Bonus No. 1: Yeah, like that’s going to work…

Bonus No. 2: Yet another time Bill Watterson was prescient.

Bonus No. 3: Election 2020: What Happens Next?

As a journalist I don’t give a shit who gives me information or what possible nefarious reasons they might have for dropping the information on my desk. I only care if the information is true. In my 2020 world, the need to publish now, now, now bests the need to be accurate and truthful. Validating information literally take weeks or months. What’s a journalist to do?

Ask the question: is the story true? Get the story fucking right!

Matt Taibbi (and Glenn Greenwald) are two journalists who have the Hunter Biden story right and yesterday, in With the Hunter Biden Expose, Suppression is a Bigger Scandal Than The Actual Story—Taibbi hit back hard at corporate media. In the non-subscriber excerpt for the story, Taibbi ledes:

The incredible decision by Twitter and Facebook to block access to a New York Post story about a cache of emails reportedly belonging to Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter, with Twitter going so far as to lock the 200 year-old newspaper out of its own account for over a week, continues to be a major underreported scandal.

The hypocrisy is mind-boggling. Imagine the reaction if that same set of facts involved the New York Times and any of its multitudinous unverifiable “exposes” from the last half-decade: from the similarly-leaked “black ledger” story implicating Paul Manafort, to its later-debunked “repeated contacts with Russian intelligence” story, to its mountain of articles about the far more dubious Steele dossier.

[snip]

The flow of information in the United States has become so politicized—bottlenecked by an increasingly brazen union of corporate press and tech platforms—that it’s become impossible for American audiences to see news about certain topics absent thickets of propagandistic contextualizing. Try to look up anything about Burisma, Joe Biden, or Hunter Biden in English, however, and you’re likely to be shown a pile of “fact-checks” and explainers ahead of the raw information

The good news is that our nation is so divided that a revelation that Hunter Biden’s hell-spawned nanny raised him on a regular diet of virgin’s blood wouldn’t change the election. The bad new is that story wouldn’t even rate a spot on Stephen Colbert’s Meanwhile or Trevor Noah’s Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That segments.

Viola Smith, pioneering swing and big band drummer, dies aged 107.

Bonus No. 1: Viola Smith: America’s Original Hep Girl on Tom Tom TV.

Bonus No. 2: And still, much, much more Viola Smith.

Yes, I’m going on the record here. President Kamala Devi Harris will face a primary challenge in 2023-2024 and New York Governor Andrew Mark Cuomo will be leading the pack.

Bonus No.1: Ohio… helped elect Trump. But he betrayed us again and again.

Bonus No. 2: The People’s Party Debate with McGowan, Knight, Wangeshi and Brana.

Bonus No. 3: He’s also a lewdatual podiatist and a persnicuous lube-sopper.

Bonus No. 4: The True Story Of Donald Trump.

Previously…

Bonus No. 1: When a Country Reeling from Crisis Turns to an Aging Father Figure.

Back in the early days of Have Coffee Will Write, the military junta of Myanmar banned my blog for the crime of calling their country Burma. Fair enough, the name Burma was associated with the colonial occupation of Myanmar by the British—including Eric Blair, aka George Orwell—and I made the change to the offending post. (Please see the first link above.)

The banning, however, had a Streisand Effect and over the next 13 years I went on to write more than 1,100 blog posts (mostly under the headline: Good Morning Myanmar) about that country.

Cuyahoga County now seems poised to repeat that experience because a public employee, whose salary depends upon tax dollars, doesn’t like getting emails from Roldo Bartimole.

Back in June I got an email from Cuyahoga County informing me that a “user reported your email as spam and I couldn’t find a way to unsubscribe them from your list.”

That user (a Cuyahoga County public employee) wasn’t subscribed, but was on a list that Roldo maintains to publicize his posts here. Roldo handled the matter himself and we thought the controversy was done and dusted.

Silly me.

Yesterday I got this email:

I just got another report of spam from [name redacted, jh]@cuyahogacounty.us

I can’t remove her from your list but I can block your list from the county. [Emphasis mine, JH]

What should I do? In the last week you have sent the county 28 emails. Do all of them want your email?

So, Cuyahoga County is trying to emulate the military Junta of Myanmar?

I forwarded the email to Roldo, along with my own reply in which I asked:

I do have to wonder, if [redacted, JH] is a public employee of Cuyahoga County and thus a public servant whose salary is derived from taxes as her email address ([redacted]@cuyahogacounty.us) suggests, how could any communication from Roldo, a tax-paying resident of Cuyahoga County, possibly be considered spam?

Like Roldo, I see this as a free-speech issue.

We’ll see how this plays out.

Bonus No. 1: “Cleveland Reporter”… Ohio News Sites [From] Republican Propaganda…

Bonus No. 2: Joy Reid: The Pandemic Has Magnified Trump’s Worst Qualities…

Bonus No. 3: Joy Reid: Sprint Through The Tape!

Bonus No. 4: Mano Singham: Film review: The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020).

From 19 October 1995. The Bomb is Trudeau’s icon for House Speaker Newton Leroy Gingrich.

Bonus No. 1: For more years…

Bonus NO. 2: Larry Kudlow, Trump Admin Official CAUGHT In New Corruption Exposés.

In recent days I have upgraded my opinion of Facebook and Twitter from evil time sucks to existential threats to our free speech rights as guaranteed by the first amendment of our constitution. I arrived at this conclusion after reading recent pieces by two journalists that I respect: Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.

The first piece—Facebook and Twitter Cross a Line Far More Dangerous Than What They Censor—from Greenwald on Thursday, 15 October, begins:

The New York Post is one of the country’s oldest and largest newspapers. Founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, only three U.S. newspapers are more widely circulated. Ever since it was purchased in 1976 by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, it has been known—like most Murdoch-owned papers—for right-wing tabloid sensationalism, albeit one that has some real reporters and editors and is capable of reliable journalism.

On Wednesday morning, the paper published on its cover what it heralded as a “blockbuster” scoop: “smoking gun” evidence, in its words, in the form of emails purportedly showing that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, traded on his father’s position by securing favors from the then-vice president to benefit the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which paid the supremely unqualified Hunter $50,000 each month to sit on its Board. While the Biden campaign denies that any such meetings or favors ever occurred, neither the campaign nor Hunter, at least as of now, has denied the authenticity of the emails.

The Post’s hyping of the story as some cataclysmic bombshell was overblown. While these emails, if authenticated, provide some new details and corroboration, the broad outlines of this story have long been known: Hunter was paid a very large monthly sum by Burisma at the same time that his father was quite active in using the force of the U.S. Government to influence Ukraine’s internal affairs.

Greenwald continues:

But the Post, for all its longevity, power and influence, ran smack into two entities far more powerful than it: Facebook and Twitter. Almost immediately upon publication, pro-Biden journalists created a climate of extreme hostility and suppression toward the Post story, making clear that any journalist even mentioning it would be roundly attacked. For the crime of simply noting the story on Twitter (while pointing out its flaws), New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman was instantly vilified to the point where her name, along with the phrase “MAGA Haberman,” were trending on Twitter.

(That Haberman is a crypto-Trump supporter is preposterous for so many reasons, including the fact that she is responsible for countless front-page Times stories that reflect negatively on the president; moreover, the 2016 Clinton campaign considered Haberman one of their most favorable reporters).

The two Silicon Valley giants saw that hostile climate and reacted. Just two hours after the story was online, Facebook intervened. The company dispatched a life-long Democratic Party operative who now works for Facebook—Andy Stone, previously a communications operative for Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, among other D.C. Democratic jobs—to announce that Facebook was “reducing [the article’s] distribution on our platform”: in other words, tinkering with its own algorithms to suppress the ability of users to discuss or share the news article. [Emphasis mine, JH]

Yesterday, 17 Ocetober, Taibbi ledes, in—Facebook and Twitter’s Intervention Highlights Dangerous New Double Standard—with:

On Wednesday, the New York Post released what they claimed was “smoking gun” evidence of corruption involving Hunter Biden, troubled son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

The “blockbuster” had a controversial provenance. A computer repair shop in Delaware reportedly came to possess a laptop belonging to the younger Biden. According to the Post, it contained a treasure trove of Republican oppo, including videos of the younger Biden smoking crack and having sex, and emails from a Ukrainian businessman pleading with Hunter to use connections to help the corrupt energy firm Burisma escape a shakedown.

Later, the Burisma exec appeared to thank the younger Biden for an introduction to his father. The Post strongly suggested that these emails, in conjunction with the well-known tale of Joe Biden demanding the ouster of then-General Prosecutor Viktor Shokin, represented a misuse of influence.

Soon after the story was published, we were hit with a stunner: two major tech platforms, Twitter and Facebook, took third-world style steps to limit the distribution of the story. Facebook announced that it was slowing the article’s spread on its news feed via a tweet from Andy Stone, a Facebook employee whose previous jobs included handling communications for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and for Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer:

Andy Stone @andymstone—While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.

Twitter’s response was more extreme. It allowed the story to reach No. 3 on its list of Trending topics before blocking it as “potentially unsafe,” preventing anyone, even the author of the piece, from sharing it. It then took the extraordinary step of locking the account of the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McInany, explaining in a series of tweets that the story had been halted for several reasons, including on the grounds that the materials had been hacked.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey seemed torn about his company’s decision:

jack @jack—Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable.

Twitter Safety @TwitterSafety—We want to provide much needed clarity around the actions we’ve taken with respect to two NY Post articles that were first Tweeted this morning.

A day later, facing intense public pressure and threats of Senate inquiry, the company relented and said it would change its policy. Twitter’s legal chief, the New York Times said, was worried that the firm “could end up blocking content from journalists,” implying that it hadn’t already done just that. The company said it would henceforth allow similar content to be shared, affixed to a label about the source of the information.

The intervention by the two platforms resulted in a predictable Streisand effect, in which an effort to censor results instead in increased attention. Conservatives lost their minds; Ted Cruz described the platforms’ actions as “actively interfering in an election”; The Hill called it a “Declaration of War”; Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn used the word “despicable”:

Sen. Marsha Blackburn @MarshaBlackburn—Despicable behavior from Twitter locking @kayleighmcenany’s account. This is the real election interference.

The near-universal reaction among mainstream press outlets, meanwhile, was to denounce the Post story as dangerous, and probably foreign, misinformation.

Taibbi goes on to deconstruct the Bidden-Burisma story and in his concluding paragraphs writes:

On April 23rd, 2014, [Deven] Archer [pal to Hunter and the college roommate of Christopher Heinz, stepson to John Kerry] gave a boastful interview to the Russian-language newspaper Kapital, explaining that Burisma “reminds me of Exxon at its founding.” The interview included the following exchange:

Kapital: In the American media, you’re sometimes described as a person in the circle of the current US Secretary of State John Kerry, and Vice President Joseph Biden.

Archer: Journalists really do think that (smiles). I know those officials.

Essentially, a mob enterprise gearing up to defend itself against international lawsuits and seizure orders hired as decorative cover an ex-president of Poland, the son of a sitting U.S. Vice President, and a close family friend and business partner of the son of the American Secretary of State—not exactly subtle, and far beyond nepotism.

The Burisma board deals were a protection scheme, funded with stolen money and designed to scare off commercial rivals and would-be regulators alike. Archer and Hunter Biden, even if they never did a minute of work for Burisma, were being paid to provide a criminal enterprise with the appearance of American protection. Similarly, if Joe Biden never actually intervened on behalf of Burisma, Hunter’s presence on Burisma’s board made it possible for anyone to argue that he was.

As I learned talking with Ukrainian sources this week (more on that upcoming), the truth around the Biden/Burisma story is hard to divine. There are indications that a few investigations of Burisma were at least technically alive during Shokin’s tenure, although some there vehemently dispute this.

Even in the most generous interpretation of what happened, however, Hunter Biden’s alliance with Burisma was a serious form of institutional corruption, and this is true even if odious figures like Rudy Giuliani want us to know it. Facebook and Twitter exercising a selective block on stories about the matter make it look worse. Either we put a lid on “salacious and unverified” reports or we don’t, but we can’t just do it sometimes, and always in the same direction.

Now they’re part of an all-out assault on any information detrimental to Biden’s electoral chances, and the last thing that anyone seems to care about is whether or not these tales involving Hunter Biden and Burisma are true, or important.

They’re absolutely important, and the ongoing effort to suppress this story—which began some time ago—is itself an element of corruption.

This episode already demonstrates deep-seated institutional corruption via the extraordinary demonstration of the powers of America’s new censorship Death Star — a story in the public interest was not only physically blocked by tech oligopolies, but denounced as foreign subversion by a remarkably cohesive confederation of mainstream press outlets.

Both pieces by Greenwald and Taibbi bear reading in detail. The Republicans and President Donald John Trump are a disaster. The Democrats and Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden may be a cataclysm.

Bonus No. 1: ‘Visionary success’: Jonathan Alter makes the case for Jimmy Carter.

Bonus No. 2: How Big Tech Companies Censor Anti-Establishment Speech.

Voting by mail, at least here in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, works just fine, thank you very much. I’ve cast every ballot here since 2006 when the “no-excuse” rule took effect. I’ve never had a problem and while 2020 did give me pause and I was prepared to drive downtown, but when my ballot arrived last Friday, I was encouraged to continue my normal practice.

Everything worked just fine. I downloaded and mailed my ballot request in mid-August. I was notified that my application has been approved and processed on 25 August and told that the ballots were to be mailed on Tuesday, 6 October. My ballot arrived on Friday, 9 October and I returned the completed ballot to the North Royalton post office the following morning. While standing in line when the post office opened at 9 a.m. I noted that everyone in the line—a dozen or so people—was also holding their ballot envelope.

I recieved confirmation that my ballot had been accepted for counting this morning. My civic duty now complete, I can ignore the noise.

Do people trust the Plain Dealer—or even any of the television news shows—to tell them the truth?

There’s an old ditty I’ve used before:

Why will people never say the things all people know?

Why must truth be smiled upon as if it were not so.

We don’t get the unvarnished truth from the Plain Dealer.

Are they afraid of telling people the truth?

I believe so.

I get upset with the Plain Dealer because with a name as that it should be able to deliver some unvarnished truth. Plainly. But forcefully.

And it is not.

For a major city newspaper to not even have a political reporter is hard to believe. The PD doesn’t have a political reporter as such.

It says something about the culture that’s being created there. It isn’t a culture of aggressiveness and going after tough targets.

And I believe it is tougher to report with the limitations put on reporters by the coronavirus. It’s harder to meet the people necessary for good coverage.

With a mayoral election year coming up the Plain Dealer has no full-time political reporter. (Brent Larkin writes a column with a politically historic memory but he is part-time (writes every two weeks) not daily reporting. Tom Suddes writes about the state legislature weekly but he also is no longer a working reporter.)

Indeed, the paper has only a single full-time columnist—Leila Atassi. One full-time columnist is woefully too few for a major newspaper. Shameful.

The editorial page has had to turn to one of its citizen editorial members—Eric Foster—to write columns. He is not on staff. He is a lawyer and black. Diversity is another gaping hole in the paper’s staffing.

Another failure, the editorial pages attempts to balance liberal and conservative voices. It doesn’t want to disturb either “side.” Probably does both. This balancing act is foolish. Rather irritating for a city with a strong Democratic base. We get right-wing editorial content from Washington Post writers as Hugh Hewitt and Marc Thiessen. Never a Dana Milbank, strongly anti-Trump.

This timidity resulted in no endorsement in the Presidential contest four years ago. Did this help Trump? At least this year the paper endorsed Joe Biden. Hardly a difficult choice.

This weak coverage extends into the news pages, too.

It’s a wonder there aren’t more cancellation of the PD with its skimpy coverage.

The answer I got trying to find out why this was so was unsatisfying.

The paper was attempting to get “balance” of views politically. I was told that it was difficult to get conservative voices that oppose, for example, President Donald Trump.

I see many conservatives speaking out against Trump. They’re easy to find.

The problem with the PD, however, is that it fails to clearly examine what is going on here and report it without trying to be balanced. Or to irritate.

A paper should irritate. How else to tell the truth.

Indeed, the paper continues, as it has for decades, to be straight forward in its coverage of the community and its events. It is especially careful not to step on the wrong toes. The ones the so need a stomping.

It prefers to play it safe by avoiding strong coverage of who gets what. The failure allows the balance of power to remain in the hands of the same people who have demanded results that favor them and not the community as a whole.

The Plain Dealer lost a number of its best reporters in the past year. However, there are some reporters who show talent that would suggest they have voices that would make the newspaper better.

Evan Macdonald, Cory Shaffer, Seth Richardson, John Caniglia, Andrew Tobias and others show talent that the community needs. They and others should be given voices to speak to the community on the city’s many dire issues.

Let them go, Chris Quinn!

When I launched Have Coffee Will Write back in 2004 one of the first categories I created was Are you revolted enough yet…? Over the years, I have categorized 17 percent of the posts here under that question intended to suggest that Americans might become revolted enough to well, revolt. Are we there yet?

Are enough Americans revolted enough to don whatever the 21st century equivalent of the Phrygian cap may be and to set the tumbrels rolling? I don’t think so, but we’re getting closer Ted Rall this morning in After The Donald, The Deluge? asks his own form of the question and offers an unexpected answer:

Even though it’s only a few weeks away, I am hesitant to call the election. Biden has a huge lead in the polls but Trump has an ace in the hole: an unprecedented volume of mail-in ballots due to the COVID pandemic, which will run predominantly Democratic and provide attractive targets for Republican attorneys to drag out state vote counts past the December 14th electoral college certification deadline, which would trigger the obscure 12th Amendment scenario in which 50 states each get one vote for president in the next House of Representatives, in which case Trump wins even if Biden wins the popular vote by a lot.

But let’s assume Biden prevails. Let’s say it’s a blue wave election and the Democrats expand their majority in the House and take control of the Senate. What happens next? Revolution, maybe.

Revolution would certainly be likelier under Biden than under Trump.

One of history’s least-discussed ironies is a counterintuitive pattern: it is not the vicious tyrants who are overthrown by angry mobs, but well-meaning liberal reformers who promise to fix a broken system and fall short of expectations.

We have only, Rall writes, to examine the short tenure of the eighth, and final General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (1985-1991)—see how this could play out.

Bonus No 1: Barrett cites ‘Ginsburg rule’ that Ginsburg didn’t follow.

Bonus No. 2: I Hate You Leftists, Please Don’t Leave Us.

Bonus No. 3: New Poll Is DEATH KNELL For Talking Point About Trump’s Base.

No one is shocked. Walter Mosley wrote: The act of writing is a kind of guerrilla warfare; there is no vacation, no leave, no relief. In actuality there is very little chance of victory. Politics feels that way now. We’re all really tired. Yet, there are those like Ruben Bolling and Ted Rall and our own Roldo Bartimole, who keep going, who keep fighting. How can I do less?

There was a vice presidential debate last evening. Did you watch? I didn’t. I didn’t miss a thing. No one did. You know that a political event is meaningless when this is the takeaway moment.

In person voting in Ohio began on Tuesday and, no surprise here, the lines in our urban centers were long. Tuesday also marked the beginning of the mailing of absentee ballots. (I hope to receive mine by Saturday and drive the completed ballot to the drop-off box at the Board of Elections on Sunday morning.)

So, this is where we are. This is how Mosley ended his essay back in 2001:

I am, I fear, like that homeless man, likely to be defeated by my fondest dreams.

But then the next day comes, and the words are waiting. I pick up where I left off, in the cool and shifting mists of morning.

And, so too, must we all.

Bonus No. 1: This is how we ought to be teaching math…

Bonus No. 2: After the QAnon Ban, Who’s Next?

A thus far unknown group is opposing a property tax levy for Cleveland schools.

Crain’s Cleveland’s Stan Bullard and Michelle Jarboe report a “mysterious mailing, sent by an organization cloaked in anonymity,” tells potential city voters that “Cleveland can’t afford Issue 68.”

They want to kill the school tax hike.

The tax issue 68 asks voters to approve renewal of a 15-mill and add a new 5 mills. It would raise as much as $98 million over 10 years.

This sets up a dramatic test for the Cleveland schools.

Cleveland schools have too often been neglected by business leaders. They have demanded schemes to avoid paying full property taxes. Both on real estate development and other business desires. Sports facilities, in particular.

Political leaders have bowed to commercial interests for a long time.

Here’s who you can blame:

Mayors George Voinovich, Michael White, and Frank Jackson, Council President George Forbes, County Commissioners Tim Hagan, Mary Boyle and Jim Petro. They all supported major tax gifts to wealthy interests.

And their string-pullers: the late Dick Jacobs, the late Sam Miller, the Ratner gang, Dick Pogue and many others who don’t care a bit about Cleveland students, who are mostly black.

They want what they want. And tax abatements flow out of city hall.
And they usually got their way.

It is hardly remembered that the Teacher’s Union in 1997 collected 33,000 signatures to put a measure on the ballot to limit the big tax abatements of that period.

Cleveland citizens care. But they get trampled by powerful business interests.

The Teachers union had foot soldiers and some money.

Mayor White and business leaders were apoplectic. They fought it and won.

The disregard for the condition of the Cleveland schools goes back to the 1960s. Federal judge Frank Battisti laid the Cleveland schools bare with his decision.

Mayor White and County Commissioner Hagan showed how little they cared about the Cleveland schools in 1990 when they pushed the sin taxes for Gateway.

They promised in a full page ad to seek no tax abatement. After it passed the two went to Columbus and successfully petitioned for a full tax exemption, denying the schools their share. Further, the sin tax ad promised $15 million EXTRA for the Cleveland schools each year. They never paid ONE CENT.

It was all a hoax. City residents turned the measure down. County voters did the opposite.

Indeed, the Gunds, when they controlled the arena, built a $600,000 apartment for themselves, presumable property tax free housing. No one else reported it.

The Cleveland schools have been the stepchild of many Cleveland administrations, as it is with the Jackson crew.

I keep wondering if anyone notices whether the Cleveland School Board, which is appointed by Mayor Frank Jackson, actually exists.

Does anyone cover its meetings, even if virtual?

The powers that be allowed the school board to be made up mostly of people who gave it a bad name. Purposely. So they could turn it over to Mayor White and now succeeding mayors.

Maybe it’s time to turn it back to the citizens of Cleveland. A bit of home rule.

They are their school children.

Bonus No. 1: FULL Last Week Tonight with John Oliver for 10/04/20.

Bonus No. 2: Trump Might Not Leave Voluntarily.

Bonus No. 3: The Lincoln Project: Our Fight.

Naomi Klein delivers a Message From the Future II.

Previously: Message From The Future I.

Walking Gillighan this morning, musing about the first presidential debate shit show I watched last evening and I think I’ve finally grasped the evil scheme of our oligarchy. Since before Reagan, before Goldwater, before Eisenhower, ever since Roosevelt’s Socialist revolution, the Republican Party has played the long game and they are about to collect the golden ticket.

The prize might of taken any number of forms, but Amy Coney Barrett is the chosen one who will deliver an unbreakable lock—fantasies of court packing notwithstanding—on our judiciary that will outlast generations. To that end, these über rich denizens of the billionaire class needed a tool to hold office for four years, just long enough to grab that lock on the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, and give the patsy the boot. This is clear in the efforts of the various anti-Trump-Republican groups that have sprung up in the past year. They got what they wanted and now they want him out.

Trump, however, isn’t going gladly. Trump did not enter last night’s debacle with the intent of winning voters, his one and only goal was to so disgust voters that they threw up their hands and walked away; Trump’s performance was one of voter suppression, pure and simple. In that goal he won and won big.

How do I know? Because that tiny slice of voters not yet committed to any party were quoted again and again this morning telling journalists that they were disgusted by the whole spectacle. They’re going to stay home and not vote and when that happens, Trump wins a second term.

America is so fucked.

Bonus No. 1: What To Expect Tonight in the First Debate Between Biden and Trump.

Bonus No. 2: Best Response—Trevor Reacts to the First Biden-Trump Debate.

Bonus No. 3: Ted Rall—Debate 1: A Bully and a Weakling.

Is a moderate Republican in the oval office better than a narcissistic madman? Well, yeah. In the way that a slap to the face is better than a baseball bat to the back of the head, but that is where we are now. Regardless how many times the lies are repeated, Joseph Robinette Biden is no liberal and Donald John Trump is no stable genius.

The Republican Party has far more in common with Andrew Jackson than Abraham Lincoln and the Democratic Party is closer to Harry Truman than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We’ve entered the 21st with a nation, a world on the cusp of a reality that Moonpie, Bartholomew and Jonathan E. would easily understand.

Ted Rall, in Joe Biden Will Be a Republican President, writes:

Past performance is no guarantee of future returns but there are few more reliable ways to predict what comes next than to examine the historical record because, most of the time, history really does repeat.

What kind of president would Joe Biden be? His centrist supporters assure progressives that he will be one of them, pushing an aggressive legislative agenda reminiscent of FDR’s New Deal. His Republican opponents portray him as a socialist. But Biden hasn’t actually promised anything ambitious.

The last two Democratic presidencies provide a good indication of what a Biden Administration would look like. Like Biden, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama hail from the centrist party establishment. If personnel is policy, the three men hang out with many of the same advisors, businesspeople and elected officials. They’re not identical: Clinton is a charismatic retail politician, Obama is aloof and professorial, and Biden is an LBJ-style buttonholer minus Johnson’s secret idealism. But they’re ideologically and temperamentally similar to a remarkable extent.

I remembered Clinton and Obama as deeply disappointing to voters with traditional liberal Democratic values. I remembered that most of their major legislative accomplishments would not have been out of place under a Republican administration.

When I checked the historical record recently, however, it was even worse than I remembered.

Clinton used his political capital to push through free trade deals like NAFTA and the WTO, which killed manufacturing jobs and drove the final nails into the coffin of big labor. He “ended welfare as we know it,” making it even more difficult for people who lost their jobs to get back on their feet and adding the chronically poor to the ranks of the homeless. Clinton signed Joe Biden’s now infamous 1994 crime bill into law, codifying a racist judicial system that disproportionately punishes black men for relatively minor offenses.

Clinton repealed the 1930s-era Glass-Steagall Act, banking deregulation set the stage for banks to wallow in the reckless predatory lending practices that tanked the global economy in 2008-09.

His most impressive achievement was balancing the federal budget and paying off the deficit, but he didn’t do it by raising taxes on the rich. He imposed austerity on social programs—just like a Republican would do.

I searched hard for Clintonian achievements that could credibly be called liberal or at least left of center, but aside from a few minor regulations here and there, there aren’t any. “So we liberals and radicals searched the Clinton administration for vast new programs to applaud. But nothing loomed into view,” Paul Berman wrote in The New Republic at the end of Clinton’s presidency in 2000. Clinton was a moderate Republican president.

In some ways—especially foreign policy—Obama was even worse. Clinton bombed with the bloody relentlessness of a Reagan or a Bush: Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan and, forgotten now, Iraq so much and so often that pilots dumped their bombs in the desert to cover for the fact that they were running out of fresh targets. His sanctions stopped everything, including medical supplies, from entering Afghanistan. But he had nothing on Obama.

After Col. Muammar Gaddafi signed a peace deal with Bush that ended Libya’s nuclear program, Obama assassinated him with a drone, plunging that nation into a bloody civil war. Thanks to Obama, Libya, formerly the most literate and prosperous country in Africa, is now a failed state where slavery has been restored. Obama similarly wrecked Syria, where he also funded and armed jihadi extremists against secular socialist leaders. Obama radically expanded Bush’s drone program, kept Gitmo open, effectively pardoned Bush’s torturers, expanded the USA-Patriot Act and NSA spying on your phone calls and emails.

With Democrats like these, you don’t need Republicans!

For liberals, there is one relatively bright spot in these 16 years of Democratic rule: the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare was the first major health-sector reform in decades and brought coverage to tens of millions of patients, most beneficially via Medicaid expansion.

Let’s face it. The last two Democratic presidents didn’t really govern like Democrats. Compare the ACA to the achievements of Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Republicans push through huge changes when they are in office.

And I’m not even going to point out—well, yes I am—that Obamacare was conceived by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.

As I wrote at the beginning of this essay, what happened under Clinton and Obama won’t necessarily be replicated by Joe Biden. But it almost certainly will be.

There’s a reason Biden considered picking a Republican running mate and a reason Republicans are endorsing him and a reason he gave Republicans more speaking time at the Democratic National Convention than AOC—he’s one of them, not one of us.

When a difference doesn’t make a difference, the time has come to change the game.

The above video is courtesy of Crip Dyke-Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden via Wonkette. Not since Eminem’s 2008 video have I seen such a powerful get-out-the-vote message from popular culture.