Two days after the first round of Democratic Party debates here’s my read: two women—Elizabeth Warren on the first night and Kamala Harris on the second night—were the clear winners of their debates. Bernie Sanders and Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg didn’t shoot themselves in the foot and Joseph Robinette Biden looked like your great uncle at Thanksgiving.

There is plenty of commentary on Warren Bernie and Mayor Pete, but I want to focus on Harris. She delivered the most memorable (and scripted) line of the evening when she said to the others on the stage talking over each other:

Hey, guys. America does not want a food fight,” Harris said. “They want to hear how we’re going to put food on their table.

Of course she knew the chances of such a squabble would occur were near certain and her team ensured that the line was ready.

Harris—pictured above—was also ready for Biden when the issue of his recent comments regarding segregationist senators arose and the debate shifted to Biden’s position on court-ordered busing. In her response, Harris made the subject personal, telling Biden:

You also worked with [senators James Oliver Eastland, D-Miss and Herman Eugene Talmadge, D-Ga.] to oppose busing. And there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.

To be fair, of course Biden worked with them. He was only elected to the senate in 1973. Talmadge entered the senate in 1957 and Eastland—the President Pro Tempore of the Senate for fuck’s sake—had been a U.S. Senator since 1943, when Biden was still shitting in his diapers. Doesn’t anyone remember the terms Dixiecrat or Southern Strategy? Having said that, Biden was stupid to raise the issue thinking that somehow that might make him more electable because if he could work with those to wastes of human genome, he certainly could work with the current crop of Republicans in Congress, but back to the present.

Cliff Albright, cofounder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, wrote in an opinion piece for The Guardian:

…[W]ithout a doubt, the debate’s most memorable moment was an exchange between Harris and the former vice-president Joe Biden on race. First, Harris shared how “hurtful” she found Biden’s warm remarks last week about working with the segregationist senator James Eastland. Then she proceeded to challenge Biden’s well-documented opposition to bussing–a policy of the 1960s and 70s designed to integrate schools still segregated more than 20 years after the historic Brown v Board of Education decision.

[snip…]

The moment was powerful not only because of the imagery of the seasoned politician coming face-to-face with the adult version of a little girl directly affected by his policy positions. It was also powerful because of the brief debate which followed over the role of the federal government in intervening when states fail to protect civil rights. In that exchange, Biden demonstrated not only his age but his political inclinations by defending local authority over federal remedies such as bussing.

In doing so, Biden was essentially echoing the “states’ rights” arguments of the avowed segregationists whom he was accused of praising just one week earlier.

Harris’ elephant lurks in her own wing and I’m certain that Biden has that bit of her history in his back pocket. If he decides to whip it out he’ll have gone nuclear and his career is over if the ploy doesn’t work. I’m talking about Harris’ decision in as San Francisco District Attorney 2004 to bar her office from continuing to work with child sex abuse survivors to challenge their abusers in the Catholic Church.

Lee Fang, reporting in As San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris’s Office Stopped Cooperating With Victims of Catholic Church Child Abuse for The Intercept, writes:

Kamala Harris, surrounded by thousands of cheering supporters, kicked off her presidential campaign in Oakland earlier this year, declaring that she has always fought “on behalf of survivors of sexual assault, a fight not just against predators but a fight against silence and stigma.”

Fighting on behalf of victims of sexual abuse, particularly children, has been central to Harris’s political identity for the better part of three decades. Harris specialized in prosecuting sex crimes and child exploitation as a young prosecutor just out of law school. She later touted her record on child sexual abuse cases and prosecuting pedophiles in television advertisements, splashy profiles, and on the trail as she campaigned for public office.

But when it came to taking on the Catholic Church, survivors of clergy sexual abuse say that Harris turned a blind eye, refusing to take action against clergy members accused of sexually abusing children when it meant confronting one of the city’s most powerful political institutions.

When Harris became San Francisco district attorney in 2004, she took over an office that had been working closely with survivors of sexual abuse to pursue cases against the Catholic Church. The office and the survivors were in the middle of a legal battle to hold predatory priests accountable, and Harris inherited a collection of personnel files involving allegations of sexual abuse by priests and employees of the San Francisco Archdiocese, which oversees church operations in San Francisco, and Marin and San Mateo counties.

Unlike earlier charges around Harris’ stance on the parents of truant students, I’m not aware of any response from her on this subject. She will have to do so at some point, and the sooner the better. If she has no credible response then she’s just as fucked as Biden.

There is a part of me that wonders if Stacy Abrams—whom I like much more than Harris, but who has not yet declared her candidacy in the race—is waiting for this precise moment to step forward as the female African-American candidate for the Democratic party.

Bonus No. 1: Annddd from Our Cartoon President…

Bonus No. 2: MUELLER! MUELLER! MUELLER! MUELLER! MUELL…!

Bonus No. 3: Ten Democrats That Didn’t Make The Cut:

Bonus No. 4: The third debate will be broadcast live from Fourth of July barbecues…

Successful writers, politicians and grifters all share one vital skill: the ability to convincingly tell a good story. (Consider this headline: Kamala Harris Is the Best Storyteller on the Democratic Stage.) The better the story we tell, the more money we collect. The equation really is that simple: if you want attention or cash, your story must appeal to the spirit or the heart.

Nathan Heller, writing in The Hidden Cost of GoFundMe Health Care for The New Yorker, understands and come out of his lede swinging: For those who want their hearts broken, the story of Zohar and Gabi Ilinetsky, the parents of one-year-old twins, is a world to live inside. You know what’s coming next and Heller invests his entire first act in telling the story before, in the second act, getting down to telling the story of story telling.

Storytelling has never not been in fashion—it’s our primal imaginative act—but in recent years the word has travelled widely with the buzz of civil enterprise and wealth. Melinda Gates: “The power of stories . . . opens our hearts to a new place, which opens our minds, which often leads to action.” Michelle Obama: “Barack and I have always believed in the power of storytelling to inspire us, to make us think differently about the world around us, and to help us open our minds and hearts to others.” Tim Cook: “Great stories can change the world.” Memo received.

In crowdfunding, this kind of storytelling has become crucial to success. “The story is obviously the paramount piece of any campaign, whether you’re raising capital for a big tech idea or raising capital for a problem you have,” Roy Morejon, the president and co-founder of Enventys Partners, a prominent crowdfunding consulting firm, told me. A good story attracts attention, from which more attention often grows. “We’ve now launched more than a thousand crowdfunding campaigns, and what we’ve seen at work is FOMO—the fear of missing out—and a sense of urgency,” he said. “Nobody wants to be the first person on the dance floor, but, once there’s a party on the dance floor, people join in.” In most successful campaigns, the first third of funding comes from one’s real-life community. “Once that happens, you usually have about an eighty-per-cent success rate to fully fund the ask,” Morejon said. At GoFundMe, a “happiness team”—a corps of customer-service representatives—occasionally contacts users with pointers for improving the way they tell their stories.

GoFundMe‘s most important skill is the marketing of marketing—improving the way customers tell their stories—with the help of their happiness team. Spare me. Remember the grifters in my lede? Yeah, they’re all over this. Heller cites the story of Jenny Flynn Cataldo:

In September of 2016, a particularly moving campaign appeared on GoFundMe. “As many of you know, our dear friend Jenny Flynn Cataldo has been battling cancer for over 3 years now,” the campaign’s description, posted by a family friend named Will Pearson, began.

The cancer is unfortunately no longer treatable and the primary goal of medical care at this point is to give Jenny as much time as possible with her precious 6-yr-old son Flynn and her husband Daniel. For those of you who have not had the pleasure of meeting Flynn, you’ll be pleased to know that he inherited his mother’s contagious laugh and larger-than-life personality. . . . With medical bills piling up, we thought we’d set up a fund so that all of us can help Jenny continue to get the treatments necessary to extend her life.

The text accompanied a photo of Cataldo, a rosy-cheeked woman with a neat brown bob, cuddling with her amiable-looking bald husband. A roly-poly child with a toothy grin was perched behind them.

That anyone would send money to someone telling a really sad story on the Internet speaks to the power of storytelling. We’re all marks in need of someone willing to pull back the curtain. Enter Adrienne Gonzalez and GoFraudMe:

“People erroneously assume that GoFundMe is doing fact checking,” Adrienne Gonzalez, who monitors the platform on her Web site, GoFraudMe, said. Gonzalez writes for the accounting-industry news site Going Concern (“the Gawker of accounting,” as she put it to me) and started GoFraudMe in 2015, after noticing a GoFundMe campaign soliciting funds for Bart the Zombie Cat, who purportedly got hit by a car, dug himself out of his grave, and rang up a sizable unpaid medical bill at the Humane Society of Tampa Bay. The campaign, created by one of Gonzalez’s neighbors, raised more than six thousand dollars. Yet it rang false. “I’m in cat rescue,” Gonzalez explained. She knew that humane societies usually pay their own care expenses, and some Googling confirmed that Bart’s bill had been covered. “I tried to report it directly to GoFundMe,” she told me. “They basically told me to take a long leap off a short pier. That got me wondering what other cases were out there.”

GoFundMe says that less than a tenth of one per cent of its postings are fraudulent. Gonzalez, whose readers send her an average of a dozen potential frauds a week, believes the number to be higher. She said that she reports only on frauds that she can confirm, often through financial evidence from a whistle-blower. Most of those who have contacted her have actual fund-raising needs but have been scammed by third parties—users who set up unauthorized campaigns in other people’s names and then make off with the money. Yet without firsthand reports or submitted evidence, Gonzalez told me, medical frauds are difficult to expose because of privacy laws.

“The only surefire way that you can prove, with minimal effort, that something is fake is if you run the campaign photos through reverse image search and you discover that it has a different source,” she said. (Danny Gordon, GoFundMe’s chief business officer, told me that the company does employ algorithmic image- and text-recognition tools in order to flag questionable materials, and is especially vigilant around crises. “After a school shooting, every single campaign that is started for a victim is flagged by our technology and reviewed by the team,” he said.) Another red flag is a shallow social-media presence, which suggests an invented identity.

(I checked the GoFraudMe site this morning and the newest story I could find involved Kristin Ashley Eagle and is dated 17 September 2018. I dropped a note to Gonzalez to find out if she had gone on hiatus. I’ll update this when I have an answer.)

In his third act, Heller rises to a meta question: why, in the purported most prosperous nation on the planet do we have people crowdsourcing their medical bills?

The problem of crowdfunding is the problem of authority and access. Who has better options now, and by whose grace? It’s often said that the path forward is self-reporting: people should speak their truths without the mediation of external power systems, so that others can respond. “Let’s get these stories out there!” the line goes. GoFundMe has become an object lesson in the insufficiency of just getting the story out there. People can share their needs, we learn, and still be subject to the pathos market, network advantages, or fraud. People can speak their truths and still get lost within a labyrinth of trending interests, channelled audiences, and ten million individuated heartfelt pleas that don’t connect. The risk in giving medical aid on the basis of stories is that the theatre of change trumps actual systemic reform; the guy with resources helps an ailing friend, or donates to a stranger whose experiences resonate, and believes that he’s done his part. Meanwhile, the causes of problems go untouched.

And, Heller should add, the medical-financial industry grows ever richer.

Like the good storyteller he is, Heller circles back to the Ilnetskys and concludes:

There was a silence. Gabi gave me an imploring look. “How are we supposed to parent?” she asked. Yael, on a blanket at their feet, began to babble and coo. “So much of parenting is about investing in your children so that they can be successful in life,” Gabi said. “But what we learned very quickly is that we have to invest in them for today.”

Yael called out, and Gabi looked straight at her. For a moment, the space between them seemed a cold and measurable object. “For today,” she said again.

I went looking this morning for further news of Zohar and Gabi Ilinetsky and their twins, Yoel and Yael and looked at their GoFundMe page. As of 0641 this morning, the had raised $267,531 or 13.4 percent of their $2 million goal. While GoFundMe waves the usual 5 percent commission on individual cases like that of Ilinetskys, the payment processors still collect 2.9 percent—$7,758 in this case—of the money raised.

Is there any surprise that Medicaid for all continues to gather momentum?

Bonus No. 1: FORTY ACRES AND A MULE IN THE 21ST CENTURY…

Bonus No. 2: Please Remember The “Concentration Camp” Victims.

During my lifetime the great American debate has been: who decides, the people or the bosses’ who wins: Jonathan or Bartholomew? Out first peaceful transition of power occurred in 1797. Our last—set in motion, perhaps, in 2010 by the United States Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United—looms on our 2021 horizon.

Ralph Nader thinks that that is what is at stake in 2020. We are already a socialist country, the question is will that socialism be democratically governed by We The People or will authoritarian plutocrats rule and make all our decisions. We may get to decide next year.

Nader, in Trump Invites Debates Over Omnivorous Crony Capitalism, writes:

Donald J. Trump’s 2020 election strategy is to connect his potential Democratic opponents with “socialism.” Trump plans to use this attack on the Democrats even if Senator Bernie Sanders, who proudly calls himself a “democratic socialist,” doesn’t become the presidential nominee (Sanders has been decisively re-elected in Vermont).

Senator Elizabeth Warren is distancing herself from the socialist “label.” She went so far as to tell the New England Council “I am a capitalist to my bones.”

Sanders and Warren are not what they claim to be. They are both updating Roosevelt’s New Deal and more closely resemble the Social Democrats that have governed western European democracies for years, delivering higher standards of living Continue Reading »

I am a total space nerd. I was born in the same year as America’s Vanguard Project. I was too young to remember Sputnik, but I do remember the launches of Alan Sheppard and John Glenn in (respectively) Freedom 7 and Friendship 7. I sat in front of my television set for every launch that followed all the way to the final Apollo mission at the end of 1972.

And I cursed President Richard Milhous Nixon when he canceled the final three Apollo missions. Nine years later I cut my freshman classes at Ohio University to watch the next phase of space exploration as John W. Young and Robert L. Crippen rode their candle, Columbia, into the sky.

I built all the models, devoted three Superior-Award-winning science fair projects to space exploration, watched all the movies and read more books than I can count.

(Did I mention that Nixon should burn in hell, if for no other reason than that he cancled the final three Apollo missions?)

Space exploration still puts a catch in my throat and I’ve found myself feeling nostalgic for the night nearly 50 years ago when Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the Eagle as I read Charles Fishman’s One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon.

Fishman is a master. I first learned of him when I and a crew of bloggers created The Writing On The Wal. In 2006 Fishman wrote the book that I still considered to be the most important examination of Walmart: The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works—and How It’s Transforming the American Economy.

I’m only five chapters into One Giant Leap, but I’ve already learned the tremendous amount that 50 years of perspective can bring. Fishman scrapes off the myths and in doing so makes what America did far more brilliant that the glitter ever could.

My first moment came as Fishman carefully steps through the learning curve of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy during his first months office. In his campaign against Nixon—did I mention that Nixon should, oh year, I did, but the message bears repeating, burn in hell—one of the messages that Kennedy hammered away on was the failure of President Dwight David Eisenhower (and the damnable Nixon) to respond strongly enough to the Soviet Union’s space program. Only 83 days into his first term Kennedy awoke to a three-deck headline in the New York Times (the same sized headline the paper used to announce the attack on Pearl Harbor) that read:

SOVIET ORBITS MAN AND RECOVERS HIM;
SPACE PIONEER REPORTS: ‘I FEEL WELL’;
SENT MESSAGES WHILE CIRCLING EARTH

On that morning Kennedy had yet to nominate, or even find, anyone to replace forme NASA administrator T. Keith Glennan who had already departed Washington and returned to Cleveland on inauguration day.

This was not good.

Fishman goes on to tell the story of how between 12 April 1961 and 12 September 1962—when Kennedy delivered the speech that set us off on our greatest adventure—the president had to brought along on what needed doing. The myth makes the decision seem obvious. The reality is far more brilliant.

In setting the goal, Fishman writes, Kennedy launched what we would come to know as the Digital Age. In doing so, Kennedy also began the process of ending America’s Industrial Age. Kennedy would not live to see what he wrought, but I’ve lived it and I have no doubts that the decision was the right one.

If you ask most Americans what we got out of the Apollo Mission, they might say Tang and Velcro. Both predate the space program and Neil Armstrong didn’t even want Tang on his Apollo 11 mission. Many, many more important innovations came from Apollo, but perhaps the most important was the integrated circuit.

The IC chip predates Apollo, but Apollo’s voracious need for computing power made the chips cheap. Really cheap. Fishman writes:

It was so early in the life of integrated circuit technology that the first samples MIT bought cost $1,000 apiece ($8,000 each in 2018 dollars). It was so early, fact, that in order to understand the manufacturing, value, and reliability of integrated circuits, [Eldon] Hall visited Texas Instruments to meet with Jack Kilby, who just months earlier invented the integrated circuit (which would win hi a Nobel Prize in physics in 2000). Hall also went to Fairchild Semiconductor and talked to Robert Noyce, credited with co-inventing the integrated circuit independently of Kilby. (Noyce would leave Fairchild before the first Moon landing to cofound Intel.)

“Imagine going to your program manager and telling him you had to buy 4,000 of these”—at $1,000 each—“to build a prototype computer,” said Hall. … The price started to come down, in part because MIT started buying integrated circuits for NASA. In 1962 MIT paid $100 per micro chip. By 1963, when Hall ordered a single lot of 3,000 chips from Fairchild, the price was $15 a chip.

Today, microchips that Hall didn’t even dream of power our Fitbits. That was how the Digital Age was launched, all to build two computers that were somewhere between my friend Diane’s 1976 8k H8/H9 computer and my 1980 48K Apple II+. The onboard Apollo computers—one in the Command Module and one in the Lunar Excursion Module—had only 3.75K of RAM and 67.5K of ROM. (My Apple II+ had 48K of RAM and 24K of ROM.)

Apollo did not create the Digital Age, but we would not have come so far so fast without Apollo.

Finally, Fishman sprinkles little facts throughout his narrative that make the story immediate. I’ll leave you with this little bit of history.

Among the indignities [Freedom 7 Astronaut Alan] Sheppard was subjected to, and which was duly reported, his full array of body sensors included a rectal thermometer that made the ride into space with him, in place.

That’s a detail that didn’t register in my five-year-old mind.

Bonus No. 1: THE ZEN ART OF EATING JUST THE RIGHT AMOUNT…

Thirty-seven years ago this month the Cleveland Press was strangled to death for profit. This is a Look Back at a chapter of civic corruption–Cleveland Style.

It was a sordid example of runaway greed on a wholesale basis with lots of dirty Cleveland hands.

Joe Cole portrayed himself saving the Press by buying in 1980 it from Scripts-Howard. It was his gift to Cleveland for helping him become a multi-millionaire at Cole National Corp. It took two years for him to dump the paper for $14.5 million from the Newhouse chain, owners of the Plain Dealer. And throw hundreds of workers out on the street.

But that was hardly all he got.

I made a practice of visiting the County Recorder Office on Friday afternoon when upcoming weekend drew attention elsewhere. A search of newly and older recorded partnerships often revealed who was doing business with whom. On a December 1981 Friday the search revealed that Cole had quietly formed a partnership with two-thirds ownership in his hands. The result: he took control of the land beneath the Press at E. 9th and Lakeside Ave., across from City Hall. It was the only real value the Press could hope for salvation.

Cole got not only the $14.5 million, but to identify the true nature of the man, he had been walking away with TVs and other appliances from an advertiser whose payments should have gone to the declining Press income–tens of thousands of dollars in lost income.

This turned out to be a smorgasbord of self-interest deals, as might be expected.

Jones Day law firm represented Cole as the U.S. Justice Dept. also saw possible problems in the death of a newspaper, leaving the Plain Dealer as a monopoly here.

Jones-Day became the sole tenant of the building eventually constructed by Cole and developer John Ferchill.

The Climaco-Garofoli law firm, representing the Teamsters, seem to walk away from the site with a 12 percent interest in the development (called North Point). This deal had the distinct odor of a quid pro quo. Somehow, both Jones-Day and Climaco-Garofoli had claims for tenancy. A lawsuit resulted in the Climaco firm becoming part-owner of North Point.

The interesting, if not questionable aspect of Climaco, was the firm’s connection to the Teamsters. At the time Cleveland Press hopes were that a Teamster strike of the PD would allow the Press to alone print and give it some financial breathing space.

The Teamsters, however, didn’t cooperate.

The Newhouses and Plain Dealer, of course, benefited with the stifling of their only competition. It came at a small price–the $14.5 million for the Press “mailing list,” called valueless by one judge. A $120-million lawsuit by press operators failed.

The deal brought the attention of the Justice Department and resulted in a grand jury probe.

It took until 1985 for the Washington office of the Justice Dept. to reign in Justice lawyers here to end the probe with no penalties to either side.

I wrote in February, 1985:

Talk is that the U. S. Justice Department in Washington, D. C., is ready to pressure the local office to wrap up its grand jury investigation more quickly than anticipated.

It was fairly clear to those following the proceedings that some of the local Justice lawyers were more than unhappy with the decision handed down but they remained publicly silent. The fix certainly was in.

[NOTE: When you bring up the issue it will be smaller than it should be. Above at right is a sign “Download,” if you click that a sign will appear in the lower left side and if you click it the issue will appear with a symbol (+) that will allow you to enlarge the issue to make it more readable. —Roldo]

Part 2—8 May 1982, Volume 14, No. 21: Press on skids?

Part 3—26 November 1983, Volume 16, No. 9: $120 Million suit.

Part 4—20 October 1984, Volume 17, No. 6: Cole Watched TV As Press died.

Part 5—23 February 1985, Volume 17, No. 15: Is fix in? Cole, Newhouse face jail.

Back in 1985 when I was a lowly assistant editor on Home & Auto—later Aftermarket Business—I did my best to convince my bosses that they needed to seriously take steps to be ready for the end of print and the coming of The Internet. The question I got time and time again was: Yeah, but how do we make money that way?

I left Aftermarket Business in 1990. The print magazine lasted another 20 years—the final edition came in December 2009—but publishers continue to struggle with the money question. On the Internet, where the mantra has always been Information Wants To Be Free, we ask the question: How do I monetize what I do?

I figured out, and tried to suggest again and again, that advertising wasn’t the answer and that only way to ensure success was to charge a subscription fee. Yes, I know that Facebook, Google, &c. make billions from online advertising but I think that is all smoke and mirrors that eventually advertisers will figure out. I say that because you know what? I haven’t read an online ad on any site since I discovered pop-up blockers around the time I left Aftermarket Business. Maybe this is all sour grapes. I’ve never make a penny from blogging, but I’ve never tried to.

Matt Taibbi, however, has a way higher profile that I could ever aspire to and clearly he’s not happy with just his Rolling Stone salary. Back in April 2018, Taibbi launched the serialization of How to Deal Drugs and Not Get Caught on Substack.

Fast forward to earlier this week and you find Taibbi’s latest monetization: Behind The News. Taibbi writes:

First, about Untitledgate. I haven’t given up on it. It’s just been harder going than I expected, and in a format where I regularly have to release some kind of content to paying subscribers, I feel I can’t just ask everyone to keep waiting for the big reveal. So I’ve been experimenting with something new to do in the in-between times.

Years ago, when I first started covering campaigns, I developed a hobby. I would walk outside my hotel room in whatever city I was in, pick up the complimentary paper they left outside the door (often a USA Today), and then try to spot as much BS on the front page as I could in under a minute, using a red marker.

Especially when it came to campaign-related coverage, it was rarely hard to end up with a whole red-marked front page in less than a minute. The New York Times is the most amusing paper to use for this exercise.

I thought about doing something similar this campaign season, only I’d do it in video form, taking bits of TV coverage as well, showing readers where the hidden manipulations and tricks are. The idea would be to play off some of the themes of Hate Inc., but do it using current political coverage.

So in cooperation with WFMU, the very cool local radio station in Jersey City, we’re playing around with a Mystery Science Theater version of media crit, which we’re calling Behind The News. The plan is to spoof all the crawls, chryons, boxes and overlays to rip on modern news coverage – cable format on cable format crime.

The first offering, launched yesterday, tackles President Donald John Trump’s masterful exploitation of media.

Taibbi, writing in Remember the billions of free coverage Donald Trump got last election? He’s getting it again, explains:

The oft-quoted figure was $2 billion, but it went up to $5 billion by the end of the 2016 election, depending upon the shrillness of the media outlet in question.
Those billions were how much “free media” Donald Trump supposedly received from ratings-hungry news outlets early in the last presidential election campaign.

Along with Russia, James Comey and Wikileaks, this phenomenon was pointed to regularly in election postmortems as a primary cause for Trump’s election. One of the people who complained the loudest was Hillary Clinton, in her astounding book-length denial exercise called What Happened. She wrote:

Their real problem is they can’t bear to face their own role in helping elect Trump, from providing him free airtime to giving my emails three times more coverage than all the issues affecting people’s lives combined.

Hillary left out the part where she, too got about $3.24 billion in free media, which is called “earned media” when we’re using it to describe politicians we like. Incidentally TV stations tend to give away “earned media” to, precisely, the politicians who can afford to pay for their own PR – frontrunners and incumbents especially.

The president’s ability to summon airtime at will (just bomb someone!) is one of the major electoral advantages of incumbency. The politicians who are really at the short end of the stick here aren’t the Clintons of the world, but the so-called “fringe” pols, the Dennis Kuciniches and Ron Pauls, the Andrew Yangs and Mike Gravels. Even Bernie Sanders got 23 times less TV coverage than Trump, a challenger whose intramural party revolt was a very similar news narrative to the Trump tale.

Taibbi’s full analysis is, of course, spot on. He concludes:

We’ve now moved to explaining that MSNBC isn’t ignoring the other 20-odd candidates out of principle, but simply because Joe Biden demonstrated such skill in manipulating the press that he got to stand “head and shoulders” above the field while Trump called him a slow, old, mentally weak loser with a light schedule.

And that, Brian, is why we showed that painful, ratings-generating footage!
Haake wrapped by saying Democratic voters just want someone who can “end the Donald Trump presidency,” and Biden might be the candidate who’ll get the chance to do that because:
OK, if Donald Trump is worried about this guy, then maybe there’s something to this. And that’s what we saw played out in Iowa today.

This is disingenuous. In my experience, when Trump vomits on a political opponent, it’s very likely he really thinks that’s going to work for him in the end. He did it to “Low Energy” Jeb Bush (check out Jimmy Kimmel loving the characterization), “Little” Marco Rubio, “pathological” “child molester” Ben Carson, “Lyin’” Ted Cruz, and a host of others.

When he’s at least a little nervous about the opponent, he lays off the nasty nicknames. Robert Mueller, for instance, only got “highly conflicted Bob Mueller.”

This is all a game. It’s not about politics, but money.

Trump’s brand of taunt-and-sneer campaigning, which is basically indistinguishable from pro wrestling, makes bank. The networks love it and once admitted to this.

Today they still love it, but they try to pretend otherwise, cloaking themselves in sanctimony and pretend-advocacy as they do. This isn’t politics. It’s low-end consumer business–mental cigarettes. Don’t fall for it.

Despite Taibbi’s warning, most of America will.

Sad.

Bonus No. 1: INTERNS EXPLORE THE CORPORATE/CIVIC TENSION…

It’s never good news when an editor gets too close to a politician.

Is that the case with PD Editor and Publisher Chris Quinn and now Cuyahoga County chief of staff politico Bill Mason?

Some believe so.

Quinn did not respond to an e-mail questioning whether he allowed Ch. 19 to break the story of Bill Mason’s hiring by County Executive Armond Budish. Typically, newspapers break such stories. Instead, it’s said one of his reporters had the story but it was held.

I asked Quinn for a response on the matter:

Chris: I’ve been hearing from various people that Naymik had the Mason story but it was broken by Ch.19 and that you held it up for a day. Can you enlighten me?

I got no response to my request for information. The PD followed with a glowing editorial of Mason, a political hack.

So, in another Look Back, the danger is revealed when an editor becomes too attached to a politician. When editors seek to also be players it could create a toxic situation.

Back in 1972—in Vol. 5, No. 11 (13 November 1972) and Vol. 5, No. 15 (10 February 1973) below—that was the case with PD managing editor Wilson Hirschfeld. Indeed, it led to his engineering the mounted police to run roughshod over pickets of the Newspaper Guild at 1801 Superior Avenue. That’s not likely to happen now as Guild members are fighting to hold their jobs, not for pay raises.

Hirschfeld’s manipulation of the news eventually got him fired. But he ended up getting a job via Mayor Perk.

The Cleveland Scene seemed to think that Quinn had already gotten too close.

Scene editor Vince Grzegorek put it rather bluntly:

To read Cleveland.com’s ecstatic, full-throated endorsement of Bill Mason’s appointment as chief of staff to beleaguered and incompetent county executive Armond Budish, one would assume that its author not only did not work at the region’s largest news organization during Mason’s tenure as prosecutor and the first county corruption scandal, but that the author was not even generally aware of either.

It is the only plausible explanation for the words that were breathlessly summoned and bestowed on a man whose lengthy and troubling resume deserves criticism, not celebration.

That assumption, of course, isn’t true. Cleveland.com editor, president and editorial board member Chris Quinn, who almost certainly penned the offending editorial, worked at the Plain Dealer through that era and, as metro editor at the time, led the coverage of the scandal and its aftermath. Which is why this week’s words are such a striking and insulting pom-pom routine.

He says further:

Mason, it’s clear and history has shown, has dedicated himself to making the government work… for himself, for his cronies, for his pals, for his relatives.

Someone should cut what looks like the big danger of editors getting too close to politicians. Before it becomes a bigger story.

And The Scene apparently believe the dealing has already started as Grzegorek wrote in Wednesday’s Scene & Heard column:

While some believed that Mason had outgrown an entire career based on patronage and rewarding political allies and friends with jobs, others cautioned that it was a track record too strong to ignore.

NOTE: When you bring up the issue it will be smaller than it should be. Above at right is a sign “Download,” if you click that a sign will appear in the lower left side and if you click it the issue will appear with a symbol (+) that will allow you to enlarge the issue to make it more readable. —Roldo

The rest of the story: Perk-Advocate Hirschfeld Sacks City Editor, Battle Continues Between PD Editors, Writers.

I can’t think of a better introduction to national politics than working in either the House or the Senate. You can be a page at 16, but interns need to be college-age, 18-24. There are also White House interns. I imagine that the selection process is beyond brutal and that those who make the cut have bright political futures ahead.

Given the number of young women and men stepping up in politics in general, I have to wonder about the mindset of the most recent class. Ralph Nader had the opportunity to look inside their heads and to do his best to kindle some fire in their psyches.

Nader, in Congressional Interns and Congress Redirections—A Meeting, writes:

On a beautiful, breezy day last week, I spoke to a roomful of Congressional summer interns working in the House of Representatives. The subject was “Corporate Power, Congress and You.” (“You” referred to the interns as the citizenry.)

I noted that they were a special group because they were willing to spend an hour listening to a talk about corporate power. I told them about how small groups of ordinary citizens became leaders in the nuclear arms control movements, the anti-tobacco drives, and consumer rights movement. I also talked about the expansion of equal rights and opportunities for people with disabilities. I took note that many of them in the room–women and people of color—would not be there if not for their predecessors’ tireless efforts to advance civil rights.

No more than one percent of Americans–sometimes far less–made the many advances in peace and justice take hold, backed by a growing public opinion.

In the 15,000 or 20,000 days these young people have, it will be their responsibility to stop the following omnicidal threats to humanity and the natural world:

1. Climate crisis or climate disruption, which is already wreaking havoc. A student asked me about the ‘Green New Deal’, which urges dramatic action. I recommend that they make the strong case that we must plan ahead for the sake of the planet. It will cost trillions to solarize our economy and otherwise reduce greenhouse gases, but that pales in comparison to the trillions of dollars that will have to be spent on mitigating the effects of climate catastrophe, which would fundamentally damage our fragile planet. In fact, International Renewable Energy Agency research found that transitioning to renewable energy will save between “$65 trillion and $160 trillion [between now and] 2050.” These costs would include spending to save coastal cities from ocean over-runs and all the other violent weather patterns and convulsions in habitat coming on this fragile planet Earth.

2. A runaway nuclear arms race between countries, which threatens to cause untold destruction. A nuclear arms race can increase the risk of nuclear weaponry being used on innocents, whether intentionally or by accidental computerized launch. Donald J. Trump seems to think that ending our treaties with Russia Continue Reading »

Two personal mantras help me get through the day as best I can. The first is that, for me, Time Is Energy; that by gathering energy for myself I am able to enjoy more useful moments in each day. Second is Order is Serenity; the lower the level of personal entropy in my day, the more likely I am to have a personal serenity that allows me to focus.

Maybe that is why I have become so ordered in my life. Maybe that is one reason why I chose the Navy over the other services. Maybe I am, as more than one coöworker has told me, I am so anal. Whatever the reason, order works for me. The less distractions I have around me the better I perform.

So, yesterday I finished reading Ted Chiang’s Exhalation: Stories. After I finished the final story (Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom), I expected to put the book down and move on, but Chiang takes the unusual step of leaving the reader with a series of notes that delve into the genesis of each story. The paragraph below spoke to me in a way that the story—which is very good—did not. Chiang writes about the two inspirations for the story. The first was Philip K. Dick’s The Electric Ant. Chiang continues:

The second was the chapter in Roger Pemrose’s book, The Emperor New Mind in which he discusses entropy. He points out that there’s a sense in which it is incorrect to say that we eat food because we need the energy it contains. The conservation of energy means that it is neither created or destroyed; we are radiating energy constantly, at pretty much the same rate that we absorb it. The difference is that the heat energy we is a high entropy form of energy, meaning that is disordered. The chemical energy we absorb is a low-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s ordered. In effect, we are consuming order and generating disorder; we live by increasing the disorder of the universe. It’s only because the universe started in a highly ordered state that we are able to exist at all.

We can’t stop creating that higher-level entropy without ending our own life—and even after death, our body’s decay continues the process so we’re still fucked—because, you know, Ginsberg’s Theorem, but we can, I can, create the illusion that locally there is a bit less disorder, more higher-level entropy in my personal space. Yeah, I know I’m game playing, but that is, at least, my game.

Bonus No. 1: Why Books Are Worth Your Money.

Bonus No. 2: Books vs. Cigarettes.

Bonus No. 3: Bill Maher: Overtime: George Will, Martin Short, Bari Weiss, Eliot Spitzer, Charlie Sykes.

[First, an update YELLOWCAKE, JOHN BOLTON AND OUR NEXT WAR. From Akela Lacy and Jon Schwarz at The Intercept: Mike Pompeo Said Congress Doesn’t Need to Approve War With Iran. 2020 Democrats Aren’t Having It.. Your single most important power is in the fucking constitution your worthless, spineless congresscritters. Do your damn Jobs!]

Five years ago when I first read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations in The Atlantic, one of the central facts that troubled me was the story of then Rep. John Conyers and House Resolution 3745, now H.R. 40—Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act—first introduced by Conyers in 1989.

Conyers’s resolution did not call for reparations but rather the founding of a commission to study the issue of reparations. Even the idea of reparation was so toxic that the resolution to never came to the House floor for a vote. Conyers would reintroduce the resolution in every Congress until he retired in 2017.

Coates article, however, simmered below the national consciousness until a range of issues—police murders of African-Americans, Colin Kaepernick, Black Lives Matter, voter suppression of minority communities—turned up the heat.

In March, P.R. Lockhart, writing in The 2020 Democratic primary debate over reparations, explained for Vox, lede:

A new 2020 litmus test has arrived for Democrats running for president: Do they support reparations?

It marks a turn in a primary contest in which black voters are expected to play a significant role. That the attention to reparations has become so prominent speaks to a series of changes that have occurred in recent years—namely, the increased academic understanding of and public attention to the ways a history of slavery and discrimination has fueled disparities like the racial wealth gap, which shows that the median white household is 10 times wealthier than the median black one.

These changes, coupled with a wave of grassroots activism around racial inequality and economic injustice, have helped produce a shift in mainstream attention to reparations. That attention intensified after some 2020 Democratic candidates commented on reparations to the New York Times and the Washington Post last month.

So far, a handful of candidates have expressed some level of support for reparations: Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro have called the issue important or acknowledged how history supports calls for restitution.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) has been running on a policy that would help close the racial wealth gap, while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has declined to support reparations but argues that his focus on policies helping distressed communities in general would particularly aid black communities.

Presidential candidate Booker picked up Conyers’ baton and has introduced HR 40 Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, a senate bill to:

address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.

So far, Booker has 12 co-sponsors for his bill. Five of those co-sponsors—Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.)—are also in the race for the Democratic Party nomination for the 2020 presidential race. (Three of candidates—Harris*, Warren and Sanders—are also on my short list. *Harris may be coming off the list, especially if Stacy Abrams gets in the race.)

Terrell Jermaine Starr, reporting in Cory Booker Secures 12 Co-Sponsors for Reparations Bill for The Root, credits Democratic Party candidate Julian Castro with putting reparations on the 2020 political map back in February and bringing Coates’ cover story back to the front burner.

On Juneteenth, Coates, and others, will testify before the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

The first Democratic Party debates are scheduled for the the 26^th and 27^th and I fully expect reparations to be among the first three questions asked. If they’re not, well…

Bonus No. 1: Nina Turner made Bill Mason; she needs to end him.

Bonus No. 2: Adani: It all looks dodgy as hell and none of it has been explained properly.

Bonus No. 3: They’re Coming Baaack: The Boondocks Is Returning to TV—With Series Creator Aaron McGruder on Board.

Bonus No. 4: How do you pronounce “Buttigieg”?

I can’t be the only journalist in the United States connecting the dots from the Yellowcake debacle of 2002 to Chickenhawk John Bolton to events in the Gulf of Oman in recent days and weeks to President Donald John Trump’s need for an election-winning bump. Yet, listening to and reading the news this morning sure makes me feel that way.

I’ve not heard or read of a single journalist asking questions that tie our reactions in the present to our reactions in the past. I am hearing and reading administration officials not answer any questions that are even in the same ballpark. All I can find this morning is evasion, obfuscation and steaming piles of bullshit from the White House, the State Department and the Defense Department. And I have no doubt that if the President Trump bothers to ask approval from Congress, the Pro-War, Pro-Business Party will enthusiastically endorse any action.

We have not lost our minds, just our memories…

Bonus No. 1: As Bolton marches to war with Iran, remember the intelligence lessons of Iraq.

Bonus No. 2: Trump adviser warns of ‘strong response’ to any Gulf attack.

Bonus No. 3: John Bolton’s Yellowcake.

Science Fiction was where I began. First with the Tom Swift Jr. books followed by Robert H. Heinlein’s juveniles and in the seventh grade—I think—I began reading adult SF and Fantasy. (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were my first.) I read some of what we classify as YA in high school, but mostly I moved on to books targeted at adults.

I never abandoned SF and Fantasy, though. In the Navy I budgeted $20 per paycheck to buying books at a time when you could still buy a new paperback copy of really thick books like Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren or Frank Herbert’s Dune for $1.95 and thinner books, like those by Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard for 95¢. My favorite place to shop was The Amber Unicorn in San Diego (Moved now, apparently, to Las Vegas.) I belonged to the Science Fiction Book Club and subscribed to Analog and Fantasy & Science Fiction as well as Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction, Omni and Heavy Metal. (I was a charter subscriber to these last three.) I even wrote—and tried to sell—a few, really, really horrible Science Fiction short stories.

All of this is to say that my SF bona fides were solid.

Then, in the early ’90s, I stopped. I stopped because my copies of the above magazines were piling up, unread. They piled up because I was a magazine editor reading, editing and still writing a lot of non-fiction with little time to read much else. I also found that my reading time was going more and more to thrillers and suspense fiction. I canceled my subscriptions and for the next quarter century I read very little SF.

I don’t recall how I first heard about Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, but I ordered the book and began reading it on Tuesday. I’m six stories—231 pages—into the book and I’m loving it. There are echoes of writers from my youth—two of his stories have wisps of works by Isaac Asimov: What’s Expected of Us and The Lifecycle of Software Objects—in Chiang’s work, but they are fresh and in no way derivative.

I read the seventh story—The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling—this morning and I immediately wanted to write about my impressions because the story struck home for me.

The unnamed protagonist is a journalist sometime in the near-future (less than a century forward) writing about Remem. Remem is a memory prosthesis that allows people to easily search their lifelogs in real time; for everyone to have eidetic memory. In the protagonist’s present, people have been creating lifelogs for 30 years or so by wearing personal cams that record every second of their lives.

Chiang artfully compares this new memory prosthesis to a far older one: writing. He does this by writing about the transition a non-writing culture, the Tiv, experiences when Europeans begin to force European ways upon the Tiv and how one young man, Jijingi, learns to write. Central to this process is how Jijingi becoming what Chiang describes as a cognitive cyborg. Chiang, through his protagonist, writes:

We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.

How profound unfolds for both Jijingi and the protagonist as Chiang leaps backward and forward to tell their two tales.

I will relate one other part of the story, not a spoiler, that illustrates part of what Chiang is getting at. Jijingi and his teacher, a priest named Moseby, wrestle with the ideas of Truth and Fact.

Then Jijingi remembered something about the European language and understood Moseby’s confusion. “Our language has two words for what in your language is called ‘true.’ There is what is right, mimi, and what’s precise, vough. In a dispute the principals say what they consider right; they speak mimi. The witnesses, however, are sworn to say precisely what happened; they speak vough. When Sabe [leader of Jijingi’s tribe, JH] has heard what happened he can decide what action is mimi for everyone. But it’s not lying if the principals don’t speak vough, as long as they speak mimi.”

Those two out-of-context passages can, at best, only give a flavor of what Chiang accomplishes in his novelette. The whole story must be read to grasp his mimi.

(An aside, I learned this morning that the title of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu—which I learned as Remembrance of Things Past—is now literally translated as In Search of Lost Time. Daniella, which translation do you think is better?)

Bonus No. 1: Multi-Level Marketing Schemes.

Bonus No. 2: Pride Like It’s 1969.

I’m not buying it, because I’m a 64-year-old journalist and I haven’t bought a print newspaper since 1992. Ralph Nader, ever the optimist, thinks that bringing back reading the morning newspaper, the afternoon newspaper and a national newspaper or two will solve many of our nation’s problems. He not wrong, but even the guttiest gambler would make that bet.

Nader, writing in It is Time to Rediscover Print Newspapers, tries anyway and makes his best case and offers no less than 15 reasons why we should follow his lead:

Friends often ask me why I spend so much time reading print versions of newspapers. I respond with the usual general reasons about learning what is happening, worsening or improving, in the world. I also point out that I send people helpful clippings.

Unfortunately, my responses do not get many people to expand their print newspaper reading time. Some recent topics that caught my attention might encourage you to revisit the printed version of your newspapers:

1. It’s the middle of the night. Do you know who your iPhone is talking to? Apple says, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” The Washington Post’s Geoffrey A. Fowler says this is not true. With his screen off, he showed 5,400 hidden app trackers guzzled his data in a single week. Shame Apple and CEO Tim Cook. You lied.

2. Take a Page From Kids Who Care. The Washington Post’s Christina Barron starts with the now famous Greta Thunberg’s weekly protests on climate disruption before the Swedish Parliament and goes on to reference eight new books “in which kids engage, in ways big and small, to better the world.”

3. Why I’m Swearing off Trump’s Nicknames, by Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post. About time a writer did this. When will reporters stop being Trump’s bullhorn for his scornful, ugly nicknames, without printing rebuttals or nicknames coined Continue Reading »

So, I haven’t read a single book written about our president. (Well I did read Art Of The Deal back in the day, but that doesn’t count.) I may read one after he’s out of office, but probably not. One of the reasons is that this particular first draft of history is just too uncertain. We’ll need time and distance before we can begin to what has happened to our country.

So, seriously, who’s buying all the books? I understand that book reviewers must and that journalists like Matt Taibbi read the books because there might, and I emphasize might, be a few words that could be considered news, but who else? Certainly not his base and the rest of the country—like me—must be suffering from tell-all fatigue by now. Yet publishers continue to spend millions cranking out these books because they expect to turn a profit.

Taibbi, in Michael Wolff’s ‘Siege’ Is Like His Last Book—But Worse for Rolling Stone, writes:

Like the Mueller report, Wolff’s book is a Rorschach test. Readers will see in it what they want. If you want to revel in tales of Trump’s narcissism, and you’re willing to buy the notion that everything (or anything) in the book is true, there’s plenty in there. There’s a hilarious scene, for instance, where Trump meets National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard and quizzes him about how much more copy he sells when “I’m on the cover instead of just a celebrity?”

Howard tells him, fifteen to twenty percent more. A few minutes later, Trump responds, “So I sell fifty percent more than any of the movie stars?”

It’s like I said, Howard replies: 15 to 20 percent.

“Let’s call it 40,” says Trump.

Trump does sell, but that’s the problem. His salability guarantees an endless stream of Trump content (which Trump himself is of course expert at turning to his advantage), but what’s worse is Trump-mania has cartoonized the press landscape, leaving us awash in endless piles of oversimplified pro- and anti- narratives, and blind to better stories, like the one Wolff almost chose to write.

Wolff can be a funny writer, and there are stretches of Siege where he reaches for high comedy, describing Trump-Mueller as an epic struggle between corruption and inadequacy, with both sides—along with all of us—losing. But Siege ends up mostly being a cheap catalogue of half-believable rumors about who backstabbed whom, and who slept with whom, interspersed with a lot of pretend-outrage, so the author can market his book on MSNBC, even as he makes Steve Bannon out to be a genius.

The problem of Trump fatigue, of course, extends far beyond books. Taibbi, in YouTube, Facebook Purges Are More Extensive Than You Think for Rolling Stone, writes:

If you turned on cable news this week, or read our own coverage in Rolling Stone, you might have heard about YouTube’s decision to demonetize well-known conservative commentator Steven Crowder.

Crowder’s offense involved calling Vox journalist Carlos Maza a “lispy queer” and a “gay Vox sprite,” leading, says Maza, to further harassment. Much press commentary either cheered YouTube’s move or called it belated.

Simultaneously, YouTube announced it would ban whole genres of videos that fell under a hate/conspiracy label. From a Yahoo [Wait, Yahoo still exists? JH] news summary:

YouTube announced Wednesday it would ban videos promoting or glorifying racism and discrimination as well as those denying well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting.

Yahoo quoted a YouTube announcement:

Channels that repeatedly brush up against our hate speech policies will be suspended under our YouTube Partner Program.

Many greeted these stories with a shrug. If blue-state audiences even know who Steven Crowder is, they think he’s a jerk. And what could be wrong with removing videos “denying well-documented violent events”?

At least two big things, as it turns out:

1. Platforms may not distinguish between reporting on hate speech, and promoting it.

[snip…]

2. Internet platforms have neither the ability nor the resources to sort out good reporting from bad—and may even perpetuate the latter

I have railed about this before: social media sites are not the commons! They are not covered under the free-speech section of our First Amendment; the nano second that any platform—Including HCWW and TWOTW—begins to curate their content in any way, shape or form, they shelter under the press section’s umbrella and become subject to all the libel, slander and defamation laws of our country.

That we have continued to allow them to shelter under the former while acting like the latter is a travesty. Congress needs to call a spade a spade and be done with this.

Taibbi concludes:

From WMD to inaccurate reports about drone strikes to things like the attitude of South Koreans toward a peace process, the most troublingly conspiratorial reporting often comes with an official imprimatur. A frequent theme is overhype of villainous news about targets of American “regime change” plans. Especially if people believe “fake news” is being carefully rooted out, they will now be even more susceptible to such official deceptions.

This speech-regulation issue—with its vast potential for misuse—is bigger than Alex Jones or Stephen Crowder. This is Brave New World territory, and people should realize that a few deletions here and there could quickly snowball into something far worse, if it hasn’t already.

The snowball gets bigger and bigger every day and until Congress grows a spine we are all standing at the bottom of the slope waiting to get smashed.

Bonus No. 1: How do you hug a climate scientist? Follow these simple rules and don’t make it weird.

Bonus No. 2: The end of political cartoons at The New York Times.

Bonus No. 3: Yes they were Lizard Breath…

Bonus No. 4: Campaign Conventional Wisdom Is Dead.

Bonus No. 5: How Ukrainian Oligarchs Secretly Became the Largest Real Estate Owners in Downtown Cleveland.

Bonus No. 6: Bill Mason rises like the undead to Budish chief of staff.

50 years after I took part in my first anti-war protest while I was a freshman in high school, America still lacks an anti-war party. There are plenty of anti-war Democrats (and even a few Republicans) but we are still in the place where real people who fought in real wars are dismissed because they’re not hawkish for the next war. That’s bullshit.

Supporting the troops and keeping America strong are not the same as politicians who never served starting wars that their children—or the children of their supporters—will never risk their lives in. (This is the primary reason for my rabid support for the return of a universal draft with no exemptions: people are much less like to support a war where they literally have skin in the fight.)

No, supporting the troops and keeping America strong means using military force only when the nation fully understands why and agrees with sending our children into harm’s way. But people like John Bolton—the poster child for American Empire—want what they want and don’t give a damn as long as they don’t have to pay the price.

Matt Taibbi, contributing editor and heir to Hunter S. Thompson’s national desk at Rolling Stone hammered away at the problem in The Liberal Embrace of War. He followed that piece by addressing the direct attacks on two Democratic Party hopefuls for the 2020 nomination: Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI). While Bernie is a life-long opponent of American imperial adventurism, Gabbard is a Major in the Hawaiian National Guard with two tours in middle-east war zones.

Taibbi, reporting in We’ve Hit a New Low in Campaign Hit Pieces for Rolling Stone magazine, writes:

…[T]he Daily Beast ran this headline: Tulsi Gabbard’s Campaign Is Being Boosted by Putin Apologists.

That was followed by the sub headline: The Hawaii congresswoman is quickly becoming the top candidate for Democrats who think the Russian leader is misunderstood.

The Gabbard campaign has received 75,000 individual donations. This crazy Beast article is based on (maybe) three of them.

The three names are professor Stephen Cohen, activist Sharon Tennison and someone using the name “Goofy Grapes,” who may or may not have once worked for comedian Lee Camp, currently employed by Russia Today.

This vicious little article might have died a quiet death, except ABC’s George Stephanopoulos regurgitated it in an interview with Gabbard days later. The This Week host put up the Beast headline in a question about whether or not Gabbard was “softer” on Putin than other candidates.

Gabbard responded: “It’s unfortunate that you’re citing that article, George, because it’s a whole lot of fake news.”

This in turn spurred another round of denunciations, this time in the form of articles finding fault not with the McCarthyite questioning, but with Gabbard’s answer. As Politico wrote: “’Fake news’ is a favorite phrase of President Donald Trump…”

Soon CNN was writing a similar piece, saying Gabbard was using a term Trump used to “attack the credibility of negative coverage.” CNN even said Gabbard “did not specify what in the article was ‘fake,’” as if the deceptive and insidious nature of this kind of guilt-by-association report needs explaining.

“Stephanopoulos shamelessly implied that because I oppose going to war with Russia, I’m not a loyal American, but a Putin puppet,” Gabbard told Rolling Stone. “It just shows what absurd lengths warmongers in the media will go, to try to destroy the reputation of anyone who dares oppose their warmongering.”

I saw that first hand in 1972 as a local-office grunt—stuffing envelopes and the like— during my first presidential campaign. I supported George McGovern, a bona fide hero of WW II. So much so that Stephen Ambrose would make McGovern the focus of his 2001 book: The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45. (Ambrose is perhaps best remembered for his other 2001 book: Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest.) Senator McGovern was savaged, in part, for his opposition to the Vietnam War. While McGovern’s war record was certainly known in 1972, I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning it during the campaign.

Mano Singham, writing in Get ready for an anti-progressive propaganda blitz agrees with Gabbard’s assessment:

The US is a one-party state and that party can be accurately called the Pro-War, Pro-Business Party (PWPBP) controlled by the oligarchy. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans. Ideological debate within this party is restricted to a narrow spectrum that only encompasses neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and right-wing extremism. This party has unanimous support from the establishment media and much of the intelligentsia, two groups that can be accurately labeled by the Chinese pejorative of ‘running dogs’, because of the tendency of dogs to do what their masters says in return for a few scraps. (It is an accurate label but one I hesitate to use because of my fondness for dogs who have many sterling qualities that these running dogs lack.)

The function of these running dogs is to police the thinking of the public so that they do not stray too far from PWPBP orthodoxy. They do this by disguising the fact that we live in this one-party state. So they put on a show of vigorous debate in the mainstream media, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing since the fundamental issue of power and who wields it and for what purposes is never addressed.

The one-party nature comes closest to being exposed when occasionally someone or some group manages to break through the cordon and gain visibility and traction among the public who sense that something is not right. We saw that with the candidacy of Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Sanders and Elizabeth Warren this year. Both are strongly challenging the Pro-Business agenda. Sanders is more strongly against the Pro-War agenda than Warren but she is better than most of the other Democratic candidates on this issue too. These two scare the hell out of the PWPBP because they are challenging the core ideology of the ruling class.

As I’ve suggested multiple times, the rest of the world figured this out a long time ago.

Political parties were anathema to our Founders. They feared that loyalty to party would trump loyalty to our constitution and nation. Our first president warned:

However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

Some 223 years after George Washington’s farewell address, political parties are an ingrained reality that we are not likely to abolish. To move forward, we don’t need a third party, we need a second party.

Bonus No. 1: GRETA THUNBERG’S SKOLSTREJK FÖR KLIMATET…

Bonus No. 2: As San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris’s Office Stopped Cooperating With Victims of Catholic Church Child Abuse.

So, I got Matt Taibbi latest update to his Untitledgate project in my email inbox on Saturday and after several reads I still can’t make heads or tails of what he’s talking about other than to say that Taibbi, has suddenly turned 180 degrees on the importance of the Mueller investigation. Taibbi clearly sees this a big story, but non-conservative media doesn’t. Why?

Taibbi, writing in Exposé in “The Hill” challenges Mueller, media, ledes:

John Solomon of The Hill just came out with what could be a narrative-changing story. If news organizations that heavily covered Russiagate don’t at least check out this report–confirm it or refute it–few explanations other than bias will make sense.

In “Key figure that Mueller report linked to Russia was a State Department intel source,” Solomon asserts that Konstantin Kilimnik, the mysterious Ukrainian cohort of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, has been a “sensitive” source for the U.S. State department dating back to at least 2013, including “while he was still working for Manafort.”

Solomon describes Kilimnik meeting “several times a week” with the chief political officer of the U.S. Embassy in Kiev. Kilimnik “relayed messages back to Ukraine’s leaders and delivered written reports to U.S. officials via emails that stretched on for thousands of words,” according to memos Solomon reviewed.

Solomon’s report, which raises significant questions about an episode frequently described as the “heart” of the Mueller investigation (and which was the subject of thousands of news stories), came out on June 6th. As of June 8th, here’s the list of major news organizations that have followed up on his report: The Washington Examiner and Fox News.

That’s it. Nobody else has touched it.

I’ve just checked—at 0625 on 10 June—and still, no one else has touched the story. Why does Taibbi think Solomon’s story is narrative-changing? Especially when he had this to say about source: John Solomon.

Solomon is a controversial figure, especially to Democratic audiences. The Columbia Journalism Review has hounded him in the past for what it called “suspect” work, especially for pushing “less than meets the eye” stories that turned into right-wing talking points. The Washington Post has done stories citing Hill staffers who’ve complained that a trail of “Solomon investigations” that veered “rightward” was also misleading and lacking “context.” The Post likewise quoted staffers who complained that Solomon was making too much of texts between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok of the FBI.

On the Russiagate story, however, Solomon clearly has sources, as he’s repeatedly broken news about things that other reporters have heard about, but didn’t have in full. [Emphasis mine, JH] He reported about former British spy and FBI informant Christopher Steele speaking to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavelec before the 2016 election, among other things admitting he’d been speaking to the media.

Solomon also reported that Kavelec’s notes about Steele had been passed to the FBI, eight days before the FBI described Steele as credible in a FISA warrant application.

It would be one thing if other outlets were rebutting his claims about Kilimnik, as people have with some of this other stories. But this report has attracted zero response from non-conservative media, despite the fact that Kilimnik has long been one of the most talked-about figures in the whole Russiagate drama.

So, can anyone out there help me to understand why non-conservative media don’t give a fuck?

Bonus No. 1: PETE BUTTIGIEG: SCANNING THE WAY AHEAD, NOT THE PATH BACK…

Bonus No. 2: Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj: Protests In Sudan.

Bonus No. 3: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Equal Rights Amendment.

The man I consider to be our greatest living non-fiction writer has tried his hand at fiction. In September, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first effort, The Water Dancer, will hit the bookshelves (I’ve already reserved my copy) and we’ll see how he does in really long-form. Meanwhile, The 10 June issue of The New Yorker has excerpted a chapter from the book in Conduction.

I read the chapter last evening and this morning I’m listening to Coates read his work. From the excerpt alone, I do not know the Novel’s time setting, but I can tell that the tale is told as a look-back to the antebellum years and quite possibly prior to 1850 when, in one of its more shameful acts, our Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act.

OK. Coffeepot filled. Headphones on. Begin…

On the platform, I saw a white woman in a bonnet and a blue hoopskirt, holding the hands of two well-dressed children. Some distance away, beyond the shade of the awning, a low white, with what I guessed to be all his possessions in a carpetbag, smoked tobacco. I stood off to the side, not wanting to inspire suspicion. The low white finished his tobacco and then greeted the woman. They were still talking when the blackbirds flew from the awning and the great iron cat roared around the bend, all black smoke and earsplitting clanking. I watched as the screeching wheels turned slower and slower and came to a stop. I presented my ticket and papers to the conductor gingerly. Fabricated for me by other agents, they indicated that I was a colored man of reputable character, that I had recently purchased my freedom and was now to take up employment as a woodworker in Philadelphia. The conductor barely looked at them. It may be hard to believe now, in these dark days, but there was no “nigger car.” Why would there be one? The Quality, the Virginia royalty, kept their slaves, their Tasked, close, the way a lady keeps her clutch—closer even, for this was a time in our history when the most valuable thing a man could own, in all of America, was another man. I headed to the back of the train, walking in the aisle between the two rows of seating. I tried not to look nervous. But when I heard the conductor yell, and the great cat roared again, I felt every inch of me draw tense and taut like a cord.

I have never come across the word Tasked used in this way before. This is a word and a usage that Coates repeatedly calls upon and one, for now, I assume he found in his research of the 19th century. (I just did a quick online search for further explanation, but found none.) One of the first elements of Coates’ writing that I noticed in reading last evening is how stylistically he capitalizes words like Tasked and Quality as proper, rather than descriptive nouns, throughout the excerpt.

Arriving in Philadelphia, Hiram Walker, Coates’s first-person narrator, introduces us to a second character this way:

There was an omnibus across the street, hitched to a team of horses. Several of the train passengers stepped on board.

“Mr. Walker?”

I turned and saw before me a colored man in gentleman’s clothes.

“Yes,” I said.

“Raymond White,” he said, extending his hand. He did not smile. “This way,” he said, and we walked over to the omnibus and boarded. The driver cracked a carriage whip and we pulled away. We did not talk much during the ride, and this was to be expected, given the business that had brought us together. Nevertheless, I was able to take the measure of this Raymond White. His dress was impeccable. He wore a perfectly cut gray suit that angled down from his shoulders to his cinched waist. His hair was neat and parted. His face seemed a stone with features cut into it, and for the whole of that ride no expression of pain, annoyance, joy, humor, or concern moved those features. Yet I thought that I saw a sadness in his eyes, which—despite all his forbearing elegance—told a story, and I knew, if not how, that his life was somehow tied to the Task. And from that sadness I concluded that his high manner, his nobility, was no simple matter of birth but one of labor and struggle.

Coates introduces the otherworldly aspect of his novel about a third of the way into the excerpt with a Proustian moment, substituting gingerbread for madeleines:

I unwrapped the parchment and brought the gingerbread to my mouth, and, as I ate, something inside me cracked open, unbidden. The winding, foggy path I’d seen back at Mars’s bakery, the one called up by the scent of ginger, now appeared before me again, and this time there was no fog, and, really, there was no path, just a place. A kitchen, the kitchen of Lockless, [An ironic name for a plantation armed labor camp (@31:30)? JH] where I had been Tasked as a boy. I was no longer on the bench, or even near the promenade. I was standing in that kitchen, and I saw on the counter cookies, pastries, and all manner of sweet things, on trays lined with parchment paper, just as they had been back at Mars’s bakery. And there was another counter adjacent to that one, and I saw behind it a colored woman. She was singing softly to herself, kneading dough, and when she saw me she smiled and said, “Why you always so quiet, Hi?”

Then she went back to kneading and singing. Some time passed before she looked up at me again. “I see you there eying Master Howell’s gingersnaps,” she said. “You might be quiet, but you fixing to get me in a whole mess of trouble.”

She shook her head and laughed to herself. But, a few moments later, I saw a look of caution on her face as she brought an extended index finger to her closed lips. She walked over to the door and peeked out, then walked back to the other counter and pried two gingersnaps loose from the paper.

“Family got to watch out for each other,” she said, offering them to me.

I took the two cookies from her hands. I must have known what was happening. I must have realized that, wherever I was then, it was not the Lockless of now, was perhaps not even the Lockless of then. It was as though I were in a dream. And this woman before me, I could not name her, though I felt a pang of recognition, and a pang of something more—of loss. And so strong was this feeling that I ran to her, the gingersnaps still in my left hand, and hugged her, long and hard. And when I stepped away she was smiling big as day, big as the baker Mars had smiled at me only that morning.

“Don’t forget,” she said. “Family.”

And then I saw the fog return, float into the kitchen from all around, until the counter disappeared before me, and the woman disappeared, and she said to me as she faded from my sight, “Now get on.”

And then I was back, seated on a bench. I felt tired. I looked at my hands, which were empty. I looked up and out past the promenade to the river. The man on the bicycle rode past again. I looked to the benches to my left and then my right. The line of benches continued on both sides with little difference, save this—three benches down I saw a piece of half-eaten gingerbread, and in the grass the parchment in which it had been wrapped, drifting gently in the summer breeze.

That was Conduction. That was the power that had drawn me to the Underground, or drawn it to me. The little trick on the park bench was the power in miniature, for at its peak Conduction opened a blue door from one world to another, moved men from mountains to meadows, from green woods to fields caked in snow, folding the land like cloth. But of its workings all I knew was that its engine was poignant memory, and mine was just then beginning to emerge from the fog. I did not yet understand how to call it forth.

And so, Coates has gifted his young conductor with a not-yet mastered power of conduction.

Family, as mentioned above, is clearly a trope in The Water Dancer. Coates reinforces that a bit further on in interviewing a recently escaped woman:

“It’s a good city, ma’am,” Otha said. “And we are strong here. But I understand if you don’t want to stay. Either way, we gon’ help how we can. As you will soon see, finding freedom is only the first part. Living free is a whole other.”

There was a moment of silence. I had stopped writing, thinking the interview terminated. Mary Bronson wiped her face with Otha’s handkerchief. And then she looked up and said, “Ain’t no living free, less I’m living with my boys.”

I hear an echo of Emma Lazarus in Mary Bronson’s statement. Coates continues:

She had composed herself now. I could see that her pain and fear were shifting into something else. “I don’t wanna hear about your city. My boys—they the only city I need. Now you done found a way to get me out, and, by God, I am thankful for it. I am thankful. But my boys, all my lost boys, that is my highest concern.”

“Mrs. Bronson,” Otha said. “We just ain’t set up like that. That just ain’t in our power.”

“Then you ain’t got the power of freedom,” she said. “If you can’t keep them from parting a mother from her son, a husband from his natural wife, then you got nothing. That boy over there is my everything. I run for him so he might know some other world. Left on my own, I would have died as I was born—a slave. That boy freed me, you see. And I owe him so much. Mostly I owe him his pappy and his brothers. If you can’t put us back together, then your freedom is thin and your city hold nothing for me.”

I was jolted out of the story for a brief moment by this sentence: Mars, the baker, rushed over and pulled me into a big scrum of people, rendering introductions and expounding on the effects of that gingerbread.

I thought that scrum might have had a different meaning in the first half of the 19th century, but I found no such deviation from the Rugby notion I’m familiar with. (Coates jolted me, but not so badly because I sensed his colloquial usage, in a similiar manner with parchment in describing the bakery and the gingerbread.)

The final transition, the climax of the excerpt returns to Hiram Walker’s conductions:

The Conductions became frequent for me now. The world would suddenly and randomly fall away, and moments later I would return, dumped into back alleys, basements, open fields, stockrooms. Every Conduction seemed activated by a memory, some whole, some mere shards, like the vision of a woman who sneaked me gingersnaps, who I realized suddenly was my aunt Emma. I remembered the stories of her prowess in the Lockless kitchen. I began to feel that something was trying to reveal itself to me, that some part of my mind, long ago locked away, was now seeking its liberation. Perhaps I should have greeted the unravelling of a mystery and new knowledge with relief. But Conduction felt like the breaking and resetting of a bone. Each bout left me fatigued and with a somehow deeper sense of loss than the one I’d carried into it, so that I was in a constant low thrum of agony, a melancholy so deep it would take every ounce of my strength to rise out of bed the next morning. For days after each Conduction, I would still be working my way through the most sullen of moods. This didn’t feel like freedom, not anymore.

And so one day I walked out of the Ninth Street office set upon leaving Philadelphia and the Underground, leaving the triggers for these memories that threw me into depression. I did not meditate on this decision. I did not gather any effects. I simply walked out the door with no view of ever coming back. I reasoned that my initial exit would alarm no one, since it was known that I enjoyed walking through the city. But then I would just keep walking. I turned away from the office and made my way over toward the docks.

Of all the people I saw in the city, the sailors seemed the freest, tied to nothing save one another, bound by boyish jabs and indecent mockery that always elicited a host of laughter. Sometimes they fought. But whatever their quarrels these men seemed a brotherhood to me. Even in their freedom, they somehow reminded me of home. Maybe it was their hard black faces, their rough hands, bent fingers, bruised and worn-down nails. Maybe it was how they sang, because they sang as the Tasked did, but were not of the Task.

I stood at the dock, hoping one might call out to me, perhaps asking for a hand, and when no one did I left, and that whole day I just wandered.

There is more, a resolution, but I’ll stop there and simply say that Coates is a writer and waiting to read the rest will not be pleasure.

Bonus No. 1: AMERICA WAS GREAT WHEN BORDERS WEREN’T…

Back in the Dark Ages of the World Wide Web (early mid 90s?) when readers began leaving comments on posts, there was a phenomenon—which I actually continue to occasionally see–where people with way too much time on their hands would pounce on new posts and leave the moment: First! as a way of adding some meaning to their lives.

Fast forward 15 years or so to 20 February 2012, when cartoonist Randal Munroe creates First Post. The XKCD Wiki describes the cartoon this way:

(A bar graph with two bars. The first bar is much taller than the second. It is marked ‘$1,500,000′, and below the x-axis, is labelled “Cost to buy an ad on every story on a major news site every day until the election. The second bar is much shorter, marked “$200,000’, and labelled “Cost to pay five college students $20/hour to camp the site 24/7 and post the first few comments the moment a story goes up, giving you the last word in every article and creating an impression of peer consensus.) [This, notes Munroe, is t]he problem with posting comments in the order they’re submitted.

The mouse-over text for the cartoon is particularly important. It reads:

Nuh-uh! We let users vote on comments and display them by number of votes. Everyone knows that makes it impossible for a few persistent voices to dominate the discussion.’

To my mind this, this is more than a cautionary tale for what would become a public obsession in 2016, 2018 and, I expect, 2020. At what point did a foreign power first think: Wait! What? I can screw any progressive, open society that doesn’t censor access to the Internet for the cost of a few thousand rounds of ammunition!

Jump ahead 1,140 cartoons to 5 June 2019 and Munroe again tackles the issue—but from a distinctly different angle—Comments. The XKCD Wiki explanation (see original for links) for this cartoon is much longer:

This comic represents a news article that bemoans how sometimes lazy journalists will, instead of taking time to research the genuine public opinion on a certain issue, simply cherry pick comments as evidence to support their thesis. The irony is that the article is likely basing its own narrative of outrage among Internet users on random comments as well. For example, an anonymous Twitter account from Northern Ireland with 159 followers gets used as an example in the first paragraph of a NY Times article about how U.S. Millennials think.

The commenters create the narrative here, by pointing out how easy it is for commenters to push a point of view, and how little editorial control or fact checking there is in such a process. The final commenter reveals that the article itself is cherry picking from a handful of random comments to support its arbitrary narrative of internet outrage, proving the real joke.

The link in one of the comments is to 1019: First Post, which also refers to manipulating comments to change public opinion of a topic. It specifically mentions «creating an impression of peer consensus», a line which is near-quoted in the first comment included in this comic.

Another comment mentions a National Public Radio (“NPR”) decision to remove comments from their website in 2016 [1] because they represented only a tiny fraction of their readers. The statement released by NPR suggested they had decided to use social media channels to engage readers instead of using an on-site commenting system.

The last of the comments may be from the user “Mary” who, in the NPR article, was explicitly cited to have said that the comments have been too violent. But it is unclear how this is possible given that this article claims to have been published after the comments having been turned off.

The title text refers to the ability to edit webpages using in-browser tools, like “Inspect Element.” However, such changes are temporary and only on the machine used for viewing the web site; anyone else loading the page will not see them, and refreshing the page causes the changes to be replaced with the real content. This would mean that no other users would be able to see the comments, and news sources could not use them to influence public opinion.

Cherry picking comments is an easy cheap way for any journalist to make their point. Phrases such as unnamed sources told this reporter ought to be red flags to anyone with a questioning mind and citing comments that could just as easily be from a public relations flak or a bot is no better.

Because I have so few commenters—in my 15 years of blogging, Have Coffee Will Write has only garnered 22,279 comments on 17,109 posts—I’m able to moderate the comments and publish only those that are from people I trust. I can only imagine the nightmare that the major news sites face, and, I confess, that is one of the reasons that I rarely read the comments. (Although Mary Jo often finds the comments on The Guardian to be a regular giggle.)

Bonus No. 1: INVITING FOX IN TO THE PEOPLE’S WHITE HOUSE…

Bonus No. 2: BUT THE DEATH OF A PARENT HAPPENS TO YOU…

One of the consequences—intended or not—of the decades-long Republican strategy to starve the beast by cutting Federal taxes is diminish government oversight of business to the point where the corporate fox is not only in the hen house, but responsible for the construction, maintenance and security of the hen house to the point where people start dying. In the hundreds.

Ralph Nader is all over the latest manifestation of this conservative scheme: the avoidable crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX aircraft that killed 346 unwitting participants in Boeing’s experiment.

Nader, in FAA’s Boeing-biased Officials: Recuse Yourselves or Resign, writes:

The Boeing-driven Federal Aviation Administration is rushing to unground the notorious prone-to-stall Boeing 737 MAX (that killed 346 innocents in two crashes) before several official investigations are completed. Troubling revelations might keep these planes grounded worldwide.

The FAA has a clearly established pro-Boeing bias and will likely allow Boeing to unground the 737 MAX. We must demand that the two top FAA officials resign or recuse themselves from taking any more steps that might endanger the flying public. The two Boeing-indentured men are Acting FAA Administrator Daniel Elwell and Associate FAA Administrator for Aviation Safety Ali Bahrami.

Immediately after the crashes, Elwell resisted grounding and echoed Boeing claims that the Boeing 737 MAX was a safe plane despite the deadly crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

Ali Bahrami is known for aggressively pushing the FAA through 2018 to further abdicate its regulatory duties by delegating more safety inspections to Boeing. Bahrami’s actions benefit Boeing and are supported by the company’s toadies in the Congress. Continue Reading »

Plain Dealer reporters being set lose isn’t the kind of news that would startle anyone today. They go in bunches now.

But in 1971 one firing produced a lot of attention at 1801 Superior Ave. The Plain Dealer fired the man who later became senior editor of Rolling Stone and a writer of erotic films–Flashdance, Basic Instinct and Jagged, among others–that made gobs of money.

As I look back, I’m shocked at the revelations uncovered in an arbitration over the firing. For some unknown reason, the PD didn’t object to my attendance during sessions in 1971-72 of the legal wrangling. No other media attended. The Newspaper Guild pursued the case for its reporter.

News editors were laid bare along with their target. It was a private inquisition that left the inquisitors, along with the object, badly tarred. It was a journalistic show trial that exposed the plaintiffs as much as the accused.

The PD became upset when Joe Eszterhas [left in this photo speaking with photographer Ron Haeberle (right) who shot the My Lai images. JH] wrote a scathing piece in The Evergreen Review about the selling of the My Lai massacre photos. Rather than looking at the revelations as historic, the PD editors envisioned, wrote Eszterhas “…the story could very well mean (for it) the Pulitzer Prize, maybe even the cover mention in Time’s press section.” Ironically, Eszterhas, in dealing to sell the photos, was interested in his name being used on the magazine cover. No, he was told, that’s for names like Mailer or Hemingway.

No one escaped unscathed in this remarkable rendition of journalism gone sour.

These pieces about the PD, I believe, can be read as revealing about news media anywhere.

The Plain Dealer and its editors and managers were laid bare by the arbitration hearings following his firing in 1971. The PD had published the photos brought to them by Ron Haeberle, a college friend of Eszterhas. He came to the paper with the photographic proof of the horrible massacre in Vietnam. Eszterhas was assigned to handle the story and photos spread over page one and inside–the first visible proof of the American slaughter. Seymour Hersh had first reported the massacre of up to 500 victims earlier.

Then the two tried to make a bundle by selling the photos in New York City to major national publications. They wanted $120,000. They waited a day too long to make a decision. A newspaper printed the photos without seeking permission and the market fell apart. But Eszterhas wrote the Evergreen article about the sale attempt and told the truth about the PD, particularly its publisher then, Thomas Vail. This was more than the paper could countenance.

Editors and bosses–in their attempt to tar Eszterhas–revealed themselves complicit. They had found their ace reporter factually-handicapped but continued to assign him prize assignments.

They tripped and revealed themselves and their thinking. Bill Ware, a top editor, continued the call the massacre “so-called,” as if it “might have happened.” Leo Ring, the Newhouse’s boss man, revealed he didn’t ever read the paper but colorfully noted that Eszterhas had “kick us in the balls.” You just couldn’t make up this stuff.

You could understand from these classic revelations why you could NEVER trust the paper or its editors to be truthful on crucial matters. It just isn’t in them.

Part 2: 28 February 1972—Editors try to discredit former star reporter, manage to tar PD; media blacks out story.

Part 3: 27 March 1972—No need for conspiracy, habit will suffice: news media avoids exam of one of its own.

NOTE: When you bring up the issue it will be smaller than it should be. Above at right is a sign “Download,” if you click that a sign will appear in the lower left side and if you click it the issue will appear with a symbol (+) that will allow you to enlarge the issue to make it more readable. —Roldo