No matter how closely you follow Russian interference in the 2016 election, The brazen ways in which Trump and McConnell reward and are rewarded by a Russian oligarch will shock you.
In Brief,
In Memory of Mitch. Mitch Buszek was a lifelong activist who showed up time and time again. On Monday, we come together to honor his life of commitment. Funeral services will be held on Monday, August 5, 2019 at 10:30 am at the Rivera Family Funeral Home located at 417 Rodeo Road in Santa Fe.
A potluck luncheon in celebration of Mitch’s life will be hosted by the Santa Fe County Democratic Party on August 5, 2019 at 2:00 pm at the Center for Progress and Justice located at 1420 Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe, Mitch’s family is kindly asking for donations to help defray funeral costs. Donations can be made at the following Go-Fund-Me page: https://www.gofundme.com/funeral-services-for-mitch-buszek
Reminder about our Organizing Meeting on Tuesday, August 6, 6:30-8:30pm at 1420 Cerrillos. We are going breaking out and refinding our plans to target eight NM Senate DINOs, the eight who voted no to decriminalize abortion. Thanks so much. And really, do RSVP. Really.
Valarie Kaur. After the video by Maddow, a 6 minute video that I post about every other month just because it is so inspiring: Valarie Kaur and her speech “What If the Darkness is Not the Darkness of the Tomb, but the Darkness of the Womb.” If you haven’t seen it, I’ve seen it at least 20-30 times and I got a chill just typing the most powerful line in the speech. As she says it, watch Reverend Barber leap to his feet and throw his arms up. If you’ve seen much of the Rev, you will know that he doesn’t leap much. Enjoy.
Russian Oligarch, Putin, Trump, McConnell and a Newly Seated and Totally Incompetent Federal Judge in One Neat Package
Not much need for comment before you see this. But I am most interested in comments. If this is not illegal, there is something very wrong with our legal system. Great reporting by Maddow.
Valarie Kaur: What an inspiration!
Enjoy your Sunday.
In solidarity,
Paul & Roxanne
Categories: Uncategorized
“What if this darkness is a womb?” “Breathe and push”
Amen
How could anyone believe anything Maddow says at this point. She refers to Russia’s attack on our 2016 election (not Russia’s alleged attack…) as if it were a fact. This is what she is being paid for. While Maddow was distracting her audience with “Russia, Russia, Russia…” the congress reduced corporate income taxes by 40% to be paid for by erosion of nonmilitary government spending. The military budget was increased by more than the total Russian military budget. The next wars are being set up.
COME ON PEOPLE. WAKE UP!!
While I also prefer a focus on Trump policies and executive orders, this just seemed surreal. I don’t really watch Maddow, but when I’ve seen clips she seems to cover far more than the Russian monkeying with the election. But you refer to her not using alleged as a problem when it seems pretty damned sure to have occurred and Mueller, who refuses to assert much, stated it as happening then and now with about as strong a wording as possible.
It’s nearly impossible to put into words how infuriating this is. It really doesn’t seem as though we have a functioning democracy on any level. Anything goes and a reckoning does not seem to be forthcoming. I so wish the political genius Nancy Pelosi had not secured the speakership of the house. She seems unwilling to allow oversight. I have repeatedly called out Deb Haaland in this blog for the incredible and courageous work she is doing as our representative. And yet she is missing from the list of 118 representatives calling for impeachment inquiry. Inexplicable.
This is how far this behavior has been normalized. We should be taking a look at how we got here, so we can fix it. This nation has been under the thrall of Neo liberalism, and not just at the federal level this permeates issues, right here in NM. They put the facts on TV, and wrote about them in national newspapers and people are still confused. They have been so bombarded with misinformation, long running lies, and propaganda.
There are few meaningful discussions on social media, on any of it, that was replaced by trolls and genuinely confused or misled people. No one looked at how all of this was promoted by the big tech companies. This was the Effin Russians our nations mortal enemy, all through the Cold War. It was not just the Russians, the Saudis and others, took advantage of our broken system. Our democrats are still waffling over impeachment a topic they should have taken up on day one. They are comprised, the facts are really clear cut, and the damage is getting harder to ignore, yet they continue to debate.
Those presidential debates showed us why this country needs a reckoning, the really bad ideas of the last 30 to 40 years need to be explained, along with the ongoing damage they are still inflicting on us all. We are seeing the Gas Lighting go on here at the local level, all the way up to internationally.
Pulling out of the INF, the “shooting” in El Paso, and the systematic destruction of every institution, should be enough. If we want to ask why they are compromised, look at how this state will benefit financially, from the withdrawal from the INF. The corruption and confusion go from the very bottom to the top.
When the Cambridge Analytica story broke, I thought maybe someone would catch on. Yet even that did not stimulate any questions. This stuff has spread, attacking other democracies, and undermining the facts everywhere. Clever manipulators used psychology and social media questionnaires to violate our privacy, and manipulate and deceive enough people, to re frame reality as a “choice or a debate.”
We used to have something called the “Fourth Estate” but they are not only failing to keep us informed, they are misleading us daily. Bernie called out the advertisers the other night, and no one discussed that, or the impact right here.
Maybe we should start asking why we all tolerated this for so long. If we cant fix it or identify it at the local level, how the heck can we fix it up to the national level.
I am watching “Regional News Reporting & Public Trust” on C-Span. They just claimed that most people get their local news from TV news. That is probably a fact. I don’t see anyone analyzing their narrative, or the marketers. That might explain why we are stymied locally on Criminal Justice Reform or Education. All they do is perpetuate denial and disbelief, with the weather and a few facts.
The idea of doing a one-week scan of the reports aired on the three major local stations seems a good idea and something we could do. From memory: tragic accident, rain predicted or not (2-3 times in 30 minute show), crime committed, cute heartwarming story; one national story, likely about a Trump tweet or some other distraction. But it would be good to see a really objective job of this and it would be an easy task for our Research Team.
Sorry, Paul, I must agree with the comment by Physicists above. Rachel Maddow has zero credibility with me, and her personal ideology, especially the warmongering, is repugnant. For Russiagate reporting, I recommend Aaron Mate and Matt Taibbi. Ex-saint Mueller, Comey, Schiff, Nadler (not to mention Brennan and the rest of the MIIC) are as dirty as they come. In a just world they would all be in orange jumpsuits in the same cell as Trump and his miserable gang.
As far as the actual facts of the Maddow story, isn’t this a lot of pearl clutching? The United States government is largely a criminal enterprise, irredeemably corrupt. Among the reasons Trump drives people crazy are because he is preternaturally vulgar and unsettlingly overt in his racism and corruption. He, and to a lesser degree McConnell, just don’t give a shit about “normal appearances”. They announce the horrible things they are going to do without any excuses. Then, if they can, they do them. In the past, the abject national Dimocrats and the bulk of the corporate media sought to disguise their oligarchic bias and inhuman policies by using rational-sounding arguments and by employing smooth frontmen, like Obama. Most of the time, the results are the same. Note that this is NOT a defense of Trump. He is a shit through and through. But I have to admit that once in a while he blurts out something that is a hard truth. It can be clarifying.
I am not a fan of Maddow, but I thought this was an instance where she did a good job of connecting some pretty brazen dots. And based upon the number of comments today I think others were somewhat stunned….despite as you noted, this actually represent nothing more than business as usual.
We are in a pickle. The first two pairs of presidential debates were nothing less than shocking. NBC, MSNBC, & CNN all revealed that corporate media is beyond compromised. I used to watch PBS but I eventually even gave up on them when guests were paired against one another with Max Schlapp making me sick to my stomach. I then went out of the way to access MSNBC even though they are an affiliate of NBC. I do have to give Maddow credit. She does go where others do not and I have never thought her to be a warmonger.
So, where do we get our information? Truthout is excellent but not a full service source of news. How is your Santa Fe New Mexican? I’ll subscribe if you Santa Fe’ans will vouch.
Yeah Steve!
We don’t really have a Fourth Estate anymore. It is almost all corporate media, just different flavors. We don’t have to trust the “credibility” of Rachel Maddow, or like her hairstyle. She reads directly from the Mueller Report, and corroborated the story with other sources, all easy enough to verify. It is not rocket science chuckle chuckle Mr “physicist” Thom Hartman on Free Speech TV is reading excerpts from the Mueller Report,and has a call in radio show. He also has Congressman Ro Khanna and others on from time to time. Maddow would get a lot more attention if she grew her hair out bleached it blonde, and invested in some silicone implants, like the females on the “other networks.”
I would not vouch for the “New Mexican” they do tell us about stuff that happened here in Santa Fe, they are just a corporate version of a small town newspaper. Their editor bragged about how they were groundbreaking in their advertising for the real estate industry. Looking back 30 years it is easy to see why people are in their own little world here, and real estate speculation has destroyed this little town. I had hoped they would have objectively evaluated their role in community information. They really only answer to their big corporate advertisers (Healthcare) and the real estate and development industry, Sure they will run the occasional story on the “poor” or a bad behaving politician, but they helped normalize the real corruption. Their coverage and Facebook amplification of extremism before the 2016 election, was horrifying.
We do not have any really objective news here. There are a few sources, and by patching them all together, you can kind of reconstruct what might really be going on. We do not have a real left news outlet either. The topics they cover on Truthout, or Free Speech TV are relevant here in New Mexico. The same issues everywhere else are going on here. There is a lot of denial about all of this due to the industries that undermine public discourse. The gun lobby did not like municipalities counting gun crimes or deaths, so even here in Santa Fe this kind of data was not collected. The realtors did not like that kind of factual data either, it could hurt a home sale. Local media not only advertises for our broken healthcare system, but tends to mislead the public on serious issues.
I follow NM Political Report, factual but to much neo-liberal and libertarian, other side, High Country News, for environmental and other news. The small town newspapers tend to be seeking out advertising dollars so they don’t want to offend anyone, but often complain about an imaginary left. They help drive the crime and incarceration narrative, by publicly shaming various small time criminals.
https://freespeech.org/ Free Speech TV
https://www.theguardian.com/us The Guardian
https://www.thomhartmann.com/ Thom Hartman
https://www.hcn.org/ High Country News
https://khn.org/ Kaiser Health News
The best commentary I found, so far.
https://blog.usejournal.com/russiagate-the-great-tragic-comedy-of-modern-journalism-fd2a451aaa25
I found out, finally, why I am not “Shocked And Horrified” as Dr. Mosqueda put it in 2001. http://www.globalissues.org/article/257/shocked-and-horrified
I was into a poor (very poor by your standards) jewish family of immigrants in a deeply antisemitic country, at least at that time.
I grew up there until I left at 22 years of age. During that period of my life I grew up with a string of dictators and military juntas together with the curfews and the fear, even fear of speaking to friends. So we never talked about internal politics.
My father would come home and close all the windows, in the middle of the hot and humid summer, and turn the radio to Radio Colonia (Uruguay) to listen to real news. Like here, most argentinians are fantastic human beings. But we had the three Marys not in reference to Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka but to the marriage between the Church, the Military and and the Oligarchs who has always dominated argentinians, their lives, and especially their economy. In school I learned about the constitutional government and the constitution, very similar to ours here. However, experience taught us at a very young age that both were useless to the people. Just like here this ‘game’ began as the constitution was put down on paper.
This will be my last blog entry which will make many happy. I have reviewed this chain of blog submissions and I don’t think I can participate any more. I so support Paul, Roxanne and all the folks up there in Santa Fe doing this important work. But I don’t know where any of this is going. First off, what the hell is physicistsfor911truth? I personally believe 9/11 was an inside job for which we (the world) are continuing to pay. Pandora’s box unleashed. I know the format for this website allows for website entries. But who is this contributor? If you’re not willing to put your name to your views then it shouldn’t be allowed. That’s how the last election was hacked. Bots.
Robert Baroody seems to think almost everyone is a shit. So, where does that get us?
I have read so many treaties from folks getting into existential angst (mine perhaps included) that is about what? There does seem to be a real Santa Fe bubble. Paul, if you posted a piece that you believed deserved attention, why discredit it by saying you’re not a fan? That’s what Trump does.
Screw pysicistsfor911truth and Robert Baroody. It’s your platform. You where right to bring this excellent reporting to a larger local audience.
I will do what I can outside this larger Sante Fe group. And to Mary, I’m a fan. Not ashamed to admit it. Best to us all!