Global
The following report is by no means exhaustive -- only illustrative. There may well be a Democratic member of Congress near you not included here who serves corporate interests more than majority interests, or has simply grown tired or complacent in the never-ending struggles for social, racial and economic justice as well as environmental sanity and peace. Perhaps you live in a district where voters are ready to be inspired by a progressive primary candidate because the Democrat in Congress is not up to the job.
It isn’t easy to defeat a Democratic incumbent in a primary. Typically, the worse the Congress member, the more (corporate) funding they get. While most insurgent primary campaigns will not win, they’re often very worthwhile -- helping progressive constituencies to get better organized and to win elections later. And a grassroots primary campaign can put a scare into the Democratic incumbent to pay more attention to voters and less to big donors.
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Donald E. McInnis’s book, She’s So Cold, is painful to read. McInnis was the defense attorney for one of three boys falsely accused of killing one of the boys’ sister. Much of the book is recreation of police interrogations that were videotaped, and of a court hearing.
This was one of those cases the mass media love and for which they effectively convict the accused in the minds of the public. This was in 1998 in San Diego, and the original victim’s name was Stephanie Crowe. But there were more victims, including Stephanie’s brother, two of his friends, and the three boys’ families. The trauma willfully and knowingly inflicted on them by the police and prosecutors was limited by the fact that so-called “confessions” by two of the three boys were videotaped. I haven’t watched the videos, but reading them is like watching violence in slow motion.
A new film by Will Watson, called Soldiers Without Guns, ought to shock a great many people — not because it utilizes a yet more gruesome form of violence or bizarre form of sex (the usual shockers in movie reviews), but because it recounts and shows us a true story that contradicts the most basic assumptions of politics, foreign policy, and popular sociology.
Trailer Here: https://youtu.be/ImwipiavM8k
Bougainville Island was a paradise for millennia, inhabited sustainably by people who never caused the rest of the world the slightest trouble. Western empires fought over it, of course. Its name is that of a French explorer who named it for himself in 1768. Germany claimed it in 1899. In World War I, Australia took it. In World War II, Japan took it. Bougainville returned to Australian domination after the war, but the Japanese left piles of weapons behind — possibly the worst of the many forms of pollution, destruction, and lingering effects a war can leave in its wake.
Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran . . .
Thanks, John McCain! Let’s mix a little humor in with war. It’s so much easier to take when we do. By the way, have you noticed that we’re always on the verge of war?
Joe Biden just put a spotlight on his mindset when he explicitly refused to apologize for fondly recalling how the Senate “got things done” with “civility” as he worked alongside some of the leading racist lawmakers of the 20th century. For Biden, the personal is the political; he knows that he’s virtuous, and that should be more than good enough for African Americans, for women, for anyone.
“There’s not a racist bone in my body,” Biden exclaimed Wednesday night, moments after demanding: “Apologize for what?” His deep paternalism surfaced during the angry outburst as he declared: “I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career, period, period, period.”
SPREAD THE WORD
Spy Behind Home Plate
opens now at Gateway Film Center on June 21
Washington Post article: https://wapo.st/ 2MzTAZT
Los Angeles Times review by Ken Turan: https://lat.ms/2wGKWhA
Aviva Kempner’s The Spy Behind Home Plate is the first feature-length documentary to tell the real story of Morris “Moe” Berg, the enigmatic and brilliant Jewish baseball player turned spy. Berg caught and fielded in the major leagues during baseball’s Golden Age in the 1920s and 1930s. But very few people know that Berg also worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), spying in Europe and playing a prominent role in America’s efforts to undermine the German atomic bomb program during WWII.
The Spy Behind Home Plate reveals the life of this unknown Jewish hero through rare historical footage and photographs as well as revealing contemporary and past interviews with an All-Star roster of celebrities and other individuals from the worlds of sports, spycraft, and WWII history.
SPREAD THE WORD
Spy Behind Home Plate
opens now at Gateway Film Center on June 21
Washington Post article: https://wapo.st/ 2MzTAZT
Los Angeles Times review by Ken Turan: https://lat.ms/2wGKWhA
Aviva Kempner’s The Spy Behind Home Plate is the first feature-length documentary to tell the real story of Morris “Moe” Berg, the enigmatic and brilliant Jewish baseball player turned spy. Berg caught and fielded in the major leagues during baseball’s Golden Age in the 1920s and 1930s. But very few people know that Berg also worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), spying in Europe and playing a prominent role in America’s efforts to undermine the German atomic bomb program during WWII.
The Spy Behind Home Plate reveals the life of this unknown Jewish hero through rare historical footage and photographs as well as revealing contemporary and past interviews with an All-Star roster of celebrities and other individuals from the worlds of sports, spycraft, and WWII history.
If you’re free, if you’re not locked behind bars (and I do realize that this is true of a smaller percentage of people in the so-called Land of the Free than anywhere else on earth), be grateful. One thing you can do is get your hands on important new books. I recommend this one: The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences by Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis, Featuring Six Portraits of Lifers.
The man who would make himself dictator is with us because we have put so many like him in power in so many other places.
And because we have 800 bases around the world, spend unlimited sums on an imperial military, and continue to use it to tell everyone else on this planet what to do and who will rule them.
Remarkably, many of those rulers turn out to be a lot like Donald Trump.
Think of Trump as the ultimate payback, the balloon payment on the Empire. He is the eternal imperial mobster, a composite of exactly who we’ve foisted on so many other innocents throughout history.
We need to stop whining about him. Instead, we need to apologize to the world, sell our bases, turn our military to peaceful and ecological uses, and stop behaving like an imperial overlord. If we don’t, our next ruler (even if a Democrat) will be just like this one, only smarter and more brutally effective. And then the one after that. And the one after that. And the one after that.
Imagine yourself in Greece just after WW2. Revolution is in the air. The chances for social democracy are real.
It’s not HBO, it’s live theater as a pack of a dozen or so merry “spanksters” mount a madcap musical spoof of the beloved fantasy series Game of Thrones and try to put the Eros into Westeros. An amiable if mischievous Benji Kaufman plays George R.R. Martin, who introduces and more or less narrates this revival of Shame of Thrones: The Musical, a two-act send-up of that author’s characters and their medieval swords and suits of armor setting.
Shame enjoys poking fun at the backstabbing and sexy hanky-spanky that were the hallmark of Martin’s novels and HBO epic about the cutthroat quest for the Iron Throne. The humor and story ranges from the satirical to slapstick to vaudevillian. Many of the popular long-running series’ beloved dramatis personae are impersonated in the musical parody, from saucy wenches to muscular knights and warriors.