Saturday, April 04, 2020

HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER returns

And it was a doozy.  HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER airs on ABC, Thursday nights.  It's been on the winter break until this week.

Annalise is out of the country, out of her mind and out of her wig.  She's sweating while drinking outside a bar and grill in Mexico.  She's waiting for the person who's supposed to help her continue her journey to a new identity.

As this takes place?

Connor and Michaela have been arrested for Asher's murder.  At the station house, Oliver screams he did it and to release Connor.  Instead, Oliver is arrested as well.

At the hearing, Bonnie represents Oliver.  She gets the charges against him dismissed.  Michaela and Connor's attorneys can't even get them out on bail.

A deal is offered.  They will sign an agreement blaming Annalise for everything and testify in court against her and they will only serve five years in prison.  They don't know what the other is offered and Michaela tells her father she can't stab Connor in the back and that this deal isn't even all that.  He tells her that they can get the deal altered, they can get records sealed, that she will be an attorney.  Meanwhile Oliver visits Connor and tells him to take the deal.  He says he can't.  Oliver offers, stupid in my opinion, that he just wants Connor home -- sign the deal, he can come home and then the five years in prison will go so quick.

Huh?

Oliver, are you horny?

At any rate, Michaela and Connor end up signing the deal.

But only after each, without the other's knowledge, demands that the other gets the same deal.

When they are released, they tell each other what they did and hug.

Bonnie.

Asher went to visit her.

And he was recording her -- remember what happened before the winter break?

Asher was with Oliver, Connor and Michaela and confessed he was the informant to the FBI.  Oliver struck him with the fire poker which is how he ended up bloody.

Okay, so Asher went to Bonnie and she knew he was taping her.  She called Frank (from the kitchen, out of Asher's ear range) and told him to get over there.

Frank did.  Frank knew everything except that Teagan helped Laurel escape to Mexico.  Bonnie told him not to tell Frank that because Frank would go after Teagan.

So Bonnie called Frank.  Frank took Asher home.  Asher was suspicious but Frank didn't kill him as far we saw.  Frank left Asher's apartment.  Asher was in a rage over not getting Frank or Bonnie recorded saying anything incriminating.  He threw his phone and it busted.  He then went next door to  Gabriel and asked to use Gabe's phone.  Gabe said no but Asher offered that big check Annalise awarded him for figuring out how to get off a client in that classroom exercise. 

That's the last we've seen of Asher on the night he died.

Bonnie and Teagan have words.  Frank and Teagan have words (he knows now that she helped Laurel run away). 

Annalise?

A woman in a cap shows up to take her on her journey.  She says that they have to hurry, there are people after Annalise.

Annalise does not get a good vibe from her.  When they are across the street from the car that is to take Annalise away, she looks at the car and driver and balks.  She pretends to run off.

The woman walks over to the car and converses while Annalise, hidden in the crowd, watches.

Before much more can happen . . . Annalise is surrounded by FBI agents and arrested.

 "Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Friday, April 3, 2020.  Rape allegations continue to exist against Joe Biden while the corporate media continues to ignore the charges, REUTERS gets suspended from covering Iraq for three months (a public outcry would reduce that) after they are found guilty of . . . reporting, and much more.


Starting in the US where a candidate running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination has been accused of assault and the corporate media has worked overtime to avoid the issue.  Matthew Stevenson (COUNTERPUNCH) observes:

And now there’s another of Joe’s #MeToo moments. In case you missed it, a report has surfaced that back in the 1990s Biden mashed one of his staffers, Tara Reade, up against a congressional wall and, with his hand roaming around her skirt, asked for a little senatorial privilege.
I don’t know the woman personally, but at the very least she captured Joe’s pattern of speech, when she quoted him as saying (while she struggled to free herself from his grinding): “I thought you liked me, man?”

Did you miss that story?  The US corporate media has worked very hard to ignore it.  Today, at THE ECONOMIST, they explain:

IN MARCH 2019, about a month before Joe Biden began his presidential campaign, a former state representative from Nevada, Lucy Flores, accused him of unwanted kissing, touching and hair-sniffing. Several other women -- including Tara Reade, who worked for then-Senator Biden for nine months in 1992 and 1993 -- subsequently made similar complaints, prompting Mr Biden to release an apologetic video in which he acknowledged that “the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset and I get it.” Recently, however, Ms Reade has levelled a more serious charge.
In an interview broadcast on March 25th she said that Mr Biden touched her in ways that made her feel “like an inanimate object”. She said that one day a scheduler in Mr Biden’s office told her to bring the senator his gym bag. When she did, he allegedly held her against a wall and put his hands up her skirt.  When she pulled away, she says Mr Biden said, "Come on, man, I heard you liked me."  Ms Reade says that she was later moved to a windowless office and frozen out.


Noting the corporate media silence, Dan Hammes (ST MARIES GAZETTE RECORD) observes:


But it is somewhat interesting if you haven’t read about the charges.
Remember, just like borders, it wasn’t that long ago that Me Too was a big deal. So if you didn’t know about Ms. Reade, how come? It seems like a pretty big story.
Reason enough to break out the p---y hats one more time.
Ironically, it was Joe Biden himself who said that anytime a woman accuses a prominent man of sexual harassment then “you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real.”
But then, that was different. That was Brett Kavanaugh.

The lesson here is the BELIEVE ALL WOMEN crowd really means to say BELIEVE ALL WOMEN ... depending on who is being accused.

Harvest Pride (WORLD) reminds:

Tara Reade told podcast host Katie Halper about the accusations in an episode that aired last week. Along with several other women, Reade said last year that Biden’s habit of touching people made her uncomfortable. This is the first time she has gone public with an alleged sexual assault.
Reade said that while serving in Biden’s Senate office, he once pushed her against a wall and sexually molested her. She said she then pulled away from him, and Biden said, “Come on, man. I heard you liked me.”


This week's podcast of INTERCEPTED found the topic addressed by Meagan Day:

JS: Meagan, I wanted to ask you about something unrelated to this discussion, and that is that Joe Biden has been accused by a former Senate staffer of his name Tara Reade, and she has for quite a while now, for a sustained period of time, claimed that Biden had engaged in inappropriate conduct toward her.

Katie Halper: Hello and welcome to the Katie Halper Show. I’m about to play an excerpt from an interview that I did with Tara Reade. The full episode will be up shortly. As a warning Tara discusses sexual assault during this interview.

Tara Reade: It happened all at once. The gym bag, I don’t know where it went. I handed it to him, then it was gone. And then his hands were on me and underneath my clothes. And yeah, and then he went down my skirt but then up inside it, and he penetrated me with his fingers.

JS: This has gotten almost no attention in corporate media, cable news, big media. I’m wondering as you watch this play out how you see this factor where you have a woman who claims that the Democratic front-runner sexually assaulted her, and there is no mention of it in corporate media, no mention of it from many of the leading Alyssa Milano’s of the world who were railing against Brett Kavanaugh and trying to tank his nomination as a Supreme Court justice, with great reason I might add, but it’s just there’s a total disconnect. It’s like this woman doesn’t exist.

MD: There has been complete, a complete wall of silence around Tara Reade’s accusation that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her. And the thing that’s most striking about it is how similar it is to the accusation leveled against Brett Kavanaugh by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. We’re talking about a first person account of sexual assault that is decades old, that is vividly remembered by the woman in question, but that is not substantiated by physical evidence, or any other kind of, you know, smoking gun. And that was enough just a few years ago, for a whole host of people to say that Brett Kavanaugh was guilty. They had good reason to do that, but the fact that suddenly a very similar scenario has arisen, and their guy is in the crosshairs and suddenly it isn’t enough anymore. It’s just gobsmacking hypocrisy, honestly.
You know, at the time Republicans said that Democrats were simply using Christine Blasey Ford’s account to score cheap points against the Republicans and to, you know, secure a favorable political outcome for themselves. And Democrats pushed back on that and they said, no, it’s really important to listen to women when they come forward and talk about sexual assault at the hands of powerful men, men who are seeking the highest offices or the highest positions of power in our entire country. I think that the Democrats have just undermined themselves enormously by turning around just a couple of years later and saying that, essentially just demonstrating that, in fact, they do think that different rules apply when there are different partisan affiliations in play. And I think that in so doing, they are undermining not just Tara Reade, but future Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s.

And I think that’s really concerning. I would like to see these allegations get a fair hearing. The fact that we haven’t seen them get a fair hearing to me just speaks to an incredible hypocrisy, and I think a terrible weaponization of Me Too. The idea that you could use it when it was politically advantageous and drop it when it wasn’t. This was always something that opponents said was at the heart of Me Too. And it’s something that many people pushed back and said, no, it isn’t. These are universal principles, and we’re going to change the culture. Well, it turned out, it’s starting to look like that’s not true. I think it’s an enormous disappointment, and I think it’s very damning.


We'll come back to Alyssa Milano, but Howie Carr (BOSTON HERALD) notes:

Uncle Joe is only doing interviews with the Democrat press, which is almost all of them. Very few of his TV appearances are live anymore —  the Democrat producers need time to clean up the frontrunner’s Grandpa Simpson-like meanderings and asides and literal walkaways from the camera while it’s rolling.
But he’s still yapping incoherently to, if not reporters, at least B-list celebrities, who have been peppering him with scores of fawning gee-whiz questions in the past week.
Yet not one of these Deep State cheerleaders has dared to inquire about the recent accusations by one of his former female aides, one Tara Reade, that he threw her up against a wall, reached his hand up under her dress and groped her in 1993.
And then, when she rebuffed him, she recalls, Sleepy Joe said to her, “C’mon man, I heard you liked me!”
Sounds totally believable, doesn’t it? Certainly much more so than the accusations of, say, Julie Swetnick, or Christine Blasey Ford. And yet we were lectured by all Democrats, including Joe Biden, that we must believe everything every woman says about any guy, well at least if they’re Republicans.
Biden, on the other hand, is allowed to go back over the same old ground, again and again and again. For instance, he loves to bring up the Defense Production Act. Certainly something he should understand, having been in the Senate for what, 36, years? Here he is with Jimmy Kimmel, uh Fallon – one of those interchangeable late-night “comedians,” anyway.
“I back a while ago uh Jimmy I, I, I said he should involve what this, this National Defense Act that’s out there, this Defense Pro- Production Act it’s called and it makes the president, gives him the authority to go to industries … he has the power to do it under the the the the act that I just referenced to.”

May we quote you on that Mr. Simpson, er, Vice President.


On the soon to be 48-year-old child performer Alyssa Milano, Tyler MacDonald (INQUISITR) explains, "#MeToo advocate Alyssa Milano is facing a wave of backlash for continuing to push her support of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden without addressing the accusations of sexual assault leveled against him by Tara Reade. On Thursday, Milano maintained her silence and instead posted a Twitter thread in which she doubled down on her demand for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to drop out of the race and let the former vice president take on Donald Trump in 2020."  Christian Toto (at the right-wing DAILY WIRE) offers:

Guess who else is ignoring her case?
Hollywood, Inc.
The stars who have previously protested President Trump’s “war on women” at both marches and Sundance Film Festival rallies reads like a who’s who of Hollywood: Katy Perry, America Ferrera, Chelsea Handler, Jessica Chastain, Zendaya, Melissa Benoist, Charlize Theron, Aisha Tyler, Kristen Stewart, John Legend, Joshua Jackson, Laura Dern and Jennifer Beals.
“Charmed” alum Alyssa Milano transformed her career from [failed and forgotten] actress to activist in the Trump era, with her specific focus on women’s issues.
Are any publicly supporting Reade in her moment of need?
No, not yet, anyway. The abuse allegation story is at least a week old, so it’s not like they haven’t heard about the charges.

To be clear, I added "failed and forgotten" because that is what Alyssa is.  No one hires her anymore.  She gets bit parts -- like in the NETFLIX show about a high school teenager -- if she's lucky and tries to pretend like that is a career -- there's no career anymore than there's any actual acting from Alyssa.

As we noted yesterday, Rose McGown hasn't been silent.  She is getting credit for her strength.

#AlyssaMilano is helping to silence Tara Reade. Her entire feed for over a week has been a wall of interview links of Tara being interviewed by , & #Risers & most recently
Double exclamation mark
She sees the tweets. Go look at her feed. Thx
Quote Tweet



Not everyone has strength.



I'm always surprised anyone takes Jill Filipovic seriously.  That bitch is not a feminist.  She went around, while in law school, begging people to trade links with her and then she wouldn't link to them after they linked to her.  That's worse than a link whore.  I've never traded links.  If someone's asked to be linked to, I've generally linked to them.  I ignored Jill's e-mail because it was obvious -- even then before her infamous summer vacation posting bikini photos while the world burned -- that she wasn't a feminist.  She never had a real grasp on any issue, she never led on any issue.  Reading her nonsense then or today, it's obvious that she just spits out words others have written and pretends like she's had an actual though.

So, no, I'm not surprised that Jill is silent about Tara Reade.  Useless then, useless now.  Be glad we have some real feminists out there -- like Rose McGowan.

Joni Mitchell could have been singing about the current landscape when she wrote "Dog Eat Dog:"




Land of snap decisions
Land of short attention spans
Nothing is savored
Long enough to really, really understand
In every culture in decline
The watchful ones among the slaves
Know all that is genuine will be
Scorned and conned and cast away


Liza Featherstone also deserves praise -- as do Katie Halper, Krystal Ball, Ryan Grimm and many others.  From Liza's essay at JACOBIN:

This week, Tara Reade, a former Biden aide, detailed her 1993 experience of sexual assault on “The Katie Halper Show” after trying for years to get someone to listen. Reade has, predictably, been smeared as a Russian agent, because that’s how mainstream Democrats respond to anything they don’t want to hear. But she’s just one of seven women who have accused Biden of horrible behavior, charges that have been public for years.
Democratic elites have known for years about Biden’s shabby, boorish treatment of Anita Hill, the dignified law professor who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in 1991. Hill brought workplace sexual harassment into the public eye years before #MeToo. Biden was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time. He has since said that he “wished he could have done something” to ensure that her claims got a fair hearing, a pretty inept apology considering he was in charge of the proceedings.
From mainstream feminists, we’re hearing little about Biden’s #MeToo problems. In fact, some have flatly declined to be involved. As the Intercept reported this week, the feminist legal group Time’s Up had refused to take Reade’s case. In a twist, Anita Dunn, a top Biden adviser, is managing director of Time’s Up’s PR firm, SKDKnickerbocker. In another twist, Dunn also advised big Democratic donor (now convicted rapist) Harvey Weinstein on how to handle his own rape allegations. Another partner in SKDKnickerbocker, Hilary Rosen, has also been advising Biden’s presidential campaign. 
The allegations aren’t getting much play in the mainstream media either. Sure, it’s a busy news cycle. And everything about Biden is boring, even his sexual assault allegations. But the day Reade’s charges went public, CNN ran an “analysis” by Chris Cillizza about Biden and gender. Its theme? “The Top 10 Women Joe Biden Might Pick as VP.”

By contrast, we’ve heard for years from these same quarters about the supposed mean, sexist tweets of the Bernie Bros, and about Bernie Sanders’s alleged tone-deafness on gender issues. But Sanders is the only candidate now running for president with no sexual assault or harassment charges against him. That’s obviously a low bar, and it’s unfortunate we have to mention it. But, perhaps relatedly, Sanders is also the only one in the race who has always been pro-choice, has always been committed to full abortion access regardless of income, and has been fighting for universal childcare for decades, as well as for advancements that benefit working-class women even more than men, like the $15 minimum wage and Medicare for All. Yet if you relied on the mainstream media for information, you’d assume that Biden was the feminist candidate in the primary, while Sanders was “problematic” for women.



Turning to the Middle East . . .



Transcript to the above NEWSHOUR (PBS) segment:

Judy Woodruff:
In the day's other news: Iran dismissed President Trump's claim that it is planning an attack on U.S. targets in Iraq.
On Twitter, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif wrote: "Iran starts no wars, but teaches lessons to those who do."

Mr. Trump said Wednesday that U.S. intelligence believes Iran and its proxies mean to strike in Iraq, but he gave no details.


In Iraq, the coronavirus continues to spread.  What's the answer?  For the Iraqi government, the answer is to ban a news agency.  ALJAZEERA explains, "Iraq has revoked Reuters news agency's reporting licence for three months after it reported the number of new coronavirus cases in the country was in the thousands, much higher than official figures."  Raphaella Stavrinou (NEW EUROPE) adds, "According to unnamed doctors and Iraqi officials cited in the report, the real number of coronavirus infections in the country is estimated to be between about 3,000 and 9,000, with more than 2,000 confirmed cases in eastern Baghdad alone."  THE DAILY STAR notes, "Reuters also said that the number of deaths was much higher than the 54 reported so far by the Iraqi authorities."  Who to believe?  REUTERS.  The Iraqi government has a long history of undercounting -- long before the coronavirus emerged.

The following sites updated:






  • Thursday, April 02, 2020

    Another science post


    Time for another science post. Let's focus on black holes. What's a black hole? NASA tells us:

    A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light can not get out. The gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space. This can happen when a star is dying.
    Because no light can get out, people can't see black holes. They are invisible. Space telescopes with special tools can help find black holes. The special tools can see how stars that are very close to black holes act differently than other stars.

    Black holes are in the news today. Ashley Strickland (CNN) reports:

    Astronomers have long studied supermassive black holes and smaller black holes that form when massive stars implode, but they have searched for intermediate-mass black holes for years.

    Now, thanks to observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have found their "missing link" to understand how black holes evolve. They were able to confirm the observation of an intermediate-mass black hole, known as an IMBH, inside a dense cluster of stars.
    The study published this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
    Only a few other possible mid-range black holes have been found before. They're difficult to detect because they're smaller than the supermassive black holes that can be found at the heart of large galaxies. At the same time, they're larger than black holes that form when stars collapse and die.

    Elizabeth Howell (SPACE.COM) adds:



    The famed space observatory made the find while hunting down the source of a powerful burst of X-rays caught in 2006 by two other cosmic telescopes: NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM-Newton).
    At the time, astronomers weren't sure if the X-rays had come from inside or outside of the Milky Way galaxy, but new high-resolution photography by Hubble shows that the X-ray source (known as 3XMM J215022.4−055108) is located in a star cluster at the edge of another galaxy. That's exactly where an intermediate-sized black hole (IMBH) may lurk — at least, according to theory.

    Back to NASA for a question and an answer:

    Could a Black Hole Destroy Earth?
    Black holes do not go around in space eating stars, moons and planets. Earth will not fall into a black hole because no black hole is close enough to the solar system for Earth to do that.
    Even if a black hole the same mass as the sun were to take the place of the sun, Earth still would not fall in. The black hole would have the same gravity as the sun. Earth and the other planets would orbit the black hole as they orbit the sun now.
    The sun will never turn into a black hole. The sun is not a big enough star to make a black hole.

    That is reassuring and good to know. I always think of the treehouse of horror episode of THE SIMPSONS where there's a tiny black hole on the earth and everyone feeds it their junk to get rid of the junk only to have the hole grow larger and larger. It's a funny episode but the first time we watched it together? One of my kids (I won't identify which) thought that could happen and we had to get online and look it up to prove that it couldn't and restore sanity.


    "Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
    Thursday, April 2, 2020.  High school drop out Whoopi Goldberg attacks Bernie Sanders because she doesn't understand democracy and can't do the math, even without the corporate media reporting on Tara Reade's allegations against Joe Biden, the news is getting out, and much that.


    Starting in the US where the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination continues.  Yesterday, Senator Bernie Sanders was attacked by Jabba The Hut.  Yes, he appeared on THE VIEW and Whoopi Goldberg tried to eat him for breakfast.

    Storm Gifford (NEW YORK DAILY NEWS) reports how the morbidly obese Whoopi Goldberg attacked Bernie:


    It’s no surprise that the tone on “The View” got testy, but this time there was no blaming Meghan McCain.

    On Wednesday’s episode of the TV gabfest, Goldberg — still working from home due to coronavirus concerns — grilled Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders as to why he was moving forth on his White House bid despite significantly trailing frontrunner Joe Biden.
    “I’m told that you intend to stay in this race because you believe there is a path to victory,” Goldberg asked the Vermont senator, who was interviewed from his home.


    If nothing else, Whoopi is exploding at least one stereotype: The one about fat people being jolly.

    If Barbara Walters wasn't in a home and in bad health, Whoopi would be gone.  Instead, she gets to continue episode after episode ruining the show that Barbara created.  It was supposed to be a place where women of various backgrounds could have an honest and respectful conversation.  Instead, it's just a mud fight among ugly women.  And Whoopi is an awful host.  She's walked out in the midst of interviews, she attacks guests, she doesn't know how to host.

    She's the prize pig in ABC's stye.  What a proud moment for a woman who last had a hit film in 1992.  How wonderful of ABC to give this high school drop out a position on TV where she uses her untrained and uneducated mind to pontificate on every problem under the sun never inhibited by her appalling ignorance.

    High school drop out Whoopi never bothered to attend college and it shows.  It really shows.  It's not often a raging idiot like Whoopi exposes themselves on TV so constantly.

    Whoopi does not see a path to victory for Bernie Sanders.

    Bernie currently has 914 delegates.  To win the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, he needs to get 1991 delegates.  Currently, he is 1027 away from that number.

    Stupid Whoopi, drop out Whoopi, dumb ass Whoopi, how many delegates are still up for grabs?

    1619.

    And Bernie only needs 1027.

    Is there a path to victory?

    Unless you're as stupid and uneducated as Whoopi, you can grasp that, yes, Bernie can pull this off.

    Will he?

    I'm not making predictions.  But it is possible?

    Yes, it is.

    I get it.  Whoopi's ignorant.  She's never understood the democratic process, let alone how primaries work.  She's just dumb and stupid.

    There are 27 primaries still to be held.  There are 1619 delegates still to be awarded.

    If you're brainless and dense like Whoopi, that means nothing.  If you grasp how democracy works, you get that those primaries need to be held.

    Whoopi would probably insist that her stupidity and dropping out came from dyslexia.  Oh, boo-hoo.  I have it too.  A lot of us do.  I'm rhyming.  But most of us learned to manage it.  Whoopi was too stupid for that.  She has a career of bit parts in films because she was too stupid to avoid the nasty image she built.  Starting with getting Howard Zieff fired from her second film, JUMPING JACK FLASH, Whoopi has always been seen as a first-rate bitch.  Zieff directed THE MAIN EVENT (Barbra Streisand), PRIVATE BENJAMIN (Goldie Hawn), MY GIRL, HOUSE CALLS and HEARTS OF THE WEST (Jeff Bridges).

    Penny Marshall was hired to replace Howard with the hopes that Whoopi would get along with her.  She did not and she floated the idea that Penny should be fired.  Penny was more popular in the industry and with FOX so it didn't happen.  Instead, Whoopi just threw tantrums each day on the set.  Again, this was her second film.  Her tantrums got worse with each film.  Most of it probably was the result of insecurity.  She was taking the parts that Cher, Bruce Willis and others had turned down.  She was no one's first or second or third or . . . choice.  And she can't act.  On THE COLOR PURPLE, Steven Spielberg grasped that he couldn't work with her like he would a normal actor so instead he treated her like a child actor, he'd go up to her before each take and explain the way he wants her to react, "Like ___ in ___."  She did a great job pretending to be this actor and that in THE COLOR PURPLE, she just never bothered to create Celie.  And that's what she's done with every one of her films since.

    After five flops in a row, she had to move into character parts and, though no one wanted her for GHOST, she managed to steal the role from Jackee -- and she imitated Jackee in the film.  The Academy Award -- for Best Supporting Actress -- led to DISNEY deciding they could rebuild her career the way they had earlier with Bette Midler.  SISTER ACT would be a huge hit but everything else that followed proved that you had to have real talent (which Bette does) to have a string of hit of movies.  All Whoopi had was SISTER ACT.  18 years later, it's still all she has.

    Or all she has to point to with pride.  The former Slim Fast spokesperson (they fired her long ago) can't keep the pounds off, not even after 2019's health scare.  People don't tend to notice that because she distracts them by insisting that Roman Polanski didn't commit "rape-rape."  It wasn't real rape, she wanted America to know, despite the fact that Roman himself had entered a guilty plea.  Again, she's stupid.  She's ignorant.  Why she's allowed on TV to share her opinions is anyone's guess.

    I don't mean: Why isn't she doing movies!!!!  She has a lousy image of being a pain in the ass on every production.  No one's going to hire her for a lead role.  She can't do a TV show -- real TV show, primetime TV show -- because she's flopped every time she's tried.  So she's gone to the sewer of daytime TV gab show.  This is the woman who couldn't even cut it on HOLLYWOOD SQUARES which is why, despite being a producer (a vanity credit, she didn't do any actual producing), Whoopi was kicked to the curb in 2002 and she was replaced with Henry Winkler.

    Yesterday, Whoopi asked Bernie why he didn't drop out of the race.  Bernie didn't ask her why she didn't drop out of the entertainment industry -- the answer was clear: The industry long ago dropped Whoopi.  Bit parts and bad Tyler Perry movies are what she tries to pass off as a career.


    Whoopi is supporting presumed rapist Joe Biden.  Former senate staffer Tara Reade has detailed her allegations of being attacked by Joe Biden.  Another failed actress is Alyssa Milano.  CHARMED as cancelled in 2006.  There's been nothing of value since.  She couldn't get a long with the show runner on MISTRESSES -- she tried to get the woman fired -- so she left the show while pretending it was because she didn't want to film in Canada.  She attacked the CHARMED reboot -- for daring to cast Women Of Color in the leads?  Remember, after the third season of the original CHARMED, Alyssa is a producer.  There's producer Brad Kern who assaults women in the workplace -- and gets fired by CBS for doing that on a CBS show (NCIS: NEW ORLEANS) but producer Alyssa claims she was never aware of anything like that going on at CHARMED.  Read Rose McGowan's book and you'll realize that a lot was going on and, yes, Alyssa was aware.  Before she got that producing credit, she did her part to run off Shannen Doherty.  Now that Shannen's in stage-four on her cancer.  Does Alyssa think she can just ignore the public apology she owes Shannen?  She's so stupid, she may not grasp that if that apology is not made before Shannen passes away, it will be even worse for Alyssa.  When she became a 'producer' of CHARMED, the show never added another African-American character -- all the ones on the show were created by Constance M. Burge -- the creator who left the show because of Alyssa.  That's why she thought she'd get away with getting the show runner fired from MISTRESSES but she didn't.  And the entire cast of that show -- male and female -- hates her -- not just hated her when they worked with her, actively hates her to this day.

    So this former child-actress who never bothered to learn how to act weighed in yesterday to praise Whoopi for attacking Bernie: "Thank you Whoopi Goldberg.  This moment in time is too important to take bulls**t from politicians."  Alyssa just increased the call outs on herself for refusing to note Tara Reade.

    Alyssa's a hypocrite and this is nothing new.  Yes, I consider Illeana Douglas a friend.  When she publicly came forward about Leslie Moonves assaulting her, I supported her here and I noted that I'd heard the story years ago from Martin Scorsese.  But you know who didn't defend her?

    Alyssa.

    Alyssa never defended Illeana.  She never called out Leslie Moonves.  And we called Alyssa out for that.  See, Leslie was over CBS and THE CW and Alyssa had a pilot she was desperately -- Norma Desmond desperately -- trying to get on the air.  So she stayed silent.

    Rose McGowan long ago told everyone that Alyssa was a fake.  And she is.  She will use anything to get her name out there.  She doesn't support #MeToo or #Times Up.  Nor could she while married to a CAA agent.  CAA enabled this behavior for years.  They actively covered for men like Harvey Weinstein and they actively procured women -- they'd send women to 'interviews' knowing the women would be assaulted.  A French actress who had two hit films in the US (made in the US, hits in the US) left this country because of CAA and will not come back because they set her up on an 'interview' that was rape.  Alyssa'a fake ass.

    And people are catching on -- click here to read some of the Tweets called the failed adult actress out.  While Alyssa is silent, Rose is not -- here, here and here for just three examples.  Rose is the real deal.  Alyssa is just someone who uses #MeToo to try to get attention.


    Yesterday, we noted Amanada Maracotte's attack on Tara.  Krystal Ball responds to that attack below.






    And we'll note this video where Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti call out the corporate media for refusing to cover Tara's story.



    Amanda Marcotte thought she could misdirect and lie and cover for the corporate media and others.  She can't.  It doesn't matter where you are on the political spectrum, you are hearing about this story and you are noticing that the corporate media is ignoring it.

    On the left, THE ALL AMERICAN SOCIALIST is covering it.



    On the right, MRCTV is covering it.




    Sonali Kolhatkar spoke with Branko Marcetic on RISING UP WITH SONALI (also UPRISING WITH SONALI) about  his article on the silence greeting Tara Reade's allegations.

    Greg Piper (THE COLLEGE FIX) notes:

    Now that he’s been accused of sexual assault by a former employee – an accusation that drew little legacy media coverage – some Democratic student groups are showing their consistency on the issue.
    The University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Democrats and Penn for Bernie demanded that Biden’s campaign and mainstream media outlets investigate the allegations by Tara Reade, his former Senate staffer, The Daily Pennsylvanian reports.

    Left-wing outlets Vox and The Intercept have run lengthy articles in the past week on the cold shoulder Reade has received since she aired a more narrow version of her allegations a year ago, accusing Biden of inappropriately touching her shoulder and neck.
    They were largely in line with allegations by a former Nevada lawmaker, Lucy Flores, but the sudden wave of claims against Biden were not enough to make Penn reconsider naming its new Washington, D.C.-based center after him.


    This is story is out there.  We are doing video links with students instead of our face-to-face conversations and this is a big issue with students.  That's where Joe already has an enthusiasm gap.  As Sonali pointed out in her interview "Trump will bring it up" if Joe is the candidate in the general election.

    Turning to Iraq, John David Randolph Hilty is the name of the US soldier who died this week in Iraq.  WBNS notes:

    A soldier from Bowie, Maryland, died in Iraq in a non-combat related incident on Monday, according to Department of Defense officials.
    John David Randolph Hilty, 44, was a Bowie resident who entered the Army as a combat engineer about 21 years ago. DOD officials said that at the time of Hilty's death in Erbil, Iraq, he was working as a petroleum supply specialist.

    KXXV adds:

    Hilty died March 30, in Erbil, Iraq, of a non-combat related incident. The incident is under investigation.
    He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 227th Aviation Regiment, 1st Air Cavalry Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division since October 2019.
    "TF ATTACK is deeply saddened by the loss of Sgt. 1st Class Hilty. He was an exceptional leader who will be sorely missed throughout the entire formation. His loss will not be forgotten and his legacy will continue through the outstanding performance of the Soldiers he led," said Lt. Col. Adam Camarano, 1st Battalion, 227th Aviation Regiment, 1st Air Cavalry Brigade commander.
    Hilty deployments include three tours to Afghanistan from January 2009 to December 2009, January 2012 to December 2012, October 2016 to October 2017 and most recently to Iraq in October 2019.



    Chad Garland (STARS AND STRIPES) explains:


      His death marks the seventh fatality for the coalition this year. Six occurred in March alone and all but two were combat-related.
    Army Spc. Antonio I. Moore was killed in a vehicle rollover incident in Syria on Jan. 25 while conducting route clearance operations in Deir al-Zour province.
    Marine Raiders Gunnery Sgt. Diego D. Pongo and Capt. Moises A. Navas, both 34, were killed March 8 during combat operations in northern Iraq, where a joint U.S. and Iraqi raid encountered Islamic State group militants in a well-fortified cave system.
    Days later, the rocket attack on Camp Taji killed Mendez Covarrubias, Oklahoma Air National Guard Staff Sgt. Marshal D. Roberts and British Army Lance Cpl. Brodie Gillon, a combat medic and reservist who volunteered for deployment with the Irish Guards Battle Group.

    More than a dozen others were injured in that attack, which the Pentagon blamed on an Iran-backed militia. In response, U.S. airstrikes hit several sites south of Baghdad, which the Defense Department said the militia used as weapons storage facilities.


    In other news, Robert Schroeder (MARKETWATCH) reports:

    President Donald Trump warned Iran on Wednesday against attacking U.S. troops or assets in Iraq, saying the Islamic Republic would pay a “heavy price” for such a move.

    “Upon information and belief, Iran or its proxies are planning a sneak attack on U.S. troops and/or assets in Iraq,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “If this happens, Iran will pay a very heavy price, indeed!” he said, without providing more details.


    The following sites updated: