I'm a loser I'm a loser And I'm not what I appear to be
Of all the votes I have won or have lost There is one vote I should
never have crossed She was a girl in a million, my friend I should have
known she would win in the end
I'm a loser And I lost to someone who's better than me I'm a loser And I'm not what I appear to be
Although I laugh and I act like a clown Beneath this mask I am
wearing a frown My tears are falling like rain from the sky Is it for
her or myself that I cry?
I'm a loser And I lost to someone who's better than me I'm a loser And I'm not what I appear to be
What have I done to deserve such a fate? I realize I have left it too
late And so it's true, pride comes before a fall I'm telling you so
that you won't lose all
I'm a loser And I lost to someone who's better than me I'm a loser And I'm not what I appear to be
thanks to the beatles
The Beatles - I'm a Loser
The Beatles sing "I'm a Loser" on the "Shindig," 1964
I'm a loser
I'm a loser
And I'm not what I appear to be
Of all the love I have won or have lost
There is one love I should never have crossed
She was a girl in a million, my friend
I should have known she would win in the end
I'm a loser
And I lost someone who's near to me
I'm a loser
And I'm not what I appear to be
Although I laugh and I act like a clown
Beneath this mask I am wearing a frown
My tears are falling like rain from the sky
Is it for her or myself that I cry
I'm a loser
And I lost someone who's near to me
I'm a loser
And I'm not what I appear to be
What have I done to deserve such a fate
I realize I have left it too late
And so it's true, pride comes before a fall
I'm telling you so that you won't lose all
I'm a loser
And I lost someone who's near to me
I'm a loser
And I'm not what I appear to be
Writer(s): Paul McCartney, John Lennon
John Lennon said in an interview in 1980 about this song, "Me in my Dylan period. Part of me suspects I'm a loser and part of me thinks I'm God Almighty."
Paul McCartney said, "We used to listen to quite a lot of country and
western songs and they are all about sadness and 'I lost my truck' so
it was quite acceptable to sing 'I'm a loser'."
This song was performed twice before the release: on BBC Radio and for a
British edition of US music TV show "Shindig!" that was broadcasted in
the USA, but not in Britain.
Bari Weiss and the Inevitable ‘Foxification’ of CBS News
Her
mission to turn the wish-washy network news business around is far less
about boosting ratings and far more about ensuring one particular
viewer is tuned in.
Network news is a long-time sick cow, neither influential nor profitable enough to please its corporate owners. NBC has the Today Show,
and, until recently, the cable channels MSNBC and CNBC to boost its
news chops and profits, but now cable has died and Comcast, its owner,
has spun off the whole division. ABC has Good Morning America
and the top-rated evening news show—but “top rated” is an
ever-declining measurement. And CBS, long the most vaunted name in
television news, home of Walter Cronkite and 60 Minutes, has had nothing for the last decade and some. It is the sickest cow of all.
CBS’s new owners,
the Ellison family and its patriarch, Larry Ellison, at times the
world’s second-richest man (with several people regularly warring for
this position), have two ideas for how to make network news and Weiss, a
television neophyte, work for them.
It can't happen here
It can't happen here
I'm telling you, my dear
That it can't happen here
Because I been checkin' it out, baby I checked it out a couple a times, hmmmmmmmm
And I'm telling you It can't happen here
Oh darling, it's important that you believe me
(bop bop bop bop) That it can't happen here
Who could imagine that they would freak out somewhere in kansas... Kansas kansas tototototodo
Kansas kansas tototototodo
Kansas kansas
Who could imagine that they would freak out in minnesota...
Mimimimimimimi minnesota, minnesota, minnesota Who could imagine...
Who could imagine That they would freak out in washington, d.c.
D.c. d.c. d.c. d.c. d.c.
It can't happen here
Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba
It can't happen here
It can't happen here
Everybody's safe and it can't happen here
No freaks for us
It can't happen here
Everybody's clean and it can't happen here
No, no, it won't happen here
I'm telling you it can't
It won't happen here
(bop bop didi bop didi bop bop bop)
Plastic folks, you know
It won't happen here
You're safe, mama
You're safe, baby
You just cook a tv dinner
And you make it
(bop bop bop)
No no no no
Oh, we're gonna get a tv dinner and cook it up
Go get a tv dinner and cook it up
Cook it up
Oh, and it won't happen here
(no no no no no no no no no no no
Man you guys are really safe
Everything's cool).
Who could imagine
Who could imagine
That they would freak out in the suburbs
I remember (tu-tu)
I remember (tu-tu)
I remember (tu-tu)
They had a swimming pool
I remember (tu-tu)
I remember (tu-tu)
They had a swimming pool
I remember (tu-tu)
I remember (tu-tu) They had a swimming pool.
And they thought it couldn't happen here (duh duh duh duh duh)
They knew it couldn't happen here
They were so sure it couldn't happen here But...
thanks to frank zappa
This content was created by a Daily Kos Community member.
Donald Trump speaks at his Mar-a-Lago club on Jan. 3 in Palm Beach, Fla.
The
United States captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and flew him
out of the country in a stunning military operation early Saturday that
plucked a sitting leader from office — the culmination ofmonths of escalating Trump administration pressureon the oil-rich South American nation.
Maduro and his wife,
taken overnight from their home on a military base, were aboard a U.S.
warship on their way to New York, where they were to face criminal
charges.
President Donald Trump said the U.S. planned to run Venezuela until a
transition of power can take place. He claimed the American presence
was already in place, though there were no immediate signs that the U.S.
was running the country.
Donald Trump joined by members of his administration at his Mar-a-Lago club on Jan. 3 in Palm Beach, Fla.
“We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe,
proper and judicious transition,” Trump said at a Mar-a-Lago news
conference where he boasted that this “extremely successful operation
should serve as warning to anyone who would threaten American
sovereignty or endanger American lives.”
Venezuelan state TV broadcast live images of small groups of Maduro supporters taking to the streets in Caracas in protest.
The legal authorityfor the attack,
which echoed the 1990 U.S. invasion of Panama that led to the surrender
and seizure of leader Manuel Antonio Noriega, was not immediately
clear. The U.S. government does not recognize Maduro, who last appeared
on state television Friday while meeting with a delegation of Chinese
officials in Caracas.
Maduro and other Venezuelan officials were indicted in 2020 on
“narco-terrorism” conspiracy charges, but the Justice Department
released a new indictment Saturday of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores,
accusing them of a role in narco-terrorism conspiracy.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed in a social media post that the
couple would “soon face the full wrath of American justice on American
soil in American courts.” Trump said the couple were aboard the U.S.
warship Iwo Jima and headed to New York.
Trump, who was set to speak Saturday morning, posted on his Truth
Social account a photo of Maduro blindfolded and in a sweatsuit aboard
the ship.
Early morning attack
Early Saturday, multiple explosions rang out and low-flying aircraft
swept through the Venezuelan capital. Maduro's government accused the
United States of attacking civilian and military installations, calling
it an “imperialist attack” and urging citizens to take to the streets.
A photo of Nicolás Maduro after his capture by U.S. forces shared by Donald Trump on Jan 3.
The attack lasted less than 30 minutes and the explosions — at least seven blasts —sent people rushing into the streets,
while others took to social media to report what they’d seen and heard.
Some Venezuelan civilians and members of the military were killed, said
Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, without giving a number. Trump said
some U.S. forces were injured in Venezuela but he believed none were
killed.
Video obtained from Caracas and an unidentified coastal city showed
tracers and smoke clouding the landscape as repeated muted explosions
illuminated the night sky. Other footage showed cars passing on a
highway as blasts illuminated the hills behind them. The videos were
verified by The Associated Press.
Smoke was seen rising from the hangar of a military base in Caracas,
while another military installation in the capital was without power.
Venezuelan ruling party leader Nahum Fernández told The Associated
Press that Maduro and Flores were at their home within the Ft. Tiuna
military installation when they were captured.
“That’s where they bombed,” he said. “And, there, they carried out
what we could call a kidnapping of the president and the first lady of
the country.”
Under Venezuelan law, Rodríguez would take over from Maduro. There
was no confirmation that had happened, though she did issue a statement
after the strike, demanding proof of life for Maduro and his wife.
The strike followed a months-long Trump administration pressure
campaign on the Venezuelan leader, including a major buildup of American
forces in the waters off South America and attacks on boats in the
eastern Pacific and Caribbean accused of carrying drugs. Last week, the
CIA was behind adrone strikeat
a docking area believed to have been used by Venezuelan drug cartels —
the first known direct operation on Venezuelan soil since the U.S. began
strikes in September.
As of Friday, the number of known boat strikes was 35 and the number
of people killed at least 115, according to the Trump administration.
Trump said that the U.S. is engaged in an“armed conflict” with drug cartelsand hasjustified the boat strikesas a necessary to stem the flow of drugs into the U.S.
Supporters of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro embrace in downtown Caracas, Venezuela, on Jan. 3.
Venezuela’s ruling party has held power since 1999, when Maduro’s
predecessor Hugo Chávez took office, promising to uplift poor people and
later to implement a self-described socialist revolution.
Maduro took over when Chávez died in 2013. His 2018 reelection was
widely considered a sham because the main opposition parties were banned
from participating. During the 2024 election, ruling party-loyal
electoral authorities declared him the winner hours after polls closed,
but the opposition gathered overwhelming evidence that he lost by a more
than 2-to-1 margin.
In a demonstration of how polarizing a figure Maduro is, people
variously took to the streets to deplore his capture and celebrate it.
At a protest in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas Mayor Carmen Meléndez joined a crowd demanding Maduro’s return.
Men watch smoke rising from a dock after explosions were heard at La Guaira port, Venezuela, on Jan. 3.
“Maduro, hold on, the people are rising up!” the crowd chanted. “We are here Nicolás Maduro. If you can hear us, we are here!”
Earlier, armed people and uniformed members of a civilian militia
took to the streets of a Caracas neighborhood long considered a
stronghold of the ruling party.
In other parts of the city, the streets remained empty hours after
the attack, as residents absorbed events. Some areas remained without
power, but vehicles moved freely.
“How do I feel? Scared, like everyone,” said Caracas resident Noris
Prada, who sat on an empty avenue looking down at his phone.
“Venezuelans woke up scared, many families couldn’t sleep.”
Destroyed containers lay at La Guaira port after explosions were heard in Venezuela on Jan. 3.
In the Chilean capital of Santiago, people waved Venezuelan flags and
banging pots and pans as vehicles passed by honking at them.
In Doral, Florida, home to the largest Venezuelan community in the
U.S, people wrapped themselves in Venezuelan flags, ate fried snacks and
cheered as music played. At one point, the crowd chanted “Liberty!
Liberty! Liberty!”
Questions of legality
The Armed Services committees in both houses of Congress, which have
jurisdiction over military matters, have not been notified by the
administration of any actions, according to a person familiar with the
matter and granted anonymity to discuss it.
Lawmakers from both political parties in Congress have raised deep
reservations and flat-out objections to the U.S. attacks on boats
suspected of drug smuggling near the Venezuelan coast and Congress has
not specifically approved an authorization for the use of military force
for such operations in the region.
National Guard armored vehicles block an avenue leading to Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela, on Jan. 3.
Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House
Intelligence Committee, said he had seen no evidence that would justify
Trump striking Venezuela without approval from Congress and demanded an
immediate briefing by the administration on "its plan to ensure
stability in the region and its legal justification for this decision.”
Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said the military action
and seizure of Maduro marks “a new dawn for Venezuela,” saying that
“the tyrant is gone.” He posted on X hours after the strike. His boss,
Rubio, reposted a post from July that said Maduro “is NOT the President
of Venezuela and his regime is NOT the legitimate government.”
Cuba, a supporter of the Maduro government and a longtime adversary
of the United States, called for the international community to respond
to what President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez called “the criminal
attack.”
“Our zone of peace is being brutally assaulted,” he said on X. Iran’s Foreign Ministry also condemned the strikes.
President Javier Milei of Argentina praised the claim by his close
ally, Trump, that Maduro had been captured with a political slogan he
often deploys to celebrate right-wing advances: “Long live freedom,
dammit!”
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Zaha Hadid sent shockwaves over the Internet yesterday
when she released her design for Qatar’s new World Cup Stadium.
Headlines that sounded like a chorus of giggling Beavis and Butt-Heads
all agreed: Qatar’s World Cup 2022 Stadium Looks Like A Vagina.
AECOM, a firm Hadid is partnering with on the project, reportedly said
that the stadium was inspired by “the dhow boat that carried
generations of local fishermen and pearl divers.” They insist its
resemblance to genitalia was accidental, but what if it wasn’t? SO THE
HELL WHAT? The world’s phallic versus vaginal building ratio could use
some balancing out. Practically every city is a ragingly Freudian
cluster of glass, concrete, and stone cock. (Fun fact: There are so many
phallic buildings that, in 2003, Cabinet Magazine launched a
Most Phallic Building Contest. After writer Jonathan Ames claimed that
Brooklyn’s Williamsburg Bank Building was the world’s most phallic,
defensive readers attacked him, claiming that their city’s dick-like
building was the most dick-like in the land. The score was settled by
voting, and Michigan’s Ypsilanti Water Tower, AKA the Brick Dick, emerged as the proud winner.)
So what of more feminine architecture? If Hadid’s flowery
stadium is indeed built, it will boost the world’s small cadre of vulvar
buildings:
The Trump Administration’s Reckless Policies Will Kill Children
The administration’s
“pronatalist” position is substantially at odds with a range of policy
decisions that will cause kids to sicken and die.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The
Trump administration has often claimed that it wants to increase the
nation’s fertility rate. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last month
that the rate is at roughly 1.6 births per woman. That is higher than
in other major developed countries—South Korea has dropped to a
fertility rate of 0.75, for example—but below the replacement level of
2.1.
Trump
described himself as “the fertilization president” at a Women’s History
Month event at the White House earlier this spring, a title he claims
is apt because of his verbal support of in vitro fertilization, a
practice that many other Republicans oppose on religious grounds. Robert
F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, has expressed concern
about the decline in potential fertility among younger Americans. “Our
fertility is dropping dramatically,” he claimed in April. “Teenagers in
this country have the same testosterone levels as 68-year-old men.” (He
was presumably referring to teenage boys.)
JD
Vance and other top Trump officials have supported the so-called
“pronatalist” movement that advocates for much higher fertility rates,
at least among certain groups of people. These concerns are shaping
policy areas that might seem unrelated at first glance. Secretary of
Transportation Sean Duffy ordered his department
in February to prioritize infrastructure projects in “communities with
marriage and birthrates higher than the national average.”
Most of
the decline in the U.S. fertility rate can be attributed to the sharp
decline in teenage pregnancies, something that would have been seen as a
policy victory by conservatives a generation ago. Increasing fertility
rates is a vexing issue that countries in Asia and Europe have struggled
with for the last 20 years with little success.
Nonetheless, if
the Trump administration is actually serious about the nation’s
fertility rate, it might want to stop doing numerous things that will
likely kill American children.
In April, for example, the Trump administration shuttered
the communications office for the National Institute of Child Health
and Human Development, one of the components of the National Institutes
of Health, and laid off its workforce. Among the office’s
responsibilities was coordinating
the federal government’s participation in the Safe to Sleep program,
which aims to encourage parents to adopt safe-sleep practices for
newborns and infants.
The Safe to Sleep program emerged in the
1990s as researchers sought to identify the causes of sudden infant
death syndrome, or SIDS, which killed thousands of infants every year at
the time. While the specific causes of SIDS are still being studied,
the program has helped persuade millions of parents to avoid practices
that might seem safe or normal—bed-sharing, using blankets or stuffed
animals, letting infants sleep at night in car seats and strollers—but
actually contribute to suffocation risks. Those changes and others helped reduce SIDS deaths by 50 percent by the 2010s.
It
is hard to imagine a better use of taxpayer funds than preventing
infant deaths—or one more aligned with so-called “pronatalist”
interests. Instead, the Trump administration appears poised to destroy
how federal public health agencies track infant mortality and maternal
health problems and communicate about them to Americans. Kennedy began
his tenure at HHS by proposing a radical internal restructuring of the
department, shuttering numerous programs, and directing layoffs for
roughly 20,000 employees.
Among the casualties are the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, or PRAMS, which collects data on prenatal and postpartum care across the country to improve policymaking on maternal and infant health. The Washington Post
reported that HHS also dismantled programs that collect fertility and
reproductive health statistics, with vast downstream implications for
research that relies on official numbers for issues ranging from IVF
success rates to postpartum depression.
Personnel can be policy as
well. Kennedy, the nation’s top public health official, has a long
history of spreading doubt and confusion about childhood vaccinations
for personal gain. After the island nation of Samoa paused its measles
vaccination program in 2019 after a fatal vaccination mishap, Kennedy flew in to encourage
government officials there to engage in a “natural experiment” to see
what would happen if they went without vaccinating their children
against the disease. The resulting measles epidemic killed at least 83
children and sickened thousands of others.
While seeking Senate
confirmation earlier this year, Kennedy downplayed his anti-vaccine
views and told senators that he would leave current childhood
immunization schedules intact. That pledge appears to be hanging by a
thread. Kennedy and his allies are reportedly planning
to remove the Covid-19 vaccine from the schedule. They also plan to
require that future vaccine studies include unvaccinated control groups,
a practice that health experts had long opposed because it was
unethical.
Some
of Kennedy’s critics have described his policies and rhetoric,
especially toward people with autism and vaccines, as “eugenic” in
nature. After overseeing a measles outbreak in Texas that killed two
children earlier this year, he recently suggested in a Fox News interview that the measles vaccine was unnecessary because the disease had a low mortality rate.
“Even
in 1963, before the introduction of the vaccine, there were 400 deaths a
year and there were up to two million measles cases,” he claimed. “Only
very, very sick kids should die from measles.” With sufficient
vaccination rates, however, it is possible to eliminate childhood deaths
from measles altogether. Kennedy’s comments suggest that children who
die from childhood measles outbreaks “should” die from it and that
vaccinations only impede this outcome.
Other “Make America Healthy
Again” advocates are cut from the same anti-scientific and
conspiratorial cloth, casting themselves as brave truth-tellers who
propose treatments that the medical establishment rejects as unproven
and inflaming doubts about scientifically proven practices. At Kennedy’s
behest, for example, Trump recently nominated Casey Means, a failed ENT
surgeon with an inactive state medical license, to serve as the
nation’s next surgeon general.
Means,
like Kennedy, has espoused anti-vaccine views in the guise of
questioning established truths and encouraging skepticism. That would
make her a dangerous pick for an office that has long served as the
nation’s “top doctor” of sorts. Among her other anti-child views is her
promotion of “raw milk,” a term used by promoters to make unpasteurized
milk sound natural and wholesome. Unpasteurized milk can sicken healthy adults by introducing them to a wide range of pathogens; those same illnesses can severely injure or kill children.
Means
framed her advocacy of unpasteurized milk as one of personal
empowerment. “When it comes to a question like raw milk, I want to be
free to form a relationship with a local farmer, understand his
integrity, look him in the eyes, pet his cow, and then decide if I feel
safe to drink the milk from his farm,” she once claimed. For decades,
Americans did not need to engage in such feel-good nonsense to obtain
safe milk for themselves and their children because the Food and Drug
Administration operated a national quality-control program for dairy
producers. The Trump administration laid off that task force’s workers in April.
Beyond
the nation’s public health apparatus, the Trump administration is also
pushing federal agencies in ways that are directly harmful to children.
Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency,
has championed a radical plan to slash most of the agency’s regulatory
efforts. In April, the agency moved to end grants
for a variety of health-related programs, including one that studies
pesticide exposure among children in rural America and another that
traces how “forever chemicals” enter the nation’s food supply. Other
deregulatory efforts for air and water pollution will likely have an
indirect health impact on American children in the years and decades to
come.
Last week, Trump also fired
the three Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission,
which is charged with organizing recalls of unsafe products. While its
mandate covers products for Americans of all ages, the CPSC’s impact is
most acutely felt in child-related products. The Trump administration eventually hopes to dismantle it altogether by absorbing it into Kennedy’s HHS. This campaign is hardly new: I wrote last year
about efforts by the conservative legal establishment to defang the
commission on behalf of companies that are frustrated by efforts to
prevent them from selling unsafe products to American customers. But it
is still striking given the agency’s cost-to-payoff ratio and
uncontroversial nature.
Trump administration officials do not
generally describe these moves as if their goal is to increase childhood
mortality. (Kennedy appears to be an exception.) They typically justify
them as part of an effort to alleviate regulatory burdens on
businesses, to reduce government costs, or to otherwise shrink the
federal workforce. The net effect of these policy changes, however, is
to make this country a more dangerous place for Americans to give birth
and grow up.
Is that at odds with Trumpworld’s embrace of pronatalism? Perhaps not. Taken at face value, the term pronatalism
simply means to be in favor of births and children. (Antinatalism, a
fringe movement that supports human extinction on philosophical grounds,
is its counterpart.) I would venture to guess that being pronatalist in
that sense describes the overwhelming majority of Americans, even those
who do not have or do not plan to have kids of their own. My child-free
friends were all happy for me when I had a kid recently, for example.
For
American conservatives, pronatalism appears to mean something much
different. DOGE head Elon Musk, a South African billionaire, has framed his concerns
about “birth rates” along white nationalist lines by focusing on
declining fertility rates in Europe and the United States. Vance has
favored shaming women who don’t have children by deriding them as
“childless cat ladies,” claiming they have no stake in the country’s
future. Vance has also denounced
federal subsidies for childcare that make it easier for working women
to have children. Instead, he argued, children should be cared for at
home by one of their parents. (Guess which parent he prefers.)
The
Trump administration’s real goal is not to increase the fertility rate
or, more specifically, to address policy issues that prevent Americans
from having more children. Instead, it appears that they hope to
reorient American society by driving women—and especially white
women—out of the workforce and pressuring them to raise children at
home. It is unlikely that the Trump administration can reverse a nearly
century-long social and economic shift over the next four years. It is
also unlikely that their efforts to do so will lead to any measurable
boost to U.S. fertility rates. If the Trump administration’s goal is to
increase childhood mortality rates over the next four years, on the
other hand, then it is off to a terrific start.
Las Vegas is home to a lot that might raise a pair of eyebrows, but a
new art installation depicting Donald Trump as a naked, 43-foot-tall
marionette might raise them right off your face.
Made of foam over rebar and weighing approximately 6,000 pounds, the
gigantic naked Trump will travel the United States as part of the
“Crooked and Obscene Tour” but first, you can see it in person and in
the wild at 13460 Apex Harbor Ln in Las Vegas right now.
Per the tour’s organizers, portraying Trump in the nude “is
intentional, serving as a bold statement on transparency, vulnerability,
and the public personas of political figures.”
They also aim to spark conversation about “transparency—or lack
thereof—in politics, challenging viewers to think critically about
political influence,” according to press materials.
Those who can’t make it to Las Vegas will have opportunity to see it
on tour stops at other locations across the United States. Dates and
cities for the tour have not yet been announced. We’ll keep you posted.
Enjoy — or ‘enjoy’ — some photos of the project below:
Via “Crooked and Obscene”Via “Crooked and Obscene”Via “Crooked and Obscene”Via “Crooked and Obscene”Via “Crooked and Obscene”Via “Crooked and Obscene”Via “Crooked and Obscene”
This isn’t the first time a nude statute of Trump has appeared in
public, though it certainly dwarfs its predecessor. In 2016 Joshua
“Ginger” Monroe was hired at the art collective INDECLINE to create five life-size naked statues of the former president as part of a project called “The Emperor Has No Balls.”
The statues were put up without permits at locations in Seattle, New
York City, Cleveland, Los Angeles and San Francisco; naturally they were
soon removed by police.
