The Evening Blues - 8-23-24



eb1pt12


The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Hollywood Fats

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Los Angeles guitarist Hollywood Fats. Enjoy!

Muddy Waters and Hollywood Fats - Got My Mojo Workin'

"The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans will kill a million Palestinians and say they’re doing it so Jesus will come back, whereas Democrats will kill a million Palestinians while making noises with their mouths like “ceasefire” and “two-state solution”.

That’s basically it; one does an evil thing in an evil way, while the other does the same evil thing in a much more photogenic way."

-- Caitlin Johnstone


News and Opinion

The Democratic Party Exists To Make Sure Good People Do Nothing

The reason I criticize the Democrats so much can be explained in the aphorism “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” The Democratic Party exists to ensure that good people will do nothing.

Gaza is such a perfect example of this. When Instagram progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez promulgates the blatant lie that Kamala Harris is “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza,” the result is that people who trust AOC will relax and stop pushing for an end to the genocide. They’ve been told by the congresswoman who’s been marketed as standing as far to the left as anyone can reasonably be that the current administration can be trusted to take care of this thing, so all they need to do to save Gaza is vote for the vice president in November.

It isn’t necessary to impose such manipulations upon Republicans, who simply support Israel’s atrocities in Gaza because they believe Muslims should be exterminated and because Israel is going to fulfill a biblical prophecy that will bring back Jesus and send all the heathens to burn in hell. Such manipulations are only necessary to politically nullify the kinds of people who would otherwise see what’s happening in Gaza and move mountains to end this mass atrocity.

So, so many of the world’s problems wouldn’t exist if the Democratic Party simply was what it pretends to be. If it really did stand against the sickest impulses of the Republican Party, if it really did stand for peace and justice and equality and ordinary working people, things would be unrecognizably different — not just for the United States, but for the entire world. Because good people would be doing something instead of nothing, evil would not triumph.

The Democratic Party exists to prevent this from happening. Instead of a good faction standing against an evil faction, the world’s most powerful and influential government instead has two evil factions working together toward the advancement of evil agendas. But what makes it so destructive is that it’s not just two openly evil factions: it’s one openly evil faction, and another faction which pretends to stand with good people against the evil faction.

If it was two openly evil factions, good people would immediately recognize that their goals are not being represented by either party, and a real revolutionary movement would emerge. What makes the Democratic Party such an effective psyop is that it stops good people from recognizing that everyone with power and influence in their country is their enemy. And it stops them from responding accordingly.


For ten and a half months American progressives have been mollified into a state of paralysis with empty words about a ceasefire and a two-state solution by a political party that has never had any real intention of bringing about either of these things. The Biden administration has been just as guilty in Israel’s genocidal atrocities as the Netanyahu regime itself, but by paying lip service to humanitarian concerns and pretending to be working toward peace while regularly leaking stories to the press about how angry and stern Biden is with Netanyahu, they’ve been able to wash their hands of their guilt in the eyes of many.

That has been the single defining feature of this presidential race. Not electing the first female president. Not stopping Trump. Not saving American democracy (whatever that means). The single defining feature of this presidential race has been one of America’s two mainstream factions claiming to want peace and justice for the Palestinians while supporting an administration that has been butchering them in a horrifying genocide.

That’s the effect of the Democratic Party, and it’s been doing this since long before October 7. Obama made a whole political legacy out of weaving tapestries of flowery prose expressing deep compassion and a love of peace and justice, while spending eight years continuing and expanding all the most depraved and murderous policies of his predecessor. Biden gave liberals throughout the western world a sigh of relief when he took office, because at long last “the adults are back in the room,” and now he’s waging a steadily escalating proxy war against a nuclear superpower while backing an actual genocide.

An empire whose existence depends on endless violence, oppression and exploitation at home and abroad cannot afford to have a major political party which stands against those things — so it doesn’t. And because it doesn’t while pretending that it does, it is able to relegate objections to this tyranny to the fringes of political discourse.


So I criticize the Democrats more than the Republicans because they require more criticism. That Republicans are evil is obvious at a glance to anyone with a conscience; that Democrats are evil is much less obvious, and usually requires quite a bit more consciousness and commentary to understand.

The empire has weaponized the insight that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing, so spreading awareness of the reality that the Democrats are not good people and are not doing good things helps take away that weapon.

Evil will continue to triumph as long as good people continue to do nothing, and good people will continue to do nothing as long as they believe their values and desires are represented by a political party whose sole purpose is to ensure the triumph of evil. Shattering that belief is an absolutely essential step toward a healthy world. This should be a major goal of good people everywhere.

There is a time in some negotiation processes where the best thing to do is to walk away from the table and seek other options. There is also an appropriate time to raise hell. I wish to suggest that when your negotiating "partners" reveal themselves to be implacable racist pigs hostile to your existence - it is a good time for the above options.

Democratic convention fails to meet uncommitted delegate deadline for Palestinian speaker

The Democratic national convention failed to make a 6pm CT deadline that the ceasefire delegates had set for a final decision on allowing a Palestinian American to speak from the main stage.

In a press conference outside the convention around 7pm CT, Abbas Alawieh, a leader of the uncommitted movement and an uncommitted delegate from Michigan, denounced the convention’s failure to listen to their demands.

“The scandal is that there are forces within Democratic party leadership who do not want us to talk about Palestinian human rights,” he said. “They’re out of step with the majority of the Democratic base, the majority of Democratic voters who believe that Palestinian human rights are a priority.” ...

At the press conference, movement leaders said they do not plan to disrupt the events inside the convention Thursday. They did say they are calling for Harris or senior members of her team to meet with the uncommitted movement in Michigan to talk about a ceasefire and arms embargo. They set a 15 September deadline for a meeting.


Muslim Women for Harris disbands and withdraws support for candidate

On the third night of the Democratic national convention, the group Muslim Women for Harris released a statement announcing that it was disbanding in response to the Harris-Walz campaign’s refusal to allow a Palestinian person to speak on the main stage.

The statement was released as members of the Uncommitted National Movement, which won 30 delegates to the convention, and their supporters held a sit-in outside of the convention. Ilhan Omar joined the demonstration for some time, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called in to the sit-in via FaceTime. The sit-in came after the anti-war group was told a Palestinian person would not be allowed to speak on the main stage – until then, whether or not such a speech would happen was up in the air.

During the sit-in, Muslim Women for Harris pulled their support for the Democratic nominee.

“We cannot in good conscience continue Muslim Women for Harris-Walz, in light of this new information from the Uncommitted movement, that VP Harris’ team declined their request to have a Palestinian American speaker take the stage at the DNC,” the group’s statement reads.

Prof. John Mearsheimer : A Destructive Foreign Policy

US officials say Gaza ceasefire ‘in sight’ but Israel and Hamas downbeat

US officials have expressed optimism that a ceasefire deal in the war in Gaza “is in sight”, despite growing indications from Israel and Hamas that a breakthrough is not imminent and as renewed fighting rages in parts of the Palestinian territory.

Washington has put pressure on both parties to accept a bridging proposal suggested during internationally mediated talks in Qatar last week, dispatching the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, on his ninth visit to the region since the conflict broke out 10 months ago. The latest round of negotiations, in which Hamas is not directly participating, were scheduled to restart in Cairo by Thursday but appear to have been postponed. ...

Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper quoted “officials knowledgable about the negotiations” as saying “the chances for a deal are slim” but attempts were being made to hold talks in Cairo on Friday and Saturday.

It said, quoting the same source, that Netanyahu insisted on an Israeli army “presence along the Philadelphi corridor” on the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt and that the US “demanded a significant withdrawal of troops” in two stages.

The paper said “the Americans understood the mistake” made by Blinken when he announced during his visit to Israel that Netanyahu had accepted a US proposal to bring the two sides closer together and that “the ball was now in Hamas’s court”.

Matt Hoh : Israel, Its Own Worst Enemy

Satellite images reveal Israel building new land corridor inside Gaza

Satellite imagery analyzed by the Forensic Architecture research group reveals the building of a new Israeli army land corridor east of Gaza City in the northern strip since November.


“Our analysis of satellite imagery from November 2023 through July 2024 reveals evidence of a new Israeli military corridor east of Gaza City,” Forensic Architecture wrote on 20 August in an update to a report from March.

“This new corridor constitutes the second Israeli-built east–west passage through Gaza, after the so-called ‘Netzarim Corridor.’ Together, these corridors are infrastructural indications of an intended permanent Israeli military presence in the northern parts of the occupied Gaza Strip,” the research group added.

The Netzarim corridor was established by Israeli forces during the early months of the war on Gaza.

The corridor, which runs through the former grounds of the old Netzarim settlement, splits the strip in two and prevents the return of displaced Palestinians to northern Gaza.

Israeli defense officials who spoke with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in February said the corridor is part of Tel Aviv's “plans to maintain security control over the enclave for some time.”

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : US Government in Search of Enemies

Ukraine Says It’s Using US-Provided HIMARS Inside Russia

Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces said Wednesday that its soldiers are using US-provided HIMARS rocket systems to target pontoon bridges and engineering equipment in Russia’s Kursk Oblast.

The statement, made on Telegram, marks the first time Kyiv has said it’s using US rockets inside Russia, which marks a significant escalation of the proxy war. The US has said Ukraine is allowed to use US-provided weapons in its Kursk offensive but has not confirmed the use of HIMARS. ...

The US still says that it won’t support long-range strikes inside Russian territory, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is pushing hard for the US and other NATO countries to lift all restrictions on the use of their weapons.

Germany deindustrialized, taps out of Ukraine

Arkansas supreme court stops abortion rights initiative from going to voters

The Arkansas supreme court upheld the state’s rejection of signed petitions for an abortion rights ballot initiative on Thursday, keeping the proposal from going before voters in November.

The ruling dashed the organizers’ hopes of getting the constitutional amendment measure on to the ballot in the predominantly Republican state, where many top leaders promote their opposition to abortion.

Election officials said Arkansans for Limited Government failed to comply with state law primarily because it submitted documentation regarding paid signature gatherers separately and not in a single bundle. The group argued that it should have been given more time to provide any additional documents needed.

“We find that the Secretary correctly refused to count the signatures collected by paid canvassers because the sponsor failed to file the paid canvasser training certification” in the way the law requires, Justice Rhonda Wood wrote for the 4-3 majority.

A dissenting justice wrote that the decision stripped Arkansans of their rights and in effect changed the state’s initiative law.

BREAKING! 818,000 New Jobs Were A HUGE LIE!

New Orleans ordered to pay $1m to teen who was sexually assaulted by cop

The city of New Orleans was ordered by a federal jury on Wednesday to pay $1m to a teenager who was sexually assaulted by one of the city’s police officers in 2020.

The federal civil trial, which was brought against the city by the teenager’s family on her behalf, began on Monday and lasted three days.

The jury deliberated for about three hours before reaching its verdict and found the city liable for hiring and failing to stop one of its officers, who had a criminal past, from molesting the teenager, and ordered the city to pay $1m to the victim, according to Nola.com.

The officer in question, Rodney Vicknair, died in prison earlier this year from brain cancer. He served less than six months of his 14-year sentence after pleading guilty to violating the teenager’s rights by sexually abusing her in 2020.



the horse race



"Two Faces of American Capitalism": Juan González on What the RNC & DNC Reveal About U.S. Politics

Behind silence over foreign policy at DNC, Democrats prepare escalation of global war

The most striking aspect of the Democratic National Convention, which is currently underway in Chicago, is the absence of any discussion of the foreign policy of either the Biden administration or a future Harris administration, despite the fact that the United States is currently engaged in a war against Russia and preparing for a potential war with China. The Democratic Party, and not just “Genocide Joe,” is fully culpable in the genocide in Gaza, which has officially killed 40,000 people, and could have killed as many as 200,000 people. Aside from a few insincere and hypocritical references to a “ceasefire,” the genocide has not been mentioned by the various officials who are dripping in the blood of the Palestinian people. ...

On Tuesday, the day Obama addressed the convention, the New York Times reported that the Biden administration has adopted a new nuclear strategy document that would significantly expand the number of deployed US nuclear weapons, further driving up the already exorbitant costs of a nuclear modernization program estimated at $6 trillion. “Biden Approved Secret Nuclear Strategy Refocusing on Chinese Threat” ran the headline of the Times article. Behind the backs of the American people, the Biden administration has authorized a new strategy that directs “US forces to prepare for possible coordinated nuclear confrontations with Russia, China and North Korea,” according to the Times.

The complete lack of discussion of US foreign policy at the Democratic convention is even more striking considering that the platform adopted on the first day of the convention includes major changes in language related to nuclear policy compared to that adopted four years ago. The 2020 platform condemned the Trump administration for building new nuclear weapons and pledged to expand nuclear non-proliferation treaties. However, all of this language is absent from the 2024 platform, which instead pledges to vastly expand the US nuclear arsenal. ...

Nowhere in the convention speeches was the demand to massively expand the US nuclear arsenal even hinted at, much less argued for. With no explanation, the Democratic Party platform has gone from declaring that building new nuclear weapons is “indefensible” to instead asserting that every single US nuclear weapons system must be “modernized,” invested in and upgraded, at the cost of trillions of dollars. In reality, the platform reflects a sea change in official US nuclear doctrine under the Biden administration, rejecting the concept of “mutually assured destruction” and instead proclaiming a “new nuclear age,” in which the US must not be “deterred” from waging war against nuclear-armed states by the threat of nuclear retaliation.

Media Gaslights about Kamala Fighting for a Ceasefire (w/ Ralph Nader)

The DNC Fiddles While the World Burns

An Orwellian disconnect haunts the 2024 Democratic National Convention. In the isolation of the convention hall, shielded from the outside world behind thousands of armed police, few of the delegates seem to realize that their country is on the brink of direct involvement in major wars with Russia and Iran, either of which could escalate into World War III.

Inside the hall, the mass slaughter in the Middle East and Ukraine are treated only as troublesome “issues,” which “the greatest military in the history of the world” can surely deal with. Delegates who unfurled a banner that read “Stop Arming Israel” during U.S. President Joe Biden’s speech on Monday night were quickly accosted by DNC officials, who instructed other delegates to use “We [Heart] Joe” signs to hide the banner from view.

In the real world, the most explosive flash point right now is the Middle East, where U.S. weapons and Israeli troops are slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly children and families, at the bidding of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And yet, in July, Democrats and Republicans leapt to their feet in 23 standing ovations to applaud Netanyahu’s warmongering speech to a joint session of Congress.

In the week before the DNC started, the Biden administration announced its approval for the sale of $20 billion in weapons to Israel, which would lock the U.S. into a relationship with the Israeli military for years to come.

Netanyahu’s determination to keep killing without restraint in Gaza, and Biden and Congress’ willingness to keep supplying him with weapons to do so, always risked exploding into a wider war, but the crisis has reached a new climax. Since Israel has failed to kill or expel the Palestinians from Gaza, it is now trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, a war to degrade Israel’s enemies and restore the illusion of military superiority that it has squandered in Gaza.

To achieve its goal of triggering a wider war, Israel assassinated Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah commander, in Beirut, and Hamas’ political leader and chief cease-fire negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Iran has vowed to respond militarily to the assassinations, but Iran’s leaders are in a difficult position. They do not want a war with Israel and the United States, and they have acted with restraint throughout the massacre in Gaza. But failing to respond strongly to these assassinations would encourage Israel to conduct further attacks on Iran and its allies.

The assassinations in Beirut and Tehran were clearly designed to elicit a response from Iran and Hezbollah that would draw the U.S. into the war. Could Iran find a way to strike Israel that would not provoke a U.S. response? Or, if Iran’s leaders believe that is impossible, will they decide that this is the moment to actually fight a seemingly unavoidable war with the U.S. and Israel?

This is an incredibly dangerous moment, but a cease-fire in Gaza would resolve the crisis. The U.S. has dispatched CIA Director William Burns, the only professional diplomat in Biden’s cabinet, to the Middle East for renewed cease-fire talks, and Iran is waiting to see the result of the talks before responding to the assassinations.

Burns is working with Qatari and Egyptian officials to come up with a revised cease-fire proposal that Israel and Hamas can both agree to. But Israel has always rejected any proposal for more than a temporary pause in its assault on Gaza, while Hamas will only agree to a real, permanent cease-fire. Could Biden have sent Burns just to stall, so that a new war wouldn’t spoil the Dems’ party in Chicago?

The United States has always had the option of halting weapons shipments to Israel to force it to agree to a permanent cease-fire. But it has refused to use that leverage, except for the suspension of a single shipment of 2,000-pound bombs in May, after it had already sent Israel 14,000 of those horrific weapons, which it uses to systematically smash living children and families into unidentifiable pieces of flesh and bone.

Meanwhile the war with Russia has also taken a new and dangerous turn, with Ukraine invading Russia’s Kursk region. Some analysts believe this is only a diversion before an even riskier Ukrainian assault on the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Ukraine’s leaders see the writing on the wall, and are increasingly ready to take any risk to improve their negotiating position before they are forced to sue for peace.

But Ukraine’s recent incursion into Russia, while applauded by much of the West, has actually made negotiations less likely. In fact, talks between Russia and Ukraine on energy issues were supposed to start in the coming weeks. The idea was that each side would agree not to target the other’s energy infrastructure, with the hope that this could lead to more comprehensive talks. But after Ukraine’s invasion toward Kursk, the Russians pulled out of what would have been the first direct talks since the early weeks of the Russian invasion.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy remains in power three months after his term of office expired, and he is a great admirer of Israel. Will he take a page from Netanyahu’s playbook and do something so provocative that it will draw U.S. and NATO forces into the potentially nuclear war with Russia that Biden has promised to avoid?

A 2023 U.S. Army War College study found that even a non-nuclear war with Russia could result in as many U.S. casualties every two weeks as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did in two decades, and it concluded that such a war would require a return to conscription in the United States.

While Gaza and Eastern Ukraine burn in firestorms of American and Russian bombs and missiles, and the war in Sudan rages on unchecked, the whole planet is rocketing toward catastrophic temperature increases, ecosystem breakdown, and mass extinctions. But the delegates in Chicago are in la-la land about U.S. responsibility for that crisis too.

Under the slick climate plan former President Barack Obama sold to the world in Copenhagen and Paris, Americans’ per capita CO2 emissions are still around double those of our Chinese, British, and European neighbors, while U.S. oil and gas production have soared to all-time record highs.

The combined dangers of nuclear war and climate catastrophe have pushed the hands of the Doomsday Clock all the way to 90 seconds to midnight. But the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial complex. Behind the election-year focus on what the two parties disagree about, the corrupt policies they both agree on are the most dangerous of all.

President Biden recently claimed that he is “running the world.” No oligarchic American politician will confess to “running the world” to the brink of nuclear war and mass extinction, but tens of thousands of Americans marching in the streets of Chicago and millions more Americans who support them understand that that is what Biden, former President Donald Trump, and their cronies are doing.

The people inside the convention hall should shake themselves out of their complacency and start listening to the people in the streets. Therein lies the real hope, maybe the only hope, for America’s future.

Thousands March Against U.S. Arming of Israel as Harris Accepts Presidential Nomination



the evening greens


Global surge of water-related violence led by Israeli attacks on Palestinian supplies

Israeli attacks on Palestinian water supplies in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip accounted for a quarter of all water-related violence in 2023, as armed conflicts over dwindling resources surged globally, according to new research.

Almost 350 water conflicts were documented worldwide in 2023, a 50% rise on 2022, which was also a record year, according to the Pacific Institute, a California-based nonpartisan thinktank tracking water violence. The violence included attacks on dams, pipelines, wells, treatment plants and workers, as well as public unrest and disputes over access to water, and the use of water as a weapon of war.

Overall, water-related violence has been rising steadily since 2000 but has surged in recent years as the climate crisis and growing scarcity exacerbate old conflicts over land, ideology and religion, economics and sovereignty, and new ones erupt, according to the Water Conflict Chronology. In 2000, just 20 water conflicts were documented by the tracker.

Regions with major jumps in water violence include Latin America and the Caribbean, a region hit by drought and unequal access to water resources, where year-on-year the number of incidents rose more than threefold to 48 in 2023. In Bolívar, Colombia, police fired guns and teargas to disperse residents protesting a 10-day water outage, injuring four. Meanwhile in India, severe drought and community disputes over access to irrigation water for farmland drove a 150% increase in water conflicts last year, with 25 incidents including clashes between communities in the neighboring southern states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka over the Cauvery River.

“All these cases highlight different aspects of the growing water crisis: the failure to enforce and respect international law; the failure to provide safe water and sanitation for all; and the growing threat of climate change and severe drought,” said Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, an independent research and policy organization which created the conflict tracker in 1985. “There was a massive uptick in violence over water in 2023, widely around the world, but especially in the Middle East.” Water conflicts in the Middle East accounted for 38% of last year’s total, driven in large part by attacks on Palestinian water supplies and infrastructure in the occupied territories.

We must restore nature to avoid global catastrophe, warns biodiversity summit president

Humanity risks catastrophic global heating if it focuses only on decarbonisation at the expense of restoring the natural world, Colombia’s environment minister has said in the lead-up to the world’s key nature summit later this year.

Susana Muhamad, who will be president of the UN biodiversity Cop16 summit in Cali in October, said that a singular focus on cutting carbon emissions while failing to restore and protect natural ecosystems would be “dangerous for humanity” and risk societal collapse. ...

While the nature crisis has risen up the global political agenda, with a 2022 UN agreement to halt the loss of biodiversity by the end of the decade, thenature summits – which take place every two years – do not enjoy the same attention from governments and world leaders as meetings about the climate, which are attended by tens of thousands of delegates every year.

Ahead of talks, Muhamad urged governments from the global north to make good on their commitments to increase funding for nature restoration, adding that Cop16 would focus on how to mobilise alternative sources of finance from the private sector.

She called for countries to “make a gesture to increase trust in the conference and actually put their money in the global biodiversity fund that we approved in Montreal [at Cop15 in 2022]. It would be a sign that we are committed”.

Big polluters targeting esports industry with advertising deals, report reveals

Oil companies, petrostates, airlines and carmakers are among the big polluters bombarding the esports industry with adverts, a study has found. Esports, short for electronic sports, are competitive video games watched by spectators, with multiplayer games such as League of Legends and Defense of the Ancients 2 attracting peak viewer figures in the millions.

The campaign group Badvertising counted at least 33 large-scale deals that carbon-intensive companies have struck with the booming industry since 2017. Most of the deals the researchers found were made with carmakers. A further five were made with fossil fuel companies, three with airlines, two with petrostates and two with the US military.

“Our research shows that polluting companies facing the mounting pressure to move away from fossil fuels are doubling down on esports sponsorship to maintain influence,” said Andrew Simms, a co-founder of Badvertising. ...

Climate-damaging companies have long sought to improve their public image by sponsoring sporting events. They are now also looking to the fast-growing esports industry, which has an estimated half a billion viewers and is particularly popular among young people.


Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Republicans Kill Civilians For Bad Guy Reasons, Democrats Kill Civilians For Nice Guy Reasons

Probing US Regime-Change in Pakistan & Bangladesh

Patrick Lawrence: Zelensky’s Misadventures in Kursk

On the UK Terrorism Act

The Right to be Left Alone


A Little Night Music

Blasters featuring Hollywood Fats - Rock and Roll Will Stand

Hollywood Fats - Okie Dokie Stomp

Hollywood Fats Band with Roy Brown - Boogie Woogie Blues

Hollywood Fats Band - Shake Your Boogie

Hollywood Fats Band - Rambler

Hollywood Fats - She's Dynamite

Hollywood Fats Band - Too Many Drivers

Hollywood Fats Band - Red Head Woman

Hollywood Fats Band - Tribute to T-Bone Walker

Hollywood Fats Band - RPM Boogie


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Comments

QMS's picture

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Yeah! Got some good stuff up there joe.
Thanks for your werks.

Have a great weekend!

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6 users have voted.

truth is considered foreign influence, world peace is a threat to national security

joe shikspack's picture

@QMS

glad you're digging the tunes, have a great evening!

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4 users have voted.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4844566-rfk-jr-suspends-campaign-t...

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Friday he was suspending his campaign and throwing his support to former President Trump.

Kennedy said his name would remain on the ballot in most red and blue states but would be removed from swing-state ballots where he could make a difference.

In Pennsylvania, court records showed Kennedy making the move to remove his name and his intended backing of Trump just before he took to a podium. Earlier Friday, Kennedy moved to remove his name from Arizona’s ballot.

In a lengthy press conference announcing his decision, Kennedy spent most of his time ripping the Democratic Party and the media, arguing his campaign was unable to get a fair shake.

In Phoenix, Kennedy told an audience that he would stop his bid in 10 key battlegrounds.

“In my heart, I no longer believe that I have a realistic path to electoral victory in the face of this relentless, systematic censorship and media control,” he said. “So I cannot in good conscience ask my staff and volunteers to keep working their long hours, or ask my donor to keep giving when I cannot honestly, tell them, that I have a real path to the White House.”

“In those meetings, he suggested that we join forces as a unity party,” Kennedy said about talking with Trump.

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QMS's picture

@humphrey
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he is leveraging his influence to damage the democrats
wish he would use that mojo to support Stein instead

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13 users have voted.

truth is considered foreign influence, world peace is a threat to national security

@QMS although her open border policy is very destructive to the country.
Nobody understands this in the US like people in the borders states, of which I am one.

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8 users have voted.

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

joe shikspack's picture

@on the cusp

one brighter note there, it is likely that stein would cease many of the stupid policies and interventions that create desperation south of the border and drive immigration.

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8 users have voted.

@joe shikspack agree with that, joe.

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6 users have voted.

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

@humphrey
where he could possibly take enough votes from Trump to swing Blue. He needs not to feed the spoiler accusation. He has already begun to have his name removed from these swing state ballots, so the only way to vote for would be write in, assuming that is allowed in that particular state.

Technically he has only ‘suspended’ his campaign. He welcomes votes from from all states where he remains on the ballot. The objective is to surpass the 5% vote threshold nationally, which would establish his third party viability so he will not have to repeat the laborious process of collecting 1,000,000+ ballot signatures the next time he runs.

Where I live, in MA, he will remain on the ballot and I will continue working on his behalf toward exceeding the magic 5% number. The possibility of him winning true blue MA is nil.

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“ …and when we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine,and understand who God is, and what our own potential is and duties are as human beings.- RFK jr. 8/26/2024

joe shikspack's picture

@humphrey

it's hard to say what the impact will be, especially since kennedy was pulling votes from both parties (though there's a lot of argument over which party he drew most from).

perhaps if kennedy does public appearances with trump and rips into kopmala effectively, garnering lots of media, he might make a bigger dent.

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6 users have voted.
snoopydawg's picture

@humphrey

But the ending isn’t and is good read.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/watch-live-rfk-jr-addresses-nation
His family’s statement:

“Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

Such hypothetical game players.

It wasn’t enough to reach office but it got his foot in the door after RFK Jr. was shunned by Democrat Party insiders in their initial effort to prop up husk of a president, Joe Biden.

Now they are stuck with Biden’s insurance policy, Kamala Harris.

It terrified the Dems to have RFK Jr. in the running, so they rigged the rules, banned him from state ballots, and vilified him as extreme. And to dampen his impact on the Harris-Walz ticket, after trying to deny him ballot access and remove RFK Jr. from the state ballots he made his way to, Democrats will now attempt to keep him on ballots to hurt Trump.

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10 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Voting is like driving with a toy steering wheel.

@snoopydawg

It seems to be a bit biased but it is very informative.

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Cassiodorus's picture

@snoopydawg So which values do the Dems hold these days? The values of first-term Reagan administration foreign policy?

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6 users have voted.

"If genocide is not a deal-breaker for you, there is something wrong with you." - Nick Cruse

snoopydawg's picture

@Cassiodorus

Definitely if genocide isn’t your red line pray tell what the fck is?

Kennedy listed all the issues that dems used to stand for and I wondered if anyone from the base would reject that. Lo and behold I read a shitlib mocking his statement. Biden’s censorship is my biggest issue, but I see so many shitlibs in favor of it. SMDH. Is it a failure of civil rights in schools or what explains it?

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6 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Voting is like driving with a toy steering wheel.

snoopydawg's picture

.

Saudi Arabia agreement or the Abraham Accords that happened during Trump. It’s been put on hold since October 7 because SA is insisting that Palestinians have their own state….or are they really?
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/08/23/the-us-push-for-saudi-recognition-...

Saudi Arabia’s formal entry into this scheme carries far-reaching and dangerous ramifications for Palestine and the broader region.

SA has cracked down on anyone being pro Palestinian online going back 10 years.

Anyhoo it clears things up some.

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6 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Voting is like driving with a toy steering wheel.

joe shikspack's picture

@snoopydawg

the interests of the saudi people and the saudi regime are not the same. the people are supportive of palestinian sovereignty, the regime would gladly cut the palestinians loose in order to promote their selfish priorities. the regime, however, knows post 10/7 that they don't dare go against the people's will on this issue.

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6 users have voted.
snoopydawg's picture

@joe shikspack
It would definitely screw up their relationship with China which would be a dumb move to tie itself to the 2 pariahs America and Israel. China is rising whilst we are going down. They’d have to give up BRICS and for what gain?

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5 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Voting is like driving with a toy steering wheel.

@snoopydawg
into those 'peace accords' and how, by screwing over the Pals and effectively
killing a real two-state solution that it actually helped precipitate the 10/7 attacks - which were at least partly a last-ditch attempt to prevent their being fully implemented...

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2 users have voted.
Sima's picture

Just wanted to say I was sorry for missing the commenting on the Open Thread yesterday. Things got busy, not in a bad way, but very busy. So I couldn't get on the computer until around now. Everything is good, just had an unexpected friend encounter, which was great!

Hope everyone's Friday is rocking! Have a great weekend!

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10 users have voted.

If you're poor now, my friend, then you'll stay poor.
These days, only the rich get given more. -- Martial book 5:81, c. AD 100 or so
Nothing ever changes -- Sima, c. AD 2020 or so

@Sima No worries, chica!

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7 users have voted.

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

joe shikspack's picture

@Sima

good to see you, glad to hear that you're having a life (you know, away from the computer). Smile

have a great weekend!

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6 users have voted.
enhydra lutris's picture

Alexander Mercouris is of the opinion that the Ukies might not make it intact to the US election, and he suspects that this might bode ill for the Dems. HEH. Understatement anybody?

Since it's the political season, I'll post a few quotes I just looked up for other purposes, all Leo Tolstoy:

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.

We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

Have a great weekend
be well and have a good one

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9 users have voted.

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

joe shikspack's picture

@enhydra lutris

that tolstoy had a fine understanding of things.

have a great weekend!

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7 users have voted.
joe shikspack's picture

apparently, the dems thought that they could buy off cornel west:

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7 users have voted.

@joe shikspack

It is good to see that Cornel West has more integrity in his baby finger than those slimy democrats have in their whole body.

I wonder which states that he will be on the ballot?

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6 users have voted.
joe shikspack's picture

@humphrey

ballotpedia (not sure if it is up to date) has him on 9 states' ballots:

https://ballotpedia.org/Cornel_West

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5 users have voted.
dystopian's picture

Hi all, Hey Joe,

Thanks for all the great tunes... the news ain't yer fault. Wink

Been record heat here this week, some local WU stations showed 107-8 several days straight. Was especially nice the couple hours 40 customers in the area had no power yesterday at peak heat. Been too hot for too long here now.

Thanks for the great sounds man! Have a great weekend!

happy trails all!

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6 users have voted.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein

joe shikspack's picture

@dystopian

wow, that's pretty nasty heat! sorry to hear about that. i feel guilty because for the last week we've had a preview of fall weather, though it is supposed to warm up next week again.

have a great weekend and stay cool!

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5 users have voted.

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6 users have voted.
joe shikspack's picture

@humphrey

i hope that they act with alacrity, though in a legal process that is pretty rare when powerful states are involved.

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4 users have voted.

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6 users have voted.

I hope that our resident troll I won't mention his name sees this.

The rest of the tweet:

According to Politico, Brown called the Ukrainian military incapable of performing real combat missions, but only capable of taking selfies.

According to Brown, a huge amount of money was invested in this operation, essentially to take a few photographs.

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4 users have voted.