NOLA Christmas Carolling

 

Found on Twitter:

Marco
@marcorasi1960
· 
Carolers fill Jackson Square with Christmas songs and candle lights, New Orleans

2024 Year in Review

I've been watching the year in review on NBC news for decades.

I no longer watch network news, but I still enjoy the recaps from NBC, though I miss Tom Brokaw.

Here's a link to a 7 minute review of 2024.  https://youtu.be/VqvowV3cS1s?si=Ddps7-KUUcU3rt29

What a crappy year it was, in my opinion.  

Monday smile

 

Dad recorded his music-loving daughter's growth over the years. Notice that his face doesn't change in at all thru the years.

OH, Canada

Snapshot: "Oh, Canada"

On unelected Elon, spending rejected, worsening inequality and happy dreams about our neighbor to the north

Steven Beschloss

Dec 20, 2024 

At first I was struck by the sheer arrogance and stupidity of Donald Trump posting this week about turning Canada into the 51st state—“Many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st state,” he lied—never mind that MAGA enablers were later claiming that their humorless leader was just joking. Then Wednesday happened, when unelected President Elon Musk blew up the pre-Christmas spending bill that would have kept the government open and functioning and likely would have passed with bipartisan participation.

Insisting that the proposed bill was “criminal” and spreading lies about its actual contents, the world’s richest man threatened to primary any member of Congress who went along with the legislation. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Musk posted. This was just one of over 100 posts by America’s leading oligarch, intended to bully Republicans into submission.

It worked. He tanked the bill that would have extended government funding through next March and included funding for child cancer research, disaster relief and economic aid for farmers. This mess is of course deeply worrying, given the damage that Musk’s destruction would cause millions of government employees, military members, farmers, senior citizens and other at-risk Americans who count on government services and payments for their survival.

But, amid MAGA Republicans kowtowing to their new overlord—who, by the way, will surely be all-in on fresh tax cuts that help billionaires like him, never mind rising national debt, or massive defense contract increases—I began to think more about Canada. Oh, Canada.

In these turbulent times, I often hear people pondering what it would mean if America split up into blue states and red states. Well, how about a different scenario? What if Musk-Trump and their nasty band of marauders succeed in turning our beloved country into a collection of scraps so cheap that our friends from the north could consider acquiring and turning the U.S. into its 11th province?

Yes, I’m kidding. But, to my surprise, when I posted this thought on Bluesky, my joke was warmly applauded as a welcome notion. Here was a chance for people south of the Canadian border to join a system of universal healthcare. Here was a chance for, as one person put it, “benevolent rulers.” Here was a chance to dwell on the delights of maple syrup, the need not to flee the country and all those very nice Canadians. “I would be OK being a Canadian,” said one poster. “We should be so lucky,” said another. “At this point, that sounds fabulous, eh?” said a third.

Of course, it’s not like this proposal would be warmly received in points north. “With all that debt, nah,” said one Canadian. Ending this warm reflection, there was this sober slap of reality: “I speak for all Canadians here on this topic. We won't buy, even if you pay us.”

OK, so it looks like we’ll have to dig our own way out of our mess. As of last night, a stripped-down alternate proposal was dismissed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries with these simple declarative sentences: "The Musk-Johnson proposal is not serious. It's laughable. 

Extreme MAGA Republicans are driving us to a government shutdown." A subsequent vote confirmed nearly every Democrat and 38 Republicans agreed the new bill was not serious. Final defeat for the spending bill Trump endorsed: 235-174.

I don’t know what the coming days and weeks will yield, except more chaos, conflict and madness from co-presidents Musk and Trump. And as much as I dread the consequences for everyday Americans who neither voted for this nor imagined how cruel oligarchic rule could be, it’s worth noting that this fiasco a month before they officially take power will meaningfully decrease their political capital.

Even among spineless House Republicans, Musk’s Grinch-like theft of Christmas relief is a bad sign of things to come. While I’m not one to revel in others’ misfortune, we can only hope that the Trump-Musk “let’s destroy America and buy up the broken remnants on the cheap” project eventually earns these awful men the enmity they deserve. It might finally convince a solid majority of Americans why they should be mad as hell and why they shouldn’t take it any more from corrupt, self-serving billionaires. That could eventually yield system change that a grossly unequal and unjust America sorely needs.

Monday Smile

 ffffffdddThis dkdkdkdkdkffstt

Thistttttttrttttttttttgggttttttttttttttttttttttgggggggg

Nobel Laureates Against RFK Jr.

 

The story is at this link

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5031298-nobel-laureates-oppose-rfk-jr/

Winner shows us who some Americans reallly are

 

 Jamie O, Political Crack, So Called Liberal Media

A Tale Of Two Big News Stories

Pete Hegseth and Hunter Biden

A recurring phenomenon of the Trump era, those years of hell starting in 2015 that we are still mired in, is the level of outrage aimed at many things that Trump does and many things that Democrats do feel backward. This means that Trump will do something terrible with great consequences, and some Democrat will do something perhaps bad but not near the level of the bad thing Trump did, and the level of outrage in the Great American Discourse will be higher for the Democrat.

The most recent example of this is what happened yesterday when two huge stories dropped – President Biden announcing he will pardon his son Hunter, and a New Yorker article that outlined Trump’s nominee to run the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth.

Let’s take a look at the two stories.

President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden, who faced potential jail time on charges related to late tax payments and lying on a federal form about drug use. These charges were widely viewed as politically motivated, targeting Hunter because of his father’s presidency. The charges against him are almost never prosecuted. Criminal tax evasion is especially rare when the defendant has already paid all owed taxes, penalties, and fines. A plea deal that would have resulted in probation was derailed, leaving Hunter at risk of disproportionate punishment for offenses rarely prosecuted on their own. In his pardon statement, Biden decried the selective prosecution as an effort to harm both his son and his presidency, asserting that enough was enough.

Critics argue that the pardon could set a precedent for Donald Trump to justify pardoning his allies, but for those who have lived under a rock in a deep coma for the last 10 years, Trump has already extensively used his pardon power for personal and political reasons, including high-profile figures like Roger Stone and Michael Flynn. Historically, political pardons are not unprecedented, as seen with George H.W. Bush’s Iran-Contra pardons and Jimmy Carter’s Vietnam draft evaders’ clemency. Biden’s critics on the right have long used Hunter’s struggles as a tool to attack the president, but Biden’s refusal to sacrifice his son to uphold “norms” that Trump and his allies have repeatedly disregarded reflects a recognition of the political reality. Meanwhile, threats from Trump’s allies to pursue the Biden family underscore the fraught political landscape. If it were to come out that a large part of the motivation for the pardon was Trump’s FBI director pick and his new attorney general pick, Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, and their quite open statements about targeting the Biden family with bullshit, I would not be surprised.

As for the Hegseth story, I’ll just let an excerpt from it do the talking:

After the recent revelation that Pete Hegseth had secretly paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2017, President-elect Donald Trump stood by his choice of Hegseth to become the next Secretary of Defense. Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, issued a statement noting that Hegseth, who has denied wrongdoing, has not been charged with any crime. “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his administration,” Cheung maintained.

 

But Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.

 

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

This combination of extremely poor ethics, criminal behavior, and general incompetence should disqualify Hegseth from leading the largest department in the federal government and being in charge of one of the world’s largest militaries. Which is a helluva lot bigger deal than the Hunter Biden pardon, but of course, given how broken our media is, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

CNN has a big headline on their home page that declares “Biden’s pardon of his son gives Trump an opening,” referring to how Trump will now pardon everyone as if he wasn’t already going to do this (I am BEGGING the institutionalists in media and elsewhere, please look around you and realize what is going on…please?).

I won’t give too much grief to Professional Agitator Tom Nichols, who seems to love starting shit whether it’s over the merits of Indian food or pardoning Hunter, both of which he thinks are the worst things ever. But I will call out Professional Bad Takes Haver Jonathan Chait, who had this to say about it:

“Biden chose to prioritize his own feelings over the defense of the country” is something else, even for Chait. I guess a failson addict with no political power is a bigger threat to the nation’s security than an incompetent racist rapist with a history of violence running the Pentagon. Someone please, make it make sense. Well, it’s Jonathan Chait, so I guess it never will.

I can’t wait for Trump to order troops to fire on protestors, kill over 500, and then the next day’s Jonathan Chait headline is “AOC’s criticism of Trump’s protest response stokes division during a trying time.” I hope we do a bit better with our media’s priorities and story sense, but I am not holding my breath.

RFK Jr.

 

Found this on Bluesky

                        "Get in, losers.  we're getting polio"

The Pardon (Peter Athas post)

 

FIRST DRAFT

The Pardon

By Peter Adrastos Athas on December 3, 2024 I hate everything about the Hunter Biden story. I've avoided writing about it because of my aversion to the whole mishigas. Why do I hate the story? It's all about flooding the zone with shit. It's an attempt to make President Biden look as bad as the Insult Comedian. Adding insult to injury is the way the legacy media and some Democrats have taken the pardon bait and run with it. I feel sorry for Hunter Biden. His father is a great and good man. His older brother Beau was a paragon, the perfect son who would likely be a Senator from Delaware if he had lived. Hunter Biden is a junkie who's trying to stay straight and out of jail. Joe Biden is being accused of lying or breaking his word. Instead, he changed his mind because of changing circumstances. I'll let the President speak for himself: "No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough. For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth. They’ll be fair-minded. Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice – and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision." What the legacy media would have Joe Biden do is to throw his son to the vengeful MAGA wolves just to be consistent with an earlier statement. Fuck that shit and fuck them. To the stern and sanctimonious critics of the pardon, all I have to say is this: Look in the mirror. What would you have done? Imagine having the power to save your son from unjust incarceration and not using it. I, for one, would find that harder to live with than the media's scorn. No wonder I hate the Hunter Biden story.

Monday Smile