#republicans don’t respect veterans

[bouncinghedgehog]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 26, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 27, 2024

Today President Joe Biden pardoned more than 2000 former military personnel who had been convicted of engaging in consensual sex under a gay sex ban in the military that has since been repealed. People covered under the pardon can apply to have their military discharges corrected and to recover the pay and benefits the convictions cost them. “[M]aintaining the finest fighting force in the world…means making sure that every member of our military feels safe and respected,” Biden said in a statement. 

Biden said he was “righting an historic wrong.” “This is about dignity, decency, and ensuring the culture of our Armed Forces reflect the values that make us an exceptional nation,” he said.

On this date in 2015, the Supreme Court handed down the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which said that states must license and recognize same-sex marriage because of the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement that citizens must have the equal protection of the laws and cannot be deprived of rights without due process of the laws.  

In the New York Times today, Kate Zernike explained how the public conversations about abortion have shifted in the two years since the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion. The state bans that went into place have illustrated that abortion is indeed healthcare, as people suffering miscarriages have been unable to obtain the imperative medical care they need. 

Zernike quoted pollster Tresa Undem, who estimated that before the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe, less than 15% of Americans thought that abortion was relevant to them personally. Now, though, Undem said, “it’s about pregnancy, and everybody knows someone who had a baby or wants to have a baby or might get pregnant. It’s profoundly personal to a majority of the public.”

In the three weeks since Biden announced restrictions on asylum applications for undocumented immigrants, the number of people trying to cross the border has dropped more than 40% to its lowest level since he took office. This information will likely come up in tomorrow’s scheduled debate between the president and presumptive Republican nominee Trump, who has made it clear he intends to accuse the president of promoting immigration policies that bring criminals into the United States.

Former representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), a military veteran who joined the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and who has fiercely criticized Trump, today endorsed Biden for president. 

In a video, Kinzinger said: “[W]hile I certainly don’t agree with President Biden on everything, and I never thought I’d be endorsing a Democrat for president, I know that he will always protect the very thing that makes America the best country in the world: our democracy. Donald Trump poses a direct threat to every fundamental American value. He doesn’t care about our country. He doesn’t care about you. He only cares about himself. And he’ll hurt anyone or anything in pursuit of power.” 

On CNN tonight, Georgia governor Brian Kemp told Kaitlan Collins he did not vote for Trump in his state’s Republican primary, although he said he would “support the ticket” in November so that Georgia would remain in Republican hands. It was an interesting statement, since he could easily have deflected the question or simply said he voted for Trump if he cared about avoiding Trump’s wrath. But he appeared not to care, suggesting that Trump’s power even with prominent Republicans is slipping. 

Two Republican voters from Pennsylvania told MSNBC tonight that they are voting for Biden. When asked whether they think there is “a silent Biden voter out there,” one said, “I do. I know there is…. We don’t want to talk about it, but we’re all going to vote for Joe Biden.” 

By a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court today blessed the practice of taking “gratuities” as a gift for past behavior by an official, distinguishing them from “bribes,” which require proof that there was an illegal deal in place. The case involved a former mayor from Indiana who helped a local truck dealership win $1.1 million in city contracts and then asked for and received $13,000 from the dealership’s owners. The mayor was found guilty of violating a federal anti-corruption law that prohibits state and local officials from taking gifts worth more than $5,000 from someone the official had helped to land lucrative government business.

For the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that the law prohibited officials from accepting “gift cards, lunches, plaques, books, framed photos or the like” in thanks for an official’s help, although David G. Savage of the Los Angeles Times noted that the law came into play only when the gift was worth more than $5,000. 

Savage pointed out that as the federal law in question covers about 20 million state and local officials, the decision could have wide impact. This decision that officials can accept “gifts” so long as they are not “bribes” might have something to do with the fact that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have accepted significant gifts from donors—Thomas’s count is upward of $4 million—and it doesn’t relieve the sense that this Supreme Court, with its three right-wing Trump-appointed justices, is untrustworthy.

Writing for justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and herself, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said, “Officials who use their public positions for private gain threaten the integrity of our most important institutions.” 

Yesterday, House Republicans released draft legislation to fund the Justice Department and the Commerce Departments for fiscal year 2025, which starts October 1. They propose to slash nearly a billion dollars from the Department of Justice in retaliation for its bringing cases against Trump, and both to cut funding for the FBI and to block the construction of its new headquarters. Attorney General Merrick Garland called the cuts “unacceptable” and said that the “effort to defund the Justice Department and its essential law enforcement functions will make our fight against violent crime all the more difficult.”

In a secret vote yesterday  by a House panel that fell along party lines, House Republicans also agreed to say that the last Congress’s construction of the January 6th committee was invalid and illegal. This enabled them to back a last-ditch effort by Trump ally Steve Bannon to stay out of jail. After Bannon refused to respond to the committee’s subpoena for documents and testimony about the January 6 attack, a jury found him guilty of being in contempt of Congress. 

Today, Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) filed a brief with the Supreme Court saying that Bannon was right to ignore the subpoena because the committee was illegally organized. Politico’s Kyle Cheney pointed out that the lawyer for the brief is not a House lawyer but rather comes from America First Legal, a public interest organization put together by Trump loyalist Stephen Miller to challenge the legal efforts to rein in Trump’s orders when in office. 

Finally, Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer reported in The Recombobulation Area today that event bookings expected for the week of the Republican National Convention, which is set to begin on July 15, four days after Judge Juan Merchan sentences Trump for his 34 criminal convictions, have not materialized. Estimates were that the convention would bring $200 million in economic impact to Milwaukee, but that now appears to be optimistic. “[This is] certainly nothing like we were told or promised,” chef Gregory León told Shafer. With locals staying home to avoid the downtown area during the convention, “[i]f the [reservation] book stays the way it is, we’re not going to make enough money to cover costs.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[reynard61]

The bottom line, though, is that Iowa Republicans’ desperate attempt to stop Satanists from reading a book in the Capitol may end up hurting homeless veterans looking for a job. That’s the GOP for you. They don’t care who’s caught in the crossfire as long as they can tell their base they won a “culture war” battle. So far, the only sympathy for the people who may have benefitted from that event is coming from the Satanists: The Satanic Temple of Iowa would like to express our support to Iowa’s unhoused population who have been unfairly targeted by this policy change, which we believe occurred due to the Iowa state government’s unwillingness to respect diverse perspectives and religious freedom. Lucien Greaves, the co-founder of The Satanic Temple, told me separately that this is precisely why government officials ought to be neutral on religious matters: The unintended negative consequences of populating our public offices with functionaries who do not understand the value of government viewpoint neutrality or pluralistic religious liberty are too numerous to anticipate. To now see homeless veterans potentially denied resources due to the simple pettiness of officials whose sole purpose in doing so is to limit religious expression that does not match their own should be an absolute outrage to any decent person, regardless of their religious beliefs. So far, neither Reynolds nor her administration have responded to the chaos they’ve created.

And they probably never will. First of all...

And, of course...

[daily-thoughts96]

Dear Americans (More specifically Republicans)

Anytime you post that veterans deserve a whole month, you make yourself look like the biggest idiots in this country. You keep saying that veterans don’t have a month, and Pride month exists. Clearly you never payed attention in school or in general. Your lack of knowledge just keeps showing. Here’s something interesting, had you done some research. Did you know that November is National Veterans and Military Family Appreciation Month? Also Veterans Day is November 11th. Another fact, May is another month to celebrate military members and veterans. But because you lack the common sense to take time to research a subject, i just made it easier for you. Here’s the actual reality. If you cared about veterans, maybe find a way to help them. A smile, a polite hello, donating to the VA hospital, ask them how they are doing, things of that nature. To think you say you care about veterans and completely ignore the fact that there ALREADY is a month for Veterans, you just don’t give a fuck enough to pay attention to it. No respect for the people that have served this country and get set aside like nothing. IF you cared as much as you say, you would already have known that November IS a dedicated month for Veterans. IF you are this delusional, are you really an American? Don’t act special, because no one feels bad for someone who can’t do the simple search. Know your facts before you open your mouth. As for pride month, it was earned. By the way veterans are within the LGBTQIA, you just hate people loving who they love so you ignore them. Congrats. There’s no love like Christian love. Good Luck in this life. It’s not going to be gentle.

[yourreddancer]

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

August 29, 2024 (Thursday)

And now the U.S. Army has weighed in on the scandal surrounding Trump’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery for a campaign photo op, after which his team shared a campaign video it had filmed.

The Army said that the cemetery hosts almost 3,000 public wreath-laying ceremonies a year without incident and that Trump and his staff “were made aware of federal laws, Army regulations and [Department of Defense] policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds.”

It went on to say that a cemetery employee “who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside…. This incident was unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the… employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked. [Arlington National Cemetery] is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve.”

“I don’t think I can adequately explain what a massive deal it is for the Army to make a statement like this,” political writer and veteran Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote, noted. “The Pentagon avoids statements like this at all costs. But a draft dodging traitor decided to lie about our armed forces staff, so they went to paper.”

The deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said the Department of Defense is “aware of the statement that the Army issued, and we support what the Army said.” Hours later, Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita reposted the offending video on X and, tagging the official account for Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, said he was “hoping to trigger the hacks” in her office.

In Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall reported that the Trump campaign’s plan was to lay a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery to honor the 13 members of the U.S. military killed in the suicide bombing during the evacuation of Kabul, Afghanistan, in August 2021. They intended to film the event and then attack Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden for not “showing up” for the event, which they intended to portray as an “established memorial.”

Another major story from yesterday is that the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has finalized two rules that will work to stop corruption and money laundering in U.S. residential real estate and in private investment.

This is a big deal. As scholar of kleptocracies Casey Michel put it: “This is a massive, massive deal in the world of counter-kleptocracy—the U.S. is finally ending the gargantuan anti–money laundering loopholes for real estate, private equity, hedge funds, and more. Can't overstate how important this is. What a feat.”

​​After the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, the oligarchs who rose to power in the former Soviet republics looked to park their illicit money in western democracies, where the rule of law would protect their investments. Once invested in the United States, they favored the Republicans, who focused on the protection of wealth rather than social services. For their part, Republican politicians focused on spreading capitalism rather than democracy, arguing that the two went hand in hand.

The financial deregulation that made the U.S. a good bet for oligarchs to launder money got a boost when, shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act to address the threat of terrorism. The law took on money laundering and the illicit funding of terrorism, requiring financial institutions to inspect large sums of money passing through them. But the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) exempted many real estate deals from the new regulations.

The United States became one of the money-laundering capitals of the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars laundered in the U.S. every year.

In 2011 the international movement of illicit money led then–FBI director Robert Mueller to tell the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City that globalization and technology had changed the nature of organized crime. International enterprises, he said, “are running multi-national, multi-billion dollar schemes from start to finish…. They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military…. These criminal enterprises are making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement. They are cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder…. These groups may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”

Congress addressed this threat in 2021 by including the Corporate Transparency Act in the National Defense Authorization Act. It undercut shell companies and money laundering by requiring the owners of any company that is not otherwise overseen by the federal government (by filing taxes, for example, or through close regulation) to file with FinCEN a report identifying (by name, birth date, address, and an identifying number) each person associated with the company who either owns 25% or more of it or exercised substantial control over it. The measure also increased penalties for money laundering and streamlined cooperation between banks and foreign law enforcement authorities. That act went into effect on January 1, 2024.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration made fighting corruption a centerpiece of its attempt to shore up democracy both at home and abroad. In June 2021, President Biden declared the fight against corruption a core U.S. national security interest. “Corruption threatens United States national security, economic equity, global anti-poverty and development efforts, and democracy itself,” he wrote. “But by effectively preventing and countering corruption and demonstrating the advantages of transparent and accountable governance, we can secure a critical advantage for the United States and other democracies.”

In March 2023 the Treasury told Congress that “[m]oney laundering perpetrated by the Government of the Russian Federation (GOR), Russian [state-owned enterprises], Russian organized crime, and Russian elites poses a significant threat to the national security of the United States and the integrity of the international financial system,” and it outlined the ways in which it had been trying to combat that corruption.

Now FinCEN has firmed up rules to add anti-money-laundering safeguards to private real estate and private investment. They will require certain industry professionals to report information to FinCEN about cash transfers of residential real estate to a legal entity or trust, transactions that “present a high illicit finance risk,” FinCEN wrote. “The rule will increase transparency, limit the ability of illicit actors to anonymously launder illicit proceeds through the American housing market, and bolster law enforcement investigative efforts.” The real estate rule will go into effect on December 1, 2025.

The rule about investment advisors will make the obligation to report suspicious financial activity apply to certain financial advisors. This rule will go into effect on January 1, 2026.

“The Treasury Department has been hard at work to disrupt attempts to use the United States to hide and launder ill-gotten gains,” Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen explained. “That includes by addressing our biggest regulatory deficiencies, including through these two new rules that close critical loopholes in the U.S. financial system that bad actors use to facilitate serious crimes like corruption, narcotrafficking, and fraud. These steps will make it harder for criminals to exploit our strong residential real estate and investment adviser sectors.”

“I applaud FinCEN’s commonsense efforts to prevent corrupt actors from using the American residential real estate and private investment sectors as safe havens for hiding dirty money,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said in a statement. “For too long, vulnerabilities in the system have attracted kleptocrats, cartels, and criminals looking to stow away their ill-gotten gains. I hope FinCEN will apply similar safeguards to commercial real estate, as well as due diligence requirements to investment advisors. These are all welcome steps toward keeping our country and financial system safe and secure for the American people—not those who wish to abuse it.”

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (also known as the Helsinki Commission) brought the history of modern money laundering full circle. It said: “We welcome the Treasury Department's decision to close off crucial pathways for Russian money laundering and sanctions evasion through real estate and private equity.”

[bllsbailey]

2024 Debates: CNN Host Abruptly Ends Interview After Trump Spokeswoman Highlights Bias Of Network Moderators

A CNN host cut Donald Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt from the air just days before the network is set to host the first 2024 presidential debate.

Leavitt was cut off only minutes after the interview began. Leavitt was asked what the former GOP president’s strategy would be when he takes the stage in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday.

“President Trump is well prepared ahead of Thursday’s debates. Unlike Joe Biden, he doesn’t have to hide away and have his advisers tell him what to say. President Trump knows what he wants to say,” Leavitt started.

She then highlighted that the debate would most likely be a “hostile environment” for Trump, mentioning how the network’s moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, have a previous history of biased coverage against him.

“That’s why President Trump is knowingly going into a hostile environment on this very network on CNN with debate moderators who have made their opinions about him very well known over the past eight years in their biased coverage of him,” she said.

Meanwhile, host and political correspondent Kasie Hunt, who was interviewing Leavitt, fired back and asserted that her CNN colleagues were “professionals” before playing prepared clips showing Trump’s past comments regarding what he’s expecting to face from moderators.

As Leavitt tried to clear her throat and speak up, as it was supposed to be her turn to speak, Hunt simply drowned her out and continued to do so several times at any point that Leavitt noted the bias of past remarks said by both CNN moderators.

“Ma’am, we’re going to stop right there if you’re going to keep attacking my colleagues,” Hunt said. “I would like to talk about Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who you work for.”

“I’m sorry, guys… Karoline, thank you very much for your time. You’re welcome to come back at any time,” Hunt suddenly declared. “She is welcome to come back and speak about Donald Trump. Donald Trump will have equal time with Joe Biden when they both join us. later this week in Atlanta for this debate.”

After the show, Hunt posted on X (Twitter) defending her actions: “You come on my show; you respect my colleagues. Period. I don’t care what side of the aisle you stand on, as my track record clearly shows.”

You come on my show, you respect my colleagues. Period. I don’t care what side of the aisle you stand on, as my track record clearly shows.— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) June 24, 2024

Leavitt maintained that the on-air snub indicates that the presumed GOP nominee “will not be treated fairly” in the forthcoming debate in a statement given to The Post on Monday.

“CNN cutting off my microphone for bringing up a debate moderator’s history of anti-Trump lies just proves our point that President Trump will not be treated fairly in Thursday’s debate,” Leavitt said. “Yet President Trump is still willing to go into this 3-1 fight to bring his winning message to the American people, and he will win.”

In a statement released on Monday, CNN defended Tapper and Bash, vaguely stating that the two are “well respected veteran journalists who have covered politics for more than five decades combined.”

“They have extensive experience moderating major political debates, including CNN’s Republican Presidential Primary Debate this cycle,” a rep for the network said. “There are no two people better equipped to co-moderate a substantial and fact-based discussion, and we look forward to the debate on June 27 in Atlanta.” 

Stay informed! Receive breaking news blasts directly to your inbox for free. Subscribe here. https://www.oann.com/alerts

[dankusner]

NPR editor resigns after response to critical essay

A senior business editor at National Public Radio has resigned after writing an essay for an online news site published last week accusing the outlet of a liberal bias in its coverage.

In a Wednesday post on X, Uri Berliner included a statement in what he said was his resignation letter to NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher.

'I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years,' Berliner wrote in the post. 'I don’t support calls to defund NPR. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.'

On Friday, Berliner was suspended for five days without pay, NPR confirmed Tuesday, a week after his essay in the Free Press, an online news publication, where he argued the network had 'lost America’s trust' and allowed a 'liberal bent' to influence its coverage, causing the outlet to steadily lose credibility with audiences.

Berliner’s essay also angered many of his colleagues and exposed Maher, who started as NPR’s CEO in March, to a string of attacks from conservatives over her past social media posts.

NPR reported the essay reignited the criticism that many prominent conservatives have long leveled against NPR and prompted newsroom leadership to implement monthly internal reviews of the network’s coverage.

Neither NPR nor Maher have not yet publicly responded to Berliner’s resignation, but Maher refuted his claims in a statement Monday to NPR.

'In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen,' Maher said. 'What matters is NPR’s work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public. NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests.'

In response to the essay, many prominent conservatives and Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, launched renewed attacks at NPR for what they perceive as partisan coverage.

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo in particular targeted Maher for messages she posted to social media years before joining the network – her first at a news organization.

Among the posts singled out were a 2020 tweet that called Trump racist.

Trump reiterated on his social media platform, Truth Social, his long-standing argument that NPR’s government funding should be rescinded.

Berliner expressed no regrets about publishing the essay in an interview with NPR, adding that he tried repeatedly to make his concerns over NPR’s coverage known to news leaders.

'I love NPR and feel it’s a national trust,' he said 'We have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they’re capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners.'

I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years.

Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.

Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.

Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, says he started sounding the alarm internally when he noticed a bias creep into the network’s coverage. (Pete Kiehart for The Free Press)

You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite.

It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far

off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.

I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.

So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back.

As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed.

We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.

In recent years, however, that has changed.

Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

But it hasn’t.

For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon.

Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable.

No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large.

Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal.

We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.

That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience.

But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump.

As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.)

But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting.

At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse.

By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia.

During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion.

The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.

What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.

Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.

In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.

When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.

Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin—supporting the hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.

The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists.

But that wasn’t the case.

When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded.

Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive. Fauci and Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential scientific paper known as “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Its authors wrote they didn’t believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t die. And understandably so. In private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his colleagues, “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.”

Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.

Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that “the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.”

When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.

NPR editor Uri Berliner tells how the network lost America's trust in The Free Press Uri Berliner near his home in Washington, D.C., on April 5, 2024. (Photo by Pete Kiehart for The Free Press) I’m offering three examples of widely followed stories where I believe we faltered. Our coverage is out there in the public domain. Anyone can read or listen for themselves and make their own judgment. But to truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step inside the organization.

You need to start with former CEO John Lansing. Lansing came to NPR in 2019 from the federally funded agency that oversees Voice of America. Like others who have served in the top job at NPR, he was hired primarily to raise money and to ensure good working relations with hundreds of member stations that acquire NPR’s programming.

After working mostly behind the scenes, Lansing became a more visible and forceful figure after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. It was an anguished time in the newsroom, personally and professionally so for NPR staffers. Floyd’s murder, captured on video, changed both the conversation and the daily operations at NPR.

Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death, it would have been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s—in law enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way.

But the message from the top was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.

“When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,” Lansing wrote in a companywide article, “we can be agents of change. Listening and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for this.”

And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”

He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.

These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.

They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).

All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If, as NPR’s internal website suggested, the groups were simply a “great way to meet like-minded colleagues” and “help new employees feel included,” it would have been one thing.

But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR’s union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.

In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.

Conflicts between workers and bosses, between labor and management, are common in workplaces. NPR has had its share. But what’s notable is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.

And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.

Today on Honestly Bari talks to Uri about this essay and his decision to publish it. Listen here:

There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.

The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.

More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the “intersectional” lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.

For nearly all my career, working at NPR has been a source of great pride. It’s a privilege to work in the newsroom at a crown jewel of American journalism. My colleagues are congenial and hardworking.

I can’t count the number of times I would meet someone, describe what I do, and they’d say, “I love NPR!”

And they wouldn’t stop there. They would mention their favorite host or one of those “driveway moments” where a story was so good you’d stay in your car until it finished.

It still happens, but often now the trajectory of the conversation is different. After the initial “I love NPR,” there’s a pause and a person will acknowledge, “I don’t listen as much as I used to.” Or, with some chagrin: “What’s happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?”

In recent years I’ve struggled to answer that question. Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.

So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.

In a follow-up email exchange, a top NPR news executive told me that she had been “skewered” for bringing up diversity of thought when she arrived at NPR. So, she said, “I want to be careful how we discuss this publicly.”

For years, I have been persistent. When I believe our coverage has gone off the rails, I have written regular emails to top news leaders, sometimes even having one-on-one sessions with them. On March 10, 2022, I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it didn’t even use the word gay. I pushed to set the record straight, and wrote another time to ask why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate—Latinx. On March 31, 2022, I was invited to a managers’ meeting to present my observations.

Throughout these exchanges, no one has ever trashed me. That’s not the NPR way. People are polite. But nothing changes. So I’ve become a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes heartbreaking.

Even so, out of frustration, on November 6, 2022, I wrote to the captain of ship North Star—CEO John Lansing—about the lack of viewpoint diversity and asked if we could have a conversation about it. I got no response, so I followed up four days later. He said he would appreciate hearing my perspective and copied his assistant to set up a meeting. On December 15, the morning of the meeting, Lansing’s assistant wrote back to cancel our conversation because he was under the weather. She said he was looking forward to chatting and a new meeting invitation would be sent. But it never came.

I won’t speculate about why our meeting never happened. Being CEO of NPR is a demanding job with lots of constituents and headaches to deal with. But what’s indisputable is that no one in a C-suite or upper management position has chosen to deal with the lack of viewpoint diversity at NPR and how that affects our journalism.

Which is a shame. Because for all the emphasis on our North Star, NPR’s news audience in recent years has become less diverse, not more so. Back in 2011, our audience leaned a bit to the left but roughly reflected America politically; now, the audience is cramped into a smaller, progressive silo.

Despite all the resources we’d devoted to building up our news audience among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In 2023, according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is 14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.

These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren’t conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio—where for years NPR had no peer—is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from.

Even within our diminished audience, there’s evidence of trouble at the most basic level: trust.

In February, our audience insights team sent an email proudly announcing that we had a higher trustworthy score than CNN or The New York Times. But the research from Harris Poll is hardly reassuring. It found that “3-in-10 audience members familiar with NPR said they associate NPR with the characteristic ‘trustworthy.’ ” Only in a world where media credibility has completely imploded would a 3-in-10 trustworthy score be something to boast about.

With declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an audience that has become less diverse over time, the trajectory for NPR is not promising. Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we’re doing, hoping it will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we’ve gone wrong. News organizations don’t go in for that kind of reckoning. But there’s a good reason for NPR to be the first: we’re the ones with the word public in our name.

Despite our missteps at NPR, defunding isn’t the answer. As the country becomes more fractured, there’s still a need for a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith. Defunding, as a rebuke from Congress, wouldn’t change the journalism at NPR. That needs to come from within.

A few weeks ago, NPR welcomed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who’s been a leader in tech. She doesn’t have a news background, which could be an asset given where things stand. I’ll be rooting for her. It’s a tough job. Her first rule could be simple enough: don’t tell people how to think. It could even be the new North Star.

Uri Berliner is a senior business editor and reporter at NPR. His work has been recognized with a Peabody Award, a Loeb Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and a Society of Professional Journalists New America Award, among others. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @uberliner.

To support our mission of independent journalism, become a Free Press subscriber today:

[arpov-blog-blog]

..."2 More Polls Have Biden Up/Other 2024 Election Notes - NPR/Marist, a highly respected poll, has Biden up 50-48 today, and a new Big Village poll came in at 42-40. Both showed Biden gains from their last poll. With these new polls there are now 14 polls taken since late February showing Biden leads (via 538):

50-48 NPR/Marist

42-40 Big Village

44-42 Morning Consult (this week)

48-45 Quinnipiac

44-43 Noble Predictive

44-43 Economist/YouGov (March 19)

47-45 FAU/Mainstreet

44-43 Morning Consult (March 11)

46-45 Public Policy Research

50-48 Ipsos/Reuters

45-44 Civiqs

47-44 Kaiser Family Foundation

51-49 Emerson

43-42 TIPP

The latest Harris X poll, which has consistently had Trump up by 5-6 points, now has the race even at 50-50. As I wrote yesterday, after the GOP’s corruption of polling in 2022, I don’t pay much attention to polls funded by Republican-aligned groups like the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, and neither should you.

In case you need it here are some recent posts, pods and videos of why I am optimistic about winning this November.

In GOP primary voting last night Trump’s opponents once again broke 20% in CT, NY and WI. It’s a continued sign of his struggle to bring his party together, of what I call the splintering of the GOP. The opposition to Trump inside the GOP is unprecedented in the last several generations of American politics - Romney, Cheney, former staff, etc. Haley has still not endorsed, and Trump has said he doesn’t want her. Whereas what I think is happening inside our party is a spirited and important debate over policy. No Dem official is holding back their endorsement of Biden. The party is unified as we head into the general election, with work to do, no doubt, but building and maintaining winning coalitions is always hard and challenging, and will be again this year. To be very clear what is happening inside our parties are not the same, not mirror images of one another, and attempts to paint them as similar are misleading and false. There is no significant and organized opposition to Biden inside the Dem Party as there is inside the GOP.

Polling in the Maryland Senate race has begun coming back to Earth with Former GOP Governor Larry Hogan only up 1 over David Trone (43-42) and 4 over Angela Alsobrooks (44-40) in new local polling. While we have work to do here in Maryland, we should win here, with either candidate.

Ruben Gallego just reported raising $7.5m in the first quarter - a really big number! Thanks to all of you who have helped critical campaign. From the story:

“Thanks to the support of hundreds of thousands of small-dollar donors who have chipped in what they could to help elect Ruben Gallego, we are building the infrastructure to win this November,” Nichole Johnson, Gallego’s campaign manager, said in a press release. “Arizonans are ready to elect a senator who will defend abortion rights, cut costs for families and take care of our veterans — and that’s exactly what Ruben will do.”

Ruben texted me yesterday thanking all of us for the significant support we’ve showed for his campaign so far - great work all."

[pashterlengkap]

GOP members of congress are badmouthing Rep. George Santos to the press

Republican congressmen are badmouthing gay Rep. George Santos (R-NY) as he faces increasing scrutiny over his questionable recent statements and possible campaign finance violations. On Monday, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) said, “[Santos] appears to be a bunny boiler,” a reference to a murderous stalker who boils a pet rabbit alive in the 1987 film Fatal Attraction. “He’s nutty as a fruitcake,” Kennedy continued, saying that he would kick Santos out of office if criminal allegations against the freshman legislator prove true. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) took aim at his fellow Republican Rep. George Santos, calling the freshman congressman 'nutty as a fruitcake' and a 'bunny boiler' pic.twitter.com/zShBlgFg7M— NowThis (@nowthisnews) January 24, 2023 On Tuesday, Santos responded to Kennedy’s comment, writing via Twitter, “I am saddened that a distinguished senator from the GOP, whom I’ve respected would use such derogatory language against me. Language like that is hurtful and divisive, and has no place in Congress.” I am saddened that a distinguished senator from the GOP, whom I've respected would use such derogatory language against me. Language like that is hurtful and divisive, and has no place in Congress. https://t.co/O7gA2zmZRo— Rep. George Santos (@RepSantosNY03) January 24, 2023 However, Kennedy isn’t the only Republican criticizing Santos. On Sunday, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the newly appointed Chairperson of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee said on CNN’s State of the Union, “Look, he’s a bad guy.” Comer said he hadn’t introduced himself to Santos “because, you know, it’s pretty despicable the lies that he tells.” Comer said that it’s up to Santos whether or not to resign (Santos has said he won’t). However, Comer added, “Certainly I don’t approve of how he made his way to Congress.” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), Chairperson of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, said of Santos, “I don’t know how he got through the process, being such an imposter. I don’t know why his opponent didn’t bring this out in the election.” Six Republican congresspeople from New York and the Nassau County Republican Party have all called on Santos to resign. Santos skipped a Monday night White House event welcoming congressional freshmen, hosted by President Joe Biden (D). Recently, Santos admitted to being a drag queen after initially denying it. More recently, Santos claimed he was the victim of an assassination attempt. He also claimed that, in summer 2021, a robber took his shoes in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue, one of New York City’s busiest streets, but he has yet to produce a police report confirming this. Santos also claimed in 2020 that he met deceased child trafficker and billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. Santos said that he believed Epstein could still be alive, even though Epstein died in August 2019. In addition to numerous falsehoods in his personal and work history, Santos is under an ethics investigation for possibly violating campaign finance laws. He recently admitted that large amounts of money he claimed were “personal” loans to his campaign came from elsewhere. He also been accused of check fraud in Brazil and of stealing money designated for the medical care of a veteran’s dying dog. There seem to be no public records confirming that Santos is married to the man he calls his husband. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) recently said, “[Santos is] almost a joke; he’s become a punchline. He’s outrageous, and there’s no way he should be allowed to serve.” http://dlvr.it/ShSD8C

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: I enjoyed reading your posts about Napoleon’s death and it’s quite timely given its the 200th anniversary of his death this year in May. I was wondering, because you know a lot about military history (your served right? That’s cool to fly combat helicopters) and you live in France but aren’t French, what your take was on Napoleon and how do the French view him? Do they hail him as a hero or do they like others see him like a Hitler or a Stalin? Do you see him as a hero or a villain of history?

5 May 1821 was a memorable date because Napoleon, one of the most iconic figures in world history, died while in bitter exile on a remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Napoleon Bonaparte, as you know rose from obscure soldier to a kind of new Caesar, and yet he remains a uniquely controversial figure to this day especially in France. You raise interesting questions about Napoleon and his legacy. If I may reframe your questions in another way. Should we think of him as a flawed but essentially heroic visionary who changed Europe for the better? Or was he simply a military dictator, whose cult of personality and lust for power set a template for the likes of Hitler? 

However one chooses to answer this question can we just - to get this out of the way - simply and definitively say that Napoleon was not Hitler. Not even close. No offence intended to you but this is just dumb ahistorical thinking and it’s a lazy lie. This comparison was made by some in the horrid aftermath of the Second World War but only held little currency for only a short time thereafter. Obviously that view didn’t exist before Hitler in the 19th Century and these days I don’t know any serious historian who takes that comparison seriously.

I confess I don’t have a definitive answer if he was a hero or a villain one way or the other because Napoleon has really left a very complicated legacy. It really depends on where you’re coming from.

As a staunch Brit I do take pride in Britain’s victorious war against Napoleonic France - and in a good natured way rubbing it in the noses of French friends at every opportunity I get because it’s in our cultural DNA and it’s bloody good fun (why else would we make Waterloo train station the London terminus of the Eurostar international rail service from its opening in 1994? Or why hang a huge gilded portrait of the Duke of Wellington as the first thing that greets any visitor to the residence of the British ambassador at the British Embassy?). On a personal level I take special pride in knowing my family ancestors did their bit on the battlefield to fight against Napoleon during those tumultuous times. However, as an ex-combat veteran who studied Napoleonic warfare with fan girl enthusiasm, I have huge respect for Napoleon as a brilliant military commander. And to makes things more weird, as a Francophile resident of who loves living and working in France (and my partner is French) I have a grudging but growing regard for Napoleon’s political and cultural legacy, especially when I consider the current dross of political mediocrity on both the political left and the right. So for me it’s a complicated issue how I feel about Napoleon, the man, the soldier, and the political leader.

If it’s not so straightforward for me to answer the for/against Napoleon question then it It’s especially true for the French, who even after 200 years, still have fiercely divided opinions about Napoleon and his legacy - but intriguingly, not always in clear cut ways.

I only have to think about my French neighbours in my apartment building to see how divisive Napoleon the man and his legacy is. Over the past year or so of the Covid lockdown we’ve all gotten to know each other better and we help each other. Over the Covid year we’ve gathered in the inner courtyard for a buffet and just lifted each other spirits up.

One of my neighbours, a crusty old ex-general in the army who has an enviable collection of military history books that I steal, liberate, borrow, often discuss military figures in history like Napoleon over our regular games of chess and a glass of wine. He is from very old aristocracy of the ancien regime and whose family suffered at the hands of ‘madame guillotine’ during the French Revolution. They lost everything. He has mixed emotions about Napoleon himself as an old fashioned monarchist. As a military man he naturally admires the man and the military genius but he despises the secularisation that the French Revolution ushered in as well as the rise of the haute bourgeois as middle managers and bureaucrats by the displacement of the aristocracy.

Another retired widowed neighbour I am close to, and with whom I cook with often and discuss art, is an active arts patron and ex-art gallery owner from a very wealthy family that came from the new Napoleonic aristocracy - ie the aristocracy of the Napoleonic era that Napoleon put in place - but she is dismissive of such titles and baubles. She’s a staunch Republican but is happy to concede she is grateful for Napoleon in bringing order out of chaos. She recognises her own ambivalence when she says she dislikes him for reintroducing slavery in the French colonies but also praises him for firmly supporting Paris’s famed Comédie-Française of which she was a past patron.

Another French neighbour, a senior civil servant in the Elysée, is quite dismissive of Napoleon as a war monger but is grudgingly grateful for civil institutions and schools that Napoleon established and which remain in place today.

My other neighbours - whether they be French families or foreign expats like myself - have similarly divisive and complicated attitudes towards Napoleon.

In 2010 an opinion poll in France asked who was the most important man in French history. Napoleon came second, behind General Charles de Gaulle, who led France from exile during the German occupation in World War II and served as a postwar president.

The split in French opinion is closely mirrored in political circles. The divide is generally down political party lines. On the left, there's the 'black legend' of Bonaparte as an ogre. On the right, there is the 'golden legend' of a strong leader who created durable institutions.

Jacques-Olivier Boudon, a history professor at Paris-Sorbonne University and president of the Napoléon Institute, once explained at a talk I attended that French public opinion has always remained deeply divided over Napoleon, with, on the one hand, those who admire the great man, the conqueror, the military leader and, on the other, those who see him as a bloodthirsty tyrant, the gravedigger of the revolution. Politicians in France, Boudon observed, rarely refer to Napoleon for fear of being accused of authoritarian temptations, or not being good Republicans.

On the left-wing of French politics, former prime minister Lionel Jospin penned a controversial best selling book entitled “the Napoleonic Evil” in which he accused the emperor of “perverting the ideas of the Revolution” and imposing “a form of extreme domination”, “despotism” and “a police state” on the French people. He wrote Napoleon was "an obvious failure" - bad for France and the rest of Europe. When he was booted out into final exile, France was isolated, beaten, occupied, dominated, hated and smaller than before. What's more, Napoleon smothered the forces of emancipation awakened by the French and American revolutions and enabled the survival and restoration of monarchies. Some of the legacies with which Napoleon is credited, including the Civil Code, the comprehensive legal system replacing a hodgepodge of feudal laws, were proposed during the revolution, Jospin argued, though he acknowledges that Napoleon actually delivered them, but up to a point, "He guaranteed some principles of the revolution and, at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it," For instance, Napoleon reintroduced slavery in French colonies, revived a system that allowed the rich to dodge conscription in the military and did nothing to advance gender equality.

At the other end of the spectrum have been former right-wing prime minister Dominique de Villepin, an aristocrat who was once fancied as a future President, a passionate collector of Napoleonic memorabilia, and author of several works on the subject. As a Napoleonic enthusiast he tells a different story. Napoleon was a saviour of France. If there had been no Napoleon, the Republic would not have survived. Advocates like de Villepin point to Napoleon’s undoubted achievements: the Civil Code, the Council of State, the Bank of France, the National Audit office, a centralised and coherent administrative system, lycées, universities, centres of advanced learning known as école normale, chambers of commerce, the metric system, and an honours system based on merit (which France has to this day). He restored the Catholic faith as the state faith but allowed for the freedom of religion for other faiths including Protestantism and Judaism. These were ambitions unachieved during the chaos of the revolution. As it is, these Napoleonic institutions continue to function and underpin French society. Indeed, many were copied in countries conquered by Napoleon, such as Italy, Germany and Poland, and laid the foundations for the modern state.

Back in 2014, French politicians and institutions in particular were nervous in marking the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's exile. My neighbours and other French friends remember that the commemorations centred around the Chateau de Fontainebleau, the traditional home of the kings of France and was the scene where Napoleon said farewell to the Old Guard in the "White Horse Courtyard" (la cour du Cheval Blanc) at the Palace of Fontainebleau. (The courtyard has since been renamed the "Courtyard of Goodbyes".) By all accounts the occasion was very moving. The 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau stripped Napoleon of his powers (but not his title as Emperor of the French) and sent him into exile on Elba. The cost of the Fontainebleau "farewell" and scores of related events over those three weekends was shouldered not by the central government in Paris but by the local château, a historic monument and UNESCO World Heritage site, and the town of Fontainebleau.

While the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution that toppled the monarchy and delivered thousands to death by guillotine was officially celebrated in 1989, Napoleonic anniversaries are neither officially marked nor celebrated. For example, over a decade ago, the president and prime minister - at the time, Jacques Chirac and Dominque de Villepin - boycotted a ceremony marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon's greatest military victory. Both men were known admirers of Napoleon and yet political calculation and optics (as media spin doctors say) stopped them from fully honouring Napoleon’s crowning military glory.

Optics is everything. The division of opinion in France is perhaps best reflected in the fact that, in a city not shy of naming squares and streets after historical figures, there is not a single “Boulevard Napoleon” or “Place Napoleon” in Paris. On the streets of Paris, there are just two statues of Napoleon. One stands beneath the clock tower at Les Invalides (a military hospital), the other atop a column in the Place Vendôme. Napoleon's red marble tomb, in a crypt under the Invalides dome, is magnificent, perhaps because his remains were interred there during France's Second Empire, when his nephew, Napoleon III, was on the throne.

There are no squares, nor places, nor boulevards named for Napoleon but as far as I know there is one narrow street, the rue Bonaparte, running from the Luxembourg Gardens to the River Seine in the old Latin Quarter. And, that, too, is thanks to Napoleon III. For many, and I include myself, it’s a poor return by the city to the man who commissioned some of its most famous monuments, including the Arc de Triomphe and the Pont des Arts over the River Seine.

It's almost as if Napoleon Bonaparte is not part of the national story.

How Napoleon fits into that national story is something historians, French and non-French, have been grappling with ever since Napoleon died. The plain fact is Napoleon divides historians, what precisely he represents is deeply ambiguous and his political character is the subject of heated controversy. It’s hard for historians to sift through archival documents to make informed judgements and still struggle to separate the man from the myth.

One proof of this myth is in his immortality. After Hitler’s death, there was mostly an embarrassed silence; after Stalin’s, little but denunciation. But when Napoleon died on St Helena in 1821, much of Europe and the Americas could not help thinking of itself as a post-Napoleonic generation. His presence haunts the pages of Stendhal and Alfred de Vigny. In a striking and prescient phrase, Chateaubriand prophesied the “despotism of his memory”, a despotism of the fantastical that in many ways made Romanticism possible and that continues to this day.

The raw material for the future Napoleon myth was provided by one of his St Helena confidants, the Comte de las Cases, whose account of conversations with the great man came out shortly after his death and ran in repeated editions throughout the century. De las Cases somehow metamorphosed the erstwhile dictator into a herald of liberty, the emperor into a slayer of dynasties rather than the founder of his own. To the “great man” school of history Napoleon was grist to their mill, and his meteoric rise redefined the meaning of heroism in the modern world.

The Marxists, for all their dislike of great men, grappled endlessly with the meaning of the 18th Brumaire; indeed one of France’s most eminent Marxist historians, George Lefebvre, wrote what arguably remains the finest of all biographies of him.

It was on this already vast Napoleon literature, a rich terrain for the scholar of ideas, that the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl was lecturing in 1940 when he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald. There he composed what became one of the classics of historiography, a seminal book entitled Napoleon: For and Against, which charted how generations of intellectuals had happily served up one Napoleon after another. Like those poor souls who crowded the lunatic asylums of mid-19th century France convinced that they were Napoleon, generations of historians and novelists simply could not get him out of their head.

The debate runs on today no less intensely than in the past. Post-Second World War Marxists would argue that he was not, in fact, revolutionary at all. Eric Hobsbawm, a notable British Marxist historian, argued that ‘Most-perhaps all- of his ideas were anticipated by the Revolution’ and that Napoleon’s sole legacy was to twist the ideals of the French Revolution, and make them ‘more conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian’.

This contrasts deeply with the view William Doyle holds of Napoleon. Doyle described Bonaparte as ‘the Revolution incarnate’ and saw Bonaparte’s humbling of Europe’s other powers, the ‘Ancien Regimes’, as a necessary precondition for the birth of the modern world. Whatever one thinks of Napoleon’s character, his sharp intellect is difficult to deny. Even Paul Schroeder, one of Napoleon’s most scathing critics, who condemned his conduct of foreign policy as a ‘criminal enterprise’ never denied Napoleon’s intellect. Schroder concluded that Bonaparte ‘had an extraordinary capacity for planning, decision making, memory, work, mastery of detail and leadership’.  The question of whether Napoleon used his genius for the betterment or the detriment of the world, is the heart of the debate which surrounds him.

France's foremost Napoleonic scholar, Jean Tulard, put forward the thesis that Bonaparte was the architect of modern France. "And I would say also pâtissier [a cake and pastry maker] because of the administrative millefeuille that we inherited." Oddly enough, in North America the multilayered mille-feuille cake is called ‘a napoleon.’ Tulard’s works are essential reading of how French historians have come to tackle the question of Napoleon’s legacy. He takes the view that if Napoleon had not crushed a Royalist rebellion and seized power in 1799, the French monarchy and feudalism would have returned, Tulard has written. "Like Cincinnatus in ancient Rome, Napoleon wanted a dictatorship of public salvation. He gets all the power, and, when the project is finished, he returns to his plough." In the event, the old order was never restored in France. When Louis XVIII became emperor in 1814, he served as a constitutional monarch.

In England, until recently the views on Napoleon have traditionally less charitable and more cynical. Professor Christopher Clark, the notable Cambridge University European historian, has written. "Napoleon was not a French patriot - he was first a Corsican and later an imperial figure, a journey in which he bypassed any deep affiliation with the French nation," Clark believed Napoleon’s relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent.

Did he stabilise the revolutionary state or shut it down mercilessly? Clark believes Napoleon seems to have done both. Napoleon rejected democracy, he suffocated the representative dimension of politics, and he created a culture of courtly display. A month before crowning himself emperor, Napoleon sought approval for establishing an empire from the French in a plebiscite; 3,572,329 voted in favour, 2,567 against. If that landslide resembles an election in North Korea, well, this was no secret ballot. Each ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was recorded, along with the name and address of the voter. Evidently, an overwhelming majority knew which side their baguette was buttered on.

His extravagant coronation in Notre Dame in December 1804 cost 8.5 million francs (€6.5 million or $8.5 million in today's money). He made his brothers, sisters and stepchildren kings, queens, princes and princesses and created a Napoleonic aristocracy numbering 3,500. By any measure, it was a bizarre progression for someone often described as ‘a child of the Revolution.’ By crowning himself emperor, the genuine European kings who surrounded him were not convinced. Always a warrior first, he tried to represent himself as a Caesar, and he wears a Roman toga on the bas-reliefs in his tomb. His coronation crown, a laurel wreath made of gold, sent the same message. His icon, the eagle, was also borrowed from Rome. But Caesar's legitimacy depended on military victories. Ultimately, Napoleon suffered too many defeats.

These days Napoleon the man and his times remain very much in fashion and we are living through something of a new golden age of Napoleonic literature. Those historians who over the past decade or so have had fun denouncing him as the first totalitarian dictator seem to have it all wrong: no angel, to be sure, he ended up doing far more at far less cost than any modern despot. In his widely praised 2014 biography, Napoleon the Great, Andrew Roberts writes: “The ideas that underpin our modern world - meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on - were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman empire.”

Roberts partly bases his historical judgement on newly released historical documents about Napoleon that were only available in the past decade and has proved to be a boon for all Napoleonic scholars. Newly released 33,000 letters Napoleon wrote that still survive are now used extensively to illustrate the astonishing capacity that Napoleon had for compartmentalising his mind - he laid down the rules for a girls’ boarding school on the eve of the battle of Borodino, for example, and the regulations for Paris’s Comédie-Française while camped in the Kremlin. They also show Napoleon’s extraordinary capacity for micromanaging his empire: he would write to the prefect of Genoa telling him not to allow his mistress into his box at the theatre, and to a corporal of the 13th Line regiment warning him not to drink so much.

For me to have my own perspective on Napoleon is tough. The problem is that nothing with Napoleon is simple, and almost every aspect of his personality is a maddening paradox. He was a military genius who led disastrous campaigns. He was a liberal progressive who reinstated slavery in the French colonies. And take the French Revolution, which came just before Napoleon’s rise to power, his relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent. Did he stabilise it or shut it down? I agree with those British and French historians who now believe Napoleon seems to have done both.

On the one hand, Napoleon did bring order to a nation that had been drenched in blood in the years after the Revolution. The French people had endured the crackdown known as the 'Reign of Terror', which saw so many marched to the guillotine, as well as political instability, corruption, riots and general violence. Napoleon’s iron will managed to calm the chaos. But he also rubbished some of the core principles of the Revolution. A nation which had boldly brought down the monarchy had to watch as Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, with more power and pageantry than Louis XVI ever had. He also installed his relatives as royals across Europe, creating a new aristocracy. In the words of French politician and author Lionel Jospin, 'He guaranteed some principles of the Revolution and at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it.'

He also had a feared henchman in the form of Joseph Fouché, who ran a secret police network which instilled dread in the population. Napoleon’s spies were everywhere, stifling political opposition. Dozens of newspapers were suppressed or shut down. Books had to be submitted for approval to the Commission of Revision, which sounds like something straight out of George Orwell. Some would argue Hitler and Stalin followed this playbook perfectly. But here come the contradictions. Napoleon also championed education for all, founding a network of schools. He championed the rights of the Jews. In the territories conquered by Napoleon, laws which kept Jews cooped up in ghettos were abolished. 'I will never accept any proposals that will obligate the Jewish people to leave France,' he once said, 'because to me the Jews are the same as any other citizen in our country.'

He also, crucially, developed the Napoleonic Code, a set of laws which replaced the messy, outdated feudal laws that had been used before. The Napoleonic Code clearly laid out civil laws and due processes, establishing a society based on merit and hard work, rather than privilege. It was rolled out far beyond France, and indisputably helped to modernise Europe. While it certainly had its flaws – women were ignored by its reforms, and were essentially regarded as the property of men – the Napoleonic Code is often brandished as the key evidence for Napoleon’s progressive credentials. In the words of historian Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon the Great, 'the ideas that underpin our modern world… were championed by Napoleon'.

What about Napoleon’s battlefield exploits? If anything earns comparisons with Hitler, it’s Bonaparte’s apparent appetite for conquest. His forces tore down republics across Europe, and plundered works of art, much like the Nazis would later do. A rampant imperialist, Napoleon gleefully grabbed some of the greatest masterpieces of the Renaissance, and allegedly boasted, 'the whole of Rome is in Paris.'

Napoleon has long enjoyed a stellar reputation as a field commander – his capacities as a military strategist, his ability to read a battle, the painstaking detail with which he made sure that he cold muster a larger force than his adversary or took maximum advantage of the lie of the land – these are stuff of the military legend that has built up around him. It is not without its critics, of course, especially among those who have worked intensively on the later imperial campaigns, in the Peninsula, in Russia, or in the final days of the Empire at Waterloo.

Doubts about his judgment, and allegations of rashness, have been raised in the context of some of his victories, too, most notably, perhaps, at Marengo. But overall his reputation remains largely intact, and his military campaigns have been taught in the curricula of military academies from Saint-Cyr to Sandhurst, alongside such great tacticians as Alexander the Great and Hannibal.

Historians may query his own immodest opinion that his presence on the battlefield was worth an extra forty thousand men to his cause, but it is clear that when he was not present (as he was not for most of the campaign in Spain) the French were wont to struggle. Napoleon understood the value of speed and surprise, but also of structures and loyalties. He reformed the army by introducing the corps system, and he understood military aspirations, rewarding his men with medals and honours; all of which helped ensure that he commanded exceptional levels of personal loyalty from his troops.

Yet, I do find it hard to side with the more staunch defenders of Napoleon who say his reputation as a war monger is to some extent due to British propaganda at the time. They will point out that the Napoleonic Wars, far from being Napoleon’s fault, were just a continuation of previous conflicts that arose thanks to the French Revolution. Napoleon, according to this analysis, inherited a messy situation, and his only real crime was to be very good at defeating enemies on the battlefield. I think that is really pushing things too far. I mean deciding to invade Spain and then Russia were his decisions to invade and conquer.

He was, by any measure, a genius of war. Even his nemesis the Duke of Wellington, when asked who the greatest general of his time was, replied: 'In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.'

I will qualify all this and agree that Napoleon’s Russian campaign has been rightly held up as a fatal folly which killed so many of his men, but this blunder – epic as it was – should not be compared to Hitler’s wars of evil aggression. Most historians will agree that comparing the two men is horribly flattering to Hitler - a man fuelled by visceral, genocidal hate - and demeaning to Napoleon, who was a product of Enlightenment thinking and left a legacy that in many ways improved Europe.

Napoleon was, of course, no libertarian, and no pluralist. He would tolerate no opposition to his rule, and though it was politicians and civilians who imposed his reforms, the army was never far behind. But comparisons with twentieth-century dictators are well wide of the mark. While he insisted on obedience from those he administered, his ideology was based not on division or hatred, but on administrative efficiency and submission to the law. And the state he believed in remained stubbornly secular.

In Catholic southern Europe, of course, that was not an approach with which it was easy to acquiesce; and disorder, insurgency and partisan attacks can all be counted among the results. But these were principles on which the Emperor would not and could not give ground. If he had beliefs they were not religious or spiritual beliefs, but the secular creed of a man who never forgot that he owed both his military career and his meteoric political rise to the French Revolution, and who never quite abandoned, amidst the monarchical symbolism and the court pomp of the Empire, the republican dreams of his youth. When he claimed, somewhat ambiguously, after the coup of 18 Brumaire that `the Revolution was over’, he almost certainly meant that the principles of 1789 had at last been consummated, and that the continuous cycle of violence of the 1790s could therefore come to an end.

When the Empire was declared in 1804, the wording, again, might seem curious, the French being informed that the `Republic would henceforth be ruled by an Emperor’. Napoleon might be a dictator, but a part at least of him remained a son of the Enlightenment.

The arguments over Napoleon’s status will continue - and that in itself is a testament to the power of one of the most complex figures ever to straddle the world’s stage.

Will the fascination with Napoleon continue for another 200 years?

In France, at least, enthusiasm looks set to diminish. Napoleon and his exploits are scarcely mentioned in French schools anymore. Stéphane Guégan, curator of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which, among other First Empire artworks, houses a plaster model of Napoleon dressed as a Roman emperor astride a horse, has described France's fascination with him as ‘a national illness.’ He believes that the people who met him were fascinated by his charm. And today, even the most hostile to Napoleon also face this charm. So there is a difficulty to apprehend the duality of this character. As he wrote, “He was born from the revolution, he extended and finished it, and after 1804 he turns into a despot, a dictator.”

In France, Guégan aptly observes, there is a kind of nostalgia, not for dictatorship but for strong leaders. "Our age is suffering a lack of imagination and political utopia,"

Here I think Guégan is onto something. Napoleon’s stock has always risen or fallen according to the vicissitudes of world events and fortunes of France itself.

In the past, history was the study of great men and women. Today the focus of teaching is on trends, issues and movements. France in 1800 is no longer about Louis XVI and Napoleon Bonaparte. It's about the industrial revolution. Man does not make history. History makes men. Or does it? The study of history makes a mug out of those with such simple ideological driven conceits.

For two hundred years on, the French still cannot agree on whether Napoleon was a hero or a villain as he has swung like a pendulum according to the gravitational pull of historical events and forces.

The question I keep asking of myself and also to French friends with whom I discuss such things is what kind of Napoleon does our generation need?

Thanks for your question.

[the-daily-tizzy]

Men, like nations, think they’re eternal. What man in his 20s or 30s doesn’t believe, at least subconsciously, that he’ll live forever? In the springtime of youth, an endless summer beckons. As you pass 70, it’s harder to hide from reality. Nations also have seasons: Imagine a Roman of the 2nd century contemplating an empire that stretched from Britain to the Near East, thinking: This will endure forever.

Forever was about 500 years, give or take. France was pivotal in the 17th and 18th centuries; now the land of Charles Martel is on its way to becoming part of the Muslim ummah. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the sun never set on the British empire; now Albion exists in perpetual twilight. Its 95-year-old sovereign is a fitting symbol for a nation in terminal decline. In the 1980s, Japan seemed poised to buy the world. Business schools taught Japanese management techniques. Today, its birth rate is so low and its population aging so rapidly that an industry has sprung up to remove the remains of elderly Japanese who die alone. I was born in 1942, almost at the midpoint of the 20th century – the American century. America’s prestige and influence were never greater. Thanks to the ‘Greatest Generation,’ we won a World War fought throughout most of Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. We reduced Germany to rubble and put the rising sun to bed. It set the stage for almost half a century of unprecedented prosperity. We stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia and fought international terrorism. We rebuilt our enemies and lavished foreign aid on much of the world. We built skyscrapers and rockets to the moon. We conquered Polio and now COVID. We explored the mysteries of the Universe and the wonders of DNA…the blueprint of life. But where is the glory that once was Rome? America has moved from a relatively free economy to socialism – which has worked so well NOWHERE in the world. We’ve gone from a republican government guided by a constitution to a regime of revolving elites. We have less freedom with each passing year. Like a signpost to the coming reign of terror, the cancel culture is everywhere. We’ve traded the American Revolution for the Cultural Revolution. The pathetic creature in the White House is an empty vessel filled by his handlers. At the G-7 Summit, ‘Dr. Jill’ had to lead him like a child. In 1961, when we were young and vigorous, our leader was too. Now a feeble nation is technically led by the oldest man to ever serve in the presidency. We can’t defend our borders, our history (including monuments to past greatness), or our streets. Our cities have become anarchist playgrounds. We are a nation of dependents, mendicants, and misplaced charity. Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels. The president of the United States can’t even quote the beginning of the Declaration of Independence (‘You know — The Thing’) correctly. Ivy League graduates routinely fail history tests that 5th graders could pass a generation ago. Crime rates soar and we blame the 2nd Amendment and slash police budgets. Our culture is certifiably insane. Men who think they’re women. People who fight racism by seeking to convince members of one race that they’re inherently evil, and others that they are perpetual victims. A psychiatrist lecturing at Yale said she fantasizes about ‘unloading a revolver into the head of any white person.’ We slaughter the unborn in the name of freedom, while our birth rate dips lower year by year. Our national debt is so high that we can no longer even pretend that we will repay it one day. It’s a $28-trillion monument to our improvidence and refusal to confront reality. Our ‘entertainment’ is sadistic, nihilistic, and as enduring as a candy bar wrapper thrown in the trash. Our music is noise that spans the spectrum from annoying to repulsive. Patriotism is called insurrection, treason celebrated, and perversion sanctified. A man in blue gets less respect than a man in a dress. We’re asking soldiers to fight for a nation our leaders no longer believe in. How meekly most of us submitted to Fauci-ism (the regime of face masks, lockdowns, and hand sanitizers) shows the impending death of the American spirit. How do nations slip from greatness to obscurity? • Fighting endless wars they can’t or won’t win

• Accumulating massive debt far beyond their ability to repay

• Refusing to guard their borders, allowing the nation to be inundated by an alien horde

• Surrendering control of their cities to mob rule

• Allowing indoctrination of the young

• Moving from a republican form of government to an oligarchy

• Losing national identity

• Indulging indolence

• Abandoning faith and family – the bulwarks of social order. In America, every one of these symptoms is pronounced, indicating an advanced stage of the disease. Even if the cause seems hopeless, do we not have an obligation to those who sacrificed so much to give us what we had? I’m surrounded by ghosts urging me on:

• the Union soldiers who held Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg,

• the battered bastards of Bastogne,

• those who served in the cold hell of Korea,

• the guys who went to the jungles of Southeast Asia and came home to be reviled or neglected. This is the nation that took in my immigrant grandparents, whose uniform my father and most of my uncles wore in the Second World War. I don’t want to imagine a world without America, even though it becomes increasingly likely. During Britain’s darkest hour, when its professional army was trapped at Dunkirk and a German invasion seemed imminent, Churchill reminded his countrymen, ‘Nations that go down fighting rise again, and those that surrender tamely are finished.’ The same might be said of causes. If we let America slip through our fingers, if we lose without a fight, what will posterity say of us? While the prognosis is far from good, only God knows if America’s day in the sun is over.

~~~

from an uncredited Facebook page ||Author unknown

[kineticpenguin]

Looking at the primary candidates for senator here and... well, these sure are some guys. 3 of them are aerospace engineers.

Socialist Workers Party guy: counts “standing against anti-working class, anti-scientific ‘cancel culture’ and ‘wokeism’“ as part of his community service

Democrat Challenger 1: seems to be running mostly to air his grievances, also advocates amending the constitution to, among other things, make “Second Amendment a privilege and not a right”

Republican 1: Styles himself as a moderate who can reach across the aisle, but wants to “end CRT” and also make it even harder for suspects to be released on bail

Republican 2: Big on veterans... and cops. Seems pretty normal for a pre-Trump Republican, really.

No Preference Guy 1: Brief statement, mostly a nothing burger

Democrat Challenger 2: Impassioned centrist and grandson of Winston Churchill

Republican 3: This guy seems obsessed with getting America back to the early 1960s economically (specifically “America under JFK”), and also seems to think Trump had JFK-like policies. Sure, whatever.

Democrat Challenger 3: If this guy is as busy as he says he is, I don’t see how he’s going to have time for government work.

Republican 4: this guy is a perennial candidate who isn’t even trying to win, but “raise awareness” about things he’s angry about. He mostly hates trains, specifically the Sound Transit light rail. But don’t worry, he also hates CRT, sex ed, electric cars, and thinks global warming isn’t real because the more CO2 you have, the less it warms.

Independent: Mostly wants to abolish family court, has some interesting ideas on caring for the elderly.

Democrat Challenger 4: Wants to solve inflation and end the money-printing that transfers wealth to the financial class... via bitcoin.

No Preference Guy 2: I think this guy is mostly running to promote his book.

Democrat Incumbent: yeah I’m pretty sure Patty Murray is gonna get re-elected, guys. It’s just happening.

Independent 2: Wants to replace the Hanford nuclear stuff with geothermal

Independent 3: Picked a weird time to run on “pay off the national debt”

Independent 4: Nonspecific pledge to care about the issues

Democrat Challenger 5: This guy starts his statement with “Fuck Qanon. Fuck Vladimir Putin” and I respect that kind of energy. I’m not sure how well politicians wearing bodycams when dealing with lobbyists would work, but hell, it’s probably worth a shot.

Republican 5: lists his community service as “lifelong member of the department of Based,” is clearly so internet poisoned the previous guy’s statement might as well have been “Oh and fuck the guy next to me in this voter’s pamphlet”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Roevember

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 29, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 30, 2024

And now the U.S. Army has weighed in on the scandal surrounding Trump’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery for a campaign photo op, after which his team shared a campaign video it had filmed. The Army said that the cemetery hosts almost 3,000 public wreath-laying ceremonies a year without incident and that Trump and his staff “were made aware of federal laws, Army regulations and [Department of Defense] policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds.” 

It went on to say that a cemetery employee “who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside…. This incident was unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the… employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked. [Arlington National Cemetery] is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve.” 

“I don’t think I can adequately explain what a massive deal it is for the Army to make a statement like this,” political writer and veteran Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote, noted. “The Pentagon avoids statements like this at all costs. But a draft dodging traitor decided to lie about our armed forces staff, so they went to paper.”

The deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said the Department of Defense is “aware of the statement that the Army issued, and we support what the Army said.” Hours later, Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita reposted the offending video on X and, tagging the official account for Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, said he was “hoping to trigger the hacks” in her office. 

In Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall reported that the Trump campaign’s plan was to lay a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery to honor the 13 members of the U.S. military killed in the suicide bombing during the evacuation of Kabul, Afghanistan, in August 2021. They intended to film the event and then attack Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden for not “showing up” for the event, which they intended to portray as an “established memorial.”

Another major story from yesterday is that the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has finalized two rules that will work to stop corruption and money laundering in U.S. residential real estate and in private investment. 

This is a big deal. As scholar of kleptocracies Casey Michel put it: “This is a massive, massive deal in the world of counter-kleptocracy—the U.S. is finally ending the gargantuan anti–money laundering loopholes for real estate, private equity, hedge funds, and more. Can't overstate how important this is. What a feat.” 

​​After the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, the oligarchs who rose to power in the former Soviet republics looked to park their illicit money in western democracies, where the rule of law would protect their investments. Once invested in the United States, they favored the Republicans, who focused on the protection of wealth rather than social services. For their part, Republican politicians focused on spreading capitalism rather than democracy, arguing that the two went hand in hand.

The financial deregulation that made the U.S. a good bet for oligarchs to launder money got a boost when, shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act to address the threat of terrorism. The law took on money laundering and the illicit funding of terrorism, requiring financial institutions to inspect large sums of money passing through them. But the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) exempted many real estate deals from the new regulations. 

The United States became one of the money-laundering capitals of the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars laundered in the U.S. every year. 

In 2011 the international movement of illicit money led then–FBI director Robert Mueller to tell the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City that globalization and technology had changed the nature of organized crime. International enterprises, he said, “are running multi-national, multi-billion dollar schemes from start to finish…. They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military…. These criminal enterprises are making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement. They are cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder…. These groups may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”

Congress addressed this threat in 2021 by including the Corporate Transparency Act in the National Defense Authorization Act. It undercut shell companies and money laundering by requiring the owners of any company that is not otherwise overseen by the federal government (by filing taxes, for example, or through close regulation) to file with FinCEN a report identifying (by name, birth date, address, and an identifying number) each person associated with the company who either owns 25% or more of it or exercised substantial control over it. The measure also increased penalties for money laundering and streamlined cooperation between banks and foreign law enforcement authorities. That act went into effect on January 1, 2024.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration made fighting corruption a centerpiece of its attempt to shore up democracy both at home and abroad. In June 2021, President Biden declared the fight against corruption a core U.S. national security interest. “Corruption threatens United States national security, economic equity, global anti-poverty and development efforts, and democracy itself,” he wrote. “But by effectively preventing and countering corruption and demonstrating the advantages of transparent and accountable governance, we can secure a critical advantage for the United States and other democracies.” 

In March 2023 the Treasury told Congress that “[m]oney laundering perpetrated by the Government of the Russian Federation (GOR), Russian [state-owned enterprises], Russian organized crime, and Russian elites poses a significant threat to the national security of the United States and the integrity of the international financial system,” and it outlined the ways in which it had been trying to combat that corruption. 

Now FinCEN has firmed up rules to add anti-money-laundering safeguards to private real estate and private investment. They will require certain industry professionals to report information to FinCEN about cash transfers of residential real estate to a legal entity or trust, transactions that “present a high illicit finance risk,” FinCEN wrote. “The rule will increase transparency, limit the ability of illicit actors to anonymously launder illicit proceeds through the American housing market, and bolster law enforcement investigative efforts.” The real estate rule will go into effect on December 1, 2025.

The rule about investment advisors will make the obligation to report suspicious financial activity apply to certain financial advisors. This rule will go into effect on January 1, 2026.

“The Treasury Department has been hard at work to disrupt attempts to use the United States to hide and launder ill-gotten gains,” Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen explained. “That includes by addressing our biggest regulatory deficiencies, including through these two new rules that close critical loopholes in the U.S. financial system that bad actors use to facilitate serious crimes like corruption, narcotrafficking, and fraud. These steps will make it harder for criminals to exploit our strong residential real estate and investment adviser sectors.”

“I applaud FinCEN’s commonsense efforts to prevent corrupt actors from using the American residential real estate and private investment sectors as safe havens for hiding dirty money,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said in a statement. “For too long, vulnerabilities in the system have attracted kleptocrats, cartels, and criminals looking to stow away their ill-gotten gains. I hope FinCEN will apply similar safeguards to commercial real estate, as well as due diligence requirements to investment advisors. These are all welcome steps toward keeping our country and financial system safe and secure for the American people—not those who wish to abuse it.”

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (also known as the Helsinki Commission) brought the history of modern money laundering full circle. It said: “We welcome the Treasury Department's decision to close off crucial pathways for Russian money laundering and sanctions evasion through real estate and private equity.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[astrognossienne]

tragic icon: john f. kennedy

“Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.” - John F. Kennedy

These are words that everyone needs to hear and adhere to, especially in these insanely polarized times. Normally, I don’t cover politicians in these analyses, but this man is an exception. He was more than a politician, he was in many respects a beguiling figure: the handsome, intelligent, and charming scion of a prominent New England family, he inherited both wealth and political pedigree. The man who said these words, John F. Kennedy, was the youngest man ever elected to the presidency, succeeding the man who, at the time, was the oldest. He was looked at as a callow playboy, not serious about public policy or his career until quite late, until he runs for Congress in 1946, and maybe not even then. But you can look at the papers he wrote as an undergraduate at Harvard, some of which are available, and see a young man already (true to his lunar nature) thinking deeply and in sustained fashion about important issues. True to his solar nature, he was quite a complex character. He did have his playboy side, but some of his war actions can be called heroic. He symbolized—as he well realized—a new generation and its coming-of-age. Together with his equally beautiful and charming wife, his administration was looked at as “Camelot”. He was the first president born in the 20th century, the first young veteran of World War II to become President.

Kennedy spent less than three years in the White House, yet he was responsible for some extraordinary accomplishments. He eased the Cold War. He pioneered space exploration. After almost two years of mostly avoiding the issue of civil rights, he delivered a speech of exceptional elegance, and launched a drive for a civil-rights bill that he hoped would end racial segregation. He also proposed a voting-rights bill and federal programs to provide health care to the elderly and the poor. Few of these proposals became law in his lifetime. But most of these bills became law after his death—in part because of his successor’s political skill, but also because they seemed like a monument to a martyred president. Most scholars seem to agree that Kennedy was a good president but not a great one. But nearing the 60-year anniversary of his death, Kennedy remains a powerful symbol of a lost moment, of a soaring idealism and hopefulness that subsequent generations still try to recover. His allure—the romantic, almost mystic, associations his name evokes—not only survives but flourishes. The debate over what Kennedy would have done had he lived continues.

John F. Kennedy, according to astrotheme, was a Gemini sun and Virgo moon. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born the second son to a large, well-connected, and wealthy Irish Catholic family. Joseph P. Kennedy, his father, was a financier and former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission who was active in the Democratic party. John’s father had high ambitions for his sons, however, John would be plagued with health problems throughout his life. He contracted scarlet fever and had persistent bouts of malaria, he also suffered from hypoadrenalism and ulcerative colitis, with suspected leukemia and hepatitis along the way. He had chronic back problems that were exacerbated by his physical competitiveness, and Addison’s disease, a hormonal disorder that causes fatigue and compromises the immune system. He was given last rites, the Catholic blessing before death, three times before he reached the age of forty: in 1947 after he returned, gravely ill, from England; in 1951 while running a high fever in Japan; and following back surgery in 1954. John was voted “most likely to succeed” at the prestigious Choate School. After serving for a time as secretary to his father, who in 1937 had been appointed ambassador to Great Britain by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennedy graduated from Harvard in 1940. His senior thesis, “Appeasement at Munich,” a study of the British appeasement of Adolf Hitler, was awarded high honours. It was published that same year under the title Why England Slept, and became a bestseller. Kennedy enlisted in the navy in October 1941, and on August 2, 1943, his PT Boat 109 was sunk by a Japanese destroyer. Two of the crew died, but Kennedy helped to rescue his 10 surviving crew members and was awarded the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps medal and a Purple Heart for injury. He returned home a hero, though a naval inquiry into the sinking indicated poor seamanship and command on Kennedy's part. Kennedy had a spinal operation in 1954, and while recuperating he wrote Profiles in Courage, a series of biographies of American politicians who had gone against public opinion to do what they believed was right. It was published in 1955 and won a Pulitzer Prize for biography the following year.

In 1960 he was nominated by the Democratic convention on the first ballot. Kennedy's July 15 acceptance speech offered Americans a “New Frontier” and promised “to get America moving again.” Kennedy’s humour, charm and youth — and his father’s money and contacts — were great assets in the presidential campaign of 1960 against Vice President Richard Nixon. Kennedy expertly presented his platform and himself using a new medium, television, and calling for an expansion of American democratic benefits at home and abroad. In the November election Kennedy and running mate Lyndon B. Johnson won a majority of electoral college votes against Republican nominee Richard M. Nixon but they received less than half the popular vote. At age 43, Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected President. Kennedy said in his famous inaugural address:

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Kennedy's New Frontier legislative program was designed to get the U.S. economy moving again after the recession and slow growth of the years under the previous president, Dwight Eisenhower. It emphasized an investment tax credit and other tax breaks for business. His proposed social programs were extensions of the New Deal and a lot of tings we take for granted today: federal aid to education, medical care for the elderly, urban mass transit, a new Department of Urban Affairs, and regional development for Appalachia. Also, Kennedy spearheaded an increase in the minimum wage, higher Social Security benefits, and a public housing bill. It also passed a trade expansion act that significantly increased U.S. exports and opened up foreign markets. In 1962 Kennedy sent federal troops to Mississippi to ensure that James Meredith, an African-American student, could enroll at the University of Mississippi and attend classes without harassment. In 1963 he used federal troops in Alabama to enforce federal court desegregation orders. But Kennedy delayed introducing civil rights legislation until late spring 1963. On August 28, 1963, a March on Washington for Peace and Justice, which attracted more than 200,000 people, convinced Kennedy to push Congress harder for comprehensive civil rights laws. After East Germany constructed the Berlin Wall to seal off the communist side of the city from the West in August 1961, Kennedy traveled to Berlin to show solidarity with its citizens. In August 1963 Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere, outer space, and the oceans. Only underground testing, which presented no risk of radioactive fallout, would be permitted.

On November 22, 1963, while visiting Dallas, Texas, to help unify the feuding state Democrats, President Kennedy was shot and killed by two bullets fired from the Book Depository building while riding in a motorcade with the First Lady through the center of town. Texas governor John Connally was wounded. Lee Harvey Oswald, the suspected assassin, was taken into custody by Dallas police, but two days later he was killed by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby while being transferred from his cell to an office for questioning. A national commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that Oswald, acting alone, had shot the President in the rear of the head with a rifle and that Oswald had been mentally ill.

This is a special series of star analyses to highlight the Kennedys on this anniversary of JFK’s assassination.

Next, I will focus on his equally yoked, much-celebrated and often-imitated wife who had the appalling misfortune to sit next to him as he was violently murdered that sunny Texas day. She built and cultivated her own mystery and her allure, charm, grit, and grace outlives her: Leo Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

STATS

birthdate: May 29, 1917

major planets:

Sun: Gemini

Moon: Virgo

Rising: Libra

Mercury: Taurus

Venus: Gemini

Mars: Taurus

Midheaven: Cancer

Jupiter: Taurus

Saturn: Cancer

Uranus: Aquarius

Neptune: Leo

Pluto: Cancer

Overall personality snapshot: He combined a restless curiosity with a strong critical sense. He wanted to know about everything, to have, as it were, superior knowledge. Since time was precious, however, he was a speed reader rather than a profound scholar, and his priorities focused on what made sense and was useful, and would be of service to himself and other people. You enjoyed posing questions, even though you know the agony of never being satisfied by the answer that will follow. If he was honest (and half of him could be as strictly honest as the other half could bend any facts to fit his case), he would have to admit that he really was a paradox. He was unlikely to admit this, however, because he did not really like being told anything, preferring to work out and follow his own views. His natural critical bent could make it difficult for him to feel happy for very long in any of his projects or relationships. When unsatisfied, he started to overanalyze himself and everyone else. This left him depleted, restless, and drifting from one great idea to the next, but constantly feeling discontented and needing to try one more thing, one more relationship. But when he finally did get his need to communicate together with his desire to be of practical service, he was immensely effective in helping to make his community a better place. His worst enemy was perfectionism and elitism, and when he overcame that and realized that what he created was ‘good enough’, his cleverness, agility and good business sense was a recipe for success.

Versatile, objective and realistic, he needed to be working in those areas where his gifts for analysis and communication could be given free rein, and where you can help find the answer to your endless childhood and adulthood questions of ‘Why? Where? Who? How?’ Busy, busy, constantly active with lots of nervous energy, executive skill, wit and dry humour, he liked to keep on the go but had a way of exhausting himself with good intentions. His best environment was the ‘nervous system’ of society, be it in transport, communications, the media or teaching, and he would hanker to be the king bee rather than the worker. He was a great gatherer and purveyor of information, and he belonged among the intellectuals and artists of this world – or so he believed. He flourished in any area where facts needed to be accurately processed and evaluated in the shortest possible time. He worked with zest, for example, in such areas as journalism or on the news desk of a radio or television station. His was also a strongly logical, scientific combination with a natural talent for questioning and discovering the causes of things, and for sorting information into order. In artistic endeavours he had a gift for translating his immediate living experiences of the world into words, images, songs, carvings or canvas.

He had a warm and charming nature. His features were refined, his bones delicate and his skin fair. His movements were very graceful. He was practical, steady and patient, but he could be inflexible in his views. One thing he did have was plenty of common sense and good powers of concentration, although he tended to think that purely abstract thought was a waste of time. His thought processes weren’t as quick as others, but his decisions were made with a lot of thought behind them. He also had a gloriously resonant speaking-voice. Career issues brought out and exposed his feelings and emotions. In fact, bosses and other authoritarian figures could be the target for any unresolved problems with his mother or parents in general. He was a person who wanted a first-class life-style, and who treasured his possessions. He needed to be able to feel materially secure, and he probably gained wealth through sheer industry, because he was patient, steady and confident in this area of his life. However, he may also have been a little too trusting when it came to money, presuming too easily that there is always more where it came from. His acquired wealth may have been generously distributed, both on himself, for he was self-indulgent, and on others, because he was vulnerable to sob stories. Although he could appear reserved, he was emotional and sensitive. Sometimes he was prone to periods of melancholia and pessimism. He may have found it difficult to launch himself in the outside world unless he had the support of his family, his partner or someone he could trust. As a man, he may have found that domestic duties or confinement weighed heavily on him. He was attracted to people who were conservative in temperament when looking for a marriage partner. He tended to feel most comfortable when he depended on his partner and his partner depended on him.

He belonged to a generation that could be unpredictable in that it liked to instigate change simply for the sake of shaking things up and providing stimulation. Humanitarian ideals became extremely important, as well as the belief in absolute freedom for every individual. He came up with radical new ideas which he stubbornly followed. As a member of this generation, he may have felt deep spiritual convictions, although he may not have seen himself as religious in the traditional sense of the word. He was part of a very artistically talented and creative generation that wanted to escape from the demands of the world around them into a world of excitement and glamour. Members of this generation loved the theater and the cinema, in fact, any sort of creative self-expression. They also believed in the rights of any individual to express themselves. This generation was both idealistic and romantic, selfish and individualistic. Kennedy embodied all of these Leo Neptunian ideals. Also, as a member of the Leo Neptune generation, he experienced and fully embraced changes in sexual mores and attitudes, changing the way people approach the whole issue of romantic relationships. Changes were also experienced in the relationships between parents and children, with the ties becoming looser. He was part of a generation known for its devastating social upheavals concerning home and family. The whole general pattern of family life experienced enormous changes and upheavals; as a Cancer Plutonian, this aspect is highlighted with Kennedy’s sister Kathleen and oldest brother Joseph, Jr. being killed in plane crashes.

Love/sex life: He was a deft and inventive lover who combined his Martian earthiness with the consummate skill of a thoughtful and unembarrassed connoisseur of physical pleasures. He  was the most curious lover of this type. He paid just as much attention to what can be learned about love and sex intellectually as he did to the instinctive drives of his body. At times this caused him to over-think his love-making, to make something complex out of what should always be simple, but more often his intellectual curiosity only made him a better informed and more capable partner. At his worst, he was too clever about sex and love for his own good; too concerned about getting the best deal for his sensual nature. Relationships became transactions: this much sex of a certain quality weighed against this much emotional effort and commitment. Thinking like this only made his love life soulless and mechanical and drive the people he loved most away. He was the cleverest and most skillful lover of the supremely sensual type but these marvelous capacities were of little use if he had no one with whom he could share them.

He had a public image of himself as a family man (Mars in Taurus), posing with his beautiful and stylish wife Jackie and with his daughter Caroline and son John Jr. while playing in the Oval office. In reality, Kennedy was a womanizer (Venus in Gemini). He was involved with many women, ranging from movie stars like Marylin Monroe to White house interns and women, connected with Mafia. He preferred blondes. Jackie Kennedy knew about the love affairs of her husband, but she accepted them since she knew Kennedy would always come back to her. The ‘50s and ‘60s were different times. Before then, journalists respected the private lives of politicians. Even though Kennedy’s affairs were well known to his inner circle as well as to reporters, journalists didn’t consider them newsworthy. The public didn’t learn about the juicy private lives of their presidents until they either left office or were already dead It was common among men of the elite to have extramarital affairs. Jackie’s father, John Bouvier, was a known womanizer. Kennedy was described as “reckless”. Though Kennedy remains one of our most beloved and lauded chief executives, the many casual sexual liaisons he engaged in while president have tarnished his reputation. Compared to Kennedy, Bill Clinton was an altar boy. Kennedy employed Dave Powers, as a “special assistant”, or “First Friend”, who had the task of finding beautiful women willing to sleep with the President. Kennedy also used Secret Service to help him smuggle women in and out of White House. President's unrestrained sexual appetite caused morale problems among his Secret Service agents.

all the president’s (known) women:

Diana de Vegh said she engaged in a relationship with the president when she was 20 years old.The affair allegedly began in 1958, making him twice her age. De Vegh, now 83, said that Kennedy would often say there was "something special" about her, which admittedly captured her attention. But this, she said, "is not a romantic story." In fact, she said it took "years to recover" from the romance — "almost as many years" as it took for her to come forward with her story. De Vegh said that she was a junior at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she attended her first political dinner, a benefit for Kennedy. She and Kennedy locked eyes from across the table. At one point, the Massachusetts Senator asked someone to give up their seat "so a tired old man can sit next to a pretty girl," leaving the college student starstruck. The two supposedly met up several times following the benefit. Eventually, de Vegh said, Kennedy invited her back to his apartment in Boston, and the relationship turned romantic, with de Vegh even moving to Washington, D.C., after Kennedy was elected president.

Dane Inga Arvad aka “Inga Binga” was a long-term girlfriend of JFK whilst he worked in the navy, and was rumoured to be a Soviet spy. Their break-up was driven by Kennedy’s father, who feared the terminal effects this relationship could have on his son’s future political career.

German-born Ellen Rometsch was married to a German Air Force sergeant Rolf Rometsch, who was stationed in Washington during the height of the Cold War. However, Rometsch was also a high-class call girl who had a brief dalliance with JFK. She was one of many prostitutes who Dave Powers, JFK’s Special Assistant, solicited for the President. Moreover, she was heavily rumoured to be a communist spy and was expelled from the US in August 1963 (at the behest of Attorney-General Robert Kennedy), with the Profumo Affair in Britain highlighting the danger of sexual promiscuity.

Iconic German actress Marlene Dietrich, who revealed the details of her 1962 tryst with the President, saying, ‘I don’t remember most of what happened because it was all so quick’. She later told friend Gore Vidal that she told Kennedy during their tryst, “Don’t muss my hair. I’m performing”. She was also a long-time lover of JFK’s father, Joseph P Kennedy.

Anita Ekberg, the star of La Dolce Vita and global sex symbol was briefly connected with the President.

A running theme of JFK’s affairs was his dalliances with movie stars. One of the more illustrious was Gene Tierney, who Kennedy had an affair with around 1948, when she was still married.

Judith Exner, a mob moll who served as a conduit between JFK and mobster Sam Giancana, famously claimed that she had an abortion after she became pregnant with the President’s child. “Jack couldn’t have been more loving, more concerned about my feelings, more considerate, more gentle,” Exner, the daughter of a well-off architect, have a 1988 interview to longtime gossip columnist Liz Smith, who wrote extensively about Exner. Exner said Jackie was unsurprised — and fascinated — by what she learned. Exner died at age 65 in 1999 after a battle with breast cancer.

Mary Pinchot Meyer, the sister-in-law of legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, chronicled their alleged affair in her diary. In early 2016, a handwritten love letter from JFK to Meyer surfaced in an online auction from Boston’s RR Auction. “Why don’t you leave suburbia for once — come and see me — either here — or at the Cape next week or in Boston the 19th,” Kennedy wrote in the four-page letter. “I know it is unwise, irrational, and that you may hate it — on the other hand you may not — and I will love it.” He continued, “You say that it is good for me not to get what I want. After all of these years — you should give me a more loving answer than that. Why don’t you just say yes.” Meyer was murdered in Georgetown in October 1964. Shot twice at a close range, her death is still unresolved and has often been associated with JFK-related conspiracy theories.

Mimi Alford (born Beardsley) was only 19 years old when she started to work as a White House intern. Only four days into the job, JFK seduced her and took her virginity—in his wife Jackie’s bedroom. They continued to have an affair for the next 18 months. Mimi kept affair secret for forty years and revealed her side of a story only after somebody leaked affair to the public. In her book Once Upon a Secret, she described details of an affair, including giving sexual favors to Kennedy’s friends. As she writes, JFK dared her to give oral sex to his friend and assistant, Dave Powers.

Kennedy employed two secretaries, who despite their official titles, had one role only — to pleasure JFK. Priscilla Wear (a.k.a “Fiddle”) and Jill Cowen (a.k.a “Faddle”) were hired to skinny dip with President and accompany him on business trips abroad. Secret Service invented nicknames for them to hide the affair from Jackie Kennedy (who nonetheless, suspected what they were anyway). Jackie once gave a tour of the White House to a Paris Match reporter and, coming across Priscilla, apparently remarked in French, “This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband”.

His affair with Marilyn Monroe is well-documented and the stuff of urban legends and conspiracy theories. Conspirators say Monroe also got involved with Kennedy’s brother Bobby (partly out of spite for Kennedy not taking her affections seriously) and that she wanted to replace Jackie as First Lady. Her death was ruled a suicide, but conspiracy theories claim that the Kennedy brothers were involved.

minor asteroids and points:

North Node: Capricorn

Lilith: Leo

Vertex: Taurus

Fortune: Capricorn

East Point: Libra

His North Node in Capricorn dictated that he needed to move away from a tendency to see the world only in terms of himself, and develop a more outward-looking view. It would have been good if he took other people’s needs and desires into consideration to a greater degree. His Lilith in Leo dictated  that he was dangerously attracted to women who were true performers, the ultimate divas who had chutzpah, creative output and talent, and who had a psychic need to show off their awesomeness and to transcend normal life. His Vertex in Taurus, 8th house dictated that he had a sensual love of natural resources and a lust for precious possessions. His inner senses were ignited by interacting with and transforming material things in an artistic, dignified, and elegant way. He had an internal yearning for an inseparable union with and total commitment from another, come what may. This need was so intense that he may have fantasized all manner of unspeakable actions and reactions if the final dream, once attained, was even threatened. The dark side was that when the reality of our partner did not fit this model (and it rarely did totally) he had a difficult time adjusting if faced with a breach of contract of any sort. Once badly hurt there was a tendency to become jaded and guarded in future relationships, thereby passing up the opportunity to explore interactions which might just have fulfilled out his intense needs perfectly.

His Part of Fortune in Capricorn and Part of Spirit in Cancer dictated that his destiny lay in creating practical and long-lasting achievements. Success came through hard work, determination, responsibility and perseverance. Fulfillment came from observing his progress through life and seeing it take a form and structure that will outlive him. His soul’s purpose guided him towards building security in his life, both emotional and material. He felt spiritual connections and the spark of the divine within his home and family. East Point in Libra dictated that he was more identified with the need for a one-to-one relationship with another. Equality, harmony, justice, fair play and a sense of even-handedness were likely to be basic parts of his identity. He chose to relate in a cooperative way (and the extreme to be avoided is playing doormat, appeasing the other person). He also selected (consciously or unconsciously) competitive relationships and engaged in a series of game-playing (literally and figuratively) associations.  

elemental dominance:

air

earth

He was communicative, quick and mentally agile, and he liked to stir things up. He was likely a havoc-seeker on some level. He was oriented more toward thinking than feeling. He carried information and the seeds of ideas. Out of balance, he lived in his head and could be insensitive to the feelings of others. But at his best, he helped others form connections in all spheres of their daily lives. He was a practical, reliable man and could provide structure and protection. He was oriented toward practical experience and thought in terms of doing rather than thinking, feeling, or imagining. Could be materialistic, unimaginative, and resistant to change. But at his best, he provided the practical resources, analysis, and leadership to make dreams come true.          

modality dominance:

fixed

He liked the challenge of managing existing routines with ever more efficiency, rather than starting new enterprises or finding new ways of doing things. He likely had trouble delegating duties and had a very hard time seeing other points of view; he tried to implement the human need to create stability and order in the wake of change.

house dominants:

8th

10th

11th

He loved the totality of the human experience and embraced the whole cycle of human life, including birth, sex and death. His darker side, and the complexes and emotions that he preferred to keep hidden, even from himself was a theme throughout his life. His ability to undergo deep personal transformations and spiritual regeneration was also highlighted. His ambition in relation to the outside world, the identity he wished to achieve in regard to the community at large, and his career aspirations were all themes that were emphasized throughout his life. All matters outside the home, his public image and reputation were very important to him. His attitude to people in authority, and how he viewed the outside world, as well as the influence of his mother and his own attitude to her (which was one of contempt) was highlighted. Globally aware, he put emphasis on his friends and acquaintances, as well as the influence of groups and societies on his life. His general hopes and aspirations revealed themselves, as well as how well he functioned as part of a system. This extended to how he manifested his creativity against the background of the community.

planet dominants:

Neptune

Venus

Saturn

He was of a contemplative nature, particularly receptive to ambiances, places, and people. He gladly cultivated the art of letting go, and allowed the natural unfolding of events to construct his world. He followed his inspirations, for better or for worse. He was romantic, attractive and valued beauty, has an artistic instinct, and was sociable. He had an easy ability to create close personal relationships, for better or worse, and to form business partnerships. He believed in the fact that lessons in life were sometimes harsh, that structure and foundation was a great issue in his life, and he had to be taught through through experience what he needed in order to grow. He paid attention to limitations he had and had to learn the rules of the game in this physical reality. He tended to have a practical, prudent outlook. He also likely held rigid beliefs.

sign dominants:

Taurus

Gemini

Cancer

His stubbornness and determination kept him around for the long haul on any project or endeavour. He was incredibly patient, singular in his pursuit of goals, and determined to attain what he wanted. Although he lacked versatility, he compensated for it by enduring whatever he had to in order to get what he wanted. He ventured out to see what else was there and seized upon new ideas that expanded his community. His innate curiosity kept him on the move. He used his rational, intellectual mind to explore and understand his personal world. He needed to answer the single burning question in his mind: why? This applied to most facets of his life, from the personal to the impersonal. This need to know sent his off to foreign countries, where his need to explore other cultures and traditions ranked high. He was changeable and often moody. This meant that he was often at odds with himself—the mind demanding one thing, the heart demanding the opposite. To someone else, this internal conflict often manifested as two very different people. At first meeting, he seemed enigmatic, elusive. He needed roots, a place or even a state of mind that he could call his own. He needed a safe harbor, a refuge in which to retreat for solitude. He was generally gentle and kind, unless he was hurt. Then he could become vindictive and sharp-spoken. He was affectionate, passionate, and even possessive at times. He was intuitive and was perhaps even psychic. Experience flowed through him emotionally. He was often moody and always changeable; his interests and social circles shifted constantly. He was emotion distilled into its purest form.

Read more about him under the cut:

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917 in Brookline, Massachusetts, to Rose Kennedy (née Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald) and Joseph P. Kennedy. John was named after his maternal grandfather, John "HoneyFitz" Fitzgerald, the mayor of Boston. John was very ill as a child and was given the last rites five times, the first one being when he was a new-born. He was the second of four boys born to an Irish Catholic family with nine children: Joseph Jr., John, Robert F. Kennedy (called Bobby), and Ted Kennedy (born Edward). Because Rose made Joe and Jack (the name his family called him) wear matching clothes, they fought a lot for attention. When John was young, the family moved from Boston to New York. John went to Choate, a private school. Most of the time, though, he was too sick to attend. In the late 1930s, father Joe became the ambassador to England. He took sons John and Robert with him, as well as his wife and daughters Kathleen and Rosemary Kennedy. John went to Princeton, then Harvard, and for his senior thesis, he wrote a piece about why England refused to get into the war until late. It was published in 1940 and called "Why England Slept". His older brother Joe was a pilot during the war, and was killed when the bombs his plane was carrying exploded. Not long after that, John's sister Kathleen and her husband died in a plane crash. In the early 1950s, John ran for Congress in Massachusetts and won. He married Jacqueline Kennedy (née Jacqueline Lee Bouvier) on September 12, 1953. Their daughter, Caroline Kennedy, was born on November 27, 1957 and their son, John Kennedy Jr., was born on November 25, 1960. They also had a stillborn daughter named Arabella and a son named Patrick Bouvier, who died a few days after birth. In 1954, J.F.K. had to have back surgery and in the hospital wrote his second book, "Profiles in Courage". His father always said that his son Joe was going to be President of the U.S.; when he died in World War II, though, that task was passed on to John. He ran for president in 1960 against Richard Nixon and narrowly won. His administration had many conflicts, the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis being key examples. In November 1963, he and Jackie (his wife's nickname) went on a trip to Texas. Everywhere they went there were signs saying "Jack and Jackie." On November 22, 1963, John was to give a speech in Dallas, but on his way an assassin hidden on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository opened fire at Kennedy, who was riding in an open car. Hit twice and severely wounded, Kennedy died in a local hospital at 1:00 P.M. The alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was captured a short time later after shooting and killing a Dallas policeman, and was himself assassinated before he could be thoroughly interrogated, let alone tried. In just a little bit of irony, considering the death of Abraham Lincoln a century earlier, Kennedy was shot in a Ford Lincoln (Lincoln was in Ford's Theater when he was shot). He was laid to rest on his son's third birthday. (x)

[florrickandassociates]

TGF Thoughts: 5x03-- And the court had a clerk...

Hello again! It’s nice to have this show back. This episode was a bit less of a standout than the previous two, but I’m still happy with the overall direction for this season. More under the cut (or here, because tumblr sucks). 

When Robert King tweeted the episode title, I asked him if all the titles this season were adding up to one long sentence/story, hoping he’d confirm it and give a little more information. He did! He said it’s “in the Farmer in the Dell mode” and while I think I get what he’s saying, I’m very curious to see how it plays out. Haven’t been able to track down 5x04′s title yet, but the promo is out. (As of this morning! It’s interesting they’re not putting them after the episode this year; I kind of like it.) 

Kurt’s job is up in the air given the new administration. I think this scene exists mostly just to remind us where Kurt works and the stakes.

What month is this supposed to be in? The transition seems recent but no one is wearing masks.  

Kurt spots a poster asking for help ID’ing people at the Capitol on January 6th. He thinks he recognizes someone...

And now we’re in case of the week land. This case is about a small business owner whose business went under after someone created fake news articles accusing him of pedophilia.  

I think the whole point of this (kind of long) scene is to show that this case is a pretty small deal. Low stakes, inexperienced opposing lawyer. (Not even sure why Liz would be arguing this in court, but whatever.)

Tbh I thought this was going to wind up in 9 ¾ court.

Now that we have junior level characters, we get scenes showing that there are, in fact, people at RBL who are mid-level. Liz asks an associate to work on something, he asks another associate to work on it, she delegates to other associates, and they delegate to Marissa and Carmen. This work seems terrible.  

It’s so funny to me how this is probably more realistic than most of the lawyering on the show and yet it only shows up selectively. We only see the hierarchy here to make it clear that Marissa and Carmen are at the bottom.  

David Lee interrupts and asks for Carmen. He’s very rude to her. Interestingly, she’s hesitant to leave her grunt work and follow David, even though she must know he outranks the associate who gave her the grunt work.

“Why am I supposed to know you?” David asks her as they walk through the halls. “I don’t know if you are,” Carmen responds. “Why does Benjamin Dafoe know you?” he asks. She doesn’t know who he is.  

“Who are you?” Dafoe asks when Carmen enters. She states her name, again. “Why are you important?” he asks. “I don’t think that I am,” Carmen responds.  

Then Dafoe says his top client, and it’s a name that the characters all know. I’m glad this scene is free of any “he’s the white OJ” expository lines (that’s from Sweeney’s introduction) -- it’s clear from the reactions and the discussion of police and rape that the top client is a bad guy, probably a rapist. The rapist wants Carmen to represent him.

Putting 2 and 2 together, Carmen asks if the rapist knows Rivi. He’s not, but he’s at the same prison. As soon as Carmen says she’s representing Rivi, David Lee switches gears, understanding the situation and trying to sign the new business. He’s so shameless!  

Marissa sorts ALL the papers. There are a LOT of papers. I’m swamped. Look at all this paper.

She catches the associate who assigned her the task leaving for the night just as she finishes up, and cheerfully notes she’s finished the task. Then the associate mentions this was only half of the bills. Marissa does not like that. Since her goal in wanting to be a lawyer is mostly just to give her something exciting to do and earn respect... this hierarchy thing is not going so well.

Marissa decides that after her rough day, she’s going to stop by Wackner’s court. He’s in the middle of a case about Emily in Paris fanfiction and he’s very happy to see Marissa.  

Wackner’s night court has a program—it notes the sponsor is Copy Co-op (I thought it was Copy Coop?) and the paper products were also provided by them. And “there will be regular intermissions at the discretion of Judge Wackner.” It’s very theatrical.  

Wackner takes a recess and calls Marissa to his “chambers.” He asks for her thoughts on the case. “All they want is attention and to feel like they’ve won,” Marissa notes. Wackner’s on the same wave length and compares it to the Scarecrow’s diploma at the end of The Wizard of Oz. So, he makes copyright certificates and some minor modifications to each of the fanfic books. They say “I respect you and I love you” and that’s that.

Wackner catches Marissa before she leaves and asks her to be his law clerk—part time or full time, 10% of all the legal filings and unlimited use of copy machines. She is hesitant because she “doesn’t even know what this is.”

Wackner says his court is “the future.” Marissa turns him down; notes she wants to pass the bar. “You know why all these people are here? ‘Cause the courts and the lawyers and the appeals have made justice... unattainable. Out of reach. To anyone who doesn’t have a shitload of money to wait it out. That’s why Exxon beats out Mr. Nobody. Read Kafka’s Before the Law.”  

I just read it, and you should too! It literally is a page, but tl;dr, there’s a man who wants to get to the law and instead he spends his whole life trying to win over the first of many gatekeepers on the path to the law. He never gets through the gate.  

“Justice is only just if it’s available to everyone,” Wackner says. Marissa thinks about that.

As I said last week, it’s smart that Wackner makes so much sense. Hearing him say all this, knowing that it’s true... it makes it very easy to get on board with the thought experiment. Of course there would be huge repercussions to this kind of system, but it makes so much sense it’s compelling TV!

Kurt’s showering when Diane gets home, which gives her time to stumble across the WANTED poster and notice that Kurt has drawn facial hair onto one of the pictures. “Who is this?” she asks him. “No one,” he says. “Well, you drew in a beard and a moustache on him,” Diane notes. Kurt says he was doodling, but Diane calls him out as he is the “exact opposite of a doodler.” Kurt says he thought it was someone he knew, but he’s not sure. Diane pushes him to tell the feds. Kurt reiterates he’s not sure, but it’s someone he went shooting with. “Oh my God, then it’s him,” Diane jumps to (not incorrect) conclusions. Kurt says he didn’t talk that way; he’s a veteran. “Kurt! That’s the profile!” Diane argues. Kurt isn’t convinced and he doesn’t want to be responsible for naming names. He notes he’ll be threatened with indictment for not naming names and then only lawyers will end up benefitting. Diane is not convinced.

I think this is an interesting conflict for Kurt and Diane. I understand why Kurt is hesitant to speak out before he’s sure. And I understand and agree with Diane that it’s important to identify the attackers and prevent anything like that from happening again.

I don’t mean to blame Kurt, exactly, but I feel like all of what happens next could’ve played out differently if Kurt had been just a little clearer with Diane about why he was hesitant to ID the man. Like, the threat of indictment for not naming names sounds like some typical anti-government rambling. Saying you specifically are afraid that this will turn back on you and you need to weigh your options and come up with a plan first would put Diane in a very different mode, in which they’d work together to craft the best strategy. Because this man would’ve been ID’d by someone, sooner or later, and Kurt would’ve needed to be prepared.  

Diane stares at the wanted poster at work and asks Jay to find his identity. He’s on the FBI TEN MOST WANTED? Ten!? Ok!  

Diane shares the extra information she has—the gun range and that he’s a veteran—and Jay gets to work.  

Turns out there’s no money in the case that Liz, a name partner, is working on and Marissa just spent all those hours sorting bills for. I could’ve told you there was no money in that case lol.  

Jay IDs the guy very fast. He’s faster than the feds because they didn’t know where he shot. The range had his license on file, and Jay got ahold of it.

“Well, we don’t pay you enough,” Diane says. “Oh, I know that,” Jay laughs.  

Diane says she’s going to think about calling the feds—it's definitely the same guy.

Marissa notes someone high profile (David Cord, who I presume is a thinly veiled stand-in for David Koch given the name, his role in the plot, and the fact that he is “David Cord of the Cord Brothers”) in the lobby giving a fake name and goes to tell Liz.  

David Cord is performing magic tricks for the receptionists (they don’t recognize him) when Liz and Marissa show up. “I knew your father. I hated your father,” Cord says. “Yes, well, he hated you too,” Liz says. He says he gave a fake name to see what the reception would be like since he’s kinda infamous.  

Liz introduces Marissa as one of the law clinic lawyers. Marissa knows what to say in this situation. Specifically, she knows that it is the exact right moment to name drop her father.  

“Democrats as far as the eye can see,” Cord notes. At that, Liz asks Marissa to get Julius involved.

More good expository work! (No, editor feature of Word, I do NOT want that to say “Better expository work,” that would change my meaning, go away and please stop grading my recap??? I don’t know how I brought this up but it’s telling me my score is 72%, so a C, and it’s driving me crazy. Oh, now I’m a 71%. It had me at like, 50%, because I had written “Wackner” and “Wackner” is not a word. No shit.)  

Anyway, back to the exposition. I like that we don’t get a line like, “Liz! David Cord, the Republican super donor, is here!” We just get to see Liz’s reaction, Cord’s hate of Liz’s father, and the line about democrats. Then it becomes clearer who Cord is.

Just noticed Liz is wearing an Apple Watch.

Liz stands for her meeting with Cord, likely to maintain power. Cord says January 6th changed everything to him and now he’s all about unity and loving America.  

Cord has something to say about Liz’s case, the one that’s not making any money, and he seems to know quite a lot about it. That spooks Liz.  

Then Cord offers her $12 million to continue the case for another six months (all of these months, seemingly, will play out in the couple of days the rest of this episode takes, but, whatever). He just wants them to go after the social media company that distributed the fake news... and Section 230.

Don’t know what that is? Now you do, because there is a Good Fight short! These work so much better when they’re actually needed (explaining concepts, etc.) than when they’re trying to force one into every episode (remember that Downton Abbey one? What... was that?)  

I was talking to @mimeparadox about this short and he pointed out that this short has a VERY clear POV on an issue that actually doesn’t seem to be all that straightforward. If you’re like me and only had a vague sense of what Section 230 was prior to this episode, this short is telling you what to think of it—it isn’t just explaining what it is.

I do tend to agree with the show’s POV on most things, but this is an issue I’d like to read more on. I love how Section 230 was something I hadn’t really read up on prior to this episode and now that it’s been on TGF I realize it’s something that actually, yes, I would’ve been interested in knowing about earlier. Is this because things that are on TGF are interesting to me because they’re on TGF or is it because TGF generally only discusses things that would be interesting to me? Probs a little bit of both.  

Diane asks Jay how to make an anonymous phone call and he hands her a burner phone. She calls the FBI with the rioter’s name. She doesn’t leave her name and then she dumps the phone.  

Credits! Did you catch there’s a Jordan Boatman in the credits? She plays one of the associates who passes down the grunt work to Marissa, and she’s Michael Boatman’s daughter in real life! She’s also been in one other episode, in season 3.  

I never get tired of these credits!  

The RL partners (and some associates who are on the case? I think these are the same ones who delegated the work to Marissa?) debate whether or not they should take Cord’s money. Madeline notes that he’s funded a lot of Republican campaigns; Julius notes that both Republicans and Democrats agree that Section 230 is flawed and this is an opportunity for unity.

Diane notes that the right doesn’t want to stop conspiracy theories from spreading, so is this really that bipartisan? “It would help if the boomers would stop falling for those conspiracy theories and sharing it with their friends,” an associate (I believe this is Michael Boatman’s daughter again) notes. That quiets the room and the partners all glare at her. Yeah, that was a kind of stupid thing to say. First of all, it’s just not appropriate to say to the partners, and it’s also, like, missing the point? If it’s easy for conspiracy theories to spread among boomers, maybe just expecting each member of that generation to suddenly have a millennial’s understanding of the internet is the wrong strategy? Maybe there’s some structural issue here? That maybe, just maybe, this case is actually about?  

The associate also points out that the internet is currently a place where people can speak out about sexual harassment-- “they repeal section 230, and there would be no #MeToo.”

One of the partners says he doesn’t believe that—if they regulate section 230, then newspapers can actually be competitive and there’s still free speech online.  

“We’re not going back to reading newspapers, grandpa,” some associate says. What the actual fuck, dude? Who talks like that to their boss?! It’s so condescending. He’s also wrong! “Newspapers” are not just physical things... reporting by major publications still matters and will continue to matter. Like, is he suggesting that in the future all news will just be random people tweeting things they think are true with no fact checking or curation? Sure, journalism is struggling right now—but I don’t think that’s because there’s a lack of desire for well-reported news.  

I am glad the partners call him out on saying “grandpa” and honestly I’m shocked he isn’t asked to leave the discussion after that rude remark. Unless this young looking dude is a partner too? But I don’t think he is.  

Julius notes that if they’re going to pursue this case, they need money like Cord’s. At that, Liz starts to leave the meeting. “We haven’t decided if we’re taking this Cord money yet,” Madeline protests. “Of course we are,” Liz says and leaves.  

Now that’s more like it! I’m not sure if this is necessarily the best way to handle this, but she’s a) correct, they were always going to take the money because it is $12 million and an issue of interest and b) using her authority. Should Liz be making decisions totally on her own? Maybe not. Does Liz making this decision and then leaving (with everyone accepting that she’s correct) cut through a lot of bullshit and establish Liz as the one in charge? Yup.

Diane says, “Ooh-kay” with a little bit of an eyeroll after Liz exits, but she’s still laying low. I think in a different season Diane might’ve tried to push back.  

Is it me or does Baranski get a lot of material this episode we haven’t seen before? Lots of really good reaction shots/tones in this episode I don’t really think we’ve seen from Diane before. I’m impressed there’s still new stuff after 12 years.

At some point maybe I will actually write the essay I’ve been wanting to write for ages about how TGF is still so relevant despite being in a universe that should be showing its age by now. I wish I could find the first time that I called TGW a period piece set in the present day (I know it would’ve been during season five) because I think that’s the key to TGW/TGF’s enduring success. The shows always feel timely because they try to capture the present moment (which is, of course, always changing) and don’t get stuck in any one moment in time. Further, the fact that the writers are always so tuned in to events and skilled at quickly reacting to what happens in the world makes them VERY good in a pinch, which is (I think) why they’re able to make the most of unexpected situations (Josh leaving TGW, the pandemic).  

Liz and Julius bring a suit against ChumHum to attack 230. Judge Friend is initially skeptical of their argument that 230 is unconstitutional; then she’s intrigued. I am too. This argument about the press is a very interesting one. I obviously have a lot of reading to do on 230, but my take after this episode is pretty much that social media platforms have to be held responsible in some way, but I don’t think it’s feasible or desirable for them to be responsible for every single one of billions of posts. I think there has to be some way to regulate social media giants that would allow everyday people to share things and speak out but would prevent the curated (even by an algorithm) spread of fake news and make social media giants accountable when there are very public bad actors using their platforms. What that regulation would be I have no idea. I just refuse to believe that our options are to give the social media sites full immunity or to regulate the internet so strongly that no one is able to speak freely because all the platforms are worried about lawsuits.  

Over at the VA, people are being fired. When Kurt gets into his office, Madeline Starkey (wait, are there two characters named Madeline in this episode?) is waiting for him. She’s still very quirky and scary.  

Starkey says the guy that Diane reported is now saying Kurt trained him on using assault rifles and buying ammunition in bulk. Kurt notes these were topics covered in a group setting, which Starkey knew—and what she’s really after is the names of the others in the group. (She may already know them, since she knows there were five of them.)

Kurt refuses to name names and just stares at her.  

Case stuff happens! (I liked the last two episodes a lot but it’s much faster for me to just write, “case stuff happens” for some of the scenes.)

Hey, surprise Aaron Tveit! (Not really a surprise; he is in the credits. But still yay!)  

I don’t really know why Liz and Julius are talking about newspapers specifically and not all types of fact-based journalism/press? I feel like their argument is most convincing when it’s about actual newspapers (especially local ones) but still would apply to cable news...

Marissa’s still hard at work sorting papers when the associate comes back in and informs her she can stop; they’ve changed strategies and everything she’s done is now irrelevant. She also says “I forgot to tell you” at the start of that thought, meaning that she neglected to tell Marissa this important information earlier and wasted her time. Marissa is not pleased and so she goes to Wackner’s court, where Wackner now has a deli ticket machine and is wearing super-sized novelty sunglasses. Why not!

He sees Marissa and calls a five-minute recess. In “chambers,” Marissa tells him she’d like to work for him part-time but keep her RL job.  

Wackner needs her help processing more copyright certificates. He’s priced them competitively at $20 and found that a lot of writers want these certificates, even though they have no legal value. (Neither do actual copyrights, Wackner notes. And he notes that if anyone plagiarizes, they can sue in HIS court.)  

“Marissa, I’m building something here. I want you to join me. I want your advice on cases. I want to bounce legal theories off you,” he says. “What are your legal theories?” she asks. “I don’t know. That’s why I need to bounce them,” he says.  

Marissa gives him from noon to 2 and 5-7, which seems awfully ambitious for someone working at a law firm!

“That’s how revolutions are made. Back rooms of copy shops,” he says, accepting her offer.  

Kurt is sulking in the dark when Diane arrives home. He lets her know about Starkey’s visit and she immediately goes into lawyer mode. Notably, this scene does not spend much time on how Starkey found out the rioter’s name. Curious if they’re saving that for later or if Diane and Kurt both know what Diane must have done or if Kurt think’s it’s a coincidence.  

Kurt SET UP A TOUR OF THE CAPITOL for one of the veterans in his shooting group, and that tour was ON JANUARY 6TH! I really do wish he’d told Diane that upfront.  

Maybe the long pause where Kurt refuses to tell Diane which congressperson arranged the tour even after she promises she won’t say is him letting on that he knows that Diane ID’d the guy? Or maybe it’s just Kurt.  

I do not like the dead birds in Starkey’s office, mostly because I do not like thinking about dead birds.

Starkey compares Diane and Kurt to the Conways.  

And now more case stuff happens.  

Julius gets to question a witness for the first time in two years! He’s a little shaky at first but then he does a fantastic job! Yay Julius!

When Diane arrives at the office, reception is filled with around a hundred teddy bears. “What?” she asks. “Build-a-Bears. They were sent to Marissa,” the receptionist explains. “Okay... why?” Diane asks the logical next question. The receptionist does not know.  

“This one’s a Marissa bear,” she says, showing Diane a bear wearing boots and a wig. It does not look much like Marissa and it says “Hug me.”

Diane looks confused and furious at the same time. Her look here is, like, a milder version of the death stare she gives Alicia in Outside the Bubble when she learns about Alicia and Cary’s plan to leave.  

“Why don’t we, meaning you, take all these stuffed animals and put them in the conference room,” Diane instructs the receptionist. She is NOT! HAPPY! The receptionist seemed to be having fun with the bears, but clearly the right answer was to have done something with them and... not to have put them over every surface in reception. Eeek.  

Carmen’s new client, the rapist, arrives at the firm before anyone can hide the bears. “This may not be the firm for you,” his advisor/lawyer (I’m not totally sure what this dude’s job is) warns.  

Madeline notices the rapist and glares at the receptionist. “I know. I’m putting them in the conference room,” the receptionist says, thinking Madeline is upset about the bears. She is not upset about the bears.

Diane finds Marissa, who’s working with Carmen again. She asks Carmen to give them a moment.

“Why are there hundreds of teddy bears in our reception?” Diane asks. Marissa is confused. Diane shows her the Marissa bear. Marissa looks horrified and amused. “That doesn’t even look like me,” Marissa notes, completely missing how pissed off Diane is. I don’t think we have seen Diane be this direct/no-nonsense in ages.  

“That would seem to be beside the point. What is going on, Marissa?” Diane demands. Marissa suspects this is based on some advice she offered to a client who was buying a Build-a-Bear franchise and thinks this is a thank you gift. “What client? You’re not a lawyer! Why do you have clients?” Diane says exasperatedly.  

Marissa gives her a look, and Diane immediately understands that she’s been back to Wackner’s court. “Oh my God, this is about that Copy Coop court?”

“Marissa, no. By participating in that simulacrum of a courtroom, you exposed this firm to malpractice, sanctions, and God knows what,” Diane says. If that were really true, she wouldn’t have sat there and argued. I mean, I don’t know the legality of this all, but I feel like it’s a bigger optics issue than legal issue if Diane and other lawyers are willing to even consider participating?  

“If you wish to continue your employment at this firm, you will never do anything like that again. Do you understand?” Diane says. She will not hear any arguments.  

I love that Marissa is the thing that keeps Wackner coming back. It’s a good plot for her, but structurally, it also allows the show to keep Wackner around without many contrivances. Wackner sees that Marissa would understand what he’s up to, she sees that he shares some of her frustrations with the law, and they both want to work together again. It’s not like suddenly everyone’s talking about Wackner’s court and all the cases somehow end up there or anything.

The receptionist, who is having a truly terrible day, comes into announce that Kurt and Starkey have arrived. “Don’t put them in the conference room!” Diane commands, knowing that the teddy bears will be there. It’s too late, though, because the receptionist (who previously seemed to be fine at her job if bad at recognizing public figures and understanding that partners might not find teddy bears amusing) has already put them in the conference room. I feel bad for her, and don’t think the other things were her fault, but I feel like she could’ve seen this one coming...  

I find the teddy bears HILARIOUS, mostly because the reactions to them are so funny. It’s kind of the same gag as the balloons for Lucca in season two, but I don’t really care, because I’m getting to see Diane Lockhart treat hundreds of Build-a-Bears like they are a real work problem.

Starkey jokes about the bears; Kurt is silent.  

The rioter from the poster is now accusing Kurt of coming up with the STRATEGY for January 6th, which Kurt and Diane both dismiss as bullshit.  

I could do without Starkey’s musical cues.

I can’t tell if Kurt is in trouble here or if she’s just pressing him to name names. Why wouldn’t she just have rioter guy name names if he’s so eager to blame Kurt? I guess maybe if the others were actually there, he might be less likely to name the names of his actual co-conspirators? Or, Starkey might already know the names (surely the shooting range has logs) and be using this to raise the stakes.  

No one (except maybe the partner named Daniel) is happy about the rapist in reception. “Since when are we representing people like Wolfe-Coleman?” Julius asks. Didn’t these people help both Sweeney (though I think Sweeney was in some weird police brutality case and they didn’t actually want to represent him) and Bishop? And Rivi? But they draw the line here? Sure.  

Ah, there we go, an expository line-- “he’s the next Jeffrey Epstein”. Almost made it the whole episode without one of these. I’ll forgive it since it’s so late in the episode lol.  

“Did you approve this, Liz?!” Madeline demands. Liz did not. Daniel wonders if that means Diane approved it. Liz doesn’t think so and calls Diane (who happens to be walking past) in.  

“I know, the teddy bears. I’m working on it,” Diane says when she opens the door. I think the teddy bears are a bigger issue to Diane than to anyone else.  

Diane didn’t approve representing Mr. Rapey either. She’s uncomfortable that a meeting was happening without her; Madeline notes that she is standing there specifically because they wanted to involve her.  

David Lee pops up out of nowhere with the answer: one of the new associates (not Marissa, “the real one”) pulled in Mr. Rapey. Are there only two associates now even though orientation was for a big group?  

Firth is gone, btw. David Lee is the new Mr. Firth. I have no idea why David would want to be STR Laurie’s guy for managing RL but... sure, whatever? David Lee is an effective antagonist, especially in small doses, and this allows the writers to keep him around and continue the STR Laurie plot without a key guest star. If STR Laurie is still a thing, and it seems like it is going to be a thing for a while, then having David Lee take on this role makes sense for plot. Otherwise they’re going to have to shoehorn him in to every plot somehow. At least now he has a reason to be around.  

Liz and Diane take a walk to chat. Diane is worried about having David as their boss. Liz says she has a worse worry—David Lee knew exactly when to come downstairs with information, suggesting he know what they were talking about. “Would he do something like that?” Liz asks when Diane wonders if there’s a bug. “Oh, yeah,” Diane replies. Hah, yeah. He absolutely would.  

They decide to have Jay search for bugs and Liz is frustrated with how much time they have to spend on things other than lawyering. Yup.

“What is going on with all the teddy bears in the conference room?” Liz asks as they head back to the office. “It’s a long story,” Diane sighs. I also love that the teddy bears link the various pieces of the episode together—it feels like all of these threads are happening simultaneously because of that constant.  

I don’t get RL’s approach to clients. Bishop and Rivi are ok, Wolfe-Colman is not (except that actually he is fine). Cord is okay too. Do they draw the line anywhere? I know Liz was right when she said that OF COURSE they were taking the money, but is there really nothing that differentiates that situation from this one? I feel like there should be.

Marissa goes back to see Wackner. Since someone refuses to say “I respect and I love you,” Wackner reverses his ruling. This is part of the “Bad Loser Law of last Wednesday,” so the rules of Wackner’s court are clearly a work in progress.

Marissa explains she can’t be the law clerk because of Diane. She tries to connect him with a real lawyer, still not understanding exactly what Wackner’s after. “You know just enough not to crush what I’m doing here,” Wackner explains. “A real lawyer will look for reasons why not. I need someone to look for reasons why.”  

Case stuff happens. I cannot read Cord’s handwriting. Liz and Julius lose the case because Judge Friend says what’s happening isn’t fair, but it is constitutional. (So here we have, at least in the show’s POV, a good and attentive judge who can’t make decisions that make sense because she’s bound by a document written before anyone had ever dreamed of the internet.)  

Cord is waiting for Liz in her office. He’s prepared to bankroll an appeal. Did they blow thorough that $12 million already? Impressive; it’s been like a day.  

Cord says they are definitely the firm he wants. Interesting.

Now Liz wants a meeting with Carmen, so it’s Marissa who leaves the room. This scene seems like it was meant to be a different day?  

Liz wants to talk about Mr. Rapey. Carmen is, yet again, chill about the case. “Carmen, is there anyone that you would not represent?” Liz asks. Funny, Liz, I could ask you the same. Being hesitant about it is not changing the fact that you’re representing bad people. Carmen’s just cutting the bullshit.  

“I don’t understand. Is there someone you don’t want me to represent?” I love how Carmen’s incredibly polite responses always seem very pointed. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Carmen’s reply, and yet it puts Liz in a place where she can’t dance around what she’s trying to say.  

“I’m just trying to get a sense of who you are,” Liz explains.  

Then Liz decides she’s going to help on the Craig Wolfe-Colman (Mr. Rapey) case, and they will keep talking about her career path. Liz, this does not seem like the right solution! You're worried about your associate representing bad people so you’re like, I know, what if I ALSO represented bad people? If your goal is to convince Carmen not to take clients like this, you’re kinda shooting yourself in the foot!  

“Are you worried about me?” Carmen says, again turning things on Liz. “I don’t know what I am about you,” Liz replies. Me either. Well, I know I'm intrigued, but beyond that, no clue!

All the bears have ended up in Diane’s office, where Wackner is waiting. He jokes about how his court is always seen as informal, yet this real fancy law office is covered in Build-a-Bears. Then he says he wants to hire RL—he's willing to pay. He wants consultation from Marissa (“consultation on legal issues”) and he’s prepared to spend a lot. And, if there’s one thing we know, it’s that they’re always going to take the money. So, they do.

I love that Wackner’s goal is to “perfect my little clubhouse of the law.” It’s a fun plot, and it also allows for the rules in his court to change (I’m sure we’re going to be treated to/subjected to a lot of whimsical gags around changing and ridiculous rules). It's also a good way to work through the thought experiment over the course of the season. It’s not like Wackner already has a system set up and it’s perfect—I'm sure we’re going to see his system run into issues and explore that more, too.  

Wackner monologues a bit here about why he’s running fake court, and he lets us know he’s going to monologue. Basically he thinks people no longer want to help people and are only motivated by their own self interest. He notes that no one talks about the Peace Corps anymore and asks the last time Diane heard anyone say those words. I’m sure I’ve heard a reference more recently but my mind went RIGHT to season one Cary Agos saying “Peace Corps. Belize,” as some kind of smarmy pickup line. This is likely not where my mind was supposed to go.

Wackner wants “A new Peace Corps. For America.” Diane’s sympathetic to that and agrees to take him on as a client.  

Wackner asks if he can take a bear. Diane instructs him to take two.  

Aaaand Wackner and Cord end up on the elevator together. Wackner hands Cord a bear, the elevator doors close, and the episode ends. Since last episode ended with Marissa and Carmen in the elevator together, I’m hoping this will be how every episode this season ends. I think using the Kings’ favorite liminal space to transition between episodes is kind of fun, and it fits with the ellipses at the end of every episode title.  

Speaking of... did you see today’s elevator-themed episode of Evil? It was written by the Kings. Those two have been obsessed with elevators for at least a decade.  

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Bernie Sanders gave Washington whiplash this week — and it was all part of his plan. Barely 24 hours after the Vermont senator publicly rejected a $3.5 trillion spending deal following a Monday meeting with President Joe Biden, he turned around to tout it as the most transformational policy proposal in nearly 100 years.

The shift in tone was a tactic Sanders used to coax moderate Democrats into going far higher than they might have otherwise felt comfortable. After he had insisted on shooting for the moon with a $6 trillion budget proposal, $3.5 trillion suddenly looked pretty reasonable.

The episode revealed a conciliatory side to the liberal icon often depicted by the media and Republicans as wild-eyed and well to the left of his party. Sanders has opposed some of Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s policies and nominees, but never in instances when his vote would prove decisive. He’s also softened his opposition to a bipartisan infrastructure deal, recognizing that he can't alienate his fellow Democrats if he wants to move his own agenda.

Still, the Independent from Vermont isn’t quite ready for the “P” label. “It’s not that I’m more pragmatic. It’s that there are 50 members of the Democratic Caucus. And unfortunately not all of them agree with me on everything,” Sanders said in an interview. “It was important to have a vision going forward of where we needed to go. And I think that was the right vision,” Sanders added. “Obviously, it was a vision that was a little bit more comprehensive than some of my colleagues.”

Even after two presidential runs garnered him national stardom and effective ownership of the American left, Sanders has toiled in the Senate minority with few levers to pull. This Congress, as the Senate Budget chair and a member of Schumer’s leadership team, the 79-year-old is one of the most powerful people in Democratic-controlled Washington. He also seems to be having a good time after decades of prowling the Capitol with gruff rebuttals for reporters delivered in his signature Brooklyn accent. After his interview with POLITICO, he was pressed by another reporter to take “one more question.”

“She makes me speculate,” he teased the second reporter, his voice rising in playful incredulousness. “One more question?!”

Jokes aside, moderates surmised it wasn’t easy for Sanders to shed his uncompromising stance on this year's massive spending blueprint, which is still perhaps months away from becoming law. Tester, who quickly endorsed Sanders’ budget blueprint, despite reservations, observed that Sanders likely “had hesitation” in coming down by $2.5 trillion.

“It may have been one of those deals where it was: ‘Look, Bernie, if we don’t get this, we can’t do anything.’ And he decided to move with it,” Tester said of the haggling. Yet senators on the Budget Committee viewed Sanders as taking an extreme position precisely so that it would yield a compromise all the more fruitful for liberal Democrats. If Sanders had started off endorsing Biden’s number of $4 trillion, it’s possible he and other progressives might have had to settle for a number lower than the $3.5 trillion they agreed upon. “Bernie Sanders is like a human embodiment of shifting the Overton Window,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who serves on the Budget Committee. “We wouldn’t be there without him putting out $6 trillion.”

With a ceiling of $3.5 trillion, Sanders says he can pursue all the changes that he’s prioritized, just not for not as long as he wants. That raises the possibility of future fights over the extension of programs like the expanded child tax credits championed by Democrats. Nonetheless, Sanders argues every chance he gets that he’s pushing “the most consequential piece of legislation passed since the 1930s for working people.” On the price tag alone, he’s right: If successful, the current social spending bill will be the biggest ever passed by Congress.

Those ambitious aspirations, and his influence on the Democrat Party’s agenda, make Sanders a handy villain for Republicans. The GOP tried to use his possible ascension in the majority as an attack line in the Georgia Senate races -- only to see Democrats win those contests, giving Sanders the budget gavel. Senate Republicans still try to tie vulnerable Democrats to Sanders, more so even than Biden or Schumer. “We applaud Bernie Sanders’ commitment to socialism and his influential leadership pushing 2022 Senate Democrat candidates to the far left,” said Katharine Cooksey, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee.

In addition to his central role in the Democratic caucus, Sanders also has the ear of former presidential rival Biden. Since winning the nomination and throughout the first six months of his presidency, the president has kept Sanders close. White House chief of staff Ron Klain essentially had an open-door policy with Sanders as he pushed for a $15 minimum wage earlier this year. That hike was ultimately crushed by moderates and the Senate parliamentarian, an early blow for Sanders.

But Sanders returned quickly to press Biden to embrace an expansion of Medicare coverage for dental, hearing aids and vision. During a private Oval Office meeting ahead of the budget announcement, Sanders “made that case passionately” again and Biden “gave his full backing,” said a senior White House aide. Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said Biden “deeply respects Senator Sanders’ unflinching commitment to fighting for working people."

Medicare expansion is included in Senate Democrats’ budget proposal, though it’s unclear whether Sanders will be able to lower the Medicare eligibility age as he set out to do months ago. Nonetheless, Sanders seems close to cinching a major change to an entitlement program that's helped define the party's legacy for generations.

For many years, Sanders played “a kind of gadfly role,” said David Axelrod, who served as an adviser to former President Barack Obama, who Sanders briefly entertained primarying during the 2012 presidential campaign. But now, he added, Sanders “has comfortably shifted into the role of deal-maker."

“You're seeing a very pragmatic Bernie Sanders, but he's pragmatic in a principled way,” Axelrod said, observing that Biden and Sanders, “who really were from different places in the party, have come together in the sunset of their careers to do something potentially historic.”

Asked if Sanders is a pragmatist, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) offered a clipped “yes” for an answer: “I don’t want to get him in trouble.”

This isn’t the first deal Sanders has cut, and it probably won’t be the last. In 2014 he memorably teamed with the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on a landmark agreement to reform the scandal-plagued Veterans Affairs Department. As part of that agreement, Sanders signed off on expanding private care access for veterans, a concession directly at odds with his long-standing commitment to single-payer health care. Sanders also struck an alliance last year with Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in pushing for new pandemic stimulus checks.

“He’s obviously a passionate advocate. But he also understands this is a moment that we can’t let go by,” said Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a member of the Budget Committee and Democratic leadership. “He was able to read the room.”

Sanders is already digging in for the next round of fights. He may have centrist Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and the rest of the Budget Committee on board with his budget plan, but he still needs to win over more conservative Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Manchin said he hasn’t yet talked to Sanders about the proposal.

Once again, Sanders is drawing a line in the sand, saying he’s not coming down any more from $3.5 trillion. Time will tell whether this one is real or tactical. “No. Quite the contrary,” he said, hinting that progressive allies across the Capitol might drive the price back up. “We’ll see what happens in the House.”