Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) react to the arrest of Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and comic-strip artist Darrin Bell for possessing and distributing child pornography.

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Live at 10 am Eastern time today and streaming 24-7 thereafter:

Calin Georgescu, a right-wing politician from the right-wing Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) Party, won the first round of Romania’s presidential election on November 24. Shocked by the results, pro-NATO and pro-EU officials in Romania claimed that Georgescu had been boosted by TikTok and Russia, both of whom denied interfering.

Romania’s highest court annulled the results and ordered the government to rerun the election in its entirety. Georgescu denounced the vote cancellation as a “formalized coup d’etat.” The first round of the replacement election is now scheduled for May 4.

Dr. George Szamuely, senior research fellow at the Global Policy Institute, joins “The TMI Show”’s Ted Rall and Manila Chan to analyze this strange geopolitical turn in the heart of Europe.

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Never have Americans been more surveyed or tracked, a situation highlighted by airport security. We present IDs, allow our retinas to be scanned and submit to X-rays. Meanwhile, random migrants are falling out of airplane wheel wells and scrambling across our international borders. To be free, you need to be outside the system.

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Echoing President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning of a “military industrial complex” in his 1961 farewell address, President Joe Biden brought his decades-long career in politics to an end by warning of “an oligarchy [that] is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom.”

Indeed, income and wealth inequality have exploded to levels similar to those that preceded the 1789 French Revolution. “The TMI Show”’s Ted Rall and Manila Chan ask: what can or should be done to make American society and economics more equal?

Meanwhile, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire deal in the Gaza War that could send three dozen Israeli hostages home and give starving and homeless Palestinians a reprieve from more than a year of genocidal violence and wind down a 15-month war that helped destroy Biden’s presidency.

Streams live Monday-Friday 10 am Eastern time. You can watch anytime thereafter.

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The Russo-Ukrainian War has entered a new phase, in which Ukraine’s Western allies are finally acknowledging that Russia, which controls 35% of Ukrainian territory, is prevailing and will likely win in the end. Trump has signaled that the blank check of weapons and money to Kyiv is about to expire and that he wants a peace deal. Putin has responded that Russia is ready to negotiate. Zelensky says he’s willing to talk. So, will peace talks actually happen? If so, how are they likely to conclude?

A side show to the conflict has been Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk Region of Russia. Russian and allied North Korean forces have encircled the Ukrainians occupying Russia, and Ukraine has made much of the North Korean presence, though it’s not clear what their point is.

“The TMI Show”’s Ted Rall and Manila Chan check in with Mark Sleboda, international relations and security analyst, on the state of the Ukraine War.

The post TMI Show Ep 57: “North Korea Has Entered the Chat” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Although he’s purportedly less serious about it than his sabre-rattling against Greenland and Panama, Donald Trump is making dark threats against Canada, saying he wants it to become the 51st state. He should be careful! The US almost always loses its wars.

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Everyone needs access to high-quality health services, but health inequities persist. Societal attitudes among healthcare workers, advocates say, foster stigma and discrimination that discourage patients from seeking help.

Enter the “woke brigade.” In an effort to provide “culturally and linguistically-appropriate proficient health care delivery for our nation’s increasingly diverse population,” doctors, nurses and others are being trained in Cultural Sensitivity classes to use more better words.

Are Cultural Sensitivity programs effective or, as some studies have shown, can they be counterproductive and even create a hostile work environment? Are they actually a distraction from the real causes of unequal access to healthcare: poverty and health-insurance companies that routinely deny claims?

Ted Rall and Manila Chan have exclusively obtained documents from a Cultural Sensitivity program now in widespread use in a US hospital system. Join us as we explore the role of language training in a medical workplace.

The post TMI Show Ep 56: “Cultural Sensitivity for Marginalized Groups and Persons” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Rather than be followed by the expressions of sympathy and shock one might usually expect, the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York was also greeted with ridicule and even approval by a substantial portion of the public. Worried that copycat killers might take that response as a cue to replicate the alleged actions of accused shooter Luigi Mangione, CEOs and their companies are reconsidering their security measures.

With the Inauguration days away, how does this inform the security landscape for that high-profile event? Are CEOs paranoid or are they really at increased risk now? What can they and ordinary people worried about their personal security do to make themselves safer?

Ted Rall and Manila Chan ask these questions to security expert Mark Ledlow, a former US Marine and founder of Ledlow Security.

The post TMI Show Ep 55: “CEOs in the Crosshairs” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

President-Elect Donald Trump has threatened to use military force to invade and annex Greenland, which is currently a Danish colony, because he says the US needs it for vague national security reasons. It’s like the US never invades nice places anymore.

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Free speech is in the news! Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) discuss the high-profile departure of their colleague, Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist Ann Telnaes, from The Washington Post. Meta and Facebook are getting rid of their fact checkers. And TikTok is begging the Supreme Court for its life.

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            For journalists, this is the first of two occasions to discuss and evaluate the presidency of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. The second will arrive sooner rather than later, when the president dies. Long after we follow him to the grave, historians with the benefit of declassified archives and looser-lipped eyewitnesses will take their own measures of the man and his political career. So away we go with a look at…

            The Good…

            At the end of Trump’s first term, the country’s infrastructure was in woeful condition. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ annual report on the roads, water, waste treatment and schools we rely on gave it a grade “D.” 43% of roads were in miserable condition. We ranked at the bottom of the G20 most-developed economies in terms of infrastructure spending.

            The 2021 ASCE report said the U.S. needed to spend $5.9 trillion on infrastructure, $3.4 trillion of which was funded. The remaining funding gap was $2.5 trillion.

            Biden’s 2021infrastructure spending bill was the biggest and most ambitious attempt in decades to redress neglect by both Democratic and Republican presidents in the form of “deferred maintenance” and to maybe even build more. Republicans had long signaled that they were open to a bipartisan spending package. But when Biden asked for $4 trillion, they chopped it to bits. By the time he signed it into law in November 2021, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided for just $1.2 trillion.

            Still, it was impressive. Monies authorized by this legislation will replace out-of-date infrastructure, fund new projects and renovate airports and freight rail and the electrical grid and countless other categories for years to come. Ten and fifteen and twenty years from now, you’ll charge your vehicle at a facility that otherwise might not have existed and drive across a bridge that doesn’t collapse because Biden spent his political capital on pushing this bill, the outgoing president’s signature achievement, through Congress.

            …The Bad…

            Throughout Biden’s first year in office, President Vladimir Putin repeatedly warned that Russia would not tolerate Ukraine joining NATO, the anti-Russian military alliance whose members pledge to treat an attack on one as an attack on all. Putin’s warning was hardly surprising; how would the U.S. have responded to Mexico or Canada joining an anti-U.S. military alliance like the Cold War-era Warsaw Pact, creating a tense border for hundreds of miles? The U.S. invaded tiny Grenada over far less. And Russia had history to consider: when Nazi Germany invaded Russia during World War II, leaving 27 million Soviet citizens dead in their wake, they came in via Ukraine—and the Ukrainians greeted the Nazis as liberators and eagerly participated in the Holocaust.

            Gambling that Putin was bluffing, Ukraine and its Western allies told Putin to go to hell. Months later, Russia invaded Ukraine.

            Three years later, despite spending a quarter of a billion dollars on advanced weapons, many of which vanished into the country’s bottomless pit of corruption, Ukraine is losing.

            Ukraine’s ex-actor president, Volodymyr Zelensky, played Biden for a fool. Biden assured Americans that our support for Ukraine was in defense of democracy. Ukraine then banned opposition parties, arrested political opponents, censored the media, banned cable news channels that didn’t toe the line and canceled presidential and parliamentary elections indefinitely. We’ve gone to the mat for the dictator of an authoritarian kleptocracy with a serious neo-Nazi problem, and lost.

            As if one poor choice of foreign bedmates wasn’t enough, Biden pulled the extreme-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even closer following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 raid from Gaza. Like Zelensky, Bibi cashed the blank check from Biden like a drunk gambler on a bender, gleefully engaging in a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder that has killed at least 200,000 innocent Gazans and been officially declared genocide by international bodies and revered human-rights organizations.

            Before he dropped out of the presidential race, Biden’s immoral stance in favor of Israel’s bloodthirsty leaders had already hobbled his chances and alienated his party’s progressive base, which was disgusted by the carnage. Kamala Harris, his anointed successor and who echoed his unconditional support for the IDF, inherited this liability. Still worse from a historical vantagepoint, Biden’s branding as a good, decent man, wound up in the toilet.  

            Oh, and Biden didn’t try to increase the minimum wage or create the socialized healthcare system we need and want.

…and The Ugly

You probably know what I’m going to say, but here goes anyway.

Following his disastrous LBJ-style withdrawal from the race, some Democrats now allow that the 82-year-old Biden ought to have kept his implicit promise to serve a single term, to be “a bridge, not as anything else.”

They’re half-right.

As has now been undeniably established from the testimony of the staff who knew him best and as ordinary Americans experienced with dementia could plainly see from the beginning, Biden’s mental deficiencies did not begin with his catastrophic debate performance in 2024. He had “good days and bad days” back in 2020. He ought not have run in the first place.

Vain and self-deluded, and clearly not as sharp as he needed to be to make such a decision, Biden and his DNC handler-allies somehow convinced themselves that he was the only Democrat who could defeat Trump in 2020. That was almost certainly untrue. There are credible cases to be made that any number of other of his primary rivals, beginning with Bernie Sanders, could have taken out The Donald.

Even if Biden’s only-I-can-beat-him calculus could be proven to have been accurate, however, the nation, the Democratic Party and Biden himself have paid an awful price for his hubris.

There is now no denying that all the “Weekend at Bernie’s” jokes were true. White House officials and staffers, and the Washington press corps, were “hidin’ Biden” for four years in one of the most breathtaking and long-running scams ever undertaken in U.S. politics. They ran a stuffed corpse for president, got it elected, pretended it was running the government, and then, incredibly, tried to pull it off a second time. The Democratic Party, which branded itself the anti-Trump party of democracy and fair elections, pulled off a coup d’état; after they relentlessly attacked Trump for serial lying, it turns out that they were even worse. They stand exposed and ridiculous.

And what was the point? Despite all their efforts, including weaponizing the judicial system against him, Trump won anyway. Now the Democrats are weak and discredited, setting up Trump to be more dangerous than he would otherwise have been.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

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Like many Americans, TMI Show co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan have deep ties to Los Angeles. Manila grew up in metro LA and still considers herself a Californian. Ted was a talk show host at KFI AM 640 Los Angeles and the staff cartoonist at the Los Angeles Times. Join Manila and Ted as they discuss the long-term repercussions of the wildfires that continue to scorch the nation’s biggest city.

As the drought continues and the climate continues to change in a place that never had many water resources to begin with, can we adapt, or is it time to consider forcible population shifts away from California? Should the federal government assist Californians who lose multi-million dollar homes but can’t get insurance? How do we define a tipping point after which a place is no longer suitable for human habitation?

We are joined by Dr. Reese Halter, a conservation biologist and the author, most recently, of the book “Generation Z Emergency.”

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TikTok and knockoff reels on platforms like Facebook inexplicably highlight these giant subtitles of people talking. Remember when subtitles were for translations of foreign languages?

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LIVE at 10 am Eastern time today and STREAMING whenever:

Never embarrassed to be seen blowing with the political winds, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent the last four years leading Silicon Valley’s censorship-industrial complex. Facebook openly admitted throttling all political content on the grounds that users didn’t like it. It hired an advisory panel with clear ideological blind spots. Most notoriously, Facebook turned to outsourced fact checkers who decide whether or not posts get blocked and users get banned even though they rarely had any expertise in the controversies they were asked to weigh in on, and made frequent mistakes. Now, at least, Zuckerberg says the fact checkers are no more.

Co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan are joined by guest Peter Coffin to ask: is Facebook really entering the Free Speech Zone? If so, how long will it last in the second age of Trump?

The post TMI Show Ep 53: “Facebook: Now with 40% Less Censorship” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with food. We eat too much of it, and not the best kind; as high as 75% of Americans are considered obese. Yet our popular culture lionizes models and actors so painfully thin many of them suffer from anorexia. The latest attempt by the body-positivity movement to fight fat-shaming comes in the form of online “fat-fluencers,” one of whom has been hired by San Francisco as its weight stigma czar. Meanwhile, HHS nominee RFK Jr. is going after Big Food on the grounds that they’re inhibiting his drive to Make America Healthy Again.

Co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan investigate these latest developments in our national Food Fight.

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Democrats and Republicans may be polarized along tribal lines. But they share common ground on their feelings about the media, big business and the government. We hate them.

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Donald Trump, who takes office in a matter of days, defeated Kamala Harris in large part because of voter dissatisfaction over the economy. But what will his economy look like?

In many ways, this is a tale of two economies. The stock market, tech and the wealthy are doing better than ever. The working class and manufacturing are struggling. Can Trump reconcile his populist and billionaire bases? Can he keep inflation under control? Might he consider expanding the social safety net, especially for healthcare, or increase the minimum wage? What will he do as A.I. continues to kill jobs?

“The TMI Show” tries to predict the state of the US economy in the coming year. Co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan is joined by Aquiles Larrea, CEO and Founder of Larrea Wealth Management.

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We’ve been talking about the H1B visa controversy and how it may be affecting tech workers in the US, where the H1B program has prompted a 5% decline in computer science majors. Today we’re flipping the script to consider the issue from the other side: India, which supplies the vast majority of H1B visa workers to the US. Indian tech sector leaders are concerned that the program is poaching some of their best coders and developers, creating a neo-imperialist brain drain from India and other tech centers.

“The TMI Show” explores the other side of the H1B visa issue from the other side of the world with co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan and guest V K Samhith, independent game developer and the founder of BornMonkie.

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A self-radicalized member of the Islamic State drove into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing at least 15 people on New Year’s Day. Once again, we’re pondering how to deploy counterterrorism against opponents of US policy in the Middle East.

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The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) are joined by David Fitzsimmons, Cartoonist and Columnist for the Arizona Daily Star, to discuss David’s role as a Democratic activist and the future of the Democratic Party following Biden’s dropping out of the race and the defeat of Kamala Harris.

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