around the web

Benjamin Studebaker has a post on "media bias charts" that cling to conventional notions of left/right and rate journalists according to that outdated scale. Studebaker proposes lumping everything that is considered acceptable left and right by these pundits into a single box -- liberal, meaning essentially establishment liberal (pro war, pro "markets") -- while creating new boxes for the anti-establishment left and right:

In the process of coming up with the chart above, he formulated and discarded the chart below (minus the red ink):

This is actually a more helpful chart because it allows for a far center, which has been added in red.
The far center is who got it right on Russiagate (including voices from the right and left). New Right is used instead of Alt-Right because the latter is a Clinton term. Mostly the far center agrees that (i) the military/contractor sector is sucking the life out of the US and (ii) bank bailouts are a mistake. Where they disagree is on (A) government intervention in markets and infrastructure (left says we need more of it; right says less); (B) race/identity (the far center is more likely to be skeptical of shaming and language policing than the bulk of the anti-establishment left while at the same time scoffing at claims of white superiority); and (C) fiscal/monetary issues (e.g., whether printing money is OK to address social problems or whether it always, necessarily "leads to inflation").

Now that DC hack Mueller says he has nothing on the supposed Russian collusion that supposedly lost Clinton the election, am waiting for those emails from friends and former friends saying, "Damn, Tom, you called it right two years ago." Meanwhile, I-told-you-sos from other shot callers have been mounting up:

Rob Urie (probably the best and most heartfelt):

The Clinton campaign’s decision to blame her electoral loss on Russian interference demonstrates why she was, and still is, unqualified to hold elected office. In the first, the U.S. – Russian rivalry is backed-up by hair-trigger nuclear arsenals that could end the world in a matter of minutes. Inciting tensions based on self-serving lies is stunningly reckless. In the second, the claim demonstrates utter contempt for her most loyal followers by feeding them purposely misleading explanations of the loss. And most damagingly for political opponents of Donald Trump, these actions give credence to the insurgent status of his retro-Republicanism against liberal and left defenders of the political establishment.

Most damaging to the burgeoning left in the U.S. is the deeply ugly character assassination of poor and working-class voters carried out by the urban bourgeois, many from the self-described radical left. People I know and like, but with whom I disagree politically but am working hard to convert, have spent the last three years being derided as traitorous, marginally literate hicks too stupid to know they are pawns of the Kremlin. The irony, if you care to call it that, is that they knew the Russian interference story was cynical bullshit all along while the graduate degree crowd was following every twist and turn as if it were true knowledge.

Matt Taibbi

Aaron Maté (video)

C.J. Hopkins

Bernard

Caitlin Johnstone

Jimmy Dore videos (humorous gloating) 1 / 2 (Rachel Maddow) / 3 (laughing at Keith Olbermann rants)

Max Blumenthal's magazine Grayzone opines on the latest box office junk:

Captain Marvel was marketed as a feminist blockbuster, a rare superhero movie featuring a female lead...
As is so often the case in Hollywood, however, ostensibly progressive breakthroughs in cultural representation were seamlessly blended with US militarist propaganda.

The essay describes how the Defense Dept. participated in making the film and how the script shills for Empire. As long as identity boxes are being checked none of this is supposed to matter. Sounds horrible.