FOR PART ONE (2016) OF THIS RETROSPECTIVE FROM INDEPENDENT VOTER SITE BALLADEER’S BLOG CLICK HERE
DON SURBER ON TRUMP’S FIRST YEAR IN OFFICE.
FACEBOOK IS FAKEBOOK. Even in 2018 Facebook’s facade was crumbling.
TRANSGRESS WITH ME: JANUARY 29th. Are you brave enough for this?
“THE PARTY’S” ATROCITY ROUNDUP. Back in 2018 the FBI’s fake Russian Collusion nonsense had already been exposed. Plus vote fraud and more.
BLOCKBUSTER DEVELOPMENTS. A CBS poll showed President Trump’s support among African-American voters more than doubling since he took office. And in the election of 2016 he got more of the African-American vote than any Republican in decades. All that and more.
ONE MAN ALONE AGAINST BOTH CORRUPT POLITICAL PARTIES. Republican trash like Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Chris Christie and all the stuffy white males at National Review continue proving President Trump’s status as a de facto Third Party President. Continue reading
JANUARY 8th, 1776 – In Charlestown, Massachusetts, British troops and American Tories were attending a performance of General John Burgoyne’s play The Blockade of Boston. The play was a farce ridiculing the supposed inadequacies of the American rebels. An unknown number of American soldiers carried out a raid on the town, panicking the theater audience, capturing 5 British soldiers and destroying 8 Tory buildings.
THE MARK OF ZORRO (1920) – Douglas Fairbanks digs into his comedic AND acrobatic skills in this first screen adaptation of Johnston McCully’s masked hero of 1820s California (The Curse of Capistrano had just been published the year before and Fairbanks bought the film rights for United Artists.)
Excellent fight choreography, heroic opposition to tyranny and the rousing, marathon chase and fight scene near the film’s finale make The Mark of Zorro an absolute must-see for anyone curious about silent movies. Nearly every frame of the film is a portrait.
As always, 

MICROMEGAS (1752) – Written by Voltaire. The famed philosopher’s contribution to the nascent science fiction genre dealt with one of the earliest known instances of beings from other planets depicted visiting the Earth. Amid the fantastic elements of the story Voltaire fits in examinations of the philosophies of Aristotle, Locke, Descartes and others.
Here at
Whether you like or hate Donald Trump is irrelevant – it became clear long ago that the cesspool of corruption which masquerades as America’s political system is targeting Trump to make a public example of any non-career politician who dares to oppose the establishment.
For this weekend’s light-hearted, escapist blog post about superheroes, Balladeer’s Blog goes back to the Justice Society of America, this country’s very first superteam. Years ago, I covered the early years of the JSA, from their first appearance in
ALL-STAR COMICS Vol 1 #28 (April 1946)
Regular readers of Balladeer’s Blog may remember that I’m a Silent Movie geek. Last time around I took a look at the magnificent film poster for Douglas Fairbanks’ Thief of Bagdad. This time around it’s posters for one of my favorite underrated Fairbanks flicks, Don Q: Son of Zorro. 

STRAIGHT TO HELL (1987) – For a glib, one sentence review of this movie, how about “Quentin Tarantino minus Quentin Tarantino equals Straight to Hell?” Though this flick came out years before Tarantino’s films it clearly influenced him and to this day it feels like a lost, inferior effort by Quentin.
Alex threw in some of his stable of regulars from his two earlier films, slapped together a script in three days (co-written by Dick Rude) and used a mere few weeks to make this oddball genre-bender in Spain.