Politics

A Boomer Punches Back

It’s been said that public discourse in America has deteriorated to the point where people aren’t able to agree even upon basic verifiable facts. And, of course, that’s due mostly to politics and political viewpoints. But an idea put forth by Bret Weinstein in a recent podcast suggests that this is a new and even historic development that signals a turning away from a core principle of the Enlightenment. That core principle would be logic.

As Weinstein’s thinking goes, when people can’t agree on basic facts then logic goes out the window as we can no longer apply logic to any question or issue we humans face.

So, for instance, I consider it to be a basic fact that a decline in Joe Biden’s mental capacity, his mental energy, all the things that become ‘at issue’ for so many of our elderly citizens at some point in their later years, is evident now with the president.

I’m not going to say what it is specifically that leads me to that conclusion. Because, for me, none of it needs to be stated. It’s simply an obvious observable reality.

The point here being that no matter what specifics are presented, enough of us will invariably continue to claim not to see the president’s mental decline and, for purely reasons of political affiliation, refuse to admit that it’s happening at all, with the end result being that those on either side of the political chasm can no longer move forward together in reality.

My own political affiliation until the last few years has been Democrat. But I now see my party as being the more powerful half of the duopoly that controls our entire political system. And our American duopoly is an essential tool of a frightening global elite that has been consolidating its control over western nations for decades now.

And so I’ve come to believe that the only answer to this situation and maybe our last hope to break the grip that our party and the duopoly and the globalist forces have on our country is to elect Robert F. Kennedy Jr. president.

RFK Jr. has articulated, and continues to speak to, the realities facing Americans, as well as the profound changes to American lives that have been wrought by a predatory elite now for many decades. And he’s doing so in an election year when no other candidate is even remotely speaking to these same concerns.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, is in an obvious state of physical and mental decline. And the nation he presides over is in a state of social and economic decline. Are these facts or just opinions? Can words and their meanings be used and manipulated to deflect from what seem to be basic observable realities?

I would consider all of these statements to be irrefutable facts.

We know, however, that there are many who would disagree. But as Bret Weinstein has suggested, we are living in an era wherein even highly intelligent and educated people are not in agreement about what would seem to be basic and easily observable facts.

So I might suggest that the quality of life in this country has deteriorated greatly over the last half century for all but the more affluent who live in the most affluent regions of the country.

I would offer that the working and lower middle classes have been bled dry by the affluent through decades of wage stagnation, loss of health benefits, the busting of unions, and the disappearance of complete employment sectors of the economy accompanied by a simultaneous ever-increasing cost of living.

But somehow this perspective has come to be disputed by those who say it is merely the tendency of older Americans to look back at past eras in their lives through rose-colored glasses.

This is a very common claim that has evolved into powerful politically weaponized propaganda.

We’ve all heard it. It asserts that our recollection of how this country used to be is simply boomer nostalgia. Just a vague longing for a better past that never actually existed. Not good for minorities or gay people. It ignores our nation’s darker past. Kind of racist, actually. At the very least, not to be taken seriously. Just poor old codgers who are incapable of remembering the past accurately.

So, for instance, it would follow that I’m simply not remembering accurately being hired into the steel mill in 1977 at $5.29 an hour (which is about $25 an hour today) with full benefits like comprehensive medical and dental insurance and two weeks paid vacation.

I’m not actually recalling correctly being a member of one of the most powerful labor unions in American history, the United Steelworkers of America. I guess I should finally just accept the fact that none of these very significant moments in my life ever really happened.

So I must also be misremembering my thriving hometown of Aliquippa, PA, you know, actually thriving.

The teaming downtown full of locally owned businesses. A ballpark with stadium lighting and, in the summer, softball leagues of grown men playing under those lights till long after dark. The Sheffield Lanes filled with bowling leagues every night of the week, just like every other bowling alley in every surrounding rust belt state. The packed bars everywhere. The parades down Main St. or through downtown. The annual 4th of July celebrations and fireworks. Neighbors sitting on each other’s front porches all summer long. The yearly Italian San Rocco Festival attended by thousands. The incredible ethnic diversity of the entire region.

So it would also naturally follow that I simply don’t remember correctly working in the mill with almost as many blacks as whites.

I’m somehow misremembering how almost right out of high school anyone hired into the mill was able to buy a house. As RFK Jr. has accurately stated, there was a time when you could get married, have kids, buy a new car every few years, take your family on vacations, all on one salary. And no matter how many children you chose to have, they all enjoyed full comprehensive health and dental coverage, quite unlike the restrictive health insurance plans we have today.

The full-employment Aliquippa I remember was not a wealthy place, but it was a place where very few suffered the kind of financial insecurities that are so common today.

Today, in a bleak contrast to the past as I remember it, the blue-collar unionized working-class manufacturing base in this country has been replaced by low-wage non-union service jobs and a gig employment economy with neither providing health insurance or other benefits once enjoyed by vast sectors of the American workforce.

Some have said that, starting out in life, without a college education, it’s perfectly fitting that people should be employed at low wage fast food jobs and that they should simply work their way up to better higher paying jobs as they get older. Okay. Fair enough. People are entitled to their own opinions.

But remember, we’re talking now about whether or not they are entitled to their own facts.

In a past we boomers are now told never existed, people like me were hired into high-paying union manufacturing jobs right out of high school and could get on with our lives being financially responsible individuals who could, in short order, get married, own a home, and raise a family.

That simply is not the current reality in America today and no one in this country with any credibility at all would dare suggest that it is.

The countless towns and small cities like Aliquippa all across the country with thriving and safe streets full of locally owned small businesses provided Americans with something we might call COMMUNITY. I come from one of those communities. One of so many. Like countless others in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri and on and on.

Today, most of downtown Aliquippa has been bulldozed. The thriving community it once was, like a thousand others across this once great nation, is now ancient American history.

You can’t come from a place like that and not recognize how widespread this collapse of American small towns and communities has been as well as recognizing how the destruction of an all-important sector of the American economy and the societal base it supported has been repeated thousands of times across the country.

We see it maybe a lot clearer than others because we notice that something that was once there is gone. It was the reality of the times many of us lived in. We remember it because we were there. We know.

The fallout of this destruction of the American manufacturing base has been devastating to the health of what we might refer to as the once great American society. But you have to have a certain sensibility to recognize this fallout for what it is and what it has done to the people of this country.

The Aliquippa I grew up in was an incredible community. J&L Steel: Aliquippa Works, was the largest steel mill in the world for many decades. Nine miles long. At its peak, it employed somewhere between 10 and 20K workers.

My hometown is the birthplace of the United Steelworkers of America. It is the birthplace of the right of workers IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA to organize themselves and form a union via the Supreme Court’s upholding of the Wagner Act in 1937.

Headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Jones and Laughlin had a large plant in nearby Aliquippa that became [in 1937] the object of the National Labor Relations Board prosecution. Vertically integrated with 19 subsidiaries, it owned and operated ore, coal, and limestone properties; lake and river transportation facilities; and terminal railroads located at its manufacturing plants. The fourth largest steel and pig iron company in the nation, Jones and Laughlin employed 33,000 men mining ore, 44,000 men mining coal, 4,000 men quarrying limestone, 16,000 men manufacturing coke, 343,000 men manufacturing steel, and 83,000 men transporting its product. The company had about 10,000 employees in its Aliquippa plant, which was located in a community of about 30,000 persons. –

Encyclopedia.com

So, in the late 1930s, the fourth largest steel manufacturer in the United States employed over a half-million men. Point six percent of the nation’s total population at the time of 129 million. If half the country was female and twenty percent (rounding off current percentages) were children, that means a full one percent of the nation’s men were employed by just the fourth largest steel company in the country.

Now throw in the three even larger steel manufacturers and the countless foundries and finishing plants that lined the Ohio and rivers throughout the industrial northeast and Midwest and you can easily understand why the steel manufacturing industry was the largest employer in the United States for much of the 20th century.

Then, of course, it all disappeared. By the 1980s, you could look around Aliquippa as well as the rest of Western Pennsylvania and the good union jobs with full benefits were gone, the prosperity was gone, the excitement was gone, a massive sector of the American economy was gone, and, I would suggest, along with it, the economic security of the American working class.

In the country we live in today, the working class has no economic security. I state this as a cold and irrefutable fact. But we should know by now that facts only get us so far.

Because now, incredibly, people who think of themselves as progressive Democrats push back on the idea that things are really that bad in America today. And to do that with any shred of imagined credibility it is imperative that they push back even harder on the suggestion that things were ever better in some now distant yesterday that exists only in the deluded memories of us baby boomers.

Stand back for a moment and just look at the inherent political power that comes from simply denying someone else’s lived experiences. This is revisionist history at its most dangerous.

I often wonder if these so-called progressives don’t see how they’ve changed sides. They’re now not simply denying past historical realities. They’re glossing over and even mocking the current struggles of the working-class in 2024. This isn’t progressive or liberal or traditional Democratic Party politics. It’s the propaganda apparatus of predatory elitism, and it’s nothing less than ongoing class warfare being waged on working- and middle-class Americans.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the one candidate for president in 2024 who is not denying the past economic security of the working classes in America.

Far from it. He’s actually running his campaign on acknowledging it and promising to work to help restore some of the economic security once enjoyed by the working people of this country.

And, dare we hope, that through a President Kennedy’s efforts we might again see that certain level of prosperity that working Americans were allowed to believe they’d achieved when they were able to buy a home and raise a family on nothing more than the sweat of their backs and a high school diploma.

She Who Laughs Last: A Nightmare On Pennsylvania Ave

It’s doubtful any political junkies missed the really big news yesterday. Joe Biden will not be prosecuted for HIS classified documents issues. But the reason why as stated by the special counsel investigating the current President of the United States is that Biden would be unlikely to be convicted by a jury as he would be seen as a doddering well-meaning old man of diminished mental acuity. This is mostly my characterization of the special counsel’s language but, trust me, I’m not cooking the books here.

Former Bernie Sanders campaign staffer Krystal Ball gives her reading of the report and what it signifies here.

And even though Krystal is a prominent face of the indie-left media, her take is pretty much an accurate characterization of the mainstream establishment media’s reading of what it all means.

Look at the lead story on the New York Times this morning. I’m gifting it via this link so if you don’t have a Times subscription you can still read it here

But that’s not the most significant part of this story for me. After the report was made public and the media tongues began to wag, and as the sun began to set over the Biden White House, Sundowner Syndrome himself decided to hold a somewhat impromptu prime-time address and press availability in order to defend himself and attack the special counsel’s characterization of his mental state.

Biden looked like an angry old man but we’ve certainly seen worse examples of his mental decline in just the last few days. That’s also not the story for me.

What I found to be absolutely JAW DROPPING (but still not the point of this piece) was the behavior and treatment of the president by the White House press corps.

It seemed (at least in the edit I saw last night) to start with Peter Doocy the FOX News reporter who is a constant daily thorn in the administration’s side.

But this wasn’t that.

It quickly became very clear to me that someone told the piranhas that it was finally okay for them to go ahead and start eating this president and, let me tell you, this was one HANGRY grouping of this nation’s most prestigious news organizations’ top correspondents. You knew these probably once idealistic journalists had been deprived of doing their actual jobs for FAR too long.

They all but ran poor Joe out of office right then and there. I’ll start this (I hope) at the point where that good White House applesauce Joe likes hits the fan.

But none of this is why I’m writing this piece.

So I started this year with a prediction that either Biden or Trump or both were very likely to be unavailable to voters come November. Astonishingly bad poll numbers along with some of the most uncomfortable video examples of the president’s mental decline yet in the past week or so has resulted in what can only be called visible cracks in the fuselage of this Boeing Boeing gone idea that Joe Biden will ever be re-elected President of the United States. But hey, Joe. Never say never. There’s always 2028.

So why am I writing any of this here today? It’s all over the news. See it for yourselves. None of this is why I’m really here pounding on my laptop.

This all is presenting the likelihood of what can only be described as the Democratic Party’s worst nightmare scenario.

Is it that Joe will announce that he’s not seeking re-election? Nope. That’s not how this is going to go down. Biden has to go now if not sooner. He has to resign the office of the presidency. Full stop. I believe that’s coming very soon. 

If Biden were simply to declare he’s not seeking a second term he would still be there. He would still be a story that would be running parallel to the story of whoever the Democratic Party is running at the top of their ticket. He would continue to be a doddering leader of the free world during these so very treacherous times. So, while the Democratic Party would be desperately trying to establish their replacement candidate as the story, Joe Biden’s continuing mental decline would still be an issue for all of us and a competing headline for the Democratic Party’s preferred election year narrative.

Enter Kamala. Yep. There she is, the cackling nightmare we’ve all been dreading. But this is also the Democratic Party’s worst nightmare. And here is why.

Many are the reports coming from inside the White House about how recalcitrant the vice-president has grown over the last year or so. She has been bristling at how she’s being used or not used by the administration. She is reported to be one unhappy camper. Yes, she probably still laughs uncontrollably for no reason, but this shit is no longer funny for her and especially not funny for the Democratic Party because, while they will be more than happy to celebrate Kamala as the country’s first female president, they do not want her to be the candidate that replaces Joe Biden on the ballot in November.

Joe Biden resigns the presidency and the Democrats and the news media celebrate the nation’s first woman president. Personally, I too would love to celebrate this historic moment. I once thought Kamala Harris was a pretty sharp cookie. But no one thinks that anymore. 

The Biden administration has never found a way to use her in which she doesn’t end up embarrassing herself and the administration in short order. So they’ve hidden her away. The public has had her number since she first entered the 2020 Democratic Primary. Senator Kamala Harris of California was exposed over and over again during her short and painful primary season run as the walking, rambling, inappropriately laughing personification of an empty pants suit. VP Harris never caught on with the American public in the three years she’s been in office and the real-life VEEP’s poll numbers to this very day are worse than even the ever-declining numbers not enjoyed by the president.

But now he’s gone and she is president. There was no deal to be made. Ha-Ha Harris was the Vice President of the United States and the Democratic Party put her there. THAT was the deal that was made. Now they as well as the rest of us are stuck with her. Certainly someone is going to have to impress upon her the Democratic Party establishment’s desire that she forego any attempt to run on her own at the top of the party’s ticket in November. “No way, honey,” Someone’s going to be thinking. “This silliness stops right here!”

But now (or then) behind the scenes, is where the nightmare truly begins. The party has no power over her. She’s the President of the United States. If leaks from the administration and her former staffers are to be believed, and they are believed here inside my head, she probably hates every White House face she sees. And so I think President Kamala Harris will go rogue on the party that put here there. I think she will not go quietly into that good-night victory column of history as merely the first woman president of the US. I think she’s going to want to hang onto what she has and try for the brass ring of being the first woman, and a woman of color at that, to be elected President of the United States.

And that, ironically, could end up being a massive nightmare for the Democrats. Best case scenario for the party is an all-California Harris-Newsome ticket and I’d be looking for that announcement even before Joe Biden can remember where he put his PJs.

The however many months Kamala Harris will actually be president could very well be a nightmare for the country and the world. Maybe not as bad as we might imagine. Maybe better than we could have hoped. But this is one pissed-off lady with a wildly inappropriate sense of humor and poll numbers somewhere down in the basement of poll numbers for public figures. I can’t imagine that she’d be someone the Democratic Party can control.

Even I, who rightfully imagines this party to be the most powerful disorganization of humans in the history of the world, have to admit that once Kamala Harris is president she’s going to possess, albeit probably quite temporarily, the power to do whatever the hell she wants to. And, to paraquote a familiar boast from her current boss, to anyone who doesn’t believe that, I would say, just watch her.

The Process of Elimination

The first abbreviated work week of the new year is now all but behind us and nothing truly ground shaking has happened yet in the 2024 presidential election year story. So there’s still time for me to go out on one of those limbs that is, unfortunately, my happy place. 

Obviously I can’t see into the future (okay, maybe that hasn’t always been so obvious) but here’s some things that I think are very likely to happen this year. 

I think it’s ever more likely that either President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump or both might be unavailable to voters by November. That’s about the most generic way I can put it. Don’t over think it. I’m not. Whatever, however. And look, typically in American politics, election year is almost as much about selecting the eventual party nominees as it is choosing a president. And I get that. In the old days, we didn’t even know until after the conventions late in the summer. So in normal election years past, the parties could take half the year to decide upon their candidate. 

But these are different times and this is a vastly different election year than any of us has ever seen. Trump is now like a mythical American political figure. He’s both a former president and the leader of a movement. MAGA. He has the Republican Party base in a passionately emotional heart and soul head lock. That part of the country is ready to explode as it is right now. Look at January 6th. However you feel about them, those people and that part of America is exponentially more agitated now than they have ever been before. They see these really corrupt banana republic legal efforts (I mean, who doesn’t?) by multiple partisan jurisdictions and entities to remove Trump entirely from the elective process—either by indicting and convicting him or by literally having his name taken off the ballot—and they are quite literally seething.

But no matter the passionate displeasure of so many of our fellow Americans, I think it very possible that these efforts will be successful to the degree where it becomes impossible for Trump to win due to the pile up of enough disqualifying cases and successful efforts to remove the former president from ballots so that the Republican Party, maybe as late as the convention, will then be forced to put forth another candidate at the top of their ticket. Somehow, some way. It might happen.

So let’s just stop right there and consider what that would be like in this country coming at some point later in this already guaranteed to be explosively chaotic election year. 

Everything this massive base of Trump supporters believes is wrong with their party, their country and their elective processes will unfold exactly as they fear, right before their eyes. That alone is going to make for a s— show unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Trump is already a folk hero in much of this country. This will elevate him to political martyrdom. If MAGA can’t vote for Donald Trump on election day the national turmoil this is going to create is going to make, in my opinion, every political uprising we’ve ever seen in this country pale in comparison. JMO. 

But now think of the mad scramble AGAINST THOSE HEADWATERS of the Republican Party trying to replace Trump on the ballot. What an absolute losing proposition. Mission accomplished, Democrats! It’s VERY hard to see any Republican candidate other than Trump bringing out the 80 million or so voters it’s going to take to win the White House. 

Okay? So what about the other side? Well, I think it’s even LESS likely that Joe Biden will be available as the Democratic candidate come November. I’m not even going to go into arguments why. Come on! He’s the incumbent and yet he is DEEPLY unpopular, and the American people believe, quite correctly, that he’s not physically or mentally up to the job and they are, I believe, very disappointed in his policies and in the direction the country is heading. You can pump up, as I know some will, his accomplishments but you’re talking to yourselves. Out there in the eyes of America, this is a president and a party that is in deep trouble. I’ll leave it at that. 

So, just like the Republican Party’s problem, but not as explosively problematic, they’re going to have a hell of time selling either Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsome as America’s best choice for its next president. You could even trot out Michelle Obama and it’s not going to sell with much of this country. Look, I hate to break it to anyone who isn’t quite there yet, but people are REALLY starting to see through this elite duopoly that controls our country and they are, I believe, desperate for another option. Hold that thought. 

But step back now and take in the entire picture. Election Year 2024. Starting right now. Week One. Incumbent president running against his immediate predecessor. Then suddenly, slowly, whatever!, like a disaster movie, one by one or together in short order, both candidates fall out. I’ve only hinted at the actual chaos that will ensue. That chaos, all of it predictable, will only further disgust the American people. 

The spectacle put on by both parties will cause Americans to be even MORE disenchanted with our current national politics. They will be looking for some safe harbor in what would be a complete s— storm of an election year meltdown by both of our major political parties. 

Have I set the stage? I believe I have. 

So now there’s this guy out there named Kennedy who’s managed to get himself on all 50 states’ ballots. There he will be. The son of RFK. People will be hearing his message, which is EXACTLY what they are going to want to hear. If you haven’t heard him, trust me, it’s exactly what the people of this country are going to want to hear, and HAVE wanted to hear, for DECADES. 

These things are all very possible to even more than mildly likely to happen this year. And I think this is how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will become our next president. And that’s what I’m predicting will happen.

The scenario that I’m describing and predicting is, of course, completely unprecedented. Here now in the year of the election, the two major party candidates, an incumbent president and his immediate predecessor as president, both involuntarily rendered by, in Biden’s case age or infirmity and in Trump’s case the actions of his political opponents, no longer available for the voters to choose as their president. This alone would be something none of us have ever seen before and would set the stage for further unprecedented upheavals.

I mean, we’re clearly heading for something like that on the Trump side of things. This is already very likely to be a quite ugly possibility. But if MAGA can’t vote for Trump because he’s not on the ballot then I predict they’re going to vote for Kennedy.

If both Biden and Trump aren’t on the ballot then I believe Kennedy will win fairly easily and that’s really the point of this piece. I don’t, at this time, want to get into all of the things that have gone wrong in the last seven years under both of these candidates’ administrations and by way of the actions and direction changes of their political parties, but all of that is weighing against the establishment at this time. This is a country that elected a TV guy seven years ago. It remains vastly misunderstood and willfully misrepresented as to why that happened. But here it is. People were just that desperate for someone else. An outsider. Someone who was telling them what they wanted to hear as opposed to someone telling them the same old s—.

This country is on the brink right now. People are already scared. If you had a clean election without RFK Jr. in it, Trump would likely win, but it would be very close. The Democratic Party is scaring the hell out of so many Americans and no one more than those of us who now self-identify, reflexively, and as a pre-emptive act of self defense, as life-long Democrats. And I’m predicting that no matter who is running for either of the major parties the most important collection of letters on the ballot won’t be Kennedy or Trump or Biden or any other candidate’s actual name. It will be the word INDEPENDENT. And that word will be sitting right next to Bobby Kennedy’s name. For that reason alone, even with Biden and Trump still in the race a Kennedy win is possible. But if you remove Trump or both Trump and Biden I think RFK Jr is going to be our next president.

The context all this is taking place in now is so different than anything we’ve ever seen with the exception of what the climate must have been like in America leading up to the Civil War. We are truly living on the brink as a nation of democratic ideals because we have so often and so routinely betrayed those ideals. The chickens have now come home to roost and, as I’ve said, the American people really are waking up and seeing through their government, the relationship between the mainstream media and their elected officials, the donors and industrial complexes who ultimately call the shots, etc. LIKE NEVER BEFORE. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 is all the proof anyone should need that this is the case. Now more and more Americans are there. It’s a trend and it’s going to continue to trend for the rest of most of our lives.

The people of this country are attempting to take it back from those who control it. I would agree with anyone who maintains that it is doubtful as to whether we will actually be able to do so. But the only thing that will stop we the people is undemocratic authoritarianism as realized by the now all powerful duopoly, its donors, and maybe most especially the vast landscape of NGOs that employ the elite political classes that inhabit the Washington DC area and the other affluent coastal regions of the country. This element is already using authoritarian and even fascist tactics to smother free speech on social media or wherever else they may find it and they are NEVER going to stop. Should Bobby Kennedy Jr. become the second President Kennedy he has vowed to dismantle the national security anti-free speech elements in our government and most prominently within the Democratic Party and allow the people of this country to once again speak on their own behalf and be heard. 

Is this Kennedy simply telling so many of us what we want to hear in order to get elected? If you stay tuned you’ll get my take on that and so many other questions and issues that are sure to bombard us here in 2024. Buckle up. This is going to be an election year like no other. 

Kennedy Girls: RFK Jr.’s pursuit of the Democratic nomination hits home

In 1999, the local newspaper in Beaver County, Pennsylvania asked for letters from readers giving their thoughts or reflections in recognition of Black History Month. I submitted the following. It opens by referencing a letter I’d written to the same paper the previous year.

Last year, in response to a series of articles in this newspaper addressing the various issues involving race and racism in Beaver County, I wrote a letter to the Times in which I stated that I wasn’t taught racism by my parents. While that statement is true, it is, of course, not that simple. I don’t recall, for instance, my father ever speaking badly of black people. But then he never, as far as I can remember, said anything at all to me about race or the problems of racism in America. My mother, on the other hand, was born and raised in Alabama and more than anything else it is the stories she told of the injustices she witnessed, first in the south but also later in Pennsylvania, that forever shaped my own views regarding matters of race.

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I want to share two of these stories with the people of Beaver County, certainly in recognition of Black History month, but moreover because of the effect that these stories have had on me; in helping to form my own understanding of the ways in which America has so often failed to honor its promise of equality and justice, and the ways in which so many Americans have dishonored their country’s legacy, infusing it with a history of violence and oppression. 

It’s important to note that the racism my mother witnessed and relayed to me was not the vague disquieting negativity that is, sadly, something seemingly intrinsic in varying degrees to all of us, black and white. My mother’s stories were of overt acts, vivid examples of the outrageous and indefensible social crashes that developed from and were legitimized by the culture of mistrust and hatred that has existed for centuries in America. They are stories told from a perspective that is not often heard on the subject of profound racial injustice: that of a white person who was there and who is not socially or psychologically constrained from bearing witness. And, of course, these are the accounts that have been traditionally left out of official records and newspapers. They are alternative views of events in a historical era that one is not likely to find in history books.  

The most extraordinary of my mother’s stories occurred in Augusta, GA immediately after World War II. My father had been injured in Europe and was convalescing in Oliver General Hospital, adjacent to the same golf course which now, ironically, hosts the prestigious event that Tiger Woods’s name will always be synonymous with, The Masters Tournament. 

My mother was having lunch in a coffee shop in downtown Augusta when a black window-washer fell from his scaffold to the pavement below, just outside the restaurant’s window. A crowd, which included my mother, formed around the critically injured man and an ambulance was summoned. But when the ambulance arrived, those in charge refused to transport the injured man to a hospital. The ambulance, it seems, was for whites only. A black ambulance would have to be called. My mother, having spent a number of years in the north, was outraged and pleaded for the immediate transport of the fallen window-washer. “If I take him in this ambulance,” the driver explained to her, “no white person will ever ride in it again.”  

By my mother’s account the window washer would have died anyway, no matter what medical procedures were taken to save him but, incredibly, he died there on the sidewalk with no medical attention being administered whatsoever. And the story does not end there. In Augusta, small city that it was, news of my mother’s behavior traveled fast. Just hours after the tragedy she was informed by the owner of the boarding house where she was staying that she would have to find someplace else to live. “We don’t coddle our n—— around here,” she was told.

This was the south before African Americans effectively organized themselves, fought for and won the civil rights that most of white America in those days seemed quite comfortable denying them. But another story that my mother told took place in our own Beaver County, during the early 1960’s. And although not of the tragic magnitude of the window-washer’s outrageous treatment, it may be, due to the local political environment in which it takes place, a more useful example of manifest systemic racism.

In 1960, during John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, my mother was a close friend of this region’s state senator. Due in part to this association and due in part to the fact that my mother founded and held the charter to an organization called The Democratic Women of Greater Aliquippa, the senator assigned her the privilege of choosing Aliquippa’s Kennedy Girl. The Kennedy Girl concept was a campaign gimmick wherein teenagers from individual communities were chosen and presented solely for the purpose of creating a buzz of local publicity for the decidedly un-local Senator Kennedy. In the process of choosing the right teenager, my mother recalled one girl in particular whose singing and stage presence at a Democratic Party banquet had impressed both her and the state senator. And so, with the state senator ‘s full blessing, my mother chose a black girl from Aliquippa to be the town’s representative young person.

A group photo shoot featuring all of the local Kennedy Girls was scheduled for 9:00 AM one morning at the old Beaver Valley Tribune with pictures in the newspaper to follow shortly thereafter. In the days preceding the shoot, my mother began receiving phone calls from two prominent Beaver County democrats imploring her to reconsider her choice for Aliquippa’s Kennedy Girl. Each of the two elected officials had, it seems, chosen his own daughter for the distinction and both openly voiced the objection that they did not want their daughters to be photographed with the black girl. My mother argued that Kennedy needed the support of the area’s black voters, but she was told that the black vote in Beaver County was so minute as to be insignificant. Without painting an overly complimentary picture of my own mother, let me simply state that she did not alter her selection as requested by the two gentlemen.

On the morning of the shoot, my mother and the young lady took the drive to Beaver Falls for what they both assumed would be quite a moment for the local girl. But even after arriving at the newspaper twenty minutes early they were informed that they had come too late; the scheduled time of the photo shoot had been moved up from 9:00 AM to 8:00 AM and the photographs had already been taken. The other Kennedy Girls and their sponsors were gone. Of course there were tears on the part of the teenager from Aliquippa. One can only imagine what she must have thought at that point about white people or Democrats or even about my mother, who had naively set in motion the series of events that had resulted in her rejection.

The promise of fairness and equality prevailing above all else in America has existed ever since the founding of our nation. Yet today, just as in the window washer’s day, millions of black Americans can still claim access to only limited health care resources. How many die each year because they don’t receive proper medical treatment or procedures that are unavailable to them is anybody’s guess. And today, just as in the days of Kennedy Girls, most young black people in this country continue to be turned off at the local level by a political process that could and should enable and empower them to positively effect their own lives.

One can’t help but wonder what Aliquippa’s Kennedy Girl must have been thinking when the president she attempted to publicly support said, in his 1963 televised address on the issue of civil rights, that “The time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise.” President Kennedy’s words speak specifically to the covenant of equality that we as a nation so often take for granted. And they yet endure as a blunt challenge to all Americans.

The Piss-Colored Journalism of the New York Times: The newspaper’s jaundiced and dishonest take on Robert F. Kennedy’s big day

Scrolling through the articles on the NYTimes app it was impossible to find the newspaper of record’s coverage of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement that he will be seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2024. There’s a very good reason for that. It wasn’t there. A piece reporting on the fact that a member of the nation’s most storied political family was once again running for president didn’t rate the same visibility on the Times’ app as features with titles like “What Would You Do for a Taylor Swift Sweatshirt?” and “An A.I. Hit of Fake ‘Drake’ and ‘The Weeknd’ Rattles the Music World.” 

It wasn’t until I came across a tweet on my Twitter app that I was led to the Times’ article on Kennedy’s announcement and the event that was held at a ballroom in Boston’s Park Plaza Hotel.

I’d woken up to the speech. Literally. When I groggily picked up my phone and clicked on Twitter I saw the event being broadcast (not sure broadcast is the right word for it) on Twitter Spaces and caught the entire speech, with the exception of a few momentary glitches, from start to finish. 

To say that the Times’ piece, written by Trip Gabriel, the newspaper’s former editor of the Sunday paper’s “Styles” section, did not reflect the speech I’d heard RFK Jr. deliver would be an understatement worthy of, well, the New York Times’ own penchant for slanting the news and burying important story angles behind walls of misinformation. Gabriel dismissed the event as being a gathering of those with a “shared skepticism about vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry.”

“Mr. Kennedy is the latest in a history of fringe presidential aspirants from both parties who run to bring attention to a cause, or to themselves.” 

That statement is as stunningly off key and out of tempo with the era we’re living in as anything I’ve ever read in the Times. The journalist who revitalized the paper’s Sunday Style section “into a multifaceted presentation of fashion, lifestyle, entertainment and celebrity news” continues:

“For Mr. Kennedy, that cause is vaccine skepticism… at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, he sought to undermine public trust in vaccines.” 

Gabriel states that “Both Facebook and Instagram took down accounts of a group he [Kennedy] runs for spreading medical misinformation.”

First off, it’s hard to read the perspective presented by Mr. Gabriel and reconcile it with the calendar. It’s now 2023. Skepticism of Covid-19 vaccines is a widespread feature of the American political landscape. 

Skepticism of Covid-19 vaccines exists primarily because of the myriad instances of the American people being presented with false and misleading TRUE AND ACTUAL medical misinformation, fed to us by our government, its national health care apparatus, and the establishment news media. Whether it was about efficacy or the prevention of transmission of the virus, medical misinformation told to the public about the vaccines was a feature and not a bug throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. 

There’s so many instances of this happening that I’m not going to bother detailing them. That’s not what this piece of mine is about. It’s also completely unnecessary. If you’re reading this you already know how very often something we were told about the Covid-19 vaccines through official government medical channels here in the US turned out to be incorrect. 

Gabriel also characterized RFK Jr.’s speech as “rambling.” He highlighted the fact that many of Kennedy’s own family members don’t agree with his positions on vaccines. He quotes Bob Shrum, who claims, according to the reporting here that, “Kennedy’s attacks on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and the federal government’s top medical and scientific agencies would have infuriated his uncle. [deceased former Massachusetts senator and presidential candidate Ted Kennedy]  

This is essentially what the New York Times wants the public’s takeaway to be from its news reporting on the candidacy declaration and near two-hour content-rich speech by the nephew of one assassinated president and the son of an assassinated candidate for the same high office. 

Stick a pin in the assassination angle for a moment.

So I’ve already said that this Times piece reporting on Kennedy’s officially announcing his seeking the presidency in 2024 did not reflect the speech I heard nor the event that I witnessed on admittedly shaky video feeds coming out of Boston. The speech I heard was brilliant. It was not rambling. It was densely filled with the Kennedy intelligence, the Kennedy grace, the self-deprecation, the humility, the humor, the vision, the honesty and the TRUTH, and the exact version of patriotic inspiration that this country is so desperate for. And, make no mistake, Kennedy’s speech demonstrated innately brilliant political instincts. (We’ll talk more about this here on The Lost Democrat very soon.)

OF COURSE this speech was not broadcast live on CNN, MSNBC, or any other national TV news network. Because if it had been carried live on any of the mainstream media outlets, Robert F. Kennedy would already be the odds-on favorite to be the next president of the United States. Because this speech was something the American people have been starving for for generations. It was that good. It was a tonic reminder of all that we wish we could be as a nation and certainly as a Democratic Party that is supposed to represent the people of this country.  

Kennedy appeared to be speaking without a teleprompter. Off the top of his head. Yet the speech had so many signature quote lines that it could and will, I’m sure, be mined for things he might say at his inaugural, should he get that far. Also, the stories he told, so many stories, graphically revealing just how qualified and experienced he actually is to be president and how ready he is to replace the low-grade quality of politicians we’ve been electing to high office now for most of the last two decades. 

Kennedy spoke the truth and nothing but the truth for almost two hours. One highlight that stood out to me was his passionate insistence that the current government of the United States has, not just abandoned adherence to the Constitution, but is actively working to undermine it and the protections it affords the citizens of this country. But, Kennedy asserted, “The Constitution was built for hard times.” 

Know this. The Times piece on Kennedy’s big announcement is a gross misrepresentation of what actually happened in Boston yesterday. It’s author lies about the speech RFK Jr. so eloquently delivered. The comments to the article, so few being evidence of the low online visibility of the piece on the newspaper’s website and app, reflect the opinion of those who read this article but who certainly did not seek out or listen to the actual speech for themselves. 

Kathleen from San Luis Obispo writes: “This is just sad. His father and uncle ran for president with soaring rhetoric–not two-hour rambling speeches–and a vision of America as a beacon of hope for the world. 

Had Kathleen actually heard RFK Jr.’s speech, she would have known that her words were an exact characterization of what that speech contained. 

Brooke’s Mama from NYS wrote: “I hope the Kennedy family arranges an intervention soon. It’s a sad situation when someone has gone off the rails so publicly.”

One comment, however, was truly problematic. No one needs to be reminded of the fate of President John F. Kennedy or his brother Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Their assassinations in the 1960s turned this country upside down and we’ve never fully recovered from those deadly interventions in our elective destiny. But despite the impact those tragedies have had on the country, the world, and certainly the Kennedy family, the New York Times comment moderators saw fit to allow a Mr. Mike from NY to offer this suggestion regarding Bobby Kennedy’s son: 

“Maybe he should share the fate of his betters.”

Incompetence Takes the Stage: The many failures and disappointments of Indictment Day

I watched. All morning. Trump showed up at the courthouse looking grim. The indictments were handed down. The case was pushed to December. Morning turns to mid-afternoon and I grab a nap. 

Waking up is always a blur. I’m bleary-eyed and I don’t understand the simplest of things. I turn on CNN. I hear some stuff, but I’m not sure what to make of it. After ten minutes or so of this, someone comes into focus. 

She’s golden and stands out against the darkness. It seems night has fallen in New York City. Trump Force One has already landed in West Palm Beach. It’s 8:03 PM ET. As usual, I’m right on top of my day. 

It’s Trump’s coronavirus briefing antagonist Paula Reid, the former CBS White House correspondent who has now, inexplicably, ended up on the Cable News Network. But what is she saying? 

“I’ve read through this indictment, Anderson. And he’s being charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records. And in order to charge these as a felony in New York state, you have to prove that these records were falsified in furtherance of another crime. And it’s not clear exactly what that larger crime is because it’s not charged here. Now if prosecutors want to argue that these documents were falsified in furtherance of something that is a federal election law violation, that’s shaky legal ground. I mean, that’s an untested legal theory.”

Anderson Cooper’s expression hasn’t changed since birth. Nothing to see there. 

“Look,” Reid goes on, “This is one of the most historic cases, arguably the most significant case right now in the American court system. It appears to be built on a pretty shaky foundation because it’s not clear what the larger crime is.” 

Admittedly, I’d missed much of the afternoon’s analysis catching up on my sleep. But now I’m thinking that Paula Reid is clearly on her way to FOX News. Nevertheless, it was stunning, while it lasted, to hear someone on CNN actually disparaging this long dreamt of, long awaited, and now finally realized criminal indictment of Donald J. Trump. 

Now would have been the time for popcorn because, surely, the proven mercenary Ms. Reid was about to be eviscerated by the panel. It doesn’t matter who is on the panel. It’s CNN. 

Elie Honig, Former Asst. U.S. Attorney, Southern District of New York, speaks: 

“The only way that each of these [34 misdemeanor] counts gets bumped up to a felony, is if you can show that they falsified the records to commit some second crime. And here is where we’re going to run into legal problems. Because the indictment does not say what that second crime is, which is completely inexplicable to me.” 

Next up is Van Jones. And in a comment that seems like what you might expect to hear in one of CNN’s pre-broadcast brainstorming sessions, Jones admits some weaknesses with the charges brought against Trump but then stands up for Bragg and in opposition to the tide that is turning against the Manhattan prosecutor on this early evening of Indictment Day. 

“I had hoped that there would be more in the indictment. And I think that because it is SO thin, it’s giving aid and comfort to some of the worst people in American politics, a rogues gallery. To the extent that you do have a prosecutor who believes in the rule of law and who also thinks that our elections shouldn’t be polluted with lies and hush money and false statements and he’s trying to take a stand, I think that we need to be at least as supportive of Alvin Bragg, at this stage, as this rogues gallery is of Donald Trump.”

Anderson Cooper asks another former federal prosecutor from the Southern District of NY, Jessica Roth, what she thinks of the case.    

“I was disappointed that there wasn’t more in the indictment in terms of laying out the legal theory with more precision. Today was supposed to be the big reveal when we would get that information. To the extent that we would have a sense of what the theory of the case is in terms of what are the crimes that would have been furthered or concealed by the falsification of records, it’s not in the indictment.”

I don’t understand what I’m hearing. I’m even wondering whether I ever actually woke up from my afternoon nap and if this isn’t all some sort of crazy dream. So at this point, I can’t take it any more and reach for the remote to fast forward. But then, at that very moment, at 8:13 ET, CNN switched away from Anderson Cooper to an entirely different panel, this one hosted by Jake Tapper. In the courtroom of public opinion, surely order was about to be restored. 

Around the table are CNN’s political A-Team: John King, Dana Bash, Abby Phillip, and Jamie Gangel. Joining them is former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Reporters and federal prosecutors are professionals who deal every day in message discipline. But compared to deputy directors of the FBI, they are surely amateurs.

“If I had to characterize it,” McCabe says, “It’s a disappointment. I think everyone was hoping we would see more about the direction that they intend to take this prosecution. What is the legal theory that ties this very solid misdemeanor case, 34 counts of misdemeanors, to the intent to conceal another crime which is what makes it a felony. It simply isn’t there.”

The talking heads on screen are smaller images. The larger shot is of the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach where Trump is getting ready to speak. I have to say, I’ve never really seen much from inside Trump’s fabled Florida compound, and I’m impressed. The ballroom is glorious. Over the top? Compared to what? The White House? The interiors of the US Capitol? Anything at all in Europe? I don’t think so. I like big beautiful ornate spaces and I’m not going to fault those who create them. 

The room is filled with a certain kind of American elite. Sassy. Proud. Out front about who they are. I don’t believe they’re particularly representative of the Republican Party. They’re certainly not representative of the Democratic Party. But they are familiar to me. I’m an American. I’ve rolled my eyes at people like these my entire life. But I don’t hate them. And I don’t believe they’re trying to destroy America.

CNN is a television network that seems to be dying a slow painful death. Nothing on the landscape of culture or politics would appear to be able to save them from drifting even further off into the irrelevance that characterizes their current presence on the media and information landscape. But there is one thing that could save CNN, or at least slow its decline for the rest of this decade, and that would be a second Trump administration. 

The vibe in the Mar-a-Lago ballroom is festive. CNN’s Kristen Holmes describes it as having the feel of a rally, with “quite a who’s who of Trump world” in attendance. Someone who I’ve lost track of on CNN even suggested earlier that this speech and this event, not Trump’s earlier announcement of his candidacy, will be seen and remembered as the true kickoff to his 2024 presidential campaign. 

The staging is perfect. The American flags are appropriately placed. CNN itself as well as some very qualified talking heads under their employ has swatted away the charges in New York on behalf of the former president and has delivered a moment so rare in a public official’s life that any politician seeking high office could only have dreamed of such events unfolding as they had when their heads hit their Mike Lindell pillows at night. The only thing we were waiting on was the man himself, The Former Guy, who, having earlier been indicted in New York and having only landed an hour earlier, was, understandably and excusably, slow to seize his big moment. 

The whole world was watching and CNN was ready to broadcast a most incredible and unlikely political rebirthing of Donald Trump. 

Finally, he enters the room. I’ve noticed so many of late in both the mainstream media but especially the alternative press describing Trump as a master politician, albeit inarguably a pure demagogue, ready to chew up and spit out any and all challengers. I can’t agree or disagree. I just don’t know. But as Trump worked the crowd of those lined up to shake his hand in the Mar-a-Lago ballroom after being indicted mere hours earlier and a thousand miles away he certainly seemed an unstoppable political force and the literal master of all he surveyed. 

The truth is that the indictment by the New York DA was a dangerous and obviously politically motivated endeavor. And it backfired immediately. The verdict on the merits of the case as the judgment came down from the most establishment of neo-liberal Democratic Party friendly networks was a scathing rebuke. The stage was set for the master politician to step into the spotlight and take this easy win that had been handed to him on a silver platter by none other than his worst enemies. It was going to be so easy. But then what did Donald Trump do? What did the master politician do with this most incredibly fortuitous opportunity ever presented to him in his short but checkered political career?

Yep. He shit all over it. 

How easy would it have been for Trump to maximize the political victory this day had unexpectedly provided to him. He would have needed some help. If not maybe the ‘best’ people, if he’d at least had competent awake and aware handlers watching the talking heads on CNN’s fileting of Alvin Bragg’s 34 count indictment who might have transcribed just a few of the high points, as I did here in this piece, Trump could have then simply walked out onto his magnificent stage and said, “You know folks, I’m not going to speak about what happened today. I’m not going to give my opinion of the events of the day. I’m going to hold my tongue for another time. But what I’m going to do is read to you right now what was just said on CNN in the last half hour.” 

And then Trump could have read to his guests at Mar-a-Lago and to the world everything that was said on CNN about the case against him that I’ve included here in this piece, with attributions. And then when he was done, he could have taken the transcripts and held them delicately between two fingers as if they were filthy dirty things and then he could have simply opened his fingers and let the papers, along with the international reputations of the indictments handed down against him in New York as well as that of the Manhattan D.A. who brought those indictments, all drop silently and harmlessly to the floor.

Instead, an obviously exhausted, visibly deflated, but still toxically defiant Trump tiredly read an even more tired meandering poorly written and poorly conceived of speech off the teleprompter, choosing not to speak off the cuff and without a script, ironically committing the very same misstep every one of his primary opponents committed against him in 2016 that allowed him to bluster and brag his way to the Republican nomination. 

Trump attacked both the prosecutor in New York and the judge, as well as wives and daughters. It was an ugly, and worse, a boring performance by someone who didn’t have the political instincts nor the good sense to understand the incredible political power of what had just happened to him. Trump seems to be a person who has never learned to take yes for an answer. And if he couldn’t see this moment for what it so obviously was, so obvious that even his most fervent antagonists on CNN had to repeatedly admit it on air, and take advantage of the moment, how could he ever be expected to make sound nuanced and clever decisions in the Oval Office as President of the United States?

After 20 minutes or so of this, CNN cut away from Trump’s speech and back to their panel of talking heads. They too seemed deflated at this point. After setting Trump up for an historic banner moment, the former president provided the failing news network with only devastatingly boring television. 

What happened at Mar-a-Lago on the evening of Indictment Day explained a lot. But it didn’t explain everything. After CNN rescued its viewers from the tired toxic mess that was happening in Florida, it was fittingly Alyssa Farah Griffin, Trump’s own former WH Director of Communications, who offered up maybe the most intriguing thought of the entire Trump era.

What if 2016 was a fluke?  

Send In the Clowns: Don’t you love farce?

One of Matt Taibbi’s best pieces for Rolling Stone Magazine during the 2016 presidential primary season was the equal parts scathing and hilarious takedown, Inside the GOP Clown Car. In the piece, Taibbi writes: 

In the modern Republican Party, making sense is a secondary consideration. Years of relentless propaganda combined with extreme frustration over the disastrous Bush years and two terms of a Kenyan Muslim terrorist president have cast the party’s right wing into a swirling suckhole of paranoia and conspiratorial craziness. There is nothing you can do to go too far, a fact proved, if not exactly understood, by the madman, Trump.

The Democrats didn’t seem to remember that Matt Taibbi when he and fellow Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger faced clowns from the other side of our nation’s political circus Thursday as the two sat before the House Select Subcommittee on “Weaponization of the Federal Government” looking into both federal efforts as well as a number of non-governmental organizations’ influence over the policing of free speech on social media.

Florida congresswoman and former Democratic Party chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz began her five minutes attempting to smear Taibbi with red MAGA paint, deploying one of the most common tactical weapons used against anyone who dares offer a rationally honest take on the now very unfunny political struggles taking place in America at this time. Addressing Taibbi directly in her opening comments, Schultz scolded the decorated journalist. 

The Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics asserts that journalists should avoid political activities that can compromise the integrity of credibility. Being a Republican witness today certainly casts a cloud over your objectivity. 

In a wild and tense session that saw infighting between representatives of both parties on the panel and allegations of biased unprofessional so-called journalism leveled at the two witnesses, Wasserman-Schultz accused Taibbi of allowing himself to be “spoon-fed cherry-picked information” that is “designed to reach a foregone, easily disputed, or invalid conclusion.” When Taibbi attempted to explain himself—to testify, as the witness he was there to be—Wasserman-Schultz cut him off by reclaiming her time, a move that was used against the two journalists often by the Democrats on the panel.  

One of the most striking moments was when Wasserman-Schultz accused Taibbi of profiting off his role in reporting on the Twitter Files, saying that Taibbi “hit the jackpot on that Vegas slot machine.” Taibbi was able to quickly blurt out that whatever money he’s taken in has gone to the costs of doing the work he’s doing before, you guessed it, the Florida lawmaker quickly shut him off by reclaiming her time. 

In the lecturing rant that followed, Wasserman-Schultz suggested that the journalists were addicted to the “powerful drug” of attention and the journalistic prominence of being associated with the Twitter Files. She added that the social media companies in question were not, in fact, biased against conservative voices. She did not offer Taibbi an opportunity to respond. 

It was only later, when Democratic Representative Gerald Connolly of Virginia repeated Wasserman-Schultz’s assertion that the social media entities involved were not being weaponized against conservative voices, that Taibbi would remind the congressman that the purpose of the committee he himself was sitting on was to address the concern that forces within the US government as well as non-profit organizations funded by taxpayer dollars were being weaponized—not simply against conservative voices—but against the very concept of free speech itself. 

Wasserman-Schultz ended her attack on the two journalists with a stunningly strange and ironic diagnosis, apparently of a condition she believed them both to be currently suffering from.  

Hypocrisy is the hangover of an addiction to attention. 

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is certainly no stranger to the many flavors of hypocrisy as well as questions regarding her ethics. In 2016, after leaked emails showed she and the DNC she chaired unethically favored Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries, Wasserman-Schultz was forced to resign her chairperson’s position. 

But before that career gut punch, in the same year, the Florida congresswoman had earlier come under scrutiny due to her attempts to gut new pending Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regulations designed to reign in abuses by payday lenders. Payday lenders, as it turns out (and pardon the pun, Congresswoman) were well represented in Wasserman-Schultz’s congressional district. This from the Huffington Post:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is expected to present a final set of payday lending regulations in the next few weeks. The idea is to prevent lenders from trapping borrowers in a vicious cycle of debt, in which borrowers take out a loan expecting to pay a one-time fee, but end up taking out several more loans when they are unable to make ends meet at the end of the loan period.

Wasserman Schultz is trying to gin up support on Capitol Hill for a bill that would nullify the CFPB’s rules in states that adopt payday loan rules similar to those in her home state. The Florida law is supported by the payday loan industry and has not prevented lenders from preying on the poor. The CFPB’s regulations would be stronger, but Wasserman Schultz is seeking to block them.

You can read more here. 

There was something about 2016 that allowed us to laugh at the clownish characters traveling together in Taibbi’s Republican clown car. Yes, they and their candidacies were dangerous, there’s no question about that. But they were, nevertheless, clowns that we could laugh at. Feckless boobs, each and every one of them, and each in their own unique ways. Taibbi captured them all perfectly in the piece I mention above and so many others. 

But there are funny clowns and there are the scary clowns. And there is nothing scarier than the American government—the government of the most powerful country in the history of the planet—slowly, but most assuredly, turning away from its founding principle of unfettered free speech and towards a concerted governmental effort to eliminate that fundamental American right. And what could be more terrifying than witnessing what was once the party of the people leading the effort to crush the rights of those same people to freely discuss amongst themselves the realities and issues of their times. 

Make no mistake. These are the scariest clowns ever. 

Viewer’s note: 

It wasn’t easy to watch the hearing yesterday. I’d set my DVR to record CSPAN’s coverage of the House of Representatives which begins at 7:00 AM Pacific and was scheduled to run in a single continuous block on my cable provider’s viewer guide until 1:00 PM my time.

I went about my morning knowing that I would be able to watch the hearings when my day settled down. But when I had a minute I decided to check on how things were going at the hearings and turned my set on and navigated to the list of recorded programs in order to watch the opening statements. 

So nothing was recorded. CSPAN had changed the name of the content that would appear in that time slot from NEW U.S House of Representatives to, incredibly, and inaccurately, CAMPAIGN 2024, a title that had absolutely nothing at all to do with the content of the programming on CSPAN at that time. But underneath that completely wrong programming title was also a correct subtitle: The House will complete work on legislation to protect free speech on social media.

Then suddenly, with a Democratic representative ramping up for a full-frontal attack on Taibbi and Schellenberger, CSPAN cut away from these dramatic and important hearings to go to the House floor coverage where the chaplain led the august body in prayer. It was at that moment that I found myself wishing that I was a believer.

The Un-Democratic Party Doesn’t Care

I’ve been a lifelong Democrat. My mother, pictured above as proof (because I feel proof will be required) was the founder of the Democratic Women of Greater Aliquippa, the Pennsylvania steel town where I was born. My political heroes growing up were the Kennedys and Muhammad Ali. I’m an ex-steelworker and a former member of Local 1211 of the United Steelworkers of America. 

Back then, the perspective of people like my mother, which of course was passed down to me, was that the Democratic Party was the party of the people, just like the working-class men and women in our town. The Republican Party (cover your mouth when you say it) was the party of the rich. End of story. A lifelong Democratic I have been. So far.

But now I’m thinking that maybe I’ve just lived too long. 

Because at some point in the last 50 or so years, the Democratic Party, meaning the top-down functioning political organization that emanates from high offices in corridors of great power, has ceased to actually function as the party of the people.

I hope I’m not moving too fast for anyone here but with what we once thought of as the party of the people having long ago trapped those people in a never-ending hall of mirrors, I believe we’re running out of time to speak our truths. I’m worried about the future of, not just free speech, but specifically political speech. We all know how treacherous it has become to speak freely about the many touchy subjects that have taken over our politics. But I believe the window is rapidly closing on anyone’s ability to give honest input on most any of the political realities we face without being crushed for it. So before it’s too late, I’m going to shout out to the world what I consider to be an inarguable truth: The Democratic Party has abandoned the people of this country.  

It’s an argument many of us could make in our sleep. The political party so many of us have faithfully placed our hopes in for our entire lives certainly doesn’t care about the things that most Americans care about. The party doesn’t care about working class Democratic voters. After Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016, the New York Times ran a story on how the Democrats were holding high level meetings discussing whether the party of the people should finally just abandon the working class altogether. 

So we know the Democratic Party can’t possibly care about the American people at large. I don’t believe the party cares about progress, not true progress anyway, the kind of progress that could improve the lives of the working-class Americans who used to form the party’s base. 

But we all know the American political system is broken, that it no longer functions on behalf of the citizens of this country. We know the whole system is in the hands of elites with no real interest or connection to the average citizen. So many of us have known all this for decades. But to understand why this is and what it means, you have to dissect and study the many pieces of that system, at least briefly, then put it all back together again and take it in as a whole. And there is no one more qualified to come to a true and accurate understanding of our broken political system than disappointed and angry lifelong Democrats. 

Because it’s all right there in front of us now. From the fixed primary in 2020 to the defeat of a party hack in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race. Everything we need to know is out in plain sight. The party has revealed itself. We can blame, or thank, Donald Trump for some of it. But, mostly, by way of its own blatant hypocrisy and lies, right now as never before, our own Democratic Party stands naked before us. And if we dare not look away now, we might actually find ourselves more unified than ever and thus more able to actually do something about it. 

I’m a believer that the world can be changed and that people like us, me, even, can still change it. If you’ve read my other pieces on this Substack site, you should understand why. But I’m not a professional journalist and I’m not someone working within the political system of this country. What I am is a lifelong Democratic voter. I’m a voice on the other end of the spectrum of all that is done by my party and government. And I want to speak because I know that none of it is being done on my behalf.

I think it’s painfully clear by now that we the people are going to have to figure this out for ourselves. The political class is not going to help us. They’re actually the ones who are perpetrating all this upon us. We’re going to have to come to a better understanding of what has happened to our government and, more specifically, as disgruntled Democratic voters, what has happened to our party.  

First let’s talk about what someone somewhere cleverly dubbed the Political Industrial Complex. He probably wasn’t the first, but credit where credit is due, a contributing editor to the New York Times, Elliot Ackerman, wrote a piece on the political industrial complex in September of 2020. Ackerman maybe too succinctly describes the PIC as including “Not only legions of campaign staffers, pollsters, consultants and other party functionaries, but also media.”

Apologies to Mr. Ackerman but I think there’s a lot more to this story so I’m going to flesh things out a little. I promise your patience will be rewarded. 

The PIC also includes the think tanks, lobbying firms, the non-profit non-government do-gooder organizations (NGOs), the foreign policy specialists, the national security and military consultants, the economic councils, private foundations, etc.

And add to it, of course, the revolving door that exists between all of that mostly off the public payroll political infrastructure and the actual elected officials in our government and their staffs, as well as the unelected bureaucratic millions in the Executive Branch’s multitude of federal agencies and departments. 

And let us never forget the money behind it all: the corporations and mega-rich individuals, Wall St., the banks, the big donors and their foundations. People cycle from working for these entities into government work all the time and bring with them to their jobs in our government whatever the political perspectives and goals are of those who employed them in the private sector. 

And then there’s the revolving door between all of that and the news media. People work for a candidate, or a party, make a name for themselves, then move on to work for a political consulting firm, and then find themselves on television and their stars rise from there. They sign with the right Hollywood talent agency and then it’s book deals, breakfast speaking engagements, and maybe even their own show on one of the cable networks.

Then, finally, arriving late and underdressed, we come to the actual parties themselves. It is not an overstatement to say that our two major political parties are among the most powerful organizations ever. The relationships higher ups in the party must cultivate with huge donors requires them to seamlessly fit in with some of the wealthiest, privileged, eccentric and out-of-touch individuals in the world.

The political parties and their many ancillary organizations are complete industries. To be a person so favored in life as to work high up in one of the two major American political parties, to walk the corridors of power in Washington and then, as needed, be able to seamlessly move into positions within the vast NGO ecosystems or the news media, is to enjoy an active fulfilling career with all the social and professional rewards needed to ensure a lifetime of privilege. 

To suggest that there would be a disconnect between this culture of political power in Washington, in all of its dazzling forms, and regular Americans and their real-world problems out in flyover country, is the most tragic of understatements. Our political system is largely controlled by the political system itself and those thriving within it and feeding upon it.

Once again, knowledge of any of this is not new. I don’t know of anyone who saw it more clearly or described it more perfectly than Joan Didion when she was hired by the New York Review of Books to cover the 1988 presidential election campaign between the Republican, George H.W. Bush, and the Democrat, Michael Dukakis. 

There was this thing that the Dukakis camp did that went like this. The candidate would get on the tarmac at whatever airport they were at and toss a baseball with a young staffer. They thought it made the candidate look relatable and genuine. The Washington press corps ate it up. Joan Didion, however, did not. And she also didn’t see the press that passed along these cloying pre-packaged moments to the public as being genuine either.

The piece she wrote about all this, Insider Baseball, is legendary. Not nearly as well known or talked about, however, as it should be. I don’t wonder why. Here is an excerpt. Remember, this was written over 30 years ago. 

When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.

The moment that finally broke me, what once and for all killed what little faith I had left in the modern Democratic Party, was Super Tuesday. Let me give you my perspective on Super Tuesday 2020, not as a professional political analyst or pundit, one of the handful of insiders Didion mentions above, but just as what I am, a lifelong Democratic voter. 

Goes like this. The two leading candidates to that point in the primary, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, two candidates with progressive ideas that brought hope and excitement to people like me that we might finally land someone in the White House who spoke to the needs and concerns of regular working and middle-class Americans, were leapfrogged over by literally the weakest and certainly the most uninspiring candidate in the field, the lifelong political trainwreck that is Joe Biden. It was accomplished by way of a back-room deal orchestrated by the very behind-the-scenes Democratic Party players I’m referring to in this piece. This skullduggery saw most of the other top candidates drop out of the race over the weekend prior to Super Tuesday and throw their support to the former vice-president. This was done in return for future political favors like the one that would see a small city Indiana mayor awarded the cabinet level federal government position of Secretary of Transportation in the Biden administration. 

And then, in the Democratic Party’s version of John McCain picking the achingly unqualified Sarah Palin to be his running mate in 2008, the doddering Biden would select possibly the weakest big-name candidate in the entire 2020 Democratic primary field. Senator Kamala Harris of California, who despite the backing of some of the most powerful interests in Democratic party politics, was someone who was exposed over and over again during her short and painful primary season run for the top job as the walking, rambling, inappropriately laughing personification of an empty pants suit. 

But then somehow, with a truly ancient candidate now sitting at the top of the ticket, the Democratic Party deciders would select Harris as his running mate and choose her to sit one very elderly heartbeat away from the presidency.  

Let’s just say Super Tuesday finished it for me. It instantly became apparent to me that the Democratic Party was more interested in preserving the status quo within its own ranks and protecting itself from the internal upheaval a President Bernie Sanders might create in the cloistered, neoliberal bubble that is the Democratic Party, than it was ever interested in doing anything of substance for the American people. 

At first, I struggled for a way to explain all this to myself and to others. I came up with the following. 

My Mostly Democratic Party Hospital Analogy.

Let’s use some other kind of pair of ‘competing’ organizations: hospitals. And let’s pick someplace far away. The lovely Monte Carlo, in the Principality of Monaco. Aren’t we all ready to be there? Let’s go.

Two hospitals and I’m just going to make up some names. Democratic Hospital of Monte Carlo and the Republican Hospital of Monaco. DEMs and REPUBs. So easy to remember..

Let’s say that these two hospitals long ago dropped any pretense of being health care systems available to the general population of resort and service workers of this fabulously wealthy Riviera enclave. Both hospitals are incredibly well funded by the affluent of Monaco and cater to that class of patients and access by regular folks to the top-notch healthcare they both provide is minimal.

Let’s also pretend that every four years there are internal elections that determine who the executives are at the top of each organization. But, as things always turn out, long established regimes hang onto power no matter the results of any particular election.

What that looks like is that the names are always familiar at the top of the system and all the support personnel stays the same, all the way down to the office staff. Everyone is well paid and happy and that’s just the way things have always been.

Then, one day, at the Democratic Hospital of Monte Carlo, a hospital that was, incidentally, founded by and for the workers of Monaco, a faction starts to take hold that wants to bring the focus of the hospital, at least to some degree, back to its original mission of providing more and better health care to the working classes of Monaco.

And so they run their candidates for c-suite positions from other offices in the hospital system. Their platform is basically to speak out, and rightly so, about the influence big money donors have in determining who receives the first-class healthcare that their hospital provides and to promise change.

Now here is the point. 

Everyone knows that should this new faction actually win the election at DEMs that its leaders would oust all those who currently hold power and positions there and replace the old guard with like-minded types who feel as they do that the mission of the hospital should be to provide care of equal quality to everyone who needs it.

This is a threat, of course, to more than just the current team of execs and support staff at DEMs. It’s a threat to the power and influence of the donors. After all, they’re paying for the hospital as it’s currently structured. But this is also a threat even to the status quo at the other hospital, the Republican Hospital of Monaco. Because if a more egalitarian faction should take over at DEMs it might pressure REPUBs to enact similar changes.

So I have a question. Who and what do you think the executives at DEMs would be more focused on: a) Making sure that the internal election threat to their hold on power and their well-paid positions at their own hospital is defeated? Or b) Do you think that while facing this internal challenge they would be more concerned with the everyday year-in-and-year-out business as usual of trying to out-compete their cross-town rival REPUBs?

That’s my analogy of what is and has been going on in the Democratic Party these last few election cycles. I’ve said they don’t really care as much about winning elections as they do about holding onto the reins of power in their own party and pushing back against whomever threatens their iron grip on the party itself. And just like in my hospital analogy, let’s not forget the role of the powerful donors, who are and have been paying for and getting exactly the political party they want. 

If you really think about this on a human level, and our entire political system is made up of real humans who really like where they are and what they do, you can understand how much more committed anyone so involved with the Democratic Party would be to hanging onto this massively powerful political machine—funded by corporations and defense contractors and Hollywood and Wall St and with all the accompanying perks of power—than they ever would be concerned about losing to a Republican candidate in some little presidential election cycle.

The Democratic Party is one of the most powerful organizations the world has ever known. At any one time it controls roughly half of the government of the most powerful country on the planet. It dictates domestic and foreign policy according to the whims of its donors. So much of what constitutes this one political party is unelected, sitting just slightly outside of the elective offices and thus beyond the control of the American people. Maybe on the government payroll, maybe just off of it. Sitting in between the elected officials and the donors who pay for them. This part of it, the DNC, the party infrastructure including all the friendly above mentioned extra-governmental pro-Dem groups, is one giant powerful incestuous and corrupt political monster. 

Now think of the reach of that power. Down into the state and local governments around the country. State houses and governors’ mansions. It’s very difficult to win an election as a Democrat without the party behind you. Everything that has a ‘D’ after its name ultimately bows to powers that exist far above it. 

Think of all the familiar names associated with the Democratic Party, the Obama administration, and to a waning degree, the Clinton people. Think of how powerful their voices are as enforcers of their brand of neo-liberal politics. You know who I’m talking about. Everyone from former White House chiefs of staff to the Pod Saves America crowd. 

It’s a political machine. That’s what we used to call it. Back in Beaver County, PA where I’m from, local politics was controlled by a powerful Democratic machine. My mother was a part of it. Last time I checked, you could find the many familiar names still there running the county. Grandchildren of those who were in power back in the 1960s. This is American politics.

If the Democrats would have lost the 2020 presidential election, they would just tango on. All of their infrastructure would have still been in place. Nothing is likely to unseat this level of entrenched power. The only possibility is a takeover from inside the party that’s carried on the wave of a populist voter uprising, similar to what Trump did to the Republican Party. Everything else will amount to nothing. Business as usual. Nothing will ever really change except incrementally and never truly delivering change for the American people who exist far outside the elite-run political process.

Nothing demonstrates any of this more clearly than what happened in the 2020 Democratic primary. The party orchestrated the leapfrogging of the two weakest candidates to the top of the ticket. Joe Biden is demented. The party didn’t care. Kamala Harris’s mercifully brief primary run was one of the most humiliating examples of an empty vessel politician being exposed as such under the glare and scrutiny of a national election process as I’ve ever seen. But the Democratic Party didn’t care. 

The Democrats certainly preferred that this ticket win the presidential election, but it wasn’t essential. Their primary goal was stopping either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren from ascending to leadership positions in their party. Sanders and Warren, certainly to varying degrees, were the only truly existential threat as far as the Democratic Party elite was concerned. Defeating this threat from within was the most pressing matter for the party and it would have been under great pressure from all of its major donors, Wall St., defense contractors, big pharma and energy, to do precisely that, first and foremost.

Losing control of the Democratic Party to a crowd that actually wanted to focus on helping the people while having it simultaneously pulled away from the control and influence of its mega-rich benefactors? That was simply never an option. So the Democratic Party decision makers orchestrated their Super Tuesday primary coup. 

Here’s the deal. When people have been abandoned, they know it, and they know it first, before anyone else. They know it first because they live it and feel it in real time. The Democratic Party and the affluent elites who control its platforms and emphasis over the last many decades have abandoned, region by region, demographic by demographic, the working people of this country. And the working people of this country know it.

They have been abandoned by the only political party that could possibly represent their economic interests. And they’ve been humiliated and scorned by those working within that party on their way out the door. The words that have become the standard to describe what we used to call regular Americans includes everything from Hillary’s ‘deplorables’ comment to the much more inflammatory language we see on Twitter every day. These people are never going to forget any of it or get over it and then happily agree or like or vote with those who have said these things about them.

All of this destruction, what has become a dangerously toxic political chasm in America, is because of what the Democratic Party has become.

As true Democrats, we need to understand and acknowledge that our own side has been taken over by a predatory class of political professionals whose sole purpose is to protect its own power and status. Right now, as it is, the people of this country have no political party representing their needs and desires in government.

I’ll say it again. I’ve been a Democrat my entire life. I’m a real McCoy. The Republicans are the Hatfields. They are what they are, and I’ve always opposed them. But what I want and need now is what most Americans have desperately needed for decades. We need a political party of our own that actually works on behalf of the people. We need a Democratic Party that cares about us. And as difficult as it may be, we need to admit to ourselves that, right now, that Democratic Party simply doesn’t exist. 

No Hill to Die On

The Leica Look

Donald Barnat - 50lux.com I’m linking today to what’s called a long read. But this one isn’t just for photographers. Everyone should read this. America should read this. American businesses should read this. This is the way it’s done. This is the way we are supposed to do things here in America.

Gibson. Fender. Cadillac. Are you listening? I think some of you may be starting to.

I just bought a guitar amplifier from a boutique maker named Michael Swart. It’s the Swart Space Tone Tremelo model. I’ve heard, but don’t hold my words to be legally binding, that Michael Swart will fix any of his amplifiers that come back to him, no matter if they’ve been resold. Is this perfectly true in all cases? I don’t know. But the story is out there because this is what people who have experience with him are saying. He doesn’t give a fuck who owns the amp now! It’s got his name on it, it’s broke, it’s in front of him, he’s fixing it.

Booyah! (R.I.P. Stuart Scott) That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Leica. Leica is the mother of all boutique brands. That Leica would react to a situation like this — with the expense of the items involved — is breathtaking. Booyah on you, Leica! This is the kind of story that makes me proud to be a human being. Proud that we all evolved from the primordial soup together. It doesn’t happen all that often but here it is.

How I lost my Leica equipment and what happened next – Witold Riedel

The following story has some parts that might feel a bit strange to some, and yet will feel completely familiar to others. I guess that’s how stories go. When reading it, some will dislike me for some of the facts, while others will be able to relate and feel that what happened was not exactly easy. The story is true. And it has something to do with my cameras; with my M Leicas.

via Witold Riedel › Notes › How I lost my Leica equipment and what happened next..

Excessive Force

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I took this picture in Beverly Hills, CA two weekends ago, while protests were breaking out around the United States over the issue of the disproportionate use of excessive force by police departments against African Americans. I don’t know what the quite apparently homeless woman had done but she was in obvious distress at this moment and loudly vocalizing her displeasure with the actions being taken against her.

I have nothing else to say, really, about this conveniently relevant photo that fell into my lap because I happened to be in the right place at the right time. Well, other than the fact that my heart goes out to the woman, and also to the cop.

Back before there was such a thing as a blog, when Macromedia Dreamweaver was the coolest thing on the planet, I used it to make and publish a handful of websites. One of them was an anonymous rant against the police. I made it to publicize and characterize for the world-wide-web the never ending cycle of unjustified police shootings here in Southern California.

I had on it the story of the black girl sleeping in her car in the rain at night who police shot while she was unconscious and possibly even overcome by carbon monoxide by her car’s running engine. There was the story of the unstable 130 lb 16-year-old whose family called 911 because they were worried about his erratic behavior and who, when surrounded by police, was whirling in a circle keeping the cops at bay with a broom stick. He was shot 9 times. There was the infamous story of the homeless 90 lb woman in her 60s who was shot for pulling out a screwdriver when stopped by police for having a shopping cart back when the police were instructed to arrest homeless people for shopping cart theft.

Let me repeat. I made a website about a dozen years ago (or more) to publicize questionable killings of black and hispanic people in California. That’s ALL the website was about. The police shooting and killing blacks and hispanics.

Details are very very important. Details are why a progressive leftist person who started a website decrying police violence, along with millions of others, find themselves unable to get behind a protest movement based on an incident that doesn’t have the right set of circumstances and facts to build the kind of systemic change that is needed upon.

That is Ferguson, in my eyes.

The Staten Island tragedy, however, and the I Can’t Breath movement and protests that have been growing out of it, represent, in my opinion, a truly valid protest movement that was born by a clearly indefensible example of unreasonable force by the police resulting in the death of a citizen.

I am deeply disturbed by the death at the hands of the police of Eric Garner in New York.

More power to this movement and to these protests.

I’m putting what I’m about to say out there because I don’t see it on protest signs, I don’t hear it coming from the talking heads on television and I certainly don’t envision the police opening up on this point. So here it is.

Policies and Procedures

Police policies and procedures are largely written by the police with a big assist from police unions. They are the instructions the police write for themselves as to how they are to go about every aspect of their jobs.

In all the years that these shooting have been happening in Southern California, through multiple federal investigations and consent decrees imposed on multiple law enforcement agencies… the one thing that has remained almost untouchable by civilian oversight or the government is police policies and procedures. They’ve changed very little. The police continue to get away with discharging their service weapons into human beings who did not need to be shot to death.

If you want to fight the police the way to do it is find a way to impose civilian oversight over the re-writing of THEIR OWN POLICIES AND PROCEDURES.

Policies and procedures. It’s all right there in those two words. The police write their own. As long as the police make the rules for their encounters with the public, of how and when to use force, they are are going to continue to escalate situations, in the tragic case of Eric Garner, INTRODUCE violence, in that case, DEADLY violence, over minor non-violent and even, I believe, non-criminal violations.

Who gets this? Southern Californian activists. This region of the country is Ground Zero for questionable police shootings of unarmed, mostly (but not always) minority, citizens.

So it would be fitting that right now, as I write this, at this very hour, the LA County Board of Supervisors, with protestors raging outside, is taking up the issue of a civilian oversight board for the LA County Sheriff’s Department.

This was voted down last year but with two new members on the board supporting it there is hope that it may pass this time. It’s important that there is civilian oversight and that it not be simply the brand that rubber stamps whatever the police departments decide.

“We are encouraged that this new board is moving forward and has the political will to shift the course where the previous board fell short.” – Jaz Wade “Dignity & Power Now”

I’m not so encouraged, honestly, or nearly as optimistic as Ms. Wade but I am hopeful. If you’re in LA please keep an eye on the news as this story is being covered by all the local television channels.

Memorial Day

This is a repost of the very first real blog entry (after Hello World!) on this website back in 2012. I was in a very bad place at that time. My best friend was dying. I was not good with that. I was in one of those places where a person has no patience for the simpering superficial bullshit people tell each other mostly to make themselves feel better about themselves.

And although I feel strongly (always) about the message of this post, I didn’t repost it last Memorial Day. I was probably in a better mood. This year, with Memorial Day coming so closely on the heels of yet another gut wrenching domestic gun tragedy, happening this time here in my own back yard, and given everything else I see on the streets and read in the newspaper, I’m once again in a dark and unforgiving mood about my country. So fuck it.

Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ exposed much of the truth about America. We might have looked at that work and been properly shamed and sought to make a course correction. But we didn’t do that. Anyway. Enjoy this holiday. Don’t thank our troops. Remember instead the dead ones, and their wives, and their children, and their mothers, and their fathers. And forgive me for encroaching into sanctimonious behavior with a self-righteous attitude. I have no room to talk. It’s taken me over half a century to finally wake up.

Memorial Day 2012

Cookouts! Barbecue. Hot dogs and hamburgers. Beer. Friends and family. Unofficial start of summer. Hell yeah! That’s what Memorial Day is all about. Oh and, of course, the Memorial Day sale at Macy’s. Right?

Then there’s those people who try to remind you of the more sober aspects of the holiday. Sanctimoniously thanking ‘our’ soldiers. Does that really stick with you or are they just as annoying as the people at Christmas telling us all to remember the spirit of Christmas and that Christ ‘our’ savior was born on Christmas Day?

So they had this event down at a new memorial in Irvine for service men and women who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. I saw it on the 11 o’clock news. The Northwood Gratitude and Honor Memorial looks really nice and is said to be the first of its kind in the country honoring those who have fallen in the wars on terrorism we’ve been fighting for the last eleven or so years.

But they’ve got this open mic thing going. And the wives and mothers of those who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan come up to the mic and, if you didn’t see it, I’m telling you these women are just fucking raw. All are emotional but more than a few can barely get their words out; they’re just dying up there.

Blubbering women. Most of them young enough to be my daughter, if I’d had one. Talking about what they feel on Memorial Day.

While these women are stepping up to the mic, one at a time, to tell you the names of their husbands and sons and what happened to them – as best as they can between the sniveling and gasping and choked-off words – all over this country, millions of Americans are getting drunk, washing down burgers with Bud Lite, laughing the day away talking easily about everything that careless partying Americans talk about on a summer holiday together. Most Americans are having a good time, a welcome day off from work, celebrating the start of summer and vacation time – which is and always has been the real point of Memorial Day in our culture.

A really young woman steps up to the mic in Irvine. Her two hands are in a wrestling match with each other as she speaks.

“My name is Brooke Singer and my husband was killed in January.”

Brooke looks to be about 22. She’s wearing a pretty black dress with nickle-sized white polka dots and spaghetti straps that cut into the soft skin of her shoulders. She seems to have more to say but after that one solitary sentence she puts the back of her right hand to her face and unsuccessfully tries to stifle a sob. That hand has a mind of its own and, almost to conceal the degree to which it is shaking, Brooke drops it momentarily but then quickly raises it back again to cover her mouth, which is contorted in a way she’d obviously rather the entire world doesn’t see.

A girl who looks like she could be Brooke’s younger sister stands helplessly to her left. A woman who must be her mother puts her arm on Brooke’s back and whispers something into her ear.

If you need to be told at this point that Memorial Day isn’t about cookouts and really good shopping then I don’t know what to say to you except that you’re not alone. Not in my America.

But if you still think it’s about thanking ‘our’ soldiers and telling them how much we love them and appreciate what they’re doing for us then you really need to either wake up or grow up or maybe just look up the word ‘memorial’ in a dictionary.

If this country can ever find its soul again it will be on some hopefully not-too-distant Memorial Day. One day when enough Americans are finally able to look squarely and, maybe more than anything else, responsibly, at young women who can barely breathe as they muster the courage to stand in front of a microphone in a public square and choke out the names of their dead husbands.

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Film images made with a Leica M7 and 50mm 2.0 Leica Summicron lens.

Independence Day

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I promised (or threatened) politics when I started this blog. You had to know the bloody day would eventually come. I want to apologize in advance. There Will Be Cursing.

I just want to wrap up in a neat little ball my feelings about some things I’m seeing of late.

I had a dream once that there was a revolution and I was watching it on TV. It happened in a flash in some place like South or Central America at the meeting of the Organization of American States. lol. Seriously. And the POTUS was there and so there was a big American media contingent. Bob Schieffer was covering it for CBS. The revolutionaries stormed the conference area, security never had a chance, and they cut the TV signal coming out of the country right as the mob was overtaking the conference room where the president was. Last part of the dream was Dan Rather calling out to Bob Schieffer and saying something like, I think we’ve lost Bob. lol.

Man. Did I wake up with the chills. I’m serious. This was like in the early 90s. Tried to write a short story of it but it was and would have been a silly tale without a political perspective.

The real fear of the dream was that something could overtake the world media. Shut down or steal the voice or the truth or whatever, etc.

Although I still have that concern, actually that it might have happened a long time ago, but the feeling, the chill, is long forgotten. Until now.

The coverage of this second phase of what I am thinking of as the ongoing Egyptian revolution by the American media is just flat out chilling. It’s obvious the Obama administration thought they had their boy in place in Egypt in Morsy. If that wasn’t obvious before these past few weeks it’s obvious now. Old school American politics in the middle east at its traditional best. We’ll exchange one dictator for another, for what we like to call stability, and this one was extry special (TV hick colloquialism) because he came to power in a democratic election. So the US government is apoplectic over events in Egypt and that’s been made very clear by their many statements, threats, and the decidedly negative take they’ve expressed so far.

But the American news media? Oh my God. It’s like they’ve all been to a party at Judith Miller’s house and drank something she had mixed up in a punch bowl. It’s like they’re all mouthpieces now for the American government. Noam Chomsky has to be just stroking out right about now.

I’ve been seeing it for days now but what I just witnessed on CNN with Christiane Amanpour and Anderson Vanderbilt Cooper … it just recalls for me on a visceral level the feelings I had when I woke up from that dream. The Egyptian overthrow of Morsy seems to be some sort of nightmare from hell, if these people are to be believed.

Then they interviewed one of the guys behind the movement to ouster Morsy. God he was so real. He was PLEADING the truth. It was nothing I didn’t already know or suspect … ten thousand miles or more away. I knew that the ‘people’ of Egypt were always very uneasy about what kind of government Morsy and the Muslim Brotherhood were going to give them. And their worst fears were realized over the course of the last year as he abolished and dissolved avenues of self-determination by the people of Egypt. Always underreported by the American media… but it was out there.

Even during the initial overthrow of Mubarak the Egyptian people made it very clear that if they didn’t get an actual government that gave them a voice over their own fates the first time out and if they found out, at worst, they’d just traded one dictator for another they would be right back out in Tahir Square. And Allah bless their fucking hearts, there they are.

All of this was baked into the cake and none of it is really news or a surprise. But the American-centric perspective is so dark you’d think the Russian tanks had just rolled through fucking Poland.

I don’t know if I can ever figure out how to digitally capture something from my TV onto a Mac. But I really implore everyone here to be on the lookout on YouTube for Anderson Cooper’s interview with one of the main inspirations for the revolution in Egypt and watch especially his treatment of the Egyptian and the condescending ’emotions are running high’ crack pipe he and Amanpour share at then end of the interview.

I said I wanted to wrap this all up at the top of this page. Here’s what I mean. And I know a lot of people are really anti-Edward Snowden and everything that he did. But forget about Snowden personally for a moment and his actions and really consider the media and their behavior of late.

The Snowden situation has become a catalyst for a lot of criticism of the American media, which, hello, I happen to agree with. And here is a really blistering example of that perspective which, hello again, I happen to agree with.

This is from Gawker. The link to the complete article is at the bottom. Everything from here on is not mine.

“The Washington Post Is a Bitter, Jealous Little Newspaper

The Washington Post Has the Worst Opinion Section in America. The Washington Post, the pre-Politico newsletter of choice for The Political Establishment, has the worst opinion section in America. Today, they once again prove why: the paper, which helped to break the NSA Prism spying story, editorializes that the U.S. government must stop Edward Snowden from leaking any more of that awful news.

Presumably so that Washington Post reporters cannot cover it? The editorial board of the Washington Post—a newspaper with some of the best national security reporters in America, a newspaper whose reporter Barton Gellman was approached directly by Edward Snowden, and a newspaper that chose to publish only four of the 41 Powerpoint slides that Snowden gave to Gellman— is practically praying for Edward Snowden to be muzzled, so that no more of those news stories might be leaked to papers like, you know, the Washington Post. “How to Keep Edward Snowden From Leaking More NSA Secrets,” is the editorial’s headline. (“…To Us” is only implied.)

At least we know that the Washington Post’s terrible editorial board is fully independent from its shrinking newsroom!

In fact, the first U.S. priority should be to prevent Mr. Snowden from leaking information that harms efforts to fight terrorism and conduct legitimate intelligence operations. Documents published so far by news organizations have shed useful light on some NSA programs and raised questions that deserve debate, such as whether a government agency should build a database of Americans’ phone records. But Mr. Snowden is reported to have stolen many more documents, encrypted copies of which may have been given to allies such as the WikiLeaks organization… The best solution for both Mr. Snowden and the Obama administration would be his surrender to U.S. authorities, followed by a plea negotiation. 

Take note, potential leakers and whistleblowers inside the U.S. government: the official stance of the Washington Post’s editorial board is that you should shut up and go to jail. Would-be Washington Post sources may wish to take that information into consideration when choosing where to leak to.”

http://gawker.com/the-washington-post-is-a-bitter-jealous-little-newspap-645608016