Month: July 2026

What’s In A Name?

Since the death of poor Lindsey and the rise of his sister to the highest place in the government….at first I thought she might be her own person but that belief was smashed to pieces when she embraced the whole MAGA BS….

In a show of support for President Donald Trump, Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline, has dropped her married name, “Nordone,” and will instead go by her maiden name.

Graham, who took over the remainder of her brother’s Senate term after his sudden death despite having no prior political experience, quietly made the announcement during an interview with Sean Hannity. The name change was noticed in a lower third on the Fox News show.

“I’ll continue to say I’ve been praying a lot, talking to my family,” said Graham as the graphic below her read “Exclusive interview with Senator Darline Graham.” She added, “But with the love of my family, with the support of his staff, I know I’m a hard worker.“

https://www.themirror.com/news/politics/lindsey-grahams-sister-changes-name-1949287

Not to worry just another scheming toad in the the Senate who will embrace MAGA beliefs in the destruction of society as we know it.

She needs to be replaced and soon….but do the people of South Carolina have it in them to replace her?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Fight The Enemy Within

Ever since a DSA member won the election of mayor of NYC the Dems have been waging a war against what some call the left wing of the party.

The GOP and its ilk are called the winners socialists, Marxists, Communists and those are the polite names…..the MAGA twats are trying desperately to side line the progressives in the Democratic Party.

Then the corporate Dems are doing the same thing only are being a bit more polite…..people like Carville, Plouf, Khanna, Schumer, Fetterman, by all accounts an idiot, even overpaid sports casters get into the fray like Stephen Smith, who needs to stick to calling soccer games and leave the politics to others….these twats are joining the fight against the tide of progressive candidates…..accusing them of all sorts of things…..dirt bags, factionalist, etc etc….

This is weird…..

Pundits close to the Democratic establishment have a new term to fling at the left-wing insurgents they want to disappear: “factionalism.”

Matthew Yglesias now constantly attacks socialists and their leading figures on the basis that they believe in “factionalism and anty-partyism,” or have “a whole factional project,” “factional talking point[s],” a “passion for factionalism.” At first, he took up this line over the Graham Platner candidacy, but now Yglesias uses it to refer to any attempt by the Left to replace establishment-friendly incumbents by beating them in primary races.

Center for American Progress President and CEO Neera Tanden agreed. Platner should have been solely attacking his Republican opponent, “not attacking Dems in factional fights,” she tweeted. Socialists had to be stopped from “giving away the Michigan Senate seat for factional reasons the way they tried (and likely succeeded in) giving away the Maine seat,” warned former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum.

Even the cryptocurrency industry has gotten in on the act, with crypto investment firm executive and former Securities and Exchange Commission official Justin Slaughter adding his voice to the chorus warning that the Platner scandal was the doing of “a coherent and focused faction” more interested in remaking the Democratic Party than beating Donald Trump.

…

As one example, recall that to stop Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination in 2020, they coalesced around a candidate, Joe Biden, who they had openly acknowledged was cognitively unfit and whom they had little faith in. As we found out last year, Biden was so out of it, when they filmed him interacting with ordinary voters for that year’s Democratic convention, those who saw the footage were alarmed and convinced he couldn’t serve, and it required “creative” editing to salvage.

In other words, the factionalism-driven election disaster that party centrists are now accusing the Left of trying to engineer is exactly what they already did, risking handing the White House to Trump a second time because they were so desperate to stop Sanders. As Biden’s own adviser acknowledged, that this didn’t happen was only thanks to pure dumb luck, after a global pandemic meant Biden didn’t have to campaign or be regularly seen in public. Self-defeating “factionalism” is alive and well in the Democratic Party — but it’s coming from the establishment side.

https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/waging-war-on-the-left-within-the-democratic-party-wont-work/

Dems are trying hard to squash the up and coming candidates….why?

They are fighting hard….so does that mean these corporate Dems are against Healthcare, Green New Deal, Democracy for all, end the run away war machine, there is more?

If so then someone please let me know what are these cowards trying to accomplish?

Apparently it is not to make life better for the people of this nation….then what?

Personally I have never trusted centrists….they pretend that bi-partisanship is their goal but never seem to find the handle.

I will take a progressive any day over some corporate funded Democrat hands down.

Any thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo

Adak, A Ghost Town

A colossal waste!

When my late wife, Sue, was in the Navy she served on an Alaskan island in Adak…..and recently I read an article about the island she served on for awhile….

On an island in the Bering Sea 1,200 miles from Anchorage sits an abandoned house on an abandoned Navy base. There is no furniture, and the wind blows through broken windows. The last people to live here moved away long ago. Yet a bright orange pipe with a black fiber-optic cable inside runs from the outer wall down into the surrounding soil.

The cable was installed to connect the home to the internet after the base closed. It costs more than $340,000 per year to provide this building and hundreds of others — all but a few of them empty — with internet access no one says they use.

The money being wasted is yours.

It comes from a fee added to nearly every American’s phone bill as part of a Federal Communications Commission subsidy program intended to bring fast, affordable internet to remote towns.

Reporting this year by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica has found that the multibillion-dollar Universal Service Fund pays for what often amounts to slow internet access for customers who actually no longer use it.

The FCC keeps the money flowing to telecom companies regardless of their owners’ track records. It kept paying a Fairbanks company to provide internet service while its owner served federal prison time for tax evasion. The government kept paying Alaska’s largest telecom, GCI, even after it signed a settlement for alleged fraud related to the subsidy. (The settlement said it was neither an admission of guilt by GCI nor a concession by the Justice Department that the claims were not well founded.)

On This Nearly Deserted Alaska Island, You Pay to Keep Hundreds of Empty Buildings Wired for Internet

Just another story of how the US government wastes countless dollars and yet cannot seem to help people with their problems.

Time for a change of government….we need help….and we need it now.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The Ghost Of Gramsci

This is my continuing series on the success that the DSA has recently had at the polls and the meltdown that the Right is having dealing with this success…..passing out propaganda like candy to a 6 year old and it is working…..

Gramsci?  If you are not familiar with the workings of socialism then the name means little to Americans and yet the Washington Times invoked his name.

Before I go any further a quick lesson on Gramsci….

Key points:

  1. Historical materialism reworked
  • Society is shaped by material conditions but mediated by culture, institutions, and political practice.
  • Emphasis on how social forces, ideas and institutions interact over time to produce historical change.
  1. Hegemony
  • Core concept: ruling classes secure consent for their rule by shaping common-sense beliefs, moral frameworks, and cultural norms.
  • Hegemony = domination through a combination of coercion (state apparatuses, police, law) and consent (civil society: schools, churches, media, unions, cultural institutions).
  • Hegemony is never absolute; it requires continual work to maintain and is always contested.
  1. Civil society vs. political society
  • Distinction between political society (state, law, coercive institutions) and civil society (associations, culture, education, media).
  • Civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced and reproduced; control of civil society is crucial for long-term stability of a social order.

Very basic but if you want more…..https://theconversation.com/antonio-gramsci-his-philosophy-explained-286341

That out of the way this is the bullshit article that made me go to this rant….

 

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/jul/14/democrats-embrace-gramscis-marxist-playbook-america/

 

Just another MAGA rag that spread manure like it was real…..

Personally I think Gramsci was an excellent thinker and some of his ideas deserve a second look….but think about this MAGA and the GOP have been using his concepts for many decades….so is he all that wrong?

Questions?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Are We Containing The Wrong Country?

Our worthless wars for the last several decades have been about containing this country or that…..our present conflict is about containing Iran and its influence in the Middle East….but is it possible we are containing the wrong country?

An excellent point comes out of the small country of Oman on the boot of the Arabian peninsula and at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz…..

Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi penned an op-ed for the French outlet Le Monde on Tuesday. The article was a call for a new political and security architecture in the Gulf region, and served as a clear indictment not only for the current, disastrous war of choice that the United States and Israel initiated against Iran, but of forty-seven years of Western policy in the Gulf region.

The attention-grabbing statement comes when al-Busaidi notes the fundamental flaw of international policy in the Gulf was that it treated Iran as an existential threat to the security of the gulf region. In fact, he argues, the real threat comes from “decisions that are made in Tel Aviv.”

Unfortunately, although al-Busaidi is correct in his assertion, he merely states it as fact. He does nothing to support that point. That is a sorely missed opportunity.

Al-Busaidi has some genuine cache in diplomatic circles. He was the negotiator who managed to win a deal between the U.S. and Iran in February that would have significantly limited Iran’s nuclear program and allow for intrusive inspections. Donald Trump chose to blow that deal up by attacking Iran instead, at the behest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

If al-Busaidi had decided to use some of that credibility to elaborate on why Israel is the threat to Gulf stability rather than Iran, it would have been impactful.

Oman’s Foreign Minister to the West: You’ve been containing the wrong country

Finally someone publishing what many of us have been saying for 50+ years.

I totally agree with the foreign minister’s analysis and if you look at the history of the Middle East then a smart person will agree as well.

Israel has been the cause of more civilian deaths than any other country in the region…..they have attacked and destroyed in the name of security, which is a false narrative.

Sadly Israel will always have a free hand as long as the US is controlled by AIPAC money and a lame religious dogma.

I wish to thank al-Busaidi for speaking the truth.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

There Is An Infection Around

I could go on forever with this issue….pandemics, well just about anything could be called a sickness, right?

But for this post I want to address the disease known as MAGA.

You read that right….it is a disease and needs a cure….and soon.

Multiple experts are warning that President Donald Trump is gradually eroding American democracy through his actions since resuming office in 2025. Now, a new study from the American Journal of Political Science explains how so many Americans are willing to go along with his authoritarianism.

To learn this, researchers turned to Norway in order to assess how ordinary people reacted when surrounded by individuals with authoritarian ideologies, reported PsyPost’s Eric W. Dolan on Sunday. In a paper co-authored by Sirianne Dahlum, Torbjørn Hanson, Åshild Johnsen, Andreas Kotsadam, and Alexander Wuttke, the scholars conducted a “field experiment [which] randomly assigned soldiers to different rooms during boot camp, so soldiers lived among peers with varying levels of openness to authoritarian rule. We found that many individuals adjusted their privately reported support for authoritarian rule to align more closely with their peers.”

As a result of their study, the researchers concluded that there are weaknesses in democratic cultures when it comes to combating authoritarian ideas.

“The social basis of regime preferences that we have identified could imply that support for authoritarian rule could quickly spread in a society when citizens realize that these attitudes are more widespread than previously thought,” the authors explained. “It also points to the potential for cascade effects, where initial shifts in attitudes—through exogenous shocks—can spread rapidly through social networks, potentially leading to widespread changes in political norms. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for identifying how authoritarian sentiments might proliferate even in seemingly stable democracies and for developing effective strategies to reinforce and sustain democratic values.”

https://www.alternet.org/beliefs-of-trump-supporters/

There is a cure….but not if you are sitting there shrugging your shoulders and whining about things will always be this way….that is fucking defeatism and it has no place in the democracy.

Time to become the antidote for MAGA’s sick policies….if you cannot do that then maybe sitting around eating a grilled cheese and watching stupid shit is all you are capable of doing.

Me?  I will fight as long as I have breath in these lungs….and that is conditional on the cancer brewing….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

American Socialism–Redux

This is a continuing series that I offer on the post from IST past that cover this hot bed issue of socialism.

With the success and the possibilities of more success on the horizon the fearmongering machine of the GOP has once again started the long sleeping BS about socialism.

First let’s ask….what is a socialist?  A simple enough question yet the answers are anything but simple….

Gertrude Stein famously wrote, “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” meaning everyone knows what a rose is. The same cannot be said of a Socialist.

There are many Democratic politicians who proudly call themselves Socialists or Democratic Socialists, and there are many adversaries who brand those individuals as Socialists. Both sides use the same word, but the word means very different things to the two sides.

https://thefulcrum.us/democracy/socialism-vs-democratic-socialism

Now with that out of the way let’s move on….

Fifteen years ago I posted a history of American socialism and I thought might be helpful for those scratching their heads about the Left turn the voters are trying.

 

American Socialism–A History Lesson

Just my small attempt to show that all the monsters that the Right is predicting is pure fantasy….but if you still want horrors then look at what Trump and his corrupt band of bandits have done to this nation.

We are so much better than Donny and his thugs.

Let’s prove it to ourselves and the world.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Fraudsters Can Run Wild

Yesterday I posted about Donny’s new thing of letting corporate bosses have instant access to his babblings of Truth Social so they can run to the markets and make money before the fact….that is disgusting but there is more disgusting stories….

The DOJ is abandoning the Corporate Crime Enforcement stuff.

US President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is systematically taking a softer approach to corporate crime, letting companies and executives that have admitted to wrongdoing off the hook with no charges.

The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that “so far this year, 12 companies have pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges. At least six companies have reached deferred prosecution agreements, including refiner Phillips 66 and medical-waste specialist Stericycle, acquired by Waste Management in 2024.” The Journal added that while Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche and other officials have signaled that the Justice Department is “focusing on prosecuting employees rather than companies, it has also granted leniency or dropped charges against people it accused of wrongdoing.”

“The Trump DOJ’s grotesque retreat from corporate crime enforcement leaves Americans increasingly vulnerable to tainted food, workplace exploitation, environmental destruction, widespread ripoffs, and all-around illegal corporate predation,” said Rick Claypool, a researcher at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen who has been tracking the fall of corporate enforcement during Trump’s second White House term—which has been rife with corruption and profiteering at the very top.

Claypool called the Trump Justice Department’s lenient approach to corporate criminals “an absolute outrage” and that the trend is “going from bad to worse.”

The Journal lays out several examples of the Justice Department abandoning enforcement efforts against prominent companies. “In matters involving Alibaba, EagleBank, and Abbott Laboratories, the department declined to charge companies even when prosecutors thought executives or managers were involved in the wrongdoing,” the newspaper reported. “In those cases, the department didn’t charge any individuals.”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-corporate-crime-enforcement

This is pathetic that he would allow these pieces of shit have such freedoms…..all this sounds like his buddy Putin’s playbook in Russia for over twenty years.

Where are those elected cowards we call Democrats in all this corruption?

Well most are sitting in their offices counting the cash lobbyists throw at them….what I am saying in case you missed it….the Dems are NO better than the GOP when it comes to corruption.

I have said my piece.

I Read, I Write, You KNow

“lego ergo scribo”

Is This Legal?

Donny done a lot of things that I consider illegal and for the most part got away with it….but his latest idea I think goes a bit too far….

You knbow that our idiot Donny has his own social media, right?  It is called Truth Social and he spends every waking hour on it and degrade something or someone…..now he is giving instant acdcess to certain people….

President Donald Trump’s media company is launching a new product that will allow banks and financial traders to access Truth Social’s data at the “fastest” speed for a fee, giving them exclusive real-time access to posts that may affect the markets, as Trump’s posts frequently do.

The product is known as “Truth API,” and Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs Truth Social plans to leverage it into a “meaningful source of revenue for the company,” said interim CEO Kevin McGurn.

“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” McGurn said. He also added that the company hopes to “create a lot of friction” for firms that have already been scraping Truth Social data, which the company says is against its terms of service.

The new product comes as the Trump administration faces scrutiny over potential insider trading, spurring the White House to send a warning to staff discouraging them from making bets related to the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran on prediction markets. This followed reports of unusual activity surrounding bets before the start of the war, which came unannounced, during which traders placed over $500 million in bets on the war starting as well as $950 million in bets on oil prices.

Trump himself is also under scrutiny for questionable trading activity. In an analysis published Thursday, CNN documented over 20 times in which Trump promoted companies just days after buying stock in them. Breaking from prior presidencies, Trump’s assets aren’t in a blind trust, which means that he can see stock trades being made in his portfolio — and could, consequently, be manipulating markets for personal gain. Last year alone, managers of Trump’s assets made over 20,000 stock trades.

“This is why we’ve long said government officials should not be able to trade stock while they’re in office,” said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, interim vice president of policy and government affairs for the Project on Government Oversight, to CNN. “That definitely applies to the president and the disproportionate power of that office.”

https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/truth-social-is-selling-instant-access-to-trumps-posts-to-banks-and-traders/

This, to me, is basically saying that insider trading is okay as long as you use Donny’s magic site…..

Do you feel me on this or am I being overly critical?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

How Many Communists?

With the popularity of the DSA so far in the midterms the rage by the Right has once again exploded into the usual stupidity about socialist or communists or Marxists and as usual none of it is accurate….

I have been fighting the false narrative for many many years and here we go again….soon the MAGA people will be counting all the communists in the country for exposure….

This is something I wrote about 14 years ago during an earlier attack on the Left….I use to have a feature in IST called the VOMITORIUM……

 

How Many Communists Are There?

 

That movie exposed just how stupid the whole thing becomes when you let idiots define the political landscape….

Enjoy.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”