“Of course politicians have been pretty much the same since the beginning of history, and part of the game is creating illusion.” Gore Vidal
Mornings in Santa Barbara are foggy and cool and gray, but the fog gives way to sunshine before noon, and by mid-afternoon it’s warm. On our daily walk down State Street my colleague and I see tourists dining outside, on wooden platforms, surrounded by potted plants, strung with lights, shaded by market umbrellas. Outside the Palace Grill on Cota Street, a carpenter builds an outdoor dining platform with iron railings. Not only fancy, permanent looking.
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The November election will be chaotic and contested. As I said months ago, when he loses, Trump will not go quietly. He will scorch the earth in his wake.
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Jonathan Swan of Axios is being hailed as the second coming of Edward R. Murrow for pressing Donald Trump during a one-on-one interview at the White House. Swan appears intrepid because most reporters from our corporate-backed media giants can’t ask Trump hard questions for fear of being ostracized or losing their access. For nearly four long years, corporate reporters let Trump roll them with BS claims, word salads, nonsense statements and outright falsehoods. Until recently, when the Covid-19 pandemic made Trump’s incompetence glaringly obvious, few reporters pushed back with any gusto. I don’t have an opinion about Jonathan Swan and Axios one way or another; Swan did what any journalist worthy of the name must do, and in doing so, demonstrated to his colleagues how easily Trump can be knocked off balance. Good job, but not worthy of Murrow status.
The only journalist I’d like to see one-on-one with Trump is Mehdi Hasan of the Intercept. Hasan is as tenacious as he is intelligent, he knows political BS when he hears it, and he doesn’t let nonsensical statements stand unchallenged. Put Mehdi and Trump in a room and in about three minutes Trump would piss his Depends.
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Trump now claims that voting by mail is wonderful in Florida, but terrible in Nevada. The Trump campaign has sued the state of Nevada to stop voting by mail.
Quiz question: what’s the difference between an absentee ballot and a mail-in ballot?
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Trump said the November election will be an embarrassment to the United States. How is that possible? Donald Trump is our president, and nothing is more embarrassing than that.
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Ever the top used car salesman in a one dealership town, Trump insists, at every opportunity, that his administration has done a great job containing the pandemic. World champion in testing. The virus is going away. Hydroxychlroquine works! The very powerful travel ban against China. The economy is roaring back! Like quintessential marks, Trump’s followers wait for the miracle that never arrives while he keeps moving the target.
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Donald Trump, draft dodger, tax cheat, adulterer, racist, white supremacist, and textbook example of a narcissistic sociopath, snubbed his nose at John Lewis, refusing to view Lewis’s body as it lay in state, skipping the funeral at which three former presidents spoke, then, during the interview with Jonathan Swan, refusing to grant Lewis his due, unable even to guess at Lewis’s place in American history. Trump claimed he couldn’t remember meeting John Lewis. The wounded little boy inside Trump was miffed because Lewis didn’t attend Trump’s inauguration, nor did Lewis attend one of Trump’s magnificent State of the Union addresses. Mr. Lewis used his time on earth wisely; he didn’t waste it on insignificant men.
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Do black Americans know that Donald Trump has done more for them than any president since Abraham Lincoln?
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Lebanon, long suffering Lebanon, pawn in the geopolitical game the big powers and Israel play with and against one another. Target of aerial bombardment with American ordnance. Less a country than a place adrift. Government corrupt, dysfunctional, with no capacity to govern, regulate or adjudicate anything. A place dependent on imported food and its main port totally destroyed. How many tons of grain were destroyed in the explosion? The hospitals weren’t great to begin with and are quickly overwhelmed with casualties. The blast was felt for miles. The sky raining shards of glass and debris. Lebanon, landing spot for thousands of Syrian war refugees. Lebanon, casualty of war from without and within. The death toll will no doubt grow as the days pass and the humanitarian crisis intensifies. Think of the human needs and the difficulty in meeting them: food, clean water, working sewage systems to prevent outbreaks of disease, electricity, shelter for thousands of human beings, medical care. How will people cope? Once again, Lebanon is faced with the daunting challenge of rebuilding.
Robert Fisk, the author and journalist who lives in Beirut, wrote the following for the Independent (UK): “We all know the context, of course, the all-important “background” without which no suffering is complete: a bankrupt country which has been owned for generations by venal old families, crushed by its neighbours, the rich enslaving the poor, its society maintained by the very sectarianism which is destroying it.”
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