I have no strong opinion either way on the latest “Berke Breathed posting the strips to his facebook daily” Bloom County…

Sure.  Why not?

But I am struck by the premise of the debuts.  Opus wakes up in the year 2015 after a long hiatus, throws out a bunch of contemporary then and now allusions… and ha ha ha, Donald Trump…

The thing is… the strip didn’t quite go away.  It resurfaced immediately on Sundays as Outland.  Then a decade later as Opus.  And the thing is, this premise (or Opus trying to slam the resurgent Trump and Michael Jackson, etc into the anxiety closet)… already thrown in the Sunday Opus strip last decade… Opus standing there at the end asking “What?”

So… Why not?

Bernie Sanders… damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.

From an In These Times article, with three feminists on the subject of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the Bernie Sanders supporter of the three — Liza Featherstone — offers this … what I suppose is a statement about a certain roboticness and aloofness in not connecting the economic message and so blind to the problems on the ground…

Years ago I went to a Bernie Sanders house party with my baby, and instead of trying to kiss the bably, like a politician, he just did what any old white man does, which is talk to you and ignore the baby.

At least he didn’t eat the baby?  (The 2004 blog-post was inspired by a radio broadcast by Rick Emerson and probably Tim Riley — which as I recall was just them crying out as they watched Bush with the baby crying out “Don’t eat it!  Don’t … eat … the baby!” …)

I suppose it also makes sense in the way Bernie Sanders doesn’t quite grasp the motive behind what would be construed as an inane question — He’s not following the queries of hair coverage, because he’s issue-driven.

Other interesting tid-bits rolling about Bernie Sanders on the early years… and… for his first Senate race we see “Sanders floated hippie-friendly proposals, such as legalizing all drugs, an end to compulsory education, and widening the entrance ramps of interstate highways to allow cars to more easily pull over to pick up hitch-hikers“.  As well “he criticized water fluoridation as a government intrustion on individual freedom.”
It was to grab headlines, it appears.

But nonetheless.

widening the entrance ramps of interstate highways to allow cars to more easily pull over to pick up hitch-hikers???  I want someone to ask him if he still agrees with the idea…

  Fascinating book.  HP Lovecraft writes Richard Nixon’s career… it’s like the author test-marketed the book’s premise just for me.

Always a complicated question as to “Just what Nixon is/was”…

I had, I realized, lost track of whether I was a centrist Republican stalwart, a right wing Communist demagagouge, a mole for Soviet intelligence, the proxy candidate for a Bavarian Sorcerer, or the Wes’ts last hope against an onrushing tide of insane chthonic forces.  No one seemed to notice that Tricky Dick was himself a trick.  — 227

Indeed.

“The year 1976 will be the final one of the American Republic,” he [Kissinger] whispered.  “Cut free from the Twenty-Second Amendment, you will be an immortal mage-president.  Able to crush the rebel cult of the Supreme Court implanted by rogue initiate founders.  You will subjugate the massed power of the four legislative bodies — House, Senate, Gestalt, and Hovering.  You will sit on a white throne in a white house for all eternity, ruling the two hundred and forty eight states of the Final Union.  E pluribus Nixon, eternum.” — 280

I was curious about the Bernie Sanders appearance in Portland to know… just who would be out protesting him.  Understand we have forums out there from leftists of the Green / no vote / begruding Democrat but ugh ugh ugh variety who are holding forums around “Should the Left support Bernie Sanders?” …

… the awareness that in the end he will be tossing his support to the Hillary Clinton candidate…

Coming out of Seattle, and a smattering of voices in Portland… we have… some “elements” of Black Lives Matter… who had previously chastized Martin O’Malley for saying “Black lives matter.  White Lives matter.  All lives matter” — and here it’s a “hm”… “Not using your privilege correctly” is the quote I see bandied around.

The curious conundrum comes to the somewhat ruralified position Bernie Sanders has taken to gun control … and I guess we’ll see this one continue apace.

My final wondering is if Young Republicans will show up anywhere… I remember they proved fairly entertaining way back in 2004 with John Kerry’s apperance in town.  My guess is they’ll stick to Hillary Clinton, not having too much use for Bernie Sanders except as a cudgel.

On the heels of the latest from the release of a book under curious circumstances of a manuscript – reshuffling of a book predating “To Kill a Mocking Bird” … Harper Lee’s second novel, “Go Set a Watchman”…

Funny, maybe?

And as we watch a reshuffling of a coming sequel — or something or other — for “Catcher in the Rye”, vultures fighting and readying to come out with various shuffling of Salinger’s manuscripts…

Ayn Rand has a new book out!  Sounds dreadful.

She wrote too a variation of “If You Gave a Mouse a Cookie“.

Nose is not toes…

Donald Trump has publicly lashed out after he was banned from one of the biggest gatherings of conservative activists over controversial comments he made about Fox News host Megyn Kelly.
In an interview with CNN on Friday, the GOP frontrunner appeared to imply that Kelly ‘unfairly’ grilled him about his history of insulting women during a televised debate because she was menstruating.
He remarked that there ‘was blood coming out of her… wherever’, sparking outrage and causing RedState’s Erick Erickson to boot him off the line-up of the high-profile event in Georgia.
On Saturday, Trump took to Twitter to hit back at his critics, writing: ‘So many “politically correct” fools in our country. We have to all get back to work and stop wasting time and energy on nonsense!’
In a later post on Saturday morning, the 2016 presidential candidate added that his remarks about Kelly were not made in reference to her menstrual cycle – but to the host’s nose.

Another Democratic primary election out in the Southern tier of states, another “Some Guy Wins”… because his name is a color, basically.

Robert Gray was driving a truck for his small business Fancy Horse Transportation on Monday. On Tuesday, he was the Democratic nominee for governor of Mississippi.
The 46-year-old from Terry, Mississippi, didn’t even vote in the primary, allegedly too busy operating his independent livestock hauling business. His opponent, incumbent Governor Phil Bryant, has a reported $2.8 million cache in his campaign fund, while Gray is living day to day without health insurance.
It’s not that Gray won by default either. Democrats in Mississippi had two well-funded, hard-working candidates with clear-cut goals and practiced rhetoric. He soundly defeated Vicki Slater, a trial lawyer with the backing of a lot of the Democratic establishment, and Dr. Valerie Adream Smartt Short, an obstetrician-gynecologist—without spending a single penny. In a heartbreaking admission, Slater reportedly told the AP “I did everything I could to win this.” The Daily Beast has reached out to her campaign for comment and has yet to hear back.
Gray earned 51 percent of the vote Tuesday, obliterating Slater, who nabbed only 30.2 percent. A small group of Mississippi Democrats have begun to galvanize support for the candidate, creating a Facebook page with a mere 170 likes.
The Democratic establishment is seemingly holding their breath as they trudge toward the November election with a candidate that is the textbook definition of an Average Joe. The chances of Democrats actually winning the election were always vanishingly small, but Gray’s appearance at the top of the ticket will likely complicate efforts to hold on to the offices they do control in the deep-red state.

Eh.  He looks better than Alvin Greene.  Is better for the ticket as a whole than Mark Clayton.  I suppose the man he fits the bill is Albert M Gore, who was the Democrat’s Senate candidate in Mississippi a few cylces back — and did… huh.  As good as anyone else in articulating a Democratic message in various campaign stops, and in the current climate the alternative is seen in the next election cycle where the Democratic candidate was running with great Republican rhetoric against a Republican who was forced to make entrities to a Democratic constituency to keep his campaign afloat in the primary against a “Tea Party” challenger… and the Democrat would’ve lost to either candidate anyways.

Jefferson – Jackson dinners are disappearing from the Democratic arsenal of fund-raising.  (It’s worth noting that in some past epoch, the Jefferson – Jackson dinners in southern states were frequently paired with a third name — that of a bigtime political governor heavy-weight with huge stature in state politics of … er… keeping segregation alive and running.   I see that Mississippi gets them now paired with Fanny Lou Hamer — parties evolve.)

Interesting argument on keeping the names Jefferson and Jackson as, despite everything, historical figures worth preserving who… after all… did found the political party in two parts.  (Though, on that equation, it really should be the Van Buren Dinner.)

I’m having trouble finding it, and I am pretty sure I noted it on my blog when it happened, and it was not headline news by any stretch but once upon a time (I may be the only person anywhere who thought it worth noting) — I caught Barack Obama calling Andrew Jackson one of our nation’s “great presidents”.  Depends on criteria, as always — some call him one of the worst for, you know, Trail of Tears…

The big problem might lie in the Republican Party making some deal on the dumping of Jefferson, who… you know, after all, is quite popular, and was a “Republican” as against the “Federalist” (before Van Buren and Jackson came and turned their wares to a Demcoratic Party).  Though, here, I spotted a Natinal Review article claiming that the idea to nix Hamilton for a portrait on our currency in favor of a “woman to be named” is in a grand Democratic Party tradition, so they’re still straddling Jefferson to the Democrats after all.

I remember hearing George Carlin once refer to the news media as a bulletin board of the powerful.  I can’t help but think of that when I read over the tenor of this “Joseph Biden — Don’t run for President” story in the New York Times.

Try this one for a second.

Those supporters, in the White House and the Senate, and within the political circles he has moved in for decades, fear that the legacy Mr. Biden has built as an effective partner who took on tough jobs for President Obama, not to mention the deep reservoir of public good will and sympathy he has amassed in his poignant handling of personal tragedies, could be sacrificed in the pursuit of an unsuccessful challenge to Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination.

They fret that Mr. Biden, as well known for his undisciplined, sometimes self-immolating comments as he is for his charm on the trail, could endanger Mr. Obama’s own legacy by injuring Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy and causing his party to lose control of the White House.

While the concern about Mr. Biden appears widespread among his political allies, few seem eager to tell him out of fear of hurting his feelings and seeming to be presumptuous about a decision that is all too personal.

Followed by quotes from people who, if and when Joseph Biden reads this New York Times article, Joseph Biden is likely going to know immediately who is being quoted.

Incidentally… I find it hard to see how he is going to derail Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, no matter what he does in gaffing across America.  Or, for that matter, harm his reputation, as his gaffing is already baked in as a part of his legacy.  I suppose Hillary Clinton knows what’s up, as we move to New York Times “bulletin board for the politicos” article number two… already running against Jeb Bush, and… huh?

“This is the strategy of a weak Democratic candidate: to attack and be attacked by Jeb Bush, to rally Democratic antibodies to her defense and get her through an uncertain nomination process,” said Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist.

That’s a non sequitur.  But you always have to say things are going bad for the other team, and things are great for your team, and work the retro-fit the reasons from there.

In Republican candidate debate.. what do you make of this line-up?  Kasich in, Perry out… and the seating arrangement seems to match the “central figures in the midde”, though gets dodgy in the tiers from there… (Kasich certainly fits the outest edge, but Christie?  In 2008, Clinton and Obama were always in the middle, with Edwards and Richardson next to them, then Dodd and Biden, and out on the edge Kucinich and Gravel… can’t wait to see the seating arrangement for the Democrats — certainly Clinton’s sitting in the middle — should Biden jump in probably seated next to him, but might they just stick Chafee in the next room? … Or, apparently nowhere — he’s not at the one percent thresh-hold… which, come to think of it, would’ve dumped Mike Gravel out of 2008’s debates.)