I think you all know I love Trina and I love her website. Last night's "Tuna Melt Sandwiches in the Kitchen" made me very sad. Trina started her site to cover food and to do so because our economy was so bad and people were struggling with food prices. Bully Boy Bush occupied the White House then. All these years later, she's still having to do it. And one of her readers, Geri, suggested the recipe because her husband has lost his job and they're down to one paycheck (her husband was a federal government worker). I always love the recipes that Trian and her readers share. But I'm just shaking my head that we're now not just back there, we're now worse than we were back then.
It's so sad.
We could have progressed. Joe Biden got us back onto track. Kamala could have carried us further.
I'm a Green. My parents are Greens. Cedric, my husband, is a Democrat. My parents and I voted for Kamala Harris. We realized her qualifications and we realized how important this moment was.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for any Green that voted for Jill Stein. We all knew Jill was a fake ass -- Greens all knew.
She runs for office and then runs off. She did it again. From Ava and C.I.'s ""Media: Thrillers and Spoilers"
She's done nothing again.
It was very important that, as a country, we protect ourselves by voting for Kamala.
I don't have sympathy for those on the left who worked to defeat her. Defeating her meant defeating us, defeating our democracy. I don't think I'm a Green anymore. I don't have respect for the party anymore. It was bad enough that they ran a 74 year old at a time when people are calling for younger leaders but that they ran someone for the third time? And then they just watched as she attacked Kamala and stayed silent on Donald Chump.
I have no sympathy.
I have no sympathy for those influenced by Rashida Tlaib. You betrayed the country and you betrayed the people and, as all of us said in real time, you were betraying Palestinians because Chump was not going to protect Palestinians.
No sympathy for you at all.
Okay, two media notes. First, Prime Target. I included the paragraph about it from Ava and C.I.'s review because this is a really great show. It's on APPLE+ and it really is full of twists and turns. And I purchased The Last Showgirl -- I mention that because it made my "2024 in film (Ann and Stan)" and Stan's "2024 in film (Ann & Stan)" best films of 2024:
8) THE LAST SHOWGIRL
Gia Coppola's drama has the spirit that American indies had before big studio's started snapping them up and sapping them up. A first rate cast -- including Pamela Anderson, Dave Butista, Jamie Lee Curtis and Jason Schwartzman -- shine and register as the plot moves in story teller fashion -- as opposed to the Sy Field cookie cutter fashion that destroyed enthusiasm for film. Not yet available on streaming. Sorry but we have pirated copies. We'll buy streaming copies of the film -- purchase not rent -- when it comes out. But we heard good things and when it started showing up at the Black barbershops, we got our pirated copies because, if it was as good as we kept hearing, we wanted it on our list. It wasn't as good as we heard, it was better.
I did pre-order the film because I do not believe in piracy. It's now for sale on streaming platforms.
This is C.I.'s "The snapshot:"
Longtime Republican Party pollster Sarah Longwell is conducting focus groups with voters of President Donald Trump — and she's beginning to see some "buyer remorse."
MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace introduced the segment, playing the comments from a participant who voted for Trump.
"I think what we're starting to see is the very beginning of buyer's remorse setting in," said Longwell. "And the voters that I was talking to — both before the election — and after the election that are kind of these, we say, low-information. But we just mean people who aren't tapped into politics all the time. They voted for Donald Trump for one very specific reason. They thought things were too expensive. And they still think things are too expensive."
What is coming up now, she said, is that they don't like Trump's priorities.
"They're like, what is he focusing on? I didn't vote for this dismantling of the government!" said Longwell.
She noted that there are people online who are excited about DOGE, but the people she spoke to are citing friends or family members who are dealing with the government purge. This isn't just a "message" from Democrats.
“I think what we’re starting to see is the very beginning of buyer’s remorse setting in,” Longwell told MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace on Deadline: White House. “And the voters that I was talking to both before the election and after … They voted for Donald Trump for one very specific reason—they thought things were too expensive, and they still think things are too expensive.”
Early this month Donald Trump announced that he was about to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Then he put them on pause for 30 days. So are they on again next week? Yesterday he insisted that they are. But will they really happen? Nobody knows.
Trump is also threatening a trade war with the European Union, which he says “was formed to screw the United States.” (It was actually created with America’s blessing, because we saw it as a force for peace and democracy.) Will he follow through on his threat? Nobody knows.
The legislation currently providing the federal government with the money it needs to stay open will expire on March 14, and it’s by no means clear that Republicans have the votes to continue that funding. So will the U.S. government shut down? Nobody knows (although betting markets say that there’s a better than even chance that it will.)
The real possibility of a general shutdown aside, will DOGE’s efforts to fire large numbers of federal workers — half the staff of the Social Security Administration! — cripple essential government services? Nobody knows.
Bates: Yeah, I think that he betrays the fundamental promise that he made to the country. I remember in the Republican National Convention speech, he told people on day one—that’s a direct quote—prices will fall across the board. He also said that inflation would end immediately—immediately is also a direct quote. He was very explicit about this. And of course that was a false promise. Tariffs are a tax, and they are a tax that is disproportionately paid by people who are not wealthy, people that spend a greater percent of their income on daily necessities, food, clothing.
And I think that what’s especially telling about this is the revenue that they make from these tariff taxes—the revenue they’re taking in from middle-class folks who they said they were going to fight for—they’re turning around and they’re using it to make room in the budget for tax giveaways to billionaires and big corporations. It’s like a Bernie Madoff scheme. They are trying to take money out of the bank accounts of hardworking people after they got their votes promising lower cost, lower prices. Instead, they’re actively raising prices that they said they were going to reduce, and taxing people for it, and they’re pocketing that money.
Sargent: It’s a funny thing, Andrew. Trump is explicit on this point because he keeps saying the tariffs are going to bring in gangbusters revenue. Well, what do they need the revenue for?
Bates: That’s right. Because they’re trying to add trillions to the deficit with tax giveaways for the wealthy. And you mentioned the DOGE cuts too. That also relates to this because while everybody is against waste—myself, every Democrat I’ve ever known—a lot of what they’re cutting is bone and not fat. For example, they fired people who have been in charge of fighting bird flu while egg prices are skyrocketing. They want to use the money that went to those salaries for tax cuts for the rich. And it’s also true of the Medicaid cuts and the Affordable Care Act cuts they want to make. That is also to accommodate tax welfare for the richest people in the country, for Elon Musk and for Donald Trump themselves. It’s just a total reverse of what they promised voters.
Over the past few weeks, information has been spreading on social media about a nationwide economic protest called the "Feb 28 Economic Blackout."
The call to action — or rather inaction — is asking that American consumers refrain from making any purchases at major retailers on Friday, February 28. The protest comes as people continue to endure rising prices on everything from food and gas to housing and utilities, epitomized by the soaring cost of eggs which in January averaged $4.95 a dozen.
"I'm just not going to spend any money tomorrow," said Pat Gavin-Gordon, 83, who lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Gavin-Gordon learned of the boycott from an email circulated among a small group of friends of hers which she describes as "socially responsible women who try to do things for the community and help people."
A lifelong social activist, Gavin-Gordon said she marched along highway I-25 in Denver with civil rights leader Cesar Chavez in the 70s. She sees Friday's protest as a way to voice her disapproval of many things she said she sees going on today, from the cancellation of DEI by corporations to the Department of Government Efficiency's firing of thousands of federal workers.
"All these young people were being laid off for bad performance, which is not true at all," said Gavin-Gordon.
Also supporting the Economic Blackout is Isabel Cotarelo from Kingston, New York. "I'm all for 2/28 Economic Blackout to demonstrate that the majority of people don't agree with the way things are being taking over the richest man in the world, how the oligarchs are supporting this government and only care about enriching themselves," the 69-year-old artist told CBS MoneyWatch.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk — the world's richest person, with a net worth of $398 billion — has been tasked by President Trump to oversee DOGE, in slashing government spending and cutting the federal workforce.
"One day of Economic Blackout may not impact the corporations gravely, but they will see that there is action and that action, hopefully, will inspire more people to resist this horrendous path my dear country is going through," Cotarelo said.
Some state lawmakers who formerly supported legislation to help Tesla bring in direct sales of its electrical vehicles have soured on the company, thanks to Elon Musk's divisive political activities.
Politico reported Thursday, "In the past, blue state Democrats and environmental groups pushed for allowing Tesla and other electric vehicle makers to set up shop rather than requiring customers to buy online. They saw it as a no-cost measure to support higher EV sales and slash transportation emissions."
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is urging top Tesla investors to review the company’s current valuation on behalf of her union’s members.
“Given these mounting concerns and the potential material impact on pension fund portfolios, I would appreciate a response detailing your firm’s assessment of Tesla’s current valuation and the steps you are taking to protect AFT members who are your clients and beneficiaries,” Weingarten said at the end of the letter.
The letter was sent to the CEOs of six asset managers, with the Tesla board and Elon Musk copied onto the message.
In the letter, Weingarten goes directly after Musk, saying he is a big reason people are losing trust in Tesla.
In the fall of 1984, when I was a senior in high school in Washington, DC, the protests at the South African Embassy began. Civil rights leaders met with the ambassador of South Africa on Thanksgiving Eve. Timed for maximum press coverage, that meeting became a sit-in, and that sit-in launched a movement. Soon, there were protests at consulates across the country. College students held rallies, built “shantytowns,” and pushed their schools to divest.
Area high school kids like me got in on protesting the embassy too. And we had a soundtrack. “Free Nelson Mandela” had been released by the Specials in March. The leader of that British ska band, Jerry Dammers, later admitted he didn’t know much about Mandela before he went to an anti-apartheid concert in the UK, where a long-simmering boycott movement was rolling into a boil. The DC music scene was pretty wild then—a bouillabaisse of go-go, R&B, punk, New Wave; there was breakdancing in the hallways during lunch hour—and for some of us, ska was sort of a unified field theory. Musically but also culturally. (If you have a racist friend / now is the time, now is the time for your friendship to end.)
But it wasn’t just kids who cosplayed in checked socks or porkpie hats. In 1985, a month after I started college, Artists Against Apartheid recorded Steven Van Zandt’s “(I Ain’t Going to Play) Sun City”—essentially the music world launching its own boycott on South Africa. The song was not (like, at all) great, but the wild cross-genre supergroup—DJ Kool Herc, Lou Reed, Bonnie Raitt, Gil Scott-Heron, Pat Benatar, Bono, and Miles Davis to name but a very, very few—guaranteed continual rotation on a relatively new cultural phenomenon: MTV.
We were getting a collective education: Because South Africa was so dependent on Black labor and exports, if industrialized nations withheld trade and investments, we could backstop Black South Africans who’d been directly resisting the Afrikaner regime for decades. So, suddenly, amazingly, we did. By 1986, Congress had imposed sanctions on South Africa and banned direct flights to it. Coca-Cola became the first major company to pull out of South Africa. Sports teams joined the musicians in refusing to play there. Divestment battles raged on campuses and boardrooms for the rest of the ’80s. And they worked. South Africa’s economy ground to a near halt. Mandela was freed in 1990, and negotiations to wind down apartheid began. By 1994, free elections were held and Mandela became president.
I found myself reconstructing this history recently, as the protests and boycotts against Tesla began. Do you need a reminder as to why? Okay: Tesla CEO Elon Musk—the world’s richest man, and Trump’s biggest campaign donor; an unelected, ketamine-happy, video game cheating, transphobic, subsidy–guzzling, deadbeat dad—is leading a bunch of scythe-wielding mini-me shitposters through innards of the federal government, harvesting and compromising the most essential data of every taxpayer, government contractor, and NGO in America. Oh, and he’s also supporting fascists, using apparent Nazi salutes, and blasting antisemitic and racist theories to his millions of followers.
Anyway, the dude is bad news. And he’s threatening to use his hundreds of billions—again, money he would not have without US subsidies—to take out any politician, foreign or domestic, who opposes his and Trump’s agenda, which is a mix of toxic masculinity, grift, and a seeming desire to return to a gauzy form of racial apartheid.
Words like “apartheid” and “Nazi” shouldn’t be tossed around lightly. Musk has denied he’s a Nazi, and that his salute was a Nazi salute. But clear-eyed commentators aren’t buying it, and white nationalists like Nick Fuentes are downright jubilant: “That was a straight up, like, Sieg Heil, like loving Hitler energy.” And then there’s Musk’s history. His maternal grandparents were, according to Musk’s own father, members of the Canadian neo-Nazi party who decamped to South Africa because they were fans of racial oppression. Musk has been pretty mum about what it was like to grow up in South Africa and the influence that had on him. (Today he holds US, Canadian, and South African citizenship.) But the fact is that many white South Africans who left at that time did so because their position of privilege was coming to an end.
In any case, once in the States, Musk joined forces with fellow South Africans Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Roelof Botha—grandson of former South African leader Pik Botha; now the head of venture capital giant Sequoia Capital—to form PayPal. And they revealed themselves to be racial reactionaries. Thiel (who, according to his biographer, once called critiques of apartheid “overblown”) and Sacks wrote “The Case Against Affirmative Action” for Stanford Magazine in 1996. They’ve led concerted, organized attacks on DEI. Musk, who was under federal investigation for racial discrimination in his Tesla factories—that is, until Trump took over—is supporting extremist movements across the world, using Holocaust Remembrance Day to tell Germans they should no longer feel “guilt” over it, and echoing South Africans who claim they’re victims of “white genocide.”
So yes, some people are too quick to label people they don’t like as Nazis. But also, people who don’t want to be called Nazis should avoid giving Nazi salutes.
Apartheid is a huge issue here. You can see it in the attacks on people of color from the administration and you can see it in the attacks on modern day South Africa -- modern day South Africa where apartheid -- much to Musk's regret -- has ended. And good for Clara for making the connections. Some writers can churn out an entire book and never manage to grasp the obvious -- see Ava and my "Media: OWNED finds Eoin Higgins owned by bad journalism" for an example of how Higgins did just that.
This country never knew Musk. They knew a p.r. created dream. He wanted to sell Teslas and conservatives aren't big on electronic cars so he pandered to the left and he got rewarded with easy press and easy press. Most didn't even know, ten years ago as he was being pimped on THE SIMPSONS and elsewhere, that he was from another country and they certainly didn't grasp his support for racism. An e-mail accused me of 'othering' him.
You don't need to accuse me of that.
I'll gladly cop to it.
It's about time those of us of color learned how to turn othering back on White racists.
Yeah, America doesn't like him. He is the other. He's got a creepy voice, he looks ridiculous, his accent is laughable and he's corrupt as hell. He's unelected but he's determining who gets to keep a job and who doesn't and who's entitled to government services and who isn't and whether we -- Americans, real ones not abusers with triple citizenship -- owe our veterans.
I'm not one of those 'support the . . .' people. I've never been that. I'm not a jingoist.
But when we ask people to be prepared to die for this country -- or some lame brained scheme of some idiot who got into the Oval Office -- we keep the promises we made to them. That's why we've focused on VA issues here and covered VA hearings.
Not being an American -- he's not one, he had two citizenships before he bought his US citizenship -- he doesn't care about Americans who served in the US military. So he and Chump (who avoided military service with lies and with money) have no problem firing veterans who work at the VA. And they have no problems firing VA workers -- veterans and non-veterans -- who take care of basic needs including assistance hotline workers. They don't see the very real debt our country owes because of promises we made to people we were willing to send off to foreign lands.
Foreign. That's Musk. That's Chump. They're foreign to the basis of American life. Chump didn't care to learn about it and Musk was raised elsewhere.
One of the unacknowledged advantages of the horrendous era we’ve entered is that it is revealing the putrid connections between great wealth and great power for all to see.
Oligarchs are fully exposed and they are defiant. It’s like hitting the “reveal codes” key on older computers that let you see everything.
On Wednesday, Jeff Bezos, the third-richest person in America, who bought the Washington Post in 2013, announced that the paper’s opinion section would henceforth focus on defending “personal liberties and free markets”.
Anything inconsistent with this view would not be published, according to his statement. “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
The Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, promptly resigned, as he should have.
When they speak of ‘freedom’, what they actually seek is freedom from accountability
You’ll recall that Bezos barred the Post from endorsing Kamala Harris in the last weeks of the 2024 election. Subsequently, the paper wouldn’t print its cartoonist’s drawing showing Bezos and other oligarchs bowing to Trump, leading the cartoonist to resign.
Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, bought Twitter in 2022, laid off everyone who was filtering out hateful crap on the platform, renamed it X and turned it into a cesspool of lies in support of Trump.
Mark Zuckerberg, the second-richest person, has followed suit, allowing Facebook to emit lies, hate and bigotry in support of Trump’s lies, hate and bigotry.
All three of these men were in the first row at Trump’s inauguration. They, and other billionaires, have now exposed themselves for what they are.
They are the oligarchy. They continue to siphon off the wealth of the nation. They are supporting a tyrant who is promising them tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks that will make them even richer.
“Enabler” is the term given to those who fail to act in stopping those who perpetuate abuse. “Passive bystander” or “bad Samaritan” is the name for people who are conscious of bad actions developing around them but fail to intervene.
I often wonder how Trump’s enablers can sleep at night and get back up in the morning, still willing to degrade and prostrate themselves by supporting those who attack our democratic institutions and seriously dismantle our country’s standing in the world.
Each time anyone enables an abusive action, they keep perpetrators and themselves further from the truth and from help, and they diminish themselves and their integrity more than just a bit.
Why does Trump eagerly respond as if he were Putin’s puppet? Does Trump simply respect Putin’s dictatorial powers? Or is Putin carrying some sort of incriminating evidence over Trump?
No matter what, Trump could not be any more aligned with Putin and his agenda to return Russia to its former empire and weaken the Western alliance than if he were a secret Russian agent.
Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a Berlin-based rabbi who fled Nazi Germany in 1937 concluded: “The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.”
For what is true in AIDS education and activism holds true for all forms of politics: “Silence = Death.”
So, where are the Republicans with any backbone?
February 27, 2025
Read issue 1030
Our email address is BlackCommentator@gmail.com
Our voicemail number is 856.823.1739
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Chaos Is Bad for Business2 hours ago
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Harvey Guillén: Breaking Hollywood Molds3 hours ago
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Touchy Alien Musk, Crazy Mike Johnson7 hours ago
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Tuna Melt Sandwiches in the Kitchen7 hours ago
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Gene Hackman7 hours ago
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Chump's a sucka for the Tate boyz7 hours ago
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Trashy Garbage gets caught lying7 hours ago
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