IMPORTANT READS

AMERICAN OLIGARCHS-I often look at Jeff Bezos when trying to understand how American oligarchy functions.First of all, by currently occupying the number one slot on Forbes’ billionaires list, he is the top dog. He figured out how to play the plutocracy game quickly, and how to play it better than anyone else. 

GUEST WORDS--John Bolton, President Trump’s new (and improved) National Security Advisor argues a nuclear first strike against N. Korea is “legal.”

CORRUPTION WATCH-During the last election, Russia’s job was to screw with America. Cambridge Analytica’s business model was to data mine the www for memes in order to package and sell them to political campaigns. The job of Americans was to be educated. Two of these entities did their job while the last one failed miserably. 

POLITICAL DIVIDE--While the country is in the middle of realizing that we have had an illegitimate Presidential election, we are also continually battling the daily onslaught of misinformation that is being spewed by both Trump and his followers. This is a time when Democrats need to rally together to pursue fact checking and attempt to maintain some form of sanity.

GELFAND’S WORLD--The difference between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump is that Nixon at least had pretensions about being an intellectual and had one or two serious ideas about foreign policy. 

D.C. DISPATCH-Vladimir Putin must be a very happy man. He has a lot to be thankful for: a new term as Russian President is secure; his image as a swashbuckling, anti-Western superhero is cemented; his success in confusing the American electorate to the point that it no longer has a baseline definition of truth; and his former spooks and enemies are tending to “retire” early. 

ALT-RIGHT POLITICS-The Southern Poverty Law Center has issued a full retraction and apology for a bizarre screed it published last week lumping anti-war leftists in with fascists and Nazis. As of this writing, two other articles by the same author, Alexander Reid Ross, have also been pulled by the Southern Poverty Law Center “pending further review.” 

MY TURN--While dating has always been an “iffy” condition, in today’s world of “hooking up”, interest in an individual’s political affiliation has become a priority.

BCK FILE--Before Donald Trump ran for president, he was best known by many Americans as a reality star on The Apprentice. Since taking office, he’s issued his catch phrase or received resignations from over 40 administration officials as of Friday when he fired FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. 

GUEST WORDS--Cash-strapped social studies teachers across America have discovered an exciting new resource that provides lesson plans, study materials and even seminars geared toward elementary, middle and high school students. 

CORRUPTION WATCH-The idea of “Truth, Justice and the American Way” is dead, dead, dead.The phrase is from the 1930's when Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegal created Superman.

D.C. DISPATCH-When bombshell bribery and corruption allegations surfaced last December against OSI Systems, a 5,000-employee port-and-aviation scanning company based in Hawthorne, they arrived with all the earmarks of modern investigative reporting: anonymous sources identified as former employees with detailed knowledge, links to public documents supporting the allegations, even a well-made 13-minute documentary illustrating why one expert felt the company was "rotten to the core." 

TRUMP WATCH-The Republicans on the House so-called Intelligence Committee this week precipitously announced a "bi-partisan" report and decision to shutdown their investigation of Russian meddling and interference in the2016 election.

 TERRORISM POLITICS-A narrative was being spread throughout mainstream media like wildfire.“Was Orlando shooting terror or homophobia? Yes,” claimed a CNN headline. 

GUEST COMMENTARY--Of course, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is not the world’s most useless white person. That title belongs to sentient-pile-of-shredded-Monopoly-money-lining-an-albino-hamster’s-cage Jared Kushner, who has somehow managed to stay dead in the center of every Trump-related scandal despite the fact that no one knows what he does or did before whatever he’s doing now, or even what he fucking sounds like. Shit, even though we know what he looks like, he’s so indistinct and so aggressively “eh” that if you went to Trader Joe’s tonight and saw him working there, you wouldn’t think, “Wow. That cashier looks just like Jared Kushner!” Just “Wow. For some reason I’m compelled to smack the shit out of this cashier!”

GENESIS AND THE ORIGINS OF MONEY-With the price of a bitcoin surging to new highs in 2017, the bullish case for investors might seem so obvious it does not need stating. Alternatively, it may seem foolish to invest in a digital asset that isn’t backed by any commodity or government and whose price rise has prompted some to compare it to the tulip mania or the dot-com bubble. Neither is true; the bullish case for Bitcoin is compelling but far from obvious. There are significant risks to investing in Bitcoin, but, as I will argue, there is still an immense opportunity.

TRANS LIVES MATTER--More and more, transgender, non-binary, and alternate pronouns are being lawfully mandated to be included in the parlance of workplaces, schools, and halls of government. In my opinion, these expressions do not need to be viewed as impositions on freedom of speech; they can be an opportunity for all members of society to become more creative and respectful in their manner of communicating. 

PILL POLITICS--If the devil wears Prada, what do America’s most destructive drug pushers wear? They wear smiles. The drug pushers we have in mind here have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, enough fatalities to decrease overall U.S. life expectancy at birth for the last two years running. Yet no police SWAT teams have pounded down any doors hunting these drug pushers down.

MID EAST--The following is a satirical would-be conversation between Prime Minister Netanyahu (Bibi) and President Trump (Donald) during Netanyahu’s upcoming visit to the White House on March 5th.

IN SEARCH OF HOPE--Nearly a century ago, Mohandas Gandhi started a new publication to share his vision of nonviolent organizing, filling it with inspiring quotations and political insights. He titled the journal Young India, to indicate that its teachings were intended to help the people plan for eventual independence, fusing the methods of building a movement with those required to begin (re)building a nation. Gandhi saw the means and ends as interconnected, and reflected this in his personal practices and societal aspirations.

TRUMP WATCH-The discovery of the Russian influence in the fake news arena comes as no surprise to those of us that were monitoring the campaigns. The mere fact that the extreme left and right were basing their social media feeds on the same so-called “news” topics became quite apparent from the get-go.