Jack Nicholson Oscar Award Speech, 1975

Happy birthday JACK NICHOLSON - 86 years old today! When he won a BAFTA for Chinatown, he accepted the award from the set of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. It's one of the great acceptance speeches. pic.twitter.com/AIO9P2plt7

— All The Right Movies (@ATRightMovies) April 22, 2023

Prescient 2016 Article By Neocon Robert Kagan

Click here for a prescient article titled "This is how fascism comes to America," by Robert Kagan, first published in the Washington Post on May 18, 2016, six months before Trump was elected president.

Kagan is a neocon who cofounded PNAC with Bill Kristol, and I'm not a big fan -- but he got this one right.

This article was reposted on April 22, 2023, by another neocon, David Frum. While Frum is an ally as a solid anti-Trumper, he's an unreformed "conservative" whose ideas I take with a healthy dose of salt. Of course, he's famously the author of the ridiculous term "axis of evil," which he claimed was Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

Kagan writes: 

The Republican Party’s attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be laughable were it not so perilous to the republic. If only he would mouth the party’s “conservative” principles, all would be well.

But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy. Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. Because it did not immediately and fully embrace Trump, because a dwindling number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist him, the party is regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance is to him and him alone.

What is Trumps appeal?

But what Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies — his proposals change daily. What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence. His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger. His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others” — Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees — whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up.

It's all about devotion to a single leader:

Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Führer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how.

The power of demagoguery:

In democracies, at least for politicians, the only thing that matters is what the voters say they want — vox populi vox Dei. A mass political movement is thus a powerful and, to those who would oppose it, frightening weapon. When controlled and directed by a single leader, it can be aimed at whomever the leader chooses. If someone criticizes or opposes the leader, it doesn’t matter how popular or admired that person has been. He might be a famous war hero, but if the leader derides and ridicules his heroism, the followers laugh and jeer. [e.g. John McCain]

Kagan concludes:

This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac "tapping into" popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party — out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear — falling into line behind him.

The thing that has saved the United States is that Trump is as stupid as a box of rocks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Reich On The Debt Ceiling, April 2023

Click here for an article by Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor, entitled "Disinformation about the debt ceiling."

At a speech at the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy affirmed the Republicans’ plan to use the rapidly approaching debt-ceiling deadline to extract spending cuts and other policy concessions from President Biden. Put simply, they plan on holding the American (and world) economy hostage. Yet the media continues to hide this truth behind its “both sides” reporting.

Reich cites three myths commonly published not just on the right, but in the mainstream media:

Myth #1: Both sides are to blame.  

Myth #2: The fight is over controlling the national debt.  

Myth #3: When it comes to the national debt, both parties have been fiscally irresponsible. 

Reich goes on to debunk these three myths. 

Click here for an article at Pocket entitled "The Best Writing About Punctuation. Full Stop."

There are articles entitled "A History of Punctuation"; "I Stopped Using Exclamation Points and Lost All My Friends"; "How to Use (or Not Use) a Hyphen"; "The Virtues of the Semicolon; or, Rebellious Punctuation"; "The Commas That Cost Companies Millions"; "Can You Tell An Author's Identity By Looking at Punctuation Alone?"; "The Em Dash Divides"; "The Mysterious History of the Ellipsis, From Medieval Subpuncting to Irrational Numbers"; "Elitist, Superfluous, Or Popular? We Polled Americans on the Oxford Comma"; "Kill the Apostrophe!"; "Definitive Ranking of English Grammar Punctuation"; "The Best Grammar and Punctuation Books"; and "Seven Bar Jokes Involving Grammar and Punctuation."

Patricia Nilsen, Superstar!

Click here for Patricia's Facebook page commemorating the "Fearless Stenographers Conference" in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 13, 2023, and her second-place finish (to Mark Kislingbury) in a five-minute speed test -- at 320 words per minute!

She also won the regular speed contest, placing first in the Jury Charge and Literary portions and coming second in the Q&A. Fantastic!

Tennessee, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida - The Slide Toward Fascism

Click here for an article by Robert Reich at Substack entitled "Is the GOP becoming the American fascist party?"

I hate to say this, but America no longer has two parties devoted to a democratic system of self-government. We have a Democratic Party, which — notwithstanding a few glaring counter-examples such as what the Democratic National Committee did to Bernie in 2016 — is still largely committed to democracy. And we have a Republican Party, which is careening at high-velocity toward authoritarianism. Okay, fascism.

I thought the election of a Democratic judge, tipping the balance in the Wisconsin Supreme Court, was a gigantic win for the Ds -- but that may not be the case:

While liberals celebrated the election on Tuesday of Janet Protasiewicz to the Wisconsin Supreme Court because she’ll tip the court against the state’s extreme gerrymandering (the most extreme in the nation) and its fierce laws against abortion (among the most stringent in America), something else occurred in Wisconsin on election day that may well negate Protasiewicz’s victory. Voters in Wisconsin’s 8th senatorial district decided (by a small margin) to send Republican Dan Knodl to the state Senate.

This gives the Wisconsin Republican Party a supermajority — and with it, the power to remove key state officials, including judges, through impeachment. Several weeks ago, Knodl said he would “certainly consider” impeaching Protasiewicz. Although he was then talking about her role as a county judge, his interest in impeaching her presumably has increased now that she’s able to tip the state’s highest court.

There's a lot more, and it's scary.

 Reich concludes:

I don’t believe Trump alone is responsible for the birth of modern Republican fascism, but he has legitimized and encouraged the vicious rancor that has led much of the GOP into election-denying fascism.

Susan Boyle's Audition, "Britain's Got Talent," 2009

If you haven't seen this, it'll knock your socks off.

Randy Rainbow On Trump's Indictment

Click on the "Watch on YouTube button": definitely not safe for work.