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Glen Hirose

Humm, your photos are Arthur Morris quality.

The Sony RX10 IV is a pretty impressive piece of hardware.

Except for my skill at backing into tight parking spaces; I'm pretty much mediocre at most endeavors.

Jack Mallory

We're all mediocre, Glen, at best, in 99.9999 . . . % of all the things we could be better at. Only some of us, however, achieve the true nadir of IDIOCY! 

Jack Mallory

For all of us who watched TV during the Paleolithic. I never knew. Thanks to Jennifer Harting Christian, who posted this to Face Book. 

Ed Sullivan Matters to Black History By Kevin Powell

Because he was such an icon, he was able to have Black artists on TV when they were often not welcomed nor wanted elsewhere.

I cannot recall when I first heard the name Ed Sullivan, but it certainly had to have been when I was a ghetto youth coming of age in the 1970s and 1980s. I initially connected his name with music superstars Elvis Presley and The Beatles, and their now legendary appearances on his variety show. I was intrigued by how he introduced musical guests, his mightily distinctive diction, his genuinely low-key demeanor. But I had no clue, truly, who the man was, why he was such a major force in entertainment, and why for so long, until after I reached adulthood.

That recognition likely began when I studied Black history and Black culture while in college, and in the years that followed when I became a journalist, particularly as a documentarian of music and other art forms. And by the time I was hired to be a senior writer at Quincy Jones’ Vibe magazine in the 1990s, I found myself perpetually scanning “The Ed Sullivan Show” for footage after footage of Black performers like The Jackson 5, like Mahalia Jackson, like the legit who’s who of Black genius in song, dance, film, theater, and comedy. It was almost as if Ed Sullivan had been intentionally curating Black history on television, knowing that Black lives not only mattered then, but would matter to those to come, like me.

Indeed, it was somewhere between my Vibe years and the past decade or so that I learned how invested Mr. Sullivan was in equality. Perhaps it was because, as a young man, he was a serious and great athlete, and had encountered Black folks on the sporting field as gifted as he, and it left an impression – one that taught him not to view any people as inferior, as was commonly believed in Jim Crow America, just because of the color of their skin. Perhaps it was because he was Irish and knew there was a time in this nation where there were loud proclamations that the Irish were considered the absolute bottom of the immigrant barrel. Perhaps it was because the love of his life, his wife Sylvia, was Jewish, and he saw first-hand the anti-Semitism those like her endured.

These and other factors are likely why The Ed Sullivan Show was converted into the performance arm of the Civil Rights Movement. Because he was such an icon and such an influencer, he was able to have Black artists in that theater when they were often not welcomed nor wanted elsewhere.

How else would you explain The Temptations and The Supremes doing their massive pop hits in that hallowed circle, accorded the same treatment as White musical innovators? And, yes, how else could Motown have become “the sound of young America” without allies and accomplices like Ed Sullivan?

How else do you explain Mr. Sullivan, a close friend of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the tap dancer who was once the biggest Black star in Hollywood, arranging the funeral service for a Black man who had the sad misfortune of dying broke, and doing so in a manner that suggested, strongly, this Black man was worthy of a grand send-off?

How else would you explain Mr. Sullivan, a White man, walking matter-of-factly into the yellowed and hateful teeth of racism by kissing Pearl Bailey on the cheek, or shaking the hand of Nat “King” Cole, on his TV show, knowing such gestures would savagely anger many White viewers, especially those in the American South who believed, without apology, in “For Whites Only” and “For Coloreds Only” in every way conceivable?
For sure, we know that The Ed Sullivan Show was the longest-running variety program in American TV history. We know that Mr. Sullivan became a star as big as the biggest stars he had on that program. But we also know that the Civil Rights era, roughly 1955 to 1968 – from the murder of Emmett Till and the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the assassination of Dr. King – means that Ed Sullivan had a front-row seat to the most dramatic upheavals sweeping America.

Here he was, someone who had spent considerable time digesting the Black talent in Harlem and via the “chitlin’ circuit,” with this gargantuan platform before there was social media, before there was cable or streaming, before there were all-music outlets like MTV, quite literally broadcasting Black history into the living rooms of everyday Americans year after year, from the World War II generation to the Baby Boomers, from nonviolent sit-ins and freedom rides to city after city burning in rebellion.

This is why I believe Mr. Sullivan did two things of great significance near the end of his remarkable television run. When he learned that Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the jazz multi-instrumentalist, was challenging the power structure to have more jazz on the airwaves, Mr. Sullivan did not do what others were doing: shucking and jiving and avoiding. He gave Mr. Kirk a slot with his makeshift band that included jazz giant Charles Mingus, and it remains one of the most searing and surreal mini-concerts ever seen on TV.

But history is not history if it does not also acknowledge the traumatic that happened in real-time. Two years after the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. was tragically gunned down in Memphis, America remained a divided and burning house. Yet there was a regal and soft-spoken Coretta Scott King, MLK’s widow, in that Sullivan moment, introducing clips from two of her late husband’s most famous speeches, and declaring the kind of America it needed to be. An emotionally raw Ed Sullivan greets Mrs. King at the end, kisses her on the cheek and grabs her hand, a fearless middle finger to anyone who believed, and still believes, that White people and Black people should not even touch each other, that our histories are not intertwined, when they are.

Without question, Ed Sullivan could have lived a life awash in White male privilege and power and ignored what was happening around him. Instead, he chose a path of purpose, of substance, not knowing that there would be, say, an African American like me, in a completely different century, who would religiously watch his show on YouTube and elsewhere, and see not just my people and our whole selves, with great pride and dignity, but also see what is possible if history is inextricably linked to a sense of humanity, to a great love for all.

Jay Shackford

(Editor’s Note:  Seventy years ago to this day,  the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, declaring segregated schools unequal and unconstitutional, forever changing the path of social justice in this country.  Today we learned (thanks to a free press) that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was flying an upside-down-flag at his home on Jan, 17, 2021 (the symbol of the ‘stop the steal’ movement) less than two weeks after the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that killed five police officers. Alito didn’t deny or refute the story, but he did blame his wife. We’ve come a long way.). 

At Justice Alito’s House, a 

‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol is Displayed

By Jodi Kantor/The New York Times

After the 2020 presidential election, as some Trump supporters falsely claimed that President Biden had stolen the office, many of them displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars and in online posts: an upside-down American flag.

One of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va., according to photographs and interviews with neighbors.

The upside-down flag was aloft on Jan. 17, 2021, the images showed. President Donald J. Trump’s supporters, including some brandishing the same symbol, had rioted at the Capitol a little over a week before. Mr. Biden’s inauguration was three days away. Alarmed neighbors snapped photographs, some of which were recently obtained by The New York Times. Word of the flag filtered back to the court, people who worked there said in interviews.

While the flag was up, the court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case, with Justice Alito on the losing end of that decision. In coming weeks, the justices will rule on two climactic cases involving the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, including whether Mr. Trump has immunity for his actions. Their decisions will shape how accountable he can be held for trying to overturn the last presidential election and his chances for re-election in the upcoming one.

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot.

The mere impression of political opinion can be a problem, the ethics experts said. “It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia.

This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard, which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases,” she said.

Interviews show that the justice’s wife, Martha-Ann Alito, had been in a dispute with another family on the block over an anti-Trump sign on their lawn, but given the timing and the starkness of the symbol, neighbors interpreted the inverted flag as a political statement by the couple.

The longstanding ethics code for the lower courts, as well as the recent one adopted by the Supreme Court, stresses the need for judges to remain independent and avoid political statements or opinions on matters that could come before them.

“You always want to be proactive about the appearance of impartiality,” Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge and the director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, said in an interview. “The best practice would be to make sure that nothing like that is in front of your house.”

The court has also repeatedly warned its own employees against public displays of partisan views, according to guidelines circulated to the staff and reviewed by The Times. Displaying signs or bumper stickers is not permitted, according to the court’s internal rule book and a 2022 memo reiterating the ban on political activity.

Asked if these rules also apply to justices, the court declined to respond.

The exact duration that the flag flew outside the Alito residence is unclear. In an email from Jan. 18, 2021, reviewed by The Times, a neighbor wrote to a relative that the flag had been upside down for several days at that point.

In recent years, the quiet sanctuary of his street, with residents who are Republicans and Democrats, has tensed with conflict, neighbors said. Around the 2020 election, a family on the block displayed an anti-Trump sign with an expletive. It apparently offended Mrs. Alito and led to an escalating clash between her and the family, according to interviews.

Some residents have also bridled at the noise and intrusion brought by protesters, who started showing up outside the Alito residence in 2022 after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion. Other neighbors have joined the demonstrators, whose intent was “to bring the protest to their personal lives because the decisions affect our personal lives,” said Heather-Ann Irons, who came to the street to protest.

The half-dozen neighbors who saw the flag, or knew of it, requested anonymity because they said they did not want to add to the contentiousness on the block and feared reprisal. Last Saturday, May 11, protesters returned to the street, waving flags of their own (“Don’t Tread on My Uterus”) and using a megaphone to broadcast expletives at Justice Alito, who was in Ohio giving a commencement address. Mrs. Alito appeared in a window, complaining to the Supreme Court security detail outside.

Turning the American flag upside down is a symbol of emergency and distress, first used as a military S.O.S., historians said in interviews. In recent decades, it has increasingly been used as a political protest symbol — a controversial one, because the flag code and military tradition require the paramount symbol of the United States to be treated with respect.

Over the years, upside-down flags have been displayed by both the right and the left as an outcry over a range of issues, including the Vietnam War, gun violence, the Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional right to abortion and, in particular, election results. In 2012, Tea Party followers inverted flags at their homes to signal disgust at the re-election of President Barack Obama. Four years later, some liberals advised doing the same after Mr. Trump was elected.

During Mr. Trump’s quest to win, and then subvert, the 2020 election, the gesture took off as never before, becoming “really established as a symbol of the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign,” according to Alex Newhouse, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.

A flood of social media posts exhorted Trump supporters to flip over their flags or purchase new ones to display upside down.

“If Jan. 6 rolls around and Biden is confirmed by the Electoral College our nation is in distress!!” a poster wrote on Patriots.win, a forum for Trump supporters, garnering over a thousand “up” votes. “If you cannot go to the DC rally then you must do your duty and show your support for our president by flying the flag upside down!!!!”

Local newspapers from Lexington, Ky., to Sun City, Ariz., to North Jersey wrote about the flags cropping up nearby. A few days before the inauguration, a Senate candidate in Minnesota flew an upside-down flag on his campaign vehicle.

Hanging an inverted flag outside a home was “an explicit signifier that you are part of this community that believes America has been taken and needs to be taken back,” Mr. Newhouse said.

This spring, the justices are already laboring under suspicion by many Americans that whatever decisions they make about the Jan. 6 cases will be partisan. Justice Clarence Thomas has declined to recuse himself despite the direct involvement of his wife, Virginia Thomas, in efforts to overturn the election.

Now, with decisions in the Jan. 6 cases expected in just a few weeks, a similar debate may unfurl about Justice Alito, the ethics experts said. “It really is a question of appearances and the potential impact on public confidence in the court,” Mr. Fogel said. “I think it would be better for the court if he weren’t involved in cases arising from the 2020 election. But I’m pretty certain that he will see that differently.”

If Justice Alito were on another court, Mr. Fogel said, the flag could also trigger some sort of review to determine if there was any misconduct. But because the Supreme Court serves as the arbiter of its own behavior, “you don’t really have anywhere to take it,” he said.

Jay Shackford

Now playing off-Broadway: Trump’s synchronized sycophants

Outside the courthouse, a Greek chorus of mini-Trumps dutifully dances to the former president’s choreography.

By Dana Milbank

Columnist/The Washington Post

May 17, 2024 at 6:30 a.m. EDT

Sen. Tommy Tuberville knows a great deal about the judiciary. The Alabama Republican is on record asserting that the three branches of government are “the House, the Senate and the executive.”

And so this week, the former college football coach took his expertise in jurisprudence to Donald Trump’s hush money trial in New York, watched for a few minutes and came out to offer reporters his legal analysis.

“How can you be convinced by somebody that is a serial liar?” Tuberville wanted to know. “I mean, there should be no reason that anybody should listen to this guy.”

One hundred percent, Coach! Tuberville was talking about the witness, Michael Cohen, but he didn’t have the self-awareness to realize he was also describing the defendant, perhaps the most famous liar in American history.

The Manhattan Criminal Courthouse was overflowing with lying liars this week. Inside the courtroom, Cohen testified about all the lies he told for Trump: lying to Congress, lying to the public, lying about Trump’s involvement with Russia, lying about Trump’s alleged trysts and how Trump bought the silence of his accusers. Trump’s lawyers, in their cross-examination, sought to convince the jury that the former Trump fixer is so prolific a liar that he is still lying, as are Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal and anybody who accuses Trump of anything, ever. Trump himself, in statements to the cameras in the hallway outside the courtroom, lies about the terms of the gag order, the “corrupt” judge, the view of “everybody” with legal experience that he committed “no crime” — and whatever else comes to his lips.

In the park across the street from the courthouse on Tuesday stood the speaker of the House, the man second in line to the presidency, lying like a rug. Without a shred of evidence, Mike Johnson alleged that “the judge’s own daughter is making millions of dollars” off of the trial. He claimed a prosecutor in the case had “recently received over $10,000 in payments from the Democratic National Committee.” He alleged that, in Trump’s classified documents case, prosecutors “manipulated documents” and “might have tampered with the evidence” — conduct “so egregious” that it caused that trial to be “indefinitely postponed.” All false or, at best, deeply distorted.

It was demeaning to the office of the speaker, and to Congress, for Johnson to be trashing the criminal justice system as “corrupt,” and nakedly campaigning for Trump at the former president’s trial. He was one of a parade of MAGA legislators making a pilgrimage to the courthouse this week. On Monday came Sens. Tuberville and J.D. Vance (Ohio) and Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (N.Y.). On Tuesday came Johnson and a quartet of Republicans all dressed as Trump mini-mes in blue-gray suits, white shirts and red ties: Reps. Cory Mills (Fla.) and Byron Donalds (Fla.), North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. On Thursday came so many House MAGA Republican — including Matt Gaetz (Fla.) and Anna Paulina Luna (Fla.), Bob Good (Va.), Andy Biggs (Ariz.) and Eli Crane (Ariz.), and Lauren Boebert (Colo.), and at least five others — that the House Oversight Committee had to postpone its planned vote to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress.

The speaker owes his job to Trump, who earlier this month opposed Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s attempt to oust him. In a sense, all of the lawmakers flocking to New York owe their jobs to Trump: One cross word from him, and they’re out faster than you can say “primary challenge.” And so they performed for Trump outside the courthouse as a troupe of synchronized sycophants.

“This is a sham trial!” said Trump, inside the courthouse.

Jay Shackford

AN ISRAELI NEWSPAPER PRESENTS TRUTHS READERS MAY PREFER TO AVOID

Haaretz consistently attempts to wrestle with the realities of what is going on in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.

By David Remnick, Editor, The New Yorker

May 12, 2024

Seven months after October 7th, it is still October 8th, the day after, in the State of Israel. The country remains in mourning, a depressed state of being that alternates among rage at Israel’s enemies; rage at its leaders; anxiety about the hostages in Gaza; excruciating doubt about the future of the country; and bewilderment that so much of the world has turned its attention to the horrific, ever-growing number of dead and wounded Palestinians. Insofar as Israeli television covers Gaza at all, it is usually through the lens of military strategy, the loss of Israeli soldiers, and the fate of the hostages. As was the case for so long in the United States after 9/11, empathy often turns out to be a limited, and predominantly domestic, resource. The main outliers in this emotional landscape are the two million Palestinian citizens of Israel, men and women who exist with a kind of double consciousness, at once living alongside their Jewish neighbors and getting catastrophic news on their phones from Gaza, sometimes about the loss of relatives and friends.

Israeli public opinion is hardly a monolith. There are frequent demonstrations against the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu. The press can also prove diverse and aggressive. On the investigative TV news program “Uvda,” on Channel 12, the host, Ilana Dayan, interviewed a former chief of the Shin Bet intelligence agency, Nadav Argaman, who flatly accused Netanyahu’s government of “deliberately destroying Israeli society in order to remain in power.” Such material would not likely be permitted in an authoritarian regime, and yet Netanyahu’s Cabinet, which certainly includes authoritarians, recently voted to shut down Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel, branding the network’s coverage a threat to national security.

It’s essential to emphasize the heroic work that has been done by Palestinian journalists in Gaza, many of whom have been killed. But it is also worth looking at one of the few Hebrew-language institutions that consistently attempt to wrestle, however imperfectly, with the realities of what is going on in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank: the newspaper Haaretz, which was founded in 1918. In terms of audience, Haaretz trails far behind the popular tabloid Yedioth Ahronoth and the conservative paper Israel Hayom, which is owned by the family of the late billionaire casino operator Sheldon Adelson. Haaretz’s resources are modest, its reputation primarily ideological; it is left wing in a country that has moved decidedly to the right.

Yet what’s been impressive about the paper lately is the breadth of its reporting and analysis. On a nearly daily basis, Amos Harel and Anshel Pfeffer give unblinkered assessments of brutal military overreach and political folly; Yaniv Kubovich has scored one scoop after another on the failures of the security establishment. Amira Hass, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, has been living in, and reporting from, Gaza and the West Bank for more than three decades. Her anatomization of the structures and the human costs of occupation has been an insistent, if willfully ignored, presence in Israeli public life for more than a generation. Netta Ahituv’s portrait of David Hasan, a Palestinian American neurosurgeon at Duke, who has been treating children and adults in Gaza, provided a glimpse of the suffering in Khan Younis and Rafah. Hasan recalled trying to attend to his countless patients while bombs shook the hospital to its foundation. “I asked the local doctors what to do,” he said, “and they told me . . . I should just keep working to distract myself from the anxiety.” Sheren Falah Saab, who grew up in the western Galilee and covers Arab culture for the paper, recently published a stark report on Gaza in which she allowed the victims to speak directly to the reader:

“Death is everywhere. Not all the dead can be buried, not all the bodies can be extricated.” That’s how Maha, a 36-year-old mother of three who fled Gaza City for Rafah, describes the situation in the Strip. “Sometimes, when they can’t find and remove all the bodies that were buried during a shelling, they ask the neighbors or relatives and write the names of the dead on the wall of the house, if there’s still a wall. They write that they’re there, under the ruins. Maybe at some point they’ll be able to extricate them.”

No less impressive is the paper’s over-all capacity to present multiple truths to readers who might prefer to avoid them. Haaretz has reported, for example, on the deeply troubling rise in antisemitism around the world, but, unlike some other outlets, it has generally avoided comparing the situation to 1938 or tarring most student demonstrators as “pro-Hamas.”

The reporting on Netanyahu has been both factual and critical, but Haaretz has also presented a three-dimensional picture of the world in which the Israeli Prime Minister is not the only dangerous actor in the regional drama. Not long ago, Shlomi Eldar interviewed a range of Palestinians––including many Fatah supporters––who had experienced life in Gaza under Hamas rule and then left for Cairo. A former Fatah official named Sufyan Abu Zaydeh told Eldar how, on October 7th, when he saw a jeep racing by carrying an Israeli hostage, he anticipated with despair the war to come: “Gaza was on the road to perdition.” And Eldar’s Palestinian sources described in detail a meeting nearly three years ago at the seaside Commodore Hotel, in Gaza, called “The Promise of the Hereafter Conference.” At that meeting, Eldar’s sources told him, delegates discussed their plans to conquer Israel––or, as the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar put it in a statement, to bring about the “full liberation of Palestine from the sea to the river.” Hamas leaders outlined various aspects of what should follow—which Israelis ought to be killed or prosecuted, how to avoid a “brain drain,” and how to divvy up Israeli properties, including apartments, schools, gas stations, and power plants.

Netanyahu’s government has expressed its admiration for Haaretz by having its communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, lash out at the paper’s “defeatist and false propaganda.” One of the Cabinet’s most reactionary ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has referred to Haaretz as “the Hamas daily.”

With Netanyahu currently threatening a full-blown assault on Rafah, it’s nearly impossible to think of the future in any clear way. Amid all the fury and death and distrust, what is needed are leaders, thinkers, and institutions of vision and integrity to build what has always been imperative: a set of political arrangements that refuse to accept the cruelly stubborn “facts on the ground” of occupation, and a concerted movement toward a humane and workable settlement that provides the Israelis with the security that they naturally require and the Palestinians with the dignity and the independence that they rightly demand. ♦︎

Jack Mallory

3 BCC grads and a bear. 
 

Spotted by the road yesterday. Deb took first pic with phone, immediately rolled up her window. I was driving one-handed, taking pix with other hand through the window on her side.

Jack Mallory

​From Breaking the Silence, an organization of Israeli veterans. I like to think that encouraging veterans of all wars to speak out has been one of the accomplishments of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. 
 

OPINION

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/20/gaza-war-endgame-us-saudi-arabia-hamas-israel-iran/

I was heartened to read this article by David Ignatius about a possible endgame to the Israel Hamas war. I agree too with Mr. Ignatius that its outrageous that the ICC equated Hamas with Israel in the war. I don't know if the things mentioned in the article could happen but it gives hope to read what is going on behind the scenes. Israel has been the target of her neighbors from the start of her existence in 1948, and a peace deal with some of her Arab neighbors could usher in a whole new era. There is a plan for the day after too in Gaza so that the Palestinians will have their own country. Love, Joanie

Jack Mallory

Thousands disappeared and killed, one by one, by their own government, or thousands killed by 2,000 lb. bombs dropped by someone else's government. This is how to dig a hole in which one's plans for victory may eventually be buried along with the innocents. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/world/asia/afghanistan-abdul-raziq.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

“We would ask ourselves: ‘Are we creating something here that we may regret later?’” said Col. Robert Waltemeyer, a former Special Forces officer . . ."
 

The question Israeli government and military officials should be asking every day. 

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

Jay Shackford

A Trip Down Memory Lane

(Editor’s Note:  My progressive friends claim that Donald Trump is becoming more and more unhinged and detached from reality.  To that, I say bullshit — Donald Trump is the same bat-shit crazy lunatic that he was as a toddler 76 years ago when he was throwing rocks at the skulls of his playmates in his sandbox. Frankly, our memories aren’t deep or sadistic enough to absorb and remember all the insane things he’s done, said or threatened over the years. 

So let’s take a trip down memory lane:  

• Trump banned all Muslims from entering the country in his first day in office in 2017, a move that was quickly overturned by the federal courts; 
• Trump promises to become a dictator in his first day in office in 2025, overriding  the constitution, and arresting and detaining tens of millions of immigrants in concentration camps before exporting them to God knows where; 
• Trump promises to arrest and prosecute his political enemies, including the “Biden Crime Family,” former Chief-of-Staff John Kelly and General Milly, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who Trump claims should be charged with treason for disobeying his orders in his final days and sentenced to death; 
• Trump has called Mexicans and other immigrant groups on numerous occasions when campaigning and in office “murderers and rapists” and the “vermin that is poisoning the blood of America”; 
• Trump enjoys making fun of people living with physical disabilities and hates looking at veterans who have been seriously wounded and lost limbs fighting for America, calling them “stupid” for getting drafted or volunteering for serving our country (Trump escaped the draft during the Vietnam War when Trump’s daddy got a podiatrist working out of one of his street front offices and under the threat of being evicted to write a letter to Donald’s draft board claiming that poor Donald had “bone spurs”); 
• Trump stacked the Supreme Court with unqualified and ultra-conservative justices, who, in turn, overturned Roe v. Wade that had legalized abortion for 50 years and now threatens to ban all forms of birth control during his next term while the leader of the Supremes, Justice Samuel Alito, dishonors all law-biding U.S. citizens by flying the Stars and Stripes  upside-down at his home in Alexandria, Va., to honor January 6th insurrectionists and hangs another flag favored by ultra right-wing Christian groups at his New Jersey Shore vacation home paid for by conservative think tanks and political groups; 
• Trump is the first President ever to be indicted on felony charges (more than 90 so far) in four separate cases, including charges of planning and instigating the January 6th insurrection, obstructing the peaceful transfer of power, interfering with the Presidential election results by trying to change 11,800 votes in the battle ground state of Georgia in a telephone call with the Georgia Secretary of State,, with his first trial on paying $130,000 in hush money to an adult film star just days before the 2016 presidential election and on the heals of the Access to Hollywood “grab them by the pussy” video and then covering it up in his business records is now heading for final arguments in New York City court next week; and stealing and hiding classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago home, including possible classified  documents that identify the sites and operations of our nuclear facilities— a case that has been needlessly delayed by one of Trump’s last minute appointees to the federal bench who has reportedly been offered the next Supreme Court seat if she delays the case beyond the 2024 presidential election; and
• In a recent meeting with big-time oil and energy executives, Trump has offered to wipe out all those nasty federal laws and regulations regarding the drilling for oil and natural gas that help keep our air, water, landscape, oceans and beaches safe and clean and fight climate change in return for a $1 BILLION contribution to his election campaign, with a good portion of that money going to pay for his lawyers defending him in court.  This would include, of course, erasing federal laws and incentives encouraging the use of all-electric vehicles and construction and operation of windmills. 

Below is Susan Glasser’s most recent column in The New Yorker. Happy Memorial Day everyone. 

THERE IS LITERALLY NOTHING TRUMP CAN SAY THAT WILL STOP REPUBLICANS FROM VOTING FOR HIM

On Nikki Haley’s announcement that she’s backing her party’s “unhinged” nominee.

By Susan B. Glasser 

May 23, 2024

In the past few days, Donald Trump has floated the idea of remaining in office for a third term, despite the Constitution’s two-term limit; sent out a social-media post touting the “unified Reich” that America will become when he wins; and repeatedly promoted a false new conspiracy theory that the F.B.I., when it raided Mar-a-Lago last year to recover classified documents that Trump is accused of illegally taking from the White House, had threatened to use lethal force to take him out. “I nearly escaped death,” he said in a fund-raising e-mail sent on Thursday morning. “Biden’s DOJ was authorized to shoot me!” All of these outrages spurred their own news cycles of shock and disputation; Trump’s claims about the Mar-a-Lago raid even prompted the normally reticent Attorney General, Merrick Garland, to respond in a statement calling them “false” and “extremely dangerous.”

In an interview released on Tuesday, Trump, who is a few weeks short of his seventy-eighth birthday, signalled that he was open to restrictions on Americans’ right to contraception—an inflammatory suggestion that, a few hours later, he disavowed. “I HAVE NEVER, AND WILL NEVER ADVOCATE IMPOSING RESTRICTIONS ON BIRTH CONTROL,” he wrote on social media. Was Trump’s gaffe the mistake of a septuagenarian who did not understand the question? Or perhaps a dog whistle to some of his far-right followers who, having won at the Supreme Court on abortion, now want the Court to strike down the 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut that first established Americans’ constitutional right to privacy?

Whatever the reason, it’s increasingly clear that Trump is having a harder and harder time articulating coherent thoughts these days—a development that is on full display in his daily rants to reporters upon entering and leaving the New York courthouse where, since April, he has been on trial on criminal charges of falsifying business records to cover up a pre-election hush-money payment to a former adult-film star. On Tuesday, Trump’s defense team rested their case without calling him to the stand, despite Trump blustering for weeks that he wanted to testify on his own behalf. Here was how Trump explained that decision:

“Yeah, because he [the judge] made rulings that make it very difficult to testify. Anything I did, anything I did in the best—they could bring everything up then. You know what, I’ve had a great past, but anything, but the other thing is, and the main reason, and I don’t even mind that in fact I like talking about it because we had rigged cases. New York is out of control, and they can solve it with a good appellate.”

“A good appellate.” Got that?

As soon as next week, the jury in the New York case may render a verdict; if Trump is found guilty, he would be the first major-party nominee in American history to carry the label of “convicted felon” to the polls in November.

That Republicans have made their peace with their leader’s alternately reckless and incoherent big mouth is both old news and perhaps the most important news of the 2024 campaign. On Wednesday, Nikki Haley announced that she would be voting for Trump for President. Just a few months ago, Haley was the last remaining Republican holdout against Trump in the G.O.P. primaries, and, even when she bowed to the inevitable electoral math and dropped out of the race, she refused to endorse him. Her criticism of Trump on the campaign trail leaned heavily into his reckless statements, volatile behavior, and questionable psychological state. Trump, she said, was “diminished,” “unstable,” even “unhinged.”

Is Trump more hinged now than he was in February? Haley did not try to make that case. Instead, she reverted to what has become the Republican template for such flip-flops in this election cycle—see also: William Barr, Mitch McConnell, Chris Sununu—which is to all but ignore Trump while insisting that Joe Biden has been such a “catastrophe” in the White House that it justifies voting for a man who nicknamed her Birdbrain and whose campaign once called her a “wailing loser hellbent on an alternative reality.” Some of the coverage insisted on pointing out that Haley, though she said she would vote for him, was still not endorsing Trump—a contortion that immediately brought to mind Bill Clinton’s famous response to the question of whether he had sex with an intern: “it depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”

Haley made her announcement about Trump during her first public appearance since she dropped out of the race, at the Hudson Institute, the conservative think tank with which she is now affiliated. Much of the rest of her speech consisted of a hawkish critique of both Biden’s and Trump’s foreign policy, which she lumped together as weak and insufficiently supportive of Ukraine and Israel; she attributed this to “a dangerous world view” that would have America “abandon our allies, appease our enemies, and focus only on the problems we have at home.” (To paint Biden as just another America Firster was a new one for me, but it’s 2024, so nothing should surprise.) Haley placed special emphasis on the need to confront Russia, especially because Vladimir Putin himself had defined his invasion of Ukraine as the opening salvo in his war on the West.

Only a few hours later, in a sleepless 1:30 a.m. post on his social-media platform, Truth Social, Trump was bragging about his great relationship with Putin, who, he claimed, would be willing to release the imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, an American citizen, soon after Trump wins in November. “Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, will do that for me, but not for anyone else,” Trump said. Haley, as far as I know, had no comment.

No comment is, in fact, one of the main Republican stratagems to reëlect Trump; the Party’s theory of winning appears to rely on everyone except the Trump superfans tuning out, or, at least, brushing aside, the stylings of their candidate. “It’s baked into the cake,” Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, told the Washington Post, of this week’s Trump outrages. “It drives people who don’t like him crazy, and people who like him dismiss it.” These days, you’re more likely to find Trump’s words in one of Biden’s campaign ads than in anything put out by his many G.O.P. cheerleaders. Trump’s crazy quotes generate support for Democrats; Republicans like Haley just cringe and change the subject.

It was, of course, exactly because of this phenomenon that far too many failed to take seriously Trump’s reckless incitements after he refused to accept the results of the 2020 election. Even the storming of the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, summoned to the scene by Trump himself, could not, it seems, reverse this persistent failure. If anything, he’s getting even more of a pass in this election. Little that he has said or done seems to have made any appreciable impact on an increasingly amnesiac electorate, even as the things he says or does get ever more unbelievable.

As a result, Trump’s threats of revenge and retribution have become the background noise of the election year—it’s just more blah-blah-blah from a master of it. This, to me, is the only explanation for why there is not more discernible outrage over some remarkable findings from crew, a good-government group in Washington, D.C., which reviewed more than thirteen thousand of Trump’s Truth Social posts for a report released this week. They found that Trump had threatened to unleash the powers of the federal government on Biden twenty-five times in the past two years. Other targets against whom Trump called for vengeance included senators, judges, and members of Biden’s family. “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”—a blunt Trump social-media post from last year cited in the report—might as well be the explicit slogan of his 2024 campaign. And yet Congress, even when it was under full Democratic control in the first two years of Biden’s Presidency, has failed to pass measures that might insulate the Justice Department and other parts of the executive branch from efforts to politicize it during a second Trump term, such as reforming the Insurrection Act to make it harder to deploy the military on U.S. soil or passing legislation to make it more difficult for the White House to interfere in federal law-enforcement investigations. If the January 6th riot at their own Capitol was not enough to persuade lawmakers to take Trump’s words literally, I’m not sure anything is.

Back in February, Haley practically dripped with condescension when she complained about fellow Republican politicians who “know what a disaster he’s been and will continue to be” but are too afraid to say so publicly. “I’m not afraid to say the hard truth out loud,” she said. “I feel no need to kiss the ring.” And yet she, like all the others, did so anyway—proving, once again, that, in today’s Republican Party, actions speak just as loudly as even the loudest of words. ♦︎

Susan B. Glasser, a staff writer, is the co-author of “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.” Her column on life in Washington appears weekly on newyorker.com.

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

Thanks for the articles Jay. I agree that Trump is even becoming more Trumpian which is synonomous with crazy and dangerous. Its so disheartening that Nicki Haley finally found her voice and seemed like an authentic candidate only to put that aside recently to chose her own personal ambition over the well being of the country. How awful she said the other choice Biden would be a catastrophe. She agrees with Biden trying to stop the brutally of Putin and she has always cared about National Security. She was encouraging people to trash Biden and pick Trump. Forget the Constitution or standing up for Democracy to embrace a Putin lover. Trump and Putin are chummy. As we know Trump likes dictators.

I never liked Haley,  but now I have no respect for her at all. I don't appreciate all the 180 Republicans out there who talked about the danger of Trump only to say he's their guy. Even Republicans whose wives were disparaged by Trump have fallen into line.  I heard some commentary that Haley's so called voters are not all one block following Haley but rather chose her in the past because she wasn't Trump. Some are saying they will vote for Biden even after her disgraceful announcement. Love, Joanie

Glen Hirose

        Steven,

              Thought you might get a grin from this.

Jack Mallory

1st. Lt. Stuart Bassett Lamkin, 1st. Lt. Donald Woods Holman. Delta Company, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, KIA 10 March 1970. 

I sent Stuart out to replace Don as platoon leader, to ride on Don's tank for a day's OJT. At the end of the day Don would fly back to base, on his way home.They were killed almost simultaneously in an ambush near Tay Ninh. 

It was Stuart's first and last day in combat, Don's last. Within two months I was back in the States, demonstrating against the war. 
 

Memorial Day. More than just sales and BBQs. 

Stephen Hatchett

Yup, Glen -- that's a  goodie! Thanks for that little lift.

Stephen Hatchett

Memorial Day:   Right on Jack -- It's not sales and bbq.  We have not stopped the deaths,  but we have made some progress on other fronts in the military:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBV07j9Ybgs

Female leadership can make a difference,   Just after I retired from the Lawrence Livermore National Lab., it got a new director, an experimental physicist of the female persuasion.  From day one (I stayed on as a sort of emeritus) the place felt different.  Last year, still under her leadership, the Lab was rated as one of the top 3 or 4 places to work in the country!

Jack Mallory

A salute to the captain, Stephen!

But traditional inter-service gonad busting (clearly the expression ball busting can't be used any more) requires me to note that navy personnel camouflaged as bushes onboard ship always seems an odd choice. 

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

Jack Mallory

For me, Joanie, I'm not sorry about their deaths. I'm angry. I hope to die still angry. I was sorry and sad when my dad died young. I was sorry and sad when my mom died at 84. Both heart-breaking. But people killed in war are killed BY somebody. And my anger is directed, not at someone on the other end of a rifle or an RPG launcher, but at those wealthy and powerful who send others off to kill and be killed. Anger is appropriate. Unlike bitterness, anger can even be fun! 

In the afterlife I don't believe in (credit to Joseph Heller and Catch 22 for that concept), the aggregated anger of the living fans the flames of Hell higher and higher, while Satan's imps turn the rotisserie on which Nixon and Kissinger are mounted slower and slower. Nothing to be sorry about!

********

To cleanse the image of that rotisserie from your mind, an image from Deb's garden:

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

Jay Shackford

Who Wears the Flag in Your Family

By Dead-Center Shacks

May 30, 2024

When you fly an up-side down flag (symbol of ‘stop the steal’ movement) at your home for a couple of days after the January 6th insurrection, you have to wonder what’s going on.

When you fly a flag that is the symbol of white, Christian nationalists at your vacation home along the New Jersey shore for a couple of years,  your concerns about the occupants escalate.

When you blame your flag-loving wife, Martha-Ann,  for both events and claim that Martha refused your request to take down the “stop-the-steal” flag at your primary residence in Alexandria, VA for three days, you have to wonder, “Who wears the flag in the Alito house?”  

At the very least, Justice Samuel Alito has given new meaning the phrase, “Throwing your wife under the bus.”

The next flag-flying event at the Alito residence might indeed be the limp body of Samuel Alito himself. 

Where’s Martha Mitchell when we need her? 

Better yet, Martha-Ann has replaced the notorious Ginni Thomas as the prime suspect for leaking the Dodds decision that reversed Roe v Wade. 

It also provides fertile ground for Justice Samuel Alito to recuse himself from the Supreme Court’s upcoming decisions on Donald Duck’s criminal vulnerabilities regarding the January 6th insurrection.  

Jack Mallory

Jay--a guy who can't tell his wife to take down a piece of cloth flying over their house, but who thinks he can tell all American women what they must do with their reproductive systems?

********

Jay Shackford

Yeah, that's some crazy shit, Jack.

Jay Shackford

Guilty! 34-0.