On Thursday, May 17, at the theater in the National Archives building in Washington, DC, a preview was held of a documentary film, clips from a work in progress being produced by filmmaker Ilana Trachtman. The name of the documentary (slated for completion and release next year) is taken from a poem by Langston Hughes: There Ain’t No Back on a Merry-go-round. Gathered for the preview were perhaps 200 people, and among them were some of the activists who had protested at Glen Echo Amusement Park, which billed itself as DC’s “Wonderland of Fun.” Glen Echo Park was named for…
We have risen to meet twin crises and victory is in sight on both fronts.
I waited for the CDC to recommend the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, after the FDA approved it yesterday for use here in the USA. That’s done now, and by next week (a few days away) the first doses will start being delivered, the first people will start getting vaccinated, and the plague will slowly begin to abate. By March we should see case and death counts start to drop. By spring we should be back to where we were this past summer. By summer, if the…
As crowds lay siege to the area adjacent to the White House (where Donald J. Trump has been ushered to a bunker according to live reports at the moment), people — good, decent, mostly white people, liberal, well-intentioned white people — tell me, now and then, that “all this violence and looting isn’t about George Floyd.” …
It’s been six weeks since my last report from work (here). At that time my hospital had 2–3 positive COVID19 patients and the tension was thick. Since then we seem to have crested, about a week ago, at 67. We’re down to 53 now. We still await the “surge,” but for now, at least, we seem to have flattened the curve. One hopes, anyway, that the light at the end of the tunnel is not a locomotive. …
The current novel virus pandemic that is gripping our minds -- and some of our bodies — is only one more soldier in nature’s army of assassins seeking to kill us off as a species. …
The fulcrum is way over there
The political right has taken more than its share of the platform upon which our democratic society rests. The balance has shifted, the winds long ago changed, and figuring in neoliberalism as part of the right, the center has moved way far over to the right. Of course people don’t notice, because the fulcrum is always assumed to be visually in the center, so people cling to the center, to centrism, to centrists. It’s what leads, in this election year, to the issue of “electability,” at least among those of the Democratic persuasion. The…
We need to talk.
Recently, as you no doubt have noticed, the US Senate slipped into the hands of some particularly terrible people, and of course there was that election mishap that gave them the perfect mouthpiece, a man so profoundly stupid, vulgar and hateful that there scarcely words to do him justice. …
We Already Know What He Is. We We Will Now Learn Who We Are.
It has been widely circulated in the media that the upcoming mid-term elections are “a referendum on Donald Trump.” This notion is based on the logic that if the people vote in sufficient numbers to prevent a “Blue Tide” from taking place, that Trump will have won over a plurality, that he will have won, period.
We all — all of us, whether we acknowledge it or not — know that Trump is a very bad president and a very bad man. We know he is…
AJ Calhoun — Oct. 28, 2018
Michael Avenatti, whose name was not well known nationally until he threw himself into the anti-Trump “mob” by choosing to represent Stephanie Clifford, aka: Stormy Daniels, in a lawsuit against Donald Trump, claiming that a non-disclosure agreement she had signed at Trump’s urging to cover up an affair the two had had, was invalid because Trump had not personally signed it. The agreement had been in exchange for $130,000 in hush money paid by Trump — or somebody, maybe Trump’s then attorney Michael Cohen, but whatever. …
Democrats are so excited by the anonymous inside-the-White House manifesto published by the unsteady New York Times, that we fail to notice what’s actually happened. We now have a cabal of Republican operatives running the show, distracting the maniac at the helm and snatching truly catastrophic orders off his desk (how cute!) while demonstrating to us, in effect, how people selected by the Maniac are quite capable of running the Executive Branch to their liking without letting the world be blown up.
Awesome, huh? I mean, these people rightly criticize, along with Bob Woodward’s book “Fear,” the utter incompetence of…
