Happy Birthday, Merle Haggard

I don’t know if you had the same experience, but my high school years were not only about discovering the opposite sex but about opening the door to music. Not music that I was told to listen to, or that my folks listened to (although they actually had great taste in music), or that I played as part of the school band, but music that somehow, someway, spoke to me.

Of course, initially this was rock and roll, which was the musical culture common to almost all teenagers. In my generation, you had to beable to speak fluent Beatles. But I also remember hoping that my favorite rock band, the Rolling Stones, would not spend too much time with the Fab Four and have their bad-boyness smoothed out by success. In hindsight, I liked the Stones better because they were a blues band. A friend turned me on to Paul Butterfield, and I went from his first album to the “Fathers and Sons” record with Butterfield and Muddy Waters to “The Best of Muddy Waters” and “The Best of Little Walter.” I didn’t listen to much rock and roll after I got into Chicago blues.

Country music was always kind of lurking aound, too. The first rock act I saw in person was The Byrds. They had just released “Sweetheart Of The Rodeo” album, a country record, and they played some of those tunes live in between their AM radio hits. The crowd booed, but I liked it and bought that album and put it on heavy rotation on the turntable in my bedroom.

The summer of 1969 I went to the Seattle Pops Festival and saw the Flying Burrito Brothers, a wild and woolly act fronted by Gram Parsons, who had dreamed up “Sweetheart Of The Rodeo” album when he was with the Byrds. A month later some friends and I camped out in a field in Tenino, Washington for three days to catch the second Sky River Rock Festival. The Burritos played every day. By the time I left Tenino I was sold on those guys. When I got back to Seattle, I got their debut album, “The Gilded Palace of Sin,” and I proceeded to wear that thing out every time I took a break from the blues.

I figured that this hippie country stuff was cool, but this had to be the equivalent to the British blues I had thought was so great until I found the real stuff. What I needed to do was to go down to Discount Records and pick myself up a real country and western album.

But unlike my experience with the blues, I had no leads. I went through the country bins in the record store and saw a lot of great album covers (I think that may have been the first time I laid eyes on Porter Wagoner’s“The Hard Cold Facts Of Life” album cover), but the odds that I walk out of there having spent $3.99 with a bad hillbilly joke on vinyl seemed awfully high.

“Okie From Muskogee” was the big smash country record that summer. I was appropriately appalled by its “message,” but the singer had a good voice, and the perversity of buying it and forcing myself to listen to a whole album of right-wing shitkicker music got the better of me and I walked of the store with a copy of Merle Haggard’s “Live In Muskogee” album.

The gods were with me that day. Even now, I can’t imagine a better introduction to country music than that record. This guy Merle Haggard, it turned out, had an unbelievable voice. And his band, The Strangers, were insanely great. Who the hell was this Roy Nichols guy on guitar? Merle did many of his hits, or course, on the record, and his songs were killer. He played these fantastic blues songs by some guy named Jimmie Rodger—and yodeled like a prince!

Even today I can listen to every second of that album in my head. Merle became my guide to a vast territory of unbelievable music. Jimmie Rodgers The Blue Yodeler. The serpentine drawl of Lefty Frizzell. The vaudeville numbers of Emmett Miller. Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan—discovering those wild men was like discovering America. Marty Robbins, Merle’s big early influence. It was such a fun time in my life, going deep every day, year after year, on all these rednecks and bluesmen and their gorgeous soulfulness.

I went off to New York City to go to college and saw my first Merle Haggard show at the Felt Forum, the smaller arena next to Madison Square Garden. Merle was thirty-two. The lady-killer-with-the-Hollywood-good-looks version of Merle was a sight to behold, but the voice that the young Merle Haggard had was one of the most amazing instruments every brought onto a stage. Everybody left that show wanting to be a Stranger, and it was a revelation to see and hear what a big part Merle’s wife Bonnie Owens played in his stage show and sound.

I saw Merle dozens of times after that. Like Sinatra, his voice got even better with age. Listening to Merle sing a ballad in his forties was an unforgettable experience. For several years Merle augmented The Strangers with a slew of legendary alumni of Bob Wills’ band, the Texas Playboys, and that outfit delivered the most enjoyable—and the most musical—shows I’ve ever seen. Merle learned to play a solid fiddle with that version of his band. I sat in the audience when Merle made his first appearance on Austin City Limits. (Check out the DVD of that show, “Live From Austin, TXC ‘78,” if you want to see Merle in his unearthly prime. I caught him in the small, 300-seat Backstage in Seattle, where he just slayed us with ballad after ballad in a really intimate show. A year before Merle died, Isaw him in a theater in Red Bank, New Jersey. The high end on his voice was gone, but he still had moments of glory, and he pulled out the fiddle that night.

Merle did things his own way, from the beginning. The writer Gerald Haslam grew up with Merle in Bakersfield. In his book, “Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California,” Haslam describes his awestruck admiration of Merle the youngster, who was hopping freight trains while still in grade school, this way:

“During his early teen years the handsome Haggard seemed preternaturally mature to us neighborhood kids, a Huck Finn unencumbered by formal education and unintimidated by authority; he escaped seven times from various reform schools (that tally would eventually rise to seventeen). He was in fact envied by many of his male peers and endlessly alluring to young women. Hag had already become singular. Some of his pals even had trouble understanding him, but nonetheless they found him to be an exciting companion.”

Back in the 1970s I caught a Merle Haggard show at the Opera House in Seattle. I snuck backstage, hoping to find Merle. That didn’t happen, but I did run into Norm Hamlet, Merle’s great pedal steel player, who was still working with Haggard when Merle died. I told Hamlet how impressive it was that Merle had had put together such a great band and kept it together for so many years.

“I’ve known Merle since he was fifteen years old,” Hamlet told me. “We all knew that if he ever got his shit together, he’d be big.”

The Politics of Fear

Fellow anti-Trumpers, get a grip. Our worst enemy isn’t Donald Trump. It’s our cowardly, indecisive, and ill-informed selves.

Yes, we all want to beat Trump.

Yes, Trump can be reelected.

Yes, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Four more years of Trump and the United States will be a full-fledged banana republic.

Yes, Trump will conduct the most brutal, nasty, and sleazy campaign in American history, and he will have his own $1-billion disinformation campaign and the help of the Russians.

Yes, none of us want to mess this up by choosing the wrong candidate.

These extreme challenges should equate to a laser focused, highly energized resistance. And there are such people, and they are already hard at work on the 2020 election.

But there is an enormous amount of fear, indecision, and ignorance amongst us anti-Trump voters. The election campaign is just beginning, and people are claiming that they are exhausted. They can’t make up their minds about which Democrat to vote for. They are afraid that no one can beat Trump. Many believe the absurd talking points the Trumpists have concocted about the Democratic candidates.

Democrats are still suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from the 2016 primaries and general election. They continue to stare at national polls, which mean absolutely nothing in terms of the Presidential election. They are willfully ignoring what has happened since 2016 and the obvious path to victory in 2020.

Beating Trump will be hard. But if you believe it is impossible, you are ignoring these important facts:

For the past year polls have shown every conceivable Democratic candidate beating Trump in the general election. Every one of them.

129,085,410 votes were cast in 2016. Trump won because of 30,000 votes cast in five states.

There are 12 million more registered Democrats than Republicans in this country.

Trump is the most unpopular President since Herbert Hoover.

Nearly all Americans made up their minds about Trump three years ago. His poll numbers have been flatlined in negative territory forever.

The Democrats won an historically spectacular victory in the 2018 midterm elections. We won the House of Representatives. We won governorships in Michigan, Wisconsin, New Mexico, and deep-red Kansas. We won control of both state houses and the governorships in Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Nevada, New Mexico and New York. We flipped both state houses in New Hampshire. We flipped the state senates in Colorado, Maine, Connecticut, and New York, and the state House in Minnesota. We busted up the supermajorities in the Michigan senate and in both chambers of the North Carolina legislature. We won supermajorities in the house chambers in Delaware and Illinois, the Nevada Assembly and both chambers of the Oregon state
legislature. We made strong gains in the red or purple states of Arizona, Indiana, Iowa, Florida, Kansas, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Republican incumbents in Congress and state legislatures have been retiring in record numbers since 2016, removing the advantage of incumbency. In elections with no incumbent held since 2016, Republican candidates on average are running 5 points behind the unpopular Trump. The replacement candidates for these retirees tend to me far more extreme, which, in swing states, makes them more beatable.

The Midwest—which we all know after 2016 will be critical to the Presidential election—has been the best region for the Democrats since 2016. In elections held since then, Democrats have performed 10.2 points better in the Midwest than Clinton did in 2016.

Trump has been underwater in polls taken in the past year in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Arizona.

The 2020 U.S. Senate map favors the Democrats. Twenty-three of the 35 Senate seats that are up for grabs in 2020—including special elections in Arizona and Georgia—are held by the White Supramacist party.

The vast majority of Americans do not support the White Supremacist Party’s positions on healthcare, climate change, abortion rights, gun control, voting rights, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Trump’s just-released 2020 budget is a jaw-dropping gift to the Democrats: a half-a-trillion-dollar cut to Medicare, roughly $900 billion in cuts to Medicaid, and a $24 billion cut to Social Security.

The national polls, of course, are meaningless when it comes to the 2020 Presidential election, which will be decided by six to nine swing states, give or take a few. It’s clear that Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Colorado will be critical when it comes to beating Trump. How are things looking in those states?

The only polling site I could find that posts state-by-state favorable/unfavorable Trump polling results was Morning Consult. They are not the most highly rated polling outfit, but they are legit. They are Politico’s polling partner. 538.com gives them a B- more their 75% accuracy track record and a 2% bias in favor of Democrats.

The Morning Consult site shows Trump’s approval ratings trend since 2016 by state. So how do their polls show Trump doing in our nine swing states? Trump’s support since the election has plunged in all of them:

Down 11 points in Arizona (53% unfavorable)

Down 14 points in Colorado (53% unfavorable)

Down 24 points in Florida (currently 49% favorable)

Down 20 points in Michigan (54% disapprove)

Down 10 points in Minnesota (54% disapprove)

Down 14 points in New Hampshire (55% disapprove)

Down 19 points in North Carolina (49% disapprove)

Down 11 points in Pennsylvania (49% disapprove)

Down 15 points in Wisconsin (53% disapprove)

In fact, according to the Morning Consult polls, Trump’s support has dropped by double digits since 2016 in every single state with the exception of Idaho, where he has gained six points.

Polls aren’t scientific, the 2020 race will be hard and likely close, and there is always the possibility that the Democratic Party and its candidate will screw up. My point is that the anti-Trump resistance has a LOT going for it. We must reject the false notion that there is a sizeable group of undecided voters out there that are still in play and focus like monomaniacs on getting out the Democratic vote in those states.

Getting out the Democratic vote in nine states is not rocket science. It’s not a herculean task. Stop being scared and fearful and undecided and paralyzed. Stop whimpering and get to work on taking advantage of your built-in political advantages and your party’s recent momentum by volunteering and donating.

Most importantly, live up to the commitment the vast majority of us have made since 2016—to support
the 2020 Democratic nominee.

This brings us to Bernie Sanders.

(Full disclosure: I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries and Hillary Clinton in the general in 2016. The only candidate I have contributed to this year is Elizabeth Warren. I will vote for whoever wins the Democratic nomination.)

Sanders won the popular vote in Iowa and will likely win tonight in New Hampshire. It’s to Sanders’ advantage to have as many opponents as possible, and it looks like none of the current currents will drop out after New Hampshire. Sanders is in an excellent position to do well on Super Tuesday, when Democrats in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maine, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Vermont go to the polls.

Joe Biden will end up finishing fourth or fifth in Iowa and New Hampshire. He is like the pilot of a plane that is out of fuel and is trying to survive an emergency landing, which in Biden’s case will be an airstrip in South Carolina. Fresh polls there show that Michael Bloomberg, who has been saturating South Carolina with television ads, is taking a big chunk of African American voters away from Biden, which is the worst possible news for the former Vice President.

If Sanders does well tonight and on Super Tuesday, and the non-socialist opposition—Buttigieg, Warren, and Klobuchar—continueto split the anti-Bernie vote, Sanders’ only real opponent for the nomination will be Michael Bloomberg. Try to imagine a more disastrous scenario for the anti-Trump resistance than the Democratic Party spurning the candidate that won the most delegates in favor of a billionaire who bought his standing in polls. You can’t. That would not only mean the reelection of Trump but the end of the Democratic
party.

A lot can happen, but tomorrow morning it will probably look like Sanders will complete the takeover of the
Democratic Party that he nearly captured in 2016 and will be the one who runs against Trump.

There are a lot of Democrats still in the race, but none of them are as misunderstood and undervalued by Democratic voters than Bernie Sanders. James Carville spoke for many Democrats when he said “Are we out of our fucking minds?” about the prospect of Sanders winning the nomination.

What’s behind this reaction are the perceptions that (1) Sanders is too extreme, (2) Sanders is a self-proclaimed democratic socialist can’t win, (3) Sanders can’t win swing voters, and (3) Sanders would not be the Democratic Party “unity” candidate we need to get out the Democratic vote in November.

Sanders’ platform is only extreme when viewed in relationship to the policies of the White Supremacist Party, which has morphed from the Republican Party of old to a full-blown fascismovement dedicated to white power and the ultra-rich. Agree with Sanders’ platform or not, it doesn’t shy way from addressing real issues that Americans really care about, including healthcare, climate change, getting money out of politics, and the enormous gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us that has destroyed the American middle class. Sanders’ positions have become more mainstream since 2016, and his influence is seen in the platforms of all the other candidates. Sanders’ command of the issue of income inequality make him the best candidate to puncture Trump’s biggest political advantage—the myth that our economy is doing well.

This perception focuses on “electability,” which is a new term that is not only meaningless but that casts a dangerous fog over political reality. Presidential elections are primarily thumbs-up or thumbs-down votes on the performance of the party currently in the White House. The only times the opposing nominee has been a determining factor have been when he or she is truly charismatic and inspirational, like Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were. The history of Presidential elections is littered with the corpses of “electable” Democrats. Surely we haven’t already forgotten Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

It’s an indisputable fact is that Sanders has consistently led Trump in head-to-head polling in battleground states. Too many Democrats fail to appreciate that Sanders is way out in front of the party when it comes to understanding the national rage that has resulted from income inequality. His success has come from a lifetime spent focused on this issue. He’s shown real leadership, and it’s made him the leader of a movement. Many Democrats seem to view this as a bad thing, something cultish that is somehow threatening, when in fact the timing seems right, when the passion of his supporters is unmatched by any other candidate, and when he resonates so intensely with young Americans.

And don’t forget that Sanders is beating Trump in the polls after describing himself as a democratic socialist. So many Democrats are terrified because Trump will brand Sanders as a communist, which he will certainly do. But you are seriously deluded if you think that Trump wouldn’t throw an equal amount of raw sewage at Amy Klobuchar. This notion that the Democrats will win if they nominate someone with the least amount of pre-existing baggage is incredibly naïve. Democrats need an aggressive campaigner this year against the Master of Sleaze and a candidate who is not shy about declaring Trump to be what he is: a racist, a fascist, and a misogynist.

When Democrats dismiss Sanders as a cult leader, they are ignoring the obvious fact that Sanders is a phenomenally skilled politician. In five years he has nearly completed a takeover of a political party that he has never been a member of. Many Democrats hate this about Sanders, but these folks rarely asks themselves why their party has been so ripe for the picking by an outsider. Sanders is the best fundraiser among the Democrats and he’s done that on an average donation of $18. That’s an incredible political feat. And Sanders is proving to have the best organization and ground game, too. Sanders’ fundraising skills and organization would be incredibly valuable in the general election.

Sanders is a stark contrast to Trump. Integrity versus dishonesty, courage versus cowardice,  empathy versus privilege, eloquence versus profanity, tenacity versus changeableness , democrat versus authoritarian—name the quality, and Sanders and Trump couldn’t be more opposite.

If he wins most of the delegates in the primaries, Sanders will be the best Democratic Party unity candidate, if only because if he is denied the nomination the party will be split apart.

Democrats like to bask in the reflective glory of the Obama era, and there is a lot of be proud of there. But in this existential Presidential election facing us and the extreme peril we are facing, we anti-Trumpers should be looking at a similarly critical election in an equally perilous time.

In 1932 Democrats faced an unpopular President and a polarized electorate. They rejected the politics of the past and the once-failed candidacy of Al Smith and instead nominated Franklin Roosevelt, a candidate with a seemingly radical agenda aimed at solving the real challenges facing the country.

Roosevelt never shied away from taking it to the Republicans. Here’s what he told his followers in Madison Square Garden in 1936:

“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. Weknow now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Governmentby organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred.”

Which current Democratic candidate comes closest to Roosevelt’sprogressive—and aggressive—brand of politics?

It's the Simplicity, Smartypants

We like to think that our politics are complex and heavily influenced by events and arguments. This feels especially true given the avalanche of incidents, crises, scandals and tweets that we’ve struggled to process since January 20, 2017.

But there is nothing complex about politics under Trump.

We Americans made up our minds about Trump three years ago. Events and statements that would have crippled or even ended any other administration—Manafort, Flynn, Mueller, Stormy Daniels, Charlottesville, Helsinki, caged children and separated families, Michael Cohen, Khashoggi, the lies used to explain Soleimani’s assassination, the racist travel band, the end of press briefings and news conferences, the charges of sexual assault, and impeachment, to name just a small fraction—have had ZERO impact on Trump’s poll numbers.

Those numbers have barely moved in three years, and they are not going to move over the next ten months. No matter what happens.

Trump approval ratings over the past three years as tracked by 538.com

The Democrats had to impeach Trump, and Adam Schiff and the other impeachment managers did an absolutely brilliant job of making the case against him. The House Democrats need to continue to hold hearings, because those hearings and great reporting are the only forces for accountability left in Trumpworld.

If you believe that any argument, debate, incident, shock or statement that happens between now and November will change Trump’s reelection chances, you’re not going to use your time between now and the election wisely and you will increase the likelihood of Trump being elected.

Trump’s sizeable base has shown that they are perfectly willing to abandon the Constitution, the concept of fair elections, a free press, basic human decency, and their own national security in order to keep Trump in power. Nothing will convince them otherwise to any significant degree. Nothing.

And yet so many in the “resistance” continue to act, in denial of 1,095 days of constant evidence to the contrary, that one more document, one more scandal, one more tape, or one more unassailable argument will
turn the tide.

It’s hard to leave reality-based politics behind. It will excruciating to watch Trump take his victory lap after the Senate acquits him. But there is a empowering clarity underneath all these poll numbers, and if the resistance embraces it we will be focused and effective and we will removed Trump. If we continue to overthink the 2020 election, Trump will win.

The politics of 2020 could not be simpler. Only two things matter.

First, the majority of Americans have been opposed to Trump since day one.

Second, the only 2020 results that will matter will be those Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona, and Florida.

If the Democrats turn out their vote in those eight states, Trump will be removed. If they don’t, he’ll be elected.

Start NOW to campaign and donate in ways that increase Democratic turnout in those critical states.

We have 282 days left.

Yesterday's impeachment vote: profiles in courage, cravenness, and incoherence

The eighty-five-day sprint to impeachment managed by Nancy Pelosi was the most amazingly swift and brilliantly orchestrated Congressional effort in modern history. Pelosi had been—smartly—resistant to impeachment, but when Trump released his transcript and thereby not only dared the Democrats to nail him but revealed that he was already trying to rig the 2020 election, she went at him like a heat-seeking missile. She made the savvy call to make Adam Schiff and not Gerry Nadler the impeachment manager. She oversaw the collection of a remarkable amount of utterly damning evidence and testimony in just a few weeks despite a total stonewalling by the White House, made sure that the White Supremacist Party failed in their effort to derail the hearings, rejected the notion of pressuring her caucus in regards to final roll call, and in the end lost only two votes. It’s impossible to exaggerate how difficult this whole process was to pull off or how masterfully Pelosi and the House Democrats executed it. Trumpists and so-called progressives who think that politics is an intellectual exercise and not something involving humans love to disparage Pelosi as a soulless creature of compromise, but what she is is the best American legislative politician since World War II. And she has totally gotten inside Trump’s head, too. We are damn fortunate to have her at this existential moment in American history. If you aren’t ready to give up the American experiment—for better and for worse—the Democrats are literally the only show in town.

Yesterday we saw politicians commit acts of real courage. Twenty-eight of the thirty-one House Democrats who represent districts that Trump carried in 2016 risked their political futures to vote to impeach Trump on both articles. This is something that should be celebrated and that should inspire all of us in these dark days.

These are yesterday’s Profiles in Courage: Tom O'Halleran (Ariz.), Lucy McBath (Ga.), Cheri Bustos (Ill.), Lauren Underwood (Ill.), Cindy Axne (Iowa), Abby Finkenauer (Iowa), Dave Loebsack (Iowa), Elissa Slotkin (Mich.), Haley Stevens (Mich.), Angie Craig (Minn.), Susie Lee (Nev.), Chris Pappas (N.H.), Josh Gottheimer (N.J.), Andy Kim (N.J.), Mikie Sherrill (N.J.), Xochitl Torres Small (N.M.), Anthony Brindisi (N.Y.), Antonio Delgado (N.Y.), Sean Patrick Maloney (N.Y.), Max Rose (N.Y.), Kendra Horn (Okla.), Matt Cartwright (Pa.), Conor Lamb (Pa.), Joe Cunningham (S.C.), Ben McAdams (Utah), Elaine Luria (Va.), Abigail Spanberger (Va.), Ron Kind (Wis.)

Jared Golden (Maine) voted for the first article of impeachment but against the second.

Conversely, yesterday will always be known for the White Supremacist Party’s full-throated, snarling rejection of the Constitution in favor of outright fascism. The televised hearings revealed in living color how the former Republican Party is now the party of white men, by white men, and for white men. (Only one African American remains in the House GOP caucus, and he is leaving.) The howling, nasty mob on the White Supremacist Party side of the aisle not only looks nothing like the real America, it wants no part of it. The Profiles in Cravenness Award (there was never any doubt) goes to the White Supremacist Party members in the House. If you dream of slitting the throat of Lady Liberty and permanently replacing her with a corrupt, vicious, misogynous, and utterly immoral tyrant with testicles that will never drop, this is your tribe.
           
We’re talking about politicians here, so not surprisingly we have one more award to dole out—the Profiles in Incoherence Award. The winner—by a long mile—is Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard claims to make ending regime-change wars the centerpiece of her Presidential campaign, which would be laudable where it not for the reality that Gabbard inhabits the most horrible piece of turf in American politics—that fever swamp out behind the political barn where the alt-right and alt-left meet to swap crudely simplistic conspiracy theories. Tulsi Gabbard has much more in common with Steve Bannon (he’s a fan) than she does with Bernie Sanders, and she has created a very Trumpian political brand in that it has no coherent strategy or platform beyond her being at the center of everything and in its fundamental weirdness. Gabbard has missed 90 percent of her Congressional votes over the past two months to focus on her Presidential campaign, but despite this investment she can’t get past 2% in the polls. She needlessly caused a bitter breakup with the Democratic Party in her own state of Hawaii, and decided to retire from Congress rather than face a primary opponent. She archly announced her “boycott” of the December Democratic Presidential debate in an attempt to ignore the fact that she didn’t qualify for it. Gabbard is a political personality without a program other than to find some home that will give herself relevancy. This doesn’t play well on the Democratic side, and she hasn’t been able to get her campaign off the floor. She auditioned for a job in Trump administration in its early days. She has been running for President in a party that—for good reason—doesn’t trust her, and next November she won’t have a job. She is a frequent guest on Fox News. (Leading supremacist Tucker Carlson is keen on her.)

Gabbard was coy about her impeachment vote beforehand. On the day on which she would be asked to cast the most important vote of her Congressional career, Gabbard was AWOL. She was nowhere to be seen during the six hours of debate. When the vote was called, Gabbard arrived in the chamber in time to take the floor, hike her skirt, piss all over the Constitution and her Democratic colleagues by voting “Present,” and make a hasty exit.

“I could not in good conscience vote either yes or no. I am standing in the center,” Gabbard said in a typically goofy statement after her non-vote. Anyone who still thinks that time has stood still since 1965 and that the American political center is the spot halfway between the Democratic and Republican Party is certifiably insane and part of the problem, not the solution. Given that she committed political suicide yesterday as a Democrat, Gabbard’s career options are obvious: a job with Fox News, a place on Trump’s team, or a third-party Presidential bid. Trump would be thrilled if she choose the latter option. Gabbard and Trump deserve each other.

“This is nothing but a continuation of an internal political struggle, with the party that lost the election, the Democratic Party, trying to reach its goal by different means,” said Mitch McConnell after the vote. Oh, sorry—it was Vladimir Putin who said that.

Fiona Hill wasn't shy about speaking the truth about the biggest threat to our national security: Donald Trump. The impeachment process and the 2020 campaign need to embrace this reality, too.

Our national political crisis crystalized on Thursday when Fiona Hill pointed out—to their faces—that the White Supremacist Party members of the House Intelligence Committee were willfully promoting a disinformation campaign led by Vladimir Putin. The White Supremacists showed a rare moment of fear and squealed their denials, but Hill’s point was unassailable. Donald Trump—not Russia, not Iran, not North Korea—is the greatest threat to our national security, and this has been evident since Helsinki. This core reality needs to be front and center in the impeachment process and the 2020 election campaign.

Just as there will likely be a broad article of impeachment detailing Trump’s obstruction of justice, there should be a broad article of impeachment declared Trump a threat to national security. No further hearings or documentation would be needed, as the entire case is already in the public domain. The article could reference:

·         Trump’s refusal to accept the reality of climate change, the biggest threat to our national security, and his decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement.

·         Trump’s refusal to read his daily intelligence brief.

·         Trump’s persistent and public refusal to accept the fact that Russia interfered in the 2020 election and his public siding in Helsinki with Vladimir Putin over the entire U.S. intelligence community.

·         Trump’s refusal to spend money allocated by Congress to protect our elections from foreign interference or to put in place a plan for protecting the 2020 elections, despite constant warnings from the intelligence community and bipartisan Congressional committees that this is already happening.

·         Trump’s persistent and public effort to impugn the reputation of U.S. intelligence agencies, including accusing them, with no evidence, of spying on his 2016 campaign.

·         Trump’s refusal to keep records of his private, closed-door and telephone conversations with Vladimir Putin.

·         Trump’s decisions to pull the U.S. out of preexisting treaties and agreements, such as the Iran Deal, the INF treaty with Russia, our support of the expulsion of Russia from the G8, and our longstanding refusal to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, that enhanced our national security.

·         Trump’s refusal to abide by basic security procedures, including ensuring that security clearances are not granted to people who may be security risks, revoking the security clearances of people who disagree with him, the use of personal cell phones for highly sensitive conversations that has certainly resulted in their interception by foreign adversaries, and his sharing of classified information with Russian officials in the Oval Office.

·         Trump’s conscious strategy to not fill key national security positions, including that of the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of Homeland Security.

·         Trump’s decision to reallocate money budgeted for troop pay and pensions to pay, which are vital to troop morale, for his border wall.

·         Trump’s declaration of a phony national emergency at the southern border to justify the building of his wall.

·         Trump’s plans to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in violation of federal law.

·         Trump’s persistent efforts to enhance the international reputations of some of the world’s most odious dictators, including Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, President Xi of China, and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

·         Trump’s persistent and unjustified criticism of U.S. allies, especially our NATO partners in Europe, and his decisions to withhold military funding approved by Congress from allies unless they interfere in U.S. elections on his behalf.

·         Trump’s decision to renege on our promises to the Kurds and his approval of a campaign of genocide against them.

·         Trump’s promotion of racism within the U.S. and in Europe by mischaracterizing refugees as security threats and criminals, and prohibiting Muslims from traveling to the United States.

·         Trump’s persistent efforts to purge the intelligence agencies, the State Department, and the Justice Department of people he deems are not politically loyal to him.

·         The refusal of Trump and his family members to stop conducting personal business dealings with foreign governments.

·         Trump’s public endorsement of torture and his decision to not charge or try the prisoners at Guantanomo are both top recruitment tools for terrorist groups.

·         Trump’s decision to ban transgender people from serving in the military, which harms national security by creating unnecessary vacancies and damaging morale.

Likewise, the Democrats need to openly campaign in 2020 against the effort by Trump and the White Supremacist Party to destroy our national security along with our institutions and the rule of law. This is not a Republican versus Democrat election. This is an existential political contest and the security of the United States is at stake. Trump and the White Supremacist Party members in Congress are not acting for political gain and not for anyone’s definition of the best interests of the United States. We must take a cue from Fiona Hill and confront their treason head on.

PT Gazzell's "The Loft Sessions"

My first exposure to the harmonica playing of PT Gazell was via his 1978 LP “Pace Yourself” and his recordings with country legend Johnny Paycheck. At that time PT was part of an emerging and very small tribe of diatonic players inspired by Charlie McCoy who were focused not on blues harp but on unlocking the melodic potential of their instrument.

I finally met PT at the SPAH (Society for the Preservation and Advancement of the Harmonica) convention in St. Louis in 2018 and was in the audience when he played a remarkable set at that festival. I left town with two PT Gazell CDs—“2 Days Out” (released in 2011) and “Madness To The Method” (released in 2016)—in my luggage, and they became instant favorites and part of my steady musical listening rotation back home in Portland.

PT let me know recently that he has released a new recording—“The Loft Sessions”—and for the past few days I have been devouring this fresh collection of stellar jazz, and I feel compelled to help spread the news about this remarkable musician.

Notice I didn’t say “remarkable harmonica player.” I’ve been playing the harmonica for almost fifty years. I wrote a book on the history of the instrument, and I know the work of the players of the past and the present in all genres. It’s almost impossible for me, therefore, to listen to a harmonica recording and not hear it as the work of a mouth organist and to stop myself from measuring it against the existing harmonica catalogue—a sadly narrow perspective that is admittedly unfair to the most talented of those players.

But from the first, I didn’t react to PT Gazell’s recordings that way. I just heard music—really fine music—and not someone pushing the boundaries of his instrument. So when I sat down to write about him I tried to think through why I have this response to his recordings.

First and foremost, PT Gazell is a masterful technician who has confronted and defeated those harmonica-centric limitations—the tendency to sound thin and harsh, the difficulty of achieving a consistent tonality across all the holes, the complexity involved in hitting bent notes on pitch, the struggle inherent in unleashing complex melodies from a diatonic instrument.

Gazell also has the intelligence, good taste, and musicality to steer clear of the shortcomings of most diatonic harmonica players—the lack of good breathing technique and tone, the cluelessness about phrasing and legato, the inability to play against chord sequences more complex than the I-IV-V, and a pathological fear of ballads.

For some reason, there is a Western prejudice that equates playing fast with virtuosity. Like most misperceptions, there is some truth behind it. We’ve all been rendered appropriately slack-jawed by musicians who can play complex music at blazing tempos. But more commonly what we get is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Most musicians will tell you that it is the ballad that separates the great musicians from the rest of the stampeding herd of shredders—that listening to musicians playing at slow tempos reveals the most about their musicality. Gazell became famous in the 1970s for his ability to play bluegrass numbers at insane speeds with incredible precision, but he’s always loved ballads, and on his jazz recordings there are as many of those as there are up-tempo numbers. This not only gives him the opportunity to show the full range of his technical mastery, but it gives the us listeners a more varied and enjoyable listening experience.

Gazell eschews the heavy vibrato used by many harmonicists in favor of a light heartbeat pulse. He puts his harmonica front and center. He takes the time to demonstrate his mastery of the melody before launching into his always surprising improvisations. There is a lifetime’s worth of complex bending happening on his records, but Gazell’s legato phrasing is always even and seamless. PT use of slurring is much more restrained than that of the blues harpists, but there is a unique decay to his notes, and it’s the clarity of his playing that enables him to meld so well with his accompanists. Gazell’s playing is gutsy and fearless, but never forced and always relaxed. Like only a handful of others, he proves that the diatonic harmonica is a great vehicle for jazz.

PT Gazell plays valved diatonics of his own design manufactured by Seydel. I have no personal experience playing his “Gazell method” harps, so I can’t speak to the challenging technical accomplishments he is pulling off within that system or how they help him to do what he does. But that’s the point. PT’s music just sounds like music, not like someone pushing the boundaries on his instrument.

“The Loft Sessions, “Method To The Madness,” and “2 Days Out” are all small-group jazz recordings featuring outstanding musicians who Gazell allows to share his stage. The three records are distinguished from each other by the deployment of different featured instruments—the lap steel on “Madness To The Method,” the trombone and flugelhorn on “2 Days Out”—but Gazell clearly loves the small-combo format, and it loves him back.

These three Gazell recordings are all beautifully recorded, which is another key aspect of his success. They were recorded years apart with different musicians in different studios, but the performances are all superbly captured, the mixes are stellar, and there is a remarkable consistency in the overall sound of these recordings. The absence of effects and post-production trickery is so refreshing that it’s compelling. All the instruments are recorded naturally, including Gazell’s. What you get on these recordings is something that is, weirdly, rarely heard on the studio efforts of other diatonic harmonica players: the unadorned acoustic sound of a diatonic harmonica sound without processing, amplification or effects beyond a very subtle trace of reverb and delay.

PT lives in a musical neighborhood populated by bluesy swing numbers, jazz standards and ballads. I spend a lot time in that same zone, and no doubt PT’s inexhaustible enthusiasm for Harry “Sweets” Edison and Ben Webster makes me predisposed to like him. And he keeps these collections interesting by covering tunes by the likes of Stevie Wonder, the Beatles, and Bill Monroe as well.

“The Loft Sessions” is Gazell’s brand-new release, a killer jazz record from an all-star drummerless combo: PT on harmonica, Marek Rejhon on guitar, and Jimmy Sullivan and Roger Spencer on bass. The tunes are impeccably chosen and evenly split between swing numbers (three of which were originally recorded by Gazell’s heroes Edison and Webster) and ballads. The swing tunes (“Taste On The Place,” “Used To Be Basie,” “Candy,” and “Studio Call”) are all perfect vehicles for Gazell’s ultraconfident mastery of that familiar but challenging idiom, his complete command of macro- and microbends, his unerring but always relaxed rhythm, and the incredible evenness of his tone up and down his ten-hole instrument. The ballads on this record are particularly gorgeous and grounded in his beautiful phrasing and wistful tone. Rejhon is a truly great guitarist, and Gazell is smart to share the solo spaces throughout with him, and their work on Oliver Nelson’s ballad “Stolen Moments” is a real highlight. “Val’s Lament” by Johnny Hodges is a great bluesy ballad perfect suited for PT’s style and proclivities, and “Angel Eyes” features some beautiful microbends and high-note wizardry from him.

“Madness To The Method” dates from 2016 and here PT is supported by Pat Bergeson on guitar, Roger Spencer on bass, Rob Ickes on lap steel, Chris Brown on drums and percussion. Ickes is a monster, and the pairing of harmonica and lap steel—two instruments that live in the cracks—on tunes like “Kitty,” “A Smooth One,” and “I’m Confessin’”—is brilliant. Gazell steps up to the mic and sings two Louis Jordan classic barroom rousers—"Boogie Woogie Plate” and “Reet Peet and Gone”—and on the latter Ickes’ steel takes PT back to his country roots. The group takes Rogers and Hart’s “This Can’t Be Love” at the perfect swing tempo and lots of effortless slipping and sliding ensues. Gazell and Bergeson duet exquisitely on Benny Golson’s soulful ballad “I Remember Clifford.” This tune is a test for any player, but Gazell nails it with his seamless bending technique. This CD includes features three other ballads—the Duke’s langorous “All Too Soon” with some marvelous guitar from Bergeson and a sweet cadenza from PT, the pop classic “If I Had You” with more great steel work and PT perfectly navigating the sinuous chords and melody, and the album’s perfect closer, a luminous version of Lennon and McCartney’s “Here There and Everywhere” on which Gazell overdubs his harmonicas in unison an octave below.

“2 Days Out” was released in 2011. It’s another small-group jazz effort with guitarist Andy Reiss, bassist Danny O’Lannerghty, pianists Jeff Steinberg and Bruce Dudley, and drummer Chris Brown supporting PT. Gazell adds a musical twist to this album’s sound in the form of trombonist Roy Agee and flugelhorn ace George Tidwell. The doubling of the muted trombone and the harmonica on tunes like Ray Noble’s “The Very Thought Of You” and the Beatles’ “Fixing A Hole” results in a blend so complimentary that you’re left wondering why such an improbable pairing isn’t used more often. Predictably, the album is replete with standout swing shuffles, including “There Is No Greater Love,” “Out Of Nowhere” (featuring Reiss on guitar and some amazing chromatic runs against the chords from Gazell), “Did You Call Her Today” (piano perfection from Dudley), and “The Best Things In Life Are Free” (featuring sweet unison work and solo sharing between PT’s harmonica and Tidwell’s fat flugelhorn). For this record, Gazell’s ballad selections are Rogers and Hart’s “My Romance,” which is ended by another impossibly pretty PT cadenza, the Gershwin’s “Our Love Is Here To Stay,” featuring the piano of Jeff Steinberg, and Stevie Wonder’s “Lately,” on which PT fluently delivers a melody that would be out of reach for most diatonic players. “2 Days Out” also features two really strong blues numbers—“Sweets” Edison’s “Pussy Willow,” on which harmonica and trombone pair up on the head, and “K.M. Blues,” delivered at a blistering tempo and distinguished by Reiss’ guitar work and PT doubling himself at times both in octave and harmony. Gazell ends this great CD with one of my all-time favorite bluegrass numbers, Bill Monroe’s haunting, minor-key “Lonesome Midnight Waltz” with an unforgettable, lonesome melody.

If you’re familiar with “2 Days Out” and “Madness To The Method,” you don’t need me to tell you to rush out and buy PT Gazell’s latest release, “The Loft Sessions.” And if you’re somehow not familiar with PT’s music, purchasing his latest compilation will certainly compel you to buy the earlier two. These three collections definitely represent a cohesive trio of jazz recordings featuring a legitimate harmonica master in a small-group setting with the mouth organ right up front. If you’re a diatonic harmonica player new to jazz, melodic playing, ballads, swing, and standards, you need to check out the template and example that Gazell has set out for doing more than justice to those styles.

To order PT Gazell’s new project “The Loft Sessions” as well as his other releases—“Method To The Madness:” and “2 Days Out”—click on this link: http://www.ptgazell.com/recordings.html.

For more about PT’s career and his special line of “Gazell method” valved diatonic harmonicas, check out his web site at www.ptgazell.com.

Robert Mueller's Big Surprise

One big surprise came out of Robert Mueller’s testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee today—Robert Mueller’s disastrous performance as a witness, a prosecutor, and a patriot.

Both the Republicans and the Democrats came to the sessions with predictable and predetermined lines of questioning designed to further their narratives.

The Democrats patiently led Mueller through the segments of his report that are the most damaging to Trump. They succeeded in getting Mueller to validate those quotes on national television, but this accomplishment was muted by their inability to get Mueller to repeat those words in his own voice. Nadler established a key clarification at the outset: that Mueller and his team decided at the beginning of their investigation that indicting Trump was unconstitutional according to DOJ. But the Democrats were unable to get Mueller to even entertain the notion that Trump would have been indicted had he not been a sitting President. They focused on several specific instances of obstruction in his report and demonstrated that they met the three criteria for obstruction, but they never got him to say that they legally amounted to obstruction. “I do not agree to your characterization” was his response to this line of questioning, and he refused to say why.

The Republicans, who were just as focused and disciplined, not surprisingly spent more time asking about the maddening inconsistencies in the Mueller report to which the American people deserve answers. They spent most of their time repeatedly—and falsely—attacked Mueller, his team, and his report as being “one-sided,” “biased,” purposely misleading, unlawful, unfair, and “un-American.”

When someone calls your work “un-American” on national television, you respond, firmly and aggressively.

The Robert Mueller of legend, described by all who knew him or worked with him as a strong administrator with unwavering focus and unquestioned impartiality, and deep patriotism was not the Mueller who testified today.

Mueller appeared old, exhausted, weak, hard of hearing, unprepared for even the most obvious questions, unfamiliar with his own report, and uncaring about the significance of the occasion to the future of his country. He constantly thumbed through copies of his report and in the process forgot the preceding question, which would then have to be repeated to him. He fumbled his responses. Mueller couldn’t even remember that Ronald Reagan appointed him as U.S. Attorney to the district of Massachusetts. If you were prone to believe that Mueller was a decent guy who let the investigation get away from him and who was misled by a team made up of partisan Democrats who wrote a completely biased report, his flaccid, dottering performance this morning would make you more convinced of that narrative.

Until the very end of the hearing Mueller made no attempt to defend himself, his team, and his report against vicious attacks by Republicans. Mueller made a few half-hearted attempts to answer more fully, but he meekly wilted under the Republicans’ repeated interruptions, and the Democrats didn’t help him by telling him that he could take time to respond. Finally, just before the end of hearing, Mueller offered up a brief defense of his hiring processes.

Most incredible of all, Mueller’s flaccid performance somehow managed to make dramatic evidence of Presidential crimes utterly boring. We can only expect that he will do the same this afternoon for the “expansive” Russian interference in our election. Mueller’s performance was so passionless and dull that the “movie” version of his written report was even less engaging than a sex-education video produced by the Catholic Church for schoolchildren.

Mueller’s feebleness was not the only disaster about this morning’s hearing. Just as harmful was his refusal to answer 123 questions this morning. Some were spurious, but most were important queries about whether Trump’s actions met the legal bar for obstruction of justice, and they were asked because Congress is inheriting Mueller’s confusing and inconclusive report. Much of Mueller’s speechlessness was mostly due to his meek acceptance of William Barr’s warnings not to go anywhere near disagreements within the DOJ, even though Mueller is now a private citizen and Barr has provided his own totally distorted version of them.

Mueller was obstinately insistent that his report and his letter to Barr “spoke for themselves” when in fact they are fundamentally inconclusive and extremely confusing when it comes to issues that Americans care about. If he couldn’t indict Trump, why did he detail a dozen examples of obstruction of justice. Don’t ask Bob—he won’t tell you. What, exactly, was Mueller referring to when he accused the Attorney General of the United States of acting to steer the American public to misleading conclusions about what was in his report? Bob wouldn’t go there. Why didn’t Mueller subpoena Trump or Donald Trump Jr.? Bob won’t say. Mueller was so phobic about impeachment that he refused to even admit that it was the constitutional remedy for Presidential misconduct.

Texas Rep. John Ratciffe was effective in challenging the report’s frustrating refusal to reach any conclusions about obstruction in this exchange:

Ratcliffe: “Which DOJ policy or principal sets forth a standard that an investigated person is not exonerated if their innocence from criminal conduct is not conclusively determined? Can you give me an example other than Donald Trump when the Justice Department determined that an investigated person was not exonerated because their innocence was not conclusively determined?”

Mueller: “This is a unique situation. I cannot.”

Weirdly, Mueller’s contention that his situation was absolutely unique obstinately ignored the precedent of Leon Jaworski, who served as the second Watergate special prosecutor. The DOJ guidance that a sitting President cannot be indicted was developed for Jaworski in 1972. Jaworski, unlike Mueller, understood the momentousness of the issue of a criminal President. He followed the guidance and did not indict Nixon, but he didn’t stop there. He worked with his grand jury and allowed them to name Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator. Jaworski allowed the grand jury to detail their findings and made sure that the House Judiciary Committee had those findings and could use them as a basis for impeachment, which they did.

Our country would have benefitted from having a skilled prosecutor and a savvy patriot who understood both the law and the current constitutional crisis represented by Trump’s lawless regime to head up the Russian investigation.

What we got was a man with an incredible resume and history of stellar service who, in his most important role as the prosecutor of one of the most important investigations in our nation’s history, behaved more like a low-level Forest Service researcher so obsessed with the proper classification of trees that he couldn’t see that the forest was on fire. Mueller’s warped focus on the letter of the law to the exclusion of all else makes him a failed prosecutor in this critical case, because in the end, he has enabled the suppression of the truth by his superiors who constantly flaunt the law that Mueller says he cares so much about.

The Tyranny Trifecta

It’s a fact that the Founding Fathers didn’t design a democracy. They gave us a governmental framework that established a constitutional republic.

For more than two centuries, however, voting rights—which in the original Constitution were limited to white male landowners—were steadily expanded, and most Americans believed that our elections were fair and honest. These perceptions led many Americans to assume that they lived under a democratic system.

Over the same period, the United States benefitted from our constitutional system based on three equal branches of government. We have had constitutional crises, to be sure, but for most of our history the branches accepted the spirit of the separation of powers and governed accordingly. This also enabled our system to change and evolve organically over time.

The Founding Fathers, for all their wisdom, anticipated the inevitability of governmental corruption. They settled on the separation of powers concept, in fact, precisely because they felt that such an arrangement made disasters (in the form of a true democracy or total corruption) impossible. The Founding Fathers did not plan, therefore, for an era in which all three branches of government would become completely corrupted, simultaneously, by a tiny cabal of the ultra-rich. The Supreme Court, whose members the Founding Fathers saw as dependably apolitical, would see to that.

But it wasn’t impossible. And it’s our misfortune—and great challenge—that it is our era in which this corruption has become total and made our system completely unworkable for ninety-nine percent of its citizens. Today we have a completely rigged system that takes maximum advantage of the long-standing constitutional restrictions on democracy and completely perverts—or, more commonly blatantly ignores—the rest of that foundational document to serve the interests of the ultra-rich. Most politicians are not admitting to this reality, but the vast majority of Americans understand it explicitly, and they have, not surprisingly, already lost faith in our government.

What we have now is a national death by strangulation by a tyranny of the minority that becomes more entrenched and more invincible with each passing day. (I hate it that the fascists have co-opted the term “tyranny” and that I run the risk of sounding like a member of an armed militia by using it, but it’s the right term for what is going on.)

Here in the United States corporations have been legally defined as people so that they can benefit from the laws protecting the rights of people to participate in politics. There is no limit on corporate contributions to political campaigns and those donations can be made anonymously. The votes of our lawmakers are not only owned by these corporations, but they spend the vast majority of their time raising even more money. Our laws indemnify corporations and the ultra-rich from being held accountable for their actions and their products. Our laws stifle competition by maintaining existing monopolies like the fossil fuel industry and crippling other options and strategies, ensuring that climate change will eventually cause nothing less than the end of the human race. Legislators have slashed corporate taxes and allowed the ultra-rich to move jobs—and their vast cash holdings—overseas and to pollute the environment with impunity, with no penalties for doing so.

Here in America the rich have engineered, in just the last few decades, a truly cosmic shift in wealth distribution—totally in their direction. They have won their war against labor unions, which built the thriving middle class in America by giving workers a say in wage bargaining. Union membership has been decimated by “right-to-work” laws and campaign finance restrictions. The unions are effectively dead, wages have been totally stagnant, and the much-vaunted American middle class has perished along with them.

Here in America when one party achieves a majority in a state legislature, it is free to redistrict that state to achieve permanent political majorities in Congress and in that legislature. These safe seats have killed bipartisan lawmaking at the state and national levels. The only people who have the power to kill these phony districts are the people who designed them in the first place.

Here in America ANY legislation has to be approved by the House, a super majority in the Senate, and the President, and upheld, if necessary, by the Supreme Court. The three hundred thousand residents of Wyoming have as much representation in the Senate as the thirty-eight million Americans who live in California. The six hundred and thirty thousand people who live in Washington, D.C. have no voting representatives at all. Congress has stopped passing any significant legislation—the huge exception being, of course, a massive tax cut for the rich—because of the impassable roadblock that is the Senate and because they don’t want to be held accountable by the voters or their corporate sponsors.

Here in America we have a criminal, ultra-rich President who has publicly declared war on the rule of law enshrined in the Constitution, refused to allow Congress to oversee the executive branch, and openly dared Congress to stop him from completely ignoring them and by ruling by tweet and fiat. He has allowed a foreign government to interefere in our national elections and hs made it clear that he will not stop it from doing so again. And he has filled his Cabinet with fellow white rich men who are utterly corrupt.

Here in America we have a Supreme Court whose most recent members were selected for their partisan views and approved along party lines. One of those justices owes his seat to blatant partisan thievery. It is these justices who have defined corporations as people and upheld partisan redistricting on behalf of the minority party. And that minority party has appointed 123 federal judges in the past eighteen months, ensuring that if by some miracle Congress does pass meaningful progressive legislation, the judicial branch will certainly kill it.

The corrupting influence of money has corrupted all three branches of our government and exposed our system’s lack of enforcement mechanisms for such a situation. Our system requires a makeover--a task that seems impossible given that all three branches of government are utterly corrupt. Removing Trump is critical since it may be our last chance as a country to throw any kind of roadblock in front of the tiny gang of rich criminals who own this country. But if you think Trump created this phony excuse for a government, or if you think that removing Trump will reverse it, then we’re done for. We in the currently powerless majority need to roll up our sleeves and fight like demons to take back our government--precinct by precinct, county by county, and state by state. We can’t pass a constitutional amendment, but we don’t need to do that to make the Senate more democratic by adding more states by breaking up California and giving D.C. statehood, and we can at a minimum add one more seat to the Supreme Court to replace the one that was stolen. The Democrats took back the House with their landslide last year, but given that a criminal gang that holds all the cards and all the money, it’s clear that working within the system will not be enough. All we have is our numbers, and that’s not nothing. But we will need to be brave enough and committed enough to show up in the streets to demonstrate that we are the majority and to put as much pressure as possible on the entrenched minority. At this point we have allowed things to devolve so precipitously that many of us won’t likely live long enough to see a real change of power, but a struggle beats the hell out of sentencing our children to lives spent as pawns of the rich.

I’m reading Gordon S. Wood’s “Friends Divided,” an account of the friendship and rivalry between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The Founding Fathers did not build a perfect system, but they created the greatest and most liberal political experiment of their age. These were privileged men who turned away from their comfortable lives, their successful careers, their guaranteed privilege, and many of their countrymen to risk arrest and execution in order to launch an experiment that was the envy of underdogs the world over. We may no longer have that will or spirit in our national DNA. We’ll find out.

Seventy-Five Years Later, We Fight Racism and Fascism at Home

Seventy-five years ago this evening, my father was one of thousands of American GIs massed on the British side of the English channel. On the evening of June 5, 1944 he and all the other GIs were handed copies of this letter from General Eisenhower letting them know that the long-awaited invasion of France would take place in the morning. It’s hard to comprehend that this was a moment when the history of the world hung in the balance and that men like my father, who came from a small mountain town and had never left his home state of Washington until the war, shouldered the hopes of the free world. Lucky for me and the rest of his family, my father would not land on Omaha Beach until June 8, the third day of the invasion, and therefore missed the worst of the fighting. Too many of his comrades were not so fortunate. They died in Europe, Africa, and Asia to keep racism and fascism from the United States. They would never have imagined that they would succeed in stopping Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito only to have proud racists and fascists in the White House and in Congress less than a century later. That’s our fight, and it will be just as tough and existential as theirs. We must accept nothing less than full Victory!

Dispatches from Post-Racial America

The 2019 graduating class at West Point numbered about 1,000. Thirty-four of them were black women, which makes that class the most diverse in the history of the academy. A photo of these women was widely circulated in the press. On /r/The_Donald, Reddit’s most popular forum for Trump supporters, a user posted the photo of the recent West Point graduates along with a title that read, “Diversity just means ‘less white people'” and the comments below followed.

Read them and weep. This is our “post-racial” America. These are the Trump supporters to whom we are supposed to build bridges. These people raise children. These people vote. These people have a proud champion in the White House.

SaltMiner76

Why are they all standing haphazardly and holding their sabres like toys? There is zero discipline in this picture

JDG00

Yeah, you don't act like this in the military

NM4M

I mean, not in the Marines. Certainly not enlisted.

JDG00

I have seen pictures where they do something funny, but certainly not something that would be put out to the public.

SDsc0rch

army.... pfft!

Subterrainio

Lol says the seaman

SDsc0rch

lol

Subterrainio

Ah as the prophecies foretold

Latino4Trump

Seamen

bfhurricane

It’s one of several pictures, I’m assuming this is the silly one. This one is much more formal.

aname707

This is a fake picture right? They look like they could barely run a block to a Mc Donalds.

Alex470

Well, they're half-swording of course!

wdp1984

In this case, no white people

WarDamnStrasserism

So diverse. So many shades of brown skin, brown eyes, and black hair.

SAW2TH-55th

A rainbow of brown.

Urmissionisafailure

That’s a shitbow Randy

amicuscodex

#45

I wouldn't think this was even in America - this does not reflect our actual population at all.

bfhurricane

What? That’s like, 30 black females in a class of 1,000 cadets. The school is mostly white males - not that there’s anything wrong with it, but let’s not pretend that this is some crazy fact.

blackjack1556

And just where, of the 930 other cadets, are the non black female's at? Why aren't any of them included? Would a segregated photo of just Asian males, or white females, let alone white males not cause mass SJW REEEing?

Class photos should be of the intire class of American soldiers , not just identity politics.

bfhurricane

There are literally hundreds of photos of the entire class. I have literally no opinion if anyone wants to take a picture for whatever reason.

racer_chad

As a vet, I look at that and cring. Looks like a bunch of fools who can't even read a damn map to me.

Wold

Wake up, maps are racist.

BeeVomitImHome

Googled: are [maps] racist.

Yes, they in fact are.

Keanuthepornstar

That and they are out of shape. There is no way they could keep up with a class just out of basic, let alone do Ranger school without falling out on the first run.

I guess Army is now the Fat Branch of the Military.

racer_chad

I guess Army is now the Fat Branch of the Military.

No, just PAC clerks and REMF's.

HILLARYPROLAPSEDANUS

That's what I noticed too. Most of them look overweight.

Duke_Cesare_Borgia

Are female cadets not required to adhere to physical fitness standards?

AlexTheRockstar

They have really lax fitness standards compared to men. It's sad.

HILLARYPROLAPSEDANUS

They're part of a special program. When we get hit by the chinese human wave attacks these chicks will be rolled down special ramps to knock down the chinese soldiers like bowling pins.

redpillbomb

Correct me if I'm wrong, but how is this diverse? It's like the opposite of diverse.

ECore

Here's a clue. Absolute diversity means no white people.

redpillbomb

I know, but it's amazing how the media call such a photo diverse when there is literally no diversity in the picture. DoubleThink I guess.

American_MemeMachine

The left likes to try and change the definition of words until they fit their narrative. If this is diversity, then imagine what they think equality means.

ECore

No. They want to eliminate white people. They want us marginalized and dead. It'll all make sense when you realize that.

t3hdmanyass

"Wanted: Moar blacks for military."

USMC03BWPSS

Why are they all so fat? Jesus.

Freedom_fam

Fitness diversity

USMC03BWPSS

Fitness pizza in dem moufs

combatmonk

Underrated

USMC03BWPSS

be us

salty ass grunt Sergeant

on 7th Tour To Middle East

have a Purple Heart with a star

haven’t seen a chow hall in weeks

dirty as fuck but you want your boys to get fed take one step into chow hall

get snatched up by one of these Goblins on their first pump

have 2 ribbons

”ayyyo Sergeant, where is u think yous going?” boys_need_hot_chow.exe

”Nah Sergeant, we’s got standurdz here. This be my chow hall, You gots to clean up furst”

say fuck it and hit the PX and grab an MRE before you go back out

mfw we’re told to celebrate diversity: 🥴

Keanuthepornstar

I got kicked out of line once because my pants had a hole in them. Like a pinky sized hole. DFAC Nazis do exist.

USMC03BWPSS

I got kicked out of one in Fallujah, because I had blood on my trousers, because I was MEDEVAC’d, hadn’t eaten in 36 hours and didn’t have any other cammies to wear.

And we’re talking about a fist-sized blood stain that looked more like dirt.

I had just walked over from the BAS, with fresh stitches after being told by the Navy Surgeon to go eat and got turned away by some 240 lb land whale.

SDsc0rch

diversity hires

omguserius

The worst things in life are fat sassy black chicks in charge of white men in stressful situations

Schnazzmizzlez

God help us during WW3..

BumbaclatFratBoy

Came in to say this.

USMC03BWPSS

I say let it happen.

Shall we cull the weak now or later, once it’s worse and the Bolsheviks are in charge of the House, Senate and POTUS.

We need something to happen to allow us to clean house and it has to be extreme....

Anything short of something extreme and devastating will be viewed as “illegitimate” and/or “rayciss” by the Left

ace13ace0nater

I get this is a right wing, pro Trump sub, and I support that. What it shouldn’t be (but is) is a club for assholes to congregate and make fun of other people.

Your comment has nothing to do with the content of this pictures, and quite frankly, it isn’t even true.

Now, I do agree that this isn’t a “diverse” group of people, but you shouldn’t make rude remarks about them. It makes you no better than the people you argue against. Comments like this are why the Left call Trump supporters racist and why I get lumped in with people like you.

HILLARYPROLAPSEDANUS

It's a military school and the students are visibly out of shape. That's a topic for discussion.

ace13ace0nater

Visibly out of shape? Go look at our general public if you want to see visibly out of shape. I see maybe 3 or 4 larger women, and even though they are larger, they are by no means “fat”.

USMC03BWPSS

The “general public” isn’t tasked with national security.

And by USMC standards, almost all of them are fat and outside the allowable height/weight standards.

And these people are at the premier Military college in the country/world.

It’s an issue.

USMC03BWPSS

How many deployments have you done?

I stopped counting at 13.

How many contracts have you worked with the Dept of State or Department of Defense in the Middle East?

I’ve done 6.

My point is, my comment is made from a perspective where EXPERIENCE backs up what I said.

And you know it’s true, which is why you felt compelled to do the “nuh-uh u bigot” thing.

Don’t shoot the messenger dude.

And for the record, I’m Hispanic, I’m in an interracial marriage, with mixed race kids.

Not saying that I get a pass, but I am saying you idiots need to grow up and admit that “being “color blind” is stupid and it causes more problems than it corrects.

And lastly, we couldn’t care less if y’all think we’re racist. Your side has worn that label out a long time ago and I’ve found, as a Hispanic guy, the most racist people are in the Left.

So, everyone is racist, or no one is racist.

HONK HONK.

ace13ace0nater

I honestly couldn’t care less about your military history (it doesn’t make you a good person), your race, or who you are married to. You made a comment that makes you look like an ass.

I didn’t say you or your comment was racist. What I meant is this, people on the left see shit like this and go “look at those right wing racist extremists”, and then people like you get mad because of it. You are doing this to yourselves.

Also, in case you missed it, I consider myself more right leaning than left. I think the left is hateful and spews lies, but my side (right) does it too, case in point, you.

USMC03BWPSS

Ok, but you understand you look like an idiot right?

Basically, what you’re saying to us is, “fuck you guys and your real life experience! While I’ve never served or gone overseas, I’m nevertheless going to disregard whatever you guys say because it makes me feel yucky and my morality doesn’t approve.”

Once you’ve experienced the “welfare with guns” club, come back and let us know.

You’re an absolute MORON if you think I’m the only one who feels this way and I couldn’t care any less about what you think of my or my service when you literally have no reference point to speak from.

Clown.

ace13ace0nater

You seem like the person who wears targeted shirts about being a BadAss Marine and makes sure you get your military discount when you get your haircut. Byeeee

USMC03BWPSS

Well, I’m sure I seem like that to you since you have such a distorted view of the military.

You should probably stop watching NCIS and The Code and conflating that with real military service.

And for the record, I have a beard that is slightly longer than the hair I usually wear in a man bun while I’m contracting.

blackjack1556

Army here chiming in.

Airborne infantry turned NG Armored Cav Scout, later Mech Infantry (Recon) over 16 years total service. Medically retired in 06.

Ignore the shill. They are invincible in their ignorance and take joy contemplating what real life has in store for them.

USMC03BWPSS

Scout brother!

I was a Scout/Forward Observer rolling in shit box LAV’s with missing propellers.

The tell is how they always scream they know more than anyone while not realizing they’re showing how little they know.

When I encounter a subject I don’t know anything about, I’m more than happy to admit it and seek info.

They never do.

Civilanimal

Diversity is code (dog whistle) for racism against white people.

Mad_Hattie

Diversity has come to mean "Only black people"

Krillinlt

Sure let's casually ignore the other 900 cadets not in the photo. You are really blowing this out of proportion

Mad_Hattie

One picture as an example is so easy to dismiss, isn't it.

Pay no attention to the others behind that curtain.

There is no war in Ba Sing Se.

Krillinlt

If you really believe that there is a conspiracy against white people because 3% of the graduating cadets were black women, then I really don't know what else to say to you.

Mad_Hattie

If you really think this is only because of this one picture, I don't know what to say to YOU to be honest.

Krillinlt

If this was a post about how certain colleges handle admissions there may be something to talk about. But hating on West Point grads because they are black and using it to push a narrative is just low and unnecessary

Mad_Hattie

hating on West Point grads because they are black

Call me racist next, go ahead, I dare you.

We are talking about Diversity, HELLO?? . We aren't talking about individual specific people. can I get through to you or should I use simpler words and make a diagram in bright colors for you? If you can graduate as a lard ass then there's something wrong with the institutio 

Zerogravitycrayon

Isn't this the same prestigious academy that pumped out Open Communists into the officer ranks?

They are like the fucking Berkeley of the US Military. Shut the Communists down.

bfhurricane

Give us some credit, I believe that guy’s commission was rescinded, or at least he was severely punished. West Point is highly conservative on the whole.

Zerogravitycrayon

Are there diversity quotas?

bfhurricane

My class was about 75-80% white males, so I’m assuming not.

Zerogravitycrayon

AMERICA FIRST

How much time has passed between then and now?

Jblaze056

i pray we are not called to war any time soon.

Keanuthepornstar

Right now we are fine, in a decade, not so much. When the old guard General Officers retire, that is when our enemies will celebrate.

AnnoyedSoPosting

Good God, it looks like Beyonce trying to recreate Rhythm Nation.

Yzalirk

The Military has a quota to fill and they need their diversity points. Disgusting.

I saw this coming when the Army kept jerking me around over blood pressure despite seeing a professional Cardiologist and getting their approval over a year ago. In short, it was deduced to nerves and White Coat Syndrome. I would have signed their stupid ass waiver but they did not want to give me one. Yet they let in people like that, and in West Point no less. I bet those people would shit their pants and go AWOL at any sign of conflict.

Keanuthepornstar

The BP readings on those fatties in the picture would make you rage.

They got a pass because of their skin color.

"Their culture has a high salt intake, you racist! Of course they can go to our West Point! Your white privilege doesn't work here anymore!"

Dereliction

Apparently it also means, "Holy shit that is cringey!"

HouseSlytherin

No one should be graduating from West Point over weight. This is discussing and not the West Point that my family attended many years ago.

devilsadvocate0219

No kidding, I would love to see the 2 mile times for this group.

Keanuthepornstar

"Physical fitness tests are misogynist and racist! They pass! Now go to the dining hall ladies, you earned a second lunch for listening to this white male spout hate!"

scattyboy

I got called fat in Beast Barracks, and I was 6'2" 190 lbs.

Grandpa_Lurker_ARF

Bang your neck back, bean head! What are you gazing at? How's the cow? What is the Power of the Hour? Start the Days! 😎😉😄

(BTW, for the non grads, not swords, but cadet sabres.)

Smurfection

Who and what are they going to fight for?

bolesterol

How is a homogeneous group of people diverse?

LiberalShitholes

Lmao. It's hilarious that they want to teach people to celebrate a lack of the white race. Less whites = good. I can't imagine why there is a rise in white nationalism... gee, so weird.

abbacadef

Where are the Asians, the native Americans, the east indians, the Caucasians?

Keanuthepornstar

Exactly. We are all being replaced. Hispanic or Black only, for Army.

frogg2

To be fair, for this photo they just grouped together the 34 black women from the entire graduating class of 900+ cadets.

combatmonk

Affirmative Action.

Lower standards.

winst0nsm1thL984

I think the biggest problem with it is that instead of celebrating unity with all their classmates that they are all soon 2nd Lt, they are celebrating something immaterial that separates them from their classmates. These diversity initiatives are death to unit cohesion.

Keanuthepornstar

The Army has a huge problem with black and Hispanic gangs. Some units cannot even get mission ready without them being onboard and releasing supplies/equipment.

This gang of cadets is going to rule with an iron fist over those of other races when they are in command.

inst0nsm1thL984

The Army has a huge problem with black and Hispanic gangs. Some units cannot even get mission ready without them being onboard and releasing supplies/equipment.

Any sauce on that? If true, those units are not going to be on the side of the United States in the coming war with Mexico.

neville_bartos666

This isn’t diverse at all 

Jimmychanga2424

So many useless pogs

yelloWhit

I can’t help but be reminded of these diversity warriors

Lastaccountcensored

Stop appropriating baseball culture?

Graceful_Ballsack

No asians, no whites, no mexicans, no russians no europeans. wouldn't diverese be at least 50/50 white/black?
Diversity is our strength guys, member that

MagicMirror33

Private Timmy toed the line

and did what he was told

Sent to fight to save the world

In places hot and cold  

He gladly fought for you and me

While we sat home and surfed

He lost so many bros-in-arms

On god-forsaken turf

Timmy went to Afghanistan

To fight Islamic factions

Was led by a Westpoint graduate

A product of affirmative action

The battle became intense

They were blocked on every side

She bailed on them saying “Fuck dat shit!”

And Timmy fucking died.

(apologies to Sprog)

RealMrsBillClinton

Made in America

Pappy_Gunn

Is this a mob or an army?

indrid_colder

More like 'more communists'. The commies just have calculated that minorities are more susceptible to the commie message.

PaleIsTheNewTanUNL

I can’t help but immediately wonder how low the standards have been lowered

FerriteFerret

I hope they track the careers of every one of them. 8 years from now will be a hoot.

Unfunded

They forgot to put the cleany bit of the broom on the stick, how they gonna mop corporate HQ with that sticky thing? Oh well, iq.

Righteousnous

Total pull-ups done: 3.5

spitefulspear

I will never understand why they intentionally separate and segregate themselves from everyone else then get mad when others notice.

Jimmeh1313

NO WHITE PEOPLE

puppetknuckles

"Diversity" means the violent annhilation of Western culture, democracy, and morality -- to be replaced by a brutal and oppressive secular and socialist state.

Democrats use race as a misdirection for their ultimate goal.

beachboya1a

I don't have a problem with this. Graduating from West Point is a great accomplishment. If this picture is used to influence other black men or women to better their lives in service to our country, then let this message spread.

imokyrok

You seem to be one of the few decent people on this thread. I mean what a ratio of gobshites! An article celebrating an increase in the numbers of black women in a class of 900 and all Trump supporters can come up with is wall of negativity. If you could build your Mexico wall out of American white male negativity it would have been built coast to coast at no cost long ago. And right across the Canadian border too for good measure.

Willie Mays

On May 24, 1951, a twenty-year-old outfielder for the Minneapolis Millers in the American Association, was sitting in a movie theater in Sioux City, Iowa, when this message flashed across the screen: WILLIE MAYS CALL YOUR HOTEL.

When he got back to his room, there was another message waiting for him—to call Leo Durocher, the impatient, profane manager of the New York Giants. When the two were finally connected via phone, Durocher told Mays that he was calling him up to the majors to help the Giants, who were struggling.

Mays protested, saying that he wasn’t ready for the majors. After all, he had only played 35 games in Triple A.

“What are you hitting, Willie?”, asked Durocher.

“.477,” replied Mays.

Durocher told him in no uncertain terms to get his ass to Philadelphia, because the he was starting in center field for the Giants the very next day.

The Giants won all three games against the Phillies. Mays went 0-for-5 that first game and 0-for-12 for the three-game series against the Phillies.

Twenty-year-old Willie Mays meets the press before his first big-league game

Willie was shaken by his debut slump at the plate, but Durocher sat him down.

 “Look son,” Durocher told him. “I brought you up here to do one thing. That’s to play center field. You’re the best center fielder I’ve ever seen. As long as I’m here, you’re going to play center field. Tomorrow, next week, next month. As long as Leo Durocher is manager of this team you will be on this club because you’re the best ball player I have ever seen.”

The next day the Giants returned home to the Polo Grounds in New York to face the Boston Braves and their star pitcher Warren Spahn, the winningiest lefty in baseball.

In the first inning Spahn dispatched Eddie Stanky and Whitey Lockman. Mays took his place in the batter’s box and knocked a Spahn pitch over the left-field roof for his first major-league hit. He was on his way. ("I'll never forgive myself,” Spahn joked years later. “We might have gotten rid of Willie forever if I'd only struck him out.")

Willie Howard Mays, Jr. was born in Westfield, Alabama in 1931. His grandfather was a talented baseball player, his father played semi-pro baseball in the Negro Leagues, and his mother was locally famous for her skills in basketball and track.

In high school, Mays was a star point guard, quarterback, and outfielder and played in the Negro Leagues on weekends. He helped the Birmingham Black Barons win the Negro League World Series in 1948 and was pursued by several major-league teams. He ended up signing with the New York Giants.

Willie Mays (in the back row, center) with the Birmingham Barons of the Negro League

Willie Mays won the National League Rookie of the Year award in 1951. Mays was in the on-deck circle when Bobby Thompson hit his “Shot Heard Round The World” homer that put the Giants in the Subway Series against the New York Yankees that year. The Giants were beaten 4 games to 2, but the 1951 Series was memorable in that it was the only time Mays played against Joe Dimaggio and because the Giants fielded the first major-league all-African-American outfield—Mays, Hank Thompson, and Monte Irvin.

Mays was drafted into the Army during the Korean War and missed the next two seasons. He came roaring back in 1954 with a spectacular year in which he lead the American League in hitting with a .345 average, hit 41 homers, and was named the National League’s Most Valuable Player. He also led the Giants to another World Series, this time against the Cleveland Indians.

Willie and the Giants swept the Indians in that Series, which is known for one of the most famous defensive plays in baseball history.

In the first game, held in the Polo Grounds in New York, the Giants and the Indians were tied 2-2 in the eighth inning. Giants pitcher Sal “The Barber” Maglie walked lead-off hitter Larry Doby and then Rosen singled to put men on second and third with no outs. Don Liddle was brought in to pitch to the next batter, Vic Wertz, who already had three hits in the game.

To say that center field in the Polo Grounds was as big as the Grand Canyon would be only a slight overstatement. You could hit a ball 482 feet toward the centerfield wall there and still wind up one foot short of a home run. If a centerfielder positioned himself 400 feet (a home run in most parks today) from home plate, the wall would be 83 feet behind him.

Mays was playing in shallow center field when Wertz stroked a screaming shot to straight-away center. Mays instantly turned his back to home plate and streaked to the spot, about 425 feet from home, where the ball was destined to return to earth. Running at full speed, Mays made a spectacular, over-the-shoulder catch with his back to home plate as his hat flew off his head.

Mays’ grab of Wertz’ fly ball has been forever immortalized in sports history as “The Catch,” but the next part of the play—let’s call it “The Throw”—was actually even more impressive. As soon as the ball touched his glove, Mays somehow managed to plan his feet, spin back back towards the plate, and launch a perfect strike to second base, keeping the baserunners from scoring. The Giants got out of the inning and went on to win the game with a walk-off home run from Dusty Rhodes.

“The Catch”

The 1950s were the glory days for New York City’s baseball teams, with the game’s top centerfielders—Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, and Duke Snider—all playing in the city and at the peak of their careers. But in 1958 the Dodger decamped to Los Angeles and the Giants moved to San Francisco. It’s intriguing to think about how many more home runs Mays might have hit had he not played so many games in the wind tunnel by the Bay they called Candlestick Park.

My grandfather took me to my first major-league game in 1961. If I would have designed a perfect game in my mind beforehand, that day in the seats on the third-base side was it. The Giants beat the hated Dodgers in a close game. Mays hit a home run and Juan Marichal won the game. Given the victory, I was gracious enough to acknowleddge the homer hit by Duke Snider in that game, as he was the only Dodger I could stomach at that tender, ultra-partisan age. (Actually, I still feel the same way, although Sandy Koufax eventually joined Duke on my two-person list of Dodgers whom I respect.)

In 1962 the Dodgers and the Giants tied for the NL pennant and the Giants had to win a three-game playoff to advance to the World Series against some team called the New York Yankees, who for some reason were huge favorites. The Giants took New York to seven games, the last of which was played in Yankee Stadium. Bill Terry pitched for the Yanks and Jack Sanford was on the mound for the Giants. The score was 1-0 Yankees when the Giants came up to bat in the ninth. Matty Alou led off with a successful bunt, but Terry struck out Felipe Alou and Chuck Hiller. Willie Mays delivered a clutch, two-out double that should have tied the game, but Roger Maris came up with a great throw from right field that kept Matty Alou from scoring.

As I watched on our living-room television, Terry decided to pitch to Willie McCovey instead of walking and facing the equally fearsome Orlando Cepeda. McCovey crushed Terry’s second pitch—he would later say that it was the hardest he had ever hit a ball—over Terry’s head. 

Bobby Richardson was the Yankees’ second baseman. If you stretched Bobby Richardson’s slight frame on a medieval rack for nine months and put lifts in his shoes, you might have extended him to a height of five feet, nine inches. I followed the track of what was sure to be a Series-winning home run off McCovey’s bat for about half a second and then watched Richardson somehow leap about twelve and a half feet in the air and catch the line drive in the uppermost webbing of his glove. It was the darkest day of my young life, and I still hate to think of that obscene moment.

If you are curious as to whether baseball has changed much since those days, just ponder the game between the Milwaukee Braves and the Giants that took place on July 2, 1963. Warren Spahn and Juan Marichal each pitched SIXTEEN scoreless innings in the most epic pitching duel ever. Marichal held Hank Aaron hitless in six at-bats. Spahn took the mound in the sixteenth, after pitching for FOUR HOURS AND TEN MINUTES and gave up a walk-off homer to—you guessed it—Willie Mays.

In the 1965 season Mays rose to the occasion again, hitting 52 home runs, winning his second NL MVP award, and becoming the highest paid player in baseball.

That was Willie’s high-water mark. The financially strapped Giants traded him to the Mets in the middle of the 1972 season, which actually felt right because Willie was always more popular with New York fans than he was with San Franciscans. He hit a home run in his first plate appearance with the Mets. In 1972 and ’73 Willie was the oldest position player in baseball.

As fate would have it, I was going to college in New York City when Mays came to the Mets, and I made two trips out to Shea Stadium to try to catch him. He didn’t play in the first game I went to, but I saw him pinch-hit a single the next time.

In 1973 he became the oldest position player (he was 42) to play in a World Series, but he missed a ring when the Oakland A’s beat the Mets. Willie’s last trip to the plate came in that Series.

Willie Mays played twenty-two seasons in the majors and racked up an unreal legacy:

·        Retired with a career batting average of .302, 3,283 hits, 660 home runs (unjuiced), and 7.095 outfield putouts (all-time MLB record).

·        Won Rookie of the Year, two MVP awards, and 12 Golden Gloves (an award that didn’t even exist during Mays’ first four seasons).

·        HoldsHe holds the MLB record for most All-Star game appearances Most All Star games (24).

·        Had eight consecutive 100-RBI seasons.

·        Hit four runs in a game. (He was on deck ready to go for a fifth when the game ended.)

·        Is the only major league player to have hit a home run in every inning from the 1st through the 16th innings.

·        Elected to the Hall of Fame in 1979. Twenty-three sportswriters voted AGAINST him. New York Daily News columnist Dick Young wrote, "If Jesus Christ were to show up with his old baseball glove, some guys wouldn't vote for him. He dropped the cross three times, didn't he?"

The fans and players who saw him in action knew where Willie Mays stood in the history of baseball.

Leo Durocher talked about the obvious joy that Willie had for the game as well as his ridiculous talents: “If somebody came up and hit .450, stole 100 bases, and performed a miracle in the field every day, I'd still look you right in the eye and tell you that Willie was better. He could do the five things you have to do to be a superstar: hit, hit with power, run, throw and field. And he had the other magic ingredient that turns a superstar into a super Superstar. Charisma.”

Ted Williams, who hardly every talked, much less doled out compliments to other players, put it best:  “They invented the game for Willie Mays.”

In July of 2009 President Barack Obama flew Air Force One to St. Louis to throw out the first pitch at the All Star game. He invited Willie Mays to accompany him, and the two black pioneers had a extraordinary discussion during the flight, with Mays telling the first black President that he was so proud on Electiion Night 2008 that he couldn’t sleep.

Obama awarded Willie Mays the Medal of Freedom in November, 2015. "Willie also served our country,” Obama noted at the ceremony. “In his quiet example while excelling on one of America's biggest stages he helped carry forward the banner of civil rights. It's because of giants like Willie that someone like me could even think about running for president.”

The “Say Hey Kid” turns 88 today.

How To Get Your Impeachment Ticket Punched and Get a 2020 Win, Too

Even though Trump has clearly committed dozens of impeachable offenses, I have argued for months against impeachment because of five undeniable realities:

·        It will never succeed in this Congress

·        It will give him yet another huge political victory just before the election

·        It will only succeed in inflaming his base and increasing his fundraising

·        It will suck up all the Democratic House’s energy and resources

·        Impeachment without the support of the vast majority of Americans is a really, really lousy idea

·        Elections have consequences and Trumpism is best removed by the ballot box and not through impeachment

·        It encourages dangerously delusional political thinking by catereing to the most absurd and impossible fantasies of the resistance (e.g., impeachment has a chance of succeeding, Republicans will turn against Trump, impeachment hearings will change voters’ minds about Trump, impeachment will force Trump to resign) when we should be focusing on the election.

The argument in favor of impeachment that totally resonates with me, however, is another undeniable reality: that if Congress does not impeach Trump after his multiple impeachable offenses, it will not have upheld its Constitutional responsibility. In other words, if Congress and the Democratic Party won’t impeach someone like Trump, why do we even have a Congress or a Democratic Party?

Until this week I felt strongly that the realpolitik realities listed above outweighed this argument. But now we have Bill Barr.

I’m ashamed (heartily) to admit that I actually stated last month that the country was lucky to have Bill Barr in place as Attorney General before Mueller completed his investigation and submitted his report. I thought that because Matt Whitaker was a dangerous moron who would torpedo the Mueller finale; Barr was not stupid enough to commit a crime under Trump’s spell; Democrats and former Justice Department colleagues swore that Barr, although a conservative, was a staunch institutionalist; and Barr had a thirty-year personal relationship with Robert Mueller.

I couldn’t have been more catastrophically wrong. We now know that what we have in Barr is an Attorney General who is smart and politically savvy (he may be the only person in Trump’s administration who fits that description), completely dedicated to protecting any President from the law in any situation, thoroughly comfortable with a perpetual war with Congressional Democrats, and an aggressive advocate for the legality of Trump’s savage agenda (demolishing the Affordable Care Act, putting immigrants in concentration camps, suppressing the Democratic vote, etc., etc.). Barr is quickly usurping Trump’s standing as the most dangerous force for evil in the country.

Trumpland has no bottom, and this latest horror has got me thinking again about the how fundamental the rule of law is to any kind of civilized society. But it hasn’t led me to believe that any of my arguments against impeachment were invalid or mistaken, or that the 2020 election is the existential political event in the history of the United States. Millions of us share this feeling. We must have room for both. Doing the right thing—impeaching Trump—cannot mean that we fall into another GOP political trap.

Holding months of impeachment hearings would certainly give vast media coverage of Trump’s crimes, coverage that could be very powerful if it came in the form of public testimony from Trump insiders like former White House counsel Don McGahn. But we’ve had two years of this coverage. At this point, in this polarized country, very few votes would be changed. The Mueller report was a pretty savage indictment of Trump’s behavior, and it hardly registered in the poll. And months of hearings would consume vast reservoirs of Democratic and resistance focus and energy that should be spent on recruiting great candidates, executing on voter-registration efforts, and passing legislation in the House on nonpartisan issues that voters really care about and where Trump and the GOP are literally nowhere: health care, the environment, immigration, common-sense gun control, and infrastructure. Such legislation would be just as doomed in the Senate as impeachment, but it would force the Republicans to vote against these bills and allow the Democrats to use those votes against them in 2020.

There is a viable middle ground between a doomed impeachment and a collision with the 2020 election: a fast-tracked impeachment of Trump.

The Democrats should move heaven and earth to get Robert Mueller to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee—soon. Given the contents of Mueller’s report, and his anger with how Barr has torpedoed it, it’s certainly possible that Mueller will testify that he didn’t indict Trump because of DOJ restrictions, that he wasn’t asking Barr to make the call he could make, that he instead prepared a report that he expected Congress to act upon, that Barr misrepresented his report in his four-page summary, and that Barr’s testimony about the conversations he and Mueller had about the report were untrue or misleading.

That’s as lethal an impeachment bludgeon as the Democrats are going to get this year. Instead of holding months of hearings and colliding with the 2020 elections, the House Judiciary Committee could draw up compelling, legitimate and detailed articles of impeachment based solidly on Mueller’s findings on Trump’s clear obstruction of justice in a couple of weeks. The Judiciary Committee could then hold a series of hearings over the next month to explain those articles to the media and the voters. Following those hearings, the Judiciary Committee could quickly vote to send impeachment to the floor for a vote. This would require another month of hearings, but the next step would be a vote by the full House, given the Democratic majority, to approve Trump’s impeachment and send it to the Senate for a decisive trial there. This results in a five- or six-month process by which impeachment would be handed over to Mitch McConnell’s Senate in late September or early October.

If you think Mitch McConnell will allow an impeachment trial to be held in the Senate, you don’t know Mitch McConnell or the Senate. He has the power to change Senate rules to ensure that a trial never even happens.

So the entire impeachment debate could be completed more than a year before the 2020 election, giving the Democrats the opportunity to:

·        Truthfully state that they fulfilled their Constitutional responsibility to hold Trump accountable for his crimes

·        Avoid a split between Pelosi and pro-impeachment Democrats

·        Continue their other investigations of Trump, including those regarding his finances and tax returns

·        Pursue their subpoena requests in the courts

·        Force House Republicans to vote against their proposals on the issues most important to all Americans

·        Most importantly of all, enable them to totally focus on campaigning against Trump and the GOP in every state in 2020 and defeat them at the polls.

Pelosi, Nadler, and the Democratic Party been struggling with impeachment for all the reasons I outlined in my first paragraph. But there is no doubt that they have the political skills and power to ram a Trump impeachment through the House well before the 2020 elections.

It’s the best impeachment hand the Democrats will ever hold between now and then.

Fighting the Real Terrorists

There is no doubt about it.

Domestic terrorism committed by radical-Christian white supremacists is the biggest threat to our national security, and it is increasing at an alarming rate.

The President of the United States is the leader of a homegrown, fascist movement based on maintaining white and Christian supremacy that we can call Trumpism.

The President of the United States is a professional racist whose actions are influenced by his desire to win and maintain the political support of radical-Christian white supremacists.

The President of the United States uses his bully pulpit to foment racial hatred, spread racist conspiracy theories, and encourage violence against immigrants, non-Christians, people of color, his political enemies, journalists, media personalities, and health-care providers.

The President of the United States has created a political and legal environment that encourages domestic terrorism, emboldens and protects domestic terrorists, and makes American citizens less safe.

The President of the United States tolerates domestic terrorism because he leverages it for his own political advantage.

Trumpism is bigger than Donald Trump and will exist as a political force after the end of his political career.

The Republican Party and the current Cabinet—including the Justice Department—have committed themselves to realizing fascist and racist goals and programs of Trumpism.

The Republican Party and the current Cabinet have turned against our Constitutional system and jeopardized national security in order to realize Trumpism.

The Republican Party and the current Cabinet are implementing a systematic program designed to suppress the votes of American minorities and divide the Jewish vote.

The Republican Party and the current Cabinet are implementing a systematic program designed to end legal immigration into this country by people of color.

The United States Supreme Court now has a conservative majority that seems poised to make Trumpist programs the supreme law of the land.

The Department of Homeland Security has disbanded its task force on domestic terrorism, eliminated funding for programs to prevent domestic terrorism, and removed radical-Christian white-supremacist groups from its terrorism watch lists.

Fox News, the most popular “news” network in America, most particularly the program hosted by Tucker Carlson, regularly promotes the “Great Replacement” and “White Genocide” racist conspiracy theory used as justification by many domestic terrorists in their personal manifestos.

Evangelical Christianity is a key wing of Trumpism. American evangelical Christian organizations have supported racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and white-supremacist teachings since the Civil War and are currently engaged in blatant efforts to promote and fund Trumpist political candidates, despite laws to the contrary.

The President of the United States, the Republican Party, and the Trumpist National Rifle Agency oppose any restrictions on assault rifles and ultra-lethal ammunition, the tools of the trade for domestic terrorists.

One other fact: The majority of Americans do not support institutional, legalized racism.

So how did we end up here? Because we let it happen.

How do we fight racism and domestic terrorism in this country? By actively fighting it. By making racism and anti-Semitism loathsome again. By showing, through our actions, words and physical presence, that we are, indisputably, the majority.

We defeat Trump, because by defeating him we remove the loudest voice for white supremacy, end his power to implement racist policies, and destroy the myth of Trumpism’s invincibility.

We leverage Trump-resistance organizations and platforms like Indivisible to mobilize against racism, anti-Semitism, and white-supremacist groups.

We call out racism, anti-Semitism and hate whenever we experience it in our daily lives. We don’t let fear and intimidation keep us silent. Apathy equals acceptance. Hate increases when the reaction to it is silence.

We show up when white supremacists hold rallies in our community and we shout them down, marginalize them, and let them know they are not welcome.

We show solidarity and support for the victims of racism, anti-Semitism, and domestic terrorism.

We pressure the news media to call racism for what it is. It’s not “racially insensitive.” It’s racist.

We pressure the government to admit that domestic terrorism is our biggest threat and to keep us safe from it.

We pressure the government to end mass incarceration of immigrants and citizens of color by fighting for criminal justice reform.

We pressure the government and law enforcement to ensure that hate crimes are prosecuted and the perpetrators punished with appropriate jail sentences.

We work with our community law enforcement agencies to fund more training for police.

We condemn religious leaders who embrace racism and anti-Semitism. If our own church supports such ideologies, we find another church.

We support voter registration efforts in our community.

We help make the government look like our citizenry by voting for qualified candidates of color.

We contribute to groups like the ACLU that fight racist government actions and laws in court and that file lawsuits against white supremacists to imprison and bankrupt them.

We work to remove all Confederate monuments and make Juneteenth a national holiday.

Last Men Lying

Some tried, but in the end were not able to fulfill Trump’s demands.

Michael Flynn, Peter Smith, and Barbara Ledeen were not able to deliver on Trump’s repeated demands top obtain Hillary Clinton’s private emails.

Matthew Whitaker was unable to take charge of the Mueller investigation prior to its completion.

Some stood up to Trump.

James Comey refused when Trump asked him to drop the Flynn investigation.

Jeff Sessions refused when Trump ordered him to “unrecuse” himself from the Mueller investigation and when Trump demanded that he resign.

Don McGahn refused when Trump ordered him to fire Mueller and demanded that he not share his recollection of the event.

Corey Lewandowski and Rick Dearborn refused when Trump asked him to tell Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s investigation to future election interference only.

KT McFarland refused when Trump ordered here to write an email saying, untruthfully, that Trump did not ask Flynn to talk to the Russian ambassador about sanctions.

And then, in his darkest day, at the eleventh hour, when all had failed him, Trump found William Barr and Rod Rosenstein.

Will the Release of the Mueller Report Make Impeachment More Likely?

The occupant of the White House hopes that tomorrow’s Easter-week release of the Mueller report will complete his immaculate resurrection after two years as a target, but the day will more likely be remembered instead as the start of impeachment hearings.

But for who?

The Mueller report may force the House to begin impeachment hearings against Trump for obstruction of justice. It’s being reported tonight that Mueller could not reach a conclusion on this charge because he couldn’t determine Trump’s motive. (Which is, without an explanation from Mueller, infuriating, given that Mueller never even tried to compel Trump to testify.) The motive piece is important for a prosecutor like Mueller whose sole context is a legal one,  but not for Congress in the middle of the decidedly political milieu of impeachment. The biggest question about the obstruction of justice impasse is who Mueller considered as the audience for his report—Barr or Congress. If it is revealed that, like previous prosecutors, Mueller thought that his job was to lay out a case for Congress, not Barr, to decide and the report makes a strong non-legal case for obstruction, then Nadler and the House Judiciary Committee will feel compelled to start impeachment hearings against Trump. “What else are we here for?”, they would justifiably ask.

I’ve always felt that impeachment hearings against Trump would be a colossal mistake. Such hearings would not change the minds of many voters. (Trump’s poll have been insanely consistent because nearly everyone has already made up their minds about him, one way or the other.) They would be a huge and potentially fatal distraction for the Democratic Party, which will have to focus relentlessly and totally on the 2020 campaign in order to beat Trump. Impeachment hearings would fire up Trump’s base to vote and to contribute money to his campaign. Most important of all, Trump will never be convicted and removed by the current Republican Senate. And that’s how it should be. We need to beat Trump at the polls in 2016, not ask the politicians to remove him for us.

But if it turns out that Mueller was making a case that he wanted Congress and not Barr to decide, then the Democrats would have a solid rationale for impeaching the Attorney General.

They could argue that Barr’s appointment was illegal, given his behavior before and since his confirmation. Barr blatantly auditioned for the Attorney General job ten months before he got was nominated by sending an unsolicited letter to the Department of Justice and Trump’s lawyers championing the notion that a sitting President could not be indicted. It’s entirely possible that an arrangement was made. Barr has certainly done everything he could since his confirmation to live up to the promises he made in his tryout.

They could charge Barr with lying to Congress if he releases a heavily redacted version of Mueller’s report, given that he told the Judiciary Committee that he would publish as much of the report as possible. They may have more evidence of this after Barr and Mueller both testify before Congress.

If Mueller’s report makes a strong case for obstruction, Congress could charge Barr himself with obstruction of justice for clearing Trump of that charge before Congress could see the evidence, giving Trump’s lawyers advance briefings on the Mueller report to help them prepare a rebuttal, coordinating with the White House on the timing and process behind the report’s release, and claiming that the Department of Justice spied on the Trump campaign in 2016 without providing any evidence.

Another potential impeachable offense by Barr would be the withholding of critical information from Congress and, by extension, the public. Barr provided his own four-page summary of the Mueller report and then, unlike previous prosecutors, withheld the release of the report for several weeks. He is not allowing Mueller or his team to participate in his press conference tomorrow, thus depriving Congress or the press the ability to question the special prosecutor.

In addition, Barr took an oath to uphold the Constitution by ensuring a non-partisan Department of Justice. Instead he preemptively cleared Trump of collusion and obstruction, briefed the White House on the report before its release, and interfered with Congressional oversight of Trump. Barr is the most partisan Attorney General since John Mitchell. (Barr might want to remind himself of Mitchell’s fate—nineteen months in prison.) Using the Department of Justice to favor one political party would be an impeachable offense.

Barr also swore to uphold the law. Instead he has put his Department of Justice on the side of repealing a lawful act of Congress—the Affordable Care Act—and just this week announced his department’s decision to hold asylum seekers at the border in indefinite detention, which is illegal according to both U.S. and international laws.

There is no chance that William Barr would be convicted and removed by the current Republican Senate, but after tomorrow there will probably be a strong case for Barr’s impeachment, and Congressional Democrats could pursue it without the considerable risks and downsides associated with an attempt to impeach his boss and master.

Aretha Franklin's "Amazing Grace"

I spent part of this Sunday at church—namely, a nearly empty ArcLight Theater on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, where the Aretha Franklin concert film “Amazing Grace” opened this week.

Aretha charted more times than any other female artist in history. One hundred and twelve times, to be exact. She recorded nearly fifty albums, and the biggest of them all was “Amazing Grace,” a double-platinum live gospel recording she made in 1972 at New Temple Baptist Church—which still stands, about fifteen miles from the ArcLight Theater on Sunset.

The 1972 concert that produced that album was also filmed by a movie crew directed by Sidney Pollack, but somehow he failed to link the film footage with the audio, and the film sat in the vaults for nearly forty years until 2008, when Pollack gave the footage to Alan Elliot. Elliott spent two years synchronizing the film and the music and planned to release the picture, but Aretha sued to block it. After Aretha’s death, Elliott showed the restored film to Franklin’s family and finally got permission late last year to pursue a distribution deal. The film opened this week in theaters across the country.

The backstory behind the “Amazing Grace” is only hinted at in the film, but it’s an exceedingly dramatic one. Aretha began her musical career singing in the largest black church in Detroit, where her father C. L. Franklin was pastor. C.L. took little Aretha on the road with him and oversaw the release of her first gospel recordings. Aretha, heavily influenced by religious singer Clara Ward, became a sensation in the world of black gospel, but when she was nineteen, she told her father that she wanted to record popular music and C. L. negotiated a contract for her with Columbia Records.

During her six years with Columbia Aretha had her first hits and became a successful concert performer, but she didn’t achieve the success that many had predicted for her, and in 1967 she signed with Atlantic Records. Producer Jerry Wexler let her accompany herself on piano and return to her gospel singing style, and he brought Franklin down south to record with the brilliant Muscle Shoals rhythm section. The first Atlantic single by Aretha was the "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)," a huge hit. Aretha was off to the races and within a year she was an international star.

Over the next five years Aretha freed herself from her father’s control and reached a level of musical and professional success that dwarfed that of Ward and other influences. But there was a slice of the black community that did not look kindly on Aretha turning her back on gospel music and leaving her church career, so in 1972 Franklin turned to friend and gospel music legend James Cleveland to help her produce a gospel record, one that would be recorded live at Cleveland’s church in Los Angeles.

The just-released film “Amazing Grace”documents the rehearsals and the two nights of performances at the New Temple Baptist Church. It is a phenomenal film.

James Cleveland was the musical director and soulful host, and his Southern California Community Choir wrapped its huge, joyful sound around the star. Aretha brought her peerless backing band—guitarist Cornell Depree, percussionist Pancho Morales, drummer extraordinaire Bernard Purdie, and the genius bassist Chuck Rainey—which was augmented with the keyboard work of Cleveland, Aretha herself, and Ken Luper.

Most importantly, Aretha brought herself. All of herself. Franklin was thirty years old in 1972, and the Aretha in this film is gorgeous and supremely confident. Vocally, she is at her peak. At the very end of the film, Aretha smiles and appears to relax, but up until that hint of release she is a woman on a mission. She means to show that she is the best singer in the world regardless of style and to do that by proving, once and for all, that she is the the unchallenged queen of gospel music. During the performances she is relentless in digging impossibly deep into the music. She has the church ushers seat her father and Clara Ward right in the middle of the front row so she can simultaneously pay tribute to them and show them in no uncertain terms just how far she has surpassed them both.

There are so many thrilling moments in the film that it’s almost unbearable, but Aretha’s soaring rendition of John Newton’s 1779 hymn “Amazing Grace” is truly shattering. Beginning a capella, Aretha takes the familiar hymn apart and rearranges it, taking each succeeding verse to ever more impossible emotional and musical heights. By the time she is midway through the song Aretha has the members of Cleveland’s choir spontaneously leaping, shouting, and crying, the audience is transported, and James Cleveland is utterly overcome and weeping into a handkerchief.

All cultures have compellingly told their stories in music, and song is the supreme expression of humanity. But Aretha’s performance in “Amazing Grace” leaves no doubt that black gospel music—a music born out of the degradation of slavery—and her unique voice have no equals when it comes to telling the story—all of it—of the human spirit. In these seemingly dark times, when it feels as if the loudest voices are the ones that are preaching hatred, revenge, fear, and cruelty, it is no overstatement to claim that experiencing this film can give us renewed hope and make us better people. Hopefully those theater seats will start filling up in the coming week and “Amazing Grace” will achieve the impact it deserves on a vast audience that sorely needs it.

Happy Birthday to Walter Horton

When I was going to college in NYC, I hitchhiked up to Boston several times to see Walter Horton play at Joe’s Place, where he was backed up by Johnny Nicholas and his great band. Those shows were a total revelation to me—Horton’s sound was huge and gorgeous, and he greatly expanded my notion of what was possible on the harmonica. I also able to spend time with Walter at his table between sets. Walter was by nature a shy person, but after a few drinks he would let out with all kinds of outrageous statements. He gave me his address in Chicago and told me the amazing experience that would be mine if I ever showed up for a lesson. “I got a motherf----n’ x-ray machine, man, and I will slap that f----r up against my face and you will see EVERYTHING.”

A few years later I was back in my hometown of Seattle. Walter brought his band to town to play the Rainbow, a popular music venue. I had a day job downtown then and on the day of Walter’s show I dropped in at a nearby liquor store and there was Walter, standing in line at the checkout counter, wearing the fur hat that he often favored.

I was working a lot with at that time in a band led Brian Butler, a talented singer and guitarist, and the two of us went to the Rainbow to hear Horton. Walter and his band (Left Hand Frank on guitar, Rick Molina on bass, and Ted Harvey on drums) really raised the roof off the joint that night. Walter was in stellar form. When he was on, no one could touch him. He put more air in the harp than anyone, before or since.

At the end of the night, with the crowd going crazy for more, there was a quick huddle between the club owner and Walter on stage. Then the club owner grabbed the mic and let everyone know that they had just worked out a deal to have Walter play the club again the following evening.

Awesome! Except…wait a minute—Brian was booked that night. That was our gig! So another conversation happened with the club owner, Walter, and Brian and we quickly agreed that both bands would play the next night and alternate sets, with us starting out.

I thought a lot that day about sharing the stage with Walter, but by the time I got to the Rainbow I was feeling no pressure and was just determined to do a good show and savor every second of the thrill of sharing a stage with the best harmonica player on the planet. We jumped up and did a solid opening set, Walter and his guys got up and killed it, and we did another short set. I had some friends in the audience that night who had saved me a prime seat, and now it was time to have a couple of well-earned drinks and sit back and watch Walter work his magic.

I felt a tap on the shoulder. It was Rick Molina.

“Walter wants you to play the next set with him,” he was telling me. My brain went soft and I looked across the room to see Walter beckoning to me with a crooked finger. Somehow I floated across the room to him.

“You get on stage with the band and play through the amp,” Walter told me. “I’ll put a mic down on the floor and work that.”

I grabbed my harps and microphone, climbed onstage in a daze, took a place on stage between Left Hand Frank and Ted Harvey, and plugged in. Walter put a stand with a vocal mic a couple of feet below us on the dance floor and kicked us off. For the whole set I played fills around his vocals while he and Frank took all the solos. I could have cared less, as long as Walter Horton thought I belonged up there. I just stared down at the back of Walter’s head, listened to his amazing harmonica sound, and did the best I could.

And then it was over. I shook Walter’s hand, thanked him and Rick, and watched the band head off in their station wagon to the motel. I went home and bounced around the walls for a while and then headed out the door and paced the streets until dawn, trying to walk off my excitement, but that was a thrill that’s never worn off. Definitely my most memorable musical experience, bar none.

Happy Birthday, Muddy Waters

I finally made my first visit to the Mississippi Delta three summers ago. We stayed three days in Clarksdale and made the trip out to the old Stovall plantation. We visited the spot where Muddy Waters’ sharecropping cabin had once stood. That humble structure had been moved to the Delta Blues Museum, but it was still an experience to stand on that spot, look across the road to the huge fields in the distance, and imagine McKinley Morganfield on a summer evening after a long day in those furrows, working on his slide guitar playing and beginning his transformation into Muddy Waters, international godfather of the blues.

Like a lot of guys my age, my first blues record was a Paul Butterfield album. Soon after I bought the album “Fathers and Sons,” on which had Paul backed up Muddy. The very next day I was back in the record store to get “The Best of Muddy Waters,” and I just wore that thing out. Muddy was the gate to the blues for me. He quickly led me to Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells—the whole historical blues genius lineup was rolled out for me by Muddy Waters. He changed my life before I ever saw him in person.

From 1968 on I saw Muddy onstage many times. The first time was at Eagles Auditorium in Seattle—that was the first time I saw Paul Oscher in action, too. I’ll never forget Muddy’s Academy-Award enactment of every ounce of drama in “Long Distance Call” that night. I saw him at Ungano’s in New York City two years later, just after his terrible automobile accident—he apologized for sitting down. There was an improbable week-long gig at the posh Maisonette Room at the St. Regis Hotel, where Muddy gamely asked out for requests and a blue-haired matron cradling a martini called out for “When The Saints Go Marching In.” That spurred my friends and I into action, and we began shouting out for all of Muddy’s hits, which he delivered up to us. The great Louis Myers played guitar on that show. There was the time a bunch of us drove from Manhattan to Poughkeepsie to catch a Muddy Waters show at Vassar. We stood outside afterwards and waved goodbye to Muddy and the band as they pulled out of the parking lot in a weathered station wagon and pulling a small trainer with their equipment. I caught Muddy twice at Antone’s, where Jimmie Vaughan, Lou Ann Barton, and Kim Wilson sat in and delighted him. I even got to open for him once, at a show at the Showbox in Seattle.

Onstage, Muddy looked like a king, carried himself like a king, sang like a king, and played like a king. Thirty years after making the move to Chicago as an illiterate field hand and creating a new, amplified update of the Delta blues, Muddy was traveling the globe and delivering one great show after another in country after country, and no one who saw him will forget his regal nature, his total command of the stage, and the intensity and uniqueness of his music. Muddy Waters traveled a personal journey that most of us can’t even begin to comprehend, but we can spend the rest of our lives savoring the gift he left behind—some of the most beautiful and most soulful music ever recorded.

A Complete Chronology of the Incredible Democratic Witch Hunt

Fox News and Congressional Republicans have made an aggressive case for nearly two years that the special prosecutor’s investigation into the Trump campaign and Russian interference in the election was a completely biased witch hunt launched and run by the Democrats.

I was initially skeptical of this claim, but now that the Mueller investigation had ended, it’s perfectly obvious that his probe was nothing but a carefully orchestrated Democratic smear campaign. Don’t believe me? Just look at the following facts and timeline, going back to the start:

The Republican head of a special House committee spends 28 straight months conducting multiple investigations into Hillary Clinton’s actions in the Benghazi incident. No charges are filed.

The Republican head of the FBI leads an investigation into claims that Clinton improperly stored and transmitted information on a personal email server and decides that no charges are warranted.

The Republican head of the FBI launches an investigation into whether Russian operatives colluded with the Republican presidential campaign to influence the upcoming election after receiving a tip that a Republican foreign policy advisor of the Republican Presidential candidate had bragged about such a partnership.

The Republican former director of intelligence, who is secretly meeting with Russians, appears at the Republican national convention and leads the Republican delegates in chants of “lock her up, lock her up.”

The Republican head of the FBI announces just days before the election that the Clinton email investigation is being reopened. No charges are filed, but the news throws the Clinton campaign on the defensive and helps swing the election to the Republican candidate.

The newly elected Republican President appoints the Republican former director of intelligence as national security advisor, a Republican former member of his transition team as attorney general, and another Republican as deputy attorney general.

 The Republican national security advisor meets secretly with the Russians and discusses the lifting of sanctions and lies to the FBI about those meetings.

The new Republican White House counsel is informed by the Justice Department that the Republican national security advisor has lied to the FBI about his contacts with Russians.

Weeks later, news reports appear detailing meetings between the Republican national security advisor and the Russians.

The Republican President fires the Republican national security advisor, saying that he did so because the Republican national security advisor had lied to the Republican Vice President.

The Republican attorney general testifies before Congress that he had no contacts with Russians during the campaign. When that statement is proven to be inaccurate, the Republican attorney general amends his testimony and recuses himself from any Russian investigations. This means that the Republican deputy attorney general will direct such investigations going forward.

In testimony to Congress, the Republican head of the FBI reveals that his agency has been investigating Russian interference with the election and possible collusion with the Republican presidential campaign.

The Republican President meets with the Republican director of the FBI and asks the Republican director whether the Republican President was a target of the investigation and requests that the Republican director end the FBI’s investigation of the Republican national security advisor.

The Republican President lets the Republican attorney general and the Republican deputy attorney general know that he is going to fire the Republican head of the FBI and asks them to prepare a written justification for that firing.

The Republican President fires the Republican director of the FBI, using a letter from the Republican attorney general and the Republican deputy attorney general as justification.

The Republican President goes on national television and states that he had decided to fire the Republican director of the FBI before hearing from the Republican attorney general and the Republican deputy attorney general and that the Russian investigation was a factor in that decision.

The Republican President meets with the Russian ambassador and discusses the firing of the Republican director of the FBI, calling him “a nut job” and noting that “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

A week after the Republican President fires the Republican director of the FBI, the Republican deputy attorney general announces the appointment of a prominent, lifeliong Republican as a special prosecutor to look into Russian interference with the election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign. Several Congressional Republicans state publicly that the Republican special prosecutor is an ideal choice for the role.

The Republican special prosecutor moves quickly, and within five months files charges against the Republican former chairman of the campaign of the Republican President, the Republican former deputy of the Republican former campaign chairman, the Republican former national security advisor, and the Republican foreign policy advisor to the campaign of the Republican President.

The Republican former national security advisor, the Republican foreign policy advisor, and the Republican former assistant manager of the campaign of the Republican President all plead guilty to knowingly lying to the FBI and agree to cooperate with the Republican special prosecutor by telling what they know about the activities of other Republicans.

The Republican President repeatedly insists that no one in his election team or administration had any contacts with the Russians.

It is revealed that the following members of the Republican President’s team had meetings with the Russians before or after the election: the Republican President himself, the Republican son of the Republican President, the  Republican Secretary of State, the Republican Secretary of Commerce, the Republican campaign manager, the Republican deputy of the Republican campaign manager, the Republican attorney general, three Republican foreign policy advisors, a Republican campaign advisor, the Republican President’s Republican lawyer, the Republican real estate advisor to the Republican President, and the Republican brother of the Republican Secretary of Education.

The Republican assistant attorney general and the Republican special counsel approve a raid of the home, motel room, and office of the Republican President’s personal attorney.

The Republican former manager of the campaign of the Republican President is found guilty on eight counts of fraud.

The Republican former manager of the campaign of the Republican President pleads guilty to all charges brought by the Republican special prosecutor and agrees to cooperate with the Republican special prosecutor.

A Republican former attorney general submits an unsolicited memo to the Republican-controlled Department of Justice and the Republican lawyers of the Republican President that calls any investigation of the Republican President for obstruction of justice “fatally misconceived” if no collusion is proved, because then there would be no criminal motive for obstructing justice.

The personal attorney of the Republican President pleads guilty to tax fraud and campaign finance charges and agrees to cooperate with the Republican special prosecutor who is investigating the Republican President.

The Republican Attorney General, after months of withering complaints from the Republican President, resigns at the request of the Republican President.

The Republican President appoints a Republican as acting attorney general.

The Republican lawyers for the Republican President submit written answers to questions from the Republican special counsel.

The Republican President appoints the Republican former attorney general who wrote the memo saying that an obstruction of justice charge against the President would be “fatally misconceived” to serve as attorney general.

The Republican former attorney general is approved to serve as attorney general by the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee.

The personal attorney of the Republican President pleads guilty to lying to Congress and tells the court that the Republican President directed him to violate campaign finance laws and that the Republican President lied about not having any business dealings in Russia.

A Republican former advisor to the campaign of the Republican President who communicated with Russian hackers and Wikileaks is indicted by the Republican special prosecutor on seven counts, including one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of false statements, and one count of witness tampering.

The Republican attorney general receives the final report from the Republican special prosecutor. The Republican special prosecutor does not find that anyone in the campaign of the Republican President conspired with Russians. The Republican special prosecutor does not reach a conclusion on the obstruction charge.

The Republican attorney general and the Republican assistant attorney general decide that there is not enough evidence to charge the Republican President with obstruction of justice, claiming, just as the Republican attorney general noted in his unsolicited memo from ten months earlier, that there can be no criminal motive for obstruction if it was decided that there was no case for collusion.

After reviewing the report by the Republican special prosecutor and making his decision on the obstruction charge, the Republican attorney general does not release the Republican special prosecutor’s report to Congress or the public. instead, the Republican attorney general releases a four-page summary that states that while the Republican special prosecutor did not reach a conclusion on obstruction, the Republican special prosecutor “did not exonerate” the Republican President

The Republican attorney general officially closes the investigation of the Republican special prosecutor.

 Which brings us to the critical juncture that we have reached today, when the Republican attorney general’s report on the Republican special counsel’s report makes it clear completely to the entire world that there was zero substance to the Russian investigation, that the investigation did not accomplish a damn thing, that there was absolutely no contact between the Republican President’s campaign and the Russians, that the Republican President has been completely exonerated, and that this whole mess was just another plot by the lamestream media and the traitorous Democrats to ensure that America never becomes great again.

 It's easy, people: It’s not a witch hunt if the Republicans are running it!

You're an old, white, male, inarticulate, corporate Democrat. How the hell do you run for President as a young, eloquent, progressive black woman?

This would never actually happen in real life, but let's say for the sake of argument that you're a 76-year-old white guy who has been around since the beginning of time. You held elected office for 46 years. You ran two spectacularly disastrous campaigns for President made notable by their brevity and startlingly incoherent babbling on the stump. You're identified with the Democratic Party run by large corporate donors. And you've got some dark things in your past. You spent weeks on national television abusing an African-American woman who dared to accuse a Supreme Court nominee of harassment. You supported forced school integration in the South but opposed it in the north. And you championed policies that led to the mass incarceration of black males.

You decide to run for President in a year when a new breed of progressives who refuse corporate donations has brought new energy to your party and when women and people of color are achieving unprecedented success in politics. You're facing a multitude of talented opponents. Most of them are aggressive progressives. Nearly all are decades younger. Several are women. Many are people of color.

What to do to make headway against this kind of tough current?

The situation calls for something bold and different. What about the classic Trojan horse ploy? It worked for Odysseus, your best pal back in prep school. Cast yourself in an altered form in order to slip through the 2020 gates. The killer move, obviously, would be to recruit a human shield in the form of a young, dynamic, brilliant, progressive, eloquent, African-American woman!

You only have to get past one little problem in order to pull off this brilliant con: convincing such a person that this would be the smart move for her.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-do-it-stacey-abrams/2019/03/21/c79ff332-4bff-11e9-b79a-961983b7e0cd_story.ht