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Not a single “trick or treater” showed up at our door last night. Now we’re stuck with all this candy. Sad. At the same time, The Atlantic and the NYT’s are both reporting that top Trump Administration officials, including Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth and Christie Noem, have moved into military housing, houses usually occupied by generals or admirals in the DC area, because they don’t feel safe in their own civilian neighborhoods.
Feels like Trump is a Mafia Don, and his top people are all “going to the mattresses” doesn’t it? (With thanks to Mario Puzo)
Don’t you feel some odd and perhaps unholy connectivity between parents afraid to let their kids go trick or treating, and the White House sending its top people into military housing, because they’re afraid of strangers coming to the door?
Doesn’t it feel like they’re getting ready for something? Like the increasing militarization of American cities, and they need a place to hide? With Trump taking what appear to be regular “cognitive testing” and currently out of the country for no apparent reason, don’t you wonder where all this stuff is coming from? Could it be from the mind of Stephen Miller?
Do you feel safe in your home, as the Trump Administration continues to do all it can to create an insurrection, so that they can send our troops out into our streets while our President tears down our White House?
Okay, bite into this one. KABC-TV in Los Angeles is reporting that the State of California, will be closing the I-5 Freeway for several hours today, due to live-fire exercises by the Marines at Camp Pendleton. I lived in California for more than 30 years, and have no memory of anybody closing the I-5 due to exercises at Camp Pendleton. I recall there being closures because of wildfires, but never because the Marines were opening fire with live ammo.
The I-5, The Golden State Freeway, is the main artery connecting San Diego with the rest of the state. Are we supposed to believe it’s coincidental that the Feds have called for the freeway to be closed on “No Kings Day?” Really?
Maryland state flag in front of Maryland statehouse in Annapolis
The morning of “No Kings Day” in America. I turned on the tv, expecting to see something related to Trump. Or the removal of Trump. Something distinctly trumpist. Instead, the Baltimore Marathon was on. More than 14,000 runners, jogging through the streets of what DJT has called “a crime disaster” and “a hellhole.” Not really, Mr. President. Not really. More like a 5K and a 10K and thousands of happy people in a City celebrating both the Marathon and the Baltimore Comic-Con.
It kinda felt like the people of Baltimore, like Marylanders, were taking a stand. Something they’ve been known to do.
It was 1814. The war of 1812 was dragging on, and the American forces had just been beaten by the British at the Battle of North Point. It was a loss for the Americans, but it did serve to delay the British forces long enough for American troops, and volunteer Marylanders, to set up a defense system.
What happened at Fort McHenry, is the stuff of legend. A relative handful of Americans holding off the British Navy. It was an inspiration for Francis Scott Key, who penned what would become our National Anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, as he watched “bombs bursting in air.”
But there was more to it, much more, as Marylanders, many of whom had gathered in what is now Patterson Park, dug in along a three mile line, from the outer harbor in Canton out to Belair Road. They were anticipating the possibility that the defenses at Fort McHenry, might not hold. In effect, the Marylanders were saying, “This far and no farther.”
It was a not to be forgotten act of bravery in a country still in its infancy. And now, more than 200 years later, Maryland, was doing it again. After a fashion, at least. And they were doing it with a Marathon.
This time, there was no line of armed locals awaiting the arrival of the one of the most feared armies in the world. This time, there were thousands of people taking to the streets to celebrate their city and state, despite a President, who had called out their home for being “a crime disaster.”
This time it was a figurative rather than a literal stand, against a delusional President with designs on being a king. The first American king. A man who is sending American troops out onto American streets with no need to do so, other than to create a false impression through a fake insurrection, opening the door for his seizure of our Constitutional Democracy.
Today, no troops were visible on the streets of Baltimore. None were needed. Trump’s fake emergency in what he calls a “hellhole” wasn’t happening. Instead there were thousands of runners and spectators proving him wrong.
Maryland, the State where the country’s original Washington Monument still stands in the heart of Baltimore, had already taken a stand against one king. Now, you might say, they were taking a stand against another. And they were doing it on “No Kings Day.”
Call it happenstance, fate or something else, it all dovetailed together quite nicely, feeling like it was exactly as it was supposed to be. A voice from the past, with a message for the future perhaps? No Kings in America. Not now. Not ever.
SURPRISED to see CBS Sunday Morning doing a short piece about how DJT’s attack on Kimmel and the media in general is jeopardizing the future of free speech in America.
Did the sale go through, or is Shari Redstone on the phone right now, firing people?
Okay, the sale was approved by the FCC in July, so no big deal. I guess. I’m having a very hard time following events in our new world of chaos created by big daddy Trump. Papa Doc, keeps popping into my head.
All of it leaves me mad as hell and exhausted. This is not how I planned on spending my golden years, watching the deconstruction of our free society. The massive amount of ignorance out there may be the hardest part. I try and assuage my feelings with the knowledge that a great many of my fellow citizens were duped by algorithms coming from computer labs somewhere deep in Siberia.
By my way of thinking, the late night talk show hosts that are being bumped off the air are far more than comedians. They’re filling a void created by the loss of columnists due to the death of the American newspaper industry. As such, they are providing a valuable service as the media landscape continues shifting from print to cyber.
In that light, aren’t Kimmel and Colbert as much journalists as Mencken or Breslin? Aren’t they generally truthful in their presentations and due all the same First Amendment protections normally extended to newspapers? Won’t the giant media conglomerates refusal to fight for free speech rights only lead to demands that the monopolies, 6 of which control 90% of the American media, need to be broken up? Didn’t “merger madness” get us here, and isn’t it time to begin the push for a new wave of trust busting, leading to an increased number of media jobs from more and not fewer companies providing a broader spectrum of news and information?
Shouldn’t the 6 American media monopolies be as concerned with protecting the Constitution as they are with protecting their bottom lines?
Oh sure, it’ll take a while, but won’t the worm eventually turn?
So they’ve taken Jimmy Kimmel off the air while Donald is in England, taking carriage rides, dining with the Royals and cutting business deals – and some or maybe many on the left are going a little nuts about it all.
Okay, it is what it is. That being the case, something occurred to me. The Democratic Party is to blame. For all of it.
If only the Dems had effectively controlled immigration, at least made a move to lock down consumer prices, particularly at grocery stores, and then put up a candidate that was electable, they probably would have won. Trump, would have lost, and we wouldn’t be wondering if what we’re experiencing can legitimately be compared to Germany in the 1930s.
So blame the Democrats. They blew it. Big time. And stop saying they tried to control immigration but were stopped by the Republicans. Trump did it, and they could have too, but they failed. And here we now are.
If you’re a Democrat, it might be time for you to think about what will be necessary to win the next election(s) as opposed to being as PC as you possibly can. It isn’t working.
In the U.S., Americans struggle to pay ever-increasing grocery prices while long established vaccine science is being undercut in Washington by supporters of Donald Trump.
Overseas, the death count continues to rise as Israel bombs the hell out of Gaza with almost daily charges of U.S. supported genocide being raised. In Europe, Putin continues murdering civilians in Ukraine, threatening the NATO alliance by sending drones into Poland and Romania.
At the same time, not all that far away, the alleged leader of the free world, a known associate of Jeffrey Epstein, is taking an ass-kisssing carriage ride with a royal guard leading to the steps of Windsor Castle, before attending a formal dinner with the King of England.
How long can this be sustained? Where the hell is the Republican congress? Bought, paid for and cowering in fear? Who will stand up to this madness?
Headline in today’s WaPo – “What’s really going on in DC? What you see depends on who’s filming.”
ALMOST NOBODY USES FILM ANYMORE. NOBODY. The ignorance, the ignorance. Words matter. Or at least they should. They used to.
Caps are now hats. Digital video, is film. Lecterns are podiums. Up is down and down is up. Ignorance is celebrated and intellectual pursuits are just another form of elitism to be berated and shunned.
When everybody is a “Multi-media journalist,” doing three or four jobs, is there anybody left with enough time to do real Journalism? What the hell, nobody reads much of anything anymore, anyway.
Another WaPo headline this AM – “[Pentagon plans military deployment in Chicago as Trump eyes crackdown](https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/trump-chicago…/)” Oh really? Is this WaPo “exclusive” actually happening or is it just clickbait? What isn’t going through the demented brain of DJT? Did they get any real corroboration or is this just something somebody heard in the hallway?
The reporting could be valid, but in this age of clickbait with some of the best reporters abandoning formerly great newspapers after they are bought out by billionaires who appear to back Trump, who really knows?
If they don’t know the difference between digital video and film or a cap and a hat, what do they know?
I don’t recall the Governor of California or Illinois or Maryland or the Mayor of D.C., or anybody else in their right mind requesting a call-up of federal troops. I do know some things as fact, although like millions upon millions of other Americans I am so exhausted, so burned out by Trump’s gaslighting, his non-stop river of BS, that at times I doubt my own mental acuity.
We’re all being sucked into a giant black hole. Or so it feels. Or maybe Trump is going to militarize/federalize all of America? Not that he just wants to or is thinking about it, but that he is in the process of doing it. Right now. Shouldn’t that be the headline?
“TRUMP HATCHES HITLERIAN PLOT TO FILL AMERICA’S STREETS WITH SOLDIERS” Too strong? Too real for a country remaining largely in denial?
What was it that the great Sinclair Lewis wrote back in 1935? “It Can’t Happen Here?”
Every day it’s the same. Netanyahu, turns Gaza to dust, with the apparent intention of leaving nothing alive. Putin bombards Ukraine, slaughtering thousands of innocents, kidnapping any children that happen to be left alive.
In the U.S., gun violence remains the leading cause of death among children and teens while Trump, sucks his thumb and orders more gold leaf for the Oval, calling in federal troops to attack the effect while ignoring the cause.
Tyranny, it would seem, thrives on chaos. Like two meaningless summits followed by the FBI raiding the private home of John Bolton, in Bethesda, on the same day the Dept. of Justice is releasing at least some of the Epstein files to the House Oversight Committee. Fascinating.
It’s been said that if you frighten people enough, they’ll let you do almost anything. First though, you”ll have to muzzle the legitimate press – or at least convince most of the people that legitimate journalism is really fake news while blowing so much smoke that nobody can remember what you were up to just a couple of days ago.
Epstein, who? Remember him? The guy who allegedly hanged himself in a federal prison cell while the guards were taking a break and the camera mysteriously broke down, akin to the 18 minute gap in Nixon’s Watergate tapes. Remember Rose Mary Woods and the 18 minute gap? We’ve seen this one before. But Richard Nixon wasn’t even close to Trump, when it comes to the art of filling the air with smoke.
In Moscow, Putin smiles, confident his useful idiot continues to abide by his will. But what is this hold Putin has on Trump? What can it be that is so powerful that it continues to force the President of the United States to serve as a lackey to a Russian dictator? Surely the President being so seriously co-opted is a security risk to the country and the world that cannot be ignored?
And yet, here we are.
Peace, is increasingly unthinkable. We are monkeys with guns, giving some of the worst among us the power to create our reality.
Even most of the European Union, including two nuclear-armed nations, arriving at our front door on only a moment’s notice, feels like a meaningless gesture. The message they bring is critical. It is pointed. It is a message of life or death. But there is no one there to receive it.
Every day begins with the same horrible hopeless feeling, as though we are without leaders. Leaving nothing but madness, only a kind of self imposed malignancy guiding our path while our immoral national compass is exposed by South Park.
Just read that Kodak may be going out of business. Frankly, I wasn’t sure they were still in business. That said, it’s difficult for me to imagine a world without Kodak.
Trump’s co-opting the Kennedy Center Awards, is also making the rounds. Increasingly, he seems to be acting on whatever pops into his head, no matter how silly it might be. Like the notion that he has anything resembling an appreciation for the arts. Apart from fake gold leaf and the Village People.
Trump is pledging that his new and improved Kennedy Center Honors, will be devoid of “wokeism.” Well, thank God for that. And all the while I was under the impression that the concept of “wokeism” was nothing but another invention of the far-right. Along with the ever-present threat of “Antifa.” Presumably a gang of drooling octogenarians, armed with scowls and slander.
Hope Donald doesn’t trade away Canada for a luxury yacht – for the Navy, of course. Something that would go with his new luxury 747 (for the Air Force).
Despite being in the limelight 7/24, Trump appears to be starved for attention, like a 6 year old tugging at his mother’s skirt. Maybe he’ll stop by for a visit with Sarah Palin, while he’s up in the great white north. She can see Russia from her back porch, you know.
Seeing things. It’s a Republican gift. Remember that old movie, “The President’s Analyst” starring James Coburn? Might not be too far from the truth. Might be something the Surgeon General should be looking into?
Don’t like the Labor Deptartment stats? Fire the statistician. Don’t like the path of a hurricane? Get out your magic marker and draw a new one.
Are the wheels about to come off? Is it being adequately reported? Does it even matter, if so many have tuned out and stopped reading? Other than something that only reinforces their built-in bias?
Or perhaps, they’re all just that much smarter than we are, Trump and his acolytes, I mean. Perhaps our best move, those of us in the media, academics and other evil intellectuals, would be to just back off and follow the lead of this stable genius God has delivered unto us, at this, our hour of need.
The celebration of mediocrity and ignorance isn’t such a bad thing, if you happen to be mediocre and stupid.
Maybe Donald Trump will emerge from the Alaska summit with a great new deal for us all. One that ends the war in Ukraine and convinces Vladimir Putin, that peace is a far better option than war, convincing him to withdraw from his recently conquered territories, while we gather together and await the Rapture while enjoying the benefits of our new Trumpist economy enveloped by the stench of neo-feudalism, wrapped in the flag and carrying a bible.
Increasingly, I find I am being driven back to a couple of locals for tv news. KTLA is good. So are WPXI and KDKA, in Pittsburgh. Just today, I found myself installing KABC, Los Angeles.
I was watching Al Jazeera, for its extensive coverage of the Middle East, but it has now become nearly all-Gaza, almost all the time. Which probably makes sense, given the channels location and the scope of the atrocity, the absolutely unspeakable slaughter that’s taking place there. That said, I need a little more variety in the coverage of world events.
Eurovision, was also a pretty good option, until they left reality for what appears to be AI generated programming. If I’m wrong, then my apologies, but it sure sounds like AI. Whatever it is, it isn’t working. Neither are the novice anchors France24 is using, most of them being nowhere near ready for a prime time debut on an international stage.
With the great newspapers and the network news operations dying off, locals may be our broadcasts of last resort? And if they eventually die off, we’ll have nothing left but the “get what you want and not what you need” Internet. For me, PBS, has always been a little dry. With or without federal funding.
It’s happening much faster than I thought it would. Kinda like Trump establishing his oligarchy. Or should I say, dictatorship? As the free press takes a dive, tyranny goes for a ride. In a big convertible with the top down. Never thought I’d see this in our time.
How ironic it will be, if we are left with local tv news as our broadcasts of last resort, with all else having been either bought off and shut down or completely corrupted by soulless predatory capitalism spearheaded by a foreign oligarch. God help us if the Associated Press goes away. If it does, we’ll be left with nothing but local news, which will be better than nothing, but far less than what we need.
The BBC and SkyNews will still be out there, probably. It’s difficult for me to imagine those two British institutions replacing the once mighty CBS, NBC and ABC networks. It is though a thread of hope to cling to, I suppose.
If Wikipedia, and a couple of other sources have it right, Warner Brothers, moved from their original lot on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, over to their current location in Burbank, in 1928, one year after making the first “talkie” The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson, on the old lot back on Sunset, my home away from home at KTLA for more than twenty years.
After Warner Bros. left the lot, it was eventually purchased by the “Singing Cowboy,” Gene Autry, who established “Golden West Broadcasters.” KTLA, was a part of that. Autry, eventually sold Golden West to an arbitrage company who in turn sold the company to Tribune, as in “The Chicago Tribune,” headquartered in Chicago. They owned the place, or were in negotiations to buy the company, when I was hired by KTLA, circa 1986.
The timing now strikes me, as I grow older and realize that Warner Bros. move to Burbank happened only twenty years after I was born, not even the blink of an eye in the cosmic scale of things. Beyond that, legend has it that the brothers were in Pittsburgh, prior to their move to California. It was there, in the Burgh, that they interfaced with my wife’s family in East McKeesport. One of my wife’s ancestors, it is said, made a loan to the Warners, enabling them to make the trip to Los Angeles. I have no idea if it’s true, but it’s a good story.
So, it was with six degrees of separation knocking around in my head, when KTLA sent me over to the Burbank Studios, to cover the birth of the “WB,” or the “Warner Brothers Network,” on television. Majority ownership would be divided, with Warner owning 64% and my employer, The Tribune Company (KTLA), owning 25%.
It turned out, that the CEO of Tribune Broadcasting and Exec. VP of the Tribune Company at the time, was Jim Dowdle, the former general sales manager at KSTP in Minneapolis, back when I was there working at my first job in commercial broadcasting, from 1968 to 1973. I remembered Dowdle, and he remembered me, so you can imagine how the six degrees thing was bouncing around in my head as I escorted him out onto the lawn in front of the executive bungalows at Warner Brothers, for an interview about the creation of the new WB Network.
To Jim Dowdle’s credit, he made no attempt to control the interview in any way, despite his powerful role with the company that employed me. Pretty sure that not every executive would have done that. But Dowdle, did. He left it alone and answered all my questions.
Some years before the birth of the WB, my maternal grandfather, Herb Stinton, had bumped into Dowdle, at a lunch counter down in St. Petersburg, Florida. Chance meeting that it was, I continue to be amazed that it happened at all, one of the most powerful figures in the history of the Tribune Company sitting next to a retired small town depot agent for the Soo Line Railroad up in Minnesota, sharing quips over coffee at a lunch counter. I assign no meaning to it, other than sheer happenstance. Not unlike my wife’s ancestors making a loan to the Warner Brothers. If that in fact, ever really happened. If you keep moving around enough, you’re bound to keep bumping into some of the same people, I suppose.
Jim Dowdle, remembered among other things as the man who brought Harry Cary to the Cub’s broadcasting booth, died in 1999. May he rest in peace.
It feels more and more like we’re falling backwards into an Orwellian nightmare. A bad dream of such complexity, with so many hi-tech moving parts, that we can’t adequately grasp what’s happening. But it’s definitely there. It’s our new American Collective, and it’s far more than those of us on the Internet being profiled by marketers who want to sell us piles of junk.
All those profiles, some of them drilling deep into who we are, will eventually be pulled together into one massive data bank with the ability to better contain and control us. At the same time, newspapers have been going out of business, with the latest attack against a free press aimed at the Wall Street Journal, for an expose of Donald Trump.
Hopefully, Murdoch and the Journal won’t follow in Shari Redstone’s footsteps, with Paramount’s $16 million dollar payout to DJT’s protection racket. It was the utter castration of a once proud network news operation, with Paramount’s Board of Directors, wielding the scalpel.
Don’t take it personally though, it’s only business, even if it does result in our increased collective ignorance.
Politico reports that more than two-thirds of the country’s newspaper jobs have vanished since 2005. The ax is falling in newsrooms at many local tv stations as well. I know this to be a fact, as some of my friends have been victims of the corporate cost-cutting (p)urge. There is also PBS. Obviously Donald Trump and his minions want that to just go away.
Oversight, the kind provided by a free press and guaranteed by the First Amendment, can be such a pain.
And there you have a couple of fronts in the war against American Democracy, the aggregation of information about each and every one of us via the Internet, while, at the same time, traditional sources of news and information are being shut down or are going under as their traditional revenue streams leave for cyberspace, which increasingly steals the eyeballs of readers and viewers.
Absent professional Journalism, people are getting what they want, and not what they need. It’s the perfect storm for a burgeoning autocracy, all of it fitting nicely into the plans of any traditional autocrat or fascist.
Historically, killing the flow of information provided by a free press is near the top of their primary agendas when subduing a soon to be conquered people, as the oligarchs eat away at our freedoms bit by bit. So little goes with each bite, that it’s hardly noticed. Even if it is noticed, it seems relatively harmless, until you begin to add it all up.
Without a free press we are increasingly ignorant, making it increasingly difficult or even impossible to hold our elected leaders accountable, making it next to impossible to sustain a working democracy. All the while they continue collating new data on each of us. And even with all of this, we still haven’t gotten to the cameras.
It started with security cameras in retail outlets and government buildings, I guess. Then, suddenly, there were cameras at almost every intersection. Cameras, cameras, everywhere, inside and out. But who’s complaining? It was all about keeping us safe, right? It was cost-effective too, using cameras instead of people to keep an eye on things.
That’s what I was thinking as I recently installed our new video doorbell. Something I was prompted to do after that recent home invasion robbery and double murder back in Encino. A video doorbell, only seemed to make good sense. And it works very well, I must say, giving us a running record of everyone who comes to the door, and more. With AI, it remembers faces and cars. Amazing, no? Well, it’s amazing to me. I can remember when we had just one wired phone and it was on a “party line” back in rural Minnesota.
This new era of extreme audio and video coverage is both wonderful and dangerous, as eventually some new “collective” will have gathered not only digital personal profiles on us all, they will have also patched all the cameras together, keeping tabs not just on every damn thing we’ve done, but whatever we happen to be doing at any given moment.
Even now, privacy is a distant memory for those of us old enough to remember what it was.
Live and in color, the collective will be watching and listening. It’s more than something Orwell dreamed up, it’s our new reality, and it’s probably more akin to the Hitler Youth Movement keeping an eye on everything that happened in the neighborhood. That one really snuck up on the Germans, didn’t it?
But in the here and now, nobody seems to be all that worried about it. The big digital information gathering and traditional press killing picture, I mean. Even while Donald J. Trump, files his most recent lawsuit against the press, attempting to discourage and contain allegations of who really knows what with regard to his former good buddy Jeffrey Epstein? If only the government would release all the files, not just from the grand jury, but the complete FBI investigation. Suppose Pam Bondi, will ever do that? Without being ordered to by Trump, I mean.
Again, oversight can be such a pain. All those reporters poking around, with no agenda other than digging out the truth. We can’t have that. Oh, hell no. What we can have is a new collective, armed with our personal profiles while video and audio coverage of our each and every move increases daily, with the installation of each new camera.
Driven by fear, under the banner of “I have seen the enemy and he is us,” we could very well be assisting in the destruction of our free society, as the free press dies and our democratic institutions are torn to pieces while we the people install cameras, both inside and outside our homes, all of them standing by for some massive all in one AI hookup.
Welcome to the new collective, comrade. And please remember, when our free press is gone, our freedom will be going with it. Now that’ll be a real deep state. And they’ll have it all, each and every painful moment of it, on camera.
