Green Eagle

And just to note:  This took place a few minutes drive from my house. So we've already heard the narrative about Saturday:  The "peaceful" protesters versus the evil looters.  The peaceful protesters who will, of course, accomplish nothing in the face of the terror wrought upon them, and the looters, who will accomplish nothing either, except get themselves a new pair of sneakers. Even presumably liberal mayors and governors, like ours here in Los Angeles, join in defense of the police, who are obvously far more out of control than the protesters, while condemning the looters as subhumans with no right to a voice in how their lives are mangled by their own governments. Well, here is what I wonder:  How loudly did all these moral authorities speak out when Donald Trump looted two trillion dollars from the treasury for his rich backers?  How loudly did they speak out when Donald Trump stole a hundred thousand American lives in order to try to hold on to the Presid...

Well, here we go: "A 19-year-old man was killed on Friday night after shots were fired into a crowd of demonstrators in downtown Detroit who were protesting the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, per AP. Details: The teenager was injured when shots were fired from an SUV about 11:30 p.m. and later died in hospital, reports MDN reports, which noted police were still looking for a suspect." Not looking too hard, I'd guess.

"Justice Ginsburg found dead under Joe Scarborough's desk"

I am not sure why I bother taking five minutes to point things out like this, but today, the President of the United States retweeted a remark from a Republican leader saying that "the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat." We have now reached the point where the President can call for the murder of the 63 million people who voted against him, without a single mainstream media outlet questioning his right to be President.  Of course, if confronted, he will claim it was all just a joke, the same way a playground bully would say that shoving that second grader into a garbage can was just a joke, but it is not a joke.  Today is the day that Trump also questioned the right of media platforms not just to oppose him but to even point out when he lies, threatening to reverse decades of judicial precedent to allow them to be sued for doing so. Silencing the opposition, and calling for their death.  It's all so normal now, just part of the game, while the press devotes endless ti...

I want to take a moment to explain why I have been citing stories at Before it's News, which is basically an aggregator of right wing videos.  As I have mentioned, I have been following political crazies for half a century now.  And here is something that I have noticed, but never talked about before:  Practically every right wing conspiracy theory has existed in some form or another as long as I have been paying attention. But for the first thirty years or so, it took years or decades for them to gain enough legitimacy in the supposedly serious Conservative world to emerge into the light of day.  Over the last few years, that lag time has been drastically reduced, so that the most ludicrous, ugly lies make their way into the "mainstream" right wing media, or even into the mouth of the President of the United States, often within a couple of weeks.  I largely ignored the really lunatic sites at Wingnut Wrapup for a while because, well, it's enough to drive any...

That's apparently the official death toll today.  Of course, anyone who has really followed the science of the pandemic knows the real number, which can only be calculated later, will be much larger, but that is still plenty. In honor of this landmark, I wish to make the following prediction about the upcoming election.  I have never seen an election in which the voters are so polarized.  Others have said that, but they don't mean what I mean when I say it.  The truth is that about half the voters are sane, and are consequently going to vote for anyone who will help get Trump out of the White House, while a consistent and apparently unchangeable 43% have totally given themselves over to Republican madness, and are willing to destroy this country and their lives to live out their violent, hate filled fantasies. So basically, what this all amounts to is this:   The entire election depends on two factors: how much cheating the Republicans are able to get a...

I want to write about an issue that should be at the very forefront of reporting today, combining information about the covid outbreak with desperately bad news about what the Republicans are getting up to in the runup to the November Presidential election. In discussing this, I want to quote from two articles from reliable left-leaning websites. The first was published yesterday at Talking Points Memo, an almost invariably reliable source of information.  Here is an excerpt; I hope you will take the time to read the whole thing: "Are We On a Permanent COVID Plateau? We’re getting a mix of information about the state of the COVID epidemic in the United States – much of it contradictory. I wanted to take a few moments to pick apart these seemingly contradictory realities which are happening at the same time. The first fact is that the initial experiments with easing the strictures on social and economic life have not generated the spikes in new cases that some predi...

Today, the United States, which has about four percent of the world's population, has just over a quarter of all reported Corona virus deaths. Are you tired of winning yet? By the way, did you see any of Trump's appearance at the White House today?  I only saw a couple of sentences of it, but he looked terrible.  I wonder how much he is dwelling on the ultimate humiliation that may very well be coming to him, what has haunted his thinking his whole life: that he would be stripped of all pretense of worth in front of the entire world; a fate to earn which he was willing to throw away every scrap of human decency he might ever have had.  Even more than Nixon, this is the stuff of tragedy.  But like the fate of Boris Goudonov, there will be nobody to mourn his passing.

I am disturbed by Donald Trump's attempt to militarize people's thinking about the Corona virus, claiming that all Americans are now "warriors," and that he is a wartime President.  Sure, a lot of this is just to try to make himself into more of a hero to his ignorant base, but I think it is a dangerous move.  And what it reminds me of is the Japanese notion of Bushido, as warped by its government in World War II. I am sure that virtually anyone that reads my blog is familiar with the concept of Bushido, which was the code of the Japanese Samurai.  For those who are not, here is an excerpt from Niitobe Inazo's seminal 1899 book on the subject, Bushido. "Bushidō, then, is the code of moral principles which the samurai were required or instructed to observe ... More frequently it is a code unuttered and unwritten ... It was an organic growth of decades and centuries of military career. In order to become a samurai this code has to be mastered. The...

I think we'll just start out with a little Conservative "humor" today: You see, coverage of the miserable failure of Donald Trump to deal with an ongoing crisis that has killed 90,000 Americans is actually a way for Democrats to distract people from a nonexistent scandal based on Republican smears. This would be one of the great examples of projection of all time, if it were actually a Republican psychological problem, rather than one part of a systematic strategy of denying the monstrosity of their own crimes by calling their opponents the actual criminals. So, I have been spending more time with Wingnut Wrapup lately, after having not posted much of this sort of thing for quite some time.  This is because, in this material, we can see the Republican party forging the lying smear campaign that is (other than their usual electoral cheating) the only hope they have of retaining the Presidency in November.  So it is worth looking at, as a prelude to what is to come ...

The thalidomide disaster might have happened so long ago that the great majority of Americans know nothing about it.  If you are one of them, I urgently request you to read this article, or one of the many similar accounts you can find online.  Here is an excerpt: "Thalidomide is a sedative drug discovered at the end of the 50s, which caused a worldwide tragedy. The drug has been prescribed to many pregnant women in order to relieve pregnancy nausea. It was later found that thalidomide caused irreversible damages to the fetus and thousands of children were born with severe congenital malformations. Many of them did not survive more than a few days after they were born." “What the public did not know is that Grünenthal had no reliable evidence to back up its claims that the drug was safe. They also ignored the increasing number of reports coming in about harmful side-effects as the drug was being used. In fact, starting in 1959 Grünenthal was flooded with complaints f...

So what? Trump's Health and Human Services Secretary, Alex Azar, speaking today: "Is the pledge 300 million Americans will be able to get a shot in their arm by the end of the year?" Brennan asked. "That's a goal," Azar explained. "What happened is these drug companies and vaccine makers said it's all going to take this amount of time because they're using their traditional approaches." "The president said that's not acceptable," he continued. "We're going to scale up commercial manufacturing and produce hundreds of millions of doses at risk. They may not pan out, they may not prove to be safe and effective but we'll have it so we can begin administration right away." Well, then, we will have a vaccine!  But it may not work and it may not be safe.  Thanks, Trump. I guess we should have just stuck with injecting bleach into our lungs, or taken a drug meant for an entirely different disease.  Be...

Will we ever know? Donald Trump, yesterday:  "When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn't do any testing we would have very few cases." Cases that we are not allowed to hear about do not even exist. Can Trump and his sycophants really have degenerated into such magical thinking as to believe that if you don't look at the numbers, the cases aren't there? I sort of hate to quote Max Boot, but he has this to say: "This is akin to FDR saying that if no one reported the attack on Pearl Harbor, it wouldn’t have happened." Lunacy.  Or are we seeing the next step in the Republicans' answer to the coronavirus epidemic? All along, Trump has essentially done nothing to really address the crisis.  All he has done is to try to make people think that it is not really a major issue.  As is his normal behavior, he has lied about it from day one, and this is likely to be the next step in his b...

Read any stories about Richard Burr, the now former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee?  They are all over the news today, relating how the Justice Department has launched an investigation about likely insider trading violations that he committed, which resulted in Mitch McConnell removing him as head of the Intelligence Committee.  Well, hooray for the Justice Department!  All of a sudden they have made a 180 degree turn and are just so concerned with Republican corruption!  Here is a section from the Washington Post story dealing with this development: "Sen. Richard Burr is stepping down as chairman of the Intelligence Committee, following the seizure of his cellphone by FBI agents investigating stock trades made before the coronavirus crashed financial markets...Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a statement that Burr informed him Thursday morning “of his decision to step aside as Chairman of the Intelligence Committee during t...

Here's a comment from Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post this morning: "President Trump’s handling of the pandemic is getting lousy ratings. (CBS News reports: “President Trump’s handling of the outbreak continue to drop from March and are now the lowest he has received. Today, 43% say he’s doing a good job" In other words, President Trump's incompetent, murderous, corrupt handling of an epidemic that is killing tens of thousands and destroying the economy has left him with an approval rating of...exactly what it has been during his entire term in office.  There is basically not a Republican voter in the country that has been awakened by the last three and a half years of criminality and dirty self-dealing. Not a single one. Well, I can hear people replying that 43% is not enough to get re-elected.  But remember that all that it takes is to convince 8% of the rest of the voters not to vote for Biden (and the smear campaign is already in full force,) and he...

I reported in my last post about the greatest crime in history, Obamagate.  But now, perhaps an even more sinister plot has been discovered- FAUCIGATE So of course it is the responsibility of Green Eagle to bring you details of this latest abomination.  This comes from a long article at Before it's News, which contains so much ludicrous misinformation that I could not possibly cover it in a single post, so I am taking the unusual step of linking to this piece of rubbish, in case any of you want to view it in its full glory.  It's quite a read; I will try to cover the major points here. May I just say first how absolutely appalling it is that the right wing in this country is able to manufacture the most disgusting and detailed lies about anyone who threatens their psychotic world view, even as innocent and well-meaning a figure as Dr. Fauci, and then almost instantly spread these hateful smears around the entire country.  We can only imagine with dismay what...

PHILIP RUCKER: "You appeared to accuse Obama of a crime yesterday. What did he do?" TRUMP: “Obamagate.” RUCKER: What is the crime? TRUMP:  “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. Four days ago, virtually none of us had ever heard of "Obamagate," a crime which apparently involves Barack Obama's having ever existed, judging from the name.  Now, the right wing propaganda apparatus is filled with hundreds of stories about it.  How does this happen so fast?  It couldn't be that what pass for hundreds of news sources on the right are actually the limbs of a single thousand-armed octopus that is essentially centrally run by the Republican party, could it?  Well, here is a Wingnut Wrapup that concentrates almost exclusively on this gigantic lie, which this week appears to be the issue around which Republicans are going to rally this summer and fall. And let me just add that it now appears that something that I have spoken ...