Passing Warm Gas In A Leftish Direction

Despite occasional warm gas passed in a leftish direction, establishment Democrats never had any intention of allowing a left political program to move forward.

That is the perfect description of the lip service Democrats pay to progressive ideas.

Bonus snip:

[T]he Obama administration chose to overthrow the democratically elected President of Ukraine to install a puppet government hostile to Russia ... Hillary Clinton was Barack Obama's Secretary of State when the Ukrainian adventure was being conceived. ... The Obama administration saw Ukraine as a steppingstone to ... control the distribution of Russian oil and gas to benefit American "interests." ...

Nancy Pelosi apparently believes that she can ... simultaneously 1) end the momentum of left political ascendance, 2) bring the Democrats' donor base back into the fold, 3) raise Joe Biden to the top of the 2020 heap, and 4) end talk of a Green New Deal, Medicare for All and a Job Guarantee. Early reports suggest the bourgeois left is on board with her program. ...

Trump could have spent five minutes on the internet and found so much dirt on Joe Biden — such as his actual record of public "service," that he could easily win the 2020 election ...

Lithub:

Researchers have used machine-learning (a reading robot!) to read 3.5 million books published between 1900 and 2008, and tally all the adjectives used to describe men and women. ... When positively described, women are almost always considered at the physical level, whereas men are generally described according to their inherent virtue.

Computer scientist and assistant professor Isabelle Augenstein of the University of Copenhagen's computer science department:

We are clearly able to see that the words used for women refer much more to their appearances than the words used to describe men. Thus, we have been able to confirm a widespread perception, only now at a statistical level.

Apparently, Fox is not supportive enough:

The president told reporters Thursday that his team is kicking around the idea of launching a news outlet that will report on him the way he wants to be reported on. ... "CNN is a voice that seems to be the voice out there. It's a terrible thing for our country. We ought to start our own network and put some real news out there, because they are so bad for our country."

Interesting Numbers From 2016

California, Oregon, Washington:    Clinton beat Trump by 5,010,652 votes
The Other 47 States:               Trump beat Clinton by 2,141,961 votes

The New York Times shows absolutely no sign of slowing down in its rapid devolution towards becoming The-New-York-Post-For-People-Who-Can-Read. The paper repeatedly and intentionally ignores the most basic rules of journalism to present one-sided coverage (which is also Fox's modus operandi).

The Times again, as noted by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR):

What the New York Times did was essentially put the Edenwald Houses through a media perp walk, by insinuating to its readers that not only was Edenwald infested by gang violence, but that it had something to do with Officer Mulkeen's death. The Times sprinkled the word "gang" eight times into its story, dedicating multiple paragraphs to strike home the gang theme–though it wasn't even clear that Williams was a gang member.

New York Times, October 1, 2019:

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That's not allowed either, they told him. "The president was frustrated", said Thomas D. Homan, who had served as Mr. Trump's acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, recalling that week in March 2019.

Nice to see one of the best news commentary websites I used to follow from more than 15 years ago is still going strong: "Rightwing Blackout On The Alligator Moat Story". Americans are actually already supporting this type of law enforcement. (Nearly 10,000 people have been shot in less than 2 years.)

The Atlantic, September 2019:

The detention camps weren't enough.

The policy of deliberate child torture was insufficient.

The neglect of Americans displaced by natural disasters didn't pass muster.

The hush money shelled out to the president's former mistresses in violation of federal law was too small a crime.

The president using his office to enrich himself wasn't sufficient.

Deflecting blame from a foreign government's effort to elect the president while seeking financial gain from that government, and then attempting to obstruct the investigation, was deemed too complicated to pursue. ...

Millions of Americans wake up every day worried that Donald Trump's actions will hurt someone they love, but until he used his authority to go after someone beloved by the Democratic establishment, party leaders didn't quite grasp the urgency.

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), October 1, 2019:

Newsweek (9/18/19) reports NATO is losing "superiority" over Russia, without mentioning that the alliance's combined military budget is 17 times that of Russia.

If it weren't for the serious possibility that this unproductive brinkmanship could lead to nuclear war, accidental or otherwise (Guardian, 10/15/12; CounterPunch, 1/9/18), it would be funny how easily Newsweek's report is undermined by earlier reporting from Newsweek. ...

It's clear that Noam Chomsky's explanation of US media presuming ownership of the world is still relevant, given how Newsweek has internalized and amplified the perspective of American empire when it laments over the possible end of "unquestioned US global dominance." Newsweek characterizes as threatening—and in need of containment—something as banal as nation-states' willingness to use military force to defend their strategic interests and spheres of influence, because it assumes only the US is entitled to those things ...

Despite Newsweek's claims of there being "great power competition," there really is no competition. An earlier Newsweek report (6/3/18) found that Russia operates "at least 21 significant military facilities overseas," compared to the US having between "600 and 900 military 'sites' on foreign soil," likely more foreign military bases than any nation in history.

When you have to convince Ronald Reagan to be more racist, well, you must be a real piece of work.

Biden is correct that the surge began in the 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s, but a closer look at his role reveals that it was Biden who was among the principal and earliest movers of the policy agenda that would become the war on drugs and mass incarceration, and he did so in the face of initial reluctance from none other than President Ronald Reagan.

Jeffrey St. Clair, Roaming Charges:

Bernie could have spent the last four years building an independent party or taking over the wreckage of the Greens. Instead, he spent it recruiting young progressives into the same party that had just drawn-and-quartered him. ... The only real surprise is that Bernie dragged his troops through the charade one more time expecting a different result.

(Post compiled in October 2019.)