#newsday

[delta-m]

Waiting for my sharps container to come in, drawfee always coming in clutch.

[hale-my-nathan]

Trump Weird News - Home Run ! - I Agree With Me !!!

[petervintonjr]

"Tell the truth, then duck."

In the previous biography I made mention of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ); in this entry we celebrate the life of one of its original founders, Les Payne. Born in 1941 Alabama, Payne grew up hyper-aware of the immediate and constant threat posed by the Ku Klux Klan and other forms of looming racial violence. To get away from that intimidation, Payne's parents eventually moved the family to Hartford, Connecticut (not that this constituted any real improvement in race relations, to be sure, but at least the threat of immediate violence was somewhat mitigated.). Payne eventually graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1964 and then joined the U.S. Army, where he not only became a Ranger and attained the rank of Captain, but also became a military journalist (er, excuse me, that's Information Officer); at one point even covering Gen. William Westmoreland at the height of the Vietnam war. Journalism remained his passion after returning to civilian life, and in 1969 (on the recommendation of none other than Bill Moyers), joined the staff of Newsday, where --unusual for most journalism careers-- he would remain for the next 39 years.

He became an assistant managing editor in the 1990s, and then deputy managing editor in 2001. Over the course of his career he covered (much like his colleague Earl Caldwell) the immediate aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination and a behind-the-scenes look at the Black Panthers Party. He also shone unwelcome light on redlining, school segregation, migrant prison camps, and the Attica Prison rebellion, and conducted some contentious interviews with figures such as New York Mayor Ed Koch and the Rev. Al Sharpton. He also covered the Soweto uprising in South Africa (for which he received a Pulitzer nomination, though not the actual award); controversially Payne observed of apartheid that "South Africa is learning this from the Americans;" that "you don't have to have signs --drinking fountain signs and such-- to segregate people. I think America is the most successful experiment in the world for apartheid. It's done with subtlety but unerring certainty."

Perhaps one of Payne's most pivotal accomplishments was his work on The Heroin Trail (PDF file), a 1974 project that exposed, in 33 installments, a veritable "farm-to-table" tale. It traced international flow of heroin from the poppy fields of Turkey, all the way to New York City's drug addicts, and all the disquieting steps along the way --while this series would ultimately win Payne a Pulitzer, it certainly didn't come without danger; at one point he and two colleagues were captured in Corsica by one of the world's then-most notorious drug lords, Marcel Francisci.

Payne retired from Newsday in 2006. He had been working on an examination of the life of Malcolm X at the time of his death, in March of 2018. The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, was published posthumously in 2020, with assistance from his daughter Tamara Payne.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Overkill. http://Newsday.com/matt :: Matt Davies

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 13, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 14, 2024

Republican senators today elected John Thune of South Dakota to be the next Senate majority leader. Trump and MAGA Republicans had put a great deal of pressure on the senators to back Florida senator Rick Scott, but he marshaled fewer votes than either Thune or John Cornyn of Texas, both of whom were seen as establishment figures in the mold of the Republican senators’ current leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Scott lost on the first vote. The fact that the vote was secret likely helped Thune’s candidacy. Senators could vote without fear of retaliation. 

The rift between the pre-2016 leaders of the Republican Party and the MAGA Republicans is still obvious, and Trump’s reliance on Elon Musk and his stated goal of deconstructing the American government could make it wider. 

Republican establishment leaders have always wanted to dismantle the New Deal state that began under Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and continued under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower and presidents of both parties until 1981. But they have never wanted to dismantle the rule of law on which the United States is founded or the international rules-based order on which foreign trade depends. Aside from moral and intellectual principles, the rule of law is the foundation on which the security of property rests: there is a reason that foreign oligarchs park their money in democracies. And it is the international rules-based order that protects the freedom of the seas on which the movement of container ships, for example, depends.

Trump has made it clear that his goal for a second term is to toss overboard the rule of law and the international rules-based order, instead turning the U.S. government into a vehicle for his own revenge and forging individual alliances with autocratic rulers like Russian president Vladimir Putin. 

He has begun moving to  put into power individuals whose qualifications are their willingness to do as Trump demands, like New York representative Elise Stefanik, whom he has tapped to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, or Florida senator Marco Rubio, who Trump said today would be his nominee for secretary of state. 

Alongside his choice of loyalists who will do as he says, Trump has also tapped people who will push his war on his cultural enemies forward, like anti-immigrant ideologue Stephen Miller, who will become his deputy chief of staff and a homeland security advisor. Today, Trump added to that list by saying he plans to nominate Florida representative Matt Gaetz, who has been an attack dog for Trump, to become attorney general.

Trump’s statement tapping Gaetz for attorney general came after Senate Republicans rejected Scott, and appears to be a deliberate challenge to Republican senators that they get in line. In his announcement, Trump highlighted that Gaetz had played “a key role in defeating the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax.” 

But establishment Republican leaders understand that some of our core institutions cannot survive MAGA’s desire to turn the government into a vehicle for culture war vengeance. 

Gaetz is a deeply problematic pick for AG. A report from the House Ethics Committee investigating allegations of drug use and sex with a minor was due to be released in days. Although he was reelected just last week, Gaetz resigned immediately after Trump said he would nominate him, thus short-circuiting the release of the report. Last year, Republican senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma told CNN that “we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor, that all of us had walked away, of the girls that he had slept with. He would brag about how he would crush [erectile dysfunction] medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night." 

While South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham said he would be willing to agree to the appointment, other Republican senators drew a line. “I was shocked by the announcement —that shows why the advise and consent process is so important,” Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) said. “I’m sure that there will be a lot of questions raised at his hearing.” Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was blunt: “I don’t think he’s a serious candidate.”

If the idea of putting Gaetz in charge of the country’s laws alarmed Republicans concerned about domestic affairs, Trump’s pick of the inexperienced and extremist Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth to take over the Department of Defense was a clarion call for anyone concerned about perpetuating the global strength of the U.S. The secretary of defense oversees a budget of more than $800 billion and about 1.3 million active-duty troops, with another 1.4 million in the National Guard and employed in Reserves and civilian positions.

The secretary of defense also has access to the nuclear command-and-control procedure. Over his nomination, too, Republican senators expressed concern.

While Trump is claiming a mandate to do as he wishes with the government, Republicans interested in their own political future are likely noting that he actually won the election by a smaller margin than President Joe Biden won in 2020, despite a global rejection of incumbents this year. And he won not by picking up large numbers of new voters—it appears he lost voters—but because Democratic voters of color dropped out, perhaps reflecting the new voter suppression laws put into place since 2021.

Then, too, Trump remains old and mentally slipping, and he is increasingly isolated as people fight over the power he has brought within their grasp. Today his wife, Melania, declined the traditional invitation from First Lady Jill Biden for tea at the White House and suggested she will not be returning to the presidential mansion with her husband. It is not clear either that Trump will be able to control the scrabbling for power over the party by those he has brought into the executive branch, or that he has much to offer elected Republicans who no longer need his voters, suggesting that Congress could reassert its power.  

Falling into line behind Trump at this point is not necessarily a good move for a Republican interested in a future political career. 

Today the Republicans are projected to take control of the House of Representatives, giving the party control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency, as well as the Supreme Court. But as the downballot races last week show, MAGA policies remain unpopular, and the Republican margin in the House will be small. In the last Congress, MAGA loyalists were unable to get the votes they needed from other Republicans to impose Trump’s culture war policies, creating gridlock and a deeply divided Republican conference. 

The gulf between Trump’s promises to slash the government and voters’ actual support for government programs is not going to make the Republicans’ job easier. Conservative pundit George Will wrote today that “the world’s richest person is about to receive a free public education,” suggesting Elon Musk, who has emerged as the shadow president, will find his plans to cut the government difficult to enact as elected officials reject cuts to programs their constituents like. 

Musk’s vow to cut “at least” $2 trillion from federal spending, Will notes, will run up against reality in a hurry. Of the $6.75 trillion fiscal 2024 spending, debt service makes up 13.1%; defense—which Trump wants to increase—is 12.9%. Entitlements, primarily Social Security and Medicare, account for 34.6%, and while the Republican Study Group has called for cuts to them, Trump said during the campaign, at least, that they would not be cut. 

So Musk has said he would cut about 30% of the total budget from about 40% of it. Will points out that Trump is hardly the first president to vow dramatic cuts. Notably, Ronald Reagan appointed J. Peter Grace, an entrepreneur, to make government “more responsive to the wishes of the people” after voters had elected Reagan on a platform of cutting government. Grace’s commission made 2,478 recommendations but quickly found that every lawmaker liked cuts to someone else’s district but not their own.  

Will notes that a possible outcome of the Trump chaos might be to check the modern movement toward executive power, inducing Congress to recapture some of the power it has ceded to the president in order to restore the stability businessmen prefer.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was himself a wealthy man, and in the 1930s he tried to explain to angry critics on the right that his efforts to address the nation’s inequalities were not an attack on American capitalism, but rather an attempt to save it from the communism or fascism that would destroy the rule of law. 

“I want to save our system, the capitalistic system,” FDR wrote to a friend in 1935. “[T]o save it is to give some heed to world thought of today.” 

The protections of the system FDR ushered in—the banking and equities regulation that killed crony finance, for example—are now under attack by the very sort of movement he warned against. Whether today’s lawmakers are as willing as their predecessors were to stand against that movement remains unclear, especially as Trump tries to bring lawmakers to heel, but Thune’s victory in the Senate today and the widespread Republican outrage over Trump’s appointment of Gaetz and Hegseth are hopeful signs. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[sneakybiskit]

They arrived!!

[mysharona1987]

[thislovintime]

The “Ditty Diego” session, July 25, 1968.

“Well, I think Head is quite poor… The message of the movie is that we are all trapped, that the Monkees are trapped. That’s not the message of the TV episodes, so I think it’s painfully poor in that respect… The Monkees’ main contribution — the music was the filler — what we did in the TV series was that there was no senior adult figure. It’s something that hadn’t been done and wasn’t done again for decades. It reflected what the kids needed to hear. No authority was good. It was just the four of us making our own way.” - Peter Tork, Newsday, October 1, 2010

Q: “What do you think of the music from the film ‘Head’?” Peter Tork: Well, since I wrote and produced two of the songs myself, I think it’s fine. I did ‘Can You Dig It?’ and ‘[Long Title:] Do I Have To Do This All Over Again.’” - Goldmine, 1982

“My favorite album is actually not ‘Headquarters.’ It’s ‘Head.’ The songs were basically produced by Carol[e] King and she is a magic-touch woman. Coming in a close second is ‘Headquarters.’ ‘Head’ is a wonderful listening experience, and ‘Headquarters’ is a bunch of garage-band musicians. But we had a great time doing it.” - Peter Tork, Kenosha News, August 7, 2005

[magnetictapedatastorage]

Suffolk DWI police officer drank, drove, crashed, injured driver, refused breath test — yet escaped arrest

Link

March 10th, 2022