9/20/2022

'the cleaning lady' returns with new episodes


'the cleaning lady' had its 2nd season premiere on 'fox' last night.  it was a lot to absorb.  

arman is still in prison - he was going in on the last episode of last season.  his wife nadia is freaking out because she hasn't heard from thony (the cleaning lady).  arman gave thony the crypto currency.  nadia needs money to pay off the judge so arman can get out before his boss hayak figures out that arman betrayed him.  

thony is freaking out because, her last scene last season, luka is gone.  luka is her son and her husband marco - her worthless husband marco - has kidnapped him and plans to take him out of the country.

she doesn't know what to do, so she calls f.b.i. guy garrett.  he helps her go to an airport but when they arrive and she screams for luka who screams back, marco manages to escape.

fiona (thony's sister-in-law) is worried that marco isn't being treated fairly.  she's also afraid that the plan she and thony had to cut out some of the crypto currency for themselves  

thony goes to the prison to meet arman.  he tells her nadia's insane with worry.  she thinks thony skipped off with the money.  she promises to answer nadia's calls and to pull the money so that they can get arman out of prison.

but ...  hayak is starting to suspect something.

and a crooked guard lets him know that garrett visited arman and arman has cut a deal.

hayak has arman tossed into general population.

thony and fiona are getting money out when it stops working.

garrett caught on to what was going on with the currency but doesn't know who's behind it.

meanwhile marco calls thony and tells her to come to a motel alone.

fiona and chris (fiona's son) insist upon going with thony.

they all talk outside on the landing while luka sleeps in the room - he can be seen through the window.  chris says he's going in to talk to luka and marco starts shoving.  chris shoves back and marco falls.

thony goes to him and he's dead.  she tells fi and chris to get out of there and she starts wiping down the railing.  she takes off marco's wedding ring (to make it look like a robbery) and she takes his cash as well as her credit card (he stole her credit card when he kidnapped luka).  and she's ready to go.

when she looks over at the motel's office and notes for the 1st time that someone's watching.

she goes over and tells the man that a man on the stairwell is dead and he needs to call the police.  he hands her the phone and says she found the body, she should make the call.  she says she's undocumented and if she does it, she'll be deported.

he makes the call.

she watches from a distance until garrett calls her to tell her that her husband marco is dead and that they've found luka.

then she goes back to the motel.

armen is attacked by two goons paid off by hayak.  one has a shiv.  armen defeats both (believe he killed them both) but he's bleeding.

garrett takes fiona to identify the body and then brings luka to her ... as the motel guy watches.

armen's taken to the prison hospital (or maybe a non-prison hospital) and is bleeding.  

it was a fast moving season opener.  on the coming attractions at the end, we find out that the motel guy is going to blackmail thony.  we might have found out then - or earlier - but he also has video tape of the whole thing, them arguing with marco, chris pushing him, all from the security cameras. 


let's close with c.i.'s 'Iraq snapshot:'


 Tuesday, September 20, 2022.  Joe Biden piles on the make up for a 60 MINUTES fluff job, as Iraq still fails to form a government climate change gets worse, and much more.


Scott Pelley slobbered over Joe Biden on 60 MINUTES Sunday.  He was full of nonsense and lies.  He started off bragging about Joe giving us cheaper drugs prices.  When, Pelley?  If it happens -- if -- it won't be until 2025.  Scott's a nasty little whore, riddled with diseases.  He's spent over 30 years repeatedly failing at CBS NEWS but at least they finally learned how to shoot that huge forehead so he doesn't look like he just stepped off the set of MARS ATTACKS!



You shouldn't comment on the interview without first noting that outside of an aging drag queen, no man Joe's age has ever worn so much make up.

They pretend to discuss the economy.  They don't.  Pelley doesn't ask about the US military needing to go on food stamps under Joe, for example.  They don't deal with reality at all, just Joe's elderly delusions.


At WSWS, Joseph Scalice notes:


In the space of 25 minutes, Biden made a series of extraordinary statements. He declared that the COVID-19 pandemic was “over”; announced his “ironclad commitment” to backing war against Russia, while acknowledging this contained the possibility of nuclear war; and pledged US forces to a possible war with China.

It has been over 200 days since Biden last sat down for an interview with a television journalist. Much has changed. The US and NATO provoked war with Russia in Ukraine and have escalated the conflict with massive tranches of military aid and direct involvement, overseeing and planning the movement of troops and the targeting of missiles. The eastern and southern portions of Ukraine invaded by Russia have become the concentrated site of an expanding third world war.  

Mass inflation has gripped the globe. The prices of basic necessities have soared beyond the reach of the working class. Workers in Europe face the prospect of a freezing winter, unable to afford heat; workers in the United States struggle to pay rent. The stock market is turbulent, and its future looks grim. Most significantly, the struggles of the working class against capitalism are coming into the open, are growing rapidly and are taking an increasingly political form.

American capitalism is at war with reality, and nowhere is this more openly embodied than in its President Joe Biden. He acknowledged the gravity of the situation declaring, “This is a really difficult time. We’re at an inflection point in the history of this country.” At the same time, and without any justification, Biden announced, “I’m more optimistic than I’ve been in a long time.”

The American ruling class’s delusions and its grotesque indifference to the lives of workers was summed up in Biden’s statement on the pandemic. One million Americans had died. Biden pulled a long face at this but declared, “The pandemic is over ... the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.”

The 1 million COVID-19 deaths in the United States were, in their overwhelming majority, preventable. Biden, like his predecessor Trump, would take none of the necessary public health measures to isolate the virus and prevent its spread. Such measures threatened the profits of American businesses. America led the ruling classes of the world in embracing the pandemic and accepting mass death.

Now, as 3,000 Americans die of COVID-19 every week, Biden declares the pandemic is over. He celebrates the fact, the direct result of his own criminal policies, that people are not wearing masks. The death and infection rate data can no longer be considered reliable. The dead and infected, those suffering the terrible consequences of Long COVID, are being shoved into the ranks of the countless uncounted, and the pandemic declared to be at an end.

Biden’s statement, “Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape,” erases the experience of millions of people with Long COVID. According to a recent report from the Brookings Institution, roughly 4 million people suffering from Long COVID have left the workforce.

The extraordinary statement that “the pandemic is over”—which can be compared to George W. Bush’s infamous “mission accomplished” speech in the initial phases of the Iraq war—also ignores the ongoing and persistent danger of viral evolution. Recent studies indicate that new, highly mutated variants of COVID-19 appear almost every week, with increasing immune-escape potential. 

Trina also called out the nonsense of the pandemic is over and contrasts that with the prospect in the UK where they are bracing for a "twindemic" -- where COVID 19 and the flu create a combined health crisis.  Joe is not fit to be president.  Kenny Stancil (COMMON DREAMS) observes:

President Joe Biden's fresh assertion that "the pandemic is over"—a claim made as Covid-19 kills roughly 3,000 people each week in the U.S. alone—is being criticized by progressive commentators and medical experts who argue that such "false declarations" undermine support for public health measures and bolster the GOP's effort to nix funding for vaccines, tests, and treatments.

"We still have a problem with Covid," Biden acknowledged in a "60 Minutes" interview aired on Sunday night. "We're still doing a lotta work on it."

"But the pandemic is over," the president added. "If you notice, no one's wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it's changing."

According to artist and writer Artie Vierkant, it's difficult to think of a clearer example of "the sociological production of the end of the pandemic" than the exchange between Biden and CBS' Scott Pelley, which took place last week during Detroit's first annual auto show since 2019.

A right-wing judge appointed by former President Donald Trump struck down the federal mask mandate for public transportation in April, but as MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan pointed out Sunday, another key reason why most Americans have foregone masks in nearly all settings is "because people like Biden keep (falsely) telling them the pandemic is over."

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at George Washington University, asked on social media, "How do you convince Americans to get boosted again when the president declares the Covid pandemic 'is over'?"

The U.S. already has one of the lowest Covid-19 vaccination rates among high-income countries, and booster uptake has been especially low. While pervasive right-wing anti-science campaigns are certainly to blame, so too is the nation's deadly for-profit healthcare model as well as mixed messaging that downplays the pandemic.

Coronavirus mortality in the U.S. has decreased substantially since early in Biden's term when more than 3,000 people were dying every day. That decline is inseparable from the increased availability of vaccines, tests, and treatments made possible by robust government funding.

But roughly 400 people around the country continue to die from Covid-19 each day, tens of thousands are hospitalized, transmission remains high, and the White House is bracing for a potential surge in infections this fall—as money to address the ongoing crisis is drying up with no replenishments in sight.

"What's ending here," tweeted University of Washington medical anthropologist Nora Kenworthy, "is political commitment and funding, not cases or deaths."


Walter Bragman Tweets:


Joe Biden has presided over more preventable COVID deaths than his predecessor precisely because he engaged in this kind of denial… No, I am sorry to say that COVID is not over.

CBC's Katie Simpson Tweets:


Public health experts warn there will be more COVID variants to come, and that President Joe Biden’s claim the pandemic is over is premature. We spoke with
@PeterHotez
who worries the President’s words could hurt vaccination efforts.
youtube.com
Biden says ‘pandemic is over,’ but medical experts disagree
U.S. President Joe Biden is facing criticism from medical experts for saying the 'pandemic is over' during a wide-ranging interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes, give...


The corupt governments always mislead and harm the people.  Alannah Travers (ALJAZEERA) reports:


“The government doesn’t care, they are useless, and political parties are fighting for power for themselves,” said Nada, aged 27, over a coffee in Baghdad’s Karrada district, reflecting on the past few tumultuous weeks – and years – of Iraq’s political crisis. “We have nothing to lose any more,” she added, referring to youth-led demonstrations. “We need to be braver … we need to wake up, no one speaks for us anyway.”

A part-time volunteer for autistic children, Nada’s view was shared by the other young activists around the table on the top floor of a smoke-filled cafe.

The group is discussing plans to mark the second anniversary of Iraq’s Tishreen protest movement, and how best to fix Iraq’s deep-seated political malaise after some of the deadliest clashes Iraq has seen in years took place in Baghdad at the end of August.

“Tishreen will be back even bigger soon, I promise you,” Nada said confidently. On the opposite end of the table, two men in their early thirties shake their heads at plans to demonstrate on the same scale. “We have lost too many friends to try again,” one of them, Rami, said. “Maybe in a few years.”

“I feel lost – like all Iraqi people – we don’t know what our future will be, not even the coming days,” 26-year-old Muser chips in. “Everything is on the edge,” he says as he describes a conversation on his way to our meeting place. “Even the taxi drivers are tense, asking if there will be a solution or a civil war… Iraqis are worried and tired.”

Many young Iraqis feel they have no say in the direction of their country’s future.

Exhausted by Iraq’s ongoing political drama, and raised alongside a series of deeply traumatic events, they are caught in the middle of vying political groups and militias that they say do not represent them.


The failed state of Iraq.  October 10th, elections were held.  All this time later, no president, no prime minister.  20 days away from a full year since people turned out to vote.  A corrupt state, a failed state. RUDAW reports:


 There is a possibility for the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) to present a joint candidate in the Iraqi parliament, a KDP official told Rudaw on Monday.

“The atmosphere between the KDP and PUK is very good and they may enter the [next] parliamentary session with a single common candidate,” Bangin Rekani, a member of the KDP’s negotiating team in Baghdad told Rudaw’s Sangar Abdulrahman, adding that the atmosphere between the two Kurdish parties is “very good.”

Rekani believes that the existing “minor” issues between both parties can be resolved if a meeting occurs between KDP Vice President Nechirvan Barzani and PUK head Bafel Talabani.

Talabani conveyed to the KDP his intention of agreeing on a joint candidate for parliament, according to the KDP official.


As the government dithers, Iraq loses more and more each day.  PHYSORG notes:


It was the river that is said to have watered the biblical Garden of Eden and helped give birth to civilisation itself.                                                        

But today the Tigris is dying.

Human activity and climate change have choked its once mighty flow through Iraq, where—with its twin river the Euphrates—it made Mesopotamia a cradle of civilisation thousands of years ago.

Iraq may be oil-rich but the country is plagued by poverty after decades of war and by droughts and desertification.

Battered by one natural disaster after another, it is one of the five countries most exposed to climate change, according to the UN.

From April on, temperatures exceed 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) and intense sandstorms often turn the sky orange, covering the country in a film of dust.

Hellish summers see the mercury top a blistering 50 degrees Celsius—near the limit of human endurance—with frequent power cuts shutting down air-conditioning for millions.

The Tigris, the lifeline connecting the storied cities of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, has been choked by dams, most of them upstream in Turkey, and falling rainfall.                                      


Iraq is suffering from climate change.




Let's wrap up with Margaret Kimberley.






The following sites updated:





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