Friday, July 3, 2020

BLINDSPOT, THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW, bad gas, TCM

On "BLINDSPOT -- is Patterson dead?," everyone e-mailing agrees that Patterson's not dead and this is some how part of the team's plan to take down Madeline.  I hope we're right. 

Mandy e-mailed that next week on Thursday, NBC is airing two BLINDSPOT episodes -- both new ones.  I checked and she's right, two episodes next Thursday night.

Now tonight.  "Carl Reiner" passed away this week and CBS honored him with two episodes of THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW that aired tonight. 

The classic sitcom, which ran for five seasons during the sixties on CBS, was created by Reiner.  In fact, he played Rob Petrie in the pilot.  But then they recast -- Rose Marie was hired to play Sally, for example, and Carl would show up on the show from time to time playing Alan Brady -- Rob's boss. 

So CBS colorized two episodes (the show was filmed in black and white) and aired them tonight.

The first one was when Laura Petrie (Mary Tyler Moore) accidentally, while on live TV, admits that Alan Brady is bald.  Alan's been wearing rugs and he's furious.  Laura goes to see him to save Rob's job and she's hilarious. 

Here's something a lot of people don't know.  Mary was hired for her looks.  They didn't realize that she could do comedy until after they hired her and until after they started filming episodes.  Mary wrote about that in her book AFTER ALL (1995). 

Mary and Carl had great chemistry and that is a classic episode that really nails the laughter in the  big scene with Laura and Alan (and, half-way in, Rob). 

They were hilarious and the audience loved them. 

The second episode had Carl playing a different character.  Sally goes to an art show and calls Laura.  Why?  There's a painting there.  Of Laura.  Nude.  Carl plays the painter who painted it years ago. 

I enjoyed both episodes but the first one was the classic one. 

New topic: Gas. 

I've had gas all day and it's been very uncomfortable. 

How did I get it?

I've heard Ruth and Trina talk about lentils and I decided to try them.

Great food.  I love it.  I will try them again.  But I fixed them according to the directions.  And I got bad gas.  I called Trina and she explained that the directions tell you just to rinse them, the directions on the package, and that you don't need to soak them.  Trina didn't soak them for years.  In 2020, she started to because they gave her granddaughter gas if she didn't soak them.

They're wonderful.  Lentils, I'm amazed how tasty they are.  I just seasoned them with a little salt and I loved them.  I quickly ate one bowl after another and the whole pot of beans was gone.  But hours later, my stomach was killing me.  And I had bad gas with all the pain that entails.  I toughed it out because I had no Rolaids or Gas X in the house and I did not want to go out today (I was off from work) because my stomach was killing me and I didn't want to run into a gas station and fart all over everyone.

I'm going to soak them next time and also make sure that I have some Beano on hand.  I hope that works, if not, I'll note it here.

But lentils are so damn tasty.  It was a buck for the bag of dried lentils.  So they're also inexpensive. 



Now let's talk TCM.  First, I hope you read Ava and C.I.'s "TV: The day TCM died" -- Thursday last week, this 'classic' movie channel aired . . . the kiddie porn flick THE BLUE LAGOON.  They really are scraping bottom.  If you doubt it, look what a 'hot' Friday night finds them offering: MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, FORT APACHE, THE SEARCHERS, STAGECOACH . . .

Why?

Because it's time for them to celebrate John Wayne and spit on the LGBT community and people of color.

From the AP this week:

 In the latest move to change place names in light of US racial history, Democrats in Orange county are pushing to drop film legend John Wayne’s name, statue and other likenesses from the county’s airport because of his racist and bigoted comments.
The Los Angeles Times reported that earlier this week, officials passed an emergency resolution condemning Wayne’s “racist and bigoted statements” made in a 1971 interview and are calling on the Orange county board of supervisors to drop his name, statue and other likenesses from the international airport.
The resolution asked the board “to restore its original name: Orange county airport.”

“There have been past efforts to get this done and now we’re putting our name and our backing into this to make sure there is a name change,” said Ada Briceno, chair of the Democratic party of Orange county.
[. . .]
In a 1971 Playboy magazine interview, Wayne makes bigoted statements against black people, Native Americans and the LGBTQ community.
“I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people,“ he said.


That was this week.  And here's TCM celebrating John.

Now, to be honest, I don't want the garbage on the network at all.  But if you're going to put it on, put on during the week during the day when few people are watching anyway.

On a Friday night, TCM does not need to air old westerns -- no 1 wants to watch that s**t.  The ones who do went to bed at 7 o'clock.  That's why westerns are shown during the day on other channels.

It's Friday night. I should be able to count on TCM to air either a laugh out loud funny old movie or a thriller or suspense classic.

Westerns aren't popular anymore.  Their audience -- remaining audience -- is old and dying.  Stop wasting Friday nights, during a pandemic, by airing CRAP movies starring an old RACIST.


Going out with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"


Friday, July 3, 2020.  Joe Biden, who overthrew the 2010 Iraqi election results, has the nerve to claim Donald Trump might not honor this year's US election results, the Iraqi government is considering filing a complaint with the United Nations of Turkey bombing the country and sending ground soldiers in, Susan Rice supported the Iraq War but Steve Chapman smokes a blunt and decides otherwise, and much more.


Here's a thought: Next time Steve Chapman's on a pot high, how about he just eat some munchies and not try to write a column for THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE?  

He want to save Susan Rice.  He's convinced not only that he can, but that he should.  Why?  He just knows she's the one to be Joe Biden's running mate.

Okay, unlike Steve, I'm not stoned as I'm dictating this.  

So I realize that more than anything, Joe's running mate has to bring energy to the ticket.  That's not Susan Rice.  She brings nothing.  

Of the women mentioned, only Kamala Harris -- via her supporters -- brings passion.  If it's not Kamala, the smart move would be to go with someone not currently seen as a potential running mate because the rest are all dull and inspire no passion.

That's especially true of Dirty Rice who carries with her the scandal of Benghazi.  Is Steve trying to re-elect Donald Trump?  Because picking Susan means bringing up Benghazi all over again.  And while that might not matter to Democrats and neocons, I believe they'll need to reach beyond the group that turned out for Hillary in 2016 if they're going to win the White House this time.

Before we get back to Steve Chapman's stupidity, let's deal with the other stupidity right now.  Peter Van Buren addresses it and we'll note him in just a section.  But the stupidity is the conspiracy talk that Donald, if he loses, will refuse to step down.  

That nutty conspiracy theory did not start last week or last month.  Crackpot Bob Somerby has been pimping that for several years now.  Bob's been projecting his own grand lunacy onto Donald.  Donald is many things (none of which I like) but he's not "grand" in any sense.  He doesn't have big ideas or plans.  After three years in the White House, I'd think that would be obvious to even the most ignorant in this country.  As a business person, Donald never had big ideas either.  He copies and ripped off.  He wasn't an original.  So this notion that suddenly, Donald's capable of a grand conspiracy?  It only speaks to the crackpots who repeat these lies.

Peter Van Buren, at ICH, notes how this nonsense is being pimpec by many -- including Joe Biden.  Ptere misses an important point and we'll get back to that but this is from his column:

For nearly four years, the same forces that may declare 2020 invalid tried very hard to convince us 2016 already was. There are plenty of Hillary people (including Hillary) who have not accepted 2016. Has Stacey Abrams really accepted her defeat yet? Think back to everything that happened during the last election, the gaming by Comey and the FBI to influence results. Remember how the intelligence community manipulated Russiagate. Why wait for November 2020 to have a coup? We’ve been in what Matt Taibbi calls a permanent coup for years. They’ve been practicing.
Any of the those things would have been considered crazy talk only a few years ago. None would have ever passed into the mainstream. Compare Russiagate to the Great Obama Birth Certificate kerfuffle. The idea that Obama was ineligible for office festered on right-wing talk radio. It was dismissed as fact-less by just about everyone else. Fast forward to 2016+ and America’s paper of record is happy to front a story claiming the president is subject to a foreign enemy’s blackmail based on nothing but desperate hope that it might be true.
The critical tool for the ending of democracy is people’s conditioned readiness to believe almost anything. The media tells the world what’s important using a very narrow range of truth, or just makes things up if truth is not around to be manipulated.
We are exhausted, neck-deep in cynicism, decline, and distrust. And scared. There are no facts anymore, only what people can be made to believe. That power was not well understood in 2016 and was clumsily applied. Today it is ripe for exploitation, far beyond generating clicks and ad revenue. I don’t think Trump will try to stay in office if he loses. But there are people who will tell us that to manipulate our fears and steal this election. That’s why I am finally scared.

It's a great column and one that he deserves praise for writing.  But, yes, he missed one point that surprised me.  Joe Biden is going around insisting that Donald may not accept the 2020 election results and, if he loses, may refuse to step down.

Joe Biden is saying that.

We've covered why that's offensive before.

I guess we'll need to cover it again.


Joe Biden needs to shut his damn mouth.  He has no right to ever talk about someone refusing to leave when they lose an election.  Why is that?

Joe is the mother of ISIS in Iraq.  He passed it through his slim birthing hips in 2010.

That's the year Iraqis voted incumbent Nouri al-Maliki out of office.

Remember that?  Iraqis risked their lives to vote that March.  They turned out in record numbers. That really hasn't happened since but why should it?  When you risk your own safety to vote and your vote is overturned why ever bother again?

Who overturned those votes?

Joe Damn Biden.  Robinette.  Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.  Miss Priss Instant Coco Biden.

US Gen Ray Odierno knew giving Nouri a second term he didn't earn was a mistake.  But, hey, Ray was only the top US officer in Iraq, why listen to him, right?

US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was against it as well.  So was US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

But who cares what they thought, Joe knew best.

Barack decided to listen to Joe who was (along with Susan Rice, Samantha Power and Chris Hill) of the opinion that Iraq didn't need democracy, it needed a "strongman" (thug).  So Joe called for the election results to be overturned and Barack, who had put Joe in charge of Iraq, went along.

So Nouri, who spent eight months after the election refusing to step down, got a second term.  Joe was the lead behind The Erbil Agreement -- the US negotiated legal contract that overturned the 2010 election.  It gave Nouri a second term.  To get the heads of the other political parties to go along with this theft of democracy, Joe offered bribes.  That's all The Erbil Agreement was -- a bribe list put into a contract.  To get Kurds to go along, for example, the contract said Article 140 would be implemented.

Kurdish leaders were idiots.  The Iraqi Constitution called for it to be implemented and that didn't lead to it being implemented.  But this legal contract was going to change everything?

It didn't.

Nouri went along with the promises going into the contract and used The Erbil Agreement to get his second term as prime minister and then he refused to honor it.  He kept none of the promises made to get a second term.

And the US had sworn to all the parties that the contract was something that they would stand by and demand it would be honored.  Barack Obama, on the telephone, gave his word to Ayad Allawi who had walked out of Parliament.  

But the US government looked the other way.

They did that over and over for Nouri.  He persecuted Iraqis, especially Sunnis, he ran secret prisons and torture chambers -- the US just looked the other way.

ISIS rose in Iraq because of that.  No one was sure, at first, what they were. Black masks.  They showed up to defend the protesters against Nouri's attacks -- protesters blocking the road between Baghdad and Anbar Province.  

We covered it here.  Not only that, we predicted it here.

The Iraqi people had done everything that they could and they were failed, they were betrayed.

They went to the ballot box to change things and the US government, led by Joe Biden, overturned their voices, disregarded the will of the Iraqi people.  What happened next?

Too many in America didn't pay attention.  Next you had the various leaders -- Barzani, Moqtada, al-Hakim and others -- insist that Nouri implement The Erbil Agreement or they would vote him out via a no confidence vote in Parliament.  They'd given him a year to implement The Erbil Agreement.  He refused.  Moqtada al-Sadr said, the whole time they were threatening a no confidence vote, that Nouri could stop the effort at any point by implementing the contract (the contract he had agreed to, the contract he had used to claim a second term).  Nouri refused.

The Parliament followed the law as outlined in the Constitution.  They gathered the signatures.

Per the Constitution, the President of Iraq, reads it into the record.  At the time, fat ass Jalal Talabni was the president.  Under pressure from Joe Biden to stop the no confidence vote, Jalal refused to introduce it.  It's a ceremonial task but Jalal created new 'powers.'  He said he'd contacted people who signed it.  To ask if they had signed it?  No, to see if they would sign it right now.  He then claimed that many said they wouldn't -- this was all done in secrecy and all anyone had was Jalal's claims -- so he was refusing to introduce the petition for a no confidence vote.

He then lied that he had to have surgery in order to save his life and fled to Germany where fat ass had . . . knee surgery.

He's blown out his knee due to his intense girth.

Karma bit him in his fat ass.  Months later, in December, he got into a verbal fight with Nouri and suffered a stroke.  He was care flighted from Baghdad to Germany.  This time it was a life or death issue.  Karma signed off on his earlier lie.

Jalal never recovered.  His family posed him for photos and pretended he could move his body and speak.  He couldn't.  18 months later, he returned to Iraq.  He was a joke.  He still couldn't speak.  And his lies ensured that the PUK party he led went from one of Iraq's two dominant political parties to a weak third party in the next elections.

Joe destroyed Iraq in so many ways.  Most infamously, he destroyed it by spitting on democracy.  The Iraqi people voted and being a racist and a xenophobe, that didn't matter to Old Racist Joe. Old White Man knew best.

He gave Nouri the second term and he and Nouri gave birth to ISIS.  It's their baby.


I need to work something in here, following the 2012 elections, Nouri called the White House to congratulate Barack.  Barack, disgusted with Nouri, refused to take the call and fobbed it off on Joe. We've noted that here since it happened.  Barack and I share a mutual friend who, over the weekend, told me that one point I got wrong or left out on that was that Barack did so because Joe was responsible for Nouri.  It was his disgust in Nouri and in Joe that made him refuse to take the call.  I said I'd work that in the next time I discussed 2010 in the snapshot so there it is.

But the point is, in 2010, Nouri lost the election and refused to step down.  And who called him out?  Not Joe Biden.  No, Joe Biden was all about ignoring the vote of the people.

So he needs to shut his damn mouth and the press needs to be calling out his hypocrisy.


Now let's get back to Steve Chapman's nutty nonsense.  He tries to rewrite history.  Susan Rice didn't support the Iraq War -- despite what everyone says -- despite what the public record says.  She's an innocent!!!!!

He concludes his revisionary history with this: "A lot of smart, knowledgeable people made the mistake of endorsing the Iraq War. Susan Rice deserves credit for not being one of them."

She didn't oppose the war.  She did endorse it but Steve lies and, even lying, can only offer that she didn't endorse him.

She didn't speak out against it either.  (And she did endorse it.)

It's moments like this that make me wish Steve would stop his pot habit and switch to heroin in the hopes that an overdose could spare the world from his hideous writing and his constant need to lie.  Or at least leave him too strung out to write.

We don't need your lies, Steve, we never did.  Toke up and pretend the world needs you, Steve.





Meanwhile, the Turkish government continues to terrorize Iraq.  Martha Leah Nangalama Tweets:

via
@PerilOfAfrica
Iraq sets up border posts to try to prevent Turkish advance: Iraq is enforcing positions along the border with Turkey to try to prevent a Turkish military advance deeper into Iraqi territory after two weeks of airstrikes as Ankara…
Iraq sets up border posts to try to prevent Turkish advance
Iraq is enforcing positions along the border with Turkey to try to prevent a Turkish military advance deeper into Iraqi territory






Baghdad is taking a look at its trade with Turkey as it considers using economic pressure to compel Ankara to end its military attacks within Iraq’s borders, the foreign ministry spokesperson told Rudaw on Thursday.

“There is a trade balance between Iraq and Turkey in favor of Turkey with a value of more than $16 billion annually, and there are hundreds of Turkish commercial companies operating in Iraq. We put all of these criteria under urgent evaluation,” said Ahmed al-Sahaf, spokesperson for Iraq’s foreign ministry.

Baghdad is also applying diplomatic pressure. “We are still communicating and coordinating with the Turkish side on the need to apply international laws, good-neighborly rules, and diplomatic agreements,” Sahaf said, adding Iraq plans to push for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council to condemn Turkey’s military intervention. 

Trade's not all that Iraq's considering.  Mina Aldroubi (THE NATIONAL) notes:

Iraq said on Friday it might file an official complaint to the UN Security Council if Turkey does not halt its military operations against Kurdish fighters in the north.
"We reject any unilateral action that would harm our sovereignty. We started with a statement of condemnation and may resort to gathering support from the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation and could file a complaint to the UNSC,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmad Al Sahaf said in a statement.
The “unilateral” action taken by Turkey will not “enhance security nor will it result in joint efforts to combat terrorism”, Mr Al Sahaf said.
Baghdad has requested an emergency meeting of the Arab League meeting to discuss the issue, he said.
The government of Iraq better take some serious steps immediately.  Not only are they letting the Iraqi people down, they are also risking Mustafa al-Kadhimi looking even weaker.  He's only been prime minister since May 7th and he's already becoming a joke.  Mustafa Salim and Louisa Loveluck (WASHINGTON POST) report:
A raid ordered by Iraq's new prime minister on militiamen accused of planning an attack against Baghdad's international zone could mark a turning point in his government's efforts to bring Iran-backed groups to heel.
The arrest of 14 members of Kataib Hezbollah late last month marked the boldest move yet by any Iraqi leader against the Iran-linked militias, which often operate in Iraq outside the law. Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, who took office in May, has vowed to halt their attacks on foreign forces in the country, primarily U.S. troops.
But the response of the powerful militia to the June 26 raid underscores how challenging it will be for Kadhimi to recast the relationship between Iraq’s government and some of the country’s armed groups.
After gunmen in pickup trucks cruised Baghdad’s Green Zone demanding their comrades’ release, most were let go, then welcomed back to the group’s headquarters as heroes. Television stations linked to the militias live-streamed the men burning American flags and stamping on photographs of Kadhimi’s face.

In the raid against Kataib Hezbollah, Kadhimi’s message was simple: Shiite militia groups in Iraq can no longer operate with impunity. The operation was audacious insofar as it could have prompted an armed response from the group, disrupting the fragile political consensus that enabled Kadhimi’s appointment two months ago.
However, the events that followed the raid have done little to carry Kadhimi’s message. It appears very probable that the operation was carried out in coordination or consultation with Iran and Iran-aligned political actors. For instance — whether out of sheer luck, or prior coordination with Iran or the leadership of militia groups and parliamentary blocs — the group did not respond in a major way. After the raid, Kataib Hezbollah mobilized a force of roughly 150 fighters in nearly 30 pickup trucks around the prime minister’s residence, which was designed to intimidate Kadhimi but avoid escalating the crisis into an armed confrontation.
Moreover, it was telling that the militiamen captured during the raid were placed under the supervision of the security directorate of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), the umbrella militia organization that is dominated by Kataib Hezbollah and other Iran-aligned groups. The directorate is led by a Kataib Hezbollah commander. Therefore, the group was essentially able to get the prime minister to release the suspects into its own custody and deter the government from escalating the crisis in the process. On Monday, the militiamen were then, unsurprisingly, released by the PMF’s security directorate on the basis that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute them.  

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