CARTOON BLOCKHEAD: You Ain't Gonna' Teach Me Squat!
You can’t tell me anything when I know everything!
Cartoon my Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (12/18/24)
As usual, the Democratic Party remains firmly, boldly and resolutely … unwilling to learn a damn thing.
Despite the Harris/Walz ticket being soundly tromped in both the popular and electoral vote, and revelations of massive financial mismanagement and celebrity grifting off the billion-dollar-plus campaign that was left $20 million in debt, there are Democrats seriously talking of running goofball Harris again in 2028.
But why not?
Afterall, “What has always been will always be inscribed in my day planner for 2028 of what is to be whenever it is the proper time — which is now and forever — to achieve what has been always and will be.”
Yeah, sure. Why the hell not.
In a subscription-only article in the recent edition of Jacobin — Why Bidenism Failed — the deceptive betrayal of the Clinton/Biden/Harris neocon party con was properly tagged as the reason workers have migrated off to the Republicans:
“Despite lofty ambitions, four years of professional-managerial approaches to governing moved the Democrats even further away from their New Deal roots.”
Care for working people and broken communities? Screw that, we got billionaire donors to suck off.
Dems for war, genocide, ecoterrorism
And then of course there’s Biden’s orchestrated Ukraine war, that has claimed the lives of almost a million and the limbs of tens of thousands. And the US bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline, the largest act of eco-terrorism in history that crippled the economies of our Europe’s allies.
And then — most obscenely — there is the never-ending crime of the Democratic Party’s US/Israel genocide in Gaza. Which has now spread to the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria where we have joined arm-in-arm with f’ing Al Qaeda!
And, as we saw with the obsequious, oily bipartisan devotion of 58 standing ovations in Congress during Netanyahu’s “State of the Union” address, the only party in charge of this nation is Bibi’s Likud party.
But, what the hell, as the smug Harris campaign staff vented on the liberal Pod Save America, voters must have just been too damn dumb to see the brilliance of their candidate and stellar insight of their campaign.
No, the Democrats can’t be told anything. Well, anything not off the menu of billionaire donors, like Mark Cuban. The examples below are of many and prove that.
No, people, time to walk away from the corporate duopoly. Trump will prove to be to many on the right what Obama was to the progressive left: A sham. There may be a chance for the people in this country to finally understand: the only issue that matters is CLASS.
Democrats Eye Harris 2028 Re-Run As They Plot Political Comeback
By Edward Helmore
The Guardian (12/16/24)
Democratic party aides have begun to float ideas for a Kamala Harris political comeback, reportedly eyeing another run at the US’s highest office even as the party continues to grapple with the electoral messages contained in the vice-president’s decisive defeat in November’s White House race against Donald Trump.
Harris, who has reportedly not ruled out a second run for the presidency, is now reported to be considering a run for the California governorship, currently held until 2027 by Gavin Newsom. Newsom was a rumoured presidential contender during the chaotic summer that saw Joe Biden step down from a rematch with Trump – whom he defeated in the 2020 election – and then endorse Harris as his replacement.
According to the Washington Post on Monday, some Democratic party aides believe Trump – who, among other things, overcame a criminal conviction and other such charges to win – has sufficiently overturned the norms of losing White House candidates’ not attempting a second bite at the proverbial apple to give Harris the opportunity of a repeat bid in 2028, this time for the full cycle.
“Since Donald Trump has rewritten the rules – the norms – I don’t believe Kamala Harris or anyone should try to go with precedent, ever,” said Donna Brazile, a Harris ally, Al Gore 2000 presidential campaign manager and political commentator. “There are no rule books.” …
Democratic Party-Enabled Genocide Has Turned Gaza Into “a graveyard for children,” UNICEF Says
A starving child in Gaza. Handiwork of United States and Israel fascist governments. Al Jazeera photo.
By Nora Barrows-Friedman
Electronic Intifada (12/12/24)
[The following is from the news roundup during the 11 December livestream. Watch the entire episode here.]
Israel’s campaign of systematic slaughter, forced displacement, destruction and starvation in north Gaza is now in its tenth week, while airstrikes and massacres are being carried out across all areas of the coastal enclave.
Palestinians in north Gaza endured more rounds of forced displacement this past week, as Israeli forces ordered approximately 5,500 people sheltering in schools in Beit Lahiya to go to Gaza City.
Journalist Ibrahim al-Khalili reported from north Gaza as people were forced to leave, amidst Israeli tank shelling, on 5 December.
The United Nations says that about 8,000 people have been forcibly displaced to Gaza City from the northern areas since the end of November.
On 11 December, an Israeli attack in Beit Lahiya killed at least 20 people living in the multi-story home of the Abu Tarabish family.
On Tuesday, the Israeli army bombed a residential building in Beit Hanoun, in the corner of northeastern Gaza, killing 25 people and injuring dozens more.
The Gaza government media office stated that “the occupation army knew that this residential building contained dozens of displaced civilians, and that the majority of them were children and women who were displaced from their homes and civilian residential neighborhoods.”
In Beit Lahiya, Israeli forces carried out a series of massacres in and near the Kamal Adwan hospital in the last several days.
On Friday, 6 December, Israel launched yet another attack on the hospital itself, including firing directly on an ambulance near the hospital compound.
Field teams with Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that Israeli troops used Palestinian detainees as human shields, “forcing them to warn hospital staff that all displaced persons and companions of patients must leave the premises and head to areas controlled by Israeli forces. Many were arrested upon arrival, while others were forced to flee to a checkpoint in the Civil Administration [an Israeli military body] area and eventually to Gaza City.”…
DYING MAN, DYING PARTY — Dems Elect Dying Congressman To Lead Critical Watchdog Committee
“This is insanity.”
By Ken Klippenstein & Dan Boguslaw
Ken Klippenstein Substack (12/17/24)
A 74-year-old congressman stricken with an especially deadly form of cancer was chosen today to be the top Democrat in charge of oversight, a watchdog role that will oversee investigations into public corruption and wrongdoing over the next two years. Two days after his re-election last month, Rep. Gerry Connolly on November 7 disclosed that he had esophageal cancer. Medical experts told us that the survival rate for esophageal cancer is extremely low.
“The cure rate is extremely low, and even under the most favorable of circumstances only a tiny minority can be cured,” Dr. James Stark, a Harvard-educated 30-year veteran oncologist, told us.
While the five-year survival rate for esophageal cancer is about 20 percent, “when it is already large or has spread to other parts of the body, treatment is more difficult and the five-year survival rate is lower,” according to the U.S. government’s National Cancer Institute (NCI). Connolly has said that he is undergoing chemotherapy, which the NCI says “is used when the cancer cells have spread to other parts of the body.”
In other words, Connolly, now the top House Democrat on a committee responsible for overseeing ethics and accountability, will almost certainly die of the illness. Yet despite that, House Democrats today voted 131-84 for Rep. Gerry Connolly to serve as ranking member of the Oversight Committee. Connolly defeated Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 35-year-old congresswoman also contending for the position. Connolly won the support of several of the party old guard, including 84-year-old Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who found the strength to whip votes in his favor even after she was rushed by a U.S. military medevac for a hip replacement after suffering a fall while on official travel. It remains unclear whether Pelosi advocated for the septuagenarian directly from her sick bed or with the help of her whip team.
“Gerry’s a young 74, cancer notwithstanding,” a top ally, Rep. Don Beyer, reportedly said.
“His goose is cooked.”
Even if Connolly survives, treatment is grueling. It is unclear whether he’ll have the stamina to lead a committee that is supposed to be the federal government’s watchdog amid the incoming Trump administration.
“It is a horrendous thing to undergo,” Dr. Stark said of the treatment. “After radiation and chemo, a patient will likely have his esophagus removed. If that happens they will take a piece of the stomach, and hook it up to the area where they remove tissue.”
Doctors I interviewed took a uniformly dim view of Connolly’s prognosis, expressing shock that he hasn’t resigned, much less been passed up for the demanding oversight role.
“This man is clearly dying,” a Pennsylvania-based surgeon told me, requesting that their name not be used in order to comment candidly. “This is insanity.”
Another doctor remarked bluntly, “His goose is cooked.”
Connolly’s press secretary, Nick Burroughs, did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Connolly’s diagnosis and his likely prognosis.
Sources on Capitol Hill were reluctant to comment on Connolly’s health, including even his critics, who appeared to prefer to stick to policy critiques. Decorum, it seems, is the last refuge of the gerontocracy.
Lee Lakeman & The Whoredom Of The Left
The radical feminist Lee Lakeman has spent her life calling out patriarchy for its oppression, the left for its bankruptcy, neoliberalism for its cruelty and organizing women to fight back.
By Chris Hedges
The Chris Hedges Report (12/12/24)
I just got off the phone with the Canadian feminist and activist Lee Lakeman. She is in hospice. The battles she has spent her life fighting, including her advocacy for impoverished aboriginal women prostituted in desolate urban landscapes such as the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, which once had the highest HIV-infection rate in the West, lay behind her. When she is gone, we are the ones who will be impoverished, bereft of her searing intellect and unwavering fight for justice. She will leave in her wake a sterling example of what it means to live the moral life, a life of meaning.
“Everything you and I have spent our life fighting for is worse,” she said to me ruefully over the phone.
Yes. Worse. But her clear, steely-eyed view of the world, her understanding of power and how it works, never dampened her commitment or passion. To fight battles in the face of almost certain defeat, to demand justice for the oppressed no matter the cost, and to know that despite all your efforts, the forces of oppression are growing stronger and crueler, is the essence of nobility.
Lee battles a world going numb, a world banishing empathy, a world where solidarity with the oppressed and marginalized is increasingly a foreign concept.
Prostitution, she argues, is the quintessential expression of global capitalism. Our corporate masters are pimps. We are all being debased and degraded, fleeced economically and stripped of basic civil liberties and political agency, to service the cruel and lascivious demands of the corporate elite. Jeffrey Epstein surrounded himself not only with prostituted underage girls, but the powerful, including Donald Trump, who 27 women have accused of sexual misconduct, along with Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew. The hard drives found in Epstein’s safe at his Manhattan mansion, which purportedly included videos of sexual encounters filmed on his properties, have disappeared. It is unlikely they will reappear. The wretched of the earth are reduced in the neoliberal model to serving the desires and fetishes of the wealthy and the privileged. …
Link to story and 19-minute audio
Biden Pardon Of 'Kids-for-Cash' Judge Michael Conahan Sparks Outrage
"There's never going to be any closure for us."
By Brett Wilkins
Common Dreams (12/13/24)
Victims of a scheme in which a pair of Pennsylvania judges conspired to funnel thousands of children into private detention centers in exchange for millions of dollars in kickbacks expressed outrage following U.S. President Joe Biden's Thursday commutation of one of the men's sentences.
In 2010, former Luzerne County Judge Michael Conahan pleaded guilty to federal racketeering charges and was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison after he and co-conspirator Mark Ciavarella shut down a county-run juvenile detention facility and then took nearly $3 million in payments from the builder and co-owner of for-profit lockups, into which the judges sent children as young as 8 years old.
“When you think about the president of the United States letting him get away with this, who even wants to live in this country at this point?"
"It's a big slap in the face for us once again," Amanda Lorah—who was sentenced by Conahan to five years of juvenile detention over a high school fight—toldWBRE.
Destroyed families
Sandy Fonzo, whose son killed himself after being sentenced to juvenile detention, said in a statement: "I am shocked and I am hurt. Conahan's actions destroyed families, including mine, and my son's death is a tragic reminder of the consequences of his abuse of power."
"This pardon feels like an injustice for all of us who still suffer," Fonzo added. "Right now I am processing and doing the best I can to cope with the pain that this has brought back."
Many of Conahan's victims were first-time or low-level offenders. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court would later throw out thousands of cases adjudicated by the Conahan and Ciaverella, the latter of whom is serving a 28-year sentence for his role in the scheme.
Conahan—who is 72 and had been under house arrest since being transferred from prison during the Covid-19 pandemic—was one of around 1,500 people who received commutations or pardons from Biden on Thursday. While the sweeping move was welcomed by criminal justice reform advocates, many also decried the president's decision to not grant clemency to any of the 40 men with federal death sentences.
Deserving of clemency
Others have called on Biden—who earlier this month pardoned his son Hunter Biden after promising he wouldn't—to grant clemency to people including Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier and environmental lawyer Steven Donziger. …
DNC party is walking corpse
Thanks as usual, Mark. Great articles a lot to process.
The lack of introspection is disturbing. The Democrats, as you point out, haven’t learned a damn thing, or are in on the take. Personally, Kamala’s platform was a mystery, her website was as vacuous as her remarks. It aptly echoed what our country has become, a pervasive racket conning folks into buying useless stuff.
Her endless peroration of representing the party of freedom fell flat on its face. Not freedom of speech for Palestinian-Americans during the convention, and not the freedom to live and self-determination for the Palestinians. Somehow Obama thinks he can infringe on Black men’s freedom to choose, as he condescendingly admonished them for not supporting the genocidal candidate . Hillary and Kerry didn’t get the memo, both taking shots at the first amendment. What a beautiful mess.
Folks don’t like her nor the Clintons, nor the Obamas, nor the gerontocracy. These corporate lackeys are responsible for the corporate takeover of the Democratic Party, and serving the interests of the criminal enterprise called AIPAC , to the detriment of its constituents . The corporate takeover was in full display yesterday. The Zionist and genocidal Josh Shapiro shamelessly stated that millionaires are virtuous because they buy yachts.
Same as our mainstream media, the Democrats are doomed to irrelevance. Talking about the MSM, this week it incessantly churned out articles praising the corrupt Milei. Argentina’s godly savior for taming hyperinflation, the latest darling in the debased hallways of Wall Street and Mar-a-Largo. Petty issues such as driving 4 million people into poverty, an 11 percent increase from last year, from 42% to 53 % are trivial issues. The MSM didn’t mention the pettiness the insecure little man has toward the poor, laying waste 5 million pounds of food his predecessor sourced for the food insecure, paraphrasing Lee Lakeman in Chris’s article, that everything they fought for is getting worse.
It’s always refreshing to remind ourselves that decent people like Chris Hedges and Lee Lakeman exist, true warriors never ceasing to fight injustices. It’s sad to realize that Lee won’t be with us much longer. The article is as lovely as its heart rendering . A must read.
Gotta stop venting. Didn’t expect to go on, so disappointed with the system. Stop the genocide and free Palestine 🇵🇸