[Update at 1538 on 18 June: Sam Allard, writing in Cuyahoga County Will Pay More for Downtown Hilton Bailout than Covid-19 Rental Assistance, also weighs in on the story.]

It’s going to be a very tough year.

Cleveland and Cuyahoga County for the past several decades have played fast and loose with finances to reward the rich. And it charge to especially the low income. They used sharply regressive taxation. Pretty disgusting.

Now, the devastating pandemic and its partner—a depressed economy—are making those decisions even more onerous. You can’t always predict the future.

It stresses the budgets of the city and county.

The elite have demanded certain projects. No matter the cost. The politicians have responded.

We are their piggy bank. A costly burden. They get their way.

The costly public list of projects:

—Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame.

—Progressive Field.

—Browns Stadium

—Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse (arena).

—New Convention Center.

—A 600-room hotel.

—A so-called Medical Mart.

—Two Gateway Parking Garages.

ALL WITH PUBLIC FUNDING. All property tax FREE.

These public projects were accompanied by major downtown building spree, financed by tax abatement and other forms of public loans.

And all siphoning taxes from Cleveland schools. Who wants to support the Cleveland schools anyway? Not the people who run things. Their children don’t go to city schools. Why would they?

These forces created the debt cesspool. Now let’s see who pays for it.

The pandemic’s economic-crush has damaged some of the cash flow used to financing these private interests. Other avenues are blocked.

And now, the bills have to be paid.

The method of payment rests on taxes that now suffer from the lack of commerce: sales tax, parking tax, hotel tax, admission tax, car rental tax, cigarette, beer, liquor taxes. Other tax avenues also suffer.

The kind of crisis the greedy don’t plan for.

ALL SUFFERING BADLY FROM THE ECONOMIC SLAMMING OF THE CORONAVIRUS.

Mayor Frank Jackson, a man of the People according to legend, has put his stamp of approval on all these financial gimmicks. Further, Jackson, man of the People, raised the city’s payroll tax, a sharply regressive income-type tax by 25 percent. It rules off any attempt to use that avenue of escape now. The payroll tax takes from the first dollar one earns with no deductions of any kind, making it highly regressive unlike the federal income tax. Another unfair tax.

Cuyahoga County depends heavily upon the sales tax. It provides more than 50 percent of its general fund. It was raised a quarter percent, a good-bye gift of Hagan. Of course, the deep decline in spending has cut into this source.

While this decline continues, the Cleveland news media mostly concentrates news about opening restaurants. It’s so easy to report.

County residents (and city) pay each Jan. 15 for bonds that raised funds for the basketball arena. The debt goes back the 1990s. It drains some $6 to $9 million in public funds annually. In one recent year, $6.3 million came from city admission taxes. Thus those city funds couldn’t go for police, fire, EMS and other uses. Bed tax revenue was also used to pay off the bonds.

It’s hard to make people believe their government is so corrupt. But it is true. The bonds mentioned above were advised as proper by Squire, Sanders & Dempsey (Now Squires Patton & Boggs). It didn’t matter that the Cleveland law firm had already been paid $1 million in legal fees by Gateway Economic Development Corp., the beneficiary of the bonds. Commissioners hired them for more “advice.” Wouldn’t they be biased toward Gateway? Yes, definitely so.

Of course, the law firm gave its blessing. Good to go.

It hardly seems possible. But the County Commissioners, always ready to oblige corporate leadership, held the public meeting to decide on these bonds on CHRISTMAS EVE morning, 1991. Liberal Democrats Tim Hagan, as willingly pliable as silly putty for elites, and Mary Boyle, who won her seat by ravaging Republican Commissioner Vince Campanella for proposing a stadium deal, paved the way for tens of millions of dollars into the pockets of our three sports owners.

Public expression? No thanks.

It’s Cleveland tradition to shit on public opinion. Ask the Greater Cleveland Congregations and others who worked diligently to get some 20,000 signatures to put the second bond deal to the voters. Council President Kevin Kelley in true spirit told them, “Fuck you people.” Now, Kelley wants to be your mayor. He’s paid his dues to the manipulators.

Why bother. The towns tied up.

But now the public officials are tied up. By a pandemic. But they won’t lose their toys.

I’m sure you may remember that the city and county recently arranged for the other set of bonds to be let for the arena – $35-million, $35-million and $70 million. But since bonds from 1990 are still being paid these new bonds won’t become payable until 2024 The original arena bonds will be paid the previous year. How convenient.

It’s money galore in Dan Gilbert’s pocket.

It’s a lovely game brought to you by obedient office-holders, their bosses in the private sector and with the propaganda dishing of the Plain Dealer.

The $92-million Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is also on the dole. I wrote in 1999:

“The county and city bed taxes on hotels since 1993 have diverted taxes to the funding of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: !993 – $1.95 million; 1994 – $2.48 million; 1995 – $2.84 million; 1996 – $3.06 million; 1997 – $3.45 million; 1998 – $3.72 million. The pay off bonds issued by the Port Authority.

It’s so easy for these private interests. Led by the Greater Cleveland Partnership, a business/foundation bloc, it arranges for public payments. For private deals. Why do we allow it? It just goes on and on.

The financing of the Rock Hall was one of the most disgusting examples of elites demanding and getting public funds for their desires. In addition, the elites, led by Dick Pogue of Jones Day, demanded and got RTA to build the money-losing Waterfront line at its cost. RTA had to avoid federal funding to get it done. QUICKLY. The fed contribution, which would have paid most of the cost, depended on environmental study. Too long for Dick. Cost: $69 million, not county any interest. And it works at a loss. If it works. Jones Day picked up $375,838 in fees. Icing on the cake.

In addition to the costly Rock Hall (other financing comes via property tax diversion from Tower City) the city, urged on by elites, wanted UDAG money from the feds. The feds refused. A first. The rejection noted: ”Couldn’t they just do a live-aid concert?”

They just don’t understand Cleveland in D. C. How can anyone?

We set aside today to memorialize the dead. We focus almost exclusively on our military dead, but some like my family take this time to visit our ancestral graves. Today is also a good day to remember the another kind of dead: the Africans dragged from their homesand enslaved in the fields and homes of their enslavers in the Americas.

I have written about Ta-Nehisi Coates and the issue of reparations before and particularly I have advocated for the passage of House Resolution 40, the bill championed by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan (D-Mi). in H.R. 40 Is Not a Symbolic Act. It’s a Path to Restorative Justice. for The American Civil Liberties Union, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) writes:

The designation of this legislation as H.R. 40 is intended to memorialize the promise made by Gen. William T. Sherman, in his 1865 Special Field Order No. 15, to redistribute 400,000 acres of formerly Confederate-owned coastal land in South Carolina and Florida, subdivided into 40-acre plots. In addition to the more well-known land redistribution, the order also established autonomous governance for the region and provided for protection by military authorities of the settlements. Though Southern sympathizer and former slaveholder President Andrew Johnson would later overturn the order, this plan represented the first systematic form of freedmen reparations.

We are no closer to any form of reparations in 2020 than we were a century-and-half ago. Lee continues:

With the withdrawal of Union troops from the South in 1877, the promise of Reconstruction proved short-lived, and over the next century and a half, the Black Codes would morph into Jim Crow segregation and federal redlining and the war on drugs and mass incarceration and racism in policing and underfunded schools — injuries not confined solely to the South. These historical injustices connect through a web of government policies that have ensured that the majority of African Americans have had to, in the words of President Obama, “work twice as hard as anyone else if you want to get by.” Black America’s unemployment rate is more than twice that of white America’s. Black families have just one-sixteenth of the wealth of white families. Nearly one million Black people — mostly young men — are incarcerated across the country. Though remote in time from the period of enslavement, these racial disparities in access to education, health care, housing, insurance, employment, and other social goods are directly attributable to the damaging legacy of slavery and racial discrimination.

Since its introduction, H.R. 40 has spurred some governmental acknowledgment of the crime of slavery, but most often the response has taken the form of an apology. Even the well-intentioned commitments to examine the historical and modern-day implications of slavery by the Clinton administration, however, fell short of the mark and failed to inspire substantive public discourse.

Rep. Conyers died last October, but H.R. 40 continues, championed now by Rep. Lee.

Since my reintroduction of H.R. 40 at the beginning of this Congress, both the legislation and concept of reparations have become the focus of national debate. For many, it is apparent that the success of the Obama administration has unleashed a backlash of racism and intolerance that is an echo of America’s dark past that has yet to be exorcised from the national consciousness. Commentators have turned to H.R. 40 as a response to formally begin the process of analyzing, confronting, and atoning for these dark chapters of American history.

Even conservative voices, like that of New York Times columnist David Brooks, are starting to give the reparations cause the hearing it deserves, observing that: “Reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute, but the very act of talking and designing them heals a wound and opens a new story.” Similarly, a majority of the Democratic presidential contenders have turned to H.R 40 as a tool for reconciliation, with 17 cosponsoring or claiming they would sign the bill into law if elected.

Though critics have argued that the idea of reparations is unworkable politically or financially, their focus on money misses the point of the H.R. 40 commission’s mandate. The goal of these historical investigations is to bring American society to a new reckoning with how our past affects the current conditions of African Americans and to make America a better place by helping the truly disadvantaged. Consequently, the reparations movement does not focus on payments to individuals, but to remedies that can be created in as many forms necessary to equitably address the many kinds of injuries sustained from chattel slavery and its continuing vestiges. To merely focus on finance is an empty gesture and betrays a lack of understanding of the depth of the unaddressed moral issues that continue to haunt this nation.

Lee, and others, refer to slavery as the original sin of our nation, but I think that is letting the founders off too easily. Slavery was foundational to the political and economic existence of what became these United States. Believing that Benjamin Franklin was correct when he reportedly told a divided Continental Congress that: We Must Hang Together Or Surely We Shall Hang Separately, those assembled would not risk the defection of the cotton and tobacco states in the fight for independence.

Bonus No. 1: America, It Is Time to Talk About Reparations.

Like he did in 2017, 2018 or campaigns to our troops as he did in last year. This year?

This year he did a respectable job. But he fell far short of the presidential standard set by President Abraham Lincoln on 21 November 1864.

President Donald John Trump embraced the catchphrase of the Democratic Party’s 1992 candidate for president—It’s the economy, stupid coined by James Carville—and basked for three, glorious years in a soaring stock market and historically low unemployment numbers. Then he didn’t. He ignored science and Mother Nature and COVID19 bit him in the ass.

The markets crashed to below 2008 levels and unemployment skyrocketed to Great Depression levels. Trump should have been fucked, but he’s holding on, doing what he does best: blaming everyone but himself, accepting no responsibility for bad outcomes and firing everyone who even hints at dissing him or threatening his sycophants.

I greatly admire Ralph Nader, his lifetime of advocacy and good work ought to be a model for anyone, but Trump is a black swan, a president so venal that the rules don’t apply. Still, one has to try. Nader, in Donald Trump, Resign Now for America’s Sake: This is No Time for a Dangerous, Law-breaking, Bungling, Ignorant Ship Captain, writes:

Where are the calls for Trump’s resignation? Since his first months in the White House, Trump has been the most impeachable, most lawless, most self-enriching, most bungling President in U.S. history. He relies entirely on lying and scapegoating to avoid taking responsibility for his failures. Trump didn’t even win the popular vote—the Electoral College selected him. President Trump has fomented chaos and corruption in his administration without encountering insistent demands for his resignation.

The supine Republican Senate shields Trump from any political accountability. Dominated by the evil “Moscow Mitch” McConnell, the Senate prevented Trump from being convicted under the impeachment clause of the Constitution. But Trump makes the case against himself—“I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Trump makes good on that statement every day, making decisions with reckless abandon and doubling down, falsely accusing people of crimes, turning our government over to big businesses, and firing inspectors general investigating crime and corruption in Trump’s regime of corporatism, favoritism, and nepotism.

Trump exercises his pouting, unstable ego as the determinant of misgoverning on a deadly scale, as with his delaying, downplaying, over-riding science and providing lethal advice regarding the Covid-19 pandemic. For which he boastfully gives himself a perfect ten.

Trump keeps flailing, failing, and using foul-mouthed rhetoric because about 43 percent of voters stick with him, no matter what.

Well—the parents of many Trump supporters did not stay with Richard Nixon in 1974. Public demands for “Tricky Dick” to leave office ultimately included much of his “base” including scores of Republicans in Congress, led by Mr. Conservative Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ). Why? Nixon had defied a Congressional subpoena and committed an obstruction of justice. Trump, on the other hand, has defied many Congressional subpoenas and engaged in over a dozen obstructions of justice, many of which are ongoing.

Why no demands for resignation? Have too many Americans lost their proper sense of honest public service and accountability? From 1974 to now, the American Bar Association—supposedly a first responder against the destruction of rule of law and constitutional observance—has done nothing to challenge above-the-law presidential abuses. (In 2005-2006 the ABA displayed some courage and charged the Bush/Cheney administration with three sets of unconstitutional behavior.

Many Trump voters seem to expect more of virtually every public figure who isn’t Trump! Ask Trump voters if they would support their local fire chief if he or she lied daily about the fire department’s readiness to fight fires? Would they support a fire chief who appoints firefighters with no experience? Would they support a police chief who accepts no responsibility for a street crime wave while disabling the force?

Would they support a CEO of a major hospital who promotes, against the advice of his/her medical scientists, chemicals and drugs that can take the lives of patients? Would they support a super predator bank CEO who gives sweet-heart deals to the rich at the direct expense of customers of modest means? Would they support a CEO of a big construction company, spouting anti-immigrant hate, while hiring hundreds of poorly paid undocumented foreign laborers taking jobs away from American workers? The answer is pretty clear.

These people in positions of power would have lost their jobs if they engaged in such reckless and unjust behavior. Corrupt Donald, on the other hand, has done all of these continually and remains an escapee from justice. In addition to these previously acknowledged failings, Trump has wrecked the federal health, safety, and economic protections including many life-saving controls on deadly pollution, dangerous business practices and business theft of your earnings as consumers, workers, and savers.

In addition, here is a top betrayal: Trump promised his voters a big infrastructure repair and upgrade program in all communities—with good paying jobs. He betrayed them, giving instead about 2 trillion dollars in tax cuts to the rich and big corporations, like the drug and banking industries and even his own family!

Trump voters need to ask themselves—what else does Trump have to do to our livelihood, health, safety, and dignity before you say—“no more!” If you want more details about Mr. Trump’s lying betrayals, read Fake President by Mark Green and me and judge Trump by his own contemptuous words and misdeeds.

Most puzzling are the many columnists—both Democratic and Republican—who week after week show how disastrously unworthy and unfit Trump is, yet never conclude with a demand for his resignation or further impeachment. Many in the opinion class may believe it would never happen. My response is that judging the odds is not the primary responsibility of a columnist. Making the demand is telling readers that your critique is serious enough to warrant a necessary remedy.

Devastating critics like Dana Milbank, Republican Michael Gerson, Eugene Robinson, Margaret Sullivan, and conservative Max Boot of the Washington Post, or Charles Blow, Paul Krugman, David Brooks, Maureen Dowd and Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times have cogently taken Trump apart on very serious matters since 2017, yet they leave their readers without the obvious conclusion—Trump has to go. A clear daily peril to innocent Americans “I’m in total control”, why not try bleach, etc. The country cannot wait until January 2021—assuming dictatorial Donald and his determined GOP don’t criminally suppress enough votes to postpone Trump’s departure until January 2025.

This last bit, of course, is the crux of the matter. Will Republicans—with the support of the Senate where their majority is in serious risk—simply cancel the election? Could Addison Mitchel McConnell and his toadies actually be that far over the line?

Mmmmm, could be!

And now, this… I’m a big fan of Cal Newport’s work and I took extensive notes on his Deep Work when I first read the book a little more than four years ago. These two videos from The Art of Improvement do an excellent job of encapsulating the 300+ pages of Newport’s work and, I should think, encourage anyone to dive into the details by reading the book.

Bonus No. 1: Deep Work: …the Most Valuable Skill of the 21st Century (PART 1)

Bonus No. 2: Deep Work: …the Most Valuable Skill of the 21st Century (PART 2)

Bonus No. 3: And, a bit of poetry for a Friday morning: Tamerlane by Edgar Allan Poe.

Bonus No. 4: OK, one more: The Complete Guide to Developing Your Focus.

Whom among us does not, upon hearing the news of someone we know, or know of, death from lung cancer, immediately ask (at least silently) Did they smoke? We want to believe that our virtue protects us from the invisible harm that has struck down the other. While such magical works, until it doesn’t, sticking our collective heads in the sand is dangerous.

Blaming the victims, the ever-silenced dead, is not going to save us. Lois Beckett, writing in ‘All the psychoses of US history’: how America is victim-blaming the coronavirus dead for The Guardian, ledes:

Why do Americans represent less than 5 percent of the world’s population but nearly a third of the known coronavirus death toll? Not because of government incompetence, the Trump administration is arguing, but because Americans are very unhealthy.

The United States’ organized response to the pandemic had been “historic”, Trump’s health secretary, Alex Azar, told CNN on 17 May, but America “unfortunately” has a “very diverse” population, and black Americans and minorities “in particular” have “significant underlying disease”.

Jake Tapper, the CNN anchor interviewing Azar, paused and squinted. Surely, he asked, Azar was not arguing that “the reason that there were so many dead Americans is because we’re unhealthier than the rest of the world?”

Azar doubled down: “These are demonstrated facts.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s the fault of the American people that the government failed to take adequate steps in February …” Tapper said.

“This is not about fault. It’s about simple epidemiology,” Azar said, adding in a pious tone: “One doesn’t blame an individual for their health condition. That would be absurd.”

Blaming black Americans for dying from a novel virus because they had diabetes or high blood pressure was precisely what Azar was doing.

So, why does Beckett think Azar said what he said? She continues:

Someone had to be held responsible for an American death toll approaching 100,000 people, worse than any other country’s reported deaths. In order for the Trump administration to remain blameless, someone else had to be blamed, and the administration was now blaming the dead.

I’ll buy that, but the deeper question for me is why are so many people ignoring the sensible advice of health experts and congregating in large groups, in public, without wearing a mask? I think the psychology here is the same as that of people—like myself for many years—who smoke cigarettes. There was never any doubt that the Surgeon General’s advice was spot on: cigarettes will most likely be the death of you. They played no small part in my paternal grandfather’s death and, though he stopped smoking many years ago, also contributed to my father’s decline and final death. So, why did I start smoking and keep smoking three packs of Marlboro’s a day for all those years? (I smoke my last cigarette on 5 December 1981.) The reasons are complex and I would suggest Dark Eros by Thomas Moore for a deeper analysis of why people engage in what an observer might describe as self-destructive behaviors, but at the core is this simple truth: we don’t like looking stupid.

Huh? Isn’t that what we’re doing by engaging in those self-destructive behaviors? By acting against our own best interests? Well yes, but as long as we pretend to believe our own myths then we don’t have to own our stupidity. If I deny the experts, claim that I know better than they do and dismiss all their nattering as fake news, well, you know what happens. Beckett continues:

It took less than a month after the first shelter-in-place orders to devolve into a full-blown partisan culture war, complete with armed protests egged on by the president; conservatives questioning or denying death numbers; pundits arguing against a continued lockdown with lines like, “You can call me a Grandma killer”; attempts by hair salons and barbers to stage acts of civil disobedience; and some states led by Republican governors moving to quickly reopen, even as other states with Democratic governors announced months of continued restrictions.

A majority of Americans remain supportive of public health restrictions, including nearly half of Republican voters and 68% of people who have lost a job or suffered a pay cut.

The anti-lockdown demonstrations at state capitols have attracted a messy jumble of protesters: anti-vaccine activists and other conspiracy theorists, rightwing provocateurs, members of known anti-government militias, gun rights advocates, established conservative groups backed by wealthy billionaire donors, Republican stalwarts and people who were actually out of work.

It would be wrong to argue that racism was the sole motivation for

the protests, or even a decisive factor for the many different protesters who showed up.

But the moment when the US response to coronavirus escalated into a full culture war is revealing. The big protests at state capitols, with crowds of white Americans demanding their governors reopen the economy, started about a week after national news outlets began reporting in early April that black Americans made up a disproportionate number of the dead.

There is nothing new here. During the Black Plague more than 50 million people, approximately one-in-four Europeans and Jews were more often blamed (and murdered) for the Black Death. More severe, of course, but no different in philosophy than our president’s ineffectual attempts to protect Americans by stopping immigration by people he doesn’t like.

Liberals are not immune from this particular bigotry. Beckett writes:

Even as some leftists on Twitter were calling the GOP a “death cult”, other leftists were suggesting that the punishment for unbelievers should be death.

This impulse to blame other people for getting sick is rooted in fear, said Jonathan Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University.

Everyone wants some narrative, to explain the unimaginable level of illness and death and vulnerability that we’re all feeling,” he said. “Everyone wants there to be a logic to this.

The victim-blaming on the left, though, has come from individuals’ Twitter accounts, not Democratic party leadership. The victim-blaming of black Americans has come from the highest levels of government.
‘An acceptable sacrifice’

Just days after national news outlets first reported the emerging racial disparities in coronavirus deaths, Trump’s surgeon general, Jerome Adams, said at a White House briefing that communities of color needed to “step up” and advised them to “avoid alcohol, tobacco and drugs”.

“Do it for your Big Mama,” said Adams, who is black.

Lecturing individual black Americans about smoking, rather than talking about African Americans’ increased environmental exposure to air pollution, a demonstrated coronavirus risk, was classic “victim-blaming”, the Rev William J Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, and his son, William J Barber III, a climate activist, wrote in the Nation.

Pretending we’re safe from a threat because we don’t fit a particular profile puts the most vulnerable in our society at risk. Humanity is literally all in this together. If we pretend that we can afford to exclude the Irish then we are just jerking off.

Normally, this would be a bonus, but I just cannot bring myself to assign such qualifier to a 51-minute interview with former vice president Joseph Robinette Biden, but I don think that is one of those distasteful, but necessary, chores—like cleaning the cat’s litter box—that just has to be done, so in that spirit:

I know that sitting through that was tough, so here are some pieces to remove that taste from your mouth.

Bonus No. 1: Monk in Quarantine With Tony Shalhoub.

Bonus No. 2: Still more episodes of Peacock Presents At-Home Variety Show.

Bonus No. 3: Rich people need to blame the coronavirus economic crash on lockdown…

Bonus No. 1: Someone had to save Ohio from the gorillas smuggling explosive papayas.

Bonus No. 2: COVID19 didn’t come from China, it came for outer space…!

Aaron Paul Godfrey defeated his opponent in Ohio’s Democratic Party primary two-to-one and will face first-term Republican incumbent Anthony Gonzalez in the November general election. I backed Godfrey’s first campaign in 2018 and I’m proud to do so again this year because I’ve gotten to know Paul and he’s good people.

A perfect example of his character arrived in my email inbox the morning following the primary election when he made the ask—every candidate needs to fund their campaign—but in the midst of the pandemic, Godfrey amended the request in a very unpolicianlike way. he wrote:

…I am asking you to stick with us and continue to support this campaign through November. Donate a few bucks if you can spare it (after supporting a food bank!)

You read that correctly. He wants us to support his campaign, but only after we’ve done all we can to help local food banks and ensure that Ohioans don’t go to bed hungry.

Mary Jo and I have been doing just that—supporting both Godfrey—but we’re also donating weekly to Harvest For Hunger. The organization is able to provide food for four or more meals for every dollar of support they receive. And thanks to Heinen’s here in Cuyahoga County, we’re able to make a donation every time we shop in $1-, $5-, $10- (or any amount we choose) increments at the checkout.

They, and we, have been doing this for years, but in past the program ran only through the Lenten season. This year, however, because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the extreme need of Americans, Heinen’s continued the program into May and, quite possibly, will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.

So please, help take care of Ohioans and, if you have a bit left over, and you think we need a change in Washington, send what you can to the support Godfrey.

He’ll work like hell to earn every penny and your trust.

Bonus No. 1: Highlights of the Biden Presidency.

Bonus No. 2: The time may be right for universal basic income.

While I’m still an omnivore, my transition over the past dozen or so years to being 95 percent vegetarian has been helpful during the pandemic.

Bonus No. 1: God speed, Anna Margaret Glenn… 17 February 1920—19 May 2020

Bonus No. 2: Concession At The Prudent Gulch Bridge.

Bonus No. 3: Gary Larson predicts the future better than Sylvia Browne ever did!

For many, many years, my wake-up music was Sitting from Catch Bull at Four, the first album I ever bought—on eight-track—with my own money.

Listening to that song now, I am sent back to the fall of 1972, I was just turned 17 and dreaming of the places I would go. All I really knew then was that I wanted out of Marietta, Ohio, not because I didn’t like the town, but because there was so much I had read about and I wanted to see it all for myself.

Where I am is far better than I any imaginings I had then.

More NPR Music…

Bonus No. 1: Progressives thought they’d overtaken the Democratic Party…

Bonus No.2: The Bernie Sanders Documentary.

There was something reassuring about WMCSM’s staid sanity. Sanity. Wow, what a concept. There seems to be a dearth of rational good sense—at least from those in charge in Washington—in our time of pandemic. This is why we cling to the clearly competent like Dr. Anthony Fauci and, here in Ohio, Dr. Amy Acton, as well as the intelligent Republican who listens to smart people: Ohio Governor Richard Michael DeWine.

But now, to steal the line from John Oliver, this…

Just who is President Donald John Trump’s White House Physcian? This man: Sean Conley. I’m a firm believer that confidentiality between a patient and their physician is sacrosanct, even when the patient is a sitting president of The United States of America. But when the patient, in this case President Trump, opens the door…

We all get to pile through and ask: What the hell was he thinking? Robert Mackey, writing in Alarm and Confusion at Fox News as Trump Says He Takes Hydroxychloroquine for The Intercept, ledes:

Fox News viewers were warned on Monday not to take medical advice from the president, following Donald Trump’s surprise announcement that he takes the drug hydroxychloroquine, based on his belief that it could prevent him from becoming infected with Covid-19—a belief unsupported by scientific evidence.

Moments after the president told reporters that he began taking the medication about a week and a half ago—which is when the vice president’s press secretary, Katie Miller, tested positive for the coronavirus—Fox News host Neil Cavuto issued an urgent warning, telling the channel’s largely elderly audience that there is no evidence the drug can ward off Covid-19 but it can cause potentially fatal irregular heartbeats.

After defending a recent Veterans Administration analysis of the drug’s lack of efficacy, which Trump had baselessly described as politically motivated, Cavuto told viewers to be careful, since people predisposed to irregular heartbeats could die as a result of taking hydroxychloroquine. What’s more, as a cardiologist told The Intercept last month, many people don’t know that they have the underlying heart issue that predisposes them to dangerous heart rhythms.

“If you are in a risky population here and you are taking this as a preventative treatment to ward off the virus, or in a worst case scenario, you are dealing with the virus, and you are in this vulnerable population, it will kill you,” Cavuto said. “I cannot stress enough: this will kill you.”

That urgent warning was echoed by Dr. Bob Lahita, who told Cavuto that doctors at St. Joseph University Hospital, where he is chairman of medicine, had seen “absolutely no effect” on Covid-19 from hydroxychloroquine. Lahita also explained that the drug needs to be used only under close medical supervision, since it can cause “a fatal arrhythmia, which means an irregular heart rhythm, which will cause your death—your death will be instantaneous.”

I’m sure that Dr. Conley explained all of this to our president—I’m much less certain that Trump listened to what his doctor said—before he wrote the prescription, but Cavuto did what a responsible journalist does: told the truth. Then his bosses stepped in.

Within minutes, however, those dire warnings were undercut by Cavuto’s next guest, a Fox News medical contributor, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, who called in to say that she believed that hydroxychloroquine had helped some Covid-19 patients she treated and that she thought the president’s decision to try the drug as a preventive measure was “very smart.”

Less than 30 minutes after the president made the remarks that prompted Cavuto’s alarm, regular service was resumed on the pro-Trump network when the pundit Greg Gutfeld appeared and downplayed concerns about the potentially fatal side effects of the drug. “If it’s available to you and you can take it, you do it,” Gutfeld said.

The pundit also insisted that Trump was right to dismiss research from the department of veterans affairs that showed no benefit from hydroxychloroquine, claiming that “the media glommed onto” that study “because they want the drug to be a failure because they want Trump to fail.”

Set aside for the moment that people who actually need the drug are having a hard time getting their real prescriptions filled, where does Fox News get off allowing someone like Gutfeld to dispense medical advice? So where did this shit storm come from? Mackey has a suggestion:

Somewhat lost in the reaction to Trump’s announcement that he was taking the drug on his own initiative, after a White House doctor agreed to his request to prescribe it, was the fact that the president brought up the subject of hydroxychloroquine without being asked about it, in the course of a rambling attack on whistleblowers.

After disparaging the intelligence community whistleblower who had revealed his own corrupt effort to coerce the president of Ukraine into smearing Joe Biden last year, Trump sought to tarnish Dr. Rick Bright, the ousted vaccine and emergency preparedness official who filed a whistleblower complaint this month.

Bright said that he was forced out of his position in the department of health and human services in part because, “contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the Administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit.”

The doctor also said that he had “resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the American public,” and instead “insisted that these drugs be provided only to hospitalized patients with confirmed COVID-19 while under the supervision of a physician.” Bright said that he had only approved the use of the two drugs in clinical settings because they “have potentially serious risks associated with them, including increased mortality observed in some recent studies in patients with COVID-19.”

Bright reiterated those objections in an interview with 60 Minutes which prompted a series of outraged tweets from Trump after it aired on Sunday night.

Sigh. I need some aspirin.

Bonus No. 1: From Sparky—More crisis management tips!

Bonus No. 2: He Will Tweet Instead Of Lead. (More from The Lincoln Project.)

Bonus No. 3: A Cleveland Hero Has Made a Lido Lounge for Squirrels.

Ted Rall, in If Trump Wins, Don’t Blame Progressives. This Is on You, Centrists, ledes: The corporate conservatives who control the Democratic Party are suffering from cheaters’ remorse. The DNC and their media allies (NPR, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Vox, etc.) subverted the will of primary voters, undermining initial frontrunner Bernie Sanders…

Matt Taibbi, in Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties, writes: [Federal Court Judge Emmet Gael] Sullivan’s decision [RE: Michael Flynn] was the kind of thing one would expect from a judge in Belarus. George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley was one of the few willing to say Sullivan’s move could “could create a threat of a judicial charge…”

From Hasan Minhaj: Record numbers of Americans have lost their jobs due to the coronavirus pandemic, but rent is still due for many of them. Hasan investigates the underlying issues with housing in America as well as the impending eviction crisis many renters may be facing in months to come. For more information on what you can do as a renter to protect yourself from eviction, visit dontgetkickedout.com.

Bonus No. 1: People Are Getting Hungry. Do You Know What That Means?

Gawd bless you John Oliver…

Bonus No. 1: An absolute classic from Berkeley Breathed.

Bonus No. 2: This is why the billionaires have all of the money and you do not.

Bonus No. 3: No! No! Not Mr. Thingy! Please I have children!

Glenn Greenwald, in New Flynn Prosecution Documents Reveal Corruption in Russiagate Investigations for The Intercept, writes: More importantly, there was no valid reason for the FBI to have interrogated Flynn about his conversations with Kislyak in the first place. There is nothing remotely untoward or unusual—let alone criminal—about an…

When We The People are harmed in person or substance we have recourse to lady justice to redress our grievances before a court and a jury of our peers. That Constitutional guarantee scares the fuck out of businesses and the powerful people who hide behind their corporate charters. There is a concerted effort to use the pandemic to further tip the scales against us.

If workers have a choice of returning to work and risking their own life, as well as the lives of their family of friends or lose their unemployment benefits—as is the case here in Ohio—they’ll probably go back to work. That’s bad enough. But if they do become sick, or infect a family member, they would still have the option of going to court to make their case that the reopening of the business was ill advised. Congress may yank that rug out from under them. Ralph Nader, in Trump: Letting Big Corporations Get Away with Whatever They Want, details just how dangerous this Shock Doctrine tactic could be. He writes:

Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has allowed large corporations to run rampant, exploit people, and get away with it. Trump considers himself above the law, boldly claiming, “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” For more information about Trump’s misdeeds, please see the Articles of Impeachment proposed by me and constitutional law experts Bruce Fein and Louis Fisher in the December 18, 2019 Congressional Record, page H 12197.

In 2017, Trump betrayed his own voters by giving the corporate rich a nearly two trillion dollar tax cut instead of fulfilling his promise to invest in repairing infrastructure and expanding well-paid job opportunities.

These tax cuts for the rich and big corporations, which benefited the Trump family, ran up the deficit for our children and were largely used to give executives bonuses and let CEOs waste money on stock buybacks. In short, the corporate bosses lied to the Congress, saying they wanted these tax cuts to invest and create jobs, but actually used them to enrich themselves.

After his Trumpian giveaway, Trump crushed health and safety law enforcement, unleashing more disease-producing corporate polluters and corporate thieves. The result: harm to workers, consumers, and defenseless communities.

The New York Times reported 98 lifesaving regulations were revoked, suspended, or simply replaced with weaker versions. What remains on the books is not enforced.

Similar wreckage of corporate law-and-order has exacerbated the crisis of working people. Trump has worked to further punish student borrowers; diminish workplace and auto safety; and remove safeguards against banking, credit, and payday loan rackets.

Trump, during his failed business career and bankruptcies, saw the law as a nuisance and breaking and escaping justice as a competitive advantage.

While raising huge sums for his reelection campaign from business lobbyists, Trump keeps giving them no-law government, more loopholes for tax escapes ($170 billion more buried in the $2.2 trillion relief/bailout legislation), more corporatist judges to shut you down in the courtroom, and more of your taxes for their endless corporate welfare greed.

Big companies such as banks, insurance companies, real estate behemoths, and Silicon Valley giants have so many tax escapes and cuts that they’re moving toward tax-exempt status.

Howard Stern, a longtime friend of Trump who promoted Trump’s notoriety early on, has recently called on Trump to resign. Stern said that, in reality, Donald Trump was disgusted by his own voters. Why won’t more Trump voters realize that Trump has nothing but contempt for them? Trump will betray his followers at every turn.

During the COVID-19 virus pandemic – which Trump dismissed and scoffed for eight critical weeks, leaving the country defenseless – Trump has allowed a corporate crime epidemic. He has no qualms about aiding and abetting a corporate crime wave epidemic.

Trump, with Congressional Republicans, wants more legislation giving big companies immunity from lawsuits by victims for their negligently harmful products and services. Another rigging of the system.

Trump’s agencies actually announced that they’re putting their law enforcers on the shelf. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) astonishingly told foreign importers of food and medicine that inspections overseas are suspended. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) signaled similar retreats, as have other enforcement agencies. Why would the Trumpsters signal green lights for corporate crooks? Especially since corporate scams and other corporate crimes – some crude, others sophisticated – are exploding as trillions pour out of Washington.

A year ago, Public Citizen reported a steep decline in corporate prosecutions and fines under Trump. Now, compared to the size of the previous corporate crime wave, they’ve fallen off a cliff. You can ignore the stern warnings by Attorney General William Barr. He is a phony. He has neither allocated nor asked Congress for a budget that will provide the Department of Justice the capacity to crackdown.

In fact, Trump has fired inspectors general and not filled vacant inspectors general positions. Trump’s boasts bear repeating: Congress can’t watchdog him because “[he has] an Article 2, where [he has] the right to do whatever [he wants] as president.”

With vicious madness, Trump pushes for federal deregulation of nursing homes where residents are dying from COVID-19. He pursues court cases in attempts to end Obamacare, the result of which would be throwing 20 million Americans off of their insurance during a lethal pandemic. He is cravenly freeing corporate emitters of life-destroying mercury and coal ash in our air, condemned pesticides and toxins in drinking water, and whatever else is on the deadly wish list given to him by his corporate paymasters.

Trumps actions that dismantled protections for all Americans families have been expertly documented. Yet, few critics are calling for his resignation or removal from office, despite the clear and present danger he poses to the American people and the Republic.

Trump is doing whatever he wants. He is getting away with abandoning the rule of law and the dismantling of crucial government institutions as he embraces American-style fascism and nepotism.

Perhaps people will learn how to effectively fight back against Trump, a delusional, flailing, ego-obsessed, foul-mouthed, self-enriching bully. The people must stand up to this corrupt politician who lies every hour and turns our government over to Wall Street. He sacrifices the people on Main Street to enrich fat cats and oligarchs.

One person, Eugene Jarecki, offers a rebuttal to Trump. In a Washington Post op-ed, Jarecki’s sources found that “had the guidelines been implemented earlier, a crucial period in the exponential spread of the virus would have been mitigated and American lives saved.” According to conservative estimates from epidemiologists, “had the Trump administration simply implemented mitigation guidelines by March 9, approximately 60 percent of American COVID-19 deaths could have been avoided.” On his website, Trump Death Clock, Jarecki “displays both the number of people who have died in the country from COVID-19 and an estimate of that portion whose lives would have been saved had the president and his administration acted just one week earlier.” Jarecki has also erected a 54-foot high Trump death clock in New York City’s historic Times Square.

Increasingly during my lifetime I have watched as the likes of Frank Capra’s Jefferson Smith have been relegated to the world of fantasy. There is a saying, one that Shania Twain put to music back in 1993 that you should dance with the one that brought you. The people responsible for getting a politician to Washington is no longer We The People, but rather the corporate donors and members of the Billionaire Class who fund the voter-influence machines. Until we change that, we’re royally and truly fucked.

Bonus No. 1:

Bonus No. 1: Trump’s latest attack shows endless obsession with Obama.

Bonus No. 2: SAME THING WE DO EVERY DAY, PINKY…

Bonus No. 3: Barack Obama attacks Trump administration’s response to pandemic.

Bonus No. 4: SPACEMAN SPIFF IS SECOND ONLY TO CALVIN’S SNOWMEN…

Tom Lamont, in The death and life of the great British pub for The Guardian, ledes: The Murphy family, John, Mary and their adult son Dave, were preparing to spend a 33rd Christmas as landlords of the Golden Lion pub in Camden, north London when they heard the rumours. A mysterious figure was said to be looming in their corner of the industry, harrying pub…

Sam Allard, in Chris Quinn is the Most Powerful Media Figure in Northeast Ohio. And He Won’t Tell the Truth for Scene, writes: Quinn… has become the lone editor of the metro daily operation, a so-called “unified newsroom” which consists of cleveland.com… four Plain Dealer News Guild members and a rehired reporter: Julie Washington…

When I decided to write a novel, I typed Lawrence Block’s The Burglar in the Closet into my luggable—I think it was a Kaypro—computer with a full size keyboard, two 5.25-inch floppy drives and an orange, 5-inch screen. I wanted to see what it felt like to actually spend that much time at a keyboard; I typed an hour each morning for more than a month.

Block remains one of my favorite writers and I can’t recommend his books on the process—assembled from a column he wrote for Writer’s Digest back in the day—enough. No.Really. They are the best you’ll ever find.

I’ve long been a subscriber to Block’s newsletter—you can too, an email to lawbloc@gmail.com with Newsletter in the subject line will get the job done—and this one his my inbox today:

Back up six feet. Then read this.

Well, that’s attention-getting. [All emphasis in original, JH]

I’m glad you like it.

I didn’t say I liked it. I said it gets one’s attention. And helps remind people that this is a time when they get to flip-flop back and forth between boredom and terror.

I suppose. But, y’know, I think that’s all we need of that. The dialogue-with-self is useful, and it comes naturally enough, but I’m going to drop it for now. It’s similarly easy when I write fiction to spend a little too much time on banter—Bernie-and-Carolyn, say, or Dot-and-Keller, or Matt-and-Elaine. Easy to let those scenes run on too long, and the reader might find them entertaining, even as I find them a pleasure to write, but somewhere along the way the story gets lost.

This isn’t exactly the same, and it’s certainly less entertaining for all of us, but you see the parallel. And there’s a pandemic raging around us, and I’m cooped up in my apartment (and rather hope you are as well), and had two close friends die within the past month (and hope you’ve been spared that).

A few hours ago I put on my mask and gloves and went to the drugstore, and rather than sit down and wait for my refilled prescription, or go home and come back in ten minutes, I took myself for a fifteen-minute walk. That’s the most I’ve walked in the past six weeks or so, and while I get a good look at closed stores and empty streets from my window, it intensified the experience to see them close up.

I don’t want this to be maudlin, nor do I delude myself into thinking I have any special perspective on The Way Things Are. But I’ll let the foregoing set the table for the few things I think might be worth sharing with you. (And if you don’t agree, well, there’s a reason your keyboard came with a DELETE key.)

A Time and a Place for Writing. As some of you will recall, I had a twice-a-week workshop scheduled for April at Brooklyn’s The Center for Fiction. When we pulled the plug in early March, I turned it into a virtual event, with the same schedule—Tuesday and Thursday evenings—but everybody did it at home. No commuting time, no tuition to pay, nobody judging you—and if you cut all your classes, who would know?

I think it went well. Except for a request at the end for an evaluation of the experience, there was nothing to turn in, so I never knew (and don’t need to know) what proportion of the participants did in fact participate, and to what extent. The feedback I got was extremely positive, and quite heartening, but who knows how many elected to keep their disappointment to themselves? Or how many of my twice-weekly emails [You can read them all in the comments later today, JH] were deleted upon receipt, or slid away into a spam filter?

Sixty-six writers enrolled, some from the other side of the country, one from Germany. I know that I got something out of the experience. One man suggested I find a way to keep it going, perhaps finding a way to monetize it sufficiently to cover my time. Others said they hoped I’d offer it once again at the Center for Fiction, at some future date when live in-person events are again an option.

And I myself briefly entertained the idea of packaging my emails and some of their feedback and whatever else seemed appropriate and offering the result as an ebook.

But I don’t think so. The emails are repetitive, and to read one after another would cure anyone’s insomnia, even if his name were Evan Tanner. And the useful material in those emails can all be found in Write For Your Life, essentially the textbook for the workshop. Spend $14.99 on the paperback and do it yourself.

As for me, I’m glad to have conducted the workshop, and grateful to all who took part. And who knows? A year from now I may talk myself into having another go at it in some form or another. Right now, though, it looks like One and Done.

In a time of isolation, I found the emails helpful. I do hope he decides to have another go.

Bonus No. 1: So Your Landlord Is Trying to Evict You.

Bonus No. 2: If I could just convince Jojo to be a bit adventurous… with this.

Bonus No. 3: How Women Support Both the #MeToo Movement and Joe Biden.