* Andrew Yang keeps telling us our nation's job losses are only due to automation. I wish Yang would speak privately with maybe Thea Lee of the Economic Policy Institute or Lori Wallach from Public Citizen about how trade deals set political-economic rules that favored low wage nations against higher wage nations in races to the bottom, and how even in wealthy Silicon Valley, there were casualties. And of course Bernie Sanders strongly opposed the favored nation status for China, while the corporate Democrats joined with most Republicans to push it through.
* A conservative, er, right wing columnist is amused at establishment Democratic hatred of Sanders. It is the pro corporate bias he is describing, but if he said that, he may have to look into the mirror, too.
* The Daughter continues to be a leading correspondent at UCLA's Her Campus. Here is her latest column the organization published, which is on the oppressive nature of women's fashion and accoutrements. Her archives are here. I laughed when I read the latest column because, for years, I would be the one to go clothes shopping with her (The Wife and The Daughter would have too many fights), and I would remark to womens' sales store people how fascism and fashion are very close in sounds, and there is a reason for that when it comes to women's fashion. Women's fashion is designed to make women continually feel inadequate, and worse, it is women who are most judgmental, compared to men, about what clothes, make up, etc. women must wear--while us men wear clothes which have not changed in over a century. The Daughter laughed when I reminded her of that.
* Ryan Grimm, of The Intercept and more and more The Hill, nails the irony how Republican strategists are making the same mistake as Democratic strategists made about Trump in 2015 and 2016--and how Trump senses he may bargain for more than he expects if Sanders were to win the nomination.
* If one reads a good Reagan bio carefully, and goes back into newspaper archives from the 1970s, one finds Reagan ran a highly divisive and bitter primary against Republican presidential incumbent, Gerald Ford, and barely lifted a finger for Ford in the fall election against Jimmy Carter. He would appear at rallies for Ford and barely mention Ford's name, if at all. Reagan would rail against establishment Republicans in the Republican National Committee during the period 1977-1979, as he geared up to run for president again in the 1980 Republican primary, which had a crowded field, and where Reagan was the oldest candidate ever to run in a Republican Party or Democratic Party primary. It is too bad I have not been able to find anything on the Internet about all this, as the hagiography and noise from recent elections crowds out anything I can find substantively on the topic. Lou Cannon's monumental biography of Reagan deals with this to some extent, but not as much as it should for our current purposes, where Sanders is essentially the Reagan of this time period. It is in this context I read this article about how Tom Perez, a footman for corporate Democrats who is called the Party's national chair, has stacked the decks on the main committees with anti-Sanders people. I hope the movement which Bernie is developing as he runs for president--unlike most other candidates who are running for president on their own personal vanity--continues to swell and grow. With the various articles in this week's premier papers, The Washington Post and The New York Times, and television pundits gritting their teeth, we will see even more frenzied attacks against Bernie. This FAIR.ORG piece is helpful to show how corporate media will imply anti-Semitism against Bernie, even if it means employing anti-Semitic tropes against Bernie. The history of the capitalist press and corporate media is they will become hysterical and spread falsehoods to protect the capitalist and corporate executive class.
* And I was thinking of the eclectic 1967 era band, Giles, Giles & Fripp's Thursday Morning when writing the drive bys this morning. As prog rock fans know, the little pop outfit, GG&F, later turned into the mammoth woolly psych-prog band, King Crimson (yes, this is the great Rolling Stone article from last year about KC's signature opening song, which is so ironic as the band received such bad press from Rolling Stone in the hey day of the 1970s under the odious Jann Wenner).
* And I was thinking of the eclectic 1967 era band, Giles, Giles & Fripp's Thursday Morning when writing the drive bys this morning. As prog rock fans know, the little pop outfit, GG&F, later turned into the mammoth woolly psych-prog band, King Crimson (yes, this is the great Rolling Stone article from last year about KC's signature opening song, which is so ironic as the band received such bad press from Rolling Stone in the hey day of the 1970s under the odious Jann Wenner).
