The Propaganda Machine of the Far Right

 People think all of the proposed Bill of Rights to the Constitution were passed.  Actually this is not so.  Jefferson and Madison exchanged letters saying that corporations would be another source of danger of concentration of power along with Church and State.  Madison said that it was a danger to have a perpetual state of war.  This is definitely a fear of mine over the past fifteen years.  It’s interesting that the founding fathers viewed corporations as a dangerous source of a concentration of ruling power.  They obviously saw into the future.  Thom Hartman constantly quotes from the founding fathers to remind us of our roots, or at least where our roots should be.  Today the media has grown to great power.  But it has done so as a mouth piece of corporations.  So even Public Broadcasting and NPR are now the tools of corporations despite the left-wing rhetoric they put in their commercials.  Bill Mar and Phil Donahew were fired because of their views on the Iraq and Afghan wars.  People need to remember that.  I remember the days when the mainstream media put out feature broadcasts against war and the military.  But today they have these “embedded” reporters where they get a bunch of people who will cover the war but only if they are brainwashed first.  So we see nothing on our TV but the glories of current and past wars.  People don’t remember President Eisenhower’s farewell address where he warn us all against the dangers of the Military and Industrial complex.

I would just say that these so called “tax protests” over the weekend, are a phenomenon that I didn’t foresee the magnitude of.  They were all over the country.  They weren’t paid protestors as Donald Trump tweeted that they were.  It was a spontaneous outpouring of two sentaments.  The first was that the rich should pay their fair share of taxes to save the government from an impending exploding deficit.  The second was that President Trump needs to show his Federal Income Taxes over the past dozen years or so like every other candidate for president.  Donald Trump promised us all multiple times he had no objection to showing his income taxes and would do so as soon as he was being done audited.  But now since his election he’s doing sort of a “Nya – nya”.  He says “The election is over and I won.  The issue is decided”.  First of all it wasn’t a referendum on whether Trump should pay his taxes.  Indeed 75% of Americans want Trump to show his taxes.  But the more important point is that people like Shawn say it’s important for Trump to keep his promises.  But now that he’s won Trump is saying that he doesn’t care about promises any more.  Basically he’s just saying “I just said I’d report them so I’d be elected.  Well, mission accomplished”.  I’m surprised (though I shouldn’t be) that Shawn doesn’t see the credibility gap here.  But now we come to the protests themselves.  We are told that there were fights and disturbances at these rallies.  So the implication (from people like Shawn) is that “These liberals bring disorder and cause violence wherever they go”.  But clearly we need to examine the sources of these conflicts.  Right wingers go to these rallies of the left and deliberately set about to cause violence.  Yesterday they punched a woman right in the gut or something and started a brawl, which was their intent.  But to them it’s just another way of sabotaging the left. I am not completely confident that law enforcement will properly be able to isolate the source of these conflict.  Sometimes in football the cry goes out “They always flag the second guy to throw the punch” or whatever.  There are still a lot of Obama holdovers in the Justice Department but this could change over the course of time.  The time may come when nobody will get a fair trial in America.  

Here’s more damage that the disasterous bills from 1996 have caused.  There was something called the Internet Morality Act, which ought to be called the immorality act.  It shields certain web sites such as dating services from any liability if your account gets hacked, for instance if someone pretended to be you and started setting up fake accounts.  This happened at a gay dating site called Grinder.  There is this one young man who’s gotten over a thousand propositions for sex over the past several months.  They show up at his work and at his home.  Simetimes sixteen men will show up at his home per night.  There was a line that goes “Don’t be put off if I tell you “No” because I have fantacies of rape”.   One can only imagine what would happen if this occurred at a heterosexual web site.  It’s clearly this bow toward commercial supremacy just like the communacations act was that allowed the establishment of FOX news. 

There seems to be a movement from within the Trump administration to go back to the past and “Get more adults in the room, in the decision making process”.  Trump just hired on two people who used to be in the Bush administration.  They say Trump wants to hire more people like these two, which will further the retrenchment of promises made in the campaign.  It seems Rex Tillerson has “grown up” and now as Secretary of State for a couple of months is doing more traveling and standing up to Russia and “clearly his star is rising”.  I guess so.  

Sometimes Computer search doesn’t hit everything in blogger.  Let's talk about our rock compilations, which we have posted so many of.  “Stray Cat Blues” is on that Dylan Doors and Stones compilation.  So is “Jigsaw Puzzle” and so is “Parachute Woman”.  Also “When You’re Strange” is on that album listed under ‘People are Strange”.  I guess we’ll leave it as an overlap because there is a dearth of Doors songs as it is.  Also this album was pitched as an individual album to buy apart from the eight disk boxed set.  But you should question the completeness of the results in "Search This Blog".  For instance I searched "Stray Cat" and came up dry as far as the eight CD boxed set is concerned.  

LATE EDITION:  At a North Korean press conference at the United Nations, can you hear a diplomat say he hoped journalists had a good holiday weekend and then warn of possible thermonuclear war.

North Korea has consistently issued threats of war toward the United States in recent decades, but the Trump administration's announced end of a "strategic patience" policy with Pyongyang has upped the ante in terms of warnings and bellicose rhetoric. North Korea's UN deputy representative, Kim In Ryong, on Monday unleashed at a hastily called UN press conference a torrent of threats, war scenarios and rhetoric aimed at the United States.

The press event was held hours after US Vice President Mike Pence visited the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Pence warned North Korea not to test the resolve of the United States "or the strength of our military forces."

In New York, North Korea returned verbal fire. North Korea's UN ambassador condemned the US naval buildup in the waters off the Korean Peninsula, plus the US missile attacks on Syria.

On North Korean border, Pence tells CNN US will drop 'failed policy'

Kim said, "It has created a dangerous situation in which thermonuclear war may break out at any moment on the peninsula and poses a serious threat to world peace and security."