Oct. 17, 2024
I recently retired from Northwestern University where I was a journalism prof. I get to campus regularly and find myself talking with students and becoming acquainted with the priorities of young people; some engaged in campaigns. Many more are turned off to politics.Thursday, October 17, 2024
Will young people vote?: A college query
Thursday, September 5, 2024
Kamala Harris Campaign Anthem: Never Going Back Again
Trump broke down and let chaos in
We could see what he had done
Been down with Trump one time
Been down two time
We're never going back again
[guitar solo]
You gotta know what it means to win
So get down, vote and then
Took down Trump one time
Will take down Trump two time
Yah
Took down Trump one time
Will take down Trump two time
And there won’t be three time
We're never going back again
Yah
Written and played by Lindsey Buckingham/Fleetwood Mac
With deep thanks
Watch and listen to his virtuoso version here - https://lnkd.in/gWsmYmR7
Anthem words by Jack Doppelt
Thursday, August 29, 2024
Update: Sarah Palin and The New York Times to go at it again
Neither we nor the New York Times has seen the public passing of Sarah Palin. We may have thought we had in Nov. 2022 when she lost an election bid for Congress in Alaska under a pathfinding ranked choice voting system, depicted in the new documentary, Majority Rules. Not so fast. Her potential blockbuster libel suit, that I wrote about 1-1/2 years ago before it was dismissed, is back. A federal appeals court, in a 56-page decision, remanded the case for re-trial.
Click here to read the NYT story |
The New York Times has a way out of its lawsuit with Sarah Palin. Throw the case.
Originally published on Feb. 8, 2023
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
Resistance: Who Am I?
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Over the years, when discussions among friends have turned to what would you do at times of challenge and controversy, such as a Trump presidency, the recourse has been one of frustration. Move to Canada. Have your passport current and ready.
It is conceivable, if not likelier than not, that Trump will become president again. From all indications, if that comes to pass, his presidency will be more dire, draconian and autocratic than fathomable. Read his lips. His words, as documented by Axios:
• "Defund any school with a vaccine or mask mandate." • Impose the "largest domestic deportation operation."
• "Protect innocent life."
• "Investigate every radical out of control prosecutor."
• Reimpose the "Trump travel ban."
• End the "insane electric vehicle mandate."
• Initiate "ideological screening on all immigrants."
• Ensure "immunity for our law enforcement"
• "Obliterate the deep state."
He has pledged each of those measures, at least 5 times or more, again according to Axios.
Or watch a handful of videos:
- Trump on immigrants and deportations
- Trump on climate change
- Trump on Ukraine and NATO
- Trump on Project 2025
Project 2025, the transition report blueprint for Trump’s presidency that is spearheaded by The Heritage Foundation, as summarized by the Washington Post, would:
“Remake the federal workforce to be political: Instead of nonpartisan civil servants implementing policies on everything including health, education and climate, the executive branch would be filled with Trump loyalists…Give Trump power to investigate his opponents: Project 2025 would move the Justice Department, and all of its law enforcement arms like the FBI, directly under presidential control….Crack down on even legal immigration: It would create a new ‘border patrol and immigration agency’ to resurrect Trump’s border wall, build camps to detain children and families at the border, and send out the military to deport millions of people who are already in the country illegally (including dreamers)….Slash climate change protections: Project 2025 calls for getting rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which forecasts weather and tracks climate change, describing it as ‘one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.’”
Trump is distancing himself from the frightful specifics of Project 2025. He’s no dummy demagogue. Fascism for the people and the power of positive bullying go hand in hand with bluster mitigated by practiced denial and buoyed by drumbeats of propaganda.
The Post’s summary tries to comfort the easily distracted public by noting that “some of these ideas are impractical or possibly illegal. Analysts are divided about whether Trump can politicize the civil workforce to fire them at will. And the plan calls for using the military to carry out mass deportations on a historic scale, which could be constitutionally iffy.”
That is not how dictatorships work when the judiciary has already been coopted, and Republican voters, public officials and media platforms have fallen under a toxic spell. Trump is a master dogwhistler and MAGA supporters are obedient, angry companions. It is ironclad.
Remember the titan. Trump got the votes of more than 62 million people when he defeated Hillary Clinton for president in 2016; he got more than 74 million votes when he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.
Instead of shaking our heads in wonderment at how a deranged demagogue could have the support of millions and millions of Americans, do some basic math in assessing your fellow Americans.
Among us are segregationists whose response to the end of slavery during the end of the 19th century and most of the 20th century was to impose Jim Crow laws and fight civil rights legislation and protests with seething anger, fists in the air and bulldogs.
Count off the isolationists and Nazi sympathizers during the 1930s and World War II who linked arms to foment anti-Semitism.
Add in the anti-Communists of the 1950s and ‘60s who were the thought police of that era. They cancelled culture through blacklisting that got people fired and rendered them unemployable.
Don’t forget the White and Christian nationalists who use immigrant-phobia to keep the country from slipping into the clutches of the other.
Toss in the anti-abortion activists whose beliefs and methods have spilled over to instill fear in women and doctors who aren’t even contemplating abortion.
Hail to Huey Long, Bull Connor and Lester Maddox, hail to Charles Lindbergh and Father Charles Coughlan, hail to Joe McCarthy and hail to Donald Trump. Leaders with bullhorns and bully pulpits matter.
So do the offspring of ardent segregationists, isolationists, Nazi sympathizers, anti-Communists, White and Christian nationalists, anti-abortion activists. Take out a ledger. Subtract the many, many offspring who have disassociated from their parents and their beliefs. On the other side of the ledger, account for the biblical fruitfulness and multiplication that has repopulated each generation with revitalized venom.
If you did some simple addition allowing for overlap in the millions and margins of error, you’d still have 50 million + people who constitute the willing followers of Fascism Trump-style. It is intoxicating.
Trump is not a stand-alone nemesis. His legions are legion. They have a push-pull relationship and they mean business.
As Project 2025 sets out in its opening paragraph [emphasis theirs]:
“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.”
Project 2025 is driven by a 180-day playbook. Whether it’s Trump’s agenda or Project 2025’s playbook or a marriage made in heaven forbid, there’s work to do over the next four months to defeat Donald Trump.
There’s also work to do to organize for the resistance if he were to win. I’m not moving to Canada, as fond as I am of the place.
So what to do and how to go about it?
As a Jew whose grandparents were slaughtered in a Nazi concentration camp, I’m sensitive to the direct consequences of the demonization of the other and to the Righteous role models whose selfless sacrifices in resistance saved Jews from capture and death.
If peaceful protesters are arrested, would I and others join in to swell the ranks to make arrests less feasible? If immigrants are rounded up for deportation, would I and others hide people in our homes? Would I and others seek out churches, synagogues and mosques for sanctuaries, solidarity and moral guidance? Do undergrounds form organically?
I’m in uncharted territory here.
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Tuesday, April 16, 2024
Preparing the 2024 Haggadah is not the dilemma I feared
Joanna Chen |
Friday, March 8, 2024
Changing the immigrant narrative: A State of the Union postscript
March 8, 2024
Well into President Biden’s State of the Union address, Biden displayed a pin that referred to Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at Augusta University who was brutally killed a few weeks ago. Biden’s remarks were off the cuff, not part of the official transcript, and prompted by Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, donned in a red MAGA cap, who goaded him from the chamber after buttonholing him as he entered.
Say her name,” Greene heckled. Her stalking worked. Biden took the bait and got hooked.
Typically little is known about the person accused of crimes for weeks after an arrest until the news media researches the hell out of the person’s background. Here too, what was shared by authorities was the accused’s name - Jose Antonio Ibarra. He lived in an apartment near the Augusta campus, he was caught on video, he’s 26, he didn’t know the victim, he’s from Venezuela, he doesn’t have an “extensive criminal history,” he’s not a U.S. citizen, though authorities didn’t know his immigration status. In the initial reports, the incident was likened to a 2023 rape and killing of a 34-year-old woman, who like Riley had been running on campus (at the University of Memphis). The accused suspect was identified, had been charged in Sept. 2021 with raping another woman, and had served 20 years in prison for kidnapping a prominent Memphis attorney in 2000 when he was 16 years old. He was not an immigrant.
Diego Ibarra A few lines after his exchange with Greene, Biden returned to his script. Referring to Trump only as his predecessor, Biden pledged, "I will not demonize immigrants, saying they are poisoning the blood of our country," referring to Trump’s many anti-immigrant vulgarities, including: “It’s true. They’re destroying the blood of our country,” which he said recently live on Fox News while campaigning in Waterloo, Iowa. |
Biden engaged in a feisty, rehearsed challenge to the Republican side of the aisle to act on what he termed a bipartisan border security approach that collapsed last month after Trump told his congressional minions to kill the deal.
As Republicans started to boo and groan, Biden regained his mojo, “Oh you don’t like that bill, huh? That conservatives got together and said was a good bill? I’ll be darned,” he said and cited the proposal’s supporters, including the Border Patrol union and the Chamber of Commerce. “Unfortunately, politics has derailed this bill so far.”
As all too many polls are showing, immigration matters. It’s become the third rail of politics and it’s derailing anything and anyone who goes near. For the Republicans, they claim Trump means “illegal” immigrants are the blood poisoners. Thanks for clearing that up.
For the Democrats and the left, they cringe at the term “illegal.” Many were vocally critical of Biden for using the term in his speech.
“As a proud immigrant, I’m extremely disappointed to hear President Biden use the word ‘illegal,’”said Cong. Chuy García of Illinois.
Cong. Pramila Jayapal, chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said to an Associated Press reporter that she wished “he hadn’t engaged with Marjorie Taylor Greene and used the word illegal.” Cong. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, told the Texas Tribune that it was “dangerous rhetoric.”
Cong. Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the House, told CNN that Biden “should have said undocumented, but that’s not a big thing.” She added, “We usually say undocumented, he said illegal, I don’t think it’s a big deal.” To others, glaringly big.
Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, similarly criticized Biden, saying he “parroted dehumanizing Republican rhetoric about immigrants.”
“We were shocked to hear the president echo the words of anti-immigrant extremists,” the National Immigrant Justice Center said in a statement. “Manipulating a personal tragedy for political gain in this way is dangerous. Conflating immigration status with criminality is racist and dehumanizing.”
That’s the Republican-MAGA narrative on immigration and immigrants. It’s vicious, dangerous, divisive, and Trumped-up. The Laken Riley-Jose Antonio Ibarra saga is their gift that will keep on giving.
It’s often said that in politics, it’s not facts that matter, it’s how the public feels. More on point, it’s how people are told to feel. It’s in the messaging.
The right - from Fox News to MAGA to Trump - have conjured a pet phrase for the duration of the campaign. “Migrant crime.”
An analysis in The Washington Post - The birth of Fox News’s ‘migrant crime’ obsession – captured the phenomenon a week ago. “Over the past month, Fox News hosts, guests and video clips have mentioned ‘migrant crime’ nearly 90 times, more than half of those in the past 10 days,” the story cited. “Trump quickly picked up on the idea. Speaking at a National Rifle Association conference earlier this month, he used the term explicitly. “We call it migrant crime,” he said. “It’s unbelievable what’s going on. And now for the first time, you’re seeing migrant crime. These are tough people.”
“MIGRANT CRIME IS TAKING OVER AMERICA…” Trump said in a video that has attracted more than 20,000 likes on Truth Social. He suggested that Biden had allowed an “invasion of our country,” and “into American communities to prey on our people.” And ultimately full circle to the gift that will keep on giving. He alleged that a “Biden migrant” had committed a murder in Georgia after “Crooked Joe” ordered the immigrant to be released. Cue Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Is there a counter-message? Democrats and the left need to change the immigration narrative. The message and the reality is that the U.S. needs immigrants as workers. I’m naïve, but not so naïve to think it can be deployed during the campaign. Still, it’s to where the national conversation needs to shift. OK, what national conversation? Then call it messaging, talking points, whatever floats your political boat.
For starters, listen to Cong. Delia Ramirez, a progressive Illinois Democrat’s take on Biden’s State of the Union address, She told TIME after the address that she wanted to hear Biden emphasize how immigrants are crucial to the American workforce instead of touting a bipartisan bill that would have added restrictions on immigration. “Democrats, in some cases, we are sounding just like the other side,” she said. “What we heard tonight wasn't very different from what we’ve heard from the other side. And I wish I would have heard him with more conviction say no human being is illegal.”
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Wednesday, January 31, 2024
A dying Cub fan’s last bequest
By Margie Schaps and Jack Doppelt January 31, 2024
We may be daft, but our bats aren’t in the belfry.
In every crevice lurked wads of dust, webs, droppings, whatever a loose imagination might conjure from years in a garage. Gloves on, I vacuumed everything the nozzle approached. I emptied the garbage bags. I scoured. It looked less like a prop from the Munsters. A few days later, our housekeeper took over and applied skill to elbow grease. Better yet.
Shower curtain and rubber gloves |
Janet Leigh |