Thursday, February 13, 2025
Professional Left Podcast Episode 876: It's Time Once Again To Swear In Public
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Professional Left Podcast Episode 875: FAFO Farmers Reap What They Sowed
Monday, February 10, 2025
Magic Ruralism* is Back Baby!
*Noun: a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of political fantasy.
Of course that's not exactly true.
Magic Ruralism never left.
I drafted and then abandoned a post in April of 2021, working title "Magic Ruralism: Epilogue", but before I wasted that time I should have heeded driftglass circa November, 2020 when I posted "Magic Ruralism (tm) is Forever."
What can I say. I contain multitudes.
It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.
Magic Ruralism will never have an epilogue because it will never end.
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Right in Front of Their Noses
"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." -- George Orwell
Friends, readers, MAGA trolls, lend me your ears; I come to praise Margaret Sullivan, not to bury her. Truly, hers has been one of the most prominent voices of sanity during the parlous times, so what I offer here is a friendly "Yes, and..." to her newsletter, not a snotty, "No, but..."
Also, if any of some of the second half of this post sounds familiar, it's because I am borrowing it from an episode of the Professional Left podcast which my wife and I have been doing every week for the past 15 years.
Ms. Sullivan begins her newsletter praising Jamelle Bouie, and rightly so:
Jamelle Bouie gets it. The New York Times columnist wrote something a few days ago that stood out to me because it was so directly stated and so horrifyingly correct.
She then laces into the Washington Post's Jason Willick as a textbook example of how godawful Big Journalism has become:
But Bouie’s sense of alarm, well founded as it is, is strangely rare in Big Journalism these days.
Witness, for example, a piece last week by Jason Willick, a regular opinion columnist at the Washington Post, who wrote something titled “Save the panic over Trump’s ‘power grabs.’ It might be needed later.”
Calm down, Willick counseled, mocking the idea that a coup is underway, and concludes that, instead of having what he calls a “meltdown,” everyone should just wait and see. Why? Because, he argues, casting Trump and Musk’s early moves as a constitutional crisis “will diminish the force of such warnings if they are needed.”
Willick was appropriately blasted in the reader-comments section: “This sycophantic, willfully delusional apologia for the dismantling of the American republic and the shredding of the constitution … is contemptible sophistry of the very worst kind,” said one. Read Willick’s column, if you have the stomach, and judge for yourself; here’s a gift link.
Again, no argument here. Three cheers and all that. And her call to action is right there in her newsletter's headline:
We need righteous indignation and truth-telling, not complacency
The tone, in media and politics, is far too restrained for our current emergency
And there is where I get a little baffled and more than a little exhausted at her failure to recognize that there are already a lot of such media outlets who have been actively doing what Ms. Sullivan says needs to be done for decades and, for the most part, have been either ignored or mocked or treated as pariahs by Big Journalism even as Big Journalism conspicuously failed us over and over again, and the pariahs got it mostly right over and over again.
For example, Daily Kos started as an upstart independent media thingie back in 2000, and it still is.
Daily Kos spun off Steve Gilliard's News Blog, which remained an upstart independent media thingie until Steve passed away in 2007. In 2005, my blog was spun off from Steve's and I've been an upstart independent media thingie for going on 20 years now.
My wife, Blue Gal, started blogging in 2004 and has been an outstanding upstart independent media person ever since.
Crooks and Liars launched in 2004 as well and has been a beacon of clear, consistent Liberal news coverage. And if contrarian means going against the mob, Crooks and Liars has been a contrarian all along.
Digby's Hullabaloo. Bob Cesca. The Brad Blog. First-Draft. Martin Longman at Progress Pond, Show Me Progress. Mock Paper Scissors, No More Mister Nice Blog. The Field Negro, The Rectification of Names, Lawyers, Guns & Money, Only Sky, Slacktivist, Free Thought Blogs, The Rude Pundit.
And all of the Liberal bloggers we feature at Mike's Blog Roundup.
Along the way, some of our merry band have died. Some have quit. And some have lost their mind. But there remains a large corps of battle-hardened veterans who have been at this since back during the days when questioning Dubya's military and economic genius marked you as a Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving laughingstock, and the only headlines Donald Trump was making were of the trash celebrity gossip variety like this in Vanity Fair:
TRUMP FAMILY VALUES
Once on the brink of losing his gaudy empire, Donald Trump is about to take his casinos public in a sale that he figures will net him billions. Joining him in his comeback are new bride Marla Maples and baby daughter Tiffany. For Trump, getting to the altar was as difficult as any of his financial maneuvers. With his parents telling him to go back to Ivana, and Marla setting deadlines, only Marla's mother kept the course of love running smooth. EDWARD KLEIN joins the re-emerging mogul as he prepares for the deals of his life
Turns our, those righteously indignant and truth-tellers Ms. Sullivan is looking for have been here the whole time!
So, given that the present crisis was tailor-made for a battalion of skilled, salty communication who have long memories, steamer-trunks full of receipts and can write at speed, how is it that veteran Liberal bloggers and podcasters by-and-large continue to be ignored and dismissed?
Because of gravity. Because of the tidal forces of politics and of the media marketplace.
See, from one angle, the story of the crisis we are in is actually pretty simple. It is the story of the Right pandering to the rage and paranoia of the Republican party base and turning tens of millions of Americans into reprogrammable meatbags. It is the story of the laziness and timidity of "independents" and "Centrists" who do not want to be asked to pick a fucking side already. It is the story of Big Journalism which doesn't want to alienate its paying customers and advertisers by talking about the stupidity and fascism of the Right and the laziness and political torpor and cowardice of the Center.
Add to that the fact that while trafficking in fascist propaganda is easy and it pays extremely well, and trafficking in mindless Both Siderist codswallop is easy it pays extremely well, and slagging Liberals is easy and it pays extremely well, writing with clearly and accurately about our present crisis and how we got here means getting up every day and writing of the about the derangement of the Right, the pusillanimity of the Center, the treachery of the turncoats and the complicity of the media.
And writing about the derangement of the Right, the pusillanimity of the Center, the treachery of the turncoats and the complicity of the media ain't easy, and it almost certainly means you will never be making more than a small and precarious living out of your tip jar for the rest of your professional life.
Sunday, February 09, 2025
Saturday, February 08, 2025
The Monsters Are Due on Mapplethorpe Street
Degenerate art (German: Entartete Kunst) was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe modern art. During the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, German modernist art, including many works of internationally renowned artists, was removed from state-owned museums and banned in Nazi Germany on the grounds that such art was an "insult to German feeling", un-German, Freemasonic, Jewish, or Communist in nature. Those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions that included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art.
Degenerate Art also was the title of a 1937 exhibition held by the Nazis in Munich, consisting of 650 modernist artworks that the Nazis had taken from museums, that were poorly hung alongside graffiti and text labels mocking the art and the artists.[1] Designed to inflame public opinion against modernism, the exhibition subsequently traveled to several other cities in Germany and Austria.
While modern styles of art were prohibited, the Nazis promoted paintings and sculptures that were traditional in manner and that exalted the "blood and soil" values of racial purity, militarism, and obedience.
Trump Takes Over the Kennedy Center
The president intends to replace members of the institution’s board as he adopts a more aggressive approach toward the arts.
Artists embarrassed Donald Trump when he first came to Washington. Now that Trump is back in power, he is determined not to let that happen again.
Trump plans to announce the dismissal of multiple members of the Kennedy Center board as soon as today, a group likely to include recent appointees of former President Joe Biden; among those on the current board are the Democratic political strategist Mike Donilon, former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and Democratic National Committee finance chair Chris Korge.
The White House has also had discussions about having Trump himself installed as chair of the board, according to two people familiar with the purge, who requested anonymity to describe plans that are not yet public.
This is, of course, disgraceful. But it could have been done slowly and quietly, without the sounding brass of Donald Trump bellowing to the world that this was straight-up, fascist degenerate art. But that would have defeated Trump's agenda of loud, public demonstrations of authoritarian domination and humiliation. And so
...Trump confirmed the news, writing on Truth Social that he planned to make the Kennedy Center “GREAT AGAIN” by terminating “multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” He wrote that he planned to announce a “new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” adding, “The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation. For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”
So get ready to enjoy all the soaring, heroic "art", personally approved by Il Douche.
Friday, February 07, 2025
To Serve MAGA: Part 2
There are many Denizens of the MAGA cesspit who do not like what I write. Didn't like it back when they were Fake Tea Partiers. Didn't like it before that when they were Bush's loyal cheerleaders.
Yeah. Been at this awhile.
And since Musk's Incel Clown Posse can't cut off my nonexistent Soros/USAID/ACORN (Remember ACORN?) funding and no one in Trump's cabinet can sack me, instead I get shit like this.
To which I say, thanks for the content The Blogger Team!
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To date, this is how the very few interactions I've had with Never Trumpers have gone, because I want to talk about the Befor...
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Among us elitist, Liberal swingin' dicks who live lives of unspeakable privilege and luxury out here in the Middle of Amer...