The western capitalist democracies like to blame the current economic problems plaguing the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela on its socialist system and that would be totally inaccurate, after all there are many other practicing socialist societies that are quite successful in the twenty-first century. Venezuela has the world’s largest known oil reserves and has been one of the world’s leading exporters of that oil, so, what is the problem there, and that my friend is mismanagement, and the once reliance on a one market commodity economy, oil. So, if Venezuela had diversified into other commodities when oil prices were high, so that when oil prices fall and it will and did a living of sort, trading in other commodities could have held the country together at least till oil prices rise again and it surely will again someday. Will a country called Venezuela still be in existence or will a cataclysmic event, that currently looks like it will be man-made turn the country into something else that cannot be even imagined now, only time can tell…?

After watching Kellyanne Conway, the administrations spin doctor on the Sunday morning political chat shows it becomes quite clear as to why this President has not conducted a full-fledged solo news conference recently, he just doesn’t have the spin skills to do so. The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, has no idea on any given day just what’s the President’s thinking past or present on any given issue of the day…so, here we are, the American people stuck in a kind of nowhere land of who knows what…

After the Cuban Missile Crisis many stories became known, among my favorites is this one, a special envoy representing the President of the United States was dispatched to several key embassies around Washington, DC, to explain the administration’s position ahead of any rumors. In almost each case the envoy offered photographic proof of the missiles being installed on the island of Cuba, and almost to a person, the offer was rejected, the reasoning stated, if the President says it, was enough, the word of this American president, John F. Kennedy, as we now know, was no known saint, but who’s word was as good a gold, setting the Presidential standard for many years to come, at least in the eyes of some, until the war in Vietnam, but that’s a story for another posting. If the President says it, it must be true, today, not so much, if ever it was…

Washington Week, Friday’s on PBS.org, is just another political television chat show in a long line of having been ruined by banners, such as the subject under discussion appearing on the screen, there are just somethings that I, the viewer would like to discover for myself without having to read a banner. The only information that is appreciated on the screen to be read are the nameplates of the reporters, anything else is a distraction and totally unnecessary…so, I have taken to treating Washington Week as a radio program, not television, that is the only way to be able to drain the full essences of the broadcast and not spend any brain processing energy on reading…On the 03/24/2017 broadcast, hard to believe not a single gray hair could be found, was that by design? And oh yes, fifty years of Washington Week, save it for the programing biographic profile, every week, is just purely excessive…to the station and network managers, I hope I have not hurt anyone’s feelings…

While the United States wallow in its narrow ‘America First’ mud, four eastern European Union leaders along with the French President Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel take on the leadership of the free world. As for the British who are laboring at home with Brexit, the vacuum is being filled with more wiser and more accommodating forces. Don’t look now America, the world is passing you by. This morning at a European Union summit, the Visegrad Four as the East European states are called, have agreed to set up an expert level group to narrow differences between France, Germany and everyone else trading in Europe and to lessen the harsh treatment of refugees and migrants throughout the continent advising the United States only later as a courtesy…

Concerning the ‘breaking news’ banner that’s chronically used on all cable news outlets, yesterday, on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, it was used throughout with reference to the Presidents taping of conversations related to the firing of James Comey which was admitted to as not existing even though the story at the time of this broadcast broke hours ago, all news is ‘breaking news’ to someone who hasn’t heard it before. After all, like the Jimmy Buffett-Alan Jackson record, time to leave work because it’s ‘five o’clock somewhere’. It seems that the ‘breaking news’ banner is used to add some urgency to a story even when there is none and may have been percolating for hours in the news sphere. The breaking news banner produces one thing that all cable news outlets seem to love and that is screen clutter, the more the better, the producers have never heard of the concept, or so it may seem, of a simple clean screen so that whatever the story that is being reported can be clearly and better understood, add a news crawl and the poor viewer is left with story and image load, just how many of them can the human mind process with any meaningful comprehension and take away, at some point it all can seem like gibberish in addition to more like a lot of audio cross talk.

America finds itself once again ‘between a rock and a hard place’, with a problem that seems to defy a satisfactory solution concerning comprehensive health care for all, for all except the well off, as for the rest of us, well that’s another question, that can only be answered by the one and only Dr. Howard Dean; so, where are you? Dr. Dean?

Howard Brush Dean III (born November 17, 1948) is an American politician who served as the 79th Governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2003 and Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) from 2005 to 2009. Dean was a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2004 presidential election. His implementation of the fifty-state strategy as head of the DNC is credited with the Democratic victories in the 2006 and 2008 election years. Afterward, he became a political commentator and consultant to McKenna Long & Aldridge, a law and lobbying firm.
Wikipedia, 06/22/2017