The Intercept podcast is always interesting, always new.  If you think you’ve heard all the arguments, you haven’t.

Podcast:

http://dcs.megaphone.fm/PPY2471205263.mp3?key=28adf140c6ec1f16e4ab51a31c38d3dd

Jeremy Scahill

I’m having a hard time getting back to writing these days.  There is just so much information all the time, washing over me.  I am overwhelmed.  I am outraged.  I am despondent.

I read an article yesterday in which the reporter was saying that all of us keep waiting for some incident, some event to happen that we can mark as the coup (the firing of Mueller, for example).  But the coup has already happened.  We are just documenting, bearing witness, to the slide into kleptocracy.  I am no longer convinced that we will emerge from the Trump presidency with anything like a workable democracy.  There is too much at stake for the Republicans, the Trump, Inc. people and the Russians to allow themselves to lose.  And they have already demonstrated that they are willing to do anything, anything, to win.  And, the forces against them are too weak, too compromised, too ambitious to make careers and money off the proceeds, too mannered, too deluded about how the institutions (or Bob Mueller) are going to save us.  Everyone keeps asking why the Republicans enable this.  It’s easy.  The Republicans are up to their eyeballs in Russian or dirty money.  They can’t afford to stand up to Trump, Inc. because they are completely owned subsidiaries of Trump, Inc.  They are not cowards.  They are part of the scam.

These are just a few of the things that are pissing me off today:

-Stephanie Ruhl and Ali Velshi (MSNBC) posing in a gushing, hugging photograph with Sarah Huckleberry Sanders at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

-Ali Velshi posting in response to the criticism for the photo that they had also posed with Kathy Griffin.  The fact that he thinks this makes everything alright just demonstrates that they don’t get it.

-Mark Warren for voting to confirm the torture Queen Gina Haspel.  I phoned his Senate office and told them I felt betrayed, heartsick and furious.

-Michael Cohen and his lifetime of sleaze.  You must listen to Trump, Inc. a podcast that details Cohen’s career of sleazy behavior.  Almost everybody he’s ever worked with has been disbarred, arrested, had their medical license taken away.  His whole career has been working with people who were con artists.  Natural he would land up with Trump.

-Jennifer Rubin for arguing that Nikki Haley and Salley Yates should run for president on the same ticket.  Nikki Haley just walked out on the Palestinian ambassador when he started speaking at the UN.

-People who think that voting for women is the answer to all our problems.  I lived in Scotland during the reign of Margaret Thatcher.  Tell me about how naive that is.

-Yamiche Alcindor for asking Bernie Sanders if he wasn’t a sexist for running against Hillary Clinton.  And she has made a career off it when I’ve never heard her say anything that was remotely interesting.

The Things that are keeping me Sane.

-The ruby-throated hummingbird who comes to my bedroom window feeder now at least ten times a day.

-My mouse-gray Burmese cat, Little Neal, who sleeps in my arms, watches hours of news every day with me, makes me take a walk with him by pulling my glasses off my head with his teeth, hates taking his potassium medicine but doesn’t run (which he could) and takes it anyway, who has loved me and been my constant companion for the better part of twenty years.

-J.P. Morgan, the new feral cat (or at least we think he’s feral, or sort of).  He comes around every few days, but we can’t find his parents.  He’s too fat to be homeless.  This guy has never met a stranger, including the guy who delivered rocks the other day.

-The sunshine filtering through the Spanish moss in our back yard.

-The three tiny squirrels who have made our upstairs deck their feeding station three times a day and who sit on the back of the outside sofa and look at me while I’m reading or writing or cursing at Trump, Inc.

 

 

 

 

In a HuffPost/YouGov poll taken just after the sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein, 8%, just 8% of the supporters of Trump believed that he had been guilty of sexual assault even though the Access Hollywood tape had already been released.

There’s a reason why evangelicals flock to Trump.

The History Extra Podcast is made by the BBC.  

500 Years of medicine

Were the Suffragettes terrorists?

1983: The Cold War almost goes nuclear

Africa’s Contested past

Shakespeare’s Greatest Actor

The Vietnam War on Film

Medieval mystics

 

If you haven’t got the podcast habit yet, this is a great place to start.  Listen in the car, while exercising and most importantly when you can’t sleep.

 

   Ruth Ellis was the last woman hung in Britain.  Ellis, beaten cruelly by her lover, David Blakely,on several occasions, was beaten so badly that she miscarried a few weeks before the killed Blakely.  She was condemned to death in less than 15 minutes.  Ellis was not only a successful model and business woman, she refused to adopt a  penitent pose in Court.   Statistically, she is the kind of woman who still gets the death penalty – unrepentant and challenging conventional female stereotypes.  Class was a salient issue in the trial.  Ellis was a lower class single woman who was having an affair with a wealthy man.  She was seen as a social climber who expected to marry a wealthy man above her station. 

Se was the last woman hung in Britain.

 

   

“The Ruth Ellis Files” can be seen on BBC.  And there is an article about her in the BBC History Magazine.

 

In the 1920s, Sinclair Lewis enjoyed a brilliant career “portraying and satirizing what he regarded as the mediocrity, materialism, corruption, and hypocrisy of middle-class life in the United States.”  His major novels of the 20s – Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth were all best sellers.  Then came the Stock Market Crash of 1929.  The middle class was no longer interested in being satirized.  Lewis had to look for new material.

With the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, Lewis began to focus on the discussion of whether fascism could rise in the U.S.

Quote from It Can’t Happen Here

“Windrip (the authoritarian candidate) will probably get elected and then drag us into a war just to prove our masculinity and toughness.”  Sinclair Lewis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Nicole Wallace’s program yesterday, Donny Deutsch (frequent quest on Morning Joe and some kind of branding expert) said something which rings true to me. After he had lunch with Michael Cohen, Deutsch said Trump was going to go to war with the Justice Department.  Trump, he argued, could not afford to allow the “rock” to be turned over.  Nicole Wallace asked: What’s under the rock?  Deutsch responded:  Everything Donald Trump has been and done for forty years.  Trump can’t afford for that rock to be turned over and if it means he will be impeached, he will provoke impeachment because he cannot allow this to happen.   It will uncover everything Donald Trump is – personally, politically and financially.  Pretty well suns up the situation.

CNN is reporting this morning that a doorman was payed to keep quiet over an illegitimate child Trump had with somebody.

Nick Ackerman is saying on Chris Hayes that the underlying crimes the Cohen search warrants were based on does not have to be separate from the Russia probe. People were assuming that if it had to do with the Russia probe, Mueller would have kept it.  But, Ackerman is saying that if the crime occurred in the Southern District of New York, the search warrant has to go through the Southern District.

Five Things You Need to Know About Deripaska

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/382111-five-things-to-know-about-deripaska

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published a semi-satirical novel entitled “It Can’t Happen Here.” The novel is designed to portray the take over of an authoritarian government in the United States. This is not an easy read, and if you aren’t interested in the parallels between Lewis’ novel and the Trump election and administration, you probably won’t want to wade through it. Lewis, reportedly, took much longer to research the book than he took writing it (four months) and it suffers from lack of character development and plot drift. A play was based on the book was produced just after Trump took office. And, some of the parallels are interesting.

Lewis predicted that the current anti-intellectualism would be part of the authoritarian program.

…the Americans were the first to start new and completely orthodox institutions, free from the very first of any taint of “intellectualism.”

“…the morning papers had been combined by the government into one sheet, rich in comic strips, in syndicated gossip from Hollywood, and indeed, lacking only any news.”

 

 

 

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published a semi-satirical novel entitled “It Can’t Happen Here.”   The novel is designed to portray the take over of an authoritarian government in the United States.  This is not an easy read, and if you aren’t interested in the parallels between Lewis’ novel and the Trump election and administration, you probably won’t want to wade through it.  Lewis, reportedly, took much longer to research the book than he took writing it (four months) and it suffers from lack of character development and plot drift.   A play was based on the book was produced just after Trump took office.  And, some of the parallels are interesting.

Senator Windrip is the authoritarian President – folksy, charismatic and power-hungry.  People are left wondering what country they are about to get into a war with – Canada, England, Mexico.  At the end of the novel, after sporadic uprisings have occurred, the president launches a war with Mexico.

“As month by month they (the people) saw that they had been cheated with marked cards again, they were indignant; but they were busy with cornfield and sawmill and dairy and motor factory, and it took the impertinent idiocy of demanding that they march down into the desert and help steal a friendly country to jab them into awakening and into discovering that, while they had been asleep, they had been kidnapped by a small gang of criminals, armed with high ideals, well-buttered words, and a lot of machine guns.”

 

 

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-roseanne-barr-abandoned-all-reason-and-embraced-the-alt-right

 

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2018/0323/In-Trump-emoluments-case-questions-of-ethics-and-constitutional-intent

 

 

The ASPCA is alerting Georgia citizens that on Monday, puppy mill lobbyists will be trying to pass an amendment to a bill in the Georgia house.  This amendment(to HB 876) will “prevent local governments from banning the sale of puppy mill puppies in existing pet stores.”  These Puppy mills, according to the ASPCA “are cruel breeding facilities that prioritize profits over the health and wellbeing of animals.  Dogs in these operations are often kept in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions without adequate veterinary care, food, water or socialization.”

Republicans who support the amendment advertise themselves as supporting local control, but this amendment prevents local communities from deciding that they don’t want their pet stores to sell these cruelly treated animals.

Please phone: Lieutenant Gov. Georgia Casey Cagle.  You can leave a message on the weekend, or phone Monday.  (404) 656-5030.  You can also contact your local representative and senator.

 

The Lyin’, the Rich and the Warmongers

Intercepted Podcast: The Lyin’, the Rich, and the Warmongers