John Oliver rightfully rules the political comedy category as evidenced by his three, consecutive Emmy win in the Variety Talk Series category. I believe, however, that another show—Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj may very well take the award in 2020 thanks, in no small part, to shows like this week’s: Why Billionaires Won’t Save Us.

According to his webpage, Giridharadas:

[I]s the author of, most recently, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, published by Knopf in 2018. His other books are “The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas,” about a Muslim immigrant’s campaign to spare from Death Row the white supremacist who tried to kill him (optioned for movie adaption by Annapurna Pictures); and “India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking,” about returning to the India his parents left.

He is an editor-at-large for TIME, an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. He is a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times, having written, most recently, the biweekly “Letter from America.” His datelines have included Italy, India, China, Dubai, Norway, Japan, Haiti, Brazil, Colombia, Nigeria, Uruguay, and the United States. He has also written for The Times’s arts, business, and travel pages, and its Book Review, Sunday Review, and magazine–and for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he was raised there, in Paris, France, and in Maryland, and educated at the University of Michigan, Oxford, and Harvard. He worked briefly as a consultant for McKinsey & Company in Mumbai, before becoming a journalist in 2005, reporting from that city for the International Herald Tribune and The Times for four and a half years. He was appointed a columnist in 2008. He first interned for The New York Times at age 17, writing two articles on money and politics.

Minhaj’s show airs on Netflix on Sundays, but, unlike his competition, he puts the show on YouTube after 24 hours so that millions—as of this morning the show has passed nearly a quarter of a million views in just a few hours and garnered more than 1,500 comments.

Unlike Oliver—who I think targets an over-thirty (over-fifty?) audience—Minhaj speaks to a distinctly under-thirty crowd and some shows (like his take on Supreme) excited my high school students when I share that episode with them.

Bonus No. 1: Anand Giridharadas on YouTube.

Bonus No. 2: You know you’re not legally required to like Jeremy Corbyn in order to vote for him right?

Garry Trudeau made his bones on the dumpster fire that was the presidency of Richard Milhous Nixon. First, with his now iconic Guilty! Guilty, Guilty, Guilty! and a little more than a year later, the stonewall going up around the White House. This morning Trudeau has reprised the latter image for a 21st century Nixon.

I anticipated that Trudeau would repurpose Nixon’s stonewall for the Trump White House, but I’m not certain why today. The Intelligence Committee hearings have concluded (for now) and the Judiciary Committee hearings are set to begin on Wednesday.

What ever Trudeau’s reasons miight be, the image still holds the power 25 years later.

Context is all.

President Donald John Trump is the vindictive little boy trashing his room because his parents said it was not OK to pee on the neighbor’s flowers. The danger is that he’s not just trashing his own room—his heirs will take possession of ocean, not ocean-front, property, but that he is burning down the only house humanity has because a comedian made fun of him.

Having said that, I believe there are a myriad of crimes against We The People for which he should be impeached and removed, but doing his best to spite people who refuse to be bullied by destroying the planet just isn’t one of them. But hey, that’s just me. Ralph Nader makes the case that this could Charge No. 13 on his list.

Nader, in Impeaching Trump for Deliberately Abetting the Climate Crisis Security Perils, writes:

It is time to take Donald Trump’s disregard for climate crisis seriously. As Commander in Chief, Trump is abdicating his duties to protect his people, instead actively aiding and abetting the corporate polluters who are causing the climate chaos. Trump is wasting irreplaceable time that we need to prevent a worsening climate crisis. Trump’s actions, expanding the fossil fuel industry’s emissions, make the perils even worse. This is another reason for impeachment—climate crisis jeopardizes the American people in major ways.

Trump denies the overwhelming scientific warnings about the devastating destruction of the global climate crisis. He calls climate disruption a “Chinese hoax,” taking his delusionary persona to loony, dangerous levels.

The world is experiencing unheard of environmental upheaval: unprecedented heat waves, rapidly melting glaciers and permafrost, record floods, intensifying hurricanes, more frequent and severe droughts, and massive habitat convulsions. Despite the clear warning signs the worse is yet to come, Trump is shredding regulatory standards designed by law to curb the emission of greenhouse gases by fossil fuels, such as coal. He is opening large areas to oil and gas production, including those on our federal lands, the Arctic Continue Reading »

Recently I had the occasion to watch the video of Admiral William H. McRaven deliver the graduation speech at his alma mater: University of Texas at Austin. After I watched the video a few times I went out and got his book: Make Your Bed—Little Things That Can Change Your Life And Maybe The World. This is a great book.

I think so much of the book that I plan on making McRaven’s thoughts part of my daily life and presenting copies to my nieces and nephews as graduation presents. All that is to the good, of course, but given recent event I have to wonder how the now retired McRaven, who rose to the rank of four-star admiral and commanded both Operation Neptune Spear and United States Special Operations Command, views the court martial of Chief Petty Officer Edward R. Gallagher and his subsequent pardon by President Donald John Trump.

The story had been in the back of my mind, but with all the other shit going on in Trumpland, I hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to the details of the story. Joshua Johnson’s piece on 1A this morning brought the story into sharp focus.

Johnson’s lede for the piece was:

The Navy’s top official has lost his job.

Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said he ousted the Navy secretary because he was “flabbergasted” to learn that Richard V. Spencer tried to make a secret deal with the White House involving a Navy SEAL.

Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher was accused of “murder, attempted murder and obstruction of justice charges,” according to The New York Times.. But Gallagher was convicted in 2017 for posing with the corpse of an Islamic State militant.

He was demoted, until last week when President Donald Trump restored his rank.

The Navy notified Gallagher that his case would be reviewed by a Navy SEAL review board. There was a chance he might not be allowed to remain a SEAL. Trump tweeted that he would not allow that board to review Gallagher’s case.

That’s when Spencer allegedly went over Esper’s head and tried to work out a deal with the White House. This led to Spencer’s dismissal.

How do SEALs and other servicemembers feel about the situation? What does this mean for the military’s relationship with the White House?

Included in the program are: Leo Shane, Deputy editor of Military Times; Bradley Strawser, Associate professor of philosophy in the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School and Sean O’Keefe, Former Secretary of the Navy; former administrator of NASA; University Professor, Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

I’ve neither read nor heard a better telling of the story than Johnson’s. You should listen.

Meanwhile, former SecNav Spencer wrote an op-ed published in today’s Washington Post that strikes the note that I think Adm. McRaven would second. Here, in what I think is the key passage, is Spencer’s conclusion:

[T]he Navy established a review board to decide the status of Gallagher’s Trident pin. According to long-standing procedure, a group of four senior enlisted SEALs would rule on the question. This was critical: It would be Gallagher’s peers managing their own community. The senior enlisted ranks in our services are the foundation of good order and discipline.

But the question was quickly made moot: On Nov. 21, the president tweeted that Gallagher would be allowed to keep his pin — Trump’s third intervention in the case. I recognized that the tweet revealed the president’s intent. But I did not believe it to be an official order, chiefly because every action taken by the president in the case so far had either been a verbal or written command.

The rest is history. We must now move on and learn from what has transpired. The public should know that we have extensive screening procedures in place to assess the health and well-being of our forces. But we must keep fine-tuning those procedures to prevent a case such as this one from happening again.

More importantly, Americans need to know that 99.9 percent of our uniformed members always have, always are and always will make the right decision. Our allies need to know that we remain a force for good, and to please bear with us as we move through this moment in time.

Between 2011 and 2019, 154 SEALs (of approximately 8,500 serving) or 1.8 pecent, lost their membership in that elite unit as a result of behavior or actions deemed by the SEALs to be unacceptable. Gallagher’s peers, four senior enlisted SEALs were to rule on the question of whether or not he would remain a seal. Again, Spencer wrote:

This was critical: It would be Gallagher’s peers managing their own community. The senior enlisted ranks in our services are the foundation of good order and discipline.

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.

Bonus No. 1: Serial gateist Angus Taylor and the mystery of the faked documents.

President Donald John Trump will be the fourth President of the United States to face impeachment. Three were impeached but none were removed from Office. (The fourth, Richard Milhous Nixon resigned when he was certain that the Senate would boot him.) There is no question that Trump will be impeached.

There is equally no question that the Senate will not remove him. The only question here is for which crimes under Article II, Section 4 of our Constitution he will be impeached. Ralph Nader thinks that an even dozen makes sense and in Nader and Constitutional Scholars Push for 12 Articles of Impeachment, writes:

On November 22, 2019, Ralph Nader, Louis Fisher, Bruce Fein wrote to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urging her to act on their proposed 12 Articles of Impeachment.

Both the letter and the Articles of Impeachment can be seen below.

300 New Jersey Avenue, N.W.
Suite 900
Washington, D.C. 20001
202-465-8728

November 22, 2019

The Speaker of the House of Representatives
United States Capitol
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Madam Speaker Pelosi:

On October 31, 2019, you elaborated with perfect pitch that the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump was not only about the man but about the constitutional oath of every Member of Congress to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Among other things, you correctly underscored the danger of a Chief Executive who boasts, “Then I have Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” He has recklessly flirted with the ideas of slaughtering 10 million civilian Afghans, which, if acted upon, would violate the War Crimes Act, and initiating a nuclear war of aggression against North Korea, which, if acted upon, would violate the Declare War Clause. A clear and present danger that the President will Continue Reading »

It all started (above) at the corner of East 9th street and Euclid Avenue. Back in the late ’70s.

It was all started by a corrupted bank, a corrupt law firm and the state legislature. I don’t have to call it corrupt, do I?

Now, it will never end.

But now it has become not only corrupt but laughably so.

Because I read in the Plain Dealer that Shaker Heights has given a TIF (Tax Increment Financing) to a fast food restaurant. It means the taxes DON’T go to the city, schools and library.

A new Wendy restaurant replaced an old one. Still a fast food outlet.

Bad food. Bad jobs. Bad pay. (Average pay: $9.06 an hour).

Now, bad taxes. Shaker homeowners (and renters) will pick up the tab with higher taxes and rents. As if they aren’t high enough in Shaker.

You see the public doesn’t understand this because newspapers (the main source of information all these years) are corrupt, too.

They hedge the truth so badly that the public can’t understand how corrupt things are.

It’s all part of The Avenue development. Property owned by Sam Miller and the Ratners.

I know Sam’s dead but his tax dodges march on.

I’m talking about the new Wendy’s fast food place on Chagrin & Warrensville Center Road. Where the old one was.

It should be charged a tax as a traffic nuisance. Instead its taxes 100 percent for 30 years are diverted from the public treasury.

Instead, as a sign that Shaker Height is open for business, the city and the schools have bestowed a TIF, a form of abatement, according to a Plain Dealer article.

What it means naturally is that any shortfall in tax collections for the next 30 years will be made up by pleas to increase tax levies—for general use and for schools.

Somebody’s got to pay MORE.

In the 1970s, Squire-Sanders wrote a law to abate taxes. The law firm was employed by National City Bank (now gone, as the money). It build that ugly building that on Euclid that says, “Go away.” See it below and the gory details:

I turn 65 in less than 10 months and while the AARP has been chasing my ass for more than a few years, I’ll officially enter the realm of Medicare. My primary healthcare provider is the Veterans Administration and my treatment there has been, and continues to be, stellar. Others, including a lot of veterans without service-connected disabilities are not so lucky.

Ralph Nader has a few words on the topic for those who might fall prey to Healthcare’s Harold Hills. Nader, in Beware of the Medicare “Disadvantage” Corporate Trap—Wake Up AARP, writes:

While the Democratic presidential candidates are debating full Medicare for All, giant insurance companies like UnitedHealthcare are advertising to the elderly in an attempt to lure them from Traditional Medicare to the so-called Medicare Advantage—a corporate plan that UnitedHealthcare promotes to turn a profit at the expense of enrollees.

Almost one third of all elderly over 65 are enrolled in these numerous, complex MA policies the government pays so much for monthly. The health insurance industry wants more enrollees as they continue to press Congress for more advantages.

Medical Disadvantage would be a more accurate name for the Continue Reading »

Leaders are people smart enough to figure out which way the masses are moving and quick enough to grab their mace and sprint to the head of the column before anyone else realizes what is going on. If Donald John Trump can be said to be a student of politics then his mentor was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the alias Lenin.

Lenin didn’t lead the Russian Revolution of 1917, he hurried home from his exile in Switzerland to co-opt a revolution in progress. President Trump—for simultaneously the same and very different reasons—accomplished much the same nearly a century later and, primarily because he’s in much better health than Lenin, could reign much longer.

Ralph Nader believes that Democrats should lead. In The Most Impeachable President vs. The Most Hesitant Congress. What Are The Democrats Waiting For?, Nader writes:

Amid the worst Republican President and Republican Party in modern times, the Democrats are playing the politics of low expectations. This is not the time for Democrats to be in disarray. On Capitol Hill, the prevailing view of most Democrats is that they will cling to their House majority and they shouldn’t expect to regain the Senate in the 2020 elections. The Democrats should be using massive rebuttal evidence, relayed with invincible vibrant rhetoric, toward a “wave election win” as occurred in 1936, when President Roosevelt won 61 percent of the popular vote and the Democrats won large majorities in both the House and Senate.

Tyrant Trump is the most impeachable president in the country’s history—hands down. Before he resigned, Richard Nixon was sure to be impeached and convicted in 1974 due to his obstructions of the Watergate scandal investigation. Selected president Donald Trump has committed many more serious offenses than Nixon. Trump’s abuses amount to repealing the gains of the American Revolution against monarchical rule, and they eviscerate the U.S. Constitution’s “separation of powers” system of presidential accountability. Moreover, major protections for the American people against big corporate crime, power and greed are all on Trump’s unlawful chopping block. His offenses Continue Reading »

Bonus No. 1: Here are some of the real quiet Australians.

Between 1789 and the year of my graduation from high school, our House of Representatives took the extraordinary Constitutional action mandated under Article I, Section 2, Clause 5 and Article II, Section 4 of our Constitution only once. Now, for the third time in my brief lifetime, we have begun public impeachment hearings aimed at removing a sitting President.

So, the last time I followed impeachment hearings the internet was still too slow—I think my baud rate was 14,400 at the time (up from 300 when I first got on line in 1982)—for live streaming and I listened to the gavel-to-gavel coverage on my public radio station: WCPN. That was twenty years ago. Yesterday, I watched the proceedings live.

I confess that I found what I can only describe the pitiful, carnival-barker-worthy attempt by members of the Republic party to misdirect viewers and cover President Donald John Trump’s butt, difficult to watch, but I feel, indeed all Americans are, obligated to do so. This is our country we’re dealing with here.

Of course, late night television had a field day. In particular, I watched Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert:

Bonus No. 1: Republicans Cite Insane Debunked Conspiracy Theories During Bill Taylor Testimony.

Bonus No. 2: Will Trump Get Booed? Veterans Edition!

Bonus No. 3:Bill Taylor’s Testimony Closely Ties Trump To Ukraine Quid Pro Quo.

Bonus No. 4: Columbus Day Should Be Indigenous Peoples Day ft. Congresswoman Deb Haaland.

Bonus No. 5: What Was Trump Doing While Congress Debated The End Of His Presidency?

Bonus No. 6: It’s Paula’s White House.

Bonus No. 7: Bose Fact-Canceling Headphones

If Dennis Kucinich lost city hall 40 years ago, Michael White gained city hall 30 years ago.

How time does fly when LOOKING BACK.

In 1989, Cleveland voters had choices. Many prominent political names were on the primary ballot. Hagan, Bonanno, Perk, White, Forbes. Only the latter two made it to the final vote.

White and Forbes had been political partners. It was said that Forbes had blessed White’s candidacy for mayor. Until, however, Forbes felt he might not be able to maintain the Council presidency as he had for 16 years. Then he thought, why not me for mayor?

Indeed, Forbes and White were partners in a deal to convert two Cleveland school buildings into housing in 1984. A deal, by the way, that got them in legal trouble but no conviction. It was a cushy deal that allowed for hefty tax credits as outlined in an April 1984, Vol. 16, No. 20 issue of Point Of Viəw.

How times have changed.

The lack of mayoral candidates of late is an embarrassment. Mayor Frank Jackson now serves a historic fourth term. His performance has been far short of historic. More like depressing.

Even more disheartening, we don’t see a formidable line-up of potential candidates.

The danger is that Jackson will anoint a successor. What will that mean? That the line-up of Jackson hangovers will remain at the feeding troth. Doing as little as possible. More of the same.

It doesn’t suggest Cleveland Rising. More Cleveland Coasting. Downward.

As lethargic as our politics here have become, the news media seems as sluggish. The Plain Dealer as drowsy as Jackson. Not enough spark.

Broken politics. Broken journalism. Let’s have another conference.

The PD itself has a dual personality. It is divided between the Plain Dealer, headed by president and editor George Rodrigue, and Cleveland.com, headed by editor and president Chris Quinn. Notice the shift of editor and president on the two PD top guns.

Cleveland’s challenge will be to boost itself out of its stagnation.

Yet the four-daily delivered newspaper seems itself stagnated. Some believe Quinn exerts too much control. Over content. Over direction. That’s self-defeating.

A newspaper can be a bloodline for a community. But the paper seems confused. There’s the Plain Dealer. Then there’s Cleveland.com. Competitors instead of partners?

Maybe a lively newspaper is better for the community than a winning Browns team.

For one who worked the old busy city rooms of the PD, I cannot imagine the comradery and tip-sharing lost with separate news locations for the PD & the dot com outfits. Dismal. And boring.

Quinn, former city hall reporter, was a tough White critic. With Jackson, he’s been far too lenient. And too friendly.

Change will be difficult for him. He’ll need competition.

Ten years ago, White took office at a crucial time. The clock is there again.

White promised, “I pledge I will not raise taxes in the city during my first term.”

I called the promise a “betrayal” in April 1990, Vol.22, No. 16. It was. He choose to raise taxes. Not in the first year. In 100 days.

White led a $500,000 TV drive to pass a $275-million tax for Gateway. It began 30 years of revolving regressive sales taxes. There is no end in sight. We continue to piggyback on that tax. Part of today’s problem.

Here in the United States we are burdened with a single political party that allows internal discontent to create the illusion of a two-party system so as to maintain wealth and power in the hands of those best able to ensure wealth and power stays in their hands. Jonathan Miller, as part of the comedy revue Beyond The Fringe, made the case back in 1960.

That brief exchange has stuck with me and helps me to deal with the theater we call politics. I first came across the use of pro-war/pro-business party to describe the political system in the United States back in 2006 when Mano Singham wrote in The media propaganda model in action:

Another misunderstanding I wish to avoid is that the agendas I am talking about is not the “liberal” or “conservative” agenda that gets much discussed. The whole debate over whether the media is “liberal” is a bogus one, whose roots and purposes will be examined in a later posting. As I said in an earlier post, what we have in the US is a single pro-war/pro-business party with two factions, and the media reflects this. The two factions are divided over social and moral issues such a church-state separation, abortion, affirmative action, flag burning, pledge of allegiance, sex education in schools, evolution, sex, etc. The existence of heated debates over these issues can easily give one the impression that there are deep divisions in the country that are reflected in the media and in government.

Ted Rall beautifully illustrates the point this morning, in If Medicare-for-All Were a War, No One Would Ask: How Do We Pay It?

Rall writes: Whenever someone wants to start a war, nobody ever asks how we are going to pay for it. But when there is a proposal to help people with basic human needs, suddenly the budget becomes a top consideration.

We all should live in a world where …our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.

Bonus No. 1: The War To End All Wars.

Since launching Have Coffee Will Write back on 9 November 2004, I have tagged nearly 3,000 of my 17,239 posts with: Are you revolted enough yet…? The point of the question is to constantly ask myself, and my readers, how far does our nation need to sink before we don our liberty caps, raise the barricades and start the tumbrels rolling?

I voted for Bernie Sanders in the Ohio’s 2016 primary and then for Jill Stein in the general election because I didn’t buy the Stop Trump meme (see Ted Rall urges progressives to seize the moment below) then and I sure as hell am not going to buy it next year. Ralph Nader thinks the moment is here.

Nader, in America’s Streets and Squares Are Waiting: Massive Rallies Work!, writes:

Around the world people are marching, rallying, and demonstrating in huge numbers. Some of these countries are ruled by dictators or plutocratic regimes, others are considered democracies. Despite the peril of protest, people are seeking justice, freedom, and decent livelihoods.

Many boast about the United States being the oldest democracy in the world. While there are some street protests in the US, they are sadly too few and far between. Rallies calling attention to climate disruption have received less public support and media attention than they deserve. Likewise, the Parkland rally in Washington, D.C. against Continue Reading »

I look in my spam email folder once a week or so to check for the very rare instance where a legitimate email has been misdirected and of late the very annoying classmates.com has been sending notices spam informing me that the Warren High School Class of 1973 is already talking about our 50th reunion. Stephan Pastis supplies my top reason for not attending.

I’m one of those people who remembers their high school years as the worst four years of their life. Not even a paid hit could get me back there (though Minnie Driver might).

Bonus No. 1: John Denver’s Country Roads in minor key.

Bonus No. 2: Ted Rall urges progressives to seize the moment.

Bonus No. 3: It’s time! The ALP are doing some soul-searching to figure out how they so completely screwed up.

What happens when you run a government like a business? You get President Donald John Trump. Much has been made of the number of lies told by our president—he’s somewhere around 14,000 since taking office—but no one should be surprised because he’s running the government like a business which means he’s always selling, and selling means lying.

Often when salesmen lie the worst that happens is the buyer is disappointed. But sometimes people get hurt and even die. In recent years we’ve watched the greed of pharmaceutical companies crush American families with our relentless, slow-motion opioid crisis. But sometimes, the deaths pile up in a moment. Boeing’s head salesman Dennis Muiulenburg, whose official title is president and chief executive officer who sold the deadly 737 MAX aircraft, can talk about that experience. Ralph Nader wants him to talk more.

Nader, in Buffeting Boeing CEO’s Rope-a-Dope in Congress, writes:

This past week, Boeing’s deadly 737 MAX crashes were the focus of two back-to-back hearings—one in the Senate and one in the House. In the House Transportation Committee hearing, at least 50 Democrats and Republicans criticized Dennis Muilenburg’s mismanagement and implied criminal negligence. Muilenburg’s actions allowed Boeing’s marketeers to overrule Boeing’s engineers so that Boeing could circumvent FAA’s safety oversight, which had already been diminished by the Congress.

These hearings were held because of efforts by the families of the victim’s aboard preventable airplane crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Family members attended the hearings, holding up large signs with photos of their lost loved relatives. There were 346 fatalities in two crashes driven down by stealth, faulty software installed to address, what Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger called, the reduction of the Continue Reading »

This is a crucial LOOK BACK to 40 years ago next week when Cleveland made a change -that has had a long-term effect. It has produced the government that we suffer under today. A corporate dominated-subsidy for the rich state.

Lt. Gov. George Voinovich defeated one-term mayor Dennis Kucinich in November 1979.

But the real change was from an administration that claimed to be progressive to a mayor who claimed he favored Fat Cats.

It has made all the difference.

Voinovich allied with business/civic/legal/foundation partners. They actually bragged to a reporter from Fortune magazine for a major article that they had pursued a coup to change the direction in Cleveland. They did.

In a pre-election piece, Oct. 24, 1979, Vol 12 No. 7, I wrote: The answer has to be neither one.

In a Nov. 1979, Vol. 12 No. 8 issue I pretty much told why Kucinich didn’t deserve re-election. The headline: Racism Fails. Weisman Tactics Lose.

The piece shows two racist pieces of campaign literature distributed by Kucinich campaigns. Both use photos of George Forbes, Council President. One to attract black voters, distributed on the east side. The other to attract white voters distributed on the west side.

Thereafter, mayors rode the business train with huge subsidies for major downtown buildings and three money-draining sports stadiums and arenas.

Now as some panicked leaders see major problems. A troubled city again. They call for Cleveland Rising. However, too many have fallen for the patchwork that they will produce to work.

Mano Singham has much more…

Bonus No. 1: Watch the entirety of Bernie Sanders on Heart Attack, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez & Trump Impeachment.

We can live only minutes without oxygen, days without water and weeks without food, but deprive us of any of these three for long enough and we die. I have fasted for as long as three days, but I have never gone more than 24 hours without water. Three days without food is no big deal for a well-nourished American like myself, but a day without water sucked.

I really didn’t think I’d be writing about water again so soon, but Andrew Marlton, in this morning’s First Dog On The Moon—All that perfectly good water dumped into the ocean like some sort of enormous NATURE TOILET!—put Brenda The Civil Disobedience Penguin (pygoscelis anarchii) front and center.

Reading about Australia’s water challenges reminded me of a year-long project that The Guardian began last week on Our Unequal Earth. The editors write:

Today the Guardian is launching a year-long series, Our Unequal Earth, investigating environmental injustices: how ecological hazards and climate disasters have the harshest impacts on people of color, native tribes and those on low incomes.

The most egregious examples include the lead poisoning crisis in Flint, Michigan, petrochemical pollution in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, and today’s series launch story, about an entire river that stops at the US-Mexico border, leaving ordinary Mexicans without water. Each of these cases has also prompted inspiring community activism.

Our new environmental justice reporter, Nina Lakhani, asked five luminaries of the movement [Dr. Robert Bullard, Kandi Mossett-White, Mustafa Ali, Jamie Margolin and LeeAnne Walters, JH] to explain “environmental justice” in their own words. They reveal why, alongside global heating and the extinction crisis, it is one of the most pressing issues of our time.

You should read the whole introduction, but this morning I want to write about the first installment: The lost river, Mexicans fight for mighty waterway taken by the US. Nina Lakhani begins:

The temperature is rising toward 45C (113F) as young brothers Daniel and Dilan Rodríguez skip towards a bridge over the Colorado River in the Mexican border town of San Luis Río Colorado. But there is no water flowing through the channel of one of the world’s mightiest waterways. The pair run down the river bank and cheerfully splash through stagnant puddles dotted about the riverbed.

“We wish we had a river, so we could swim, and jump and sail my cousin’s boat,” said Daniel, 12. “At least we have puddles to make mud balls, that can be fun.” The Colorado originates in the Rocky mountains and traverses seven US states, watering cities and farmland, before reaching Mexico, where it is supposed to flow onwards to the Sea of Cortez.

Instead, the river is dammed at the US-Mexico border [Link not in the original, JH], and on the other side the river channel is empty. Locals are now battling to bring it back to life.

Yes, there is a treaty, but like many treaties that the United States signs, the beneficiaries are always those who would profit and never those with the real need.

The disparities on both sides of the border are stark.

In the US, the Colorado serves more than 35 million people, including several native tribes, seven national wildlife refuges and 11 national parks, and supports $26m tourism and recreational industries, as well as farming. California has rights to the largest quantity, with 4.4m acre-feet per year – or 29% of the total – while Utah is allocated 1.7m and Nevada 0.3m.

At the Morelos dam, located between Los Algodones, Baja California, and Yuma, Arizona, the river is diverted to a complex system of irrigation canals which nourish fields of cotton, wheat, alfalfa, asparagus, watermelons and date palms in the vast surrounding desert valley. This is good for farmers—and less so for ordinary Mexicans.

Water is literally—on either side of the border—life in the southwest and like the bad guys in China Town, the real villains want to hoard what belongs to the planet for their own benefit and damn all the invisible people.

Bonus No. 1: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Bonus No. 2: ‘It’s where we come from’: the River People in Mexico left without a river.

Bonus No. 3: GAWD WILLIN’ AN’ THE CREEK DON’T RISE: PART I…

Bonus No. 4: 6 Ways Trump Has Sold Out America.

[Update @ 1157—I do love synchronicity: The fight to stop Nestlé from taking America’s water to sell in plastic bottles.]

I live in one of America’s Green Zones. Not green in the sense of all our trees and parks; not green because of a leftist environmental vibe, but green in the way the other Green Zone in the heart of Baghdad is green: a go zone, a safe zone. And, at 64, I very well may live to see our own climate-crisis refugees come flooding in. For our water.

The water battle is not new. The southwest has coveted the single largest reservoir of potable surface water on the planet for generations and the people in the Great Lakes states, and two Canadian provinces, understand the growing crisis.

As our existential threat from climate chaos escalates so too will the mass exodus from what Bill McKibben calls “large swaths of the world increasingly off-limits to humans.” Our danger is not from places like Asia or the Middle East. Our danger is from places like California.

Bill McKibben in Has the climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in? for The Guardian, writes:

Monday morning dawned smoky across much of California, and it dawned scary—over the weekend winds as high as a hundred miles per hour had whipped wildfires through forests and subdivisions.

It wasn’t the first time this had happened—indeed, it’s happened every year for the last three—and this time the flames were licking against communities destroyed in 2017. Reporters spoke to one family that had moved into their rebuilt home on Saturday, only to be immediately evacuated again.

In the early ’90s (no online version available) I wrote an op-ed in Cleveland’s Plain Dealer about the absurdity of building homes in places where Mother Nature—with her floods and earthquakes and fires and hurricanes—continuously sent the message to us puny humans that our presence was not wanted nor tolerated. At the time I was writing about the insanity of rebuilding the devastated communities in Florida recovering from Hurricane Andrew.

To illustrate my point, I imagined a developer despoiler building housing on Lake Erie ice—something you could have done in 1992 but not in 2019—only to see the homes sink in the spring and then repeating the futile exercise the next winter. This bizarre habit of building in danger zones—who’s afraid of a 500-year flood?—is more than bizarre now and we have only our own hubris and the lies of the fossil-fuel extraction industry, to blame. McKibben continues:

The spectacle was cinematic: at one point, fire jumped the Carquinez Strait at the end of San Francisco Bay, shrouding the bridge on Interstate 80 in smoke and flame.

Even areas that didn’t actually burn felt the effects: Pacific Gas and Electric turned off power to millions, fearful that when the wind tore down its wires they would spark new conflagrations.

Three years in a row feels like—well, it starts to feel like the new, and impossible, normal. That’s what the local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, implied this morning when, in the middle of its account of the inferno, it included the following sentence: the fires had “intensified fears that parts of California had become almost too dangerous to inhabit”. Read that again: the local paper is on record stating that part of the state is now so risky that its citizens might have to leave.

On the one hand, this comes as no real surprise. My most recent book Falter centered on the notion that climate crisis was making large swaths of the world increasingly off-limits to humans. Cities in Asia and the Middle East where the temperature now reaches the upper 120s—levels so high that the human body can’t really cool itself; island nations (and Florida beaches) where each high tide washes through the living room or the streets; Arctic villages relocating because, with sea ice vanished, the ocean erodes the shore.

But California? California was always the world’s idea of paradise (until perhaps the city of that name burned last summer). Hollywood shaped our fantasies of the last century, and many of its movies were set in the Golden State. It’s where the Okies trudged when their climate turned vicious during the Dust Bowl years—“pastures of plenty”, Woody Guthrie called the green agricultural valleys. John Muir invented our grammar and rhetoric of wildness in the high Sierra (and modern environmentalism was born with the club he founded).

California is the Golden State, the land of ease.

We have nothing to be easy about. Is it any wonder that the under-30 crowd is obsessed with dystopian fiction? When you’re living the nightmare, it can help to believe that reality isn’t real.

Bonus No. 1: TRUMP’S SALARY’S THE LEAST HE MAKES FROM US…

Bonus No. 2: California wildfires leave destruction across the state—in pictures.

Bonus No. 3: Trump Gets Extremely Graphic In Describing Death Of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Bonus No. 4: Ta-Nehisi Coates pulls few punches at Raleigh “Color of Education” summit.

Bonus No. 5: The unfairness of it all.

Bonus No. 6: Beware of the extremists in moderate clothing.

Bonus No. 1: Will the brave and clever sulphur-crested cockatoo win Bird of the Year? Did a cockatoo write this?