It's been a series of stunning blows this week if you're trying to follow the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Even if you're not following that, the constant contravirus news is stressful. So maybe we need a bit of good news? If so, here it is: The kids are back.
VARIETY reports that AMAZON has ordered a new season (eight episodes) of the classic sketch comedy series THE KIDS IN THE HALL.
I don't know about you, but I loved THE KIDS IN THE HALL. My favorite characters? I loved Gavin. He always made me laugh (and I always felt Stuart on MAD TV ripped off Gavin). I loved the Chicken Lady and how her head would explode when she got aroused. I loved Tammy, Canada's teen sensation. "And dance." :D Buddy Cole was always funny and one of the first gay characters on TV played by a gay actor.
Do you remember "slipped my mind"? This co-worker borrows a copy of MAHOGNANY on VHS and keeps not returning it. And always promising to return it and provide something extra but never does? "Slipped my mind."
There was another skit that stands out where they talk about coincidences. At one point, one says, "Oh my God! We were just talking about Cher and Colorado!"
I loved the skit where Cathy and Kathie were so mean to the temp worker.
Trying to think what else. I haven't watched KIDS IN THE HALL since college in the 90s.
But I'm really excited to have eight new episodes.
More good news? Issa Rae has a new film coming out: THE LOVEBIRDS. It's a comedy. I saw an ad for it tonight during either WILL & GRACE (Rebecca covers the latest episode "will & grace") or during INDEBTED (Betty covers the latest episode in "INDEBTED"). THE LOVEBIRDS is a comedy. And it looks funny and so does Issa. Why does that matter? From "THE PHOTOGRAPH:"
It's a good movie but . . . Issa Rae is wonderful as the female lead but she really comes alive if she's laughing and I felt the film would have been better if it had provided her more moments to do comedy. It's a romance, yes, but it could have had stronger comedy elements. If you've seen the movie, think about it. Think about when she laughs and you'll see what I'm saying.
She's probably the strongest comedy actress since the 90s -- when Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock emerged as comedy actresses.
If there were any brains working at movie studios today, they'd be planning comedy projects for her. She has star written all over her.
Hopefully, this will be the first of many comedies Issa Rae will star in.
Going out with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Thursday, March 5, 2020. Reactions to Super Tuesday continue as the DNC
again tries to change the rules for being invited to the debate.
Starting with the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. The big news? Mr. Potter is returning to Bedford Falls. Yes, after spending weeks and over $500 million trying to buy the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, Michael Bloomberg has dropped out of the race.
Currently still in the race? War Hawk Joe Biden, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and US House Rep and Iraq War veteran Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi's campaign noted that Super Tuesday results mean she should be on the stage at the CNN moderated debate later this month:
Last night, we made history. Tulsi — the first female combat veteran, Hindu, and American Samoan to ever run for the presidency — secured a Super Tuesday delegate, putting her on the board with Senators, a former VP, and second-time presidential candidates … BEATING out billionaires who spent HUNDREDS of MILLIONS and failed to secure even a single delegate.
This is something to be proud of, friend. Day after day, week after week, $19 at a time, our genuine grassroots campaign is allowing Tulsi to keep speaking truth to power against enormous establishment resistance to her historic candidacy. Together, we JUST hit our goal of $1 million by Super Tuesday, and now we need to keep up the momentum.
It won’t be easy. With last night’s delegate, Tulsi passed the threshold to make the national debate stage that she’s been shut out of for months. And while the DNC moved the goal posts by LOWERING them to let billionaire Bloomberg on the stage in February, we can expect them to do the opposite if it means keeping Tulsi off that stage.
We can’t just sit back and let that happen, friend. Tulsi’s unwavering truth telling and soldier’s heart is more needed on that stage now more than ever as the establishment machine pulls the strings to orchestrate a victory for the elite over the people. Will you chip in $19 now to help her keep standing up for a government of, by, and for the people? chip in
As suspected, the DNC is now attempting to change the rules yet again in an effort to keep Tulsi out of the debate.
Starting with the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. The big news? Mr. Potter is returning to Bedford Falls. Yes, after spending weeks and over $500 million trying to buy the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, Michael Bloomberg has dropped out of the race.
Currently still in the race? War Hawk Joe Biden, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and US House Rep and Iraq War veteran Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi's campaign noted that Super Tuesday results mean she should be on the stage at the CNN moderated debate later this month:
Last night, we made history. Tulsi — the first female combat veteran, Hindu, and American Samoan to ever run for the presidency — secured a Super Tuesday delegate, putting her on the board with Senators, a former VP, and second-time presidential candidates … BEATING out billionaires who spent HUNDREDS of MILLIONS and failed to secure even a single delegate.
This is something to be proud of, friend. Day after day, week after week, $19 at a time, our genuine grassroots campaign is allowing Tulsi to keep speaking truth to power against enormous establishment resistance to her historic candidacy. Together, we JUST hit our goal of $1 million by Super Tuesday, and now we need to keep up the momentum.
It won’t be easy. With last night’s delegate, Tulsi passed the threshold to make the national debate stage that she’s been shut out of for months. And while the DNC moved the goal posts by LOWERING them to let billionaire Bloomberg on the stage in February, we can expect them to do the opposite if it means keeping Tulsi off that stage.
We can’t just sit back and let that happen, friend. Tulsi’s unwavering truth telling and soldier’s heart is more needed on that stage now more than ever as the establishment machine pulls the strings to orchestrate a victory for the elite over the people. Will you chip in $19 now to help her keep standing up for a government of, by, and for the people? chip in
As suspected, the DNC is now attempting to change the rules yet again in an effort to keep Tulsi out of the debate.
trendingpolitics.com/dnc-to-change-… DNC changes rules, worried Tulsi Gabbard will do to Joe Biden what she did to Kamala Harris in debate
Yesterday @TulsiGabbard won one delegate. By DNC rules, that gets her into the next two debates…So the DNC changed the rules!
They don’t like her opposition to the War on Drugs? To our soldiers in the Middle East? Here’s more about @TulsiGabbard:
Not allowing Tulsi Gabbard in the debate is ridiculous. No matter who we support, we should be infuriated by this on principle. Tulsi should be on that stage because she qualified until DNC decided to change the requirement after the fact.
Tulsi belongs on the stage. Rules were changed -- barriers lowered -- to put Michael Bloomberg on stage. Tulsi met the guidelines, she needs to be on stage at the next debate this month unless she drops out of the race. That is basic fairness and if the DNC doesn't want to support fairness and equality, they need to make that clear before the convention to prepare voters.
Robert Reich (COMMON DREAMS) has a question on his mind:
As the Democratic Party's "moderate" (or shall we say "establishment") wing coalesces around Joe Biden to stop Bernie, the primary contest is starting to look a lot like 2016, when the same wing rallied around Hillary Clinton.
Today, Mike Bloomberg quit the race and endorsed Biden—as has Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg. As the New York Times' David Leonhardt put it, "if you're a Democrat who doesn't want Bernie Sanders to be the party's nominee, your choice is now clear: you should vote for Joe Biden."
But suppose you're a Democrat who doesn't want Donald Trump to have a second term? Suppose you're a Democrat who suspects that Trump got elected in the first place because he exploited a deep sense of betrayal felt by tens of millions of Americans whose wages haven't budged in 40 years and who know the system is rigged for the benefit of those at the top? Do you really vote for Joe Biden?
I will repeat again. If democrats rally behind bumbling Joe as party standard bearer they are either delusional or have written off defeating Trump opting instead to defeat the left within their party.
Ben Burgis (JACOBIN) also reflects on Super Tuesday:
The narrowing of the race to Sanders and Biden renders all such secondary considerations irrelevant. I agree with my friend Michael Brooks, who has commented several times on his show that calling the son of Jewish refugees from Hitler “just another white man” crassly erases important distinctions, but whatever one makes of that issue, Biden’s status as just another white male candidate is hardly in doubt. What’s more, seventy-seven-year-old Biden was born less than a year before Bernie — and is in far worse cognitive shape, as we’ve seen over and over again in recent days.
Someone who clasps his wife’s hand and says “this is my little sister Valerie” — as Biden did just last night — is not a candidate prepared to face off with the most cruel and uninhibited debater in the history of modern presidential politics. Remember how much fun Trump had with Marco Rubio’s bottle of water or Michael Bloomberg’s height and try to imagine what he’d do with Biden.
And the ideological gap separating these two white men — Sanders and Biden — is large enough to be seen from space. Biden did the bidding of the credit card industry in Delaware while the independent socialist from Vermont carried a lonely torch for economic justice. Biden voted for the Iraq War in the Senate while Bernie helped lead the effort in the House to oppose it — an effort so successful that the majority of the House Democratic Caucus voted “no.” Biden supported the Patriot Act while Bernie Sanders has a 100 percent rating from the ACLU. Bernie Sanders is practically synonymous with “Medicare for All,” while Biden stands for the preservation of the private health insurance industry. Bernie Sanders was talking about the evils of mass incarceration in the early 1990s, while Biden spent decades as one of the Senate’s most consistent advocates for “tough on crime” policies. And, crucially, Biden supported every trade deal that Bernie Sanders opposed.
The evidence shows that Democratic primary voters are politically closer to Sanders than to Biden — for example, in all the states where exit polls included Medicare for All questions last night, the majority of respondents said they supported the measure. The fact that so many of those states went to Biden anyway means two things: first, that Sanders and his supporters need to do a better job informing the public about just how bad Biden’s record is on this and many other issues important to primary voters. And second, that it’s likely that even many voters who do know how far Biden is from their policy preferences voted for him anyway based on the severely misguided idea that he would be more electable than Sanders in a matchup against Trump.
In response, we need to point to the polling evidence, to Biden’s obvious cognitive decline, and to the connections between electability and policy. Whoever is the Democratic nominee will need to win back the Rust Belt swing states (like my home state of Michigan) that Clinton lost in 2016. If voters there don’t already know how bad Biden is on trade, Trump will ensure that they do by November.
Media Twitter & Political Twitter get so obsessed with "electability" that they often ignores how policies can be bad on the merits. Let's be real: many voters oppose bad policies not because they hurt "electability," but simply because the policies are, ya know, actually bad.
Just gonna say it: @JoeBiden voting for the Iraq War, supporting the bankruptcy bill, backing NAFTA & trying to cut Social Security wasn't bad just because those votes make him a weak candidate against Trump -- those actions were also bad because they were ACTUALLY BAD.
David Sirota Retweeted
Biden voted for the Iraq War
Bernie vociferously advocated against it
Biden voted to reduce increases in Social Security
Bernie consistently calls for increasing benefits
Biden voted for every rotten trade deal of the 90s
Bernie opposed them
The two couldn't be more different.
For those following @JoeBiden's lead and pretending that there's no such thing as "the establishment" - heres a good snapshot of what "the establishment" is, so that you can stop playacting & start being honest about the industries that are trying to buy the Democratic primary
Q: Who silenced Anita Hill when she was trying to speak out about Clarence Thomas?
A: Joe Biden
At WSWS, Eric London feels Super Tuesday results offer a look at the reality of the Democratic Party itself:
In the week leading up to Super Tuesday, the same party that Sanders claims can be captured for socialism mobilized its party apparatus to resuscitate the right-wing campaign of the semi-senile ex-vice president, whose career as a corrupt Democratic Party politician spans more than four decades.
The Democratic Party is the oldest capitalist political party in the world. Its existence stretches back to 1828, and in the course of its long history, it has perfected the art of deflecting popular opposition to inequality through the skilled combination of demagogy and deceit.
It is the party of Andrew Jackson, the forced removal of the Native Americans, southern secession, Jim Crow segregation, Chinese exclusion, the Palmer Raids and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements. It disarmed the Populist movement through William Jennings Bryan and suffocated the industrial rebellions of the 1930s through Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the popular front and the American Federation of Labor. It disarmed protests against inequality and the wars in Vietnam and Iraq and subsumed opposition into “left” primary campaigns only to select a nominee each more right-wing than the last for 40 years. This was repeated in 2016, when Sanders told his 13 million supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton. It is now being repeated again in 2020.
The second lesson from Super Tuesday is that the racial politics actively promoted by the pseudo-left for decades has far-reaching, right-wing consequences. Race was the principal weapon used by the Democratic Party against Sanders last week.
The Democratic Party mobilized the corrupt representatives of the African-American bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie to proclaim that Joe Biden represents the genuine voice of “black America.” From James Clyburn to Al Sharpton, a litany of African-American politicians explicitly stated that racial solidarity—not class—is fundamental.
The Democratic Party is well practiced in the use of race to manipulate social discontentment and suppress class grievances behind its own reactionary aims. It is ironic that the contemporary Democratic Party boosted Biden as a defender of African-Americans in precisely the same states where it oversaw segregation some fifty years ago. It is doubly ironic that Biden just last year praised segregationist senators James Eastland and Herman Talmadge as examples of political “civility” and is responsible for supporting “tough-on-crime” laws that incarcerated hundreds of thousands of black people in the past quarter-century.
Biden won overwhelmingly among older African-Americans in the South, dominating areas with high proportions of regular churchgoers. In North Carolina, where 10 percent of the electorate were black voters over the age of 60, Biden won 66 percent to Sanders’ 11 percent. Younger black voters in the South, who are far less conservative than their parents and grandparents, however, were more likely to support Sanders, though youth turnout was down nationally compared with 2016.
Sam Husseini (COUNTERPUNCH) feels that there are three choices if you feel that the corruption in the Democratic Party cannot be overcome. You can burn down the party, you can just cave in, or . . .
But there is a third choice: The VotePact strategy.
With the VotePact strategy, in the general election, disenchanted Democratics team up with a disenchanted Republicans. They pair up: spouses and friends and coworkers and neighbors and debating partners and ex-facebook friends. Instead of the two of them voting for candidates they don’t want, they pair up and vote for the third party or independent candidate of their choice.
If there’s an anti establishment ticket that appeals to both left and right — think something like Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul — it could bring together a transpartisan united alliance from across the political spectrum against the establishment candidates. (Yes, Trump is and always has been an establishment candidate, his rhetoric to the contrary.)
Thus a shrewd thing for Sanders supporters to do in the short term is to reach out to anti establishment Republicans: To try to get them to vote for Sanders if he does get the nomination — and to get them to pair up and vote independent with them if he doesn’t.
The great thing about this is that putting it on the table now lessens the chances that it will have to happen. That is, the Democratic establishment, by trying to stop Sanders, is effectively saying to Sanders supporters: You have to vote for the Democratic nominee no matter who it is. Otherwise, you’re helping Trump.
The truth of course is that the Democratic establishment is effectively helping Trump by undermining Sanders in this way.
But having VotePact on the table now makes it clear to all concerned: Sanders supporters do have another path. They don’t have to attack the party or capitulate to its establishment. They can make a VotePact with a Republican and vote in a manner that is both principled and super strategic.
Let's take a moment to welcome the trash heap THE PROGRESSIVE and human garbage Ruth Conniff to the discussion. Yes, they've finally found the race for presidency with a piece more than a few paragraphs long. And they find it with another insipid piece of scribbling by Ruth. In Ruth's world, it's all a horse race and positions don't matter and what happens to people doesn't matter.
Does that surprise you?
It shouldn't. This is the fool who went on KPFA's THE MORNING SHOW to explain that the Iraq War didn't effect her because no one she knew had served in Iraq. This is a leftist? This is a raging idiot. She got put in charge of the increasingly useless THE PROGRESSIVE and she turned it into a lifestyle rag (she's no longer in charge but her damage continues). The poor are not covered by THE PROGRESSIVE, the wars are not covered by THE PROGRESSIVE, But conspiracy theories abound ("the upcoming civil wars") as does right-wing garbage like "Iraqis Rise Above the Blame Game to Build New Lives in Texas" -- up by their bootstraps, is it?
That rag is useless and so are the people who write for it. Remember how Ruth was Chris Matthews' favorite guest? Yeah, I do too. She was a useless piece of trash even then. If only THE PROGRESSIVE dumped their trash the way MSNBC eventually does.
Dropping back to earlier this week, Super Tuesday, Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) notes:
After Texas voters waited in hourslong lines on Super Tuesday, voting rights experts and advocates highlighted the state's systemic problems with election administration, expressed concerns about the possibility of similar issues in November, and urged elected officials to make it easier—not harder—for Texans to get to the ballot box.
"Long lines in any single county can happen for any number of reasons but multi-hour wait times all over the state point to a bigger systemic problem," Common Cause Texas executive director Anthony Gutierrez said in a statement Wednesday. "That problem, to put it bluntly, is that the people in power in state government have no interest in making it easier for Texans to vote."
In Iraq, the protests continue.
Iraq Protests: The Weapons Used Against Demonstrators
The following sites updated:
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