Because of a service-connected injury I qualified for health care from the Veterans Administration, but, for most of my life, I didn’t avail myself of that service because the healthcare from my employers was just fine and I didn’t want to take funds from other veterans who weren’t so fortunate. That change in my mid-50s when I joined the gig economy.

Since then I have received nothing but the very best care from staff and doctors who take great pride in seeing to the health of their nation’s veterans. This is why I was always puzzled by stories about veterans ill-treated by the system and forced to wait long periods for care, sometimes, the stories ran, until the veteran died before they could be seen too. And that always rang false to me because that wasn’t my experience or the experience of those I knew in the system.

I got a window into what might be going on yesterday when I read Nancy Peacock’s review of It Shouldn’t Be This Hard to Serve Your Country: Our Broken Government and the Plight of Veterans by David Jonathon Shulkin on page six of the most recent issue of DD 214 Chronicle. Peacock ledes:

By the time Dr. David Shulkin joined the Department of Veteran Affairs in 2015, he had already earned a successful reputation in the private sector after 30 years of turning around a series of struggling hospitals. But instead of resting on his laurels, Shulkin was excited by a new challenge—tackling the country’s largest health care system and improving it for the nine million veterans who rely on the VA for their medical care.

What he couldn’t have predicted was that this job, in the glare of the national political spotlight, would come at a high price to his personal and professional life. His attempt to reform the VA is chronicled in his newly released book, It Shouldn’t be This Hard to Serve Your Country: Our Broken Government and the Plight of Veterans.

On 20 January 2017 Huckster Donald John Trump became President Donald John Trump and Shulkin’s job got a lot tougher. Peacock continues:

Throughout his tenure as secretary, Shulkin encountered a never-ending assault by political appointees, lobbying groups and Trump’s friends who had their own agendas. These people created a layer of inaccessibility to the president while compromising Shulkin’s ability to run the organization.

In an administration riddled with leaks, Shulkin found himself the target of disinformation from political appointees who knew how and what to feed the media in order to tarnish his reputation. The “politicals,” as Shulkin called them, met behind closed doors each day to advance their goal of privatizing the VA. The Concerned Veterans of America, a lobbying group funded by the Koch brothers, ran a smear campaign to get rid of Shulkin and his staff. When he protested this sabotage, Shulkin was informed by a White House appointee that Shulkin could not remove or demote any political appointee in the VA.

“I learned very quickly,” Shulkin writes, “that it wasn’t just a matter of miscommunication but a purposeful strategy aimed and getting rid of me and any other obstacles to privatizing the VA.”

Shulkin came to understand that there were two parts to the White House.

“First, there was the President, John Kelly, and those surrounding them in the West Wing,” he writes. “Second there were the politicals who had given up their previous jobs to support the Trump campaign. These opportunists had their own agenda and were working behind the scenes to accomplish it, and then they were going to the media and attributing their own viewpoint to the White House.”

In December 2017, Navy veteran Shawn VanDiver, in Concerned Veterans for America—A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing for HuffPost, wrote:

The Department of Veterans Affairs has its fair share of challenges—no one disputes that. Still, over the last two years under Secretary Bob McDonald, VA has made irrefutable progress through the MyVA transformation. But you would never know that if you listened to the rhetoric of the politically motivated advocacy group calling themselves Concerned Veterans for America.

The deceivingly-named group has positioned themselves as champions of veterans who are simply seeking quality health care. Over the past year, CVA has slowly been exposed for what the American Legion called a “mouthpiece” vets group who is proactively trying to privatize VA.

And give Shulkin the boot. Peacock continues:

A series of daily leaks from anonymous sources spread rumors that Shulkin would be fired soon. The Concerned Veterans of America was gaining more influence. An article from Politics USA announced: “The Koch brothers are about to make their move to privatize the VA.”

To privatize—the leech-speak term for turn government contracts into fat profits—is to profitize. Finally:

Major initiatives Shulkin had worked for were implemented: a restructuring plan for the VA, a major IT contract for electronic medical records and a system to provide veterans more access to community health care. What concerns Shulkin is that the new access standards are too broad and the cost will ultimately drain the VA of its funding.

There you have it. Trump;s politicals don’t want to drain the swamp—that’s where they thrive, after all—the want to drain the Treasury.

Bonus No. 1: Happy birthday, Jojo!

Bonus No. 2: The Pesticide Industry’s Playbook for Poisoning the Earth.

Bonus No. 3: The Sad Downfall of Elizabeth Warren.

Bonus No. 4: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

Crazy—or at least mentally incapacitated—presidents have served our nation in the past. (Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Woodrow Wilson and, possibly, Ronald Wilson Regan come to mind.) But in those instances, and possibly others, there was no constitutional mechanism for transferring power even temporarily; until 1967.

With the 1967 passage and ratification of the 25th Amendment to our constitution that omission by the founders was corrected. In the decades since, the 25th Amendment has been invoked seven times: Section 1 in 1974; Section 2 in 1973 and 1974; and Section 3 in 1981, 1985, 2002 and 2007

Section 4, which reads—

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

—has never been invoked.

Ted Rall is not the first to suggest that we might need to rethink that.

Rall, in The President Is Crazy. Someone Should Do Something, writes:

Everyone agrees that President Trump seems to have been exposed as unfit for office in the week of his rash assassination of a top Iranian general. But who is going to act? The public is scared because they know that protest doesn’t work and that it often turns protesters into targets of surveillance. Congress won’t act because they are cowards and are owned by major corporations. And the media won’t do anything for the same reason.

Bonus No. 1: This country has too many stinkin’ rights!!

Bonus No. 2: From this morning’s Guardian Long Reads: After 26 years at the Guardian, Gary Younge will soon be taking up his new role as a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester. This powerful essay, written in 2015, just as Gary was preparing to return to the UK after years living in the US, remains one of the best articles we have published.

Bonus No. 3: The Sanders Campaign Researched Whether Warren Could Be Both Vice President and Treasury Secretary at Once.

[Update @ 1221 on 8 February—You can view the video of the reading of Roldo’s piece at DEMOCRACY DAY READING OF ROLDO BARTIMOLE…]

[Update @ 2015 on 19 January—From Roldo:

I received a request to have the latest read at Democracy Day in Cleveland Heights, for which I gave my approval, of course.

You can find more at 7th Annual Cleveland Heights Democracy Day. If the reading is videoed and posted on line, I’ve asked for a copy to post here. JH]

You may have heard or read that the paint company Sherwin Williams is looking for a new home.

They have been in Cleveland for 150 years or so years.

The years don’t make a difference to the paint company.

It doesn’t matter that the company and its employees have been served and nurtured here by various local governments for a century and a half.

No, it’s not enough. The greed must be satisfied.

A century and a half just don’t matter.

—Doesn’t matter that they have been protected by publicly paid fire departments for those 150 or so years.

—Doesn’t matter that its employees have been safeguarded by publicly paid police departments for such a long time.

—Doesn’t matter that they have been protected over the years by publicly paid fire departments.

—Doesn’t matter that their children have been educated at publicly financed school systems.

—Doesn’t matter that health departments have kept communities where they live healthy.

—Doesn’t matter that publicly-funded water systems have provided clean water.

—Doesn’t matter that tax and fee-funded sewer systems have kept them safe and clean.

—Doesn’t matter than city & state funding has provided them with roads and highways to get to work and ship their products.

—Doesn’t matter that citizens tax themselves for stadiums and arenas for their pleasure.

—Doesn’t matter that the public treasure provides airports for transportation of them and their products.

—Doesn’t matter that public subsidy provides a transit system that helps their employees get to work.

Why go on. It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.

These corporate greed masters want more.

They conveniently forget yesterday. All the yesterdays.

This “Cleveland company” that had revenue in the 12 months ending Sept. 30, 2019 of $17.8 BILLION dollars here in Cleveland. It wants MORE.

This Cleveland company that paid its chief J. G. Morikis $13,213,749 in salary and benefits last year now wants to either stick-up Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, just as a bank thief would—or leave.

One-hundred-and-fifty years or not.

What’s interesting is that the media/news people are making it seem WE OWE THEM something to make them stay. They actually endorse the bribery.

What nonsense.

We have become government by bribe.

Who can offer the biggest, best bribe wins the corporate chiseler?

What a sick way of governing.

Nothing new though. Check the past in this LOOK BACK at how it started:

And how the Cleveland establishment gets things done:

Cleveland has been in this give-away business for a while now.

The price goes up, as it usually does.

The problem is that the governmental cost has to be made up somewhere.

The tax abatements, the TIFs, the outright grants and gifts are tax losses.

The big guys get them. The little people pay—more to make up the difference.

If you, like myself, have one or more Republican senators representing your state, call them and let them know that you expect them to honor the solemn oaths they have taken to …support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same… and to …do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws: so help me God.

I do not know what is in Senator Robert Jones Portman’s heart, but I do know that he is overtly a man of faith who does not publicly shirk from championing that faith. He, at least, must decide what is most important to him and his family: President Donald John Trump, the Republican Party, his reëlection to the senate in 2022 or his good word.

Bonus No. 1: Well… You could always resign…

As predicted, the knives of the 1 Percent’s minions came out last night in the final televised debate before the Iowa Caucuses and they were aimed at the most progressive candidate on the stage: Bernie Sanders. There is blood on the hands of CNN and the leadership of the Democratic National Committee. Even the blind squirrels could see what was happening.

Matt Taibbi, writing in CNN’s Debate Performance Was Villainous and Shameful for Rolling Stone lays out the tale. He ledes:

CNN debate moderator Abby Phillip asked Bernie Sanders in the Tuesday debate in Des Moines:

“CNN reported yesterday—and Senator Sanders, Senator Warren confirmed in a statement—that, in 2018, you told her you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?”

Not “did you say that,” but “why did you say that?”

Sanders denied it, then listed the many reasons the story makes no sense: He urged Warren herself to run in 2016, campaigned for a female candidate who won the popular vote by 3 million votes, and has been saying the opposite in public for decades. “There’s a video of me 30 years ago talking about how a woman could become president of the United States,” he said.

Phillip asked him to clarify: He never said it? “That is correct,” Sanders said. Phillip turned to Warren and deadpanned: “Senator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?”

That “when” was as transparent a media “fuck you” as we’ve seen in a presidential debate. It evoked memories of another infamous CNN ambush, when Bernard Shaw in 1988 crotch-kicked Mike Dukakis with a question about whether he’d favor the death penalty for someone who raped and murdered his wife, Kitty.

So, yeah. This story, which has only two witnesses—Warren and Sanders—happened in 2018. In 2018 for fuck’s sake. That there have been no leaks, no other discussions, no messaging on this before last night tells me that the Warren and her staffers have been bouncing on the balls of their feet like an eight-year-old who really, really needs to pee, for months. Taibbi continues:

Over a 24-hour period before, during, and after the debate, CNN bid farewell to what remained of its reputation as a nonpolitical actor via a remarkable stretch of factually dubious reporting, bent commentary, and heavy-handed messaging.

The cycle began with a “bombshell” exposé by CNN reporter MJ Lee. Released on the eve of the debate, Lee reported Warren’s claim that Sanders told her a woman couldn’t win in a December 2018 meeting.

Lee treated the story as fact, using constructions such as, “Sanders responded that he did not think a woman could win,” and “the revelation that Sanders expressed skepticism that Warren could win.”

Lee said “the conversation” opened a window into “the role of sexism and gender inequality in politics”: The conversation also illustrates the skepticism among not only American voters but also senior Democratic officials that the country is ready to elect a woman as president …

Although Lee said she based the story on “the accounts of four people,” they were “two people Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter,” and “two people familiar with the meeting.” There were only two people in the room, Sanders and Warren. Lee’s “four people” actually relied on just one source, Warren.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same construction that’s driven countless other shaky stories in the past, from WMD reports to Russiagate speculations. An unconfirmable hearsay story is conveyed by one source, who gives the reporter the numbers of two or three other people in the office who’ve heard the same tale from the same place. Voilà: A one-source pony is now factual “according to several people familiar with the matter.”

Exactly one month ago I posted this headline: WARREN SANDERS TERRIFIES PRESIDENT TRUMP… Last night that band broke up. I went looking this morning to see if Robert Reich—he who as touted Warren Sanders—had yet posted a response to the divorce, but found nothing. Perhaps in coming days…

Meanwhile, Taibbi writes:

CNN factory-produces these banal meanderings, worrying over the chances of establishment candidates and how they might overcome the irrational urges of the electorate (“It’s head or heart,” as Bash put it). It’s elite messaging in numbing quantity, to the point where you feel like screaming, “We get it!”

This continued during the debate, with the chryon featuring questions like, “How will [Sanders] avoid bankrupting the country?” Or: “Does Sanders owe voters an explanation of how much his health plan will cost them and the country?”

After Phillip pulled the “When Sanders said that horrible thing we can’t prove happened, how did you feel?” trick with Warren, she moved to Klobuchar, who by coincidence was the person panelists predicted might “go for the jugular” over this story: “Senator Klobuchar,” Phillip said, “What do you say to people who say a woman can’t win the election?” Again, the sleazy construction of the question presupposed that someone actually did say it.

I wondered online how long it would take for someone after the debate to declare Klobuchar the winner. It turned out to be the very first comment on Anderson Cooper’s wrap-up show, from Gloria Borger: “Well, I think that Amy Klobuchar tried her hardest to distinguish herself as a pragmatist who can tell the rest of the Democrats to get real.”

Then McIntosh said this: I think what Bernie forgot was that this isn’t a he said/she said story. This is a reported-out story that CNN was part of breaking. So, to have him just flat-out say no, I think wasn’t—wasn’t nearly enough to address that for the women watching.

Poor Anderson Cooper was forced to intercede and point out that it literally is a he said/she said story (and not remotely “reported out,” I might add).

Can you picture President Donald John Trump, lying in his bed, surrounded by McDonald’s cheeseburgers, grinning from ear to ear, when the news was delivered to him?

Bonus No. 1: From a former student: Being more bonobo—Why I run a zoo.

From the outside, knowing whether the infliction of pain and suffering is a matter of cruelty or indifference can be difficult because while the end result may be similar or even identical, the intent of the actor is the defining distinctness. As a purely personal matter, I don’t think that anyone in the Trump family is actually cruel or evil. They just don’t give a fuck.

Ralph Nader disagrees. He believes that President Donald John Trump is cruel, and,perhaps more importantly, criminally so. Nader, in Making America Dread Again!, writes:

President Donald Trump
White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Trump:

The disabling and dismantling of the federal health and safety agencies under your cruel command has been leaving a trail of American fatalities, injuries, and property destruction without precedent even among past Republican Administrations. Your criminal negligence toward federal agencies like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is an impeachable offense. You are obsessed with corporate profits, obeisant to the corporate CEOs funding your campaigns. You deliberately selected corrupt henchmen to run these lifesaving agencies into the ground, under the guise of “deregulation.”

Constitutional law scholars declare that refusing to “faithfully execute laws” was seen by our Founders to be a major impeachable violation, sufficient for removal Continue Reading »

Here’s a fun fact I’ll be you never learned in your world history class: in September 1918 President Thomas Woodrow Wilson sent nearly 8,000 United States Army troops to invade Russia. That—Hollywood’s fantasies notwithstanding—was the only time that either country invaded the other. In other words, the current score on invasions is United States 1, Russians 0.

Our recent obsession with Russian interference in our affairs is, at best, laughable hypocrisy and, at worst, dangerous deflection. Ted Rall, writing in America’s Long History of Meddling in Russia, takes a look at our 20th century continuation of England’s Great Game in 19th century:

Russia—OK, not the actual Russian government but a private click-farm company located in Russia—bought $100,000 worth of political ads on Facebook designed to change the outcome of the 2016 election. Except that only a small fraction of those ads were political. Also except that that small fraction was divvied up between pro-Hillary Clinton and pro-Donald Trump ads. And especially except that $100,000 in Facebook ads can’t affect the outcome of a $6.8 billion election.

Now the same media outlets who touted Robert Mueller’s fizzled Russiagate investigation daily for three years is warning that Russia is planning to do the same thing in 2020.

Be slightly afraid. Very slightly afraid.

Or not. In the fine tradition of fear-mongering in American politics, the Billionaire class—yes, including Michael Rubens Bloomberg and Thomas Fahr Steyer—wants keep Americans scared and distracted so that they don’t see the home-grown threats from Wall Street, Banking and the 1 percent. Rall continues:

“Our adversaries want to undermine our democratic institutions, influence public sentiment and affect government policies,” read a statement from top Trump Administration security officials issued in November. “Russia, China, Iran, and other foreign malicious actors all will seek to interfere in the voting process or influence voter perceptions.”

Setting aside the question of whether it’s smart to take the U.S. government at its word — it isn’t — if Russia were to meddle in our domestic politics, we would have it coming.

To say the least.

Throughout its history the United States repeatedly attacked, sabotaged and undermined the Soviet Union. U.S. interference was one of the major contributors to the collapse of that country in 1991. So the Russian government that followed—the Russian system now in place–might not even exist if not for the United States.

Imagine being one of the freshly-minted leaders of Russia in the months following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. You have a lot on your plate. The last thing you need is a U.S.-led invasion force of tens of thousands of troops invading your chaotic new country, most of which is primitive and dirt-poor. But that’s what they got. It took three years to kick out our troops.

That’s a little more interferency than Facebook ads.

Rall’s point—and mine—is that Russia, in the grand pantheon of threats to the United States and our Constitution, isn’t even on the table. The few thousand families who possess and control nearly all the wealth in the country are. We are seeing that play out in our 2020 election and I expect that Bernie Sanders is about to become the target of wealth’s wrath because he, more than any other candidate, is an existential threat to their continued ease, luxury and power.

By my count, between December 2007 and October 2019, Roldo Bartimole wrote about Dennis Kucinich no less than 71 times here on Have Coffee Will Write. Roldo’s most recent piece came under the headline: DENNIS KUCINICH KICKED AWAY A CHANCE FOR A PROGRESSIVE URBAN STRATEGY FOR CLEVELAND.

I mention Roldo’s long history with Dennis because this morning I read Matt Taibbi’s piece for Rolling Stone Magazine under the headline: Dennis Kucinich, Who Was Ahead of His Time, Reflects on New Hampshire, Iran, and the Antiwar Movement

Now, I respect Taibbi and I’m not saying that anything he’s written here is wrong, or even misleading, but context is important and this is the primary reason that Roldo’s Look Back series is so vital.

Taibbi ledes:

Sixteen years ago, after a campaign event in New Hampshire, Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich talked about what happens in politics if voters can be convinced to spend more time worrying about polls than ideas.

“Unless we’re motivated by principle in our voting, we walk into a mirrored echo chamber, where there’s no coherence,” he said.

Kucinich ran for president in 2004 and 2008 and aroused indignation among campaign pundits and party strategists for his stubborn pursuit of “fringe” politics. The few headline news stories about him tended to involve harangues about his “miniscule vote tallies” and gripes about his presence in debates.

Years later, the Kucinich platform—it was simple enough to fit on a playing card-sized pamphlet in 2004—is progressive mainstream. He preached universal health care, a repeal of NAFTA, an immediate pullout from Iraq, same-sex marriage, slashing the defense budget, and the decriminalization of marijuana.

The Washington Post two years ago ran a feature noting how his campaign predicted the “future of American politics,” and credited him with being tuned into populist undercurrents that later exploded in both the Sanders and Trump campaigns. In the 2020 cycle, Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang, and Tulsi Gabbard (whom he endorses) also sound Kucinich-like themes of corporate exploitation, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the failures of American military policy.

This week, I asked him if he felt validated that his ideas are no longer dismissed as “fringe.”

Taibbi portrays Dennis as a thinker, a serious thinker. He writes:

[Dennis] spent a lot of time thinking about the broader philosophical picture, which was reflected in ideas like a Department of Peace, another concept that attracted ridicule at the time. He saw the promotion of “nonviolent conflict resolution” as a way not merely to counter militarism, but also to help prevent domestic violence and mass shootings.

In this area in particular, he ran up against the orthodoxy of the two political parties, which both were and are heavily funded by defense contractors. He says he understood his brand of politics could therefore never win approval.

“The parties are straitjacketed by interest groups that make their money off war,” he says. “Why would they want a candidate who is opposed to war?”

When I tried to ask him if it’s difficult for candidates with his politics to succeed, given his party’s awkward relationship with the antiwar movement, he cut me off.Exh

“It’s not an awkward relationship. It’s no relationship. Let’s start with that,” he says.

Nonetheless, he kept hammering the same message, during and after his presidential runs.

“I did 341 speeches [on the floor of congress] against the Iraq war,” Kucinich says. “I gave 155 speeches against war with Iran. I spent the better part of sixteen years dedicated to trying to protect America from the tragedy of going to wars based on lies. And I’ll tell you, it’s exhausting.”

Exhausting indeed.

Bonus No. 1: Kucinich: An Open Letter To President Trump.

Bonus No. 2: The 10 Laws of New Hampshire Primary Reporting.

Senator Michael Shumway Lee is the senior senator (Willard Mitt Romney is the junior) from Utah and an outspoken supporter of President Donald John Trump. What he told reporters—with Senator Randal Howard Paul looking on—yesterday, following what can barely be referred to as a briefing, must give Senate Majority Leader Addison Mitchell McConnell and Trump pause.

Jordain Carney, writing in Rand Paul, Mike Lee rip administration over ‘insulting and demeaning’ Iran briefing for The Hill, ledes:

GOP Sens. Mike Lee (Utah) and Rand Paul (Ky.) ripped the administration over a closed-door briefing on Iran on Wednesday, announcing they will now support a resolution reining in President Trump’s military powers.

Lee, speaking to reporters after a roughly hourlong closed-door meeting with administration officials, characterized it as “the worst briefing I’ve seen, at least on a military issue.”

Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, CIA Director Gina Haspel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley were dispatched to brief both the House and Senate on Wednesday amid days of concerns from lawmakers that Trump was on a path to war with Iran, which on Tuesday night launched missiles at Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops.

Lee said the officials warned that Congress would “embolden” Iran if lawmakers debated Trump’s war powers.

“I find this insulting and demeaning … to the office that each of the 100 senators in this building happens to hold. I find it insulting and demeaning to the Constitution of the United States,” Lee said.

Following his statement to the press, Lee sat down with National Public Radio Host Rachel Martin. I found this exchange between Martin and Lee’s—beginning at time mark 4:30—telling:

MARTIN: …I do want to play a clip of Florida Senator Marco Rubio. He and other Republicans had a dramatically different take on the outcome of the briefing.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MARCO RUBIO: It was very well done. I think they’ve done an excellent job of outlining the rationale behind both the decision to go after Soleimani and the response to the Iranian attack yesterday.

MARTIN: Now, you have said earlier that you believe in the legal justification of the strike. But how could Marco Rubio come out of that briefing with such a different opinion than you?

LEE: I think he must have been in a different briefing than I attended. [Emphasis mine, JH] I literally find it difficult to imagine how my friend Marco, who is smart, who listens carefully, who cares about these things—how he could emerge from that meeting and say that it was good. It was terrible. I think it was an unmitigated disaster.

MARTIN: What kind of precedent do you think this sets?

LEE: Not a good one. It’s a precedent that is, unfortunately, not itself unprecedented. We have had many decades now—going back 50, 60, 70 years—in which we’ve been drifting away from this idea embedded within the Constitution that the power to declare war belongs to the Congress. It’s enumerated in Article I, Section 8. There’s a reason for that. We wanted to make sure that the power to put American blood and treasure on the line is given only to that branch of government most accountable to the people at the most regular intervals. Ours is not a system in which we can be taken into war by the executive, and it never should be.

Trump repeatedly demonstrates that when he crosses a line and receives little or no opposition, he quickly moves onto the next line. His senate supporters, including Lee, have said that they are fine with crossing the bridge resulting in the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. What I’m hearing here is that any subsequent bridge will be a bridge too far.

Bonus No. 1: White House Officials “Shushed” Lawmakers Who Asked Questions During Iran Briefing.

Bonus No. 2: Sen. Bernie Sanders: I Will Do Everything I Can To Stop A War With Iran; Sen. Sanders Is Concerned That Sen. McConnell Wants An Impeachment Trial Without Witness Testimony; and Sen. Bernie Sanders: Increased Focus On Climate Change Is The Difference Between 2016 and 2020.

We (those who don’t think that President Donald John Trump is good for our nation) make ourselves crazy looking for reasons and any possible way we may conceive for how we got to where we are today. But just as you can’t reason anyone out of a view that they didn’t arrive at from reason, you can’t find rational motives in actions not driven by rationality.

A spoiled child wants what a spoiled child wants and such a child will pursue any path to gather pleasure and avoid pain. We don’t need to understand any more than that. Since, however, there’s no such equivalent action to a time out in our Constitution, we must make do with the tools our Constitution does give us, and in the case of a sitting president, that’s impeachment.

Unlike the first impeachment in my lifetime, we are not dealing with a legislative body devoted to duty, honor and what is best for the nation. Instead we must find good women me who are not part of the present cult of personality and demand they do what they swore to do: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same. Not their constituents, not their state and not their president,but the Constitution of the United States of America, so help them God.

Ralph Nader believes, as I do, that the present occupant of the Oval Office is a criminal most worthy of Dante’s fourth circle of hell.

Nader, in Full Impeachments for Trump will Shake Senate Republicans from Kangaroo Court, writes:

Many Americans have forecasted that the outlaw Donald Trump will commit even more illegal acts to increasing his support in the 2020 presidential year. Remember Wag the Dog, a film about using a fabricated war to draw attention away from presidential misdeeds. Those Americans have been proven right by Donald Trump’s attempt to provoke an unlawful war with Iran. Likewise, Trump has illegally ordered his staff Continue Reading »

Two American presidents from the Republican Party are so revered that both their faces appear side-by-side on possibly our most famous national monument: Mount Rushmore. Both men are remembered for their reforms and for their honest dealings. Tragically, assassins’ bullets changed both their presidencies; ending the first and starting the second.

The two, of course are President Abraham Lincoln, assassinated on 15 April 1865 and Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, who rose in office after President William McKinley was shot and later died from his assassin’s wound on 14 September 1901. Roosevelt is remembered for much, but I want to focus on what he called his Square Deal:

The Square Deal was President Theodore Roosevelt’s domestic program, which reflected his three major goals: conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection.

These three demands are often referred to as the “three Cs” of Roosevelt’s Square Deal. Thus, it aimed at helping middle class citizens and involved attacking plutocracy and bad trusts while at the same time protecting business from the most extreme demands of organized labor. He explained in 1901-1909:

When I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.

A progressive Republican, Roosevelt believed in government action to mitigate social evils, and as president he in 1908 denounced “the representatives of predatory wealth” as guilty of “all forms of iniquity from the oppression of wage workers to unfair and unwholesome methods of crushing competition, and to defrauding the public by stock-jobbing and the manipulation of securities.”

Coming after the rapacious accumulation of wealth that we now call The Gilded Age, Roosevelt’s Square Deal was a bright promise to Americans not blessed with millionaire fathers.

We are now amidst a 21st century Gilded Age that might make John D. Rockefeller, Andrew W. Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Flagler, Henry H. Rogers, J. P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt blush (or green with envy) and Andrea Bernstein has written a book chronicling how we got here and the premier family of the age in American Oligarchs: The Kushners, The Trumps And The Marriage Of Money And Power.

Both Terry Gross and Ailsa Chang draw out from Bernstein the tale of generational malfeasance and appropriation of taxpayers’ dollars under false flags by these families to build an empire they pretend came from honest labor and native wit.

You should listen carefully to both.

Bonus No. 1: Trump Inc.

Bonus No. 2: Campaign Diary: Notes from the Most Unpredictable Primary Race Ever.

Bonus No. 3: Full Frontal Rewind: Make Voting Fair Again.

Mano Singham posted The War Prayer by Mark Twain yesterday. He wrote: At times like this when people are being wound up to go to war, I wish the media would reprint this Mark Twain piece. I agree. What I really wish, though, is that Congress repeal The War Powers Resolution of 1973 and do its damn job as defined in our Constitution.

There, in Article I, section 8, clause 1, our founders wrote that:

The Congress shall have Power To… To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings…

The President of The United States does not get to wag the dog and throw our nation into war on a whim and then let us know about the coming maimings and deaths that will follow in a fucking Tweet.

Yet, here we are again.

When I was in high school I first read Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. While it would be many years—after I had served 11 years in the military—that I would see Trumbo’s movie version of his powerful book.

Here, on the cusp of yet another righteous war you should read the book or watch the movie and understand what we will ask in the name of patriotism and profit.

Mano concluded: War fever makes people lose their humanity.

We can choose to keep cooler heads.

Bonus No. 1: Bob Dylan “John Brown” Haunting Live Performance 1999.

I confess that I did not know that Representative Tulsi Gabbard (HI-2) was still in the race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, but clearly, President Donald John Trump’s reckless actions in Iraq have made her the go-to source for a qualified opinion on events in Baghdad and the repercussions for our troops and our nation.

Gabbard is so focused and so on-message in these two interviews with Fox News that she’s almost scary. (She probably is scary to them.) This is a confident, well-educated candidate who won’t get sucked down the typical Fox News rabbit holes.

Gabbard might not be what Bernie will be looking for in a vice president—hell, she might not want to be a vice president—but I certainly hope that he finds a post in his administration that allows her to fully use her considerable skills and knowledge.

Bonus No. 1: Four Reasons Why Millennials Don’t Have Any Money with Robert Reich.

Bonus No. 2: Media leaders agonize over amplifying Trump lies as 2020 election year begins and Sleepwalking into 2020: are the media who missed Trump’s 2016 rise ready now?

THE SPARK IS GONE. DON’T KNOW HOW LONG IT HAS BEEN GONE.

BUT IT HAS BEEN SOME TIME.

WHAT WILL LIGHT IT UP AGAIN? I DON’T KNOW.
.
WILL IT TAKE A PERSON? STILL DON’T KNOW.

WILL IT TAKE A MOVEMENT? NOT SURE. BUT THAT WOULD HELP.

SOME 50 YEARS AGO IT WAS SUCH A COMBINATION THAT PROPELLED EVENTS IN CLEVELAND.

I LOOK BACK some 50 or more years to Cleveland of the late 1960 and early 1970s to now as we enter a new decade of 2020.

THOSE PAST DECADES HAVE NOT BEEN GOOD FOR OUR CITY.

Cleveland has fallen. Time has not been kind.

Today we have a mayor, seemingly asleep. Visibly uncaring. “It is what it is” colorless. Rather than “it’s not what it should be” activist.

This mayor has long overstayed his welcome.

The change here, however, goes much deeper.

A Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank report by Mark Schweitzer, tells one aspect of the city’s decline or inability to grow.

The economic decline is noticeable. He writes:

In 1969, the Cleveland Metropolitan Statistical Area was among the top 10 percent of MSAs for per capita income. Despite declines in per capita income following the large shocks to manufacturing employment experienced in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Cleveland MSA’s per capita income remained above average until 2000. The decline in manufacturing experienced in the Cleveland MSA between 2001 and 2010 appears to have further dampened income growth; this which experience is consistent with the experience of other industrial heartland MSAs that suffered income losses along with manufacturing losses. The Cleveland MSA is now notably below the national MSA average for per capita income.

That’s from a Cleveland Federal Reserve report.

Cleveland’s Mr. Numbers—George Zeller—has been broadcasting the bad news of Cleveland and Ohio job figures for years.

He wrote recently:

Ohio extended its lengthy sub-par job growth streak to 91 consecutive months below the USA national average as a result of the weak November 2019 figure and substantial revisions to the USA job figures going back for several decades. In November 2019 Ohio’s year over year job growth rate remains at a figure below the USA national average.
We also know that the city’s population has declined precipitously since that time period.

Cleveland has lost population in every decade but one since 1930. In 1950 it had a .41 percent hike.

In 1970 the census data showed 750,000 population for the city proper. The latest figure shows 383,000.

However, those are dry, stale figures. They don’t tell the human story of then and now.

The election of Carl B. Stokes dominated the political landscape of the late 1960s and into the 1970s. He was re-elected in 1971 as Cleveland had two-year terms then. He then left Cleveland.

Stokes attracted national attention, especially from the Lyndon Johnson-Hubert Humphrey administration. The Cleveland business leadership, hungry for racial peace, ran a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal proclaiming an old blue-chip city with bright new leadership. Stokes was their man. It didn’t last.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. made forays into the city from Chicago to support voter registration in the city’s black community. He added to the racial tension.

With him was a 23-year old bouncing high-spirited Jesse Jackson. Unknown at the time, he would rise later.

Saul Alinsky, the radical organizer, made a trip here, courtesy of the Council of Churches. The Council wanted to organize an action program. He spoke once and said, “No thanks” to Cleveland. Alinsky didn’t like what he saw—a black community divided.

Cleveland was a hot spot.

As members of the campus Students for a Democratic Society looked to organize off-campus, they choose two cities—Newark, N. J. and Cleveland, Ohio.

They worked the east and west side. They invited me to dinner at a Jay Ave. apartment but nixed any media coverage (I was with the Plain Dealer at the time).

Equally uninterested in any PD coverage was Ruth Turner, a young woman and a graduate of Oberlin College. She was a young chair of the Congress of Racial Equality here. She also would meet with me but refused coverage in the PD.

No wonder. When I mentioned I had interviewed Robert Penn Warren before I left Connecticut and he suggested I speak with Turner, reporters here blew her off as too radical. “Why would you want to talk with her?” was the reaction. Strange but revealing.

Warren in an interview with Turner about another major tragedy here—the death of the Rev. Bruce Klunder. Was she there? Yes, she was and answered:

I didn’t see it but I was there at the time,” said Turner. Klunder was killed by a bulldozer that ran over his prostate body, trying to stop construction of a segregated school.

Yes, well that occurred around 3:30 or 4 when the construction had stopped and the policemen were attempting to send the mob home, and we knew they were angry—they were justifiably angry—they had been provoked considerably by the actions of the police that day. And yet we felt there was cause to be served at that point by exploding there in the community. We attempted to quiet them and to send them home.

Hardly seemed anything but responsible, not radical at all. She soon also left town. (Warren’s interview with Turner can be Googled.)

Oh, Cleveland, you’ve made so many mistakes. Led by a business establishment that wanted peace. Without the cost of justice.

While Cleveland’s racial situation (which brought me here) dominated that period, it wasn’t the only major issue.

The twin issue to racism was, of course, the war. And Cleveland had its role.

Where did a contingent of some 30 police officers drag two priests from the altar as they said Mass?

Well, here, of course.

Two priests—Rev. Robert Begin and Rev. Bernie Meyer—“took over” St. John’s Cathedral in downtown Cleveland to celebrate a Mass in protest.

They protested the war in Vietnam, white racism and poverty. In other words, the big problems of the day.

The pressures of the times propelled actions.

The Case-Western Reserve campus was alive with protest.

In peace matters, Cleveland then housed a national figure—Dr. Benjamin Spock who was at the University from 1955-67. I wrote a page one profile of the “baby doctor” for the Wall Street Journal in 1967.

Dr. Sid Peck, a professor at Case-Western Reserve University, was instrumental in the national Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam.

I remember students and others blocked Euclid Ave. the morning of the Kent State shooting, forcing police to bring in the mounted police for skirmishes that last most of the day.

The SDS contingent remained in Cleveland. However, some were activists at Kent State University.

Some early issues of my newsletter Point Of Viəw were printed by SDS members. Terry Robbins of SDS was one of them. Early on he admonished me for writings he said turned off liberals.

To understand how fast events were taking people as the war in Vietnam dragged on, Terry unfortunately became much more radical as an original member of the Weathermen. He was making a bomb when he blew himself and others up in a New York townhouse later.

One imagines that the “times” force many to act as they would not in “normal” times.

Fifty or so years ago did demand trigger events and people take stands they might never have dreamed of considering in ”normal” times?

If there is a lesson for today, it is that possibly the “times” don’t demand enough of us. Thus, we get the lassitude that seems to pervade at least our local politics.

I do believe, however, that we may be on the lip of a new activism here. We shall see.

Ted Rall is having a justifiably bad day. He’s having a bad day because he’s grappling with the idea that Generation X, those Americans born in the 1960s may be the last human beings who will get to live out their full actuarial life expectancies. Their children and grandchildren are unlikely to live anything like the three score and ten found in the Hebrew scriptures.

My parents expected that my generation—I’m a mid-line boomer—would have a better life than they had. Not that their lives were bad, they weren’t, but that the American Dream would continue and grow and that we would be the beneficiaries. And, for the most part, we were. But we were the last and life as we know it is all down hill from here.

Rall, in A Grim New Definition of Generation X, writes:

“Climate change now represents a near-to mid-term existential threat” to humanity, warns a recent policy paper by an Australian think tank. Civilization, scientists say, could collapse by 2050. Some people may survive. Not many.

Some dismiss such purveyors of apocalyptic prognoses as hysterics. To the contrary, they’re Pollyannas. Every previous “worst-case scenario” prediction for the climate has turned out to have understated the gravity of the situation. “Paleoclimatologists have shown that past warming episodes show that there are mechanisms which magnify its effects, not represented in current climate models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the Paris Accords,” reports The Independent. It’s probably too optimistic to assume that we’ll make it to 2050.

I may actually live to see 2050. I’ll be 95 then and thanks to excellent government healthcare—I’m covered under the Veterans Administration—living that long is not unreasonable. But I’m not sure I’d want to. Rall continues:

Millennials and the children we call Generation Z face the horrifying prospect that they will get stuck with the tab for humanity’s centuries-long rape of planet earth, the mass desecration of which radically accelerated after 1950. There is an intolerably high chance that today’s young people will starve to death, die of thirst, be killed by a superstorm, succumb to a new disease, boil to death, asphyxiate from air pollution, be murdered in a riot or shot or blown up in a war sparked by environmentally-related political instability long before they survive to old age.

And we wonder why so my Young Adult fiction is dystopian.

Rall is not issuing a call to arms. In his evaluation that ship sailed during the Carter administration. (Remember Jimmy telling us to start wearing sweaters and turn down the heat? Remember the solar panels he put on the roof of the White House (and President Ronald Wilson Reagan tearing off)? Now, from where he’s sitting, all we can do is choose how we’re going to go out.

What if we woke up and demanded action from our political leaders? Radical problems require radical solutions; only the most radical of solutions could resolve the most radical problem of ruining our planet’s ability to sustain us: revolution. We would have to rise up and abolish—immediately—consumer capitalism in all the major greenhouse gas-producing nations, prioritize cleaning the environment as the human race’s top concern, and pivot to an economic mindset in which we extract the bare minimum from the ecosystem that we need in order to survive and nothing more.

Voting might achieve some incremental reforms but reform falls far short of what we require. Saving our young people (and their children, should they be foolish enough to have any) would require global revolution, the violent overthrow of the ruling elites and replacing them with people who understand what must be done. It would need to happen today. Fifty years ago would be better. Got a time machine?

None of this is going to happen. We are going to sleepwalk to our doom in a haze of social media and corporate entertainment distraction.

Rall concludes:

Much is to be said for hedonism: eat, drink, have sex, and don’t bother to sort your recycling, for tomorrow we die. Stoicism has its advantages too; go out with dignity rather than weeping and gnashing your teeth and making your fellow survivors miserable.

Nihilism is about to become the best worst possible life strategy. Life is meaningless. That will soon become obvious. Moral principles, relics of a time with a future, will blow away like the irradiated dust we leave behind.

None of this will have mattered.

This then is our legacy, that we leave to no one. We can go out with a last great act of defiance, but we’ll still get eaten.

Bonus No. 1: Ep. 5: Free Dental—A Conversation With My Dentist.

Bonus No. 2: Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9: When was that moment we could have turned things around.

[Update @ 0900—Where I’ll be today (and where you should be if you live in Cleveland) at 1400: Cuyahoga for Bernie General Meeting at the Parma Snow Library, You should also plan on being at one of these meetings Tuesday evening.]

When we think of Justice, the iconic image that leaps to mind is the figure that stands atop London’s Old Bailey. But there is another iconic statue, one that so embarrassed United States Attorney General John Ashcroft, that he hid her bosom with blue drapery. (Shamefully, President Barack Hussein Obama recovered Spirit of Justice in 2014.)

That sculptor Paul Jennewein figured his version—Spirit of Justice–without a blindfold or a covered right breast, I think, is telling in our Age of Trump. Justice, for President Donald John Trump, is not blind, it is wide-eyed and understands who signs its paychecks. Trump thinks of Lady Justice in the way he thinks of all attractive women:

[W]hen you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. …Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

Trump’s serial defilement of justice reaches far beyond his presidency. We really do need that perp walk.

Robert Reich, in At every opportunity, Trump recklessly degrades American justice for The Guardian, writes:

As the Senate moves to an impeachment trial and America slouches into this election year, the rule of law is center stage.

Yet Donald Trump is substituting lawless thuggery for impartial justice.

The biggest immediate news is the president’s killing of Qassem Suleimani. The act brings America to the brink of an illegal war with Iran without any congressional approval, in direct violation of Congress’s war-making authority under the constitution.

But other presidents have disregarded Congress’s war-making power, too. What makes Trump unique is the overall pattern. Almost wherever you look, he has shown utter disdain for law.

Reich continues, detailing further examples that include: Trump’s outing of the whistleblower central to his impeachment; his intrusion into the navy’s prosecution of Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher on war crimes; his ongoing intrusions into the justice department and the FBI; the toady actions of his pet Attorney General William Pelham Barr; the rogue actions of his goon squad: Rudolph William Louis Giuliani, John Michael Mulvaney and Stephen Miller. When he has completed his nefarious and mobbish litany, Reich concludes:

You see the pattern: whistleblowers intimidated, the justice department politicized, findings of special counsels and inspectors general distorted or ignored, foreign policy made by a private citizen unaccountable to anybody, rogue military officers and rogue sheriffs pardoned.

Each instance is disturbing on its own. Viewed as a whole, Trump’s lawlessness is systematically corrupting justice in the US.

Impartial justice is the keystone of a democracy. Even if the Senate fails to remove Trump for impeachable offenses, American voters must do so next November.

If not sooner.

Bonus No. 1: Winning the 2020 Election: Robert Reich and Ro Khanna.

Bonus No. 2: Donald Trump Jr and Ivanka Trump among top Republican picks for 2024.

Several times in this podcast Moore refers to it as his first. Perhaps he started here and then recorded episodes 1-3 to provide the introduction, maybe, when he learned that this was De Niro’s first podcast he made the decision to give chops to an idol. Either way, he couldn’t have come up with a better choice in De Niro with his Fuck Trump Trifecta.

As I listened this morning, I made notes on four points. The first comes at timemark 20:58 where more asks: What do we do? The second come eight or so minutes later when Moore makes the point that the demographic is with us. The third moment, only a minute or so later did make cringe when the two candidates that De Niro names are Biden and Bloomberg. Biden I get, but fucking Bloomberg? The fourth, and final, moment also gave me pause because this is the point from which the episode takes its name where De Niro suggests that President Donald John Trump needs to be humiliated.

I get this last, but humiliation was partially how we got into this mess. People laughing at Trump after Seth Meyers roasted him during the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner was the kicker. The only humiliation that will end Trump’s reign of tantrum would be his leaving the White House—either after a conviction by the Senate (not likely) or after losing the 2020 election (very possible but nowheres near a gimme) escorted by Marines in their dress blues in the perp walk he so richly deserves.

Bonus No. 1: Now yous can’t leave…

Bonus No. 2: The empty promises of Marie Kondo and the craze for minimalism.

There are some actors whose performance as a particular character forever remains an iconic standard by which all who follow must be judged. All James Bonds must be compared to Sean Connery—in my opinion, only Daniel Craig comes close—and in an anti-Flemingly way, fellow spy George Smiley OBE will, in my universe, always be portrayed by Sir Alec Guinness.

Guinness did not inaugurate the role. Two actors—Rupert Davis and George Mason—preceded him and one actor—Gary Oldman—has played Smiley since Guinness’ death in 2000. But when I read John le Carré’s books it is Guinness’ voice that I hear in my head.

I began reading his latest—Agent Running In The Field—yesterday afternoon and even though Smiley is not in the book (yet?), he is there in the cadence and word choice of the protagonist Nathaniel (né Anatoly). This passage comes at the end of Chapter 3.

The Prue of today is not the dedicated Office spouse of more than twenty years ago. As selfless, yes, and upright. And as much fun when she lets her hair down. And as determined as ever to be of service to the world at large, just never again in a secret capacity. The impressive junior lawyer who had taken courses in counter-surveillance, safety signals and the filling and clearing of dead letter boxes had indeed accompanied me to Moscow. For fourteen exacting months we had shared the perpetual stress of knowing that our most intimate exchanges were listened to, watched over and analysed for any hint of human weakness or lapse of security. Under the impressive guidance of our head of Station—the same Bryn Jordan who today was huddled in anxious conclave with our intelligence partners in Washington—she had played the starring role in husband-and-wife setpiece charades scripted to deceive the opposition’s eavesdroppers.

But it was during our second back-to-back stint in Moscow that Prue discovered she was pregnant, and with pregnancy came an abrupt disenchantment with the Office and its works. A lifetime of deception no longer appealed to her, if it ever had. Neither did a foreign birthplace for our child. We returned to England. Perhaps when the baby is born, she’ll think differently, I told myself. But that was not to know Prue. On the day Stephanie was born, Prue’s father dropped dead of a heart attack. On the strength of his bequest, she paid cash down for a Victorian house in Battersea with a large garden and an apple tree. If she had stuck a flag in the ground and said ‘Here I stay,’ she could not have made her intentions more clear. Out daughter Steff, as we were soon calling her, would never become the kind of diplomatic brat we had seen too many of, over-nannied and shuffled from country to country and school to school in the wake of their mothers and fathers. She would occupy her natural place in society, attend state schools, never private or boarding schools.

And what would Prue herself do with the rest of her life? She would take it up where she had left it. She would become a human rights lawyer, a legal champion of the oppressed. But her decision implied no sudden separation. She understood my love of Queen, country and the Service. I understood her love of law and human justice. She had given the Service her all, she could give no more. From the earliest days of our marriage she had never been the sort of wife who can’t wait for the Chief’s Christmas party or the funerals of revered members or At Homes for junior staff and their dependents. And I for my part had never been a natural for get-togethers with Prue’s radically minded legal colleagues.

But neither of us could have foreseen that as post-Communist Russia, against all hope and expectation, emerged as a clear and present threat to liberal democracy across the globe, one foreign posting would follow on the heels of the last and I would become a de facto absentee husband and father.

Well, now I was home from the sea, as Dom had kindly said. It hadn’t been easy for either of us, Prue particularly, and she had every reason to hope that I was back on dry land for good and looking for a new life in what she referred to, a little too often, as the real world. A former colleague of mine had opened an outward-bound club for disadvantaged kids in Birmingham and swore he’d never been so happy in his life. Hadn’t I once talked of doing just that?

My father had the Ian Flemming Bond books and I tried to read a few of them but they never caught on with me. Dad also like the work of Len Deighton and I found those much better. Deighton’s main character Harry Palmer was brought to life by another iconic British actor: Michael Caine.

Back in October, NPR’s Scott Simon interviewed and le Carré had this to say:

Agent Running In The Field is yet one more experience I’ll never share.

Bonus No. 1: Denison UCC, Homeless Advocates Call on Council to Support Cold Weather Plan.

Bonus No. 2: To present a bit of the flavor of the book I offer this exchange—found in the middle of Chapter 5—between the protagonist and Ed, a youngish 20-something who, I expect, is our villain here.

‘Mind if I ask you a question, Nat?’ he enquires in a blurt of sudden resolve.

‘Of course I don’t,’ I say hosptiably.

‘Only I respect you quite a lot actually. Although it’s short acquaintance. It doesn’t take long to know a person once you’ve played them.’

‘Go on.’

‘Thank you. I will. It is my considered opinion that for Britain and Europe, and for liberal democracies across the entire world as a whole, Britain’s departure from the European Union in the time of Donald Trump, and Britain’s consequent unqualified dependence on the United States in an era when the US is heading straight down the road to institutional racism and neo-fascism, is an unmitigated clusterfuck bar none. And what I’m asking is: do you in broad principle agree with me, or have I offended you and would it be better if I got up and left now? Yes or no?’

Bonus No. 3: John Roberts: justice once labelled a ‘disaster’ by Trump to oversee impeachment trial. Roberts wrote:

We should reflect on our duty to judge without fear or favor, deciding each matter with humility, integrity, and dispatch. As the New Year begins, and we turn to the tasks before us, we should each resolve to do our best to maintain the public’s trust that we are faithfully discharging our solemn obligation to equal justice under law.”

What our courts do have, wrote Publius in Federalist paper No. 78, is merely judgment. On Tuesday, in THEIR SOLUTION IS TO LET JOHN ROBERTS DECIDE… I wrote: History first recalls those who held the seat as Chief Justice of the United States. Those who follow the Supreme Court of the United States recognize the names John Jay, John Marshall…

Jay, our first Chief Justice, is the cogent personage here because he, along with Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, wrote, sharing Publius as a pseudonym, The Federalist Papers, a body work that the current Chief Justice, John Glover Roberts described as an enduring exposition on the core principles of our constitutional democracy.

In a barroom conversation a few weeks ago, a friend bemoaned the lack of civics education in our schools. That, at best, only a tiny, tiny percentage of students have even heard of The Federalist Papers, let alone read them—I confess that I didn’t read them myself until my freshman year in college and then, only partially—is a major deficit.

Chief Justice Roberts, in his 2019 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, however, grounds his annual report on these founding documents. He writes:

It is sadly ironic that John Jay’s efforts to educate his fellow citizens about the Framers’ plan of government fell victim to a rock thrown by a rioter motivated by a rumor. [Read Roberts’ report for the details. JH] Happily, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay ultimately succeeded in convincing the public of the virtues of the principles embodied in the Constitution. Those principles leave no place for mob violence. But in the ensuing years, we have come to take democracy for granted, and civic education has fallen by the wayside. In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital. [Emphasis mine, JH] The judiciary has an important role to play in civic education, and I am pleased to report that the judges and staff of our federal courts are taking up the challenge.

By virtue of their judicial responsibilities, judges are necessarily engaged in civic education. As Federalist No. 78 observes, the courts “have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.” When judges render their judgments through written opinions that explain their reasoning, they advance public understanding of the law. Chief Justice Earl Warren illustrated the power of a judicial decision as a teaching tool in Brown v. Board of Education, the great school desegregation case. His unanimous opinion on the most pressing issue of the era was a mere 11 pages—short enough that newspapers could publish all or almost all of it and every citizen could understand the Court’s rationale. Today, federal courts post their opinions online, giving the public instant access to the reasoning behind the judgments that affect their lives.

These opening lines of Roberts’ annal have caught the attention of court watchers in general and those studying Roberts’ potential actions presiding over the impeachment trial of President Donald John Trump in particular. One such, Edward Helmore, writing in Americans ‘take democracy for granted’, supreme court chief warns suggests that Roberts’ reports hints he will will not willingly preside over a kangaroo court. Helmore ledes:

Supreme court Chief Justice John Roberts has urged federal judges to promote public confidence in the judicial system, while warning that Americans have come to “take democracy for granted.”

In his annual report on the state of the judiciary, the George W Bush-appointee, who will preside over Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, said civic education had “fallen by the wayside.”

“In our age,” he wrote, “when social media can instantly spread rumour and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital.”

Roberts did not mention Trump but his statement was widely interpreted as part of an ongoing effort to shield the judicial branch from executive harassment.

Regardless of how much President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Addison Mitchell McConnell coordinate Roberts ain’t havin’ it.

Bonus No. 1: Reparations and Religion: 50 years after ‘Black Manifesto’

Bonus No. 2: Native American ‘land taxes’: a step on the roadmap for reparations

Bonus No. 3: Fantasmagorie (1908) First Cartoon Ever and Little Nemo (1911) Winsor McCay. Via: The Surprise and Wonder of Early Animation.

Back in 2012 I made a single New Year’s resolution: to read deeply instead of reading widely, taking my inspiration here from Henry David Thoreau who encourages me to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.That first year I read and reëad Moby Dick by Herman Melville. The next year, encouraged by my experience, I shifted to non-fiction.

In 2013 I dove into The Collected Essays, Journalism And Letters Of George Orwell. Volume I. An Age Like This. 1920-1940. In 2014 I read Les Misérables by Victor Hugo; 2015, My Country Right or Left; 2016, Don Quixote; 2017, As I Please; 2018, Ulysses; and last year, In Front of Your Nose.

This year I dip back into the 19th century with Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe edited by Edward H. Davidson.

Yesterday I rounded up all the library books that I currently have, made a note of their titles and authors for future reference, and bundled up the lot. I returned: Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Randolph Nesse, On Fire by Naomi Klein, The Second Founding by Eric Foner, A Short History of Charleston and Confederate Charleston by Robert Rosen, The Civil War Day By Day by E.B. Long along with What if? and Thing explainer by Randall Munroe.

Next comes the really, really hard bit: resisting taking out more books. I have a very short list of authors that I check each month so that I can get on the short list for any new books coming out. That list includes: Lawrence Block, James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, Bernard Cornwell, John Grisham, John le Carré (his Agent Running In The Field is waiting for at the library), Walter Mosley (I’m reading his Elements of Fiction at present) and John Sanford.

My two greatest sources of temptation are shows on National Public Radio and the browsing racks at the library. The first is the very difficult to deal with, but I’m going to try something new this year and pick up my books at the drive-through window at the library.

We’ll see how that works.

Bonus No. 1: Robert Reich: 6 Reasons for Hope in Trump Times.

Bonus No. 2: Favorite cartoons from The New Yorker as selected by: Hasan Minhaj, Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Terri Gross and some others whom I don’t know.