We knew there was going to be violence, didn’t we. I mean, the threat of violence has been a constant theme in the MAGAverse. Just a few days ago, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, announced, “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Hell, Trump his ownself, during the George Floyd protests, asked his Sec. of Defense, “Can’t you just shoot them?Just shoot them in the legs or something?”
Of course there was going to be violence. We just didn’t expect the violence would be directed at Trump. It’s always been MAGA that’s been doing the threatening. They’re the ones with all the guns. Democrats and the left have all been threatening to…you know, vote. We’ve been threatening to…you know, hold criminal investigations and give Trump and his MAGA fuckwits a chance to defend themselves in court. We’ve been threatening them with the Constitution of the United States. Or the tattered shreds of the Constitution after SCOTUS ripped it up.
And MAGA? This is their approach:
A pickup tailgate with the image of a kidnapped President Biden.
We post images of Trump in an orange jumpsuit on social media. They celebrate the imagined kidnapping of Joe Biden. And let’s not forget, just four years ago 13 men were arrested by the FBI and charged in a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and ‘try’ her for the crime of…you know, implementing Covid public health restrictions.
But the MAGAverse is trying, once again, to turn reality on its head. Here’s one of the headlines in the morning’s Washington Post.
Trump allies immediately blame Biden, Democrats for their rhetoric
There are LOTS of examples of GOP politicians and supporters blaming Democrats. I’ll just mention one. Senator Tim Scott, once a hopeful VP candidate, said “This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.” Scott ignores the fact that Trump actually IS a threat to democracy.
At this point, we know very little about what happened yesterday. We know the shooter was a 20-year-old registered Republican armed with an AR-15 style rifle. That’s about it; that’s about all we actually know at the moment. We’ll know more by the end of the day. We’ll also be inundated by a cascade of conspiracy theories, misinformation, disinformation, and outright bullshit. It’ll be hard to separate what we know from the bullshit. Hell, a lot of folks won’t even try to separate it. MAGA won’t.
But we can count on this: Democrats and folks on the left will be held to a higher standard of behavior than Republicans and other MAGA fuckwits.
I used to pay a lot of attention to photography. Not just the practice of photography (you know, shooting photos and all that), but photography as a craft and art form. Then, for a lot of reasons, I stopped doing that. For a few years, I just wasn’t interested in photography. I shot occasional photos with my cellphone and that was enough. But a few months ago I picked up one of my old cameras and…hey, guess what. My interest in photography was resurrected.
I started thinking about photography again. I started reading articles about photography again, and studying other photographers again. In doing so, I came across an article that suggested looking at your old photos as if they were made by a different person. I’ve never really bothered to look at my old photos. I saw them when I took them and again when I processed them; why look again? But I thought, “Well, what the hell, I might as well try that.” And I did. I picked an old photo and studied it (and wrote about it here). Now I’m doing it again.
Here’s a thing I learned the last time I did this: looking at old photos–and I mean actively looking at them, not just thumbing through them quickly–is weird. It’s sort of dissociative. At least it is for me. It turns out there’s two or three things going on at the same time. You 1) look at the photo as a photo, an object in its own right. But you also 2) consider what was happening in the world around you when you shot that photo. And 3) you remember why you shot the photo.
6:59 PM, Sunday, August 7, 2011
This photo was shot on a Sunday evening, at 6:59 PM on the 7th of August, 2011. It was shot at a hospice facility for veterans, where my brother Jesse Eugene was dying from pancreatic cancer. I visited him almost daily during his stay. On that particular day, I’d wheeled his bony ass out to this small enclosed porch so he could look at some trees and feel some sunshine. He stayed in his wheelchair, I sat on the bench. We didn’t talk much. I think the trees and sunshine meant more to me than to him. He may have been humoring me when I suggested visiting the porch. We were only out there a short time before he said he was tired and wanted to return to his room.
I remember wanting to shoot his photo while we were out there; the light was amazing. But he looked awful–the cancer had pretty much ravaged him–and I knew he wouldn’t want his photo taken like that. After I got him back in his bed and comfortable, I scurried back to the porch and took this photo, catching the last little bits of that delicious sunlight.
He died a few days later. This may have been the last time he left his hospice room. I think it was. It’s possible somebody else might have wheeled him out to that porch, but I don’t think so. At the time, it never occurred to me that he might never get to sit in the sunlight again.
Here’s a weird thing. I knew he was dying, but I can’t remember ever thinking something like, “This will be the last time he ever eats black-eyed peas” or “He’ll never get to hear this song again.” I take that back; I vividly recall bringing his dog to visit, knowing it would be the last time he got to hold and hug his little buddy. That was pretty crushing. But that was unusual; mostly I always thought there’ll be at least one more day. But, of course, eventually there wasn’t.
Here’s another weird thing–an uncomfortable weird thing. There’s a selfish part of me that wants this to have been taken on the last day Jesse Eugene sat in sunshine. Why? Because it would give the photo more emotional weight. That complicates my thoughts about this photograph. I have to wonder if my memory is reliable. It’s entirely possible I’m remembering this as the last time my brother sat in sunlight because I want to remember it that way.
Without all that context, I think it’s a pretty good photo. The light is sweet, that yellow bench is an absolute treat, the hint of flowers in the left of the frame is a nice touch. The last rays of sunlight give the photo a sentimental quality that, I hope, isn’t entirely sappy.
I’m still uncomfortable with this idea of examining an old photo of mine, but I’m willing to consider there may be some value in it. I’ll probably do it again in a month or so.
We’re living through the early stages of a climate change nightmare right now. Persistent heat domes with dangerously high temperatures, torrential rainstorms, exceptionally powerful hurricanes forming earlier than usual, drought-based wildfires whipped into firestorms by freakishly high winds, stronger than usual tornadoes that stay on the ground longer, thousand-year floods every couple of years leading to dams collapsing.
Because of the exceptional rainstorms, the Des Moines River is currently 20-22 feet higher than normal–not quite at actual flood levels (which, I believe, is 24 feet). A visit to the dam which creates Saylorville Lake yesterday was compelling. The 6000 acre lake has risen almost two feet in the last 24 hours; the spillway was releasing over 16,000 cubic feet of water every second — that’s 190% of its normal release. It was loud and furious and utterly fascinating to see.
View of the spillway from the parking area
People showed up to see it. Young people, old people, families with kids and dogs, couples, people on their own — a constant low-volume parade of people just to take a look at the chaos of the spillway. Just a few dozen at a time. Most of them would slowly approach the fence guarding the spillway, gawk a bit, gradually move closer to the release point at the bottom of the dam. The turbulent water was mostly unpredictable, and would splash people unexpectedly. Most laughed and ran away from the fence. A few got irrationally angry, as though the water had played some sort of trick on them.
The dam and the spillway
That large solid hill behind the spillway? That’s actually the dam holding back the Saylorville Lake. On other side, the water level is probably 30-35 feet higher. There’s a second, emergency spillway (not pictured in any of these photos) in the dam. The water level in the lake is expected to peak in a couple of days, and (it’s hoped) will remain a couple of feet below the emergency spillway.
Visitors on the other side of the spillway
“If you fell in there, you’d die.” I can’t tell you how many people I heard say that. They’d stand at the fence, look at the raging water cascading out of the spillway, shake their heads, and say it in an awestruck voice. They often repeated themselves. “Wouldn’t have a prayer, if you fell in there. Nothing you could do. Nothing anybody could do. Find your body somewhere downstream.”
Everybody was a photographer at the spillway
Normally, the only people you’d see at the spillway were fishing. It’s a popular fishing spot; apparently it’s one of the few places you can catch eight to ten different fish species along a single short stretch of the river. Under normal conditions, that also makes it a popular spot for birds — pelicans, cormorants, gulls and terns, eagles. I didn’t see any birds even approach the spillway yesterday. Birds have too much sense for that.
A road runs along the top of the dam.
There was something almost pagan about the experience. Not pagan in a religious sense (since ‘paganism’ is just a term early Christians applied to any pre-Christian belief system), but in the sense of common people making a sort of pilgrimage to witness, awestruck, the beauty and savagery of nature, to experience their own smallness in the world. I doubt many of the people at the spillway thought of it in those terms, but it was there. The awareness of a natural power beyond our control and our understanding.
We were only there for a half hour or so. It seemed like longer, but time gets weird in the presence of the old gods.
Editorial Note: I was informed about this fishing video that shows the spillway under ordinary conditions. You don’t have to watch the entire thing; the opening seconds will give you a sense of what it’s normally like at the spillway.
Yes, Joe Biden is old and didn’t do well in a debate. Yes, he’s lost a step (or two) and he needs his sleep. Yes, his cooperation in the genocide in Gaza is monstrous. He wasn’t my first choice in 2020–he wasn’t even in the top five on my list of candidates–but he’s been a much better and more effective president than I hoped he’d be. He’s still far from an ideal candidate.
Has there been too much emphasis on his age? Maybe. Has there been too much fuss about his debate performance? I think so, yes. Yes, but…what about the other guy?
…but this fucking guy?
Let’s not forget what Donald Trump has accomplished. In no particular order, he…
tried to block Muslims from entering the country
instituted a border policy that separated children from their families, then couldn’t find many of those children because of bureaucratic incompetence
evicted reporters who asked tough questions from the White House press briefings
hired his daughter and son-in-law, neither of whom were qualified, to work in the White House and ordered they be given security clearances they didn’t merit.
fired the FBI director for refusing to halt the investigation of his ties to Russia, then bragged about firing the FBI director to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador
unwittingly revealed highly sensitive intelligence to those same Russian diplomats IN THE OVAL OFFICE for fuck’s sake
couldn’t be bothered to take part in daily intelligence briefings and wouldn’t read most Intel reports unless they included photos
refused to release his tax returns
withdrew the US from the Paris accords to combat climate change
withdrew the US from the Joint Comprehensive Iranian nuclear deal, designed to check Iran’s fuel enrichment and uranium conversion
withdrew the US from the Trans Pacific Partnership between 12 Pacific Rim economies designed to reduce their dependence on Chinese trade
suggested the US should try to buy Greenland
reduced environmental regulations protecting the public from mercury and asbestos, and stopping coal companies from dumping toxic waste into rivers
opened millions of acres of federal lands to development and drilling
diverted US$3.8 billion of military funding to build approximately 177 miles of fencing/wall
seriously mismanaged the Covid pandemic, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands
promoted the use of an antiparasitic medicine used to treat roundworm infections as a prophylactic against the coronavirus
privately told journalist Bob Woodward that Covid was deadly while deliberately downplaying the risks and dangers in public
eliminated the White House office of pandemic response
tear-gassed hundreds of peacefully gathered protesters on Lafayette Square in order to hold a photo op of him holding a Bible in front of a church
refused to condemn Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia after MBS ordered the execution and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a US-based journalist for the Washington Post
later bragged about protecting MBS and Saudi royalty after the Khashoggi scandal
played a shit ton of golf almost exclusively at his own resorts; spent about two days of every week at one of his properties during his tenure as POTUS
tried to convince the G7 to hold a meeting at one of his golf resorts
tried to get the PGA to hold the British Open at his golf course
charged the Secret Service exorbitant rates for protective agents to stay at his golf resorts
repeatedly lied about winning golf tournaments
abandoned Kurdish allies after their help in fighting ISIS
vetoed a defense funding bill because it included renaming military bases that were named after Confederate soldiers
withdrew US troops from Syria, allowing Russian troops to occupy former US bases, which prompted Sec. of Defense James Mattis to resign in protest
refused to commit to supporting and defending NATO allies
called soldiers who died in combat losers and suckers, and refused to attend a D-Day event honoring US war dead because it was raining
banned transgender people from serving in the military
claimed the US military had no ammunition under Obama
praised military dictators and authoritarian regimes while criticizing traditional US allies
did nothing after learning Russia paid members of the Taliban a bounty for killing US Marines
publicly took Vladimir Putin’s word on Russian election interference over the analysis of the US intelligence community
held a private meeting with Putin with only a translator present, ordered translator to destroy the notes, failed to disclose the meeting, which became public through Russian news media
passed massive tax cuts for the wealthiest
claimed he should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
claimed he was offered Time’s Man of the Year but refused it
claimed he made it possible for people to say “Merry Christmas”
claimed Andrew Jackson could’ve stopped the Civil War (AJ died before the Civil War began)
thought there was an African nation called Nambia
maybe shit his pants a few times, I don’t know, I’m just saying is all
stole SCOTUS seats with the help of Mitch McConnell
called the news media the “enemy of the people”
was found liable, along with his two adult sons, for fraud and fined nearly half a billion dollars
found liable for sexual assault and defamation, fined US$ five million.
found liable for re-defamation and fined another $83 million
found liable in Trump University fraud and forced to pay $25 million in restitution to students
was required to shut down Trump Foundation after it was found to have committed fraud and misappropriated funds
was indicted for a whole lot of felonies relating to the insurrection and fraud and obstruction of justice and illegally hanging on to all manner of confidential and secret documents
was convicted of 34 felony counts by State of New York and is awaiting sentencing
gave Rush Fucking Limbaugh the Presidential medal of Freedom
gave Ed Meese, Reagan’s AG who was involved in the illegal Iran-Contra affair and resigned in disgrace after a corruption scandal, the Medal of Freedom
had a 92% staff turnover rate in the most influential positions within the executive office
thought the Virgin islands had a President
used a Sharpie to ‘correct’ a map in an absurd effort to to justify his claim that Alabama was under a hurricane threat
suggested using nuclear weapons to somehow stop a hurricane
threatened to withhold federal aid from states and cities with Democratic leaders who criticized him or failed to thank him
put Louis DeJoy in charge of the Postal Service even though DeJoy had clear conflicts of interest by being CEO of a company that did business with USPS
tried to pressure the president of Ukraine to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden
got impeached
staged an insurrection
got impeached again
refused to concede the 2020 election
refused to even attend Biden’s inauguration
ordered member of his administration NOT to comply with Congressional subpoenas
stopped holding press briefings for months at a time
suggested that wind turbines cause cancer and drive whales ‘batty’
stared directly into an eclipse like a goddamned idiot
and did a whole bunch of other awful shit that I’ve forgotten about
promises to do sparkly new awful shit in the future, especially now that he’d be free from the fear of criminal prosecution
Almost every single day of the Trump administration was a tightrope walk, waiting to see what new scandal, what new form of corruption, what inevitable act of incompetence, what unanticipated moment of galactic ignorance, what novel example of naked greed would lead the day’s news cycle. It was fucking exhausting. He’s ready and eager to do it again.
But, yeah, Biden is old and needs a nap. His knees are brittle and he walks stiffly. The White House probably spends a fortune on Ensure.
Yesterday, to distract myself from the SCOTUS-induced alternating rage/depression cycle, I sorted through some of the photos I shot at Saturday’s Farmer’s Market. And there was one photograph that…well, wait. I need to back up a bit. Two things.
First thing, a reminder: I recently bought a new camera, a Ricoh GR3x. It’s unlike any camera I’ve ever owned. To begin with, there’s no viewfinder; you compose the photo using the rear LCD screen. I was actually hesitant to buy the camera because of the lack of a viewfinder (yes, you can buy an attachment viewfinder, but that’s more coin and fuck that.) Composing with an LCD screen seems wrong; that’s what you do with your fucking phone. To my film-trained mind, it’s NOT how you use a camera. And yet, with the GR3x it turns out to be surprisingly handy and intuitive. Old dog, new tricks.
Second thing: Alex Webb. He’s a street photographer who’s famous for extremely colorful and complex photos. When I say ‘complex’ I mean many/most of his photos are composed in a way that organically divides and separates the elements within the frame into what could be different, distinct photos. I’m not going to include an example image here because when I publish this and post the link on various social media, there’s a good chance it’ll feature Webb’s photo instead of the photo I’m writing about; I don’t want people to think I’m taking credit for Webb’s work. But seriously, if you’re not familiar with this guy, do a quick image search. He’s amazing.
So, back to the opening paragraph, me sorting through Saturday’s photographs. At the Farmer’s Market I noticed a woman comforting her dog (which looked to be some sort of spaniel/poodle mixed breed) behind a vendor’s booth. The dog had apparently been overexcited by the crowd. There was something very sweet about their interaction and I wanted to photograph it. Having recently re-examined Alex Webb’s work, I thought it would be cool to include the vendor in the shot. But there was a guy who kept moving in front of me (I think he thought I was trying to cut in front of him to get the vendor’s attention). I’d shift to one side hoping to get a shot, and the guy kept shifting with me. With each step, I was losing sight of the woman and her dog. Just as I was about to give up, I saw a mother & child walking by behind the vendor.
I took the photo.
Not a great photo, but the potential is there.
Okay, it’s not a great photo. But I like it because it’s as close as I’ve ever come to shooting something almost almost in Webb’s style. Not in terms of color (my photo is rather drab in terms of color), but because the frame can be visually divided into three distinct image areas. The woman and her dog, the vendor, and the mother and child. Granted, the original idea of the woman and her dog largely gets lost, and the image is badly off balance…but still, there it is.
The thing is, if I’d been using a camera with a viewfinder, I wouldn’t have seen the mother and child before they entered the frame (and yes yes, if you’re shooting with a rangefinder camera you can keep your left eye open, which allows you to see outside the camera frame, but that only works if you’re right-eye dominant…and I’m not; I compose with my left eye). If I’d been using one of my usual cameras, I’d have missed the shot.
The GR3x allowed me to compose this photograph thoughtfully and almost instantly. It’s not a great photo by any means, but it demonstrates (to me, at least) this particular camera’s potential to catch unique, unexpected moments. I understand why this camera is beloved among many street photographers.
I don’t do much street photography. I’m not particularly good at it, but I enjoy it. But I also believe in practicing in public, in showing work that doesn’t quite meet my standards for what the work could be. So this is why I’ve inflicted this photo and this blog post on you. Thanks for being patient.
Yeah, I’m talking about those Nazgûl motherfuckers on SCOTUS. Like almost everybody I know, I spent yesterday vacillating between 1) feeling depressed and helpless and 2) wanting to set fire to the entire combustible world. The decision yesterday that POTUS (and Trump in particular) is essentially above the law was appalling and frightening, but the fact that it was delivered in smug terms by the most conspicuously corrupt and openly partisan SCOTUS in history was insulting. It’s like they’re standing there, grinning in their black robes, saying “Fuck yeah, we’re corrupt. And ain’t nothing you plebs can do about it.”
Justice Sotomayor, in her properly raging dissent, wrote, “in every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” And she’s right. That whole notion that nobody is above the law has gone straight down the porcelain facility. This is an unprecedented fuckwankery. This is deep fuckwankery; fuckwankery down at the cellular level. I mean, the spouses of two of the Justices (Alito and Thomas) openly supported the insurrection/insurrectionists, and yet those two tainted pricks didn’t have the fundamental sense of decency to recuse themselves from the case.
What makes this even more galling is the fact that those arrogant motherfuckers on SCOTUS were put on the bench by partisan politicians who represent a minority of US citizens. A combination of partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the absurdity of the Electoral College means that the US is largely ruled by the minority. And in recent years, that minority cheated, lied, and wriggled around enough to install three partisan hacks onto the SCOTUS bench.
Wipe the smiles off the faces of 6 of these corrupt wankers.
Every single one of the Justices sitting on this SCOTUS testified under oath that they respected stare decisis, the legal concept that courts should follow precedent. At least six of them lied about that. This Court has largely shat all over precedent. For almost half a century, Roe guaranteed a woman’s right to choose. That’s gone. The Bakke decision on race-conscious admissions in higher education was the law of the land for almost as long. Not any more. For 40 years, Chevron — Jesus suffering fuck, people, there have been 70 SCOTUS and some 17,000 or so lower court cases based on Chevron, which states courts need to defer to the experts in various regulatory agencies when deciding how to interpret a law. A judge probably doesn’t know enough to decide what level of exposure to a certain chemical or substance would be harmful to a child. A judge probably doesn’t have a fucking clue about the long term effects of effluent run-off from a hog containment farm into a local river upstream from a small town. Experts need to decide this shit, not judges. But nope, this SCOTUS has turned that power over to elected or appointed judges.
Wait…I forgot bribery. Last week, this SCOTUS (and I am NOT MAKING THIS UP) made the bizarre decision that while it’s illegal for a public official (like, say, a mayor or a member of Congress, or possibly a judge) to accept a bribe, it’s perfectly for fine for them to accept a gratuity. A bribe is the offer of money (or something of value) from a person/entity before the public official makes a decision affecting that person or entity. A gratuity is accepting the same fucking thing after the decision is made. Seriously, the Court says bribes are bad but gratuities are okay. This decision was written by the Justice whose massive credit card debt was mysteriously paid off before he was nominated. You know who I’m talking about–the guy reliably accused of sexual assault. That guy. (Okay, Kavanaugh.)
If you’re reading this hoping that at the end I’ll suggest some way to make you feel better about the situation…sorry. If you’re hoping I’ll cobble together ideas for a way forward, or maybe offer some practical advice on how to minimize the damage…nope. Maybe tomorrow or at some point in the future. For now, all I have to say is let yourself be angry or depressed for a while. Maybe just be numb for a while.
But pretty soon we’ll need to get over it and resist. Resist in any way we can. Resist in every way we can. But today it’s literally raining here in the heartland, and for today that’s fine.
US presidential debates have always been…wait, wrong approach. US presidential debates have NEVER been debates. I mean, a debate is a discussion, right? A discussion between individuals or groups about a particular topic or a related range of topics. When you sit around the coffee shop and have a convivial argument with your friends about the merits of film photography versus digital imagery, that’s a debate. When you sit in a bar and challenge your friend to prove that Star Wars has a more coherent universe than Star Trek, that’s a debate. These may be stupid debates, but they’re more true to the debate concept than whatever the fuck that was last night.
[Okay, I wrote this yesterday morning, then had a Squirrel Moment and got distracted by something outside. Then I had to go to the gym and get ritually humiliated in pickleball by a bunch of savage retired women. Then there was lunch and the day just got away from me. So any reference to ‘last night’ should be interpreted as ‘Thursday’.]
Presidential debates in the US have just been awkward Q&A sessions. The moderators ask a question, the candidates give some sort of an answer that may or may not be tangentially related to the question. There’s rarely any real discussion, and to my knowledge there’s never ever been any attempt to persuade their opponent to change their mind.
What we saw last night was…well, I don’t know what the fuck it was. Whatever it was, it was ugly. And the reaction by most of the US political news media to whatever it was, was even uglier. In fact, the news media reaction has been just as fucking stupid as Donald Trump was last night.
How stupid? The New York Times editorial board called for Joe Biden to drop out of the race. Why? Because he gave a poor performance. Which is true; Biden seemed older than usual, and his voice was raspy and congested. He didn’t always give a consistent, reasoned answer to the moderator’s questions. He rambled a bit, he stuttered (the guy has always had a stutter, that’s not unusual for him), and he sometimes strayed from the topic. It was unpleasant to watch.
Trump, on the other hand, was fucking vile. Which is to say, Trump was Trump. Rude. Often incoherent. Insulting. Openly lying in literally almost every comment he made. But he told those lies in a loud, confident voice, as opposed to Biden’s tremulous responses. Trump refused to even attempt to answer the moderator’s questions, while Biden tried to answer them.
But NYT thinks Biden should drop out of the race? Because he’s old and did poorly in a debate? Because he’s a decent, patriotic American, Biden should be willing to sacrifice his presidential career for the good of the nation?
What about the convicted felon and sex pest? The NYT did NOT call for Donald Trump to drop out of the race. In (grudging) defense of the NYT, there’s no point in suggesting Trump drop out for the good of the nation, because he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the good of the nation. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about anything but his ownself. Trump is a fucking cancerous tumor; the only way he’ll leave the political body if he’s surgically excised.
Trump mugging democracy
This is a seriously risky moment in US history. The Republican Party has become an authoritarian White Christian Nationalist party, openly hostile to the very concept of representative democracy. That’s bad enough, but we also have what is essentially a rogue Supreme Court. In the last couple of weeks alone, SCOTUS has decided that 1) homeless people can be banned from sleeping outside even if there’s no other place for them to sleep, 2) random judges should have more control over the environment, public health, workplace safety & consumer protections than expert regulators, 3) public officials can accept ‘gratuities’ from wealthy businesses for favorable decisions AFTER the decision is made (but not before the decision is made, because that would be bribery), and 4) that obstructing or impeding an official proceeding only applies if you destroy records or documents, not if you violently disrupt Congress by breaking in and threatening members of Congress. (We still don’t know how SCOTUS feels about presidential immunity for criminal acts, but I’ve got no confidence in them doing what is obviously right.)
Joe Biden is NOT an ideal candidate. I mean, his role in enabling the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is, to me, incomprehensible and unforgivable. But I’ll vote for the guy because he IS the Democratic candidate. I’ll vote for whoever the Democratic candidate is because fuck Trump and the GOP. Fuck them in the neck.
Try to imagine this. A nation in which entities licensed to broadcast news or entertainment to the public were obligated to set aside a certain amount of their broadcast schedule to discuss controversial matters of public concern–and to do so in a way that included different perspectives.
Let’s say there was a television network called Really Good TV. To keep its broadcast license, RGTV created a regularly scheduled program called Really Important Stuff. And let’s also say there was a public controversy involving…I don’t know, maybe the overpopulation of parrots. RGTV’s Really Important Stuff show might do a segment in which people would discuss whether overpopulation of parrots was a critical issue, and if it was, how it might be handled. They’d include folks who very much enjoyed all the parrots and didn’t think it was a problem, and folks who totally fucking hated parrots and felt they should be poisoned at government expense, and folks who felt the best solution to parrot overpopulation was to allow them to be hunted for sport, and folks who felt parrots should be captured and neutered and released back into the city. Every main point of view would be included in the discussion, and viewers would be allowed to evaluate those positions and make up their own minds.
Reader, we actually used to live in that nation. We really did.
In 1927, Congress decided the agency that regulated federal communications (back then it was the Federal Radio Commission) should only issue broadcast licenses when doing so serves the public interest. Not private interests, not corporate interests, not the interests of the rich, not the interests of a particular political party. The public interest. In 1949, the Federal Communications Commission (which expanded the FRC to include television) created a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses to 1) present controversial issues of public importance AND 2) to do so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints. It was called, appropriately, the Fairness Doctrine.
And hey, it worked. Television and radio stations were allowed to decide for themselves HOW to implement the doctrine; they could do it through news segments, or public affairs shows, or through editorials. Nor were the stations required to provide equal time for the various opposing views. But they had to devote some time to important public issues and they had to present contrasting viewpoints.
It didn’t always work smoothly, but it worked. In 1969, for example, the FCC yanked the broadcast license from WLBT television in Mississippi (an NBC affiliate station) because the station’s overtly segregationist politics shaped their decision to refuse to broadcast NBC’s coverage of the civil rights movement.
News media ‘free speech’ includes misleading information & lying.
Think about that for a moment. A local NBC news station refused to show news coverage of the civil rights movement created by NBC–coverage of a nationally important topic–because the owners/staff of that local station opposed civil rights. That local station didn’t have to agree with the coverage (and clearly, they didn’t; WLBT broadcast the Citizens’ Council Forum, a syndicated series of fifteen-minute interviews with segregationists). But they needed to present the issue fairly to their audience, about half of which was Black. When the station refused, the FCC punished them by taking away their broadcast license.
It was a powerful statement by the government that important public issues broadcast on public airwaves needed to be addressed fairly, and that meant including differing perspectives held by the public.
What happened to the Fairness Doctrine? One of the two dominant political parties felt oppressed by having to present opposing points of view. Care to guess which one?
President Ronald Reagan, in the mid-1980s, appointed three new commissioners to the FCC (the fourth had been appointed by Richard Nixon). They issued a report stating the Fairness Doctrine actually harmed the public interest by violating the 1st Amendment protection of free speech. Seriously. The FCC commissioners argued the free speech rights of political entities were diminished by requiring opposing views to be presented to the public. They voted unanimously to abandon the Fairness Doctrine.
Congress, believe it or not, disagreed with the FCC decision. It’s difficult to imagine now, given the current level of hyper-partisanship, but back then both houses of Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, voted to enact the Fairness Doctrine into law (previously it had only been an FCC policy).
Not surprisingly, Reagan (who, again, engineered the destruction of the Fairness Doctrine) vetoed the legislation. Congress failed to overturn the veto. The FCC decision was implemented. By the summer of 1987, the Fairness Doctrine was dead. Dead as the Wicked Witch of the East–not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.
About a year later, in the summer of 1988, radio broadcaster Rush Limbaugh began his new radio show at WABC-AM in New York. In 1991, Democrats attempted to revive legislation to make the Fairness Doctrine law. That failed when President George H.W. Bush announced he would veto the law. In 1996, Rupert Murdoch and former Republican Party political strategist Roger Ailes launched Fox News.
gregfallis.com 