Right Wing Jerks

It’s been a bit of a gap week or two, since pining in with this sort of catharsis,  but some of us schmucks have to make some really lousy money and attend to some really rotten job hunting in a time of pure delusion, all the while that white noise buzzing, the white static noise of the mush of NPR and mainstream mindlessness and the BS of labor stats and economists who deserve what the SEALs and Obama said what happened to Osama (right, US punk prez, directs US amped-up murder incorporated to shoot to kill, ask no questions later, I don’t need no stinking badge, and then burial at sea, hea

Crushed for years in the framing/messaging wars, Democrats are finally joining the fray with populist, though cautious, election-year banners. Right, let’s defeat the take-no-prisoners, right wing war cries — dripping with life and death dramas — with safe, feel-good, happy faces. Appealingly, this modest strategy doesn’t depend on the besieged Obama, slow-footed on gay marriage, legal marijuana, upping the minimum wage, or reversing income inequality via serious tax reform.

It’s been about two weeks since the news media began smothering the nation with stories about UPS and FedEx delivering packages late during the holiday season.
A short shopping season of less than 30 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, combined with extraordinary numbers of deliveries and extreme weather problems caused thousands of packages not to be delivered by Christmas. For some media, this was the top story.

You’re not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you cannot face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says It.
–Malcolm X

As a preface here, as I have done many times as my role as writer for DV, I have to default to the local, as in, where you see fault lines and bright lines in a local situation, you can pretty much make the larger microcosmic statement about many things for a state, region, country, culture, what have you.
The School to Prison Pipeline has been written about many, many times, and my hat goes off to some of those writers:
The ACLU has it on its radar: ** 

Yesterday marked the closure of the annual celebration of Sinterklaas, the Dutch equivalent of Santa Claus. Traditionally, the children’s festivity is an occasion for family fun and pleasure that unites a nation, but this year it has become a highly charged political battleground that is exposing a society increasingly more conservative and hostile towards people of color, while unleashing an unprecedented anti-racism movement that is empowering minorities and posing fundamental challenges to the Dutch establishment.

Chris Hedges says that while people are disgusted with the centers of power, unless there is a constructive alternative, any eruption will be nihilistic and could be fascist.

Here is Today’s Pop Quiz: Who Said the Following?

It’s been a rough week for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The “corporate bill mill” group’s annual States & Nation meeting was overshadowed by damaging evidence of misconduct revealed by The Guardian.
And it just got a whole lot rougher with yet another investigative installment in The Guardian series.

Captive by the relentless train wreck called establishment politics, let us pause and consider potential breakthroughs. Scoff at my optimism, even fantasies, but doesn’t every epic calamity beget a perk or two, eventually? I trust the “gift in the wound” learned from poet Robert Bly. And my father’s best lesson, “If you don’t learn from failure, you suffer a double loss.”