The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

[Bill Fite]

1 hour ago, Douglas Caddy said:

Another must-read. I read the full article in the print edition of the New York Times today. It is an eye-opener.

 

Their America Is Vanishing. Like Trump, They Insist They Were Cheated. (yahoo.com)

Interesting article.

Those interviewed in the article aren't the only ones who think that they have been disenfranchised.

 

[Douglas Caddy]

Surprise?

 

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas temporarily blocks Sen. Graham's subpoena from Georgia grand jury (msn.com)

[Douglas Caddy]

 

Alito Assured Ted Kennedy in 2005 of Respect for Roe v. Wade, Diary Says – DNyuz

[W. Niederhut]

3 minutes ago, Douglas Caddy said:

Surprise?

 

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas temporarily blocks Sen. Graham's subpoena from Georgia grand jury (msn.com)

If anything, people in positions of authority and responsibility should be held to a high standard in cases of criminal conduct, including election fraud, shouldn't they?

That's one thing that puzzles me about these endless evasions of accountability by Trump and his election-hacking accomplices.

They behave as if their political offices excuse them from complying with laws and procedures that the rest of us routinely obey.

[Matthew Koch]

7 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

They behave as if their political offices excuse them from complying with laws and procedures that the rest of us routinely obey.

When Eric Holder was involved with sending guns to Mexican Cartels he was found in contempt but did't get jail time.

The country didn't have derangement syndrome and wasn't persecuting their ideological enemies aka political rivals back then. 

 

 

[Matthew Koch]

2 hours ago, Matt Allison said:

Yep.

Putin is a terrorist. Ultimately, he will use a dirty bomb or tactical nuke in an attempt to get his way because he is out of options.

I would imagine the efforts to remove or assassinate him are moving as quickly as possible.

Matt and William sound like John Bolton (Neo Con)

 

[W. Niederhut]

Apparently, our new forum member from the MAGA-verse, M. Koch, still hasn't figured out that Operation Fast & Furious was launched by the Bush/Cheney administration, in an attempt to trace guns to the Mexican cartels.

But, more importantly, it's another MAGA deflection by M. Koch -- a moronic Both Siderist/What About-ism-- to change the subject from Trump and his election-hacking accomplices (including Senator Lindsey Graham) evading accountability for their unprecedented 2020 political crimes.

Isn't it great having our once scholarly forum thread cluttered with this kind of Faux MAGA nonsense? 🤥

Edited October 24, 2022 by W. Niederhut

[Matthew Koch]

12 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

Isn't it great having our once scholarly forum thread cluttered with this kind of Faux MAGA nonsense? 🤥

Just pointing out our Ivy League Scholor William only tells half the story and lies by omission. The Point that you apparently are too midwittied to understand is that Erick Holder did the same thing you were complaining about MAGA people like Steve Bannon were doing. As they say in Russia William "DUH!!!" 

What does William choose to do Focus on Bush Admin WHY?  Because he's a walking talking logical fallacy
 

Edited October 24, 2022 by Matthew Koch

[Joe Bauer]

 

Clarence Thomas should be censured!

Clarence Thomas stalls Lindsey Graham Georgia Subpoena order!!!

If that doesn't show Gini Thomas election denial influence bias ... what would!

What a national outrage!  Thomas should have recused himself immediately.

The guy should be censured! He and his wife have destroyed his objective credibility.

Recall this guy!  Before he does even more trust and integrity damage to the SCOTUS!

Graham knew this guy would weasel him out of under oath trouble.

 

[Douglas Caddy]

Fifty years ago (1972) The Exorcist was filmed on or around the campus of my alma mater, Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. It was released in 1973 and scared the daylights out of everyone who saw it. Will Ruha on Facebook today recounted the strange background behind the film:

William Peter Blatty was an expert in the CIA's MKULTRA brainwashing programs under cover of employment with the United States Air Force Psychological Warfare Division. In 1955, he became head of CIA brainwashing in the Middle East under guise of doing work for an agency front, the United States Information Agency in Beirut. He wrote The Exorcist as a CIA psy-ops tactic during its overt public transition to Stimulus-Response mass social engineering, with the book’s premise arguing humanity’s “Original Sin,” ergo the essential iniquity of man and hence, the need for human evil to be countered by external behavioral modification authority - church, state, police, national security intelligence, etc.

It was part of Nixon's attempt to railroad through Congress, Senate Bill 1, an early version of The Patriot Act, in which the Deep State can be as invasive and illegal as it likes in enforcing its authority, ostensibly for the public good. This occurred during a reign of domestic terrorism unprecedented in American history with more plane hijackings, bombings, shootings, cult massacres, kidnappings, and other crimes of acute violence than at any other time – all designed to psychologically destabilize the American public. And to a large extent it worked.

FightBack News wrote in 2016, “The Exorcist has profoundly conservative politics and a backwards social vision at the film's center. It's a right-wing call to return to 'old-time religion', with its medieval attitudes towards gender, its rebuke of science and its blatant class inequalities. . . the worldview promoted by The Exorcist falls comfortably in line with the reactionary policies promoted by another Reagan, along with conservative evangelical con-men like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.” Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice wrote, “The Exorcist succeeds on one level as an effectively excruciating entertainment, but on another, deeper level it is a thoroughly evil film." That statement had audience reactions supporting it. The NY Times quoted a repeat viewer as saying, “You feel contaminated when you leave the theater. There's something that is impossible to erase". Many viewers fainted, or vomited, or felt extreme nausea. A woman in New York miscarried during a showing, while another showing caused a man to be carried out on a stretcher. There were reports of some viewers having to be institutionalized, having suffered nervous breakdowns. The move was an attempt to produce psychological instability in viewers, and it largely succeeded.

It was during this period that the CIA’s MKULTRA went rampant using mental health hospitals, state prisons, and other facilities to fabricate legions of "Manchurian Candidate" assassins, serial killers, mass murderers, terrorists, and other sociopathic killers. California alone was rife with the Manson Family slaughters, the Juan Corona serial homicides, the Zebra murders, the Zodiac killings, the “Golden State” serial rapes and killing, the Dating Game Killer, the Hillside Strangler, the Freeway Killers, the Vampire of Sacramento, the Trailside Killer, Cinque and the Symbionese Liberation Army's Patty Hearst kidnapping and Sacramento bank guard killing, the Assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the Rev. Jim Jones Guyana massacre and assassination of Congressman Leo Ryan (who had a bill pending demanding Congressional approval of CIA ops) and many more to set the stage for the attempted passage of Senate Bill One and finally, ramrod passage of the "Patriot Act" and Homeland Security, amidst the mounting terrorism.

The Exorcist was an exercise in evil. And every trick of CIA psy-ops conditioning was used in that film. It remains today, the most psychologically destabilizing film in cinematic history.

[W. Niederhut]

40 minutes ago, Joe Bauer said:

 

Clarence Thomas should be censured!

Clarence Thomas stalls Lindsey Graham Georgia Subpoena order!!!

If that doesn't show Gini Thomas election denial influence bias ... what would!

What a national outrage!  Thomas should have recused himself immediately.

The guy should be censured! He and his wife have destroyed his objective credibility.

Recall this guy!  Before he does even more trust and integrity damage to the SCOTUS!

Graham knew this guy would weasel him out of under oath trouble.

 

       Yes, and there is nothing remotely equivalent in American history to Trump's multi-faceted efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election-- including his fraudulent high pressure campaign against Raffensperger and state officials in Georgia.

       Does Clarence Thomas really believe that Graham should be held to a more lenient standard than the rest of us, for using his high office to fraudulently subvert an election result?

      Where is the logic in that?

[Steve Thomas]

The Oath Keepers are using the 'we were just kidding' white privilege defense

by Amanda Marcotte, Salon October 24, 2022.

https://www.rawstory.com/oath-keepers-trial-2658495238/

“When faced with text messages showing the plan was to force Congress to invalidate President Joe Biden's electoral win, defense attorneys argue it was just "macho" talk, reports Brandi Buchman of Daily Kos, who has been watching the trial daily.”

“They said the thing and did the thing, so it seems like the prosecution would have an open-and-shut case, right? But there's a good reason the defense thinks an "it was just talk" argument will work. Conservative white people generally get a generous benefit of the doubt when it comes to determining whether they really mean the terrible things they say. Like Donald Trump dismissing it as "locker room talk" when he was caught bragging about sexual assault, the presumption of innocence for conservative white people is so robust it's often extended even in the face of overwhelming evidence.”

“ To get an idea of how deeply ingrained this white conservative presumption of innocence is, check out a recent, lengthy article for Esquire about the plot to kidnap and murder Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. In it, journalist Chris Heath recasts the accused conspirators as a bunch of goobers who didn't mean any real harm. While repeatedly admitting that the FBI had a large number of text messages and testimony to establish that these men were plotting a serious crime, Heath keeps circling around to the idea that, in the end, they were just fooling.”

This is interesting. I saw an interview with some of the spectators at the trial of the Michigan Governor kidnap plotters. The spectators framed the issue as a First Amendment issue.

To paraphrase, the spectators said that, “This is America, and in America, you can say whatever you want. They didn’t actually do anything. They just talked about it. The fact that they were thwarted is irrelevant.”

 

To plot a crime is not a crime.

Interesting.

Steve Thomas

 

 

 

 

[John Cotter]

5 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

John,

      I agree that the U.S. would view this as an existential threat, but Mearsheimer's analogy is absurd on several counts.

     For one thing, if we think of an analogous "Russian domination of South and Central America" on the borders of the Russian Federation, what have the U.S. and NATO actually done?

    Talk to people in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, etc.  They have eagerly welcomed the opportunity to be free and protected from domination by Putin's neo-Soviet police state-- after their terrible experiences under the Soviet yoke in the post-WWII era.  Among other things, Stalin systematically sent his ethnic neighbors to the Gulag, as Solzhenitsyn described in detail.  And, in true Stalinist fashion, Putin is even now exfiltrating Ukrainian civilians to Russian prison camps!

    As I asked you earlier in our discussion, would you have opted to live in Dresden or Munich in the post WWII era?

    U.S./NATO "domination" of Western Europe after WWII has consisted in supporting freedom and economic prosperity.

    The same thing has been true, more recently, in Eastern Europe.  Those people don't want to be oppressed by Putin's police state.

     Here's a story from this past week that speaks volumes about Putin's Russian Federation today.

Ukrainian conductor shot and killed by Russian troops for refusing to participate in concert

Ukrainian conductor shot and killed by Russian troops for refusing to participate... - Classic FM

October 17, 2022

 

William,

Thanks for replying to my questions.

You say:

      “I agree that the U.S. would view this as an existential threat, but Mearsheimer's analogy is absurd on several counts.”

I should begin by saying I’m not sure that it was Mearsheimer’s analogy or my analogy based on Mearsheimer’s thesis.

Whatever about that, the important thing is that you agree that the USA would consider the progressive domination by Russia of south and central America an existential threat.

Your argument relating to the acquiescence or agreement of eastern European countries to membership of NATO is a separate matter. It concerns a comparison between the political cultures of western so-called democracy and Russian so-called autocracy.

I’ve already repeatedly explained why I’ve used the adjective “so-called” in each of these cases. In this regard, for example, I’ve adverted to the fact that western “democracies” are actually plutocracies or kleptocracies.

In my own little country we’ve got a few billionaires and a considerable number of millionaires; but we’ve also got tens of thousands of poor souls on a minimum wage which is far less than the officially determined “living wage”, the minimum amount considered necessary to be able to afford the bare necessities of life.

These “Untermenschen”, are arguably in a worse position than slaves, since most slave owners ensured their human chattels were well enough fed and housed to be able to work productively and maintain their monetary value in the slave market.

Our modern neoliberal slave owners and slave drivers don’t have to worry about that, since the casualties of their oppressive enterprises will be “cared for” by dysfunctional underfunded public health, welfare and education systems. And those who fall through the cracks in the system die homeless on the streets.

Since western “democracy” and global capitalism go hand in hand, one should bear in mind that in that socio-economic system 20,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related diseases, while in the same system Wall Street fund managers “earn” up to a billion dollars a year.

Can you really defend such a murderous socio-economic system? And pointing to another allegedly worse system is no defence.

It’s easy to see why poor benighted souls in eastern Europe could be seduced into thinking that western “democracy” is Sugarcandy Mountain by western propaganda entities such as the government and plutocracy controlled mainstream media, Hollywood, the illusory American Dream and the “culture industry”, and blinded to the ugly underlying realities.

But as I said, all of the foregoing jeremiad is irrelevant to the nub of the matter, which is that, as you have agreed, the Russians were justified in viewing NATO expansion in eastern Europe as an existential threat.

It follows that in view of that existential threat, and in view of the fact that Ukraine was complicit in that threat, the Russian invasion of Ukraine can be justified as an act of self-defense.

Edited October 24, 2022 by John Cotter

[Douglas Caddy]

As I posted here earlier this month, Alexander Vindman told the Progressive Forum in Houston on Oct. 13 that the threat of nuclear war was minimal because Russia had to take six steps before making its final decision to use nuclear weapons. I then sent an email to a Wall Street Journal reporter suggesting that she interview Vindman about this. Today the WSJ released this video detailing the steps Russia must take before its final decision:

The Mechanics of Russia’s Nuclear Arsenal, Explained | Watch (msn.com)

Edited October 25, 2022 by Douglas Caddy

[Douglas Caddy]

 

You can watch this livestream for free on October 27.

Alexander Vindman Livestream | The Progressive Forum (progressiveforumhouston.org)