Category Archives: Poltiics

One Just for Us Kubrick Geeks

Posted on by

As the lights went up for intermission I turned to get a good look at my people. People with whom I clearly share a bona fide kinship. Modern, connected America being all about sub-sets of sub-sets of smaller and tighter cults of like-thinkers, “these people”, I thought, “must be mine.” Who else would tuck into a theater on the hottest afternoon of summer to see a 50 year-old movie most likely for the umpteenth time.

Heading toward the lobby I found myself following a very tall, very large blonde woman. Open-toed pumps with two-inch heels, a light summery white dress with dainty floral patterned trim, a small white hand bag held delicately by the handle and a tight, prim page-boy hair cut.  But tall. And large. Easily 6′ 2″ and, um, not obese, but definitely large-boned.

As I considered going over and asking her how many times she’d seen “2001: A Space Odyssey”, or if this was a first, since it was in town (at the Emagine Willow Creek, now held over a second week) in 90% of its original splendor — 70 mm film, with immaculately preserved color and definition, but not in Cinerama — she turned toward me. And despite the carefully applied lipstick and eye shadow, revealed just the barest hint of a 3 o’clock shadow. That and an Adam’s apple.

A fellow Stanley Kubrick geek, of the prim, put together and seasonally appropriate trans variety. You know, my people.

I’m a little sheepish about saying out loud how many times I’ve seen “2001”. But, what the hell, in theaters alone we’re closing in on 60. That’s um, let’s see … carry the three … roughly 150 hours of my life or nearly an entire week.

While there was once a phase of just going, usually in a moderately-to-highly enhanced state, to be pulled along on “the ultimate trip”, the constant overriding appeal has always been the admiration — the pleasurable sensation — of the film’s beauty, which is directly connected to an appreciation of the craft that made it.. It’s beautiful because it is so well made, and being so beautifully composed makes it beautiful.

“2001`” was consciously designed as a thing of beauty, with Kubrick describing it in terms of a symphony of cinema. (You can argue a great symphony elicits emotion and intellectual response with the command of only one sense, sound. While film, “2001” in particular, interweaves sound with image and all the photo-chemical balances available to the medium.)

And far from diminishing, the beauty of the movie — its concept, imagination, technical invention and audacity (three and a half years in production with $10.5 million of a publicly-traded studio’s money — $80 million today) — is as vivid as when it was released (to scathing reviews) in 1968. What’s more, “2001” remains today genuinely unparalleled, without valid comparison, certainly by any other mere “sci-fi” movie.

Not that I didn’t watch it — okay, twice last week — and imagine what The Maestro might do with it today if he had a chance to apply digital fixes to the few things beyond his control in the mid-Sixties.

Kubrick’s stated goal was a completely realistic sense of being in space, as best anyone could imagine it years before any human left low-earth orbit. The cliche movie word today is “immersive”, which I assume Kubrick would have accepted, considering his decision to shoot it for projection on gigantic curving Cinerama screens. (RIP Cooper Theater.)

The print being shown at Willow Creek is nearly perfect in terms of original color balance. Beautiful subtleties of color — ambers, ochres and muted yellows — in the African landscape in “The Dawn of Man” sequence are again visible after decades of being lost in washed-out, scratched-up 35 mm prints.

Tiny figures moving about the space station as the PanAm shuttle lines up for docking, and in the moon base Clavius as the bulbous Aries transporter is lowered, like a head on a platter, into the vast underground hangar are now clearly articulated.

 

Everywhere the nearly pristine quality of the print restores the remarkable depth Kubrick always sought with his use of wide-angle, deep-focus lenses, especially in interior scenes.

As it is, the effect is very close to 3-D, which I strongly suspect would have been an option had the technology been (a lot) better than the cheesy junk it was in 1965-68.

At this point, Kubrick and “2001” are held in pretty much the same regard as Van Gogh and “The Starry Night”. Imitations are rampant but no one would ever consider “touching up” the original canvas itself.

But … if someone, like Christopher “Inception” Nolan or James “Avatar” Cameron were to take on a digital-reconstruction of “2001”, as, you know, a student’s homage to the master, an “unauthorized enhancement” of “2001” as Stanley Kubrick himself very, very likely would have preferred, based on everything we know about what he was going for, it would be a service to cinematic posterity.

For example, Kubrick would certainly be open to color-correcting for the “Dawn of Man” sequences where it is too obvious that the foreground action is taking place on a sound stage. The stage was lit as though in shadow from surrounding rocks, with the Namibian landscapes behind projected through the actors in their ape costumes. There’s a digital fix for that.

More glaring, in both the opening “Blue Danube” sequence and at the end when the Star Child floats back from his transmogrification, is the indiscernible white-ish blue blob that is meant to be planet Earth.

Actual film footage of the planet at that distance — maybe 20,000 miles out — wasn’t available in the mid-Sixties. But compare Earth as we see it in “2001” to what director Alfonso Cuaron and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki did in “Gravity”, with the resource of countless hours of HiDef imagery available to them. Instead of an indistinguishable over-exposed celestial object, “Gravity’s” audience can easily see the shape of specific land masses, the lights of cities and coastlines. Apply the impact of that realism — especially as the Star Child contemplates what to do with his beautiful home and it’s ill-evolved inhabitants — and it’s unimaginable that Kubrick wouldn’t say, “[Bleep] yeah, that’s the shot I want!”

A digital fix could be applied there quite easily.

The biggest fix, certainly in terms of “immersiveness” and realism would be a big up-date in the soundtrack. The print at Willow Creek (supervised by Nolan), booms with the crispness of old, but there’s still only so much separation you can get with the limited digitizing they did off the celluloid film’s sound track.

Somehow there’s a way to toy with that, enhancing for example the threatening growl of the leopard in “The Dawn of Man” sequences, terrifying the man-apes huddled in their dried river bed, by pushing the roar out of speakers in the far reaches of the theater, a la Dolby Atmos. Likewise, “immersiveness” would be well served with more sound separation in the interior scenes, especially in the space vehicles with their subtle symphony of beeps and bleeps and burps.

Other than that, amazingly, there’s very little else the film more “contemporary”.

I was entertaining some of this as I returned to my seat after intermission. I lost track of the large, prim, trans blonde. But my attention was drawn to another of my people, a ringer for Jeff Dowd, the inspiration for Jeff Bridges’ “Dude” in “The Big Lebowski”. Maybe 60, wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt with long frazzled hair, the poor guy had obviously lost track of where he had been sitting. Wandering back and forth, finally some friend spotted him and yelled out.

The guy’s head snapped up. He raised a fist.

 

 

 

“Stanley!” he shouted. “The man!.”

 

 

 

 

 

Face It, We May Have to “Go Low” to Stop Kennedy’s Replacement

Posted on by

The past few nights I’ve been binge-watching “Billions”, the Showtime series starring Paul Giamatti as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York obsessed with taking down a hedge fund billionaire, played by Damian Lewis. There’s a lot to like about the show, (and it gets much better in the second season), but close to the heart of the drama is Giamatti’s character struggling to stay within the lines of propriety in pursuit of a criminal who is every bit his tactical equal and far, far better financed.

Some times, if there’s only person playing the game “the right way”, the rules are a serious impediment to winning. And not winning means truly nefarious activity prospers even more than it already is, exerting an even deeper and more insidious effect on hundreds of thousands if not millions of innocent people.

You can see where this is going.

With Donald Trump being handed the opportunity to appoint a second Supreme Court justice in only 17 months, liberals/progressives/Democrats, whatever you want to call anyone who isn’t an evangelical Trumpist, are staring at a moment of moral reckoning attached to a seismic event.

One more Trump justice, very likely someone relatively young with a good chance at a 20-30 year run on the top bench, means the Court’s balance will shift well out of balance for the foreseeable future. That kind of keel-turning puts not just Roe v. Wade, but any control of dark money in politics, environmental protection, gun control, gay rights … and on and on … in serious, stark jeopardy.

So yeah, elections matter. (And with that thought in mind, let’s pause here and revisit the fact that the 78,000 votes in three states that handed the election to Trump were dwarfed by the numbers of the high-minded and naive who voted for Jill Stein having bought and sold the argument that Hillary Clinton was the second coming of the Gambino crime family.)

As most of us know, a variation of that Purity Of Essence mentality afflicts the entire Democratic establishment. Certainly to the extent of a willingness to resort to the kind of utterly shameless but effective tactics Mitch McConnell used in denying a vote on Merrick Garland in 2016.

That sort of thing is, you know, “low”. And “we” always “go high.”

But this heart attack serious. Particularly vulnerable are protections for all sorts of chronically at-risk constituents liberals/progressives/Democrats claim — claim — to be so concerned for and devoted to. Failing to stick a knife, even a nakedly low-minded knife, into this Court choice means, quite literally, capitulating (again) to powerful regressive forces ideologically opposed to the interests in those particular citizens.

By last night the usual Democrats were making the usual noises about “holding” McConnell to the same standard he applied to Garland, and denying him a vote until after the next Senate is seated in January. The usual verbiage of “appealing” to Republican colleagues, “reaching across the aisle”, “hoping” that Republican senators “will do the right thing” was making the rounds of cable chat shows and churning up a sickening knot in my stomach.

“Reaching across” and “hoping” is the same as accepting defeat.

Yes, a firestorm of public protest — from the usual cultural liberals — will crank up a lot of emotion over this. But I have no confidence that anyone in the current Democratic establishment has either the reptilian guile or the raw Darwinian instinct to stick one of their manicured hands deep into the septic system of politics and stop this next deployment of a weapon of bona fide mass destruction.

I’d use the example of Lyndon Johnson, a classic ratf**ker. Johnson would resort to anything. But Johnson usually had the benefit of a majority somewhere.

Which means your Chuck Schumers and Chris Murphys and Diane Feinsteins are going to have to reach down even deeper for a game-changer, for something ordinarily so obnoxious few parents would be proud to tell their children it is the “fair” and “honest” thing to do. (As though real-world everyday politics always are.)

In “Billions” Giamatti’s US Attorney believes in the law, despises the parasitic power elite kiting money back and forth for their own fabulous gain and to the detriment of all the common chumps too honest/lazy to get in the game of stone cold killers. (Giamatti’s guy also has some basic male issues with his wife and her affiliations, but I’ll let that go for the moment.)

The point is: from time to time Giamatti wrestles with the entirely rational logic that you don’t stop a mob boss and his lethal capos with a noble assertion of the Boy Scout Oath.

MN GOPers Aren’t the Health Care Saviors They Claim To Be

Posted on by

Exuberant Minnesota Republicans seem to think they have a winning health care issue for the 2018 election season–reinsurance. And they do deserve a great deal of credit for helping to enact a state reinsurance program that is reducing premiums for Minnesotans in the individual market. The individual market is for the 162,000 Minnesotans who can’t get insurance from their employer or the government.

While their claim that premium increases in 2016 and 2017 were due to DFL policies is ridiculous, it is true that the Minnesota reinsurance program they helped pass is helping those consumers. As the Star Tribune reported:

Jim McManus, a Blue Cross spokesman, said that were it not for the state’s reinsurance program, the carrier’s Blue Plus HMO would be seeking an average individual market premium increase of 4.8 percent as opposed to the 11.8 percent decrease cited Friday by Commerce

Impressive, and Republicans deserve credit for this.

The Rest of the Story

But as Ricky Ricardo would say, before Minnesota Republicans can credibly brand themselves health coverage saviors, they still have some splainin to do.

Why Not National Reinsurance? First, they need to explain why their party – in complete control of the U.S. Senate, U.S. House and the Presidency and entire U.S. Executive Branch of the federal government – doesn’t enact reinsurance to help all Americans. Because of economies of scale and the need for market consistency, a national reinsurance program makes much more sense than a hodgepodge of variable state programs.

Moreover, if stabilizing the market and helping consumers pay less is good for Minnesotans, wouldn’t it be even more awesome to do that for all Americans?  That’s likely why 75% of Americans support enacting reinsurance at the national level.

Why Sabotage the ACA?  So why aren’t Rep. Erik Paulsen, Rep. Jason Lewis, Rep. Tom Emmer, Jeff Johnson or former Governor Tim Pawlenty pressing for reinsurance at a national level? Because they and their White House puppet master would rather sabotage the remarkably effective Affordable Care Act (ACA) than improve the ACA to help American families.

The list of things Trump and his congressional Trumpbulicans are doing to irresponsibly sabotage American families benefiting from ACA protections is long and breathtakingly irresponsible.  This is hurting tens of millions of struggling Americans.  Republicans are ignoring the 71% of Americans who say the Administration should do all it can to make the the ACA work, compared to just 21% who support efforts to make the ACA fail and replace it later.

Why Oppose Adding A MinnesotaCare Buy-in Option?  The other thing Republicans boasting about the state reinsurance bill need to explain is this: Why aren’t they supporting giving the 162,000 Minnesotans in the individual market a MinnesotaCare buy-in option?

The MinnesotaCare buy-in option would achieve much of what Republicans profess to support — more plan and doctor choices for consumers in sparsely populated areas, guaranteed coverage for all Minnesotans in sparsely populated areas, and more competition to control prices.

The fact that Minnesota Republicans won’t support the common sensical MinnesotaCare buy-in option proposal, won’t push for a national reinsurance program, and continue to actively sabotage the ACA makes their gloating about being health care saviors ring very hollow.

The Pot is Reaching Boil Phase

Posted on by

My prediction that it’d be about now we’d begin to see the Berlusconi-antics of the Trump kleptocracy reach full boil is holding up pretty well. Maybe not exactly as I was thinking four months ago, but well enough to note the high rate of agitation.

The emotional power of this obscene family separation crisis down on the border — the latest in a long list of crises entirely self-created by Team Trump, especially his low-key Goebbels-like “advisor” Stephen Miller — has the dual effect of, A: Re-reassuring “the base”, a.k.a. The Goobers, that Trump is still everything they and their parents before them have dreamed of in a strong white leader, and B: Deflecting attention from the Robert Mueller “witch hunt.”

And it’s working.

Trump’s polling numbers — deeply valued by a ratings-obsessed ego maniac — are rising. The Base and a smattering of traditional, tribal Republicans are firming up around his ankles, encouraged, as usual, by a guy who “keeps the promises he made”, which in this case is to keep out everybody who isn’t known by name at a Lake Charles, Louisiana Waffle House.

Naturally Trump is invigorated by this rise and solidifying of his numbers. Which explains his even more aggressive disregard for truth and decency.

I had calculated — and still do — that the indictment of Michael Cohen (or even more delicious, Jared Kushner) would be the trip wire that set off the full Trump IED. At that point he’d spiral into unfettered neo-Mussolini demagoguery and “hereby” order The Base to take up arms against, well, I don’t know who for sure, but any minority or liberal will do.

Cohen’s indictment remains inevitable and imminent, and there is zero doubt that Trump’s real lawyers, (not Rudy Giuliani), have warned him that both Mueller and the Southern District of New York have all the ingredients necessary or a slam dunk case of long-term fraud and corruption against both Cohen and him. Moreover, his flagrant and comically unsophisticated money laundering scams with Russian gangsters is more cheap grease for Mueller’s collusion probe.

Point being, Trump has no viable legal strategy. He never has. All he has is obstruction and politics. He can do whatever he can to delay and divert investigations and indictments. That’s it, lawyer-wise. But in the end he knows that everything will come down to how fervently (and perhaps even violently) The Base will support him in the face of all the revelations to come.

Because, as we see every day, even with this “children ripped from their mothers’ arms” episode, because The Base loves this there simply aren’t enough Republicans in Congress, or at the state level, brave enough to peep a word of disagreement. One step out of cadence with their Dear Orange Leader and they’ll be on the receiving end of a tweet telling Goober Nation they are a “stooge” and to “hereby” vote for the other guy.

You have to laugh at poor Ted Cruz, aka the Single Most Loathed Creature on The Hill, who has been forced by a credible opponent (Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke) to garp up a lip-service bill reversing Trump/Miller’s “not a policy” policy. Once this moment passes it’ll be fascinating, in a nauseating sort of way, to listen to Cruz back pedal and explain this gross disloyalty to the Goober Borg as an aberration. You know, some kind of Walter White-like fugue state.

But while 90% of self-proclaimed Republican voters, (i.e. 40% or less of the actual electorate), are still all in for Trump, the temperature of antipathy of voters outside The Goober Bubble for Trump (and Miller and Scott Pruitt and Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Sanders and all the other White House gargoyles) is rising quickly.

It may be Trump’s improving poll numbers as much as this family separation story, but my sense is that garden variety “Trump haters” have lately moved beyond dismissal and disgust to actual hate. Put in vulgar terms that everyone can understand, the attitude today is, “This shit has gone on too long and far enough. These bastards not only have to be stopped, they have to be crushed.”

As an aside, it’ll be interesting to see how low-key, standard-issue, machine-bred Democrats like Tina Smith respond to this temperature spike among likely voters. The bet is Smith in particular is so genetically programmed for Mondale-era politesse she’ll leave the exploitation of visceral disgust/hate of Trumpism to Richard Painter.

Would you give that away?

As for a resolution to this latest immigration crisis, I can imagine Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen resigning, having thoroughly disgraced herself in front of everyone who doesn’t think of Mountain Dew and Coors Light as a formal cocktail. But I don’t see Trump accepting defeat on this issue in any shape or form, no matter how it plays out.

He doesn’t have to.

I suspect Miller is telling him The Base will accept any theory of the case he offers. Ever.

Even if the “zero tolerance” separation is reversed, if Trump wants to say his strategy worked, the Democrats caved, the wall has been built, illegal immigration (hell, all immigration) has stopped and all those vicious MS-13 toddlers have been sent off to some SuperMax lockdown, that fantasy will be accepted within The Goober Bubble. In there, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones will be reading from the same script, “revealing” how videos of kids in cages (or kids being returned to their parents) are in fact “crisis actors” in “doctored videos.”

I still have roughly a month left in my “late spring to mid-summer” window for a Pinatubo-like eruption of next-level craziness.

But the trend lines are looking good. I mean, “bad.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Nick I Knew

Posted on by

I don’t want to belabor the similarities between Tom Wolfe and Nick Coleman, but since they’ve both passed within the same moment there are a couple qualities worth offering up for inspection.

There’s no question Wolfe and Coleman shared a distaste often bordering on contempt for meek and restrained conventional journalism. The world was more vibrant and nuanced and, hell, theatrical than what your average daily broad sheet was describing to you.

They also shared a level of self-confidence that egged them on to conflicts with peers and cultural figures they regarded as too immune to fair comment. A good, righteous battle required an adversary of substance.

Nick was a friend I met back in the early Eighties when he was still the TV critic for the Tribune. I had been reading him faithfully for sometime before our mutual friend David Carr got us together, most likely for drinks, most likely at Moby Dick’s or some other unsanitized dungeon Carr was patronizing at the time.

 

 

Unlike every other TV critic I read as I kicked around the country, Coleman was scabrously funny. He didn’t see his role as a stenographic PR desk for the “stars”, be they Hollywood sitcom starlets or local TV anchors. His job description said “critic” and he flashed that license with relish.

I know it earned him a red circle around his name with the Hollywood PR machine. Nick Coleman: Not a reliable asset, if you know what I mean. (Long after he left the beat former colleagues around the country were telling hilarious stories of Coleman, in big ballroom interview sessions, commandeering the mic and gleefully vivisecting some pompous network executive or creative wunderkind du jour.)

He and I grew closer in the two years Carr, Eric Eskola and I produced a weekly half hour media talk show, “The Facts As We Know Them”, on cable access. Coleman was a regular guest, and as you’d expect from a guy whose father was a prominent politician, the most dangerous place in the studio was between Nick and the camera.

But we kept asking him back because, A: Preening for the camera was what we were all doing, B: Coleman could tell a damn good story and therefore hold the room, and C: His factuality was way better than average, even allowing for plenty of righteous hyperbole.

Like Wolfe, Nick was genetically coded for center stage. That fact of character may well have been to key to his undoing as time passed and newspaper managers became steadily less comfortable with big, in-your-face personalities with lots of thoughts on every imaginable topic.

The guy had a very unique career path. As dyed-in-the-green Kerry wool a son-of-St. Paul as you’ll ever find, Nick leveraged his popularity (among readers, if not editors and disapproving, convention-bound newsroom colleagues) over to the Pioneer Press and then back to the Strib yeas later.

While at the Pioneer Press, we shared, with cronies like Katherine Lanpher and Rick Shefchik, long lunches that were basically competitions to see who could say what that would make the others blow coffee out their noses. (Nick, as his closest, dearest friends will tell you, not only kept the most astonishingly cluttered desk, a teetering slum of paper, tchotchkes and long dead paper cups, but was also the world’s messiest diner. His corner of the table at the end of lunch looked like it had been hit by an ISIS mortar attack. A 40% tip couldn’t begin to compensate whoever had to clean up after him.)

As Nick saw it, a metro columnist’s license was like a diploma from the Mike Royko/Jimmy Breslin school of full contact journalism. Far from getting a pass because of their social standing, and the high likelihood they would soon be making cocktail circuit chatter with newspaper bosses, the plump and entitled of the city were irresistible targets for attack, or even a classic Irish feud, as Coleman’s brawls with Garrison Keillor proved.

Moreover, righteous liberal politics were baked into the gig. The fat cats could hire platoons of flacks to spin their saintliness. But the people they were constantly screwing over needed someone with a big public pulpit to argue their case. Nick saw himself as that guy.

Unfortunately as he found out, the game was shifting. The well-fed, glory days of newspapering – where indignant, bull moose-like columnists could lay regular siege to the thin humanitarian veneer of community leaders — were being replaced with an ever more corporatized editorial culture.

Never exactly a hot bed of provocateurs, (other than the sports department), as the internet squeezed their parent companies (i.e. private equity bandits) regional papers like the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press subtly but steadily migrated toward an institutional voice that was less personal and less confrontational and more committed to what we’ll euphemistically call “consensus building”.

Stoking partisan anger with columns attacking the slick cynicism of sitting governors – Coleman v. Pawlenty for example – was, uh, discomfiting to managers charged with sustaining circulation and ad revenue in conservative, outer ring suburbs and maintaining good relations with major, usually Republican business owners.

The key admonition to writers inclined to batter the revenue class was to avoid being “needlessly provocative”. What writers like Nick Coleman weren’t supposed to say out loud to their editors’ faces was that they were such pathetic wimps a “needless provocation” could be as little as saying “shit” when you stepped in it.

Nick knew the old newspaper mule of his youth had gone terminally lame when the Star Tribune, with conservative columnist Katherine Kersten and him exchanging (heavily read) volleys over the 2008 presidential election, issued instructions to both to avoid any further comment on the election until it was over. Because you know, that’s when readers want to argue over politics.

Based entirely on Nick’s telling of the, uh, conversations he had with Star Tribune management over that one, it was clear his Obsequious/Deference Deficiency Disorder had gotten him in hotter water than ever before.

No one doubts Nick could be annoying as all hell, and that’s coming from people like me who didn’t have to supervise him. As far as employee-to-employer subservience went, Nick’s basic message to any editor telling him what to do was: “Look, all you need to know is that I’m damned good at what I do, and thousands of people read this paper because of me. So go find someone else to fuck with.”

Classic old school bosses might have yelled back at him and made perfunctory threats, before in the end conceding (to themselves) that he was right and that passionate characters like “that asshole Coleman” were vital to any relevant, healthy newspaper. But the newer crowd, fresh from six months of the corporate management academy, had a much lower threshold for blowback. A big, blustering bear like Nick was seen as a direct threat to their authority.

He had to be controlled.

Nick and I bonded anew in the mid-aughts as the Star Tribune began dropping the hammer on him.

Just as every crisis is an opportunity, the paper’s financial distress presented managers ideal cover to finally deal with “problem” employees. Officially, nothing could be further from the truth. For the record, it It was all about “right-sizing.” But in reality, any news reporter who failed to see what was happening for what it was was too credulous by half and really needed to find a different line of work.

As the Star Tribune tightened the screws, Nick would call two, sometimes three times a day, reporting on the latest ultimatum, squirrely management-speak verbiage and outright insults … at least as he saw them.

It was painful just to hear it. As I say, Nick was a fiercely proud, intensely competitive guy. Moreover he had substantial bottom line proof, in terms of readership, that his talents and distinctive voice were driving eyeballs to the paper. But as he told it, the paper wanted him to either confine himself to a far more modulated tone, you know, emphasizing “the good things that bind us together” instead of, to quote Nick, “the fucking scumbags looting the public coffers”, or give up the columnist gig completely and move over to some straight reporting beat.

The lame mule would also have had to have been blind not to see what they really wanted. Every option would be a public humiliation for such a proud, high-profile writer. The unspoken message to him was: just to go away.

And so he did.

Frankly, based on all the conversations as the shit was coming down, I was worried for him, and I told him so. The biggest difference between the two of us, besides reporting talent, was Nick’s investment in being a public figure. Loved or hated, it didn’t matter to him. He was in the game. He was a player. But removed from the action entirely? I didn’t like the potent.

He was of course a lot tougher and had a deeper pool of resources than I gave him credit for. (Some of my expressions of concern were a way of signaling that people – especially his enemies — would be watching to see how he handled it all, and not to feed the bastards’ lust for schadenfreude.)

In the months after he left the paper we met several times to kick around ideas that might approximate a return to the public stage.

He had tried a radio gig with ultra-lefty AM 950. It quickly went south when the not exactly progressive owner-operator, who was barely paying him gas money, melted down and handed him a list of edicts designed to muzzle The Full Coleman fury of his act.

The only thing missing from her list was a traumatic castration.

(Nick the proud, unrepentant liberal was so reviled by some commercial broadcasters he was literally forced out of the studio when I had him on as a guest on my show at right-wing KTLK.)

When I got the call telling me about his stroke and imminent death I felt a rush of remorse. I hadn’t had any contact with him in five years. Heading out on a camping trip, I crossed paths with his family and him at a sporting goods store in Grand Marais. The formality of the interaction accentuated an underlying tension. What exactly it was, I’m still not exactly sure.

I recall being annoyed when he showed no enthusiasm for a dual-headed media/politics blog, a kind dual exhaust rant fest. I thought it could be fun. It might even attract some attention and some walking round cash. We both agreed that other than celebrity foo-foo and collegial, transactional reporting, media coverage was a gaping hole in the Twin Cities news menu.

I took his disinterest as a reluctance to co-brand with me. Such are my insecurities. What he really thought, I never knew. But suddenly years had gone by and now he’s dead.

Over the years I was often struck when people who knew I knew Nick would ask, “Why do you like that guy?” (My wife adored him BTW. It was all that pained-poetic Irish crap, I’m certain.)

What I couldn’t understand was what they weren’t seeing in what he wrote, and if they bothered to get to know him, the gracious and informal way he treated most people.

The guy plainly had a big heart and a soul. He cared, truly and deeply about the people and causes he wrote about. The obvious converse of caring is that is he saw no good reason to coddle the other crowd, the goddam soulless stooges and jackals making life more difficult for the decent folks.

Yeah, beers with Nick meant listening to a lot of Nick. It’s true what they say about the Irish, “You can tell ‘em, but you can’t tell ‘em much.” But as a dominating force Nick had the immense benefit of being well-informed, damned funny and sincere about the people and things he cared about.

If the trade-off was learning not to wait for him to ask, “So, what’s up with you?” The whole package, the whole experience all put together was well worth your time.

There’s no shortage of boorish egos polluting the landscape. (Lord, if Nick had a column and free rein in the era of Trump!)  But there are far too few of the big ego people who thicken and season the (Irish) stew with talent, conscience and, you gotta love it, the theatrical flourish of genuine righteous anger.

Rest easy, Nick. You’ve served your fellow man well.

 

Mueller and Trump: The Contrast Doesn’t Get Any Starker

Posted on by

Being both obsessive and nerdy I often find myself wondering, “What does a guy like Robert Mueller think of this?” Maybe you wonder that, too? If so, you have my pity.

But today, as we digest the latest gobsmacker — the one where a Russian oligarch dropped a half million bucks into Michael Cohen’s sketchy bimbo slush fund LLC and attended the Trump inauguration — straighter-than-straight-laced Princeton grad/ex-Marine/Vietnam vet/ex-FBI chief Mueller is “in my thoughts” again, as we so often say about those enduring tragedy.

Now obviously Mueller already knows about the (latest) Russian oligarch (a.k.a. organized crime boss) and plenty more about the rank skeeviness of Cohen and Donald Trump. He probably passed the point of being surprised and disgusted by Trump months ago. But as he watches the target (excuse me, a subject, wink wink) of his investigation continue to abuse every norm and tradition associated with respectable behavior, and create chaos with every rollback of anything Barack Obama touched, I wonder how it affects his thinking in terms of how to play all the information in his possession.

Conventional wisdom says Mueller, being a by-the-book kind of guy with an almost genetic respect for institutions, traditions and legal precedents, will never go so far as indict a sitting president. Not even if he has branded-in-the-cowhide proof that, for just one example, Cohen funneled oligarch cash through his funky LLC and into Trump’s pocket. Sober thinking says that no matter how egregious, Mueller will abide by the standard that says he only issues a report and leaves it up to, oh [bleep] Congress!, to decide what to do next.

My question though — what I regularly wonder about as Mueller amasses ever more evidence of Trump’s utterly disreputable career — is how he will eventually phrase the report he hands down.

In a more normal investigation, a guy like Mueller would, you think, stick to a Joe Friday approach. You know, “Just the facts, mam.” But I have to believe that Trump inspires a much higher level of disgust and contempt in a guy like Mueller, someone who takes such obvious pride in conducting his life with honor and integrity.

Look at it this way. From the perspective of a guy like Mueller, Donald Trump can only be seen as an astonishingly obnoxious, reprehensible fraud.

Through the eyes of an ex-Marine, Vietnam vet, Donald Trump is a man who has never, in any facet of his personal or public life, conducted himself with honor — not to his wives, not to all of his children, not to his business associates, his contractors, his lenders or the Constitution he vowed to serve and protect. In Donald Trump Mueller has to see the worst stain imaginable on the respectability and integrity of the institutions Mueller has devoted his life to honoring, not the least of which is the presidency itself.

Trump’s essential sleaziness, compounded by the unsophisticated, cheesy shamelessness of his frauds and constant lies, has to have a guy like Mueller thinking, “Why should I go out of my way to apply traditionally respected standards to a man who holds everything I respect in such contempt?”

Practically speaking, Mueller is almost certainly armed with a mountain of evidence on Trump’s decades-worth of money laundering for Russian crime bosses. His “Dream Team” of prosecutors have seen scams like Trump’s and Cohen’s hundreds of times before. The only thing remarkable about this set of frauds is that one of the perps is President of the United States.

Simultaneously Mueller sees what is — again — an overflowing septic system of tacky, tawdry cons and tissue-thin deceptions. And all this is in addition to obstruction of justice and, oh yeah, conspiring with a foreign adversary to subvert a presidential election.

I can’t imagine that the scent of all things Trump doesn’t disgust him on the deep, personal level he is duty bound to keep under control.

Given all that, why would Mueller pull up short of, at the very least, indicting Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon (and please, please Robert and Rebekah Mercer) and handing Rod Rosenstein a vividly-detailed, novel-sized “report” on what Trump has been and is?

A report so voluminous and detailed Trump’s for-profit defenders in the FoxNews/Limbaugh/Breitbart nexus howling “DEEP STATE COUP D’ETAT!!!!!!!” will be floundering  against a mountain of irrefutable evidence.

 

I’m Still Giving Garrison Keillor the Benefit of the Doubt

Posted on by

Lord knows I don’t want to discourage Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) from any future exercise in transparency. But after reading Laura Yuen and Euan Kerr’s (long and  commendably comprehensive) historical explanation for how and why their employer dealt with Garrison Keillor the way they did, I’m still giving Keillor the benefit of the doubt.

My reasons for this are connected to three statements Yuen and Kerr make in their piece (which I have to assume was combed through, massaged and finessed like a federal indictment) and what I recall from moments with Keillor.

The statements, in the order they appear are:

“MPR News has had to rely to an unusual degree on anonymous sources in covering the Keillor story. Staff members — even former staff members — are reluctant to discuss their experiences at the company … .”

“[Bill] Kling and [Tom] Kigin are now retired and declined to comment for this story.”

“MPR said its outside investigation into the claims of inappropriate behavior, conducted by the law firm Briggs and Morgan, has been ‘substantially complete’ for months. [Jon] McTaggart has no plans to disclose more information about its findings, saying he needs to respect the privacy of the woman involved.”

The story notes the high possibility that MPR’s summary execution of Keillor after years of tolerating his, shall we say, on-the-job romantic adventures, was due to the #MeToo moment. Ignoring a supervisor with a habit of hitting on women subordinates and writing them racy mash notes just doesn’t cut it any more. So there’s that, and the fact that at 75 Keillor’s prime revenue-producing days are behind him.

But another movement MPR fails to acknowledge is the more nascent evolution in journalism thinking that says “transparency is the new objectivity.”

Translated for lay-folk understanding it means this: In this day of fake news and wall-to-wall PR blather bona fide journalism organizations should consent to displaying and discussing the work they’ve done to reach important conclusions.

In that context, and this Keillor business is as high-profile as anything MPR may ever fall into. So if MPR wants its view of the Keillor episode to carry the day it should release all the information its “independent” lawyers, (who presumably were paid by MPR and therefore regard MPR as a client), amassed on Keillor and then, after the public has had time to digest it, present CEO McTaggart in some sort of “independently” moderated forum to take on all questions.

The name of the key woman in the story — a woman in her 50s remember, not a naive grad student — can be protected via redaction, etc.

Since both MPR and Keillor have agreed not to sue each other as part of the settlement over his archived material, full disclosure (i.e. transparency) of the indicting evidence would make for a fascinating, healthy debate on all sorts of facets of the #MeToo moment, especially since Keillor seems unabashed in defending himself.

But then “transparency” is not a word much in favor at MPR or many other news organizations in 2018. Yuen and Kerr’s piece quotes former media writer David Brauer echoing everything I’ve said about MPR for almost 30 years. Namely, MPR has always operated with extraordinarily tight corporate control over its image and message. This is understandable once you understand the strategic structuring of MPR’s financial base, with its close, fraternal associations with prominent area companies for both underwriting and board service. Bill Kling (MPR’s founder) had no intention of running another rag-tag, semi-hippie “public radio” station. He was an empire builder and successful empires run by a far different set of rules, where openness and transparency are not necessarily virtues.

Very much like any large corporation, MPR consented to media inquiries if they believed favorable publicity (i.e. a PR boost) was in the offing, and either resisted or flat-out ignored anything that came with a hint of a negative vibe. This created what always struck me as an eery, “Body Snatcher”-like quality in even casual conversations with MPR employees, both current and former. It’s not an exaggeration to say trepidation bordering on fear was a palpable affect. Saying anything was so fraught it was better to avoid it entirely.

I don’t know how you live like that.

So I’m not surprised to read Yuen and Kerr had to rely on a lot of anonymous quotes from their own colleagues. They’re lucky they got that.

Likewise, it is no surprise to anyone that neither Kling or Kigin, the two executives most responsible for monetizing Keillor’s popularity, offered any comment … to their own newsroom. That too is classic MPR.

As for Keillor, he was a primary character on my media beat for 15 years. (I was once told by an editor, “We’re going to own that guy”, meaning, “cover him like he’s our property”). As such Keillor and I got along OK, until we didn’t.

He was an established celebrity — of, thank god almighty, actual literary and intellectual depth — when I began interacting with him in the late ’80s. (I did follow him out to Hawaii for a show in the mid-’80s.)  And while clearly a talented, ambitious guy with a skeptic’s radar for fools, he was hardly anyone’s idea of Stepford-grey corporate soldier. Moreover, by the mid-Nineties it was obvious to everyone how valuable a commodity he was to Kling’s empire building. Put another way, he had leverage over Kling and Kling knew that.

This is meant to explain that while Kling and Kigin neither say or admit to anything, they were obviously in the very familiar business of straighter-than-straight businessmen tolerating the louche behavior of “talent” in the long-term interest of the bottom line.

Keillor’s mercurial romantic moods were an open secret, certainly for anyone who cared to notice. Most didn’t. And if he was routinely falling in and out of infatuations with women he met or performed with, so what, really? He was an artist. And a very good one. He is one of the rare people unmoored from the Victorian/protestant bonds controlling us “ordinary folk.”

Obviously, times have changed, and for the better. Certainly for women badgered and oppressed by workplace clods. Yuen and Kerr present a picture of Keillor as a — that word again — mercurial boss. Shouting and saying demeaning things to his staff. That’s unfortunate, but hardly unique. But if the #MeToo movement is going to expand its focus to include bosses who should not be bosses, supervisors who are simply abusive, irrational, duplicitous or whatever, instead of just horny creeps squeezing butts, there’ll be even more management job openings coming along real soon.

In facile terms, I see nothing anywhere that suggests Garrison Keillor was in the same league as Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer or Charlie Rose. In fact, if we care to adjust our lens a bit, Keillor’s seductive style seems to be more in step with the courtly tradition of attention, flattery and … racy mash notes, most with amusing phrasing and proper punctuation.

I remember having lunch with Keillor in Miami back in Prairie Home’s heyday. The Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal was on everyone’s tongue. I forget what specific element of the story was trending that day, but Keillor got into a riff about not just “things guys say to get laid” but the way both sexes distort the truth to get what they want out of a romantic relationship. Some of it is as innocent as creating a pleasurable fantasy. Some of it is anxiety that saying what you really think will kill your chances. Either way, “honesty” in matters of seduction was often in short supply, and us humans kind of like it that way.

At the very least Keillor was not applying harsh Calvinist judgment to Bill Clinton’s randy exploits. And if you ever watched him interact with his fan base after a show, like the one in Miami Beach that weekend, you understand why.

The ballroom-like space was pretty well packed, with the upscale, mostly middle-aged (white and well-tanned) South Florida crowd milling about sipping wine and maneuvering for a moment to meet … the star attraction. For a “shy guy” Keillor was actually pretty good at the schmooze thing. He was gracious for the duration and had a quip for pretty much everyone who approached him.

But even your dullest corporate drone couldn’t help but notice the women. As I say, respectable, upscale ladies, impeccably manicured and accessorized, women long past their silly, star struck schoolgirl phase. But there they were, ever so noticeably tossing and fussing with their hair, pursing their lips, making longer-than-necessary eye contact while regularly caressing his forearm, elbows and not exactly hard iron biceps. All while balancing their stemware. The braver among them finagled hugs.

Keillor lived in a realm where the opportunities for the kind of consensual romance that the average man and woman moon over were constantly, readily available. And not skeezy rock star-groupie one-offs, but relationships with women of quality and often talent.

That’s a reality that no doubt horrifies legalistic corporate bureaucrats. The impropriety! The potential financial consequences! But it is an essence of life. Can we admit that?

The fact such “opportunities” is also asking for trouble in the workplace is indisputable. Hence our current moment. But there is so much range and variation to “sexual harrassment” I’m not content with a hired-up, sealed-off judgment like MPR is presenting as a full and final statement on the matter.

For his part, I truly hope Keillor takes his act back on the road and uses his microphone to explore why men and women do what they do and think what they think.

That’d be healthy for everyone involved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Science, Spirituality and “2001: A Space Odyssey”

Image

There’s a new book out titled, “Space Odyssey:  Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke and the Making of a Masterpiece.” I pre-ordered it a couple of months ago and when I opened it I came immediately to this quote:

“Politics and religion are obsolete. The time has come for science and spirituality.”

The story goes that that second sentence was underlined by Kubrick when the quote, from Indian social reformer Vinoba Bhave, was shown to him by Clarke. As a near lifelong (OK, “obsessive”) fan of Kubrick’s work, his emphasis on that line about science enhancing spirituality strikes me as spot on.

It’s been gratifying to see the remarkable outpouring of observance, celebration and reflection on the 50th anniversary of “2001’s” release, April 3, 1968 in Washington D.C. Its gala premiere came amid a historic week. Four days earlier Lyndon Johnson, undone by his prosecution of the war in Vietnam, announced he would not run for reelection. A day later Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.

Very few movies, a generally disposable “art” form, get the attention and respect “2001” is getting these days. Fifty years from now I doubt there’ll be much commotion over the half century anniversary of “The Shape of Water” or even “Black Panther.” That’s because only a handful of large-scale, mass-marketed Hollywood productions qualify as anything close to actual art, with even fewer as willing and determined as “2001” to defy conventional expectations and leave audiences searching their own imagination for resolution.

 

I was 17 when I saw “2001” for the first time, in late June 1968 at the Cooper Cinerama theater in St. Louis Park. I had been following what I could about Kubrick since being riveted by “Paths of Glory” on TV when I was 14 and “Dr. Strangelove” in a theater a few months later. (“Lolita” required parental permission I did not get.) Here was someone making movies unlike anything else I was seeing in far-off rural Minnesota, a resolutely conventional Mayberry RFD existence where “art” for the most part was something hung on dentists’ office walls.

It took me a few years to accept how profound an effect that first viewing of “2001” had on me. I had driven in to the Cities with my high school English teacher and a couple other pals, and like everyone else in the theater was asking “WTF?” by the time Dave Bowman left his glowing bedroom and floated back to earth as a giant fetus. I remember my English teacher, a fan of “Gone With the Wind”, shaking his head as we filed out and saying, “That was just silly.”

 

I didn’t know exactly what to say, but the word “silly” was not among anything ricocheting around my squirrely teenage head. All I could process was that anyone who could put that kind of craft and imagery up on a giant movie screen clearly knew what he was doing and more to the point, what he intended to do.

By the time the homicidal, riotous summer of ’68 was over “2001” had separated into distinct partisan camps. Old guard traditionalists remained bored, harrumphing and snorting about “pretentiousness”, as though the only explanation for a movie that didn’t push the normal buttons of escapist entertainment was that it was pretending it was smarter, and on to something they couldn’t grasp.

On the other side, the new guard was reacting like something had just jolted them out of a stupor. Yeah, a lot of the “mind-blowing” was abetted by significant amounts of pot and acid. I must have seen the movie another half-dozen times before ’68 was over, and you knew the repeat viewers by the way they filled the first couple rows of any theater you went to, with some sprawled out on the carpet in front of the front row. (There was the time a pal re-wired the speakers at a drive-in so a dozen of us could, you know, like, commune with the stars while we watched.)

It goes without saying it was that latter crowd — not all on acid — that drove “2001” to legendary status. In it, without always consciously verbalizing it, they were experiencing art. Not just art-ful camera work, or an art-ful musical score, but the art of the overall concept. That being a step up from mere masterly filmmaking craft work to something that invites and requires viewers to allow their imaginations to fire up, reboot and realign as though solving a puzzle.

A constant of Kubrick’s world view, seen most vividly in “2001”, but in some form in all of his films, is that we are not a particularly evolved set of creatures. We live fitfully and irrationally, in a way that is not all that improved from desperately hungry proto-humans clubbing tapirs for food in Africa a couple million years ago. We are still far, far too easily controlled by basic animal impulses and instincts — fear of the other, greed and an emotional subservience to higher authorities — like the corrupt generals in “Paths of Glory”, the sociopathic fools of “Dr. Strangelove”,  the police, politicians and scientists in “A Clockwork Orange”, the vain, powdered elites of “Barry Lyndon” and so on.

Politics and religion are obsolete as honest vehicles for delivering us to … something better than this … because the success of each relies on exploiting the most basic and worst of our unevolved emotions and impulses. You only have to acknowledge how much both politics and religion rely on a kind of sanctimonious demonizing of others to see Kubrick’s point.

As Bhave’s quote asserts, the reaction then of rational man to the astonishing revelations and still unfolding mysteries of science — or to explorations of human psychology, biology and the incomprehensible vastness of the universe  — is genuinely spiritual. It is a transcendant experience in how it separates us, if only for a few moments, from the chaos and fraudulence of life. Science presents a spirituality qualitatively different from what so many billions still hear from their pulpits, in that it doesn’t rely symbolic fables, highly suspect history and accepting faith as fact. It is transcendence through reality.

As I say, when all that is introduced to your intellectual life stream — via a movie — it is safe to say you’ve been exposed to something truly unique and remarkable.

(Stanley Kubrick, in blue jacket, directing “2001”).

(P.S. Christopher Nolan, director of “Dunkirk”, “Inception” and the Batman trilogy, makes no apologies for his indebtedness to Stanley Kubrick for re-orienting his notion of what film — the craft and sequencing of image and sound — can do. He has called “2001” “pure cinema”. He will introduce an “unrestored” 70mm print of “2001” at the Cannes Film Festival next month, simultaneous with a re-release of “2001” around the country in May.)

I’ll be in the front row.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Ryan Cashes In

Posted on by

Raise your hand if you’re surprised Paul Ryan wants to spend more time with his family.

As a “small government conservative” Ryan has spent essentially all of his adult life cashing government checks, (with those sweet, sweet government health care benefits). His ascension to national influence is due primarily to his deft cooperation with and service to Wisconsin’s and then the country’s wealthiest citizen benefactors. His promise to them has forever been two-fold. A: Repeated rounds of tax relief followed by, B: a dramatic gutting of social services, otherwise known as social spending “reform”.

Having delivered the former, in a package that guarantees a return to trillion-dollar deficits, he has in effect accomplished both, and can now dump the daily aggravation of his political gig in favor of a Tim Pawlenty/Norm Coleman style pay-off in the private sector, or put another way, by going to work directly for the .1%-ers who have kept him in DC for 20-plus years.

(Ryan achieves a fresh gutting of social services to poorer Americans by driving deficits up so high conservatives have fresh horrifying numbers to rage and rail that “spending is out of control” … once Democrats are back in power and red ink matters again.)

As loathsome as Freedom Caucus torch-carriers like Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan are, they are at least naked about their subservience to Robert Mercer-scale political “investors”. What’s always disgusted me about Ryan is his snake oil image of a serious, concerned public servant all the while he consents to the same noxious policies promoted by the truly shameless wing nuts of the modern conservative movement.

Very much like Newt Gingrich before him, Ryan is “what dumb people think a smart guy sounds like.”

Besides seizing the cash-out phase of his career, Ryan, being another character who is all about self-serving political calculus, knows that campaigning as a Republican this year is not going to be any fun. Not with Donald Trump looking ever more like a delusional third-tier mob boss and anger at DC descending from swamp to sewer more intense than it has been in a century. Even as Speaker of the House, Ryan was not going to have a pleasant time out in public in his own district. Like Erik Paulsen and Jason Lewis here in Minnesota, he knew public appearances with an actual cross-section of voters was going to be an extraordinarily perilous experience.

I’m still not convinced that a giant “blue wave” is going to sweep across the land this November. There are hundreds of millions in dark money available to spread any hysteria imaginable to prevent that from happening.

But clearly Ryan, the calculator, (aka “the zombie-eyed granny starver”  TM Charlie Pierce), has read smoke signals on the horizon and decided that moving now to profiteer off his “public service” is a far better option than being screamed at and vilified across southern Wisconsin.

 

 

Here Comes Trump’s Military Distraction

Posted on by

Donald Trump is going to need a big distraction ASAP. The FBI raid on his “fixer”/lawyer’s office, home and hotel room yesterday — with the Feds carting away every file, computer folder and hard drive they could find — has to have set off shrieking sirens in Trump’s head. For a guy who so clearly has terabytes of dirty personal information he doesn’t want anyone to see, the thought that his life and business career are now almost certainly an open book to prosecutors in New York and Robert Mueller has to have him feeling he’s cornered like a (pick your favorite rabid rodent.)

Thank god then for Bashir Assad and Vladimir Putin. Their (latest) chemical attack on Syrian civilians gives Trump a bona fide good reason to respond with missiles and bombs. Shock and awe never fails to thrill the psyches of ‘Murica’s 35% goober base and “mainstream” pundits as well. There is no end of professional deep thinkers who conflate every cruise missile launching with a projection of “real American power”, even if like the last time Trump ordered up a volley, the bombs crash harmlessly into a mostly abandoned airfield, (at $1.5 million per missile.)

We should expect Trump to go bigger this time, even if it means pissing off Putin, partly because he so badly needs something a lot scarier to get Michael Cohen off the front pages.

So fasten your seat belts for that one.

Meanwhile though, while the FBI raid yesterday was a result of Mueller referring an investigation to the US Attorney in New York, on the grounds that it involved the not-all-that-clandestine-or-clever bank fraud, tax fraud and campaign finance violations Cohen concocted to pay off Stormy Daniels, the gathered evidence doesn’t have stay in New York. If, as seems entirely likely, the FBI finds information on Cohen’s devices relating to Mueller’s Russian collusion investigation — decades of money laundering for Russian gangsters, communications with Russian “investors”, scheming yadda yadda — all that can be handed back up to the Special Counsel’s office.

Trump’s predicament is getting more precarious by the hour. I still believe his next move on the Russia front will be to fire Jeff Sessions and replace him with a more reliable stooge, (Devin Nunes deserves a promotion), a shameless puppet who will dutifully work through the entire basket of administrative tricks to hobble and mire Mueller’s work.

That new AG will of course have to survive a Senate confirmation process. But right now all Trump can do is buy time to fire up the goobers, and egg them on to some higher level of rebellion. Hence his description of the heavily-vetted FBI raid as, “a break in”, i.e. a crime against him, the state. (Bleeping hell.)

So once you’re belted in for what’s next in cruise missiles, check that your air bags are functioning for Trump’s FBI raid blowback.

My prediction for a late spring/early summer hell storm seems to be pretty well on track.

 

“Roseanne” and Sinclair Take Network TV Tribal

Posted on by

Despite what we’ve been learning about Facebook and its power to deliver “fake news”, it’s worth keeping in mind that your fellow Americans (‘Muricans) still get most of their news, fake or otherwise, from their local TV stations. That’s according to a Pew survey from last summer.

As we digest the power of “Fox and Friends” to guide White House policy, the startling ratings for the revival of “Roseanne” and hilarious-to-appalling mash-up video of Sinclair Broadcasting anchors parroting a Orwellian script from upper management, we need to remind ourselves about how basic monetization drives our rancid tribalism.

The Sinclair video, a brilliant piece of agit-prop by a guy named Tim Burke at the sports web-site Deadspin, (which would be required reading if only for Minnesota native Drew Magary), went viral in about an hour late last week. It is the sort of thing that will laser-etch itself on the reputation of every Sinclair anchor who agreed to perform it. Something so robotic, so herd-like and craven will remain a millstone on their well-coiffured heads for the remainder of their careers. (To date, I see only one Sinclair anchor, in liberal Seattle, who has dared make any criticism of her employer.)

Having spent years observing the folkways and the compromises local TV news personalities make to sustain what still are well-paying jobs, I gotta say laying their faces out there and reading a double-think script ordered by the home office doesn’t surprise me in the least. It is what they are paid to do. The local TV anchor gig is far (far) less about journalism than it is about acting out the marketing strategies of CEOs and boards of directors.

I no longer have access to the deeper internals of Nielsen ratings, but a bit like newspapers, the broad audience for your local TV news was on the decline 15 years ago and there’s no indication that has stopped. (The most reliable figure shows a 31% decline in audience for local TV news since 2007.) But even back then, local TV news was very much a demographics game, designed (scripted and performed) for the primary consumer in traditional households … thirty-something “soccer moms”, with a kind of ancillary focus on an older audience holding hard to loyalties to their favorite hometown TV “stars”.

What’s fascinated me in the past few days, with the return of “Roseanne” on ABC and Sinclair’s Trump-echoing about “false news”, is how much traditional network television — by that I mean primetime sitcoms and dramas — and the local news that bookends are becoming segmented and segregated for service to specific tribal attitudes, like just about everything else in 2018 media.

Despite the high-minded sounding rhetoric from Sinclair’s VP for news, there’s nothing remotely unbiased about the company’s mission as it buys up more and more local TV stations.

For example:

Says Olivia Nuzzi in New York magazine today: “David Smith, the executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, said he dislikes and fundamentally distrusts the print media, which he believes ‘serves no real purpose ‘. In e-mails to New York, Smith said that print — as in newspapers and magazines — is a reality-distorting tool of leftists. Print media, he said, has ‘no credibility’ and no relevance.

‘I must tell that in all the 45 plus years I have been in the media business I have never seen a single article about us that is reflective of reality especially in today’s world with the shameful political environment and generally complete lack of integrity. Facts and truth have been lost for a long time and likely to never return’, Smith said.

‘The print media is so left-wing as to be meaningless dribble which accounts for why the industry is and will fade away. Just no credibility.”

Good lord.

It would be so refreshing if Sinclair would simply step up and say, “Yeah, we’re your Trump TV group. You like Trump? Stick with us. We’ll give you news that will reassure you you’re on to something yuge and great.”

Sinclair wants to ride/exploit the Trump crest among his believers. It sees good money to be made — shareholder value — serving the preferences (ok, “biases”) of conservative viewers, in particular viewers who maintain a loyalty to traditional network programming and the traditional forms of “news”.

And folks, there’s no law against that. It is, as I like to say, The First Rule of Show Biz: “Give the People What They Want.”  Or, to fine tune that a bit, “Figure out where the audience is for the story you want to tell and drag them into your tent.”

What I’d be interested in seeing today is a survey about the political leanings of the folks Sinclair is betting on — tradition-oriented entertainment and news consumers — as well as the millions of others (and counting) who have largely given up on primetime network TV and local TV news in favor of content that is both more “adult” and, as news goes, less worried about being accused of bias. I’m guessing your the audiences for network and cable (other than FoxNews) is now definably tribal.

I say this as someone who never watched entire episode of “Roseanne” in its hey day, (and I was a TV critic at the time), and hasn’t watched a primetime network show since “Lost” went off the air. For good reason Sinclair Broadcasting has no interest in me. But neither does it have any interest in all the rest of you who have migrated over to Netflix, FX, AMC, HBO, MSNBC, podcasts and the vast, burgeoning universe of alternatives to … stale, timid tradition.

Likewise, my (and I suspect a lot of your) consumption of local TV news has cratered over the past decade. Simply put, local TV news a product that has negligible value to a news consumer like me. (That is to say: Smug, cranky, aged liberal elitist.) Everything about local TV news is compromised to avoid stirring conflict from any quarter. The fact that almost no local TV newscast anywhere in the country dares assert and regularly remind viewers about the human impact on climate change is as conclusive an example as you need for the scripted, tightly coordinated insipidness of the overall product.

But … there is an audience that remains simultaneously resistant to “adult” entertainment and can be reassured by the blandness and celebrity appeal of local TV personalities. That crowd may continue to wane. (“Die off” is a more apt description.) But the bet by Sinclair as it buys up local stations and imposes highly centralized editorial content and viewpoint on them, mirrors what the networks themselves are no doubt looking to capture in the wake of “Roseanne’s” fire. Namely, cash in on Trumpist America while it is still a hardened, easily-defined tribe.

(I predict a Ted Nugent-Scott Baio sit-com in the near future).

There’s got to be at least another decade worth of good profits in giving traditional America what it wants to see.

Minnesota’s Trumpublican Trio Owns The Trump Damage

Posted on by

This week, statewide coverage featured Minnesota Republican Congressman Erik Paulsen, Tom Emmer and Jason Lewis mugging with President Donald Trump’s lead partner in crime, Vice President Mike Pence.

The news coverage serves as a helpful reminder to Minnesotans that these three gentlemen have enabled Donald Trump’s disastrous presidency every step of the way. They have slavishly voted for the mean-spirited Trump agenda about 90% of the time. It reminds us that the reelection of Minnesota’s Trumpublican Trio is effectively a referendum on Trump’s corruption, chaos, incompetence, and extremism.  A few things that Minnesotans should be reminded of during campaign season:

WEAKENING OUR HEALTH PROTECTIONS. These three congressmen repeatedly supported Trumpcare, which would have stripped health protections from 51 million Americans, and only had the support of 17% of Americans. They are also complicit with Trump’s ongoing sabotaging of the historically effective Affordable Care Act protections. Moreover, they oppose efforts that would make health protections much more available and affordable, such as with a national reinsurance program, restoration of the Cost Sharing Reductions (CSR) they cut, and giving Americans the option of buying into the popular and efficient Medicare program.

DEFICIT SPENDING TO ENRICH BILLIONAIRES. Paulsen, Emmer, and Lewis brought us Trump’s trickle down tax code, which gives a huge tax break to the wealthiest 1% at a time when we are suffering from the worst wealth inequality since 1928. The top 1% got an obscene 83% of the benefits provided in the tax bill, creating the largest transfer of wealth to the richest Americans in the nation’s history.

Oh, and by the way, these self-proclaimed “deficit hawks” put the $1.5 trillion cost of their lavish tax giveaway to the wealth on the federal credit card that our kids and grandkids now have to pay.  Absolutely shameless.

PUTTING TRUMP ABOVE THE LAW. They have turned a blind eye to Trump’s repeated obstruction of justice during the investigation into Russia’s attack on America’s democratic jewel, our free and fair elections. This obstruction of justice is far more extensive than the actions that forced President Nixon out of the White House, but the Republicans of 1972 had enough integrity to fulfill their oversight duties and push Nixon out, while these contemporary Republicans are cavalierly shrugging it off.

PUTTING NRA CONTRIBUTIONS OVER COMMON SENSE GUN PROTECTIONS. They have blocked common-sense gun protections that enjoy overwhelming public support, because they and their guy Trump value NRA donations over the wishes of the people they were elected to represent.

PUTTING CORPORATIONS’ NEEDS OVER ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTIONS. They have marched lockstep behind Trump as he has racked up the worst environmental record in our lifetime.  For instance, Trump made the United States the only nation on the planet to not sign the Paris accord on climate change.

These are just a few examples, but the list of pro-Trump votes is a long one. According to FiveThirtyEight, Rep. Emmer votes with Trump 87% of the time, Rep. Lewis votes with Trump 90% of the time and Rep. Paulsen votes with Trump 97% of the time. Clearly, a vote for Emmer, Lewis, and Paulsen is effectively a vote for the historically unpopular Trump.  Minnesotans who are fed up with Trump need to be speaking out, donating and organizing against them.

Sorry Stormy, It’ll Be Facebook/Cambridge Analytica That’ll Take Out Trump

Posted on by

For all of us braced to see some gag-inducing GoPro video of Donald Trump struggling out of his gold lame thong for a little sexy time, the Stormy Daniels interview was kind of anti-climactic. Note to Daniel’s pitbull attorney: Next time, don’t let the hype get so far out ahead of the available facts.

On other fronts though, the demise of The Donald is continuing on pace, perhaps even speeding up. I’ve been telling people for a while now that sometime late spring to mid-summer the sleazy farce we think of as The Trump Epoch will shift into a whole new, batshit gear. I base that on both the pace and qualities of the indictments Robert Mueller has produced to date, which leads anyone watching this dumpster fire to expect indictments of Americans connected either to Trump’s career-long money laundering for Russian gangsters and/or the weaponizing of voter data in the 2016 election.

If one of those indicted is a principal in the Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon or Robert Mercer camp the [bleep] will not only hit the fans, it’ll be a finely pureed mist.

For your betting records, I’m also adding at this point my wager that the best, most damning direct link to collusion will come through the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal churning right now.

Here the primary American players — Kushner, Bannon, Mercer and we have to assume Donald Jr. and Manafort — all converge, lacking only the link to some specific Russian player, and people … with thirty or forty Rooskie thugs/spies floating around in the conversation, it may only be a matter of drawing a name from a hat.

For what it’s worth, I also expect that given a new round of indictments rolling in those with whom Trump shares actual DNA, (instead of, you know, just exchanging it in glitzy hotels), Trump will snap and fire Mueller, or at least attempt to can him by firing Jeff Sessions and replacing Sessions with a completely conscience-less hit man like Scott Pruitt or Mick Mulvaney. (That move would require Senate confirmation, which would create a proxy fight over the whole investigation, in which Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell would continue to genuflect before The Altar of Craven Expediency. But the point is that at that point, with a Don Jr. or Kushner indictment, Trump will be so desperate and have so few other choices he’ll try anything and hope Sean Hannity can rally the goobers in his defense.)

But on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, which is fascinating on so many levels, let me toss out something I came across preparing for a class and panel discussion on “fake news” up in Grand Rapids last week.

An early, mostly innocent character in the scandal is a guy named Michal Kosinski, currently teaching at Stanford. His (apparently genuine) scientific interest in working with freely (i.e. way too loosely) available Facebook data is what eventually lead to the very precise “psychographic profiles” of individual voters in the 2016 election by the Mercer/Bannon/Kushner-funded/directed Cambridge Analytica scheme.

Many of us, not just average schmoes like you and me, but bona fide tech heads have been gobsmacked by not only how much data about individual Americans was harvested via Facebook, but how astonishingly specific it was, down to names, faces, street addresses and very personal misapprehensions and prejudices.

From a 2015 article in the Swiss periodical Das Magazin (a sort of poor European’s New Yorker) that was only translated into English and re-published 14 months ago, and has now been contextualized by Vice, we learn this:

Psychometrics, sometimes also called psychographics, focuses on measuring psychological traits, such as personality. In the 1980s, two teams of psychologists developed a model that sought to assess human beings based on five personality traits, known as the “Big Five.” These are: openness (how open you are to new experiences?), conscientiousness (how much of a perfectionist are you?), extroversion (how sociable are you?), agreeableness (how considerate and cooperative you are?) and neuroticism (are you easily upset?). Based on these dimensions—they are also known as OCEAN, an acronym for openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism—we can make a relatively accurate assessment of the kind of person in front of us. This includes their needs and fears, and how they are likely to behave. The “Big Five” has become the standard technique of psychometrics. But for a long time, the problem with this approach was data collection, because it involved filling out a complicated, highly personal questionnaire. Then came the Internet. And Facebook. And Kosinski.

And …

Remarkably reliable deductions could be drawn from simple online actions. For example, men who “liked” the cosmetics brand MAC were slightly more likely to be gay; one of the best indicators for heterosexuality was “liking” Wu-Tang Clan. Followers of Lady Gaga were most probably extroverts, while those who “liked” philosophy tended to be introverts. While each piece of such information is too weak to produce a reliable prediction, when tens, hundreds, or thousands of individual data points are combined, the resulting predictions become really accurate.

Kosinski and his team tirelessly refined their models. In 2012, Kosinski proved that on the basis of an average of 68 Facebook “likes” by a user, it was possible to predict their skin color (with 95 percent accuracy), their sexual orientation (88 percent accuracy), and their affiliation to the Democratic or Republican party (85 percent). But it didn’t stop there. Intelligence, religious affiliation, as well as alcohol, cigarette and drug use, could all be determined. From the data it was even possible to deduce whether someone’s parents were divorced.

The strength of their modeling was illustrated by how well it could predict a subject’s answers. Kosinski continued to work on the models incessantly: before long, he was able to evaluate a person better than the average work colleague, merely on the basis of ten Facebook “likes.” Seventy “likes” were enough to outdo what a person’s friends knew, 150 what their parents knew, and 300 “likes” what their partner knew. More “likes” could even surpass what a person thought they knew about themselves.

Here is a link to Kosinki’s scholastic work:

And here is another.

And, if you’re so creeped-out ny what Facebook knows about you and exploits to add to its fantastic fortune, read this.

Let’s Try Exposing the Gun Industry to the Free Market

Posted on by

Congressman and gubernatorial candidate Tim Walz is now in favor banning assault rifles in Minnesota. Thank god for small favors. But what’s more interesting, IMHO, is how much Walz, a Democrat, is the exception that proves the rule. Namely, the fact that the United States’ completely out of control gun problem is a Republican/conservative-driven and sustained phenomenon.

Poll after poll over the years shows that the issue of gun ownership — i.e. the exercise of your “precious Second Amendment rights” allegedly to “protect your family” — is not just far, far more galvanizing among those who vote Republican but is the single issue they are the most passionate about. And it ain’t even close. Credible polling puts the gap between those who vote Republican and those who vote Democratic at 50%, far exceeding the separation between conservatives and liberals over abortion or immigration or any other so-called hot-button issue.

Put more bluntly, the right to own and even stockpile guns and ammunition without any significant regulation or supervision, is the most important issue to the “average Republican voter”, meaning those who reliably show up at the polls and vote … which is another way of saying primarily exurban/rural white males.

Like a lot of people, I’m pretty much out of gas when it comes to venting about the near weekly mass slaughters in this great cauldron of freedom we call the USA. Maybe the emotion the kids are bringing to the issue after the Parkland, Florida massacre will do something. Maybe it will drive enough young people and suburban women to the polls in November to begin making a difference. Maybe (and this is bigger) court rulings against Republican gerrymandering will rebalance the map and loosen the stranglehold single-issue/gun-focused voters have over the GOP.

But as an amateur student of history, color me intensely skeptical. Even with the high likelihood of several more of these slaughters going down before November, the connection of guns to the male ego is so deep and intense you can feel the herd of single-issue gun zealots gathering for their stampede the polling booths against anyone who threatens their ability … “to protect their family.”

The Strib recently ran an editorial arguing for more research into gun violence in the USA, noting how even the mere study of gun killings has been banned by NRA-driven legislation. (Typically, the Strib avoided the elephant-in-the-room Republican unanimity on pro-gun votes). Then a few days ago it ran a syndicated piece by Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune whose argument was that there is no way to stop this insanity, it’s all too deeply baked into American culture.

He’s certainly right in terms of a legislative fix this November, or in 2020 or even in the next 10 years. But, given the cumulative effect of a half generation’s worth of elections we might make the turn to something like sanity.

Where 33,000 gun killings a year — almost 100 a day — is regarded as as close to a definition of terrorism as the next Arab loser renting a truck and running down bicyclists in in Manhattan. (Two-thirds of those gun deaths are suicides.)

Where there is general acknowledgement of how dramatically the crime rate has been dropping for years across the country …

… and how far into the realm of fantasy it is that the average American needs “stopping power” for that mythical gang of thugs [invariably black or muslim] coming through the their front door.

I believe I’ve ranted about this before, but the path to bringing American gun violence down to levels of truly civilized and safe democracies is not by demanding “bans” — Constitutional problems) but by simply exposing the gun industry (and let’s get real here, the NRA is simply a lobbying front for gun manufacturers not Uncle Steve the duck hunter) to the free market of insurance and litigation like everything else in this country.

The 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (a 65-31 Senate vote with 14 Democrats chipping in) essentially set up a force field of legal immunity for the gun industry, something not even Big Pharma or GM has been able to pull off. Were that Act, and other by-laws attached to appropriations bills, etc. to be rescinded and the gun industry forced to pay the heavy cost of regularly defending itself in court we might begin the process of blunting the campaign funding by the industry/NRA.

Likewise, I see no constitutional impediment to a law requiring every individual gun purchase and each and every gun in personal possession to carry liability insurance, at rates determined by your certified State Farm or Allstate actuaries and their banks of computers. Compounded by an aggressive round of ICE-like monitoring of gun/ammo stockpilers — and remember 3% of the citizenry of the USA owns over 50% of the guns — forcing owners to prove insurance coverage for their family-protecting arsenal could also blunt the financial ability of paranoid gun fetishists (excuse me, “enthusiasts”) to amass a warehouse of firepower. Not every one of our Second Amendment executioners has the financial wherewithal of Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock. An annual insurance bill of several thousand dollars for their toys of empowerment could make a difference.

I am also a big fan of a tax (not a ban) on ammunition. I’m still waiting hear how the pathetic kid in Florida bought not just the AR-15, ($600- $1200 depending on customization) but nine other guns over the course of a year. But when he could by ammo for the rifle at barely 25 cents a round you can see where there’s room for, well, let’s just call it “revenue enhancement”. At a tax of $1 a casing — to cover the “reloaders” among us — the likelihood of a lunatic like the Colorado movie theater killer or Nikolas Cruz in Florida storing up a few thousand rounds might diminish a bit.

Given all this in 10-15-20 years we might be able to drive our annual gun slaughter down to only 20,000 or so a year.

“Might”.

 

Steadily and Inevitably Toward the Full Trump Apocalypse

Posted on by

Lambert to the Slaughter

Every so often the question gets asked again: “How much longer can this last?” “This” of course being the brazenly corrupt reign of Donald Trump and his beyond-the-pale collection of cartoonish grifters. (Eg: EPA boss Scott Pruitt, Interior czar Ryan Zinke, Commerce con man Wilbur Ross, the already departed HHS Secretary Tom Price and on and on and on and on ad nauseam.)

Even the most cynical and despairing among us have, buried deep in our numbness from so much unchecked self-dealing, fraud and incompetence, a belief that “this” can’t survive. It’s just too flagrant, too clumsy and too shameless to avoid a day of reckoning.

Since last fall I’ve pegged late spring-to-early summer of this year as the likely point where the [bleep] really hits the wall. The point where only the most delusional far right bubble creatures refuse to accept incontrovertible evidence that our Commander-in-Chief is not merely a fool, but a criminal one as well, and very likely a treasonous one to boot.

(Read this from James Risen at the Intercept, titled, “Is Donald Trump a Traitor?” Sample:

“Most pundits in Washington now recoil at any suggestion that the Trump-Russia story is really about treason. They all want to say it’s about something else – what, they aren’t quite sure. They are afraid to use serious words. They are in the business of breaking down the Trump-Russia narrative into a long series of bite-sized, incremental stories in which the gravity of the overall case often gets lost. They seem to think that treason is too much of a conversation-stopper, that it interrupts the flow of cable television and Twitter. God forbid you might upset the right wing! (And the left wing, for that matter.)

“But if a presidential candidate or his lieutenants secretly work with a foreign government that is a longtime adversary of the United States to manipulate and then win a presidential election, that is almost a textbook definition of treason.”

Friday’s indictment of a baker’s dozen of Rooskies (and one lone American wanker roped in to help the Russians pay off Tea Party-style patriots) clearly has Trump ricocheting off his gilded walls. It is almost certainly a Phase One indictment, setting the stage for Phase Two: charges against Americans who wittingly or unwittingly (through their existing criminal endeavors) made the Russian attack on last year’s election possible. Next up, (my guess), are the American data operations who “weaponized” the Russians’ social media strategy into the swing states where 78,000 votes turned the electoral college in Trump’s favor.

Could this mean Cambridge Analytica, where son-in-law Jared Kushner crossed paths with Robert and Rebekah Mercer? All available signs point to it.

If Kushner never gets his White House security clearance, it will be, I believe, because his connections to Cambridge Analytica have compounded his debt his issues with Deutsche Bank, his sweetheart dealing with the Chinese and of course that fateful meet and greet with the Russians at Trump Tower.

A Kushner indictment would be the signal that we have arrived at a one-step-from-the-abyss moment for Trump … and us.

After Kushner, the only target left is Trump himself, who at the point will be completely exposed by everything Mueller has collected from plea deals with Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort, too, I’m guessing. (At this point even Manafort, the sleaziest of lifelong DC swamp creatures, has to realize that all he can do now is mitigate his eventual prison sentence. There is no other choice, other than making a run for it.)

I make this late spring-early summer prediction in part because of what I and others have said from the get-go. This cascading fiasco has been called “stupid Watergate” for a reason. There doesn’t appear to be anything all that sophisticated or original about Trump’s 30-year money laundering scheme with international gangsters. There just isn’t a lot of brain power and criminal craft on display here. Even Trump’s “fixer” attorney, the mobbed-up Michael Cohen, is more thug than legal strategist.

I’m inclined to believe Mueller’s (far smarter) team has seen this sort of thing many times before, but until this episode may never have had quite the incentive or resources to mount a full-scale investigation of so farcical character as Trump.

Moreover, there’s the not-insignificant fact that Trump inspires no loyalty among his “team”, other than among maybe his immediate children, Cohen, and, of course, the sad, angry chumps who use him as the prism for their rage against “the winners” of the world. Everybody else around Trump has only good reasons to give him up and quite literally no reason at all to protect him. There’s no one like Bob Haldeman or John Erhlichman here. Who thinks Reince Preibus, John Kelly or any other institutional actor is going to court perjury and jail time to protect an ungrateful fool like Trump? I mean, people! can you imagine what Steve Bannon alone said last week in 20 hours of testimony to Mueller’s crew?

So … assuming Mueller is doing what credible analysts believe he is doing, namely, steadily building up pressure through a series of strategically sequenced indictments on everyone who hasn’t flipped to come in now, I think by late May or early July we’ll be into a fresh kind of hell with Trump.

And that hell will be a form of civil war between the most ardent (i.e. angriest, deepest in the bubble) Trumpists egged on by their favorite for-profit rage inducers and the rest of us. They will be told their election is being stolen from them by “the deep state” and the liberal media and they will believe it, because that’s all they’ll have left to believe in. Any other option requires them to admit they’ve been played for chumps … yet again.

The anger and solidarity of that crowd; a large, reliable and therefore absolutely vital percentage of the Republican voting bloc will mean Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the rest of the so-called party “leadership” (ironic since they’re actually the ones being led) will remain locked in their implicit defense of Trump, no matter what Mueller chooses to disclose.

At that point, I don’t see how the 4K HD Director’s Cut version of the infamous Ritz-Carlton Moscow “pee tape” will change any minds. Hell, Trump’s evangelicals will most likely look on that as a kind of born again baptism.

 

“Trumpublicans” Not Republicans

Posted on by

Unfortunately, Donald Trump is not on the ballot in 2018.  If he was, polls indicate he would get crushed in a landslide by Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders or Oprah Winfrey.  But because Trump isn’t on the ballot, criticizing him during the campaign will have little effect on the Trump agenda, unless voters become convinced that the 468 Republican nominees who are on the general election ballots are substantively the same as Trump.

After the 2018 Republican primaries are over, we can expect many congressional Republicans to stop pandering to the roughly 35% of Americans who make up the “Trump base” and instead distance themselves from him in an attempt to win over the swing voters who will decide the election.  They’ll be saying things like “I support his tax cuts, but I’m my own person and don’t agree with him on many things.”  This is absurd because most Republicans voted with Trump over 90% of the time in Congress.

Still, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of advertising will be spent in gerrymandered districts to build this “independent from Trump” illusion.  If congressional Republicans get away with this Extreme Makeover, Americans will be stuck with unchecked Trumpism in 2019 and 2020, and perhaps beyond.  It could get so much uglier.

So Democrats need to do more than just give long-winded anti-Trump speeches on MSNBC. Casually involved swing voters don’t have the patience for long-form communications. Instead, Democrats need a concise term to rebrand Republicans in the Trump era.  Congressional Republicans need to be branded what they are, a group of Trump-programmed bots who are ideologically indistinguishable from Trump.  Republicans of the Trump era need to be branded as “Trumpublicans.”

I certainly didn’t invent the term “Trumpublican,” and I don’t find it especially clever.  But it has the important virtue of clearly and concisely communicating that Republicans have become a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump.  These shameful 468 Republicans have empowered this dangerous, bigoted, unpopular moron.  So let’s shine klieg lights on what these Republicans have allowed themselves to become, boot-licking Trumpublicans.

Even Republicans of the Reagan, Dole and Bush eras would never have kicked 30 million Americans off of health coverage.  But that’s what Trumpublicans giddily did when they repeatedly pushed Trump’s unpopular and cruel TrumpCare bill.

Even Republicans of the Reagan, Dole and Bush eras would never have deported 800,000 beautiful young people productively living out the American dream.  But Trumpublicans enthusiastically embraced Trump’s unpopular and racist DACA repeal.

Even trickle-down Republicans of the Reagan, Dole and Bush eras never would have given 83% of a tax bill benefits to the richest 1% of Americans.  But these Trumpublicans toasted the billionaire Trump as that extremely unpopular and immoral bill was enacted into law.

Even Republicans of the Reagan, Dole and Bush eras supported conservative Presidents and Administrations that had at least some modicum of experience, integrity and ethics.  Trumpublicans have embraced and blindly defended the Trump Administration’s jaw-dropping parade of incompetence, inexperience and corruption.

Because of congressional Republicans’ complete lack of Trump oversight the last two years, they are no longer Republicans in the sense Americans have traditionally used that word.  That term is now much too good for them.  Republicans have completely merged with Trump Incorporated and made themselves into Trumpublicans.  Americans need to understand this truth before November 6, 2018.  Drain THAT swamp.

So Democrats should be continually reframing Republicans as “Trumpublicans” during the 2018 mid-term campaign season.   Unlike conservatives, progressives don’t have Russian bots and billionaire funders to drive the message.  So Democrats are going to have to do it the old-fashioned way, with disciplined repetition.  Trumpublicans, Trumpublicans, Trumpublicans.

Al Franken Is Putting His Self-Interest Over Everything He Claims Is Important

Posted on by

If Senator Al Franken left the U.S. Senate in the wake of his sexual harassment admission, Governor Mark Dayton would be able to appoint a replacement.  Many speculate that he might name his Lieutenant Governor, Tina Smith, a respected, thoughtful leader who would likely be a very capable candidate in a November 2018 special election.  There are also other excellent choices Dayton could make.

As a result, Al Franken and Minnesota DFLers need to be asking themselves some important questions.

Who would have more moral standing to hold sexual harassers and abusers like Roy Moore and Donald Trump accountable, and send a clear signal that sexual harassment will no longer be tolerated?

Who would be a more credible and persuasive advocate for progressive causes?

Who would be a more respected representative of Minnesotans’ interests, opinions, and values?

Who would be a better role model for Minnesota’s young men and women?

Who would be more re-electable in 2020, and more likely to help Democrats stop Minnesota’s Senate seat from going to a Trumpublican?

What Al Franken did is less egregious than what Moore and Trump did, so he may be able to hold onto his job, even after a long and humiliating Senate Ethics Committee investigation that will further cement this incident in the public mind. But just because he can hold on to his job doesn’t mean that he should.

Note:  The day after this post was written, Senator Franken resigned, proving this post’s headline wrong.  In his resignation speech, Senator Franken said: “Minnesotans deserve a senator who can focus with all her energy on addressing the challenges they face every day.  I of all people am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls is running for Senate with full support of his party.” 

Two days after this post was written, accused pedophile Roy Moore lost his Alabama U.S. Senate race by 1.5 points, which underperfromed Trump’s 2016 victory margin in Alabama by a staggering 30-points.

Garrison Keillor v. Minnesota … “Public” … Radio

Posted on by

As further proof that my cynicism knows no depths, let me assert that based on decades of experience, it is my belief that when it comes to personnel issues, by gargantuan enterprises like NBC/Comcast or merely big ones like Minnesota Public Radio … “It’s Money That Matters” as Randy Newman once sang.

In the matter of its summary execution of Garrison Keillor and the scrubbing of all mention and residue of him from their archives, MPR, Minnesota’s “listener-supported” PUBLIC radio “service” is staying very much in character.

The number of people who have tried to play not just media reporter but media critic in the Twin Cities don’t amount to even a handful. But for years I was one of them, and until the current management of the Star Tribune, no organization in town was more walled off, impenetrable and resistant to potentially negative inquiry than MPR. The joke among those of us who tried over the years was that you were more likely to get a full and forthright comment out of the CIA than MPR.

Despite “Public” being a central part of its name and identity, MPR has always conducted itself as the most private of media entities. By contrast, as I’ve often said, Stanley Hubbard, who truly is a “private” owner of television and radio stations, was routinely willing to take a phone call and offer some kind of an explanation for his internal controversy of the moment. With MPR, at best you were lucky to get a turgid, opaque statement from their PR desk.

(The level of fear that permeated MPR’s newsroom staff was frankly remarkable. MPR laid off a group of people a couple of years ago. Only two of the laid-off responded to requests for an entirely off-the-record, not-for-attribution conversation about what happened … and then only to plead not to ever be contacted again.)

In this Keillor situation what leaps out at me is that the only story of an offense, such as it is, comes from Garrison himself. This is the odd business of his hand slipping up a distraught employee’s bare back. In fairness, MPR may be protecting themselves and Keillor from far … far … more unsavory behavior. But we will never know, unless Keillor decides to lay it all out for his fans and the general public, something at the moment he is saying he doesn’t care to do.

In Sunday’s Star Tribune we had this all too familiar line: “MPR’s director of communications, Angie Andresen, said Friday that her organization would like to share more information, but to do so would be a breach of confidentiality that might deter potential victims or witnesses of abuse from coming forward.”

At that, the treadworn cynic in me screams, “Bullshit.”

Since MPR never shares information about anything with even the most remote potential to injure its reputation and impact its revenue stream, it is fair to conclude that it is MPR not any victimized woman who is enforcing this cone of confidentiality. Other media organizations — CBS with Charlie Rose, NBC with Matt Lauer — have seized on high-profile offenses to encourage other women on the staff and in the culture at large to come forward and speak up. The encouragement to women to tell the sordid stories is at the essence of this moment.

MPR is, as usual, taking the opposite approach. “Public” is for them is a branding scheme with no concurrent obligation to transparency.

I’ve told a few people that I’d be fascinated to get a full picture of MPR’s financial relationship with Keillor prior to this reputational guillotining. Nothing of course could be more horrifying to MPR’s executive offices. This is after all the organization that fought tooth and nail the disclosure of founder/CEO Bill Kling’s salary, firing off letters demanding the firing of reporters reckless enough to ask so basic a question of … a public organization.

With that in mind, it is easy, even logical to believe that MPR seized on the opportunity of some kind of impropriety involving Keillor and a woman/women to invoke a morals clause immediately and completely voiding contract(s) with him. Contracts it has monitored carefully and come to regard as no longer beneficial to their revenue stream.

As the saying goes, “Every crisis is an opportunity.”

I strongly suspect NBC/Comcast executives carefully assessed the financial impact of wiping $20-$35 million of Matt Lauer’s salary off the books and concluded “The Today Show” will survive just fine with Savannah Guthrie and (my bet) Willie Geist on the set fawning over pop stars and offering shopping tips.

As for Keillor, can we all acknowledge he is not an average guy, much less a “normal” human being? A bit like Bob Dylan, Garrison long ago began protecting his talent and productivity by interacting with the quotidian universe solely on his terms, as much as possible. You simply can’t be as productive as people like those two have been and deal hour by hour with the numbing, insipid bullshit of daily life. Hell, Keillor’s even said he’s autistic to some degree. So when he then says he’s remarkably awkward in personal encounters, I believe him.

Could he have had an affair with a staffer? I suppose. But even that seems a stretch. What’s inconceivable though is going all Harvey Weinstein or even pulling a Matt Lauer button-under-the-desk and sex toy routine. But in the absence of actual transparency — from an organization that explicitly demands it of the public subjects of its news gathering — everyone’s imagination is free to run wild.

Personally, I hope Keillor reconsiders his decision not to say more about what’s gone down. As a gifted writer, and just as importantly as a humorist, not mention at age 75 with the bulk of he career behind him, Keillor could help turn this current dialogue down a more nuanced, balanced path.

A path that would include the purely monetary pressures that invariably apply in high-profile matters like this.

 

 

 

Al Franken and Our Paris-in-the-Terror Moment

Posted on by

Image result for paris in the terrorThe set of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” will never be confused with The Algonquin Round Table. If for no other reason than Dorothy Parker would never allow Joe [Scarborough] to bloviate on as long and as loudly as he so often does. But the show’s cast of supporting characters — plenty of New York Times and Washington Post reporters and columnists — is bona fide, and given a topic in her wheelhouse, in this case th gross sexual misbehavior by men, soon-to-be Mrs. Joe, Mika Brzezinski, (a.k.a. “Mika-Boo”) is a force of nature.

And Mika the Force is all over our “me too” moment. Amid much high dudgeon about sexual harassment she has also been pushing the nuancy questions of proportionate punishment and “What do we do with the apologies?” This isn’t to say Brzezinski is the first to pose these questions, only that she’s making a persistent point of them.

And that it directly affects Al Franken.

Even following the latest accusation of … butt-palming … at the State Fair, liberal women are having a hard time lumping Franken in with Harvey Weinstein and Roy Moore. For her part, (as a very committed feminist and liberal), Brzezinski is conceding her tribal affinities, while arguing that if this “moment” is going to accomplish something of lasting value, every woman has to have the right to speak and every offender should suffer or at least endure some measure of punishment. But, that said … butt palming/patting/caressing is not in the same universe as rape or pedophilia.

What Mika-Boo hasn’t yet gotten into in this Paris-in-the-Terror moment for men, is the twisty down side to a flat-out, unequivocal “believe the women” episode.

Some of us are old enough to remember the truly bizarre (and remarkably under-examined) frenzy over satanic sexual abuse, murder and mutilation of very young children in schools and day care centers in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Sociologically and psychologically, it was a mind-boggler.

Here in Minnesota the focus was in Scott County. A zealous prosecutor, Kathleen Morris — like prosecutors in the McMartin Pre-School case in California and the Little Rascals Day Care case in North Carolina — insisted the public at large had a moral obligation to “believe the children”. (BTW: The PBS series on the latter case, “Innocence Lost” remains one of the most riveting documentaries I have ever seen. If you want a case study in tribal psychosis, there it is.) Eventually, after millions in court costs and the total ruination of reputations and lives, all of the cases fell apart and the frenzy subsided.

The media took the “believe the children” bait, big time.

My point is that in those environments it was difficult-to-impossible to not “believe the children” just as, for progressive liberals and Al Franken in particular it is not functionally,  socially possible to “believe the women” in this environment.

For example: Even if Franken knew for certain the tongue-in-the-mouth business with Leeann Tweeden was a “bit” or that the butt-caressing at the State Far never happened … he can’t in effect call either of the women liars by saying so. That simply isn’t allowed under the rules of this “cultural moment”. Not for liberals anyway. Conservatives, especially Donald Trump and Roy Moore, are free to condemn all female accusers as liars (and in Trump’s case argue that none of them were good-looking enough to warrant his attention, and then threaten to sue them).

It’s a liberal dilemma … and one that is ripe for exploitation.

Now, before I wander off into the bat[bleep] conspiracy phase of this screed, let me issue the disclaimer that: The United States has always been exceptional in the long march of human nature, in that unlike every other culture on the planet, here in the USA malicious adversaries have never ever concocted a plan to destroy a political opponent through nefarious means. That sort of thing only happens someplace else.

Personally, I don’t find it unimaginable that people like Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and the toxic-but-well funded netherworld of Breitbart and the Mercers might find a way to, shall we say, “encourage” women like Ms. Tweeden and the State Fair victim to come forward with stories (and photographs) deeply damaging to a politician enjoying high regard as a clever, mediagenic assailant of their pet policies and personalities.

I know how insane that sounds. It’s real Elvis-stepped-off-the-UFO stuff. But I’m simply saying I can imagine it. (And yes, I’m taking medication to treat the hallucinations.)

Also, as we collectively try to come up with the appropriate scale to judge all the misbehaviors being tossed up, let me suggest that abuse and harassment stories coming through some form of professional vetting — like the editing pipeline of a major news organization — strike me as having more credibility than just someone holding a press conference.

Big news organizations have reputations to protect and don’t like getting sued. But no nationally renown public figure, of the progressive political persuasion, is in any position to denounce much less sue one poor woman recovering, like Ms. Tweeden and the young lady at the Fair, from the terrible, psychological scarring of sexual abuse.