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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 months

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Mike Luckovich

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 22, 2024

Last night, Florida governor Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and promptly endorsed former president Trump. DeSantis had tried to present himself as the alternative to Trump, but he put so little daylight between himself and the former president that he could never get traction.

DeSantis appeared to use his power as the governor of Florida to push measures he thought would boost his candidacy, many of which followed the pattern of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who has used his government to destroy democracy and assume autocratic powers. DeSantis pushed anti-LGBTQ+ laws, book bans, and the idea that businesses like Disney must answer to the moral positions of the government rather than market forces, and he flew migrants who were in the U.S. legally to Martha’s Vineyard in an apparent attempt to stand out as an anti-immigrant crusader.

But DeSantis never broke free of Trump’s orbit.

The Miami Herald editorial board noted that while DeSantis’s presidential bid had ended, “the damage of the laws he has pushed through in Florida, as he landed more appearances on Fox News, will live on. Without his political ambitions, there likely wouldn’t be ‘Don’t say gay,’ woke wars and the waste of state resources to fight meaningless battles against drag queen bars. These were efforts to appeal to Trump’s base but his supporters refused to leave the former president, especially after he was indicted.”

The New Hampshire primary is tomorrow, with former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley squaring off against Trump. It is not at all clear what daylight exists between the two of them, either, although Haley is perceived as the representative of the pre-Trump corporate Republican Party. Still, the contest is revealing the future in at least one way: today, New Hampshire voters are reporting that they have received robocalls with a deepfake of President Joe Biden’s voice telling them not to vote.

Republican party officials worry that while Trump is taking up tons of oxygen, the party itself has nothing to run on. Since taking control of the House in 2023, Republicans have very little to show for it except a lot of infighting. The last congressional session was “historically unproductive,” as Sahil Kapur of NBC News put it today. House Republicans’ investigations of President Joe Biden, hyped before the media, have fizzled, and now, after insisting that they would not pass funding for Ukraine, Israel, or Taiwan until the “crisis” at the border was addressed, they have backed off and now say they will not pass border legislation.

Meanwhile, radicals appear to be manufacturing a crisis on the border. On January 11, Michael Scherer and Dylan Wells of the Washington Post reported that political ads had used the word “border” 1,319 times since the start of the year, more than any other word including “approve” and “message,” standard disclaimer terms for political ads.

On Wednesday, January 17, state authorities began to arrest migrants at Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, as part of Governor Greg Abbott’s attempt to take control of immigration away from the federal government. When the government told Texas to stop blocking federal officials from the stretch of the Rio Grande where three migrants died last week, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton’s office responded: “Texas will not surrender.”

Today the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the federal government is authorized to remove the razor wire Texas has installed across the U.S.-Mexico border, although considering the federal government’s authority over border security is very well established, the fact that the vote was 5–4 is surprising. Far-right lawmakers were outraged nonetheless. Representative Chip Roy of Texas urged his House colleagues to defund the Department of Homeland Security, and Louisiana representative Clay Higgins said on social media that the federal government was “staging a civil war” and that “Texas should stand their ground.”

Meanwhile, on Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted Mexican Foreign Secretary Alicia Bárcena to follow up on migration discussions the two countries had in meetings on December 27, 2023, in Mexico. In September 2023, Mexico eclipsed China as the largest trading partner of the U.S., and in the December meeting, Blinken, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Homeland Security Advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, U.S. ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar, and National Security Council Coordinator for the Los Angeles Declaration Katie Tobin discussed cooperation to manage the border safely and humanely while also combating the drug smuggling and conditions that have been driving migration.

On January 8, Julia Ainsley of NBC News explained that the Biden administration has been pressuring Mexico to increase enforcement on its own southern border with Guatemala, deport more migrants from within Mexico, and take in more non-Mexican migrants back across the U.S. southern border. In exchange, Ainsley says, Mexico’s president—who is on the defensive at home because of corruption charges—has proposed that the U.S. invest more money in Latin America and Caribbean countries, suspend its blockade of Cuba, ease sanctions against Venezuela, and make it easier for migrants to work legally in the U.S.

On Friday, in Washington, D.C., the U.S. said that the coordinated efforts were having a positive effect on migration as officials have cracked down on smuggling networks, trains, and bus routes. “Migration is a hemispheric challenge,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said. “The United States is committed to work hand in hand with Mexico and countries across the region to address the root causes of migration and advance economic opportunities in the spirit of Los Angeles Declaration for Migration and Protection,” a landmark 2022 agreement in which the heads of twenty of the countries in the Americas agreed to embrace a regional approach to managing migration.

Today, on the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, Vice President Kamala Harris, who has made protecting reproductive rights key to her portfolio, and President Joe Biden noted that thanks to the “extreme decision” of today’s Supreme Court to overturn that decision has left tens of millions of American women “in states with extreme and dangerous abortion bans.”

“Because of Republican elected officials,” Biden said in a statement, “women’s health and lives are at risk…. Even as Americans…have resoundingly rejected attempts to limit reproductive freedom, Republican elected officials continue to push for a national ban and devastating new restrictions across the country.” He and Vice President Harris “are fighting to protect women’s reproductive freedom against Republicans officials’ dangerous, extreme, and out-of-touch agenda,” he said. “We stand with the vast majority of Americans who support a woman’s right to choose, and continue to call on Congress to restore the protections of Roe in federal law once and for all.”

This is a position embraced by 69% of Americans, and the Biden campaign has run videos with Trump bragging that he overturned Roe v. Wade and suggesting that women who obtain abortions should be punished.

Recently, the campaign released an ad in which a Texas woman who is herself an OBGYN talks about being unable to obtain an abortion for a planned pregnancy after a routine ultrasound revealed that the fetus could not survive. “Because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v. Wade,” she says, Texas “completely” took her choice away and put her life in danger. “It’s every woman’s worst nightmare and it was absolutely unbearable. We need leaders that will protect our rights and not take them away,” she says.

Finally, today, a historical moment: the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an average of the value of 30 leading companies, passed 38,000 for the first time.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters from An American #Heather cox Richardson #border #US House of Representatives #corrupt GOP #Roe v Wade #women's health #DeSantis #Texas

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thelittletsarina · 2 months

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Thanks for gifting this audio. Can you also gift The Wicked Stuttgart dress rehearsal for all of our German fans out there?

Willemijn Verkaik (Elphaba), Lucy Scherer (Glinda), Mark Seibert (Fiyero), Carlo Lauber (The Wizard), Angelika Wedekind (Madame Morrible), Nicole Radeschnig (Nessarose), Stefan Stara (Boq), Michael Günther (Doctor Dillamond) October 31, 2007; Stuttgart || Notes: Dress rehearsal

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-Q-xsoNne0AY4PpuCi1W42RwSUnCjNjh

#tsarina’s asks #audio gift #wicked musical

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nicklloydnow · 10 months

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“Kennedy crowed to me about his horseshoe coalition gathered round a campaign he views as fundamentally populist. And it’s quite a band he has put together: crunchy Whole Foods–shopping anti-vaxxers, paunchy architects of hard-right authoritarianism looking to boost a chaos agent, Nader-Stein third-party perma-gremlins, some Kennedy-family superfans, and rich tech bros seeking a lone wolf to legitimize them. Their convening can give the impression of weightiness, but if you so much as blew on them, the alliance would shatter into a million pieces. The only thing that seems to bind them is Kennedy, the current embodiment of a warped fantasy of marginalization and martyrdom that has become ever more appealing — and thus politically significant — in an age of disinformation and distrust in government and institutions.

That’s not to say Kennedy’s campaign is a joke. He is both an addled conspiracy theorist and an undeniable manifestation of our post-pandemic politics. He is an aging but handsome scion of America’s most storied political family, facing off against an incumbent who many in his own party worry is too old and too unpopular to win a second term. Far from an exile, he is an extremely well-connected person with unparalleled access to the centers of influence in New York, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C., who either has no idea what kind of fire he’s playing with, or does and is therefore an arsonist.

He is running a surprisingly potent campaign that, thanks to the lurid dynamics of social media and the boosts he is receiving from some of the wealthiest, most listened-to people in America, stands to grow even more disruptive, his deep thoughts on Rogan’s podcast translating into overflow crowds at his rallies. Lesser threats than Kennedy have played spoilers in elections before, and if he succeeds in helping burn us all to the ground, it will not be because he is an outsider, as he claims, but because of a political and media culture that has protected and encouraged and fawned over him his whole life — handing a perpetual problem child, now 69 and desperate for attention, accelerant and matches.

(…)

His vaccine beliefs hooked him up with a broader world of conspiracy theorizing. In 2006, Kennedy wrote a lengthy story, again for Rolling Stone, claiming the Republican Party had “mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004,” stealing the election in Ohio via Diebold voting machines — a specious claim that was seductive to Democrats who simply could not believe George W. Bush had won his reelection bid against John Kerry. Kennedy’s doubts in electoral results have persisted, and he recently equivocated to the Washington Post’s Michael Scherer about the 2020 election, saying, “I don’t know. I think that Biden won.”

Kennedy has also come to believe many other things that run the gamut from unproven to ludicrous to dangerously irresponsible. They begin with his conviction that the CIA played a role in the murders of both his uncle and his father and that Bobby Sr. was killed not by Sirhan Sirhan but by a security guard assigned to protect him; he actively campaigned for Sirhan’s release from prison against the wishes of most of the Kennedy family, including his mother.

(…)

Kennedy has also suggested that 5G high-speed-internet towers are being used to “harvest our data and control our behavior”; posited a link between mass shootings and antidepressant use; told Rogan that Wi-Fi pierces “the blood-brain barrier,” causing “leaky brain”; and claimed the presence of atrazine in the water supply has contributed to depression and gender dysphoria among boys since atrazine is known to clinically castrate frogs when dumped into their tanks.

Again: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been polling as high as 20 percent.

(…)

But he does not really emphasize reducing costs and making medicine and health-care treatments more broadly available to more people. If this were important to him, he would not have allowed Rogan to pit him against Dr. Peter Hotez, the Texas physician-scientist making open-source, patent-free vaccines available to poor populations around the world, undercutting the extortionate pharma companies. Kennedy’s fight is about vilifying lifesaving medical treatments in favor of others that he has decided, based on inscrutable metrics of his own, are more holistic.

(…)

American Values is also a laundering of a lot of dirty Kennedy linen. There is but one mention of Chappaquiddick and lots of florid encomiums about how devoted everyone was to one another with little mention of the famously chronic infidelity that ran rampant in the family. He lauds ancient Grandma Rose for her “curiosity about people of all backgrounds,” including “fishermen, actors, cabbies, political leaders, bus drivers, tourists, movie stars, heads of state, strangers in elevators,” a list that suggests that the full and dazzling range of humanity may fall into three categories: famous people, people who transport them to places, and others they may meet by chance on Cape Cod.

(…)

He is leaning hard into his family in this contest; his logo even borrows the iconography of his father’s 1968 campaign. It makes it all the more awkward that almost no members of the Kennedy family are supporting him. Many have already publicly endorsed Biden, who employs at least three Kennedys in his administration. Kennedy’s sister, the filmmaker Rory Kennedy, told CNN, “Due to a wide range of Bobby’s positions, I’m supporting President Biden.” On the day Kennedy filed his paperwork with the Federal Election Commission, his cousin Bobby Shriver tweeted that it was “a good day” to remind everyone he had been an early supporter of Biden in the 2016 primary.

(…)

Kennedy and his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, the best friend of his sister Kerry, announced their separation in 2010. In 2012, Mary hanged herself in an outbuilding of their home in Mount Kisco. More than a year later, the New York Post published excerpts of a diary from earlier in his marriage in which he kept an account of the 16 women he’d had sex with that year. In 2014, he married Hines.

One of the keys to Kennedy’s appeal with a certain segment of the population is his view of himself as an outcast and victim. When his inaugural campaign speech went long, he joked with the crowd, “This is what happens when you censor somebody for 18 years.”

(…)

Being shunned in any way for ideas that, when it comes to vaccines, are not just about individual choice but about our collective responsibility is perhaps anathema to people raised to assume their voices would be heard and understood as legitimate. Public-health directives during COVID were crude and sometimes wrong — messaging on masking changed repeatedly, masking outdoors now seems silly, the school closures lasted longer than they should have — but the objections made by people like Kennedy were not rooted in special advance scientific knowledge. Rather, they stemmed from the fury of normally powerful people affronted by the argument that their individual impulses put them on the wrong side of a moral question of communal engagement and compassion. It is a dynamic many managed to reframe as their willingness to stand in patriotic challenge to weak-minded, compliant, vaccinated sheep. And it is the type of environment in which men born with immense wealth and power — the kind who casually mention that governors have called and offered them Senate seats that they have turned down — can recast themselves as martyred heroes.

(…)

But of course he’s a poser. This entire campaign is a pose, as is his outsider stance. He is a Kennedy. He is the fifth member of his family to run for president. His sister Kerry was married to the man who would become the governor of New York, whose brother was a television journalist; his cousin Maria was married to the governor of California, who also happened to be a movie star. His grandfather owned a movie studio. He has written, in American Values, of attending the 1960 Democratic convention at which his uncle was nominated; he was 6, and his family stayed at the home of Marion Davies, the actress and the mistress of his grandfather’s good friend William Randolph Hearst. At that convention, Frank Sinatra hosted cocktail parties celebrating his family. Kennedy’s own wife is a star whom he met through another television star, his friend Larry David, who recently offered the Times this classic clarification about his relationship with the candidate: “Yes love and support, but I’m not ‘supporting’ him.”

Over lunch in New Hampshire, I asked Kennedy how his conversation with Republican New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu had gone following his address to the state legislature; Kennedy told me, “It was nice. I knew his father” — who was also governor. It can seem as if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knows the father of every powerful person in America. Perhaps more important, they knew his father and his uncles and his grandfathers.

So he gets traction where no one else would. His relationship with the political media, which has published him, written about him, and seen him as a full and flawed and interesting human, has always been guided by his core identity as an insider, a member of the family that this country was taught to love above all others and to pity in their many public tragedies. As a journalist who has been told for decades that my empathy for the female candidates I often cover is probably overemotional and built too strongly on personal identification, let me just tell you that you should never stand between a white male political journalist over the age of 40 and his feelings about the Kennedys.

I was a young person in journalism in New York at the turn of the millennium when a lot of people I worked for and with were Kennedy’s dining companions, buddies, and neighbors. Peter Kaplan (another of my former bosses), then editor of the New York Observer, had been his roommate at Harvard and was one of his best friends. Kennedy and his cousin John Jr. — who ran the magazine George — were big handsome puppies who frolicked among a generation of political junkies who had grown up worshipping their dads and then wound up at the same schools, jobs, and parties as the sons. I saw this at Talk and the Observer and Salon; it was true at The New Yorker and the New York Times and The New Republic and The Atlantic and the places that published Kennedy from the 1970s on, providing him the mainstream credentials he cited when I asked him about his preparation for the presidency. For what it’s worth, in those same years, I was often asked to cover Trump, then a local celebrity and bargain-basement version of a Kennedy himself, an easy call to get a quote to fill a column, with every mention making his name more recognizable, his words more legitimate. How do we think these guys got here?

(…)

If he can have that effect on me, what must his draw be for those who have not spent hours reading about thimerosal and AZT and Diebold machines just double-checking that all this stuff he says with such assuredness is, indeed, nonsense? Imagine how strong it could be for millions of scared Americans who look at him and see shadows of people they’ve lost, of men the country has lost.

If he were your uncle, you would likely consider that he is fighting some serious psychological headwinds. His own uncle was assassinated when Bobby was 9. He was pulled from school at 14 and flown to the deathbed of his father, also assassinated. His cousin drove a plane into the sea on the way to Bobby’s sister’s wedding. One brother died in a skiing accident, another of a drug overdose. His wife died by suicide. All this in a family in which his grandfather’s dictum was “There will be no crying in this house.”

(…)

And it’s not benign. Because while, no, he is certainly not likely to win the Democratic nomination or ever become president, he could do well in a rogue New Hampshire primary in which Biden is declining to participate, and his performance in that state could trigger further distrust in our elections and throw more fuel on the legitimacy crisis that is raging across this democracy — a crisis that is dangerous, insurrectionist, violent, and terrifying. This campaign will mean his views gain a broader audience, and that too is terrifying when it comes to the erosion of the public’s understanding of disease, science, and public-health measures.

And then there is the bracing reality that, here in Trump’s America, another clearly damaged man, a man whose own close-knit family has waved red flags about his fitness for office, is getting this far in the anti-Trump party.

(…)

Not so distant from this performance of retro white machismo is the fact that at least some of the blame for this wretched state of affairs lies with Biden and the Democratic Party. When elected, Biden promised to be a bridge president: to formulate, alongside the equally senescent leadership of his party, a succession plan of some sort. But these aging leaders have not done that, so here we are with some of the anti-Biden energies among Democratic voters getting directed toward a man who looks like the saviors of old, a glitchy hologram of fabled politicians who once represented youth and hope.

He never, ever, ever should have been here. In this position. In these pages, in this context. He should never have been a politician or a public figure at all. He should have been a veterinarian.

In American Values, amid all his bizarre hagiography of his family members and rehashing of the Bay of Pigs, is story after story after story of pure delight and joy and love and fulfillment: There are the falcons and hawks and pigeons, the Komodo dragons, the matricidal coati, a red-tailed hawk named Morgan. There’s a California sea lion, Sandy, who “took up residence in our swimming pool” and “ate mackerel by the barrel, devouring everything but the eyeballs, which we found scattered like marbles across the pool, patio and lawn.” One day, after causing a traffic jam on the Georgetown Pike, Sandy, like the dragons, winds up at the National Zoo. And how about Carruthers, the 16-pound leopard tortoise brought back from Africa under the diplomatic protection of his uncle Sargent Shriver in Ethel Kennedy’s Gucci suitcase? Carruthers spent 21 years roaming the house at Hickory Hill in Virginia alongside “ten horses, eleven dogs, a donkey, two goats, pigs … a 4-H cow, chickens, pheasants, ducks, geese, forty closely related rabbits” and Hungarian homing pigeons, a nocturnal honey bear who “slept away his days in the playroom crawl space,” and a jill ferret who “fed her pups under the kitchen stove.”

(…)

But this country, with its political system built around white patriarchal ideals of who powerful men are supposed to be, and its very limited view of what other kinds of power might look like, has created too irresistible an opportunity for someone with a famous name, a tremendous ego, and a persecution complex. So here we are, eight years after Trump descended the elevator in Trump Tower, listening to a man talking about ivermectin and the fascism of Fauci and the castration of frogs and watching him run riot in a Democratic primary.”

“I’ve been doing my best to ignore the farcical presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His noxious views on vaccines, the origin of AIDS, the alleged dangers of wi-fi and other forms of junk science deserve no wide hearing. Polls showing he’s favored by 20 percent of likely Democratic voters over President Biden are almost as laughable as Kennedy’s views. It’s early; he’s got iconic American name recognition; and there’s almost always an appetite, among Democrats anyway, for anybody but the incumbent. His lies have been thoroughly debunked by Judd Legum at Popular Info, Michael Scherer in The Washington Post, Naomi Klein in The Guardian, and Brandy Zadrozny on NBC News.

But I’ve come to believe I have a responsibility to write about Kennedy because of my own shameful role in sending his toxic vaccine views into public discourse: I was the Salon editor, in partnership with Rolling Stone, who 18 years ago published his mendacious, error-ridden piece on how thimerosal in childhood vaccines supposedly led to a rise in autism, and how public health officials covered it up. From the day “Deadly Immunity” went up on Salon.com, we were besieged by scientists and advocates showing how Kennedy had misunderstood, incorrectly cited, and perhaps even falsified data. Some of his sources turned out to be known crackpots.

(…)

Now, Kennedy insists, as the The New York Times paraphrases him, that “Salon caved to pressure from government regulators and the pharmaceutical industry.” He repeated the false claim in his three-hour podcast conversation with Joe Rogan, another conspiracy loon, rehashing the debunked claims of “Deadly Immunity” and claiming that Salon pulled the piece after “pressure from the pharmaceutical industry.”

That’s just another lie. We caved to pressure from the incontrovertible truth and our journalistic consciences.

(…)

The pushback began almost immediately. I’ve already linked to our corrections, which with hindsight seem not to correct what were revealed to be the worst errors. Seth Mnookin, who happened to also write for Salon occasionally, was one of the most dogged debunkers, and his 2011 book The Panic Virus, which features a chapter on Kennedy and the Salon/Rolling Stone mess, ultimately helped convince us to retract the piece entirely.

Mnookin showed, among other things, how Kennedy misrepresented what went on at a 2000 meeting on vaccine safety convened by the Centers for Disease Control, at the Simpsonwood conference center outside Atlanta, where the claims of a link between Thimerosol and autism were discussed. Mnookin wrote, “Kennedy relied on the 286-page transcript of the Simpsonwood meeting to corroborate his allegations—and wherever the transcript diverged from the story he wanted to tell, he simply cut and pasted until things came out right.”

(…)

I tell this story, incompletely and imperfectly given the 18 intervening years, because Kennedy continues to peddle the lies he published and claim that dark forces cowed us and forced us to retract his story. The odious Joe Rogan has been going after vaccine scientist Dr. Peter Hotez on Twitter, after Hotez tweeted that the Kennedy interview was “awful,” “absurd,” and promoting “nonsense.” He offered Hotez “$100,000.00 to the charity of your choice if you’re willing to debate [Kennedy] on my show with no time limit.” Twitter troll and site owner Elon Musk has been amplifying Rogan and Kennedy and going after Hotez. On Sunday a Q-Anon believer came to Hotez’s Houston home demanding that he debate Kennedy.

(…)

I regret the role I played in spreading Kennedy’s anti-vaccine propaganda, and however it helped foment the harassment of Hotez. The vaccine-autism lie isn’t the only big lie Kennedy’s told. But it’s the only one I can debunk personally.”

“I'd prefer to explore what a noted misogynist who reportedly tormented his second wife — and then vilified after she killed herself — says about the 2024 election.

Here was actor Billy Baldwin on Twitter in April, posting a photo of RFK Jr. and his late wife Mary — who, he said, spent many a time crying on his shoulder about her terrible husband:

'If Bobby were half a man she would still be alive today. It will all come out. His campaign will be over in weeks. If these walls could talk.'

Mary, according to those who knew her well, was in agony over RFK Jr.'s ceaseless womanizing. He kept sex diaries, which Mary discovered and gave to a trusted friend. Should anything happen to her, the world might know who we're really dealing with.

In the back of each diary were ledgers listing all the women Bobby had been with — many friends of Mary's or women in their social circle — numbered from one to ten, indicating, like a teenage boy, how far each sexual encounter had gone.

(…)

After Mary's death, Bobby sanctioned friends, relatives and at least one sympathetic Kennedy historian to tell his version of events: Mary was a drunk, a hysteric, a crazy woman. It was a miracle he even survived the marriage.

The greatest smear job came via a Newsweek cover story, which branded Mary's suicide part of the Kennedy Curse — oh, the terrible things that just keep happening to this family!

Somehow, the author got access to a sealed 60-page affidavit in which Bobby accused Mary of having a personality disorder, of beating him in front of their son, of drunkenly face-planting into her dinner.

Mary's siblings called the report 'scurrilous' and 'full of lies.'

(…)

Nonetheless, Bobby went to court to fight Mary's siblings, who hated him, for her remains.

Once he won, he made a big show of having Mary buried in the Kennedy family plot in Massachusetts, the media getting unobstructed photos of Mary's casket.

Not two months later, without the required permits, Kennedy secretly had Mary's coffin exhumed from her grave and buried alone on the other side of the cemetery, no gravestone.

He didn't tell her siblings. In my opinion, this was his final revenge — if Mary dared to humiliate him by killing herself — because it's all about Bobby Jr., all the time — in life, he would do the same to her in death.

(…)

This is a man who smeared the mother of his four children in the most public way possible, who made her life a misery and who gaslit the nation into thinking he was the victim.

He is, in my opinion — and I'm not alone — not just mentally ill. He's a bad man.

The Kennedys have this generational sickness, their abhorrent treatment of women.

Why aren't we talking about it?

How is it that no one's drawing parallels to Bobby's Uncle Ted, the last famous Democrat to challenge an incumbent Democratic president — you know, the uncle who left a young campaign aide named Mary Jo Kopechne to die alone after driving off a bridge at Chappaquiddick?

The party line on Ted was always that he was terrible to women in his personal life but great at legislating for us.

Tell that to the women he destroyed, his wife Joan among them, painting her as the family drunk, the political liability. Sound familiar?

Women, to Kennedy men, are scapegoats.”

“By now, you undoubtedly know presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a press dinner last Tuesday night that COVID-19 was an “ethnically targeted bio weapon” designed by the Chinese government to be deadly for Caucasians and Blacks, but spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.

(…)

The stunning moment was surreal and incomprehensible. But I’ve seen the video and heard the audio, so I know it’s true.

“COVID 19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” said Kennedy. “The races that are most immune to COVID-19 are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

Sitting next to Kennedy at that moment was an Ashkenazi Jew, New York Post reporter Jon Levine. Check out his baffled expression on the video.

Contrary to Bobby’s hair-brained theory, I got the coronavirus. My son, brother, sister-in-law, aunt, uncle, nephews, niece, cousins and friends also got COVID. My neurologist’s medical partner got COVID and died. Ashkenazi Jews all.

Bobby knows who I am. My wife, Liz, and I donated to his Riverkeeper nonprofit organization and watched him fly falcons at the Hudson River home of then-Gov. George Pataki. Bobby should also know that Frydman is a Jewish name of European ancestry. I’m not Sephardic. I’m fair-haired and light-skinned. That makes me Ashkenazi.

You’d think his campaign manager, former Ohio congressman and Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kucinich, and staff would’ve prepped Bobby about the probability of Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese journalists being in attendance. In fact, there was a Chinese reporter from the Epoch Times at the table.

(…)

But even Klein, a prominent anti-vaxxer and good friend of RFK Jr. who’s advised him on Israel, is reportedly “worried” about Bobby’s kooky COVID comments.

“This is crazy,” Klein was quoted as saying. “It makes no sense that they would do that. I read everything. I was totally against the vaccine…I wanted to convince myself it was correct not to take it. I have never seen anything like this.”

The Anti-Defamation League also weighed in. “The claim that COVID-19 was a bioweapon created by the Chinese or Jews to attack Caucasians and Black people is deeply offensive and feeds into sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years.”

StopAntisemitism added, “We have no words for this man’s lunacy.””

#kennedy #robert kennedy jr #rfk jr #conspiracy theory #conspiracy theories #anti vaccination #anti vaxxers #antisemitism #misogyny

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byneddiedingo · 1 year

Photo

Hanna Schygulla in The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979)

Cast: Hanna Schygulla, Klaus Löwitsch, Ivan Desny, Gisela Uhlen, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Gottfried John, Hark Bohm, George Eagles, Claus Holm, Günter Lamprecht, Kurt Oswald. Screenplay: Pea Fröhlich, Peter Märtesheimer, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus. Production design: Norbert Scherer. Film editing: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Juliane Lorenz. Music: Peer Raben.

Fassbinder's inspiration was the Hollywood "woman's picture," which made stars of Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis in the 1930s and '40s, but more specifically the 1950s version directed by his fellow German, Douglas Sirk (born Hans Detlef Sierck). Sirk brought a distinct style, including vivid Technicolor and high fashion, to his tales of women struggling to assert themselves in a decade usually known for its backlash against liberated women. They were vehicles for actresses like Jane Wyman (Magnificent Obsession, 1954, and All That Heaven Allows, 1955), Lauren Bacall and Dorothy Malone (Written on the Wind, 1956), and Lana Turner (Imitation of Life, 1959). Hanna Schygulla evokes all of them and more in a bravura performance in The Marriage of Maria Braun, in which she gets to suffer through World War II and its aftermath, and to triumph in the postwar German Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s and '60s. It's a sardonic story about a woman who claims to be faithful in her fashion to Hermann Braun (Klaus Löwitsch), the soldier she married during an air raid in 1943, despite her affairs with a black American soldier (George Eagles) and a French industrialist (Karl Oswald). In Fassbinder's hands, the story of Maria Braun becomes overlaid with the history of Germany after the war, including scenes in which the dialogue is often partly obscured by radio speeches by German politicians like Konrad Adenauer, the architect of German recovery. "I prefer making miracles rather than waiting for them," Maria proclaims at one point. Fassbinder's portrait of Maria is occasionally elliptical: We don't know, for example, whether she aborted the child she conceived with the American soldier or lost it in childbirth, partly because she seems indifferent to the fact, and Fassbinder leaves it up to us to decide whether the explosion in which she dies at the end is an accident or suicide.

#The Marriage of Maria Braun #Rainer Werner Fassbinder #Hanna Schygulla

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demoura · 3 months

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DIA 21 DE JANEIRO DE 2024 : ONTEM FOI DIA GRANDE NA MAGRA TEMPORADA LÍRICA DO S, CARLOS . UM IMPRESSIONANTE FIDELIO DE BEETHOVEN ,CO PRODUÇÃO COM HAMBURGO , BOLOGNA E O CCB ! :assisti à versão final apresentada em Viena em 1814 de "Fidelio, a única ópera de Beethoven. Esta ópera, reflete a onda libertadora pós-Revolução Francesa na Europa e conta a heróica história de Leonore, transvestida como Fidelio para libertar o seu marido Florestan, detido por motivos políticos. No desfecho, a justiça e o amor prevalecem. Na venerada partitura, destacam-se números memoráveis como o 'Coro dos Prisioneiros', a ária Abscheulicher de Leonore e a exigente ária de Florestan. O grandioso final celebra o amor , a virtude e a liberdade. O impacto da música e a mensagem fervorosa pela liberdade fizeram de Fidelio a primeira ópera a ser apresentada em Berlim após a derrota alemã na II Guerra Mundial, em setembro de 1945." A co produção do CCB e do TNSC provém da Staatsoper Hamburg e do Teatro Communale di Bologna. A encenação do intendente Georges Delnon apenas “lembra” Marthaler mas é uma neue regie que pelo menos não agride . Musicalmente foi uma noite gratificante . O Coro do TNSC actor crucial esteve em excelente forma. As vozes masculinas extremamente disciplinadas no Coro dos Prisioneiros, e o encerramento com o Coro completo em máxima força ( 67 cantores/cantoras) foi interpretado com tal entrega que era impossível não ficar empolgado. Graham Jenkins liderou num ritmo sensato e a orquestra respondeu bem incluindo os metais no difícil 'Komm Hoffnung', .Teve muita qualidade o elenco internacional com destaque nos portugueses para Susana Gaspar como Marzalina . O tenor Nikolai Shukoff foi bem substituído por Maximilian Schmitt . Mas o destaque da noite para mim foi a mezzo Gabriela Scherer que cantou em Lisboa a sua primeira Leonore .” Há passagens que são muito líricas e lembram Mozart, bem como momentos dramáticos e explosões emocionais muito grandes, onde é importante gerir cuidadosamente os recursos vocais .”disse a suíça .Foi o que fez e esteve esplêndida . Não me espanta por isso que esteja a ser muito requesitada . Depois desta estreia, Scherer canta a sua primeira Chrysothemis na “Elektra” de Strauss na Semperoper de Dresden, seguida da sua primeira Donna Elvira em “Don Giovanni” de Mozart na Staatsoper Unter den Linden. E também faz sua estreia no Festival de Bayreuth este verão.!

FICHA TÉCNICA

Direção musical Graeme Jenkins Encenação Georges Delnon Cenografia Kaspar Zwimpfer Desenho de luz Michael Bauer Figurinos Lydia Kirchleitner Dramaturgy: Klaus-Peter Kehr, Johannes Blum 

Florestan Maximilian Schmitt Leonore Gabriela Scherer Rocco Joshua Bloom Don Fernando Levente Páll Marzelina Susana Gaspar Don Pizarro Boaz Daniel Jaquino Leonel Pinheiro Primeiro Prisioneiro Sérgio Martins Segundo Prisioneiro Nuno Dias

Coro do Teatro Nacional de São Carlos Orquestra Sinfónica Portuguesa  

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trmpt · 5 months

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/17/trump-latino-univision-backlash/

Latino backlash grows over Donald Trump’s friendly Univision interview

Washington Post

Michael Scherer

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mirletaliz · 11 months

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#family #fertility #fundraiser #infertility #testicular cancer

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reportwire · 1 year

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Winning at the Rules Game

The most important thing I’ve read recently about the 2024 GOP primary had nothing to do with questions about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ retail political skills or Donald Trump’s slipping hold on the GOP faithful. Instead, it was a piece by Washington Post reporters Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey and Maeve Reston, that focused on the unsexy, but critically important state delegate selection…

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zeruch · 1 year

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Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 43: Toshiki Kadomatsu "Before the Daylight"

What is I told you that the following cast made a Japanese City Pop record: Vernon Reid, Nile Rodgers, Bill Frisell, Cindy Mizelle, Nick Moroch, Eddie Martinez, Vickie Sue Robinson, VJ Smith, Michael Brecker, Lenny White, Arto Lindsay, Jeff Bova, Phillippe Saisse, and Peter Scherer. Yeah, well in 1988 they did, for Toshiki Kadomatsu, himself a fixture on the Japanese pop scene for decades. It’s…

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#80s #city pop #downtown scene #toshiki kadomatsu

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reddancer1 · 1 year

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Heather Cox Richardson

January 23, 2023 (Monday)

Today a jury found three members of the Oath Keepers gang, along with a fourth defendant associated with them, guilty of seditious conspiracy for their actions surrounding the January 6th insurrection in 2021. In October a different jury also found the founder of the Oath Keepers, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, as well as their Florida leader, Kelly Meggs, guilty of seditious conspiracy. Five members of another extremist gang, the Proud Boys, are currently on trial on that charge and others.

Today’s defendants, Joseph Hackett, 52; Roberto Minuta, 38; David Moerschel, 45; and Edward Vallejo, 64, were found guilty of a rack of other charges, too, but the seditious conspiracy charges are the biggies. Such indictments are rare and indicate a careful plot against our democracy. They are hard to prove. These six convictions—so far—are a big win for Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department.

*THEY ALL SHOULD BE TRIED FOR NO LESS THAN TREASON!!!

At Talking Points Memo, Nicole Lafond notes that defense attorneys for the Oath Keepers argued that the fault for January 6th was not that of their clients. “Responsibility really rests at our politicians’ feet,” attorney Scott Weinberg said. “The president and Stewart Rhodes were claiming that the world is coming to an end even before the election.”

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol recommended that the Department of Justice consider criminal charges against former president Trump, the man behind the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. It also called a number of his associates co-conspirators.

So far, those charges have not materialized, and Trump is running for president in 2024. That campaign is off to a rocky start. Trump is supposed to kick it off next week in Columbia, South Carolina, but Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post report that he’s having trouble lining up politicians to show up. They’re not willing to indicate support for him yet. Scherer and Dawsey note that South Carolina has two homegrown candidates, former governor Nikki Haley and current senator Tim Scott, who might want to run. In addition, Trump has recently alienated evangelicals—his formerly rock-solid base—by blaming them for his 2020 loss.

It is also possible that his many legal troubles will catch fire, burning up his presidential chances. His secretary of state Mike Pompeo and national security advisor John Bolton are apparently testing the waters themselves, publicly needling each other. Bolton recently said Trump’s support is in “terminal decline,” and after Trump called former cabinet members considering a campaign “disloyal,” Pompeo told Fox News radio host Brian Kilmeade, “I never said I wouldn’t run.”

Another issue dropped today, huge in itself and at least tangentially related to the former president. On Saturday, authorities from the Department of Justice arrested Charles McGonigal, 54, at JFK Airport as he returned from a trip to Sri Lanka. McGonigal worked for the FBI from 1996 to 2018.

On October 4, 2016, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey named McGonigal the head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York field office.

As the special agent in charge, McGonigal supervised and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs. Before that, he was the section chief of the Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. Charges against McGonigal—who is one of the highest ranking FBI members ever charged with a crime—stem from his connection to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin. The United States sanctioned Deripaska in 2018 for working for the Russian state to destabilize Ukraine. Deripaska was also a close associate of political operative Paul Manafort, who ran Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Manafort was convicted in 2018 of a number of crimes associated with his ties to Russia. Trump pardoned him.

McGonigal, along with Sergey Shestakov, a former Soviet and Russian diplomat who has worked as an interpreter for U.S. courts, is charged with violating sanctions by taking money from Deripaska to investigate one of his rivals, and with money laundering. In a separate indictment, McGonigal is accused of hiding multiple cash payments from a foreign intelligence official and of trying to get the sanctions on Deripaska removed.

As Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel points out, the Department of Justice is pursuing this case so far as about public corruption, not about national security. But it is surely significant that the man who was supposed to be in charge of protecting the U.S. from Russian oligarchs went to work for one as soon as he left the FBI, and perhaps sooner. And that oligarch was connected to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager. While there is a lot we still don’t know, we do know that in 2018, Comey told Congress he worried that officials in the FBI’s New York field office had given Trump ally Rudy Giuliani sensitive information in the last days of the 2016 election, after Giuliani had said so in front of television cameras. Giuliani made that claim in October, after McGonigal took over that office.

We know that Comey told investigators that he released news of the reopened investigation of Clinton’s emails—against Department of Justice policy, right before the election with voting already underway—out of concern that “people in New York” would leak that information. Former acting attorney general Sally Yates was clearer. She told the inspector general that Comey and other FBI officials “felt confident that the New York Field Office would leak it and that it would come out regardless of whether he advised Congress or not.”

We also know that after McGonigal left the FBI, he went to work for Brookfield Properties, the multibillion-dollar real-estate company in New York that handled the bailout of Jared Kushner’s 666 Fifth Avenue by a $1.1 billion, 99-year lease—all paid up front—thanks to the Qatar Investment Authority. None of those things is currently on the table in the indictments, and they might not turn out to be significant. But my guess is that this case will continue to develop.

Prosecutors for the Southern District of New York told Magistrate Judge Sarah Cave that they had agreed with McGonigal’s attorney for him to be released on a $500,000 personal recognizance bond, co-signed by two other people.

Another prominent legal case touching on the Trump years wrapped up today when it took a jury only two hours to find another January 6 defendant guilty of all charges for which he was on trial. Richard “Bigo” Barnett, 62, of Gravette, Arkansas, who was photographed with his feet on then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, was found guilty of civil disorder, obstruction of an official proceeding, carrying a dangerous weapon into a restricted building—he was the one with a stun gun in a walking stick—and five other counts. Barnett said he ended up in the speaker’s office by accident while he was looking for a bathroom.

And legal commentator Joyce White Vance of Civil Discourse points out that tomorrow, a judge in Fulton County, Georgia, will hold a hearing to decide whether to release the report of the grand jury that investigated Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. You can see why Republicans are nervous about leaping aboard the Trump train for 2024.

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glitterypeanutmugnickel · 1 year

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January 23, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 24

SAVE

▷ LISTEN

So far, those charges have not materialized, and Trump is running for president in 2024.

That campaign is off to a rocky start. Trump is supposed to kick it off next week in Columbia, South Carolina, but Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post report that he’s having trouble lining up politicians to show up. They’re not willing to indicate support for him yet.

Scherer and Dawsey note that South Carolina has two homegrown candidates, former governor Nikki Haley and current senator Tim Scott, who might want to run. In addition, Trump has recently alienated evangelicals—his formerly rock-solid base—by blaming them for his 2020 loss. It is also possible that his many legal troubles will catch fire, burning up his presidential chances. His secretary of state Mike Pompeo and national security advisor John Bolton are apparently testing the waters themselves, publicly needling each other. Bolton recently said Trump’s support is in “terminal decline,” and after Trump called former cabinet members considering a campaign “disloyal,” Pompeo told Fox News radio host Brian Kilmeade, “I never said I wouldn’t run.”

Another issue dropped today, huge in itself and at least tangentially related to the former president.

On Saturday, authorities from the Department of Justice arrested Charles McGonigal, 54, at JFK Airport as he returned from a trip to Sri Lanka. McGonigal worked for the FBI from 1996 to 2018.

On October 4, 2016, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey named McGonigal the head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York field office. As the special agent in charge, McGonigal supervised and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs. Before that, he was the section chief of the Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Charges against McGonigal—who is one of the highest ranking FBI members ever charged with a crime—stem from his connection to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin. The United States sanctioned Deripaska in 2018 for working for the Russian state to destabilize Ukraine. Deripaska was also a close associate of political operative Paul Manafort, who ran Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Manafort was convicted in 2018 of a number of crimes associated with his ties to Russia. Trump pardoned him.

While there is a lot we still don’t know, we do know that in 2018, Comey told Congress he worried that officials in the FBI’s New York field office had given Trump ally Rudy Giuliani sensitive information in the last days of the 2016 election, after Giuliani had said so in front of television cameras. Giuliani made that claim in October, after McGonigal took over that office.

None of those things is currently on the table in the indictments, and they might not turn out to be significant. But my guess is that this case will continue to develop.

You can see why Republicans are nervous about leaping aboard the Trump train for 2024.

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