Global
Anyone who’s been paying attention should get the picture by now. Overall, in subtle and sledgehammer ways, the mass media of the United States -- owned and sponsored by corporate giants -- are in the midst of a siege against the two progressive Democratic candidates who have a real chance to be elected president in 2020.
Some of the prevalent media bias has taken the form of protracted swoons for numerous “center lane” opponents of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The recent entry of Michael Bloomberg has further jammed that lane, adding a plutocrat “worth” upwards of $50 billion to a bevy of corporate politicians.
The mainline media are generally quite warm toward so-called “moderates,” without bothering to question what’s so moderate about such positions as bowing to corporate plunder, backing rampant militarism and refusing to seriously confront the climate emergency.
Throughout its history, Earth has experienced five mass extinction events. See, for example, ‘Timeline Of Mass Extinction Events On Earth’. It is now experiencing the sixth.
1. The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction, which occurred about 439 million years ago, wiped out 86% of life on Earth at the time. Most scientists believe that this mass extinction was precipitated by glaciation and falling sea levels (possibly a result of the Appalachian mountain range forming), catastrophically impacting animal life which lived largely in the ocean at the time.
It is time we acknowledge the political realities before us, and align on the candidate who will not only win, but build the kind of multicultural, multiracial and working class movement that will enable the next President to take on corporate power and deliver justice for all.
As the executive director of Rights & Democracy (RAD) in Vermont and an organizer based in our state for more than two decades, I have had many opportunities to work closely with U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
I know what drives him, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right when she says, he is “the real deal.
By Nicolas J S Davies, World BEYOND War, November 29, 2019
This week on Talk Nation Radio: a rant on impeachment, in favor of doing it right or not doing it at all.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
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In yesterday’s Duluth News-Tribune’s editorial page, the DNT’s regular ultra-conservative Sunday editorialist and reliable Trump administration defender Marc Thiessen made an interesting comment about his hero’s impeachment threat.
Before discussing the comment, I think that it is important to point out a few things about Thiessen that the DNT hasn’t mentioned.
Thiessen grew up on New York City’s East Side, the over-privileged son of two physicians. He went to an elite private high school, attended the equally elite Vassar College and then attended the Naval War College. Interestingly, he then worked for 5 years for Paul Manafort’s lobbying firm. After serving as a staffer for the notorious racist Senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms, he worked in George W. Bush’s administration and then became a speechwriter for both Donald Rumsfeld and Bush. Thiessen is now a regular FOX News commentator anda “resident fellow” at both the conservative Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute.
Last week, the Democratic leadership put an extension of the Patriot Act into a “continuing resolution” that averted a government shutdown. More than 95 percent of the Democrats in the House went along with it by voting for the resolution. Both co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapal and Mark Pocan, voted yes. So did all 11 of the CPC’s vice chairs.
It didn’t have to be that way. House progressives could have thrown a monkey wrench into the Orwellian machinery. Instead, the cave-in was another bow to normalizing the U.S. government’s mass surveillance powers.
Academy Award winning Australian filmmaker Eva Orner’s well-made documentary Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator is an 86-minute creepfest perfect for the #MeToo Movement and moment. This no-punches-pulled nonfiction film purports to chronicle the career, life, lies, and sexual abuse of Bikram Choudhury, the main ballyhooer of Bikram or “Hot Yoga” in America and beyond. The ornery Orner goes after Choudhury with the same take-no-prisoners panache that Alex Gibney - with whom she shared (as producer) the Best Documentary Oscar for 2007’s Taxi to the Dark Side - took on another alleged cult in 2015’s Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief.