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america — centre of fantasies and cardboard cartoon heroes fuelling political delusions....

Kamala Harris is a self-confessd super-fan of The Simpsons, writes Michael Idato/SMH.

For the almost 200,000 people who will pass through its gates, the annual San Diego Comic-Con offers the entire alphabet of pop culture, from Captain America to Dragon Ball Z.

But this year the crowd had their eyes on one thing: Deadpool & Wolverine, the Marvel blockbuster which stars Ryan Reynolds and Australian actor Hugh Jackman as the unlikely lads of the superhero world.

While Reynolds, Jackman and director Shawn Levy were chatting up thousands of fans at the annual convention, the film itself was surfing the wave of publicity into one of the biggest box office openings in US history and the biggest ever for an R-rated film, pulling close to $US200 million ($305 million) over the weekend.

The success of Deadpool & Wolverine will be good news at Disney, which owns the Marvel brand, coming off the back of a couple of stumbles, including an expensive TV adaptation of She-Hulk which generated little buzz, and a Captain Marvel sequel, The Marvels, which was a box office failure.

Appearing on stage at Comic-Con in the convention’s biggest auditorium, Hall H, Jackman recalled being at Comic-Con with Reynolds when the first footage of the first Deadpool film was screened, before its 2016 release.

‘‘I was standing just over there, I watched the footage and there was this chant that started up, one more time, one more time,’’ Jackman said. ‘‘I ran backstage, and I found that the stage manager, and I said, play the footage again, if you don’t play the f--king footage again, they are going to tear Hall H to the ground.’’

Perhaps the biggest surprise was a virtual appearance at The Simpsons panel by US vicepresident Kamala Harris, who was introduced by creator Matt Groening as a ‘‘superfan’’ of the show.

‘‘We must move forward, not backward, upward, not downward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom,’’ Harris said, quoting a line from a 1996 episode of The Simpsons in which aliens Kang and Kodos impersonate then-President Bill Clinton and presidential candidate Bob Dole on the campaign trail, to rapturous applause.

This year’s Comic-Con - a fourday event which is something of the granddaddy of all Comic-Cons - is a business as usual event, coming off the back of cancellations and closures related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the writers and actors strikes.

If you needed to take the temperature of the film and TV business, which by any measure are still suffering following the strikes, and struggling to fire up production, Comic-Con would tell you that things are looking good.

San Diego’s Gaslamp district, where the convention is staged, is crammed with fans, and the convention halls are packed. Every corner you turn, you find a passing parade of home-made Batmen, Wonder Women, Spidermen, Catwomen and the weekend’s stars, Deadpools and Wolverines.

Amazon Prime Video dropped a Comic-Con exclusive trailer for the second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power that became one of the convention’s biggest announcements.

‘‘Sauron is afoot,’’ the show’s coshowrunner J.D. Payne told the fans in Hall H. For the uninitiated, Sauron is the villain of The Lord of the Rings story; the Rings of Power is, to some extent, his origin story.

‘‘There’s trouble, there’s danger, there’s death and battle,’’ Payne said. There’s also a lot more of the iconic future elf-queen Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), the dashing and diplomatic Elrond (Robert Aramayo), the boisterous

dwarven prince Durin (Owain Arthur) and, of course, the star of the season, the sinister but charming Sauron (Charlie Vickers).

Another major announcement was that Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan is joining the BBC’s Doctor Who. Coughlan, who plays Penelope Featherington in Bridgerton, will play a character named Joy in the Doctor Who Christmas special.

The character was described by Coughlan as ‘‘a determined woman whose life is forever changed when she meets the Doctor’’ in a sequence filmed secretly in the UK and played to the Hall H crowd. The convention was also treated to a sneak preview of the special, which seems to connect Manchester in 1940, Mount Everest in 1953, the Orient Express in Italy in 1962 and present-day London.

The BBC and Disney also announced a Doctor Who spin-off from Russell T. Davies and Australian screenwriter Pete McTighe titled The War Between The Land and the Sea. The series will explore a clash between humanity and the Sea Devils, a race of ancient, ocean-dwelling creatures who first appeared in Doctor Who in 1972, where they did battle with The Doctor, when he was played by legendary actor Jon Pertwee.

Meanwhile, plans to launch the HBO series The Penguin, which will star actor Colin Farrell as the iconic Batman-universe villain, almost went up in smoke when a fire broke out in the building hosting an ‘‘activation’’ for the series, a re-creation of the seedy criminal hang-out the Iceberg Lounge, which was first seen in the 2022 film The Batman.

During a media preview of the activation there was a fire in the kitchen of a restaurant in the same building, sending plumes of thick smoke into the San Diego sky and forcing the evacuation of media, studio executives, staff and members of the public, who were in a staging area adjacent to the entrance.

The San Diego Police Department confirmed that a three-alarm fire was sounded. In the US, fires are rated at up to fivealarms; a five-alarm fire is the worst-case scenario.

The streets surrounding the Penguin event were closed for hours, until emergency services had vented the building.

THE SMH, JULY 29, 2024....

running amerika....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZpsjyOv8Xw

Who's going to solve these world-threatening international crises?

Who’s running America? Because it isn’t Genocide Joe or Cackling Kamala - when the biggest war of them all is threatening to break out on top of oil and gas fields....

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc13j4GoIRQ

Warmongers wrapped in green clothes

GUSNOTE: SAME WITH THE DEMOCRATS IN AMERIKA....

 

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political extortion....

 

No Primaries, No Alternatives, No Scrutiny: ‘Anti-Democracy’ Reigns In US

 

BY Ian DeMartino

 

On July 21, US President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection. The announcement came after Democratic primary voting had completed, leaving Democratic voters with no say in the party’s nominee. Meanwhile, third-party candidates are being stonewalled at every turn and the media pretends this is all normal.

The American electoral process has degraded into a shambling shell of its former self, propped up with vapid, slick and committee-tested PR campaigns rather than debate. Over the past week, with the tickets of the two major parties all but finalized, the media can not bring themselves to ask a substantive question of either person likely to sit in the White House in less than six months.

“My question is,” YouTube personality and WWE United States Champion Logan Paul asked former US President and Republican nominee Donald Trump, “for other young people in this country who are looking to get ahead, cause for a lot of them, times are tough right now. What would you say to them, kids who want to pursue their own version of the American dream and try to achieve their wildest dreams?”

Trump answered that young people should vote for him.

Meanwhile, Harris sat down for a non-televised interview with People, which asked her about her relationship with her husband, how much sleep she gets and her favorite nickname (“Momala” as it turns out) but not any policy positions on the economy, immigration, Ukraine or Gaza.

Even Paul and his "Impaulsive" co-host Mike Majlak had the good sense to ask Trump about those topics, even if they didn't challenge him on them.

This is what passes for scrutiny in American politics. Worse, the incumbent president’s party all but refused to hold a primary. Then Biden suddenly resigned from the campaign after weeks of refusing to and his vice president was anointed the new nominee without receiving a single vote. On Saturday, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reported that Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama threatened to invoke the 25th amendment and force Biden out of office if he did not drop his reelection campaign.

“The lords of capital decided that he had to go and, in fact, they made it quite clear he had to go because they said that not only would they stop contributing to his campaign, but they told the DNC get rid of Joe Biden or don't expect any financial support for any Democrat candidate down ballot,” argued political activist and the 2016 Green Party Vice Presidential nominee Ajamu Sibeko Baraka on Sputnik’s Political Misfits. “This is clear elite extortion."

“So, this was, in fact, a coup. A coup by the donors and we need to deal with that in that way because it exposes the true nature of this anti-democratic process we have in this country. So, people [who] are committed to democracy, [who] would like to see something that approximates democracy. You can't continue to support these two anti-democratic parties. That's a very important point,” he added.

To shore up the perception of support, the Harris campaign hosted a series of Zoom calls, bizarrely segregated by race and gender. Black Men for Harris came first, then Black Women for Harris. Then White Women for Harris and finally, White Dudes for Harris.

“It is sort of a silly Zoom call,” said Baraka. “But it does reflect the kind of identity reductionist policies we have in this country.” 

“I mean, why are people supporting Harris? Based on what? What policies? There’s no serious political conversation taking place. This is just a very slick PR process that, again, has been engineered by the same elements that got rid of Joe Biden.”

On the other side of the aisle, things were only slightly more democratic. The Republicans actually held debates, though the only candidate anyone really cared about didn’t participate. In a healthy democracy, Trump’s refusal to face Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley and the rest would have been seen as a sign of arrogance–if not fear– in a healthy democracy. This year, few seemed to care.

When the most democratic thing you can say about the two-party system is that one of the parties’ candidates received actual votes in the primary, and that's the party that is accused of trying to end democracy, it is clear things have gone off the rails.

As the Democratic party argued in court after being sued for allegedly rigging the 2016 primaries in favor of Hillary Clinton, the two-party system is not technically part of the government, and are free to run their primary process however they like, even picking a candidate no one voted for, as they have done with Harris.

But in the media, and even in some classrooms, the US system of politics is often described as a two-party system and the two parties make sure it stays that way.

In 1992, Reform Party candidate Ross Perot led both Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush in the polls after a strong debate performance. His campaign sank after he inexplicably dropped out in the summer before reentering right before the election. Perot claimed the GOP blackmailed him with doctored pictures of his daughter but the accusation was never seriously investigated. The close call nevertheless scared the two parties enough that they worked to make sure it would never happen again.

After the ‘92 campaign, the Commission of Presidential Debates, which touts its “bipartisanship” because it is staffed with Republicans and Democrats, increased the requirements for third-party candidates, increasing the national poll numbers a candidate needs to qualify from 5% to 15%.

That Perot did not reach 15% until after he appeared on the debate stage with Clinton and Bush was not lost on the Perot campaign, which ran a series of ads in 1996 decrying the decision to no avail. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was virtually impossible for a candidate to achieve those numbers without the assistance of the media.

As the internet has grown and surpassed traditional media in importance, that began to change. Early in this election cycle, it looked like Independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr might come close to reaching the 15% required to earn a spot on the debate stage. Perhaps not coincidentally, the two parties dropped the debate commission entirely and partnered with media outlets to devise a new set of requirements that Kennedy and other alternative candidates had no chance of reaching.

“This was the entity that was supposed to be managing the debate process for the candidates, for the parties. But that was a process in which, even though it was a difficult one, that third parties could participate,” explained Baraka. “But they decided that they weren’t going to have any possibility of third party participation. And so, they abandoned that process and developed a relationship between the parties and the news media, and [so it’s] also reflective of the anti-democratic character.”

Earlier this month, Sputnik reported that the US Treasury halted funds awarded by the FEC to the campaign for Green Party candidate Jill Stein after the campaign hit the required milestones.

“This, again, is another reflection of the poverty of politics in this country,” Baraka said, noting that the Democrats have been suing to get Green candidates off the ballot in many states.

In March, the New York Times reported that Democrats were preparing an “aggressive counter” to “third-party threats,” writing that “[c]onventional wisdom within the Democratic Party now is that any vote not for Mr. Biden benefits Mr. Trump, and there are concerns that giving people more choices on the ballot is more likely to hurt Mr. Biden.”

Now, presumably, it must be that any vote not for Harris benefits Trump, and no one outside of the leadership of the DNC had any say in it.

“These are all examples of why the struggle has to be in this country, to redefine what real democracy is and have people prepared to struggle for them and not fall prey to this appeal to a lesser of two evils that is backward, reactionary, anti-democratic and profoundly dangerous,” concluded Baraka.

 

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240731/no-primaries-no-alternatives-no-scrutiny-anti-democracy-reigns-in-us-1119571814.html

 

 

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