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If one were only limited to viewing or reading the US mainstream media the story of how President Joe Biden went down on his knees to honor two visiting Israelis would never have surfaced. Fortunately, the story did make considerable waves in both the Israeli and the alternative media, though not enough to convince the faceless editors at CBS news and elsewhere to run with it. The kneeling incident reportedly took place while Biden was meeting in the White House with soon-to-be retired Israeli president Reuven Rivlin. Rivlin was doing something like his victory lap, having presumably completed his term of office without being charged with corruption, which is what the Jewish state’s leaders have traditionally been noted for.

“I don’t take people seriously anymore if I find out they believe the official 9/11 conspiracy theory.” -- Gadfly Bites

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” – Carl Sagan

“It also gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them.” -- Adolf Hitler

By trade, I’m a full-time film historian/critic who has authored/co-authored four movie history books. I say this because at one point in the new play Taming the Lion Joan Crawford (as depicted by Marie Broderick) tells William Haines (Landon Beatty) he’s the top box office movie star on Earth. Yet until I was invited to cover Taming the Lion this reviewer had never even heard of Haines, who also is not listed in David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. The world premiere of playwright Jack Rushen’s two-act dramatization of real-life Hollywood history and personalities explains why.

Throughout the 1920s and until the mid-1930s Haines was a leading man in Tinseltown, appearing in about 50 flicks. In 1929 he starred in the ironically entitled A Man’s Man, which Greta Garbo and John Gilbert are also in, and played the title character in 1931’s Just a Gigolo. A number of Haines’ pictures were military-themed, such as 1926’s Tell It to the Marines, 1929’s Navy Blues, 1934’s The Marines are Coming.

Another football ‘controversy’ has started when football players participating in the ongoing ‘UEFA Euro 2020’, kneeled down during national anthems to protest racism, a serious problem that has plagued football stadiums for many years. 

The big banner headline across the top of the New York Times homepage as Tuesday got underway -- “TRUMP’S TAXES SHOW CHRONIC LOSSES AND YEARS OF TAX AVOIDANCE” -- might give the impression that Donald Trump is finally on the verge of political downfall. Don’t believe it for a moment.

The same kind of mistaken belief has led many to put undeserved trust in a corporate-media system. But the New York Times isn’t going to save us. Neither is the Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN or any of the other mass-media outlets, “liberal” or otherwise.

Below are the lyrics to four powerful anti-establishment songs that were performed and recorded by the song-writing/singing duo, Ethan Miller and Kate Boverman, back in 2005. The pair were “Back to the Land Movement” advocates/activists from Maine. Miller and Boverman are currently part of a farm collective in a rural part of the state (for more info, click on https://www.landincommon.org/board-of-directors/ ). The album was titled “If All the Land Would Rise”, a devastating expose of some of the worst corporate/government corruption in America, corruption that was just raising its ugly head. Miller and Boverman very accurately identified some of the culprits – and named some of them.

Sunday, June 20, 2021

Ottawa:

The man who has led the public campaign to expose and prosecute the Indian Residential School Genocide has been nominated for the Order of Canada.

Kevin Annett, the former United Church minister who first publicized evidence of the deaths of native children in 1995, was named today as “one who, at enormous personal cost for over a quarter century, has compelled Christian Canada to face its shadow and brought not only the truth but hope and life to countless people.” His nomination was made by a group of nineteen Canadians and indigenous elders. (A partial list of nominators is below)

Along with their individual nominations, the group stated in a letter to the Order of Canada Nominations Committee,

BANGKOK, Thailand -- When the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan secured Bagram Air Base in January 2002, a Special Operations officer said he motivated newly arrived 82nd Airborne Division troops with a human skull, because the young Americans became enthusiastic when they saw death's head.

"I'm a skull worshipper," Special Operations Command Sergeant-Major Raymond V. Cordell said in an interview at the time in Bagram Air Base, 42 miles (67 kilometers) north of Kabul.

A human skull, given to him by fellow soldiers, was mounted in his office at MacDill Air Force Base's Special Operations Command headquarters in Florida, he said.

"Apparently they got on the Internet and typed in 'skulls'. And what came up under 'skulls' were medical services, where you could actually buy one.

"They got together and chipped in all their money. I don't even want to know how much it cost them for just the skull.

"He [the skull] wears the actual 82nd [Airborne Division] beret. It's the maroon beret, which is the sign of the American paratrooper on jump status.

Since the Civil War, midterm elections have enabled the president’s party to gain ground in the House of Representatives only three times, and those were in single digits. The last few midterms have been typical: In 2006, with Republican George W. Bush in the White House, his party lost 31 House seats. Under Democrat Barack Obama, his party lost 63 seats in 2010 and then 13 seats in 2014. Under Donald Trump, in 2018, Republicans lost 41 seats. Overall, since World War II, losses have averaged 27 seats in the House.

Next year, if Republicans gain just five House seats, Rep. Kevin McCarthy or some other right-wing ideologue will become the House speaker, giving the GOP control over all committees and legislation. In the Senate, where the historic midterm pattern has been similar, a Republican gain of just one seat will reinstall Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader.