"I Can't Believe Trump Has ANY Support!" ------- collective sentiment of breathless liberals

As long as the Democratic Party remains committed to the multiplication of victim minorities at the expense of the white working class, Trump has a built-in base of substantial support, which he can reach directly through Twitter ... AND he doesn't need anything like a majority vote to win in the electoral college ... If the strategy is to force the electorate to eat a political shit-sandwich, don't be surprised if voters vomit up something worse ... .

“How in heck did Armistice Day become Veterans Day?

          Skip Oliver, Ch 39  

“How in heck did Armistice Day become Veterans Day? Established by Congress in 1926 to “perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations…” 

Bring Back Armistice Day and Honor the Real Heroes

By Arnold Oliver

How in heck did Armistice Day become Veterans Day? Established by Congress in 1926 to “perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations, (and later) a day dedicated to the cause of world peace,” Armistice Day was widely recognized for almost 30 years. As part of that, many churches rang their bells on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month – the hour in 1918 that the guns fell silent on the Western Front by which time 16 million had died in the horror of World War I.

To be blunt about it, in 1954 Armistice Day was hijacked by a militaristic US congress and re-named Veterans Day. Today few Americans understand the original purpose of Armistice Day, or even remember it. The message of peace seeking has been all but erased. Worst of all, Veterans Day has devolved into a hyper-nationalistic quasi-religious celebration of war and the putatively valiant warriors who wage it. We no longer have a national day to recognize or reflect upon international peace.

And the identification of warriors as heroes is pretty shaky too. If you are a veteran, and honest about it, you will admit that most of what goes on during wartime is decidedly unheroic, and actual heroes in war are very few and far between.

I have to tell you that when I was in Vietnam, I was no hero, and I did not witness a single act of heroism during the year I spent there, first as a U.S. Army private and then as a sergeant. Yes, there was heroism in the Vietnam War. On both sides of the conflict there were notable acts of self-sacrifice and bravery. Troops in my unit wondered how the North Vietnamese troops could persevere for years in the face of daunting U.S. firepower. U.S. medical corpsmen performed incredible acts of valor rescuing the wounded under fire.

But I also witnessed a considerable amount of bad behavior, some of it my own. Among US troops racism against any and all Vietnamese was endemic. There were countless incidents of disrespect and abuse of Vietnamese civilians, and a large number of truly awful war crimes. Most unheroic of all were the U.S. military and civilian leaders who planned, orchestrated, and profited greatly from that utterly avoidable war. I should have taken action to resist the war while still on active duty, but I did not.

The cold truth is that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Vietnam had nothing to do with protecting American peace and freedom. On the contrary, the Vietnam War was fought to forestall Vietnamese independence, not defend it; it bitterly divided the American people.

Unfortunately, Vietnam wasn’t an isolated example of an unjust conflict. Many American wars — including the 1846 Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the Iraq War (this list is by no means exhaustive) — were waged under false pretexts against countries that didn’t threaten the United States. It’s hard to see how, if a war is unjust, it can be heroic to wage it.

But if the vast majority of wars are not fought for noble reasons, and few soldiers are heroic, have there been any actual heroes out there defending peace and freedom? And if so, who are they? Well, there are many, from Jesus down to the present. I’d put Gandhi, Tolstoy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the list along with many Quakers and Mennonites. And don’t forget General Smedley Butler, who wrote that “War is a Racket”.

In Vietnam, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson stopped the My Lai massacre from being even worse.

Another candidate is former U.S. Army specialist Josh Stieber who sent this message to the people of Iraq: “Our heavy hearts still hold hope that we can restore inside our country the acknowledgment of your humanity, that we were taught to deny.” We were honored to be able to host Josh in our home as he walked across the US on a mission of peace while giving away the money he had earned in the military as partial atonement for his role in a thoroughly unjust war.

And how about Chelsea Manning who spent seven years behind bars for exposing ugly truths about the Iraq war, and the Plowshares Seven now in the news? The real heroes are those who resist war and militarism, often at great personal cost.

Because militarism has been around for such a long time, at least since Gilgamesh came up with his protection racket in Sumeria going on 5,000 years ago, people argue that it will always be with us.

But many also thought that slavery and the subjugation of women would last forever, and they’re being proven wrong. We understand that while militarism will not disappear overnight, disappear it must if we are to avoid economic as well as moral bankruptcy – not to mention the extinction of our species.

As Civil War General W.T. Sherman said at West Point, “I confess without shame that I am tired and sick of war.” We’re with you, bro.

This year on November 11th, Veterans For Peace will bring back the original Armistice Day traditions. Join them and let those bells ring out.
~~~~~~~~~

Arnold “Skip” Oliver is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio. A Vietnam veteran, he belongs to Veterans For Peace, and lives in Sandusky.  He can be reached at soliver@heidelberg.edu.

The Ruling Class, Its “Deep State” Servants, And Us

The Ruling Class, Its “Deep State” Servants, And Us

The present mind management program obsessingly distracting us with impeachment bulletins by the micro second is part of the consciousness controlling dictatorship which has kept the majority of Americans focused on our feet while our heads are filled with propaganda, what some ruling class servants called “tittytainment”, and anything but the most serious problems of a system decomposing faster than ever and threatening to come down on all our heads while we scrupulously study our feet.

The election of Trump was never supposed to happen and is another sign of the ruling powers slowly losing control but desperately trying to maintain it as, at present, depicting the rich and outspoken pinhead as an enemy of all America holds sacred – war, poverty, racism etc – by blaming him for all America holds sacrilegious – war, poverty, racism etc. The confusion, over issues like incredible economic inequality and the destruction of the environment given the brand name “climate change”, is greatest at a time when information sources should be most clear but are creating a fog of misinformation, propaganda, disinformation and near idiocy. A people rallied in the recent past to support the slaughter of millions of human beings all over the world in defense of alleged threats to our right to market guns, pets, fossil fuel and children have every right to be confused.

While the inequalities of a system with less and less rich people holding more and more scandalous amounts of wealth while great numbers in the former affluent world sink to middle class status, former middles descend to working class and the overwhelming majority of workers the world over sink faster and faster into poverty, debt and despair become more obvious even to those kept obsessed with celebrity trivia and mindless news reporting. The damage wreaked upon humanity and the nature on which we survive and evolve becomes more deadly and dangerous as the rich, arrogant and seemingly uncontrollable outspoken twit tweeting from Washington DC reaches more people than any other president has and in the process of sharing his dullard’s view of the world also speaks blatant truths never before uttered by anyone that high in the staff of our ruler’s highly paid servant class. And we must understand that the tiny group of people whose wealth is beyond that of all past tyrants, royals, dictators and upper class hooligans put together are still grasping to maintain their control of global capitalism by destroying adversaries whether foreign or local, and doing so by any means necessary. Trump is lucky to only face a ridiculous impeachment circus, while so much of the world including America faces bloody wars and threats to survival beyond anything previously experienced or imagined.

While 20^th century Americans were conditioned by brain dead conservative reactionaries to look under the bed every night lest evil degenerate Russian communists hid there waiting to steal the family savings and send us all to slave labor camps, the present generation has advanced to being mind molested by brain dead liberal-progressives into fearing sneaky Russian degenerate capitalists hiding under our sacred voting booths and meddling in our most holy democracy in which every single president and most of congress has been bought and paid for by the minority rich, and never voted for by more than a minority of workers, both mental and manual. Never in our history has any president been elected by a majority of our electorate, and that is part of the ruling power’s control of this fake democracy which relies on a class of relative “house Negros” as in slavery, to keep order and block out reality. Class society was introduced to the slaves when the house negroes, who lived much better lives than the field negroes, were used by the masters, time and again, to quell uprisings and basically calm down the cries at injustice by performing as the upper class of workers does now. Though some in the house occasionally led rebellions against the master, most, overwhelmingly, did what most Americans do, whatever their skin tone, religion, sexual preference or taste in breakfast cereals; They went along to get along and maintained slavery like republicrats and demublicans now maintain capitalism, often supporting lesser evils in sincere hopes of making life better for all but without threatening their own membership in the more comfortable upper-servant class in the process.

Our rulers employ what has come to be called a “deep state” apparatus, commonly labeled an intelligence community though that involves a rape of our language. They were once seen, by the people warned about Russian commies under the bed, as being evil practitioners of all that was un-American, but in the transition from right wing brain death to what passes for left wing malignant tumors between the ears, this community is treated heroically as it performs its duty in turning against a president and creating a case for a kangaroo court to find him guilty of something, anything, to get him out of the CEO position before he bankrupts the company. The problem for America is the company, not the CEO, but our mind managers and un-intelligence community are working overtime to misguide, mislead, confuse and scapegoat one or another individual villain, while also dividing and conquering us by placing us into minority identity groups that guarantee no majority democracy possible. Despite great odds against us, we are slowly learning and showing signs of rejecting not only the lies of individual class servants to the rich rulers, but the system that places them into anti-democratic power itself.

Good people are manipulated into believing a small mob of bikers with swastika tattoos, most of them more alienated than hordes able to afford therapy, are somehow a greater menace than a tiny mob in limousines and private jets moving around the world from Wall street to Berlin to London, buying and selling nations, governments and in the process destroying people, cultures and humanity. But many among the people are learning that the alienation experienced by increasing numbers of suffering people is not due to one or another identity group reducible to a skin tone, religion or ethnicity but rather to the confiscation of wealth created by humanity into the banks and financial institutions somehow owned by special inheritors and not the working masses who created that wealth. We may not all come to our senses at the same moment, but that time is drawing near when we must. A good beginning is to look through and past this idiotic vendetta against a rich fool who represents much that is rotten about America, but also quite a bit that is good. That’s why they want him out. It has nothing to do with any constitution, especially the corrupt debased document that they want to use to further a deranged system that makes it legal and constitutional to reduce more than half a million Americans to living in the street, more than 13 million American children to living in poverty, while it recklessly squanders our wealth on war, misery and depravity. Our system and the constitution that rationalizes its social degeneracy are what must be changed, not simply one or another hack sitting in the CEO chair. And if we don’t elect a social democrat like Bernie in 2020 there may be little chance of ending the power of our ruling class, its deep state hirelings and their house servants, and less chance for all of us. At a time when our leadership is making religious fanatics, 911 truthers and area 51 believers seem like cutting edge intellectuals, we need to look beyond what they tell us and trust our own senses before having corporate media completely cloud our capabilities to think, let alone act. The problem is not the capitalist Trump. The problem is capitalism.

Deficits Aren't Bad, Capitalism Is

Earlier this week CNN announced that the federal budget deficit was nearly a trillion dollars a year, an all-time record. Puzzlement was expressed at the relative lack of public concern about this alarming matter.

There is no need for puzzlement. Deficits are fine if they are incurred to improve our economic position over time. Virtually everyone goes into debt, for example, to purchase a house rather than pay rent in an apartment forever, and this is only sensible. Of course, one must make sure that one's mortgage does not exceed one's reasonable capacity to pay it, but there is no issue of principle at stake. 

With the U.S. government, debt is even less problematic. As Adam Smith noted in Wealth of Nations, no nation in history has ever paid off its debt, for there is no need to. As long as deficits are used to keep employment and production sufficiently high, they are a necessary stimulus to economic health.

On the other hand, going into debt to rich bankers who make profits by selling worthless paper is obviously a prescription for disaster. (See Frank Scott's wonderful "Variation on a 2008 Theme," published on this blog July 11, 2012, for a hilarious summary of this madness.) And we should take notice that the corporate media does not oppose such looting operations by "too big to fail" banks, only raising the issue of "excessive" budget deficits when there's a threat that government spending may benefit ordinary people (Social Security, Medicare, etc.)  But when we're going into massive debt to benefit the already obscenely wealthy, whose profitability is directly tied to taxpayer guaranteed bailouts, our media lapdogs are as silent as the proverbial lamb.

There is nothing the least "puzzling" in this. The rich stick us with unpayable debts to force us to keep giving them our working lives. That's teamwork under capitalism. 

Source:

Chris Cillizza, "The 2019 federal deficit is almost $1 trillion. No one seems to care." CNN Online, October 9, 2019

Bulletin From Capital Central

Fed to resume asset purchases to prevent a cash crunch ( Financial Times)


Cash? Don't they mean Credit? ( Legalienate )

How to Re-Elect Trump and/or Start a Civil War

How to Re-Elect Trump and/or Start a Civil War

 

The moment this rich, arrogant, egotistical fool – meaning he’s over qualified for the job – moved into the white house, the ruling class began plans to get rid of him. Much too blatantly indicative of what America really is to possibly be allowed to serve as chief executive, they supported impeachment rather than assassination, since even in their nearly comatose mental condition the rulers saw the possibilities of murders of Americans by Americans taking on far more massive than usual numbers if Trump were offed that way. And their employees in the democratic wing of the party of capital have not only served their owner-master but tried to go beyond, in the best house Negro fashion of past slaves with “We’ll get him for you, boss man, just watch us!” servitude. And after the incredible fiasco of trying to get him on a spy rap for colluding with Putin, we now have an alleged relationship of traitorous meaning with a Ukrainian leader, with all manner of alleged-liberal pseudo-progressive excitable bed wetting threatening DC and its suburbs with flooding dangers not attributable to climate change.

Trump is supposed to have urged the Ukraines to investigate Joe Biden, his son, his wife, or some other members of his family in this fantasy that threatens to make 911 truthers look like masters of logic. Somehow, Trump anticipated long before any votes were cast that Biden would be his opponent in 2020 – wow, what a great democracy the party nurtures with the presidential pinhead already knowing the outcome of the fierce, passionate, dedicated and sacred democratic process by which all candidates are nominated! – and so urged the Ukrainians to destroy his candidacy, as only they can. I mean hey, aren’t Americans aware of the power of that nation right on Russia’s borders and many of whose people speak Russian and stuff like that? Anyone not aware of the overwhelming power over our great democracy enjoyed by Russian speaking truck drivers and housewives in the Ukraine has probably never studied political science in an American college and then become an advisor to Wall street, Madison avenue, and the Cartoon Channel.

So the party faithful previously playing it cool when urged to move for impeachment by applying some small bit of logic, like; you want the other schmuck to be president? , have now come out from under their political beds and joined the chorus calling for an investigation of the lack of evidence for the charge of alleging traitorous treasonous really bad behavior, again, just like with Russians before and now with Ukrainians, and the rest of the world collapses in laughter at the crumbling of what passes for leadership in America while also cringing in fear of what our empire in deterioration might spell for the future of the planet, let alone Americans. Our citizens chained to their jobs, traffic and TV sets with little time or energy to notice the first vanishing to part time if at all, the second getting worse by the minute with more gig workers speeding about to more part time gigs offering lower pay and no benefits, and the TV sets gifting them with momentary escape into the dumbest reality shows and sitcoms to promote shopping for more useless commodities only affordable to a population dining on steak and salmon on a rice and beans budget with plastic payments nearing 900 billion and panhandlers begging for visa, amex, discover and master cards rather than money. Money? What the hell is that? Just charge it and move on, like the government does to support the military industrial complex, the Israeli lobby’s desires, and our minority billionaire owners, their millionaire servants, and global capital. Is this a great democracy or what?

Meanwhile, humanity’s most Important Identity Group, that ruling class more recently dubbed a Deep State by newer critics, has arranged a market approach to the climate crisis that urges newer and cleaner profiteering to save the planet from older and dirtier profiteering. And in future all wars will be fought by a gender, ethnic and philosophically diverse military wearing white gloves while committing mass murder. Yay. But wait. More attention is being paid the Climate Change Crisis while global capital, its cause, still remains mostly unquestioned as humanity is falsely held responsible for creation of the problem while the RC/DS works to suppresses its solution – democracy - wherever and whenever it rears its dangerous head.

As in every other case of a problem needing solution, including this deemed the most serious ever, there must be private profits available to truly solve it with even children entrusted to lead as a market force to upbraid their elders and innocently promote greater investment – private, of course - in the necessary transformation that will replace some fossil fuel with more renewable energy but use that energy to create more mostly useless products for consumption in the private profit creating market which is the bottom line factor in creation of the problem. This while Trump leads the forces of fundamentalist capital against the social democratic capital favoring the sanitized version of poverty and war. But there is now a small but growing group of actual socialists who need to move quickly and end the façade of cosmetic change that works to return to a dead past instead of creating a future of democracy that not only extends to politics but the economics at their foundation.

While we are manipulated to support laws that impeach individuals and leave a system intact, or more commonly charge individuals with something called hate crimes, we are kept oblivious to a global economy that is one horrendous hate crime, a malevolent social disease that threatens the future of all humanity. The borrowing of more artificially inflated money that is then used to purchase goods and services of materially deflated value can only continue us on the path towards a fate much worse than financial failure. 

Americans reduced to identity-by-hyphenation need to focus on what follows the hyphen with far more intensity than what precedes it. Divide and conquer politics distract us from understanding the minority group at the commanding heights of the political economy, the one which is being bailed out by all the minorities which compose an unrepresented majority. The now at least partly multicultural minority at the top, thanks to affirmative action, should demand all our attention. They amount to a gang of political servants to capital who wear sombreros while eating lasagna at a gay synagogue in Harlem. And rest assured, they will join in this impeachment fiasco which could lead to an even worse crisis than the dangerous one we already experience.

We need to become a democratic majority to insure our survival, not as cultural minorities, hyphenated ethnicities or racist subdivisions, but as members of the only scientifically verifiable identity group in which we all hold membership: The human race.

Penis Story Collapses In Flaccid Hearsay

Ann Coulter
September 18, 2019
 
If I can produce someone who saw John Roberts’ penis in college, can we get the Obamacare opinion overturned?

As all MSNBC viewers are well aware, last Sunday’s edition of The New York Times ran an excerpt of the book “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, which revives Debbie Ramirez's accusations against the Supreme Court nominee.

Quick reminder: This is NOT the Kavanaugh accuser with two front doors. It is NOT the Kavanaugh accuser whose own father warned that she had psychological problems.

This is the one who didn’t remember what Kavanaugh did to her for more than 30 years, until a few lefty friends helpfully reminded her that they’d heard something about it from a guy, who heard it from a guy, whereupon she spent six days “assessing her memories” during the nomination hearings -- and darned if it didn’t all come back to her!

What the guy who heard it from a guy heard was that, at a drunken party in a freshman dorm, Kavanaugh unzipped his pants and stuck his penis in Ramirez’s face.

Contrary to Pogrebin and Kelly’s claim that “at least” seven people “heard about the Yale incident long before Mr. Kavanaugh was a federal judge," this vast array of witnesses includes only one person whose secondhand, rumor-mill story includes both Kavanaugh and Ramirez: Kenneth Appold.

(All we know about Appold is that he is a professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary, meaning that he is less likely to believe in God than any person not a professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary.)

The guy Appold claims he heard it from doesn’t remember it.

Are you following how absurd this is?

This is not merely hearsay; it’s double hearsay offered by only one person, and he wasn’t there, but he heard about it from another person, who denies knowledge of it. And the corpus delecti is something that happened with a group of drunk teenagers 35 years ago.


The main point made by the excerpt is to remind us that truth means nothing to liberals.

Here’s the book’s big new scoop:

“We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms.Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.”

This story was on the Times’ website for more than 24 hours when -- at close to midnight on Sunday -- the paper issued an “Editors’ Note” admitting that the victim does not remember it.

I’m not even going to mention that Stier was a lawyer for Bill Clinton, defending him for whipping it out in front of Paula Jones, as governor of Arkansas. Obviously, that’s not as serious as doing it as a college freshman.

But could some good reporter -- which excludes anyone in the mainstream media -- look into Stier’s undergraduate years? Any embarrassing incidents when he was a freshman? Any rumors or third-hand accounts? While we’re at it, can we get Stier’s tax returns for the last 30 years? Where’s Chuck Johnson when we need him?

Let’s consider just the physics of Stier’s story.

How can anyone, let alone two or more people, "push" a man's penis into another person's hand? Just how big is Brett Kavanaugh's penis, anyway? Wouldn't a man's penis, if it were able to be "pushed" by one's friends into third parties, need to be erect and at least 3 feet long? Don't push my penis, bro!

The best part of the Times excerpt is the Women’s Temperance League tone of the piece.

“(Ramirez’s Yale classmates) also had experience with drinking and sexual behavior that Ms. Ramirez -- who had not intended to be intimate with a man until her wedding night -- lacked. ... ‘I had gone through high school, I’m the good girl, and now, in one evening, it was all ripped away,' she said in an interview. ...”

If someone from Bob Jones University said that her dreams of marital purity were “ripped away” because she saw a man’s penis in college, liberals would never stop laughing.

“(Kavanaugh) was ... known to attend an annual teenage bacchanal called ‘Beach Week,’ where the hookups and drinking were more important than the sand and swimming.”

It wasn’t much of a “beach party” -- if you want to call it that. Instead of wholesome fun, the young people consumed alcoholic beverages and engaged in inappropriate flirting. Everyone said it was inappropriate -- not just us.

Most shocking, from a “Little House on the Prairie” perspective, was this:

“People ... would start to say ‘Debbie does ...’ playing on the 1978 porn movie ‘Debbie Does Dallas.’ But Ms. Ramirez didn’t understand the reference.”

Remind me: Aren't these the same people demanding that we teach kindergartners about “fisting”?

But the “Debbie Does Defamation” authors weren’t finished.

“(Kavanaugh) came of age during the era of ‘Porky’s’ and ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High.’”

Ha! What do you say, NOW, Trumpsters?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg “came of age during the era of” the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War. Can we impeach her?

I’m beginning to suspect that, instead of writing the book, Pogrebin and Kelly screwed around for six months, then pulled an all-nighter the day before it was due. Also, “American Pie” was big!

But half the Democratic candidates for president are demanding Kavanaugh’s impeachment on the basis of this sublime idiocy. Trump touched their SCOTUS!

COPYRIGHT 2019 ANN COULTER