There’s nothing like hearing Peter Lorre repeating the phrase, “Each man kills the thing he loves”

I was going to write something really great tonight on Twitter’s newly announced ban on political ads and Obama’s recent comments on progressives who spend their time trying to out-woke one another. I really was. But then I realized that the brilliant, dark and absolutely beautiful 1935 Peter Lorre horror film Mad Love (also known as The Hands of Orlac) was on television. And now I’m stuck.

Here, if you’ve never seen the film, is a quick scene, just to give you an idea.

And, here, if you’re still not convinced, is the plot overview from Wikipedia.

Actress Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake) rests after her final performance at the ‘Théâtre des Horreurs’ (styled after the Grand Guignol) in Paris, France. As she listens to her husband Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive) play the piano on the radio, she is greeted by Dr. Gogol (Peter Lorre), who has seen every show featuring Yvonne, and unaware of her marriage, is aghast to learn that she is moving to England with her husband. Gogol leaves the theater heartbroken, buys the wax figure of Yvonne’s character, refers to it as Galatea (from the Greek myth), and arranges that it be delivered to his home the following day.

Stephen Orlac is on a train journey from Fontainebleau to Paris, where he sees murderer Rollo the Knife thrower (Edward Brophy), who is on the way to his execution by guillotine. (Gogol later witnesses the execution, along with the American reporter Reagan (Ted Healy)). Orlac’s train crashes later that night, and Yvonne finds her husband with mutilated hands. She takes Stephen to Gogol in an attempt to reconstruct his hands, and Gogol agrees to do so. Gogol uses Rollo’s hands for the transplant, and the operation is a success.

The Orlac couple are forced to sell many of their possessions to pay for the surgery, while Stephen finds he is unable to play the piano with his new hands. When a creditor comes to claim the Orlacs’ piano, Stephen throws a fountain pen that barely misses his head. Stephen seeks help from his stepfather, Henry Orlac (Ian Wolfe). Henry denies the request, upset that Stephen did not follow in his line of business as a jeweler. A knife thrown in anger by Stephen misses Henry, but breaks the shop front’s window. Gogol meanwhile asks Yvonne for her love, but she refuses. Stephen goes to Gogol’s home and demands to know about his hands, and why they throw knives. Gogol suggests that Stephen’s problem comes from childhood trauma, but later confirms to his assistant Dr. Wong (Keye Luke) that Stephen’s hands had been Rollo’s.

Gogol then suggests to Yvonne that she get away from Stephen, as the shock has affected his mind and she may be in danger. She angrily rejects Gogol, whose obsession grows. Henry Orlac is murdered, and Stephen receives a note that promises that he will learn the truth about his hands if he goes to a specific address that night. There, a man with metallic hands and dark glasses claims to be Rollo, brought back to life by Gogol. Rollo explains that Stephen’s hands were his, and that Stephen used them to murder Henry. He also claims that Gogol transplanted his (Rollo’s) head on to a new body…flashing a leather-and-metal neck brace as “proof!”

Stephen returns to Yvonne and explains that his hands are those of Rollo, and that he must turn himself in to the police. A panic-stricken Yvonne goes to Gogol’s home, and finds him completely mad (after he has come home and shed his elaborate disguise). Gogol assumes that his statue has come to life, embraces her, and begins to strangle her. Reagan, Stephen and the police arrive, but are only able to open the observation window. Stephen produces a knife and throws it at Gogol, then finds his way in. Gogol dies as Stephen and Yvonne embrace.

It may not be as over-the-top crazy as 1934’s The Black Cat, but it’s pretty damn close. And it’s got something the The Black Cat doesn’t have — Three Stooge’s founder Ted Healy, who, as we’ve discussed before, may well have been beaten to death by Wallace Beery in Hollywood… I could go on, but every minute I spend on the blog, is a minute that I’m not watching Peter Lorre, with metal hands, and an elaborate neck brace, pretending to possess the reanimated head of a criminal put to death by guillotine.

Posted in Art and Culture, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman to confirm that, yes, Donald Trump pressured the President of Ukraine to open an investigation into the Bidens, “undermin(ing) U.S. national security”

Later this morning, decorated Iraq War veteran Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman is scheduled to give testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. Vindman, who, as a member of the National Security Council, was on President Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, is expected to tell members of Congress that he was so alarmed by Trump’s pressuring of Zelensky to open investigations into the Bidens that, on two occasions, he reached out to a top White House lawyer, asking for something to be done. [“I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen,” Vindman plans on saying.] The following is an excerpt from the opening statement that we’re told Vindman will be delivering prior to his questioning.

Among other things, it’s expected that this testimony of Vindman’s will directly contradict that of Trump’s Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, who previously testified under oath that, “Nothing was ever raised to me about any concerns regarding our Ukraine policy.” [Vindman, as you can read in the above statement, will be testifying that he and Sondland discussed this very thing.]

The Republicans, true to form, have already begun to suggest that Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who earned a Purple Heart in Iraq, is a “double agent” guilty of espionage.

And, this morning, the cast of Fox and Friends questioned Vindman’s loyalty to America. As an immigrant to our country, they argued, his loyalties lie elsewhere.

Posted in Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

Happy Birthday to Q

I’ve just been informed that the mass delusion known as QAnon turned two today. It was apparently on this day back in 2017 that the following was posted to 4Chan, marking the beginning of what is probably the most ridiculous chapter to date in American history.

Spoiler alert… Hillary Clinton, fearful of prosecution, did not flee the United States. She was not extradited back to the United States and thrown into prison. And the promised riots in response to her imprisonment never materialized… And, for some reason, in spite of all this, a certain subset of the American population continued to believe this bullshit anyway, even as it spiraled into progressively more ridiculous territory. [Remember the Q revelation that Robert Mueller wasn’t really investigating Donald Trump, but working secretly with him in order to bring the likes of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and George Soros to justice for plotting to destroy America?]

Here, by way of background, is something that I wrote about the online QAnon cult the summer before last, just as it was starting to break through into popular culture.

…Qanon, for those of you who haven’t heard of it before, is essentially the rat king of conspiracy theories, a diseased, multi-headed rodent monster, held together by shit. As NBC’s Ben Collins explains, it’s “like Pizzagate on steroids, but it’s really both emotionally and socioeconomically Pizzagate on bath salts.” It’s like fan fiction for the more delusional members of the far right, where every crazy idea they can possibly imagine can find a home. It’s a framework for making sense of an increasingly confusing world that allows for Tom Hanks being a pedophile, Hillary Clinton drinking the blood of babies, and JFK Jr. not only being alive, but directing the patriotic assault against the so-called “deep state”…

JFK Jr., by the way, is still dead.

The good news is, the stupidity of the Q may have finally run its course. Doing a little bit of searching around the web tonight, it looks as though the main account pushing pro-Trump conspiracy theories under the Q banner has been dormant since August. Of course, it could come back — god knows that stupid people, overwhelmed by the confusion of modern life, are hungry for easy answers — but I’d like to think that, after two years of making predictions that never came true, perhaps people started to figure out that they’d been played for fools by a bad fiction writer.

For those of you who may have once been believers, there’s no shame in being gullible. I can see the appeal. If I’d voted for Donald Trump, I might also take comfort in a narrative that painted him as a hero engaged in a secret battle against the forces of evil. I get it. It’s not easy to accept that, in fact, you put a criminally unqualified reality television personality with a penchant for self-dealing into the White House.

Posted in History, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 47 Comments

Five things about the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

In the early morning hours of May 2, 2011, a U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group, as part of an operation code-named Neptune Spear, entered a fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and executed Osama bin Laden, the head of the Islamist terrorist group Al-Qaeda. In a televised announcement later that day, a sober Barack Obama informed the American people that the man responsible for having planned and funded the September 11, 2001 attacks against our nation had finally been brought to justice.

At the time, as you may recall, not everyone rallied together around the President of the United States, thanking him for making the apprehension of Osama bin Laden a military priority. Among those who refused to acknowledge Obama’s role in the operation was Donald Trump, who said the following in an interview with CNN at the time.

Donald Trump was adamant that the President of the United States should not get “credit” for either having prioritized the apprehension of Al-Qaeda’s leader, or having ordered the mission against the terrorist who, by that time, had eluded capture for almost a decade.

Now, though, it would appear as though Donald Trump has had a change of heart. Having just listened to his bewildering speech about the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by U.S. forces last night, it seems as though he now believes the President of the United States deserves quite a bit of credit in instances like this… a sentiment that’s shared by his Vice President, who said today that “All the credit goes here to the decisiveness of this commander in chief and the courage and professionalism (of the of special operations forces who carried out his commands).”

Oh, and, for what it’s worth, our incredibly petty President also apparently thinks that the killing of al-Baghdadi is more significant than the killing of bin Laden. “Osama was a big thing,” he told reporters today, “but this is the biggest there is.”

I know it’s doesn’t do any good to complain here about the hypocrisy of Donald Trump. It’s not as though any of his followers, who stuck with him through all the other scandals, are going to walk away from him now, because yet another blogger points out that, eight years ago, when Obama was in the White House, he had a different take on such things. But, I felt as though I should at least mention it for the record, before getting into the substance of what happened here with regard to the al-Baghdadi mission.

One more thing before we move on, though. William McRaven, the Navy SEAL commander who oversaw the operation to take out Osama bin Laden, penned an op-ed earlier this month warning the American people that Donald Trump is a threat to our nation.

OK, so now let’s get to al-Baghdadi. As time is limited, I’m going to limit myself to just the five things that I think are the most important, interesting, etc. So, if you’re looking for speculation as to whether or not the photo of Trump in the situation room yesterday was staged, you’re going to have to look elsewhere, because that didn’t make my cut.

1. It would appear as though we’ve known were al-Baghdadi for some time now, thanks to our Kurdish allies in Syria. Apparently, we had know the ISIS leader’s location in Idlib for the past “three and a half months. For multiple reasons, however, we’d decided not to act on the information until yesterday. The calculus apparently changed when Trump announced earlier this month that we’d be pulling our troops from northern Syria, meaning that our ability to control the situation going forward would be greatly diminished. [I’ve read that they were hoping to kill him in transit, so that there would be less collateral damage, but I imagine, had they waited, he may have also led them to additional high-level ISIS leaders.] The following background comes by way of the New York Times.

The surprising information about the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s general location — in a village deep inside a part of northwestern Syria controlled by rival Qaeda groups — came following the arrest and interrogation of one of Mr. al-Baghdadi’s wives and a courier this past summer, two American officials said.

Armed with that initial tip, the C.I.A. worked closely with Iraqi and Kurdish intelligence officials in Iraq and Syria to identify Mr. al-Baghdadi’s more precise whereabouts and to put spies in place to monitor his periodic movements, allowing American commandos to stage an assault Saturday in which President Trump said Mr. al-Baghdadi died.

But Mr. Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw American forces from northern Syria disrupted the meticulous planning and forced Pentagon officials to press ahead with a risky, night raid before their ability to control troops and spies and reconnaissance aircraft disappeared, according to military, intelligence and counterterrorism officials. Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death, they said, occurred largely in spite of Mr. Trump’s actions.

The officials praised the Kurds, who continued to provide information to the C.I.A. on Mr. al-Baghdadi even after Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw the American troops left the Syrian Kurds to confront a Turkish offensive alone. The Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, one official said, provided more intelligence for the raid than any single country…

And you read that right. We got al-Baghdadi because of the Kurds, our allies that Donald Trump recently gave the word to abandon.

Also, this sentence bears repeating… “Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death, they said, occurred largely in spite of Mr. Trump’s actions,” not because of them.

2. Donald Trump told members of the press today that he watched the entire mission go down, and that al-Baghdadi, right before taking his own life, “was screaming, crying, and whimpering.” According to intelligence officials, however, there was no live audio or body cam video. What Trump was watching, it would appear, was surveillance footage from above the compound. So, when he said, “I got to watch much of it… Mr. al-Baghdadi died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way,” he was lying.

3. Donald Trump, in his public statement today, made reference to the fact that Russia had been briefed on the mission prior to its execution. It would appear, however, that no one in the administration thought to brief Speaker Pelosi or members of the House Intelligence Committee… Speaking of Russia, Trump also thanked them before even thanking the members of Delta Force who executed this mission, or the Kurds who make it possible. He also, of course, downplayed the role of the Kurds… Oh, and the Russians say they’d already killed al-Baghdadi in May, but who the hell knows.

4. Donald Trump told members of the press today that, prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks on our country, he had called for the death of Osama bin Laden in a book that he’d written. “About a year — you’ll have to check it, a year, year and a half — before the World Trade Center came down, the book came out,” he said. “I was talking about Osama bin Laden. I said, ‘You have to kill him. You have to take him out.’ Nobody listened to me.” This never happened.

5. If we’re going to give Donald Trump “credit” for killing al-Baghdadi — which I don’t have a problem with doing — then we should also give him credit for the five ISIS prisoners who escaped from Qamishli on October 11, and the 800 who escaped from Ain Issa on October 13, when U.S. troops, on his command, pulled back. These were ISIS prisoners who were being held by our Kurdish allies before they were forced to flee.

One last thing. Even after all of this — this great news about the leader of ISIS having been killed — Donald Trump was still booed at tonight’s World Series game. People know what’s going on. We are not alone.

[They also chanted “Lock him up.”]

Posted in Other, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 67 Comments

Conservative legal analyst Andrew Napolitano shocks the cast of Fox and Friends, telling them that Democrats are just following the rules put in place by the Republican majority in 2015

Remember how, yesterday, we were talking about how 30-some Republicans, laden with shitty pizza, went storming into a closed session of the House Intelligence Committee, accusing Democrats of somehow breaking the law in the way they’ve gone about prosecuting the impeachment case against Donald Trump? Well, this morning, on the set of Donald Trump’s favorite television program, Fox and Friends, Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, dropped some serious knowledge, telling his fellow Trumpists on the couch that Congressman Adam Schiff was just “following the rules” as they’d been passed into law by a Republican majority in 2015.

So, when your poorly informed uncle reposts a quote by Republican Congressman Steve Scalise on Facebook, asking about what Adam Schiff is “trying to hide” by interviewing witnesses in private, you now have a great response… right from the set of Fox and Friends… spoken by a man who the President himself once said had “a very talented legal mind“.

So, no, Congressman Matt “the human frat paddle” Gaetz wasn’t telling the truth when he said that the Democrats were proceeding with “no rules“. And, when he said that Schiff and company were “trying to overturn the results of a presidential contest in the basement of the Capitol underground with secrecy,” it probably would have been more accurate to have said that they were, “just following the rules that had passed into law by Republicans.”

And, if your conservative uncle doesn’t believe the very talented legal mind of Andrew Napolitano, here’s something else you might want to try…. Mention to him that every Benghazi deposition taken during the Obama administration was also conducted behind closed doors, in the exact same way. And the same goes for the Republican investigation last year into the text exchanges between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Speaking of which, here’s video of Republican Trey Gowdy explaining why these depositions are taken in private.

One more thing… The fact that this is all the Republicans have — this laughable idea that the Democrats, by interviewing witnesses in private, aren’t giving Donald Trump a fair shake, when it’s so easily provable that they’re just following the rules voted into law by Republicans — should be very alarming to every literate American who still identifies as conservative. The President and his defenders know that the law was broken by the administration in their dealings with Ukraine, and the only thing they have left, in the wake of recent testimony by administration officials, is to attack the investigative process that brought those crimes to light… If you want a perfect illustration of just how pathetic things have gotten for the Republicans, check out this video of Senator John Cornyn, being asked about the administration’s criminal activities in Ukraine, and responding by talking about how unfair it is that the House Intelligence Committee is interviewing witnesses in private.

Oh, and here’s one last thing…. You’ll never guess who else is parroting these very same talking points. Our old friend Tulsi “I was never really a Democrat” Gabbard.

Posted in Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 55 Comments

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