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With its third production of the season at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion LA Opera remains on a roll. Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco is another eye-popping extravaganza, with director and designer Thaddeus Strassberger’s optically opulent sets that not only recreate and evoke ancient Jerusalem and Babylon during biblical times (like D.W. Griffith did for his 1916 masterpiece about man’s inhumanity to man, Intolerance), as well as simultaneously suggesting 19th century Italy. In particular, Milano’s famed Teatro alla Scala, where Nabucco premiered in 1842.

Exactly at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 99 years ago, people across Europe suddenly stopped shooting guns at each other. Up until that moment, they were killing and taking bullets, falling and screaming, moaning and dying. Then they stopped, on schedule. It wasn’t that they’d gotten tired or come to their senses. Both before and after 11 o’clock they were simply following orders. The Armistice agreement that ended World War I had set 11 o’clock as quitting time.

Steve Bannon’s attempted fascist putsch in Virginia and New Jersey has failed.

Is Alabama next? Can the Democrats keep it from being stolen?

Tuesday’s gubernatorial elections in the Garden State and the state “for lovers” were soundly won by moderate Democrats. The elections were widely featured in the corporate media as referendums on Donald Trump.

This time, the “the fire and the fury” of American mass murder erupted in church. Twenty-six people were killed, including children, one only 18 months old.

How do we stroke their memory? How do we move forward? This is bigger than gun control. We should begin, I think, by envisioning a world beyond mass murder: a world where rage and hatred are not armed and, indeed, where our most volatile emotions can find release long before they become lethal.

As I read about the shootings at Sutherland Springs, Texas, and studied Devin Patrick Kelley’s troubled bio, I suddenly found myself picturing a coal miner trapped in a collapsed mine. Here was a man trapped inside himself: buried in his own troubles, disconnected from his own humanity and, therefore, everyone else’s humanity. A man in such a state is utterly disempowered.

And in this country, the path back to empowerment — for God know how many people — begins with owning a gun.

n his latest impersonation of the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland, the president of the United States stopped just short of shouting “Off with his head!” at the latest New York terror suspect, but pretty much everyone knows that’s exactly what he meant. Lewis Carroll intended the Red Queen to be an entertaining caricature by virtue of her absurdity. That’s a luxury we don’t have when considering our Trump’s affinity with the Red Queen’s jurisprudence: “Sentence first – verdict afterwards.” That’s just what our Trump demands again and again from legal proceedings, with appalling disregard for the Constitution and any other law that happens to displease him.

A big chunk of American democracy is riding on Tuesday’s Virginia election.

The outcome could turn on how well Democrats protect the right to vote….and the right to have the votes accurately counted. 

If Democrat and anti-Trump activists do not work to guarantee everyone’s access to the polls, they could very well lose the election.  The GOP has perfected the use of Jim Crow tactics to prevent from voting countless black, Hispanic and other ethnic citizens by electronic and other means.  The Democrats have been weak at best at protecting those votes. 

They can also expect a “last minute surge” for Republican candidates, followed by “glitches” in electronic voting machines, especially in rural areas where election boards are controlled by Republicans.  If experience in states like Ohio, New Mexico, Wisconsin and elsewhere are any indicator, ballots will be “found” for the Republicans and “lost” for the Democrats in key swing districts.  These could easily determine the outcome. 

Basically, it’s kidnapping.

Were the Border Patrol agents wearing MAGA hats when they grabbed Rosa Maria Hernandez as she left her hospital room?

“It’s a shocking case — the most outrageous case I’ve ever seen. Is it a preview of things to come?” ACLU attorney Michael Tan said to me about the incident, shortly after the civil-rights group filed suit against the federal government demanding the 10-year-old child’s release from a detention facility in Texas, 150 miles from her home in Laredo.

Rosa Maria, who has cerebral palsy, was arrested at a children’s hospital on Oct. 25, the day after she had emergency gall bladder surgery. She’s been at the detention center for a week now, under the bureaucratic “care” of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which wants to ship her back to Mexico.

The child’s problem is that, although she has lived in the United States since she was three months old, she’s illegal. Her mother brought her into the U.S. — from Nuevo Laredo to Laredo — so she could get better medical care.

Congress Members Jones and Garamendi are going to screen and discuss a hilarious movie mockery of militarism. They’re going to do it in the U.S. Capitol. They’re going to go right on funding the war madness, sanctioning possible new enemies, and risking all of our lives. But for a moment, they’re going to open a window and let a bit of sanity in.

French filmmakers Thibout Bertrand, Guillaume Lebeau and Benjamin Clavel have flown from Paris to L.A. to present the American debut of their just released documentary Red In Blue at the Left Coast Forum. The 57 minute film is especially timely as the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution is this Nov. 7.

Red In Blue includes clips from American movies about the Bolshevik uprising going back to silent movies and includes scenes from David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago, Warren Beatty’s Reds, the animated feature Anastasia and more. The documentary also features archival footage and original interviews with Warren Beatty, a U.S. Red plus French and American film historians, including Ed Rampell, co-founder of Hollywood Progressive, author of Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States.

Columbus Crew SC fans can only wonder. What team was Anthony Precourt rooting for when the Portland Timbers upset the Crew at Mapre Stadium for the 2015 Major League Soccer Cup?

In 2016 he traded star striker Kei Kamara to New England. Kamara was a fan favorite even with the fringiest of local Crew fans. Fast forward to the summer of 2017 and the Crew has the worst attendance in the MLS.

Again, something he was rooting for?

Another red flag was flashed in 2013 when Precourt bought the team from the Hunt family, the original owners. Precourt insisted on being the principle owner even though the Hunt family at first tried to offer him minority investment. Precourt then pledged to Columbus he would keep the Crew here.