Friday, June 14, 2019

Professional Left Podcast #498


“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
--  Milan Kundera, writer

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Links:
  • Republicans have cheated, are cheating and will continue to cheat.  Get ready for it.


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3 comments:

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

Before I get started, I have to say, DG, I feel your pain. I am a plus size male, maybe not as tall as you but maybe a bit wider. Almost always, I can't buy t-shirts of my favorite bands because they do not offer them in "wisconsin sizes" (not a problem with your store, I will add!)

I am also on Team Joe Crane. Not that I know him at all, but because he is right and honorable. And Sinclair is terrible and evil and all other kinds of horrible, and they belong on the Group w bench.

Here's a story: back when our son (referred afterward as Young Zombie or YZ) was pre-school age, I was mostly the one who delivered him to our day care providers. One winter morning, we had the TV on, where th newscasters were having orgasms about the oncoming first storm of the winter, and going on at length about the danger and how terrible it would be. When the time came, I said "Hey YZ, it's time to go...." and we made it to the edge of the front porch, where the first faint snowflakes were starting to fall.

Where he burst into tears.

It took me a while to calm him down, and figure out what he was upset about. Turns out, all the scaremongering about what was a basic winter snow storm, had scared the fucking hell out of him.

I patiently explained to him a bit about how TV worked, and they could get eyeballs by fear-mongering. And that we should never trust what we see on TV, or in fact, any screens. We managed to get out the door, in the falling snow, and nothing terrible happened to us, and life went on.

But Joe Crane is fucking right, TV stations amplify the fear, especially for perfectly normal weather. I'll never forgive them for terrifying my son on that perfectly normal winter morning. Go Joe.

And fuck Sinclair.

dinthebeast said...

The Kansas supreme court's decision to keep riding herd on the school funding there because they obviously can't trust them to do it themselves reminds me a little of the OPD, and the scandals they caused in poor neighborhoods by violating residents' civil rights so horribly that the case made national news, one of the accused officers fled the country and has never been heard from since, and all the other officers were acquitted at trial, because of course they were.
This brought a civil suit before the court of Thelton Henderson, who as a famous civil rights judge, wasn't having any of their bullshit, and court-ordered a list of reforms the department had to institute by certain dates, which they were always behind on, and every damn appearance before him his first question was "Are you trying to make me throw this department into receivership? Because I already have the receiver picked out, if that's what you want."
So the reforms continued apace until he semi-retired, and now the OPD is basically back to their old tricks without his supervision to put the fear of god into them.
I accidentally got to speak with Thelton once, back in the '90s, when I was delivering a refrigerator to an old woman in Berkeley, and it turned out to be too tall to fit in the space where her old refrigerator had been. We asked her if she wanted us to leave it or take it back so she could order a shorter one, and she said she needed to ask her son, who she called on the phone.
She got him on the line and handed the phone to me so I could explain the situation, and I found myself speaking to the Honorable Judge Thelton Henderson, who quickly decided that the handyman could easily deal with raising the shelf a few inches to make the new one fit, and thanked us for treating his mother with such professional consideration. I stammered an apology for bothering him on the bench, and he said "Don't worry about it, my mother's case always takes precedence."

Thank you again for the podcast, the heat wave finally broke and today has been a lovely time to consider how fucked-in-the-head our media has gotten and how terrifying that is.

-Doug in Oakland

Robt said...

Zombie rotten,

Sinclair will eat the FOX flesh mostly.

My concern is their extent on disguising more of their felonious brain washing with the truth of the weather report and a dose of conservative biased lies.

What it does to the younger expecting is more of a concern. Thing is, if the youth begins their life out of school with Edumukation from Texas text books.
It is going to make for lots of discussion and debate of worthless endless lies that mislead everyone down the same Rush Rabbit hole.