They are. 99.99% is not just an Occupy slogan, it’s a fact.

America’s billionaires take center stage in national politics, colliding with populist Democrats
By Jeff Stein, Washington Post
November 8, 2019

The political and economic power wielded by the approximately 750 wealthiest people in America has become a sudden flash point in the 2020 presidential election, as the nation’s billionaires push back with increasing ferocity against calls by liberal politicians to vastly reduce their fortunes and clout.

On Thursday, Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire and former mayor of New York City, took steps to enter the presidential race, a move that would make him one of four billionaires who either plan to seek or have expressed interest in seeking the nation’s highest office in 2020. His decision came one week after Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) proposed vastly expanding her “wealth tax” on the nation’s biggest wealth holders and one month after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said America should not have any billionaires at all.

The populist onslaught has ensnared Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, led to billionaire hand-wringing on cable news, and sparked a panicked discussion among wealthy Americans and their financial advisers about how to prepare for a White House controlled by populist Democrats.

Past presidential elections have involved allegations of class warfare, but rarely have those debates centered on such a small subset of people.

“For the first time ever, we are having a national political conversation about billionaires in American life. And that is because many people are noticing the vast differences in wealth and opportunity,” said Timothy Naftali, a historian at New York University.
…
The leaders of the anti-billionaire populist surge, Warren and Sanders, have cast their plans to vastly increase taxes on the wealthy as necessary to fix several decades of widening inequality and make necessary investments in health care, child care spending and other government programs they say will help working-class Americans.

Financial disparities between the rich and everyone else have widened over the past several decades in America, with inequality returning to levels not seen since the 1920s, as the richest 400 Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution, according to research by Gabriel Zucman, a left-leaning economist at the University of California at Berkeley. The poorest 60 percent of America has seen its share of the national wealth fall from 5.7 percent in 1987 to 2.1 percent in 2014, Zucman found.

But the efforts at redistribution pushed by Warren and Sanders have elicited a fierce and sometimes personal backlash from the billionaire class who stand to lose the most. At least 16 billionaires have in recent months spoken out against what they regard as the danger posed by the populist Democrats, particularly over their proposals to enact a “wealth tax” on vast fortunes, with many expressing concern they will blow the election to Trump by veering too far left.

Bloomberg’s potential presidential bid follows that of fellow billionaires Tom Steyer, a major Democratic donor, and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who in September suspended his independent presidential bid. Steyer has proposed his own wealth tax, but Schultz ripped the idea as “ridiculous,” while Bloomberg suggested it was not constitutional and raised the prospect of America turning into Venezuela.

Piling on against the wealth tax have been corporate celebrities from Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Zuckerberg suggested Sanders’s call to abolish billionaires could hurt philanthropies and scientific research by giving the government too much decision-making power. Microsoft co-founder Gates criticized Warren’s wealth tax and mused about its impact on “the incentive system” for making money.

David Rubenstein, the billionaire co-founder of the Carlyle Group, told CNBC that a wealth tax would not “solve all of our society’s problems” and raised questions about its practicality. Also appearing on CNBC, billionaire investor Leon Cooperman choked up while discussing the impact a wealth tax could have on his family.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, a multi-billionaire and the world’s richest man, asked Bloomberg months ago to consider running for president in 2020, Recode reported Saturday. A Bloomberg spokesman did not immediately return a request to confirm the call. (Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.) An Amazon spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

“I don’t need Elizabeth Warren, or the government, giving away my money,” Cooperman said. “[Warren] and Bernie Sanders are presenting a lot of ideas to the public that are morally, and socially, bankrupt.”

Then there is perhaps the most prominent wealthy person of all likely to stand in the way of populist Democrats’ proposals: President Trump. Asked about the wealth tax, a White House spokesman declined to comment directly on the proposal but said in an email, “President Trump has been very clear: America will never be a socialist country.”

But there are signs the pushback is having little impact on nixing the idea in Democrats’ minds. Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), who has endorsed Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, told The Washington Post he is crafting a new wealth tax proposal to introduce in the House of Representatives. Boyle’s involvement suggests the idea has broader political support among Democrats than previously thought.

Warren’s campaign has created a tax calculator that shows how much money multimillionaires would pay under her plan. The initial wealth tax raised by Warren would raise close to $3 trillion over 10 years — enough money to fund universal child care, make public colleges and universities tuition-free, and forgive a majority of the student debt held in America, according to some nonpartisan estimates.
…
“The hyper concentration of wealth within the top 0.1 percent is a mortal threat to the American economy and way of life,” Boyle said in an interview. “If you work hard and play by the rules, then you should be able to get ahead. But the recent and unprecedented shift of resources to billionaires threatens this. A wealth tax on billionaires is fair and, indeed, necessary.”

But conservatives and even many Democrats have raised a number of objections to the wealth tax, arguing it could be easily skirted and may have limited political appeal. Microsoft’s Gates, famous for his philanthropic efforts, joked to the New York Times that it could erase his entire fortune. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) this week proposed a surtax on couples earning more than $2 million a year to address what they framed as unfairness in the tax code exacerbated by the Republican tax cuts, while stopping short of the starker wealth tax.

In an email, Bloomberg adviser Howard Wolfson denied that the prospect of paying the wealth tax factors into the former mayor’s interest in running for president: “Mike’s not worried about what would happen if Elizabeth Warren won. He’s worried about what would happen if Donald Trump won.”

Ok. Full stop. Gentle pasture fed earth gifts down wind and the tinkling bells on the necks of peaceful ruminants.

Tinkle I say! Not Clunk. I’m working on my mindfulness damnit. It’s a bad time of year for me, I’m mostly depressed and angry. Forgive my forthrightness, candor, and lack of manners in suggesting such a metaphor.

Still, the ultrarich have still taken notice of the threat, according to interviews with half a dozen financial planners and wealth managers.

Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, whose membership includes many of the country’s biggest financial firms, said members of the business community are “agonizing” over the prospect of having to choose between Warren and Trump in the general election.

“A lot of people in the Wall Street crowd still think the world is top-down,” Wylde said. “They think the people at the top of the pecking order are still making the decisions or driving the debate, as opposed to the new reality of grass-roots mobilization. They don’t realize the way pushback to their criticism goes viral.”

Lance Drucker, president and CEO of Drucker Wealth Management, said he has recently heard alarm from many of his millionaire clients over plans like Warren’s to implement a wealth tax on fortunes worth more than $50 million.

“Honestly, it’s only been the last month when people started getting worried,” said Drucker in an October interview. “These tax proposals are scaring the bejeezus out of people who have accumulated a lot of wealth.”

Some financial planners are urging wealthy clients to transfer millions to their offspring now, before Democrats again raise estate taxes. Attorneys have begun looking at whether a divorce could help the super-rich avoid the wealth tax. And some wealthy people are asking whether they should consider renouncing their U.S. citizenship and moving to Europe or elsewhere abroad ahead of Democrats’ potential tax hikes.

“You’re hearing it already,” said Jonathan Lachowitz, a financial planner at White Lighthouse Investment Management, who said he has heard discussions about leaving the country and renouncing citizenship or other legal tax planning moves due to Democrats’ tax plans from several multimillionaires. “As the frustration mounts and tax burdens rise, people will consider it, just the way you have New Yorkers moving to Florida.”

Not that I want to beat on Bloomberg, I don’t think he’s really even a thing, simply keeping his options open because he can afford to. However Bernie and Liz are correct, we don’t need any Billionaires or Monopolistic Mega Corporations either in our economics or our politics. I’m kind of agnostic about using wealth in benign ways like public gardens (I’ll have you know I find them excruciatingly boring, but I’m a sport) on brownfield industrial wastelands. I suppose if you want to piss away your money on something inherently selfish because it’s not subjected to the collective wisdom of the people like tax money it’s sort of ok as long as it’s not demostratably bad but the idea institutions given permission by the State to operate at all should be granted also the rights and privileges we deny Dogs, Cats, and Dolphins is insupportable and just has to go.

CuteKittiesCuteKittiesCuteKitties

Yah hearing me Joe?

You know the problem with being old? People don’t get your jokes anymore because they lack the cultural references you think are so relevant and act like you’re senile, treating you as a bubble wrapped fall risk.

Dragnet gosh durn it. AND GET OFF MY LAWN!

In Virginia, Republicans confront a fearful electoral future
By Gregory S. Schneider and Michael Scherer, Washington Post
November 8, 2019

As Virginia election returns rolled in Tuesday night, Republican campaign manager Daniella Propati quickly realized two things: Her candidate for the House of Delegates, GayDonna Vandergriff, would lose, and calling their opponent a “socialist” hadn’t worked.

North Richmond and the tony suburbs of Henrico County had once been a dependable backstop for the GOP, a place where statewide candidates found votes to offset Arlington and Alexandria. But the suburbs have undergone a metamorphosis in recent years — growing more socially liberal, more diverse, less interested in the red meat of the tea party and Donald Trump.

“Republicans — we’ve been running campaigns in Virginia the same way for 20 years,” Propati said. “We need to come together and say, ‘What do we need to do next time?’ ”

That’s a question Republicans around the country are wrestling with after Tuesday’s elections revealed new troubles in suburbs from Memphis to Philadelphia. Nowhere has the problem been more pronounced than in Virginia, where Republicans have been all but wiped from power in the past decade.

A GOP candidate hasn’t won statewide office in Virginia since 2009. On Tuesday, Democrats gained majorities in both houses of the General Assembly for the first time in a generation; the House of Delegates swung from a 66-34 Republican edge in 2017 to a 55-45 Democratic advantage for next year’s session.

In presidential elections, Virginia has moved so swiftly to the left in recent contests that it barely paused to be a swing state.

“This is the nightmare scenario for a lot of people in the Republican Party,” said Ruy Teixeira, a demographer at the liberal Center for American Progress. “Virginia is an example of a possible future for some of the states that are now part of the Republican coalition.”

Virginia now stands as a fearful avatar for Republicans of what the nation’s unrelenting demographic and cultural changes mean for the party, as the moderate-to-liberal urban and suburban areas grow and more conservative rural areas lose ground. Similar shifts are starting to hit such states as North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia and Texas, as minority populations increase and white college-educated voters continue to turn away from the Republican brand.
…
Former House majority leader Eric Cantor lost a Republican primary in the Richmond suburbs in 2014 to a tea party challenger, who went on to lose the seat to a Democrat after two terms. He now says Republicans have a window to retake the suburbs in 2020 given the leftward tilt of Democrats embracing ideas like a wealth tax.

“The commonwealth is a great microcosm for the rest of the country,” he said. “The answer for our party is to make sure we offering the solution to the problems of these voters.”

Down ballot, the shifts in support carry implications far beyond the presidential contest. Tuesday’s results in Arizona were so jarring for Kelli Ward, the state Republican Party chair, that she took to Twitter to propose an electoral college “type system” on the state level to give rural areas disproportionate power.

“As a rural AZ resident, it is frustrating that the state’s population centers, Phoenix and Tucson, could control politics in this conservative state,” she tweeted, suggesting that the solution was finding a way around majority rule.

A spokesman for the state GOP, Zach Henry, said the state has different challenges than other states.

“Arizona is not Virginia,” he said. “Arizona is not Mississippi.”

Leaders in other states argue that it is not the rules that have to change but the party’s approach to elections and the candidates they choose.

“We need candidates who can run strong campaigns with a conservative agenda that actually people are attracted to and not repelled by,” said Dick Wadhams, the former state party chair in Colorado who has also worked in Virginia. “That may sound trite, but I’d swear sometimes people act like they have never heard such a thing.”

Ok, I have to stop right here and highlight the the nugget of sanity- “We need candidates who can run strong campaigns with a conservative agenda that actually people are attracted to and not repelled by.” Would that be not ripping babies out of the arms of their Mothers? Just askin’. To continue-

Thanks to an influx of new, younger voters to the Denver suburbs, only one Republican has won statewide in Colorado since 2002, Sen. Cory Gardner (R), who is expected to face one of the toughest battles for reelection in the country next year.

The problems have also filtered down to legislators at the state level, where the Republican advantage built up over the Obama presidency has been whittled away over the last three elections.

“No doubt about it, Republicans have a suburban problem. Anyone who looks at the data can see that,” said Austin Chambers, head of the Republican State Leadership Committee, which supports the party’s candidates around the country.

But Chambers doesn’t think the problem is a matter of substance for Republicans — it’s a matter of packaging. “I don’t think you have to moderate your politics and beliefs in politics to win in the suburbs, you just need to do a much better job communicating,” he said.

Yup. Better communication. Those Brown Babies are EVIL!!!!. Why don’t you libturds get it?

Instead of keeping pace with change, the GOP has “moved farther and farther to the right, and become more rigid and vitriolic in its ideology and rhetoric,” former Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling lamented this week on Facebook. Bolling was edged out for his party’s gubernatorial nomination in 2012 by the hard-right Ken Cuccinelli, who went on to lose the election to Democrat Terry McAuliffe.

“The GOP is simply out of touch with suburban voters who now control the outcome of critical elections,” Bolling wrote.

Virginia Republicans need to focus “on what works here and stop thinking what they see on Fox News is going to be successful here, because it clearly isn’t,” said former longtime GOP strategist and adviser Tucker Martin. “We’ve got to get back to that big-tent effort.”

Democrats like McAuliffe and Gov. Ralph Northam, meanwhile, were able to reclaim the mantle of jobs and economic development. It’s a message that McAuliffe, who has not ruled out another run for governor in 2021, plans to preach next week when he attends a policy retreat hosted by North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D).

“You can’t just want to fight on the social issues, you have to have an economic message,” McAuliffe said. “We became the party of jobs and economic development, and they became the party of divisive social legislation.”

And this is how we lose- “The Centrist Both-Siderism is strong in the Democratic Establishment,” not that I’m against social justice, just that I think Identity Politics is often used as a shield against economic justice. Billionaires don’t write checks for Warren, why that?

This year Virginia Republicans may have severely miscalculated on the issue of gun control. After a May 31 mass shooting in Virginia Beach in which a gunman killed 12 people, Northam called a special legislative session to consider gun restrictions. The Republicans in charge of the General Assembly adjourned after 90 minutes without debating a single bill.

That, said Republican strategist Chris Jankowski, was not a way to win in the suburbs.

“You cannot look at a mom who just bought her daughter a Kevlar backpack and say, ‘I’m sorry, but because we don’t think anything can be done about it we’re not going to try.’ That is a losing message,” he said.

For House of Delegates candidate Vandergriff, it was a struggle to find a winning message this cycle. The horseshoe-shaped 72nd House District she tried to win touches working-class neighborhoods in Richmond’s North Side and then arcs out through the affluent western part of Henrico County.

At the start of the race, her campaign looked like a Democratic bid, with light blue signs and a website that did not mention her party affiliation. She posted a series of videos online about “what matters,” from schools to health care to local neighborhoods.

But late in the race, she shifted to the right in an attempt to energize the Republican base, calling her opponent — a high school civics teacher elected as a delegate in 2017 — a socialist and abortion enthusiast who favored illegal immigrants.

It wasn’t a winning formula. “We need to find a way to rebrand that socialist message,” her campaign manager Propati said. “Calling someone a socialist isn’t enough anymore.”

You don’t say. Hmm…

I admit when I was first exposed to this song I dismissed it as a piece of lightweight fluff that had reasonable musicality (nothing as challenging as the guitar riff in Badge for instance, let alone the 5/4 break in Dancing Fool) and questionable lyrics that apparently endorsed unrealistic expectations of women which, while not being personally familiar with their oeuvre in detail, was aware enough of Cake’s general reputation to accept as satiric, ironic commentary.

I was wrong.

It’s much more bitter than that. This is the official video-

Short Skirt / Long Jacket – Cake

Yeah. What do you think about Cake now?

Girl All The Bad Guys Want – Bowling For Soup

Wonderful – Everclear

Things to never say-

“You should smile more.”

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Germans dance on top of Berlin Wall as communism crumbles in Eastern Europe; Nazis target Jews during ‘Kristallnacht’; A massive blackout hits the Northeast; Poet Dylan Thomas and Actor Art Carney die.

We would all like to vote for the best man but he is never a candidate.

Kin Hubbard

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Oh hell, let’s just do what we always do. Hijack some nuclear weapons and hold the world hostage. Yeah? Good! Gentlemen, it has come to my attention that a breakaway Russian Republic called Kreplachistan will be transferring a nuclear warhead to the United Nations in a few days. Here’s the plan. We get the warhead and we hold the world ransom for… ONE MILLION DOLLARS!

Don’t you think we should ask for *more* than a million dollars? A million dollars isn’t exactly a lot of money these days. Virtucon alone makes over 9 billion dollars a year!

Really? That’s a lot of money.

Okay then, we hold the world ransom for…

One… Hundred… BILLION DOLLARS!

Well, first off we have enough, my art is generously patronized in the sense of subsidies but also ridicule (“Oh, ek? He blogs.” I write damnit. Format and ephemeral photons don’t matter.). I’m not here for charity of the financial or critical type. Sure I’d help my family, they help me and some of them are in bad spots, I might upgrade my lifestyle a bit but 32 feet is enough boat to single hand and if what you want is a floating Hotel you can buy one or a real Hotel (or bunches of them) or just rent one for a while and pretend.

What are you going to do with the rest of your $53 Billion? Buy dK out of spite (Ok, I would so totally do that. I have a Bosendorfer sitting in my living room that my Mother composed Grade School Musicals on and nobody else in my family plays except my brother who hates playing piano. I could raise the money if he had a business model other than sucking up and pissing people off.)?

I suggest to you the study of Brewster’s Millions, a film with John Candy and Richard Pryor. Brewster (Richard Pryor) stands to inherit an unimaginable amount of money, Han Solo money (“Idunno Princess, I can imagine quite a lot”), but only if he can spend a certain amount to teach him it’s value.

As you might surmise buggy whips come back into vogue and even buying the Chicago Cubs doesn’t suffiently deplete Brewster’s bankroll (he should have tried Atlantic City Casinos, failing Golf Courses, and Mall Steaks) so he does the only thing he can possibly do to blow a vast amount in a limited time to no purpose whatsoever.

So he runs for Mayor.

Bloomberg has already been there, done that but evidently he’s back for more and I’m only half kidding when I say I could file in New Hamshire for $1000 and run as a favorite son (or nearby neighbor).

Michael Bloomberg faces a major ideological challenge
By Paul Waldman, Washington Post
November 8, 2019

Unlike our current president, Bloomberg actually is one of the richest people in the world; Forbes ranks him at No. 8, with a fortune of $53 billion. Which means that he could spend unlimited money on a campaign if he wanted. But the money might not not matter, since the real question is whether there’s a space for him in what has already been a spirited race for the Democratic nomination.

Much of the coverage of Bloomberg’s potential candidacy has described it as a threat to Joe Biden, who is currently understood as the chief “moderate” in the race. But that underplays the complex ideological currents that could make Bloomberg’s candidacy such a challenge.

Before we go further, I should note that for years I have angrily condemned (with little apparent effect) the phenomenon of rich businesspeople running for elected office by saying “I’m a businessman, not a politician,” as though their lack of relevant experience is what qualifies them for the job. If you had a leaky pipe and somebody showed up at your house saying, “I’m an accountant, not a plumber; those guys can’t solve your problem because what you need is common-sense solutions to the water filling up your basement,” the last thing you’d let him do is start taking apart your plumbing.

Our current president offers a kind of horror-cartoon instantiation of this idea, but there are plenty of less dramatic examples of businesspeople who either ran abysmal campaigns (which is where many of their ambitions run aground) or got into office only to find that governing is, whaddya know, hard.

Bloomberg, however, was in many ways the exception to this rule. Even though he did some extremely controversial things as mayor of New York (such as expanding the use of stop-and-frisk), even his critics acknowledge that he was an effective nuts-and-bolts manager in what some people regard as the second most difficult job in America, bringing some sorely needed efficiencies to the operation of the city’s government.

But while there are certainly things he’ll tout from his time as mayor, in a presidential primary voters aren’t looking for management skills as much as they are agreement on issues and a particular vision for where the party should go. You could take Bloomberg’s unusual combination of issue positions, put some into one box and others into another, and end up with something you’d call “moderate” or “centrist.” The other way to look at it, however, is that whoever you are, you’re going to find something about him to dislike.

As David Dayen wrote in 2016 when Bloomberg was considering a run, “An anti-teachers’-union, anti-gun, pro-nanny state, pro-Wall Street, pro-stop-and-frisk, pro-inequality, pro-immigration, pro-surveillance, pro-Iraq War neoconservative is almost surgically designed to repel practically every American voter on some level.”

If Bloomberg does decide to run, I’d predict that questions of ideology are going to bedevil him. He has indicated that he’s contemplating a bid because he doesn’t think the field is strong enough to beat Trump, but he’ll have to articulate a rationale for his candidacy that goes deeper than that.

Or think about it this way: What does Bloomberg think the problem is, and what does he think the solution is? Elizabeth Warren, for instance, thinks the problem is an economic and political system captured by the wealthy and powerful; her solution is deep structural change to dismantle their power. Joe Biden thinks the problem is polarization and partisanship, and the solution is his brand of problem-solving based on good faith and strong cross-partisan friendship.

Bloomberg may already have answers to those questions, even if he hasn’t made them clear to the public. And it’s even possible that his complex collection of issue stands could, in a general election, remain fuzzy enough for voters that they’d just view him as “moderate.”

But to get there, he’ll have to win over a Democratic primary electorate that may be looking for someone whose ideological beliefs look a little more like theirs.

Excuse me, I need to take a cold shower in $100 bills, I mean, go America’s Cup Yacht racing.

We are so very pleased and excited your Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio has decided to join us celebrating the great successes of the Soviet Working Classes Rapacious Oligarchs Benevolent Capitalist system under our virile and handsome leader, Vladimir Putin.

You see, May Day is not just a parade of potentially Potemkin propaganda but probably not Troops, Tanks, and honking great ICBMs down heavily reinforced military supply routes designed to support urban “kill zones” during rebellions and invasions, but a recognition of Workers all over the World for the productive labor that supports our Parasitical Police/Military/Industrial Complex lavish and luxurious lifestyle of Criminal Racketeers equitable economy which provides each citizen with his barest needs.

I personally have lobbied long and hard for United States recognition of May Day as a symbol of Worker Solidarity and Socialist/Anarchist Identity. Unlike what some people think I’m a pragmatist and I’ll make do the best I can with our inferior and deliberate substitute ‘Labor Day’ but I don’t stint recognition of my International Brothers and Sisters.

It IN FACT bothers me a good deal to have a great idea (hey, even better relations with Russia is not such a terrible idea, but that is not what is happening) debased this way however I’m not going to let better get in the way of ‘progress of a sort’ and if I am ever put on the spot to name one positive thing I suppose I might use this as not being as bad as most.

Stop looking at me that way. You’d think I was coming out in favor of Bloomberg.

We are so very pleased and excited your Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio has decided to join us celebrating the great successes of the Soviet Working Classes Rapacious Oligarchs Benevolent Capitalist system under our virile and handsome leader, Vladimir Putin.

You see, May Day is not just a parade of potentially Potemkin propaganda but probably not Troops, Tanks, and honking great ICBMs down heavily reinforced military supply routes designed to support urban “kill zones” during rebellions and invasions, but a recognition of Workers all over the World for the productive labor that supports our Parasitical Police/Military/Industrial Complex lavish and luxurious lifestyle of Criminal Racketeers equitable economy which provides each citizen with his barest needs.

I personally have lobbied long and hard for United States recognition of May Day as a symbol of Worker Solidarity and Socialist/Anarchist Identity. Unlike what some people think I’m a pragmatist and I’ll make do the best I can with our inferior and deliberate substitute ‘Labor Day’ but I don’t stint recognition of my International Brothers and Sisters.

It IN FACT bothers me a good deal to have a great idea (hey, even better relations with Russia is not such a terrible idea, but that is not what is happening) debased this way however I’m not going to let better get in the way of ‘progress of a sort’ and if I am ever put on the spot to name one positive thing I suppose I might use this as not being as bad as most.

Stop looking at me that way. You’d think I was coming out in favor of Bloomberg.

Who’s the Communist here? (said by Trotsky to Stalin)

I have toyed in the past with the concept of monetizing content but I’ve come to realize that I’m much more interested in producing it despite the cries of “Get a job you bum.”

Because I am an artist!

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Adolf Hitler makes his first attempt to seize power in Germany; Democrat John F. Kennedy wins the presidency; Ronald Reagan is elected governor of California; Bonnie Raitt is born; Led Zeppelin releases the album ”Led Zeppelin Four.”.

Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.

Martha Gellhorn

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