off your hand after you stuck it in his mouth. The Democrats are the ones who were supposed to save us. It was their failure in this duty that allowed the catastrophes to pile up. They failed to stop the post-Reagan explosion of economic inequality; they failed to stop the militarism that has embroiled us in endless war; they failed to argue for things like healthcare and education as rights rather than purchases; they fed our most vulnerable citizens to an evil machine labeled “criminal justice” in exchange for votes from racists. They earned their turn in power by agreeing not to use that power for the common good. And here we are: incredibly divided, hopelessly unequal, justifiably sick of our broken institutions, and very, very angry.

Good luck on the campaign trail, Joe. You’re about to meet an America that has already left you behind. I’m sorry you’ll have to find out the hard way.

Moira Donegan on excuses made for Joe Biden’s behavior

Excerpted from THE GUARDIAN:
The argument that Biden’s inappropriate touching of women is somehow innocent also implies that feminists who object to Biden’s brand of touching have set the bar for women’s public dignity too high – especially considering who’s currently in the White House. Wouldn’t you rather have the infantilizing shoulder rubs and hair kisses of Joe Biden, the thinking goes, than the boorish pussy grabbing of Donald Trump? To those who argue that while Trump’s alleged harassment is unacceptable, Biden’s is tolerable, I would reply firmly that women should not have to accept either. A culture that does not tolerate sexual harassment – the kind of culture that ours must become – must not allow for lesser evils to continue simply because worse violations exist. It must value women more highly than that.

Full column available here: 
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/02/joe-biden-inapprorpriate-touching-lucy-flores?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Rebecca Traister on the deficits of Joe Biden.

Excerpt from Rebecca Traister’s article for NEW YORK magazine: https://www.thecut.com/2019/03/joe-biden-isnt-the-answer-for-president-in-2020.html
Biden carries himself with the confidence of a winner, despite not having won, or even come close to winning, either of the previous presidential primaries he’s entered. He is the guy whose self-assured conviction that his authority will protect him from rebuke has always preceded him into any room, whose confident sense of his own entitlement repels potential objection like Gore-Tex repels rain. He is the gaffe-master, the affable fuck-up, and also, oddly, the politician who’s supposed to make us feel safe. He is the amiable, easygoing, handsy-but-harmless guy who’s never going to give you a hard time about your own handsiness or prejudice, who’s gonna make a folksy argument about enacting fundamentally restrictive policies.

For his whole career, Biden’s role has been to comfort the lost, prized, and most fondly imagined Democratic voter, the one who’s like him: that guy in the diner, that guy in Ohio, that guy who’s white and so put off by the changed terms of gendered and racial power in this country that decades ago he fled for the party that was working to roll back the social advancements that had robbed him of his easy hold on power. That guy who believed that the system worked best when it worked for him.

Biden is the Democrats’ answer to the hunger to “make America great again,” dressed up in liberal clothes. The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie has in fact argued that Biden’s racial politics have offered a form of Trumpism on the left, a “liberal cover to white backlash.” To that I would add, he has provided liberal cover to anti-feminist backlash, the kind of old-fashioned paternalism of powerful men who don’t take women’s claims to their reproductive, professional, or political autonomy particularly seriously, who walk through the world with a casual assurance that men’s access to and authority over women’s bodies is natural. In an attempt to win back That Guy, Joe Biden has himself, so very often, been That Guy.

Now it seems, That Guy is widely viewed as the best and safest candidate to get us out of this perilous and scary political period. But the irony is that so much of what is terrifying and dangerous about this time — the Trump administration, the ever more aggressive erosion of voting and reproductive rights, the crisis in criminal justice and yawning economic chasm between the rich and everyone else — are in fact problems that can in part be laid at the feet of Joe Biden himself, and the guys we’ve regularly been assured are Democrats’ only answer.

Sad but telling comment on some of our electorate.

Excerpted from a comment by Randy Matthews on HOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE related to a Biden-drops-out, Hillary-ascendant post:
Trump could seriously be a candidate for President. Just as I can't believe that Schwarzenegger was Governor. This really does feel like "Back to the Future II" day. 

Poem: ON THE PASSAGE OF NORTH CAROLINA AMENDMENT ONE

it's in the state charter now
everybody who's not cut out for
traditional marriage has to
hide in a closet
and pass for straight
and never ever ever ever
bother the people of North Carolina
unless you live in liberal areas
like Chapel Hill or Carrboro--
you know, those places
with know-it-all eggheads
who like activist judges
>
the closet's going to get bigger
and bigger just like the stateroom
in The Marx Brothers movie
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA
and eventually people will spill out
with the door off its hinges
>
then, the 61% will have to
put their moral values on a scale
and weigh what Jesus actually said
or didn't say in the Bible about LGBTs
versus all the hate that pastors
named (and not named) Graham
pump into them like IV drips
in an ancient hospital
where the windows are nailed shut
and painted black
to keep out the light.

London GUARDIAN article assesses Obama one year into Presidency.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/jan/16/gary-younge-obama-first-year

Although the article linked above has an unnecessarily dumb-edgy "Even Charles Manson could beat him" tagline, it has some sobering assessments of Year One of the Obama presidential term as the White House and the Democratic Party plan to metaphorically go over Niagra Falls in a barrel to ensure that the Massachusetts senate seat vacated by the late Ted Kennedy doesn't go to a Republican. As the media is drumbeating, this could be the (gasp!) end of the health-industry-friendly health care plan--and possibly the beginning of Obama being forced to do Clinton-esque soccer-mom pandering (plus more capitulation to Republicans) for his remaining three years in office.

Take a look at this passage in particular (highlighting by me):
"Many on America's left are also ­disgruntled with Obama. They believe the healthcare reform, without a public option, will be inadequate, that the war in Afghanistan will unravel, the stimulus bill was insufficient to kick-start the economy and that his economic team is being run by Wall Street. But unlike the right they have so far failed to turn their disillusionment into a potent political force."

If the Tuesday Senate replacement election doesn't go Obama and the Democratic Party's way, it's safe to say that the sort-of-left in this country will opt more for depressive rationalization of the "oh, he had too much to contend with from the Bush years" instead of organizing for meaningful Change that benefits people who won't cash corporate paychecks during their lifetimes.

VP-elect Joe Biden protects a member of the political brotherhood.

Found the following note about Joe Biden's LARRY KING LIVE appearance on HOLLYWOOD-ELSEWHERE: http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2008/12/hold_up_there_3.php

Of course, Biden thinks throwing shoes at soon-to-be-ex President George Butch Jr. is "uncalled for"; Biden helped make the Iraq War possible.