[Update @ 1425 on 1 January: Chief Justice of The United States John Glover Roberts is stepping up. Edward Helmore, in Americans ‘take democracy for granted’, supreme court chief warns, for The Guaradian, writes:

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.

The president and the chief justice have clashed before. In November 2018, Roberts issued a striking rebuke over the president’s criticism of a judge who blocked an asylum order.

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said.

Roberts, as Chief Justice serves as the grand protector of the legal system and he is looking to the future. We do not know what he sees.]

This could be Chief Justice John Glover Roberts’ moment. 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, Roger Taney, Salmon Chase, Earl Warren, Warren Burger, William Rehnquist and now, John Roberts.

The vast majority of Americans would be hard pressed to name any associate justices who did not serve in the last 20 years or so. (All of Dr. Dru Evarts students in Communication Law at Ohio University were required to know all nine members of the court in 1984.)

For good or ill, this is the Roberts’ Court and what happens in the Senate Trial of President Donald John Trump may very well seal how history remembers that court, regardless of what may happen after 2020. Chief Justice Roberts knows this and, I suspect, is loosing more than a little sleep over what may happen in the opening months of 2020. Ralph Nader has a few suggestions.

Nader, in Ralph Nader Letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, writes:

In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi I, together with Constitutional Law scholars Louis Fisher and Bruce Fein, proposed that the Senate allow Chief Justice John Roberts to prescribe impeachment trial procedures—subject to veto by a Senate majority. In doing so, the Senate would avoid some degree of political infighting and blatant partisan bias. While this approach is not perfect, it would create a more impartial and legitimate impeachment process.

Date: December 27, 2019

TO: Honorable Mitch McConnell
Majority Leader United States Senate
317 Russell Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

TO: Honorable Nancy Pelosi
The Speaker of the House of Representatives
United State Capitol
Washington, D.C. 20515

FROM: Ralph Nader, Louis Fisher, Bruce Fein

Dear Majority Leader McConnell and Madame Speaker Pelosi:

We, the undersigned, encourage a bipartisan resolution of the current impasse over procedures for the impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump. The trial is too important to the Republic to be left to partisan political ambitions.

We propose that the Senate endow the Chief Justice of the Continue Reading »

More than three years have passed since the death of my father and I have found myself increasingly missing him. This longing most commonly manifests in the form of my coming across some experience that I wish I could share with him. One such has been a series of YouTube videos about modeling. This morning I had a similar moment.

Sipping my coffee and reading the most recent issue of The New Yorker I came across Lost Art by John Updike. Originally published at the end of 1997, the essay details Updike’s early fascination with cartoons and his aspirations to ascend to the heights of the likes of Walt Disney, Al Capp and Peter Arno. My father once told me that he had wanted to be a Disney cartoonist.

From my perspective, he was a damn fine artist. From his own perspective—even though his college degree was in fine arts—however, not so much. I was inspired as a boy by the boxes and boxes of his drawings I found in our basement, but, strangely enough I suppose, I took only a single art class in high school and none in college. The only class I’ve taken since was a watercolors class with local artist Bob Raack. Today I have a single piece of of my father’s art: a pen and ink drawing of a dragon he did one evening after we had a discussion about the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons.

If I could send my father the Updike article I would draw his attention to the last two paragraphs. The penultimate paragraph includes two mentions of Whiteout (a third mention is found in a much earlier paragraph). What fascinated me about this is that I had always believed that Whiteout (Liquid Paper) was invented by Bette Nesmith Graham—mother of Monkees’ lead guitarist Michael Nesmith—in 1956, but Updike is making references to Whiteout in the ’30s and ’40s. Perhaps he’s referring to something different—though his line …or applying, with an annoyingly gummed-up little brush, whiteout to an errant line or a stray blot. sure sounds like the Whiteout I remember. Dad would have had the answer.

The final paragraph would have made a fine launching point for a father (the artist)-and-son (the writer) conversation. Updike wrote:

I dislike drawing now, since it makes me face the fact that I draw no better, indeed rather worse, than I did when I was twenty-one. Drawing is sacred to me, and I don’t like to see it inferiorly done. A drawing can feel perfect, in a way that prose never does, and a poem rarely. Language is intrinsically approximate, since words mean different things to different people, and there is no material retaining ground for the imagery that words conjure in one brain or another. When I drew, the line was exactly as I made it, just so, down to the tremor of excitement my hand may have communicated to the pen; and thus it was reproduced. Up to the midpoint of my writing career, most strenuously in the poem “Midpoint,” I sometimes tried to bring this visual absoluteness, this two-dimensional quiddity, onto a page of print with some pictorial device. But the attempt was futile, and a disfigurement, really. Only the letters themselves, originally drawn with sticks and styluses and pens, and then cast into metal fonts, whose forms are now reproduced by electronic processes, legitimately touch the printed page with cartoon magic.

I think that this sense of drawing as sacred is one reason why I didn’t take it up, and perhaps why my father didn’t follow that career. I’ve seen many perfect drawings by the masters and I wonder now if they felt that way when they were finished. One of the parts of my father’s history that was lost when my parents moved for the final time was all of his oil paintings were tossed in the dumpster. I once mentioned to him that I wished I could have been there to save a few but he dismissed them as not very good.

Good wasn’t the important criteria. That they were uniquely part of him was.

Bonus No. 1: How Citizens United Got Us Trump with Robert Reich.

Bonus No. 2: Repeat after me: There was no year zero, there was no year zero. There was no…

Bonus No. 3: The unfairness of it all.

Bonus No. 4: Why I’m Still Hopeful About America with Robert Reich.

Last month, in HOW WOULD ADMIRAL WILLIAM H. MCRAVEN ACT…? I summed up a post with: Then the guy who got his daddy to pay off a doctor for a diagnosis of bone spurs so he could avoid service in the Vietnam War stepped in and pissed all over the foundation of good order and discipline. I didn’t think the story could get worse. Then it did.

This was the headline from Fox News, fuckin’ Fox News for fuck’s sake: Eddie Gallagher’s fellow SEALs describe him as ‘toxic,’ ‘evil’ in new videos.

Barnini Chakraborty, reporting for Fox, said:

The Navy SEALs who served beside Special Operations Chief Eddie Gallagher described their platoon leader as “toxic,” “freaking evil” and a “psychopath,” in new video recordings obtained by The New York Times.

The recordings are part of the Navy’s investigation into Gallagher, who was accused of war crimes stemming from a 2017 deployment to Iraq. Gallagher in July was found not guilty of murder and premeditated murder but was convicted of a lesser charge of posing for a photo with an Islamic State fighter’s corpse.

Compare Gallagher’s actions to those taken by the men of SEAL Team 6, who, in 2011, killed American Enemy No. 1: Osama bin Laden.

According to U.S. officials, bin Laden was buried at sea because no country would accept his remains. Before disposing of the body, the U.S. called the Saudi Arabian government, who approved of burying the body in the ocean. Muslim religious rites were performed aboard Carl Vinson in the North Arabian Sea within 24 hours of bin Laden’s death. Preparations began at 10:10 a.m. local time and at-sea burial was completed at 11 am. The body was washed, wrapped in a white sheet and placed in a weighted plastic bag. An officer read prepared religious remarks which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. Afterward, bin Laden’s body was placed onto a flat board. The board was tilted upward on one side and the body slid off into the sea.

In Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace, Leon Panetta wrote that bin Laden’s body was draped in a white shroud, given final prayers in Arabic and placed inside a black bag loaded with 300 pounds (140 kg) of iron chains, apparently to ensure that it would sink and never float. The body bag was placed on a white table at the rail of the ship, and the table was tipped to let the body bag slide into the sea, but the body bag did not slide and took the table with it. The table bobbed on the surface while the weighted body sank.

Perhaps the most damning testimony came from Special Operator 1st Class Craig Miller:

In one of the recordings, Miller, one of the most experienced SEALs in the group, can be seen weeping.

“The guy is freaking evil,” Miller told investigators.

As a counter to the testimony of the SEALs, the White House offered this from National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien:

There were also many, many SEALs and many folks in the special warfare community that support Chief Gallagher, that appealed to the president and asked him for this clemency.

In the White House, phrases such as “many people are saying” is code for “we’re making this crazy shit up.”

Bonus No. 1: The difference between the parties in 3 simple charts.

We’re in that time of year when people take a week or three off and broadcast media traditionally fills in with specials and reruns. The Internet is no different and this week’s TED Radio Hour with Guy Raz initially posted on 3 October 2014 and I remember a bit of it, but the whole show, if creativity is important to you, is worth listening to again.

Or, if you like, you can listen to the individual segments (with transcripts) below. Enjoy.

Transcript of: Sting—How Do You Get Over Writer’s Block?

Transcript of: Charles Limb—What Does A Creative Brain Look Like?

Transcript of: Sir Ken Robinson—How Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Transcript of: Elizabeth Gilbert—Where Does Creativity Come From?

For me, creativity has always been associating two disparate concepts in a way that presents a new idea that has not existed before. This is different from reshaping an existing concept in ways that I see as derivative. For example, all flavored carbonated beverages are derivative of whoever first flavored carbonated water, or all fan fiction is derivative of a writer’s creation.

They both represents marketable constructs, but neither is creative in the sense that I use the word.

From the beginning Ralph Nader has—and, to be fair, many others have—questioned Speak of the House Nancy Patricia Pelosi’s decision to narrowly focus the charges of impeachment (while leaving the door open for additional charges in the future) rather than piling on like a prosecutor looking for a plea deal. I think she knows what she’s doing.

I may be completely off base here, but I have to question whether or not Pelosi’s gender is a factor here since—from what I’ve read so far—those questioning her strategy are all men (and probably white men, to boot). I hope I’m very wrong on that point.

Nader, in “Then, I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” —King Donald Trump, writes:

Against Donald J. Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wanted narrow impeachment charges, despite key House Committee Chairs’ arguments for broadening the impeachment charges. These veteran lawmakers, led by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler, urged Speaker Pelosi to include the ten obstructions of justice documented in the Mueller Report. These House Committee Chairs also wanted to add a count of bribery regarding Ukraine—a stance Pelosi took herself in a November 14, 2019 press conference. She then overruled her chairs and rejected the bribery count.

Speaker Pelosi told reporters on November 14:

The devastating testimony corroborated evidence of bribery uncovered in the inquiry, and that the president abused his power and violated his oath by threatening to withhold military aid and a White House meeting in exchange for an investigation into his political rival—a clear attempt by the president to give himself an advantage in the 2020 election.

Bribery is explicitly listed as an impeachable offense in the Constitution in Article II, Section 4 and resonates with the public. No matter, Pelosi dropped this crucial charge.

Since the two articles of impeachment—abuse of power and obstruction of justice (limited to the Ukraine matter)—passed the House on December 18, 2019, the Republicans may have given Pelosi reason to accept some of her colleagues’ pleas Continue Reading »

You should listen to the whole podcast, but, and this is a big but, if you need the money shot, fast forward to timemark 48:30 to hear what Moore really feels about Biden , Warren and Bernie. Can there be any wonder why his support is coming predominantly from the younger end of the pool? There is an undeniable mountain-top energy here.

Bernie has been fighting for what he believes in for ever. He has been running an ultra marathon and he now sees a finish line that he cannot reach. But all those born , but he understands that he has the chance to wave everyone born since 1980 forward if he can just get close. He sees that if he can win this electionhe can undo the damage done by presidents William Jefferson Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama and their centrist, third-way tropes. Bernie has seen what the future can be if the 99 percent tells the 1 percent to go fuck themselves. We must ignore the fear and bullshit of the 1 percent and vote for what is best for us, not them. Bernie can get us there.

Moore’s notes on the episode:

Since the economic crash of 2008, polling has consistently showed that young Americans are embracing socialism more than capitalism. Media outlets like Jacobin and organizations like Democratic Socialists of America have emerged and they are mobilizing and informing new generations of political thinkers.

In this episode of “RUMBLE with Michael Moore,” Michael is joined by Alex Press, an editor and writer at Jacobin, a labor organizer and a DSA member. She and Michael discuss the movement behind the Bernie Sanders campaign, health care, the Wizard of Oz, suicide, labor and more.

Rumble Reads:

Follow Alex Press;

The laughable New York Times story from 2015 that Michael mentioned; and

The media and organizing project that Alex mentioned, Labor Notes.

Bonus No. 1: The Problem with Voting Strategically Is That You Vote against Yourself.

Bonus No. 2: Michael Moore’s filmography.

Our presidents have a history of fudging reasons or, as in two recent examples—the non-existent weapons of mass destruction and the fabricated attacks on the USS Maddox (DD 731) and USS Turner Joy (DD 951)—flat out lying to Americans about events in order to plunge our nation into war. Other examples are less clear.

Did President Franklin Delano Roosevelt have foreknowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbor? Did President Thomas Woodrow Wilson know that the Lusitania was not an innocent passenger ship and what about President William McKinley and sinking of the armored cruiser Maine?

The first two events are well documented and cannot be disputed. The other three are awash in various levels of conspiracy theorizing. I was surprised, however, in my research for my current novel—Absent Son—to discover that our second-most revered president, Abraham Lincoln, is also considered suspect. My source here is Robert Rosen, an attorney and historian who has written five books on the American Civil War (or as I’ve come to think of it: The second War of Secession).

I’ve been reading his 1982 book A Short History of Charleston and came across these passages on pages 108 and 109:

The critical events of March and April [1861] are both obvious and mysterious. Did Lincoln manipulate the Confederacy into firing the first shot? Who was really in command of the situation? What really happened?

In March, after [President Abraham] Lincoln became president [Major Robert] Anderson remained at [Fort] Sumter. The Confederates occupied Fort Moultrie and Castle Pinckney [In Charleston]. The Star of the West [sent to resupply Sumter] had been repulsed [on 9] January [by cannon manned by Citadel students]. Only seven states had seceded. Three federally controlled forts lay in seceded territory: Fort Taylor in Key West, Fort Pickens in Pensacola and Forts Sumter. By general consensus in both the North and the South (and contrary to Scarlett O’Hara’s feeling about the matter), Fort Sumter was to be the testing ground because hit was a direct threat to Charleston, the Cradle of Secession.

For each a dilemma: President Lincoln’s dilemma was that if he withdrew Union troops from Sumter, he would be acknowledging the end of the Union. By doing so he would abandon his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” If he sent troops to defend Sumter, however, he would be the aggressor in a contest no one—North or South—wanted.

President Jefferson Davis’ dilemma was that if he allowed the Union to hold Sumter, he would be acknowledging that he headed a government so weak it allowed a foreign government to hold a fort in the harbor of one its largest cities. He would be losing the respect and perhaps the recognition of foreign governments. On the other hand, if he attacked a small band of soldiers who had given no provocation, he would seem a warmonger. If he fired on the flag, he would be causing millions of Northerners who did not want war to rally to Lincoln for a noble cause—the preservation of the Union.

Those, indeed, were the dilemmas and we all know how event played out, but what about the actions we didn’t read in our American history books. What is the rest of the story? Rosen asks:

Did Lincoln conceive of a plan during those months to force the issue at Charleston—to bring on the first shot by the Confederates—so that he could unify and rally Northern opinion? The evidence is very strong that he did.

You should read the rest, but I will say that the evidence Rosen lays out makes me consider complexities in our 16th president—though more has been written about him than any other president—that had never occurred to me.

Bonus No. 1: TAIBBI, HALPER AND MICHAEL MOORE RUMBLE…

Bonus No. 2: THEY GAVE AN IMPEACHMENT AND NO ONE CAME…

Bonus No. 3: PRO WAR PRO BUSINESS POLS ALWAYS WIN VOTES…

So, what does the world look like when Ebenezer Scrooge wakes Christmas morning refreshed from an undisturbed and peaceful night to stand across the street from the Cratchit family flat as bailiffs remove and pile their meager possessions on the curb for failure to pay rent? Well, there’s no need for any great amount of imagination.

In 2019 America, Scrooge and his peers are dancing in the streets while the Tiny Tims of our nation are thankful for the global warming that’s keeping the snow from the streets where they have to sleep.

President Donald John Trump made many promises in 2016, but he really only delivered on one: more money for himself and his friends. Senator Bernie Sanders, writing in Trump’s holiday menu: handouts for billionaires, hunger for the poor for The Guardian begins this way:

When it comes to billionaires benefiting from the generosity of the American taxpayer, the holiday spirit is alive year-round. Taxpayers paid out $115m to Donald Trump so he could play golf at his own resorts.

And Amazon didn’t just pay zero in federal taxes on $11bn in profits—taxpayers gifted the corporation $129,000,000 in rebates. That’s enough to pay for CEO Jeff Bezos’s three apartments in Manhattan, including a penthouse, that cost him $80m.

And what about government generosity for those who actually need help? Tax dollars are somehow much harder to come by when they’re not going to handouts for the rich. The average person in poverty, struggling to put food on the table, gets about $134 a month in nutrition assistance.

Now, just in time for the holidays, Trump has finalized the first of three policies that will make this disparity even more obscene.

This is the truth about the presidency of Donald Trump: There is no bottom. None. Stop for a moment and remember your reaction to in October 2016 to the Access Hollywood tape and then do a self inventory of how you feel today, after more than three years of free fall, on that topic. Seems laughable, nearly quaint now, doesn’t it? At what point to we believe we have hit the limit of obscene?

I don’t know either.

Bernie continues:

Two years after passing a $1.5tn tax giveaway to the wealthiest Americans and large corporations, the Trump administration plans to strip 3.7 million people of their nutrition benefits.

The administration’s first step is to kick 700,000 adults off of nutrition assistance as they struggle to find work. The second step: trying to punish families who have high childcare and housing costs. And third, they want to hurt families who already are making difficult choices between food or heat.

Together, the three proposals will cut billions of dollars from one of our nation’s leading anti-poverty programs. Meanwhile, the Republican tax scam is working exactly as planned. Today, the richest 400 billionaires pay lower taxes than any group in America – including the poor. Nearly 100 of the top Fortune 500 companies now pay nothing in taxes.

This is what oligarchy looks like.

And we will be outraged until the next, and even greater outrage occurs in less than 24 hours.

Then Bob proposed: “A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!”

Which all the family re-echoed.

“God bless us every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

Then the bailiff took his tiny crutch and said: “Maybe now you’ll learn to walk like a proper white boy!”

Bonus No. 1: HE WAS: THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA…

Bonus No. 2: Merry Trumpmas.

Bonus No. 3: Found in the woods while walking Gillighan.

Bonus No. 4: A Very Rumble Christmas.

Whenever I worked with a student on Biology, one of the my favorite teaching moments would come when we talked about taxonomic ranking, the way we identify living organisms by group. I would list eight groupings—Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species—and then ask: What’s missing? The common response was a blank stare.

What was missing from the list, of course, was any grouping beyond Species. Race, the way humans (Homo Sapiens) artificially divide a broad range of phenotypes—Caucasoid, Negroid and Mongoloid—is completely artificial and biologically meaningless.

We are one animal species with the least deviation of any of the animal species on the planet. DNA doesn’t lie.

Guy Raz, in a recent episode of The TED Radio Hour—How It All Began on 7 December—interviewed a number of scientists to explore just how alike we are. Yesterday I read Zaid Jilani’s review of Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race by Thomas Chatterton Williams. Jilani, in A provocative new book argues we must ‘unlearn’ race. We absolutely should for The Guardian, writes:

In 2012, writer Thomas Chatterton Williams—a biracial African American expatriate living in Paris—took to the New York Times op-ed page to declare that not only do “mixed-race blacks have an ethical obligation to identify as black”, but that interracial couples “share a similar moral imperative to inculcate certain ideas of black heritage and racial identity in their mixed-race children, regardless of how they look”.

Williams argued that embracing a black identity served as a form of solidarity between biracial African Americans such as himself and those with darker skin. “And so I will teach my children that they, too, are black—regardless of what anyone else may say—so long as they remember and wish to be,” he concluded.

Then everything changed: he and his wife, a white French woman, had their daughter Marlow. As Williams held Marlow, he took in her blonde hair and blue eyes and his conception of America’s strict racial dichotomy between black and white started to collapse before him. He began to see racial categories as an obstacle to social progress.

Go on, read the rest, and them maybe watch Dr Seuss’ The Sneetches, or if you have access, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.

Bonus No. 1: On this Christmas Eve morning, I offer one of the many examples of why I think Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing is some of the best of American television. I get teary-eyed every time I watch this.

Bonus No. 2: Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj—How America Is Causing Global Obesity.

Bonus No. 3: Then there’s Gary Larson’s take.

Bonus No. 4: The religious case for Christmas is well known. But there’s a scientific one too.

Bonus No. 5: 5 Ways to Stop Corporations From Ruining the Future of Work with Robert Reich.

“You’d hardly know that it was the time of Christ’s birthday on the near west side. Surely, he would receive the same welcome as he did some 2,000 years ago.”

It’s difficult LOOKING BACK to see how little things change.

The issue was very much the same: where and how do you house people who are homeless.

Back then Councilwoman Helen Smith and Congresswoman Mary Rose Oakar were obstacles.

Now, Councilwoman Dona Brady opposes sheltering people at the Denison Avenue United Church of Christ.

It’s her ward—stay out!

Brady is the wife and Council successor to Dan Brady, Cuyahoga County Council president in Ward 11. They make up a powerful city political duo.

Dan was considered one of the most progressive council members when he served city council. He was a Kucinich supporter and prompted an attempt to dethrone George Forbes. Now, he and the former Council boss would get along fine.

Dan has become a supporter of things—such as heavy subsidization of the arena with public funds – he would have opposed years ago.

City housing and city fire inspectors have been recruited to the job of shutting the shelter. Brady brings her troops.

Here’s a link to the PD’s reporting on this.

Oakar continued to, as I put it, “toss hand grenades” when the Sisters of St. Joseph tried (and did eventually) change a seedy hotel on West 25th into a home for women needing housing.

The irony of all this is the fact that the city and Cuyahoga County haven’t solved the problem of housing people in the dead of winter.

The gap is 35 years. Or more.

The city and county have many buildings downtown that are unused at night.

But for the last 35 years and longer no real solution.

Not surprising. Our leadership really stinks.

Instead of housing the homeless talk now filtering in is that the POWERS THAT BE want a new football stadium. Can you imagine the chutzpah?

This time what the big boys failed in 1990—a domed stadium. Not talking millions now in new taxes but billions. No housing people though.

And we have a media – newspaper and TV news—that never seem able to not pull punches. More interested in why the Browns stink than why our politics do.

Also from Roldo is a separate email: Former Cleveland planning director Norman Krumholz, nationally respected advocate of equity planning, is dead at 92.

While I never had him as a teacher, I did meet Krumholz a few times while I was a graduate student in the Urban Studies program at Cleveland State University and outside the college at various political events and symposiums.

That I believe we have a uniparty system of government in the United States and that that party is the Pro War Pro Business Party is plain. So when Congress was faced with a critical vote that demanded Democrats and Republicans come together they did what their masters demanded and voted for the money. Go team!

Ralph Nader seems surprised that Democrats would, in his words, cave in a secret budget deal, but I have to think that no caving was required. Nader, in Democrats Cave in Secret Budget Deal with Trump, writes:

While attention was focused on the House of Representatives’ impeachment of Donald J. Trump, legislators from both parties were secretly huddling with White House aides to seal a $1.4 trillion budget deal to fund the government until next September. They were rushing to do this to avoid a partial government shutdown starting December 21, 2019.

Had the budget been deliberated in open Congressional hearings, the media would have reported on this backroom deal and the people of this country would have had a chance to weigh in during the proceedings. Instead, a degraded Congress pulled a fast one on the citizens. This obfuscation is especially unacceptable considering that these lawmakers work only three days a week at best—when they are not in recess altogether.

Astoundingly the Democrats also caved in on Trump’s wall! After blocking Trump’s funding demand for the wall for three years, the Democrats approved $1.4 billion for the wall and even allowed Trump to divert funds from the Pentagon to that porous, wasteful barrier. In so doing, the Democrats legitimized one of the egregious, impeachable offenses Trump committed earlier this year when he seized $3.6 billion from the Pentagon’s budget in money not approved for the wall. The Washington Post reported that Continue Reading »

So, last week I started listening to Michael Moore’s latest project, a project so important that he has set all other projects to the side, his podcast: Rumble. In today’s installment of Rolling Stone’s Useful Idiots with Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper, Moore sits down to talk about his decision and why this is more important than anything he has every done.

Writing in Michael Moore on ‘Useful Idiots’: ‘If the Election Were Held Today, Trump Would Win’ for Rolling Stone, Taibbi ledes:

In the first episode of Michael Moore’s new podcast, Rumble, he tells a story of being given a gift of a new reel-to-reel tape recorder as a child, kicking off his media career. He taped everyone in sight, produced his own ad-hoc version of The Tonight Show before nap time, and went on to launch his own newspaper at school. In an amusing precursor of future events, the paper would be shut down almost right away after criticism of school sports programs.

More than half a century later, Moore is still going against the grain. His career arc is unique in the modern media landscape, being one of the very few figures to achieve commercial success and broad audience share without the full support of one or the other wing of the blue/red news media ecosystem.

He now feels the urgency of the political moment is such that he won’t wait to put out another movie, say, after next Election Day. The Rumble podcast will be a way for him to chime in all year long, and get out a message that is wholly his own, without having to go through studios or editors. “I’m going to say what I want to say,” he says. “I don’t have backers. I don’t have investors.”

In 2016, Moore was one of the few people in the media who correctly predicted Trump’s success in the vital swing states of the Midwest. He was ignored. This time around, it might be worth listening earlier.

I would change might be worth to is vital to be.

The entire show is, of course, worth your 93 minutes, but if you’re pressed for time, the interview with Michael Moore starts at time mark 47:31. The other moment in the show that I highly recommend watching comes at time mark 33:24 when Matt and Katie talk about Taibbi’s coverage of The Horowitz Report in ‘Corroboration Zero’: An Inspector General’s Report Reveals the Steele Dossier Was Always a Joke and Five Questions Still Remaining After the Release of the Horowitz Report .

A couple of weeks ago I was talking with a new friend and when I mentioned that my professional education and training was as a journalist he immediately asked what I thought about the state of journalism today. I wish that I could have pulled up Taibbi’s discussion and watched it with my friend.

Bonus No. 1: MOORE AND THE EMERGENCY PODCAST SYSTEM…

Bonus No. 2: The Teenies: the worst decade in history? What was the defining thingo?

Bonus No. 3: Robert Reich and Inequality Media—Help us spread the Truth in 2020.

Truly momentous events are rare in anyone’s life and often we don’t realize how important a missed event might have been until after the event. All of that is, of course, relative and in our age of FOMO* more than a little sad. Life happens whether we observe it or not; the tree falling in the forest does make a sound even if no one is there to hear.

We ought not be spectators of history. We ought to be participants.

I watched much of the impeachment hearings in our House of Representatives. I listened to the witnesses. I didn’t pay any great attention to the committee members. Yesterday the process passed a milestone and our representatives impeached President Donald John Trump along party lines. We’ve known that that would happen weeks, months? ago. I didn’t listen to any of the speeches on the floor. I didn’t need to hear three hours of yammering by Democrats and three more hours of yammering by Republicans to know how the vote would go.

Last evening, after the vote, Michael Moore recorded Episode Three of Rumble: Last Train Out of DC… Reflections From The Front Row of An Impeachment…

Moore makes much of the empty seats in the gallery, as if Americans don’t realize how important all of this is. And I don’t completely disagree, but he knew before he boarded the train from New York to Washington what everyone was going to say and how the vote was going to go. He could have saved time by observing any one of dozens of broadcasts of the vote.

But because he went there and sat through all of those hours, he might have seen and been able to share a moment after the final vote that I have not been able to locate on any recording of the live stream. Here is the C Span recording of that event.

I’ll note that the audio seems to drop out here, but I could not hear anything of the howl described by Moore at time mark 21:10 in his podcast on any of the dozen or so recordings of the event available on YouTube.

Maybe it was important that he was there. I don’t know.

*Fear Of Missing Out.

Growing up, like the vast majority of children, I loved comics and I began reading them at a time when cartoonists died in the saddle and their characters lived on and on and on. The changed in the ’80s and cartoonists stopped when they had no more to say and moved onto other projects. That happened to three artists who most influenced my young adulthood.

The first was Gary Larson who began drawing The Far Side when I was a college freshman and stopped in 1995. The second was Berkeley Breathed who began his strip Bloom Country at the end of 1980 and continued for until 1989. Finally there was Bill Watterson who drew Calvin and Hobbs from 1985 to 1995.

This morning, when I read the headline: Far Side creator Gary Larson launches website with promise of new work my heart did a little happy dance. There is no new work on the website (yet) but I’ll take the promise, as, well, a promise.

Alison Flood writes:

There will be cows, undoubtedly; there will probably also be dinosaurs. The Far Side creator Gary Larson is set to release his first new work in 24 years, it was announced on Tuesday.

A “new online era” of Larson’s beloved, surreal comic creations had been promised on the cartoonist’s website in September. His publishers Andrews McMeel have now officially launched TheFarSide.com. They said the site would feature previously unseen sketches and doodles from Larson’s sketchbooks, a daily selection of cartoons from The Far Side—previously unavailable online—as well as the “periodic unveiling of new work by Larson” from next year. “In truth, we really have no idea what might show up. But, on the other hand, what’s changed?” they said.

Flood continues:

Marking the launch, Larson thanked fans for their patience, and set out to explain “why I’m so late to this party”. Larson admitted to “some ambivalence about officially entering the online world” but said that security and graphics are both better today, and there has also been some evolution in his own thinking. “I’m finally here,” said Larson. “And I could use a drink.”

“Finally, I also concede I’m a little exhausted. Trying to exert some control over my cartoons has always been an uphill slog, and I’ve sometimes wondered if my absence from the web may have inadvertently fuelled someone’s belief my cartoons were up for grabs. They’re not. But it’s always been inherently awkward to chase down a Far Side–festooned website when the person behind it is often simply a fan,” he wrote. “So I’m hopeful this official website will help temper the impulses of the infringement-inclined. Please, whoever you are, taketh down my cartoons and let this website become your place to stop by for a smile, a laugh, or a good ol’ fashioned recoiling. And I won’t have to release the Krakencow.”

I think the time has finally come to buy a subscription to GoComics.

Bonus No. 1: The Greta Thunberg Lovely award for driving bitter old white men apoplectic goes to…

From Rumble with Michael Moore: Episode 2—We ARE the wrong side:

On the eve of Donald Trump’s impeachment by the U.S House of Representatives, Michael is joined by a man who’s bravery in exposing the lies about the Vietnam War led to him being personally targeted by President Nixon…leading directly to Nixon’s impeachment and resignation.

Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, who Nixon National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger called “the most dangerous man in America,” reflects on Nixon’s resignation and why Trump must go.

Daniel Ellsberg was the hero of my youth who now names Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Greta Thunberg as his own heroes. Perhaps the most chilling quote from Ellsberg comes at time mark 25:10 when he talks about what happens when—as Speaker of the House Nancy Patricia Pelosi describes it—we have a rogue president and a rogue leader in the Senate at the same time. This is a situation where Ellsberg says, we don’t have a government of law, we have, in effect, a king.

Bonus No. 1: Hearts and Minds.

Bonus No. 2: We weren’t on the wrong side. We are the wrong side.

That consumer advocate and knight haggler Ralph Nader would take on Boeing in 2019 with the passion he did General Motors in 1965 is to be expected. Still, as I’ve followed this campaign, I’ve grown increasingly aware that there was something more in this case. I discovered this week that Nader has a very personal stake in this fight.

While listening to an NPR story on Boeing this week I heard for the first time that Nader’s grand niece, Samya Rose Stumo, died in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. This is new only to me. The connection was reported within two days of the 10 March crash.

I have to wonder who in the Boeing organization first uttered the words Oh shit! when they heard this news. For his part, Nader has kept his reporting and analysis professional but he is not letting go. In Boeing’s Perilous Bungling Requires New Leadership, he writes:

The Boeing executives and marketeers responsible for over-ruling Boeing engineers on the 737 MAX are still in charge of this very troubled aerospace company. Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg and the rubber-stamp Board of Directors, with two trophy ambassadors, are still running Boeing—thirteen months after the deadly 737 MAX crash in Indonesia and nine months after the deadly 737 MAX crash in Ethiopia that together took 346 lives. [Muilenburg was fired on 23 December, JH] Boeing said in October that it would appoint a board member with deep air safety experience, but it has not happened yet. (Muilenburg is was the only board member with an aeronautical engineering background)

Boeing has displayed an egregious pattern of mismanagement. The company is in trouble from contractors, the Department of Defense, and NASA. California Representative John Garamendi said Boeing had “serious quality issues” with the KC-46 aerial tanker used by the military and accused the company of “pushing profits over quality and safety.” [Isn’t that always the case for any corporation? JH] According to NASA’s Inspector General Paul Martin, NASA “essentially paid Boeing higher prices to address a Continue Reading »

During a two-year period 17 December 2010 through December 2012 what came to be known as The Arab Spring sent political waves crashing across North Africa and the Arab countries of The Middle East. The promise was not fulfilled, but we all learned a great deal about the power of the Internet and distributed media to organize and galvanize political change.

In his inaugural podcast—Let’s Rumble—Michael Moore says he doesn’t have time to make another movie or even a television show because the very real possibility (I’d say certainty unless there is a seismic even in America politics) that President Donald John Trump will be reëlected demands action every day by every American who believes in the promises of the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.

So, if that does, or even might, describe you, subscribe.

Bonus No. 1: What would Jesus do? Things you’re allowed to do if the religious discrimination bill passes.

I think that the idea of President Donald John Trump fearing Bill Clinton 3.0—aka Joseph Robinette Biden—as his opponent in the 2020 presidential race is a case of Br’er Rabbit fearing the briar patch. Trump’s please Oh please Br’er Fox, whatever you do, please don’t throw me into the briar patch. is a ploy for the PWPB party’s scheme to secure power in 2020.

A vote for either Donald Trump OR Joe Biden is a vote for the 1 percent and a vote against America’s best interests. That why I’ve publicaly declared that if the Democratic National Committee pulls another coup next year and locks out either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, I’ll vote for Trump. Either in concert or individually, Sanders and Warren are our best hope for a better future.

Robert Bernard Reich, writing in Donald Trump fears only one Democrat: Warren Sanders for The Guardian, explains:

There aren’t 20 Senate Republicans with enough integrity to remove the most corrupt president in American history, so we’re going to have to get rid of Trump the old-fashioned way—by electing a Democrat next 3 November.

That Democrat will be Warren Sanders.

Although there are differences between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, I’m putting them together for the purpose of making a simple point.

These two have most of the grassroots energy in the 2020 campaign, most of the enthusiasm and most of the ideas critical for America’s future.

Why? To borrow from Hugh Nanton Romney, when people have the chance to discover the meanings behind the scare words they realize that socialism ain’t that weird. Reich continues:

Together, [Warren and Sanders] lead Joe Biden and every other so-called moderate Democrat by a wide margin in all polls.

That’s because the real political divide in America today is establishment versus anti-establishment—the comparatively few at the top who have siphoned off much of the wealth of the nation versus everyone else whose wages and prospects have gone nowhere.

Warren and Sanders know the system is rigged and that economic and political power must be reallocated from a corporate-Wall Street elite to the vast majority.

This is why both Warren and Sanders are hated by the Democratic establishment.

It’s also why much of the corporate press is ignoring the enthusiasm they’re generating. And why it’s picking apart their proposals, like a wealth tax and Medicare for All, as if they were specific pieces of legislation.

Go ahead, read the rest of what Reich has to say and if you’re into YouTube videos, take a look at Inequalitiy Media with Robert Reich. You can start with his most recent in Bonus No. 1 below.

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

Bonus No. 2: Read better strips! Read better strips!

Bonus No. 3: Jon Batiste: BLACCK and Prince.

Bonus No. 4: Come on, you know this is true.

After watching/listening to both rounds of impeachment hearings by The United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and The United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and today’s hearings on the articles of impeachment I am forced to accept one of three possible truths. Either:

The Democrats are lying and the Republicans are telling the truth;

The Republicans are lying and the Democrats are telling the truth;

or—and I find this third choice most likely—both the Democrats and Republicans are seriously shading the truth for their own ends and neither wing of the PWPB Party has any interest in arriving at some objective truth.

Matt Taibbi, writing in ‘Corroboration Zero’: An Inspector General’s Report Reveals the Steele Dossier Was Always a Joke for Rolling Stone, characterized Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 568 page report—A Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and. Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election as a Rorschach test, in which partisans will find what they want to find and ledes:

The Guardian headline reads: DOJ Internal watchdog report clears FBI of illegal surveillance of Trump adviser.

If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was.

Like the much-ballyhooed report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Horowitz report is a Rorschach test, in which partisans will find what they want to find. [Emphasis mine, JH]

The Guardian is the only daily newspaper that I read and Taibbi’s lede stung, but he’s not wrong. Perhaps, as Robert Mueller did, Horowitz is signalling for Congress to just do its damn job or—and I give this idea greater odds—protecting his own house by pleasing everyone and no one. Maybe our first clue should have been the FBI pretending to be one of the cool kids by stealing the name for its operation from a Rolling Stones lyric. Taibbi concluded:

No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be embarrassed.

Yesterday Glenn Greenwald also jumped on my peers, leading in The Inspector General’s Report on 2016 FBI Spying Reveals a Scandal of Historic Magnitude: Not Only for the FBI but Also the U.S. Media [Emphasis mine] with:

Just as was true when the Mueller investigation closed without a single American being charged with criminally conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, Wednesday’s issuance of the long-waited report from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General reveals that years of major claims and narratives from the U.S. media were utter frauds.

Greenwald gets back to the media, but first he makes sure that no one thinks that the people at the FBI are the good guys.

Before evaluating the media component of this scandal, the FBI’s gross abuse of its power – its serial deceit – is so grave and manifest that it requires little effort to demonstrate it. In sum, the IG Report documents multiple instances in which the FBI – in order to convince a FISA court to allow it spy on former Trump campaign operative Carter Page during the 2016 election – manipulated documents, concealed crucial exonerating evidence, and touted what it knew were unreliable if not outright false claims.

If you don’t consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal, what is? But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover—who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself—because that’s what these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civic and political freedoms as a matter of course.

In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or hide this severe FBI corruption.

After a lengthy examination of the 17 major inaccuracies found in the FBI’s applications for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant, Greenwald concludes his first section with:

If it does not bother you to learn that the FBI repeatedly and deliberately deceived the FISA court into granting it permission to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign, then it is virtually certain that you are either someone with no principles, someone who cares only about partisan advantage and nothing about basic civil liberties and the rule of law, or both. There is simply no way for anyone of good faith to read this IG Report and reach any conclusion other than that this is yet another instance of the FBI abusing its power in severe ways to subvert and undermine U.S. democracy. If you don’t care about that, what do you care about?

And then, back to the journalists.

But the revelations of the IG Report are not merely a massive FBI scandal. They are also a massive media scandal, because they reveal that so much of what the U.S. media has authoritatively claimed about all of these matters for more than two years is completely false.

Ever since Trump’s inauguration, a handful of commentators and journalists – I’m included among them – have been sounding the alarm about the highly dangerous trend of news outlets not merely repeating the mistake of the Iraq War by blindly relying on the claims of security state agents but, far worse, now employing them in their newsrooms to shape the news. As Politico’s media writer Jack Shafer wrote in 2018, in an article entitled “The Spies Who Came Into the TV Studio”:

In the old days, America’s top spies would complete their tenures at the CIA or one of the other Washington puzzle palaces and segue to more ordinary pursuits. Some wrote their memoirs. One ran for president. Another died a few months after surrendering his post. But today’s national-security establishment retiree has a different game plan. After so many years of brawling in the shadows, he yearns for a second, lucrative career in the public eye. He takes a crash course in speaking in soundbites, refreshes his wardrobe and signs a TV news contract. Then, several times a week, waits for a network limousine to shuttle him to the broadcast news studios where, after a light dusting of foundation and a spritz of hairspray, he takes a supporting role in the anchors’ nighttime shows….

It’s long been the case that CIA, FBI and NSA operatives tried to infiltrate and shape domestic news, but they at least had the decency to do it clandestinely.

There is more, much, much more, but after reading Taibbi and Greenwald I have to add a note to my initial evaluation of three possible truths and say the Media are lying to us as well.

That scares the fuck out of me.

Bonus No. 1: Lessons for Bernie from Britain 2019.

Bonus No. 2: A thank you to First Dog on the Moon readers.