The Iowa caucuses are tonight and Super Tuesday primaries are now a month away. Slate’s Molly Olmstead provides a briefing on how the archaic caucus process works — in Iowa, at least. Speculation on how the Iowa caucuses will shake out for Democrats is pointless, but it will fill cable news hours between now and when we actually know anything tonight.
February’s arrival brings with it groundhogs and candidates’ Federal Election Commission filings from the fourth quarter of 2019 (due by the end of January). Open Secrets’ Anna Massoglia else was checking out Donald Trump’s October though December filing over the weekend. No surprise, Trump is using campaign donations to line his family’s pockets.
New @FEC filing: Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign paid $194,247.57 to Trump family members, properties & businesses in the final quarter of last year alone—steering over $1.8 MILLION in donations from presidential campaign donors to @realDonaldTrump's private interests. pic.twitter.com/ell9EtWkDH
This news is nearly lost in the crush of Iowa reporting and stories about the remaining Senate impeachment proceedings. Since we are numbed to Trump’s self-dealing, the New York Times mentioned Trump’s campaign profits Saturday almost as a footnote:
The Trump campaign spent about $194,000 at Trump-owned properties. The filings show that the groups supporting Mr. Trump’s re-election together made 150 separate payments to Trump-owned entities and properties, totaling nearly $600,000 for the three-month period, and $1.7 million for the year.
Most of the campaign’s spending went to digital ads, but there was also $1.4 million in legal fees the campaign spent to defend Trump from various legal actions against him. Some of those legal fees went to the Trump Organization.
Hasn't received a lot of coverage, but Trump's 2020 re-election campaign has been reporting a steady stream of payments to the Trump Corporation for "legal & IT consulting" in FEC campaign finance disclosures for more than 2 years https://t.co/lVsuCS5SoF
I spent Sunday morning examining filings from some federal candidates in North Carolina. Five Democrats have filed to contest the NC-11 seat Republican Mark Meadows is vacating. The U.S. Senate race against incumbent Republican Thom Tillis has four Democrats running. The Super Tuesday primary on March 3rd should settle who will run in November, but cash-on-hand is a leading indicator — though not necessarily of the candidate’s qualifications for the job.
Like it or not, the ability to raise money is as much a measure of a candidate’s viability as how many people will stand in her/his corner of a gymnasium on a cold winter’s night in Iowa.
Many a rookie candidate files for office unaware of what it takes to be competitive. A friend once asked me to drop by the event of a Democrat running for Congress in bright-red South Carolina. They were under a pop-up in an empty parking lot. The candidate’s wife had heard I’d been involved with a congressional race before. She asked with hesitation how much it cost.
If you have to ask…. This was not going to go well, so I low-balled and said, “1.1.”
“Million?” she asked in a dejected tone.
That was then. As I reported last May, the average cost for a Democrat to flip a congressional seat in 2018 was $5.5 million.
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Rep Mark Meadows is planning to propose the "Trump Rule" banning the House from impeaching a president on "strictly partisan lines" pic.twitter.com/ljKKSFQOiv
And here’s your president, inspirational statesman, the leader of our country:
Mini Mike is now negotiating both to get on the Democrat Primary debate stage, and to have the right to stand on boxes, or a lift, during the debates. This is sometimes done, but really not fair!
This AP poll released on Saturday doesn’t show many surprises. The country is polarized, a healthy majority, including Democrats, is happy with the economy, Trump remains at 43% and most people think the country is going to hell in a handbasket.
As for impeachment, they found this:
Impeachment proceedings have closely split the public. In a January poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, slightly more said the Senate should vote to convict Trump and remove him from office than said it should not, 45% to 40%. An additional 14% of those questioned said they did not know enough to have an opinion. In the survey, 42% of Americans said they thought Trump did something illegal in his July telephone call with the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and an additional 32% said he did something unethical.
That’s all pretty much expected. But this was interesting:
A slim majority of Republicans, 54%, thought Trump did nothing wrong with Ukraine’s leader, but that share declined slightly from 64% in October.
It’s interesting that fewer Republicans think he did nothing wrong after the impeachment proceedings. I’m frankly surprised. I’m sure most of them will vote for him anyway, of course. After all, Republican senators are all saying that selling out the country for your own personal benefit is just fine. But you have to wonder if there are a couple of percentage points worth of people in there who might still have some ethics.
This comment reminds me of the fellow who asked Trump about the terrorist training camps in 2016. There’s always some paranoid nonsense like this circulating around the right wing:
A Billings Republican legislator said Saturday he believes the U.S. Constitution calls for the shooting or jailing of those who identify as socialists. State Rep. Rodney Garcia, from House District 52 on the South Side, first made a statement in the form of an unprompted question at a state party gathering in Helena Friday meant to kick off election season and offer training for party members and candidates.
In his question after a speech by former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, who was Montana’s representative in the U.S. House for two years, Garcia said he was concerned about socialists “entering our government” and socialists “everywhere” in Billings, before saying the Constitution says to either shoot socialists or put them in jail.
On Saturday, a reporter asked Garcia to clarify his remarks.
“So actually in the Constitution of the United States (if) they are found guilty of being a socialist member you either go to prison or are shot,” Garcia said. Garcia could not to point to where in the Constitution it says socialists could be shot or jailed.
Asked to clarify if he thought it was fair to shoot or jail a socialist, including those who live in Montana, Garcia said yes. “They’re enemies of the free state,” Garcia said. “What do we do with our enemies in war? In Vietnam, (Afghanistan), all those. What did we do?”
Asked if that was an appropriate response to his opponent from the last election cycle, Garcia said “according to the Constitution, I’m telling you.”
“I agree with my Constitution,” Garcia said. “That’s what makes us free. We’re not a democracy, we’re a Republic Constitution.” Garcia said he views what he sees as an influx of socialism in Montana as a “very dangerous” situation and that socialism has destroyed countries like Venezuela.
“They’re teaching that to kids. Thank God my grandkids know it’s wrong because I teach them. And it’s a very dangerous situation,” Garcia said. Garcia added he believes socialism is growing, citing advertising he says is done by socialists on Facebook.
Terrorist, socialist, whatever, amirite?
I imagine we’ll be hearing a lot more like this over the next few months, regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination. This shows that the MAGAs are already being indoctrinated.
Whatever the White House says in the face of Trump’s ultimate acquittal in the Senate, U.S. administration officials and foreign officials acknowledge Trump will increasingly manufacture his own foreign policy decisions, with his personal associates, without the input of his intelligence and national security agencies. That means Trump will more likely have the ability to run his personal political errands—and business agenda—with little, if any, scrutiny. And when that scheme falls apart, and Trump’s personal associates turn on him, or decide to detail the behind-the-scenes shenanigans, the U.S. will lose credibility on the world stage…
That new reality is one that’s all but been approved by Republicans in the Senate who are set to sign off on the White House counsel’s argument that President Trump has complete authority to make crucial national security decisions as he sees fit, even if it threatens American interests overseas or runs roughshod over a process his own deputies had put in place.
A large portion of the Ukraine story has focused on how Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and other close confidants such as former Energy Secretary Rick Perry and E.U. Ambassador Gordon Sondland carried out a shadow diplomacy effort to run what Democrats have called a political errand.
And it wasn’t just Trump administration officials that played those roles. Republicans on Capitol Hill, too, engaged with figures who helped spark the Ukraine counter-narratives touted by the president’s defenders to undermine the Ukraine case. As The Daily Beast reported, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), for one, met last May with a former Ukrainian diplomat—Andrii Telizchenko—who once spread the widely-debunked theory that Ukraine worked to assist Hillary Clinton in her 2016 campaign.
Those backdoor, behind-the-scenes efforts have been hailed inside Trump’s inner circle as effective and, despite criticism, appropriate. But career civil servants, including some of the administration’s current and former top national security officials, have denounced those efforts in interviews with The Daily Beast, claiming it undermines the well-established interagency process—one that’s meant to act as a safeguard against dangerous ideas and policies moving forward.
The important part of that last paragraph is “those backdoor, behind-the-scenes efforts have been hailed inside Trump’s inner circle as effective and, despite criticism, appropriate.” Setting aside the ethics and the morality of it, they think Trump’s Ukraine plot was effective? My God. Just how deluded are these people?
Of course, it is true that they have had some success in turning Joe Biden and his family into a mirror image of Trump’s own corrupt crime family for the Fox News crowd. But Biden might not be the nominee (and it won’t be because of this) and people who will vote for him aren’t buying this nonsense. Was it worth getting impeached over?
And as far as it being effective in foreign policy, it’s joke. We are lucky to be alive. So far, no foreign leader has made a miscalculation trying to deal with his lunacy but it’s only because there is no other country on earth led today by someone this impulsive and ignorant.
The Madman Theory isn’t supposed to feature an actual madman.
Anyway:
Perhaps even more concerning to Democrats and national security officials who spoke to The Daily Beast is Trump’s reliance on conspiracy theories to form the basis of his foreign policy objectives. And acquittal, they said, would be a nod to Trump himself that his way of navigating relationships with foreign leaders and countries is not only appropriate, but preferred.
In Ukraine, Trump leaned on Rudy Giuliani to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, a possible opponent in 2020, and his son Hunter. The former New York mayor forged relationships with Ukrainian diplomats and officials who regularly propagate Russian conspiracy theories. For example, Andri Derkach, who met with Giuliani in December, and another member of parliament, Oleksandr Dubinsky, have claimed that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election. U.S. intelligence agencies say this is the product of a Kremlin disinformation campaign.
Yet this theory and others were propped up this week by the White House counsel and other Trump-backing Republican senators who, up until the end of the witness vote, raised the possibility publicly that that theory—the conspiracy theory—could be true.
They ‘ve pushed it relentlessly on Fox and talk radio but they didn’t raise that one specifically in the impeachment trial. However, a number of Republican Senators asked questions designed to advance kooky conspiracy theories during that question and answer period.
This is shady, cuckoo-land, charater assassination that that group of Senators was willing to put into the record of the impeachment of the president of the United States. Does anyone think they won’t go along with whatever crazy conspiracy theories the voices in Trump’s head tell him in a second term?
We have to get through another year of this before we might be able to breathe a little bit easier. But he’s like a cornered animal now, desperate to win a second term and vindication. He will do whatever he thinks he needs to do to make that happen.
If there is one thing that demonstrates Trumpian projection and “I know you are but what am I” politics, it’s the completely absurd notion that he cares about corruption and has “drained the swamp.”
Jay Sekulow, one of President Donald Trump’s lead attorneys during the impeachment trial, is being paid for his legal work through a rented $80-a-month mailbox a block away from the White House.
The Pennsylvania Avenue box appears to be the sole physical location of the Constitutional Litigation and Advocacy Group, a for-profit corporation co-owned by Sekulow. The firm has no website and is not listed in national legal directories. The District of Columbia Bar has no record of it, and no attorneys list it as their employer.MORE IMPEACHMENT COVERAGE
But Sekulow, 63, is registered as chief counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, a non-profit Christian legal advocacy group based in an expansive Capitol Hill row house a short walk from the Senate chamber.
A half dozen lawyers employed by the non-profit ACLJ are named in recent Senate legal briefs as members of Trump’s defense team — including one of Sekulow’s sons. The ACLJ, as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, is barred under IRS rules from engaging in partisan political activities.
The Republican National Committee has paid more than $250,000 to Sekulow’s for-profit CLA Group since 2017, when he was first named to Trump’s legal team as special counsel Robert Mueller was leading the Russia investigation, according to campaign disclosures.
Sekulow has been one of Trump’s most visible defenders, enduring as a trusted attorney for the president even as other of his lawyers have been sidelined or entangled in controversy.
[…]
The Associated Press reviewed 10 years of tax returns for the ACLJ and other charities tied to Sekulow, which are released to the public under federal law. The records from 2008 to 2017, the most recent year available, show that more than $65 million in charitable funds were paid to Sekulow, his wife, his sons, his brother, his sister-in-law, his nephew and corporations they own.
Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, said Sekulow appears to be mixing his defense of Trump with his charitable endeavors. The group has issued a “Donor Alert” about ACLJ on its CharityWatch website.
“Charities are not supposed to be taking sides in partisan political activities, such as providing legal services to benefit a politician in an impeachment trial,” Borochoff said. “Regulators should investigate whether or not charitable resources, such as office, labor, equipment, etc., are being wrongly utilized to benefit Sekulow’s for-profit law firm.”
President Trump’s legal team made numerous campaign contributions to Republican senators overseeing the impeachment trial.
Former independent counsels Ken Starr and Robert Ray, who both investigated former President Bill Clinton ahead of his impeachment, contributed thousands of dollars to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell last year before they joined the president’s team, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics (CFPR).
Starr, who lamented that “we are living in … the age of impeachment” during the trial on Monday and accused Democrats of waging a “domestic war,” gave $2,800 to McConnell in July 2019, according to CFPR.
Ray, who wanted to indict Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair but now claims Trump has been vindicated by the transcript of his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, contributed the maximum $5,600 to McConnell in September 2019, according to the report.
The contributions came months before McConnell bragged to Fox News host Sean Hannity that he would be in “total coordination with the White House counsel’s office and the people who are representing the president in the well of the Senate.”
The best thing about Trump’s swamp is that no matter what he never pays out of his own pocket and he always gets his taste. It is his one true talent.
Democrats’ model for winning national elections is like waiting for the Olympics to start training. That model is not, as we say, sustainable.
Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was the most top-down “grassroots” effort ever. Touting itself as the people-powered effort it was and training activists in selling the candidate by telling their personal stories, the campaign was otherwise heavily metrics-driven. Orders came down from and data flowed up to national headquarters on Michigan Ave. in Chicago.
It wasn’t for everyone. Many volunteers here threw themselves into what felt like a national movement. Others felt like cogs in a huge machine and left. Local chiefs had to forward door-knock and phone-call tallies daily to Michigan Ave. If the numbers didn’t arrive on time or if production wasn’t sufficiently large, they would hear about it and/or be replaced.
But with a candidate worthy of a Shepard Fairey poster atop the ticket, it worked. The late NC Sen. Kay Hagan tried to pattern her 2014 reelection campaign on the Obama model. But Hagan wasn’t Obama. The result was Sen. Thom Tillis.
Buncombe County, NC in 2014 had a trend-breaking record with state-level races. It wasn’t luck.
Amidst the rancor of the 2016 Democratic campaign, it soon became clear Hillary Clinton’s effort was a different animal. From the vantage of the provinces, it quickly became clear Clinton could not inspire the army of volunteers who worked the streets for Obama in 2008. Volunteers weren’t being asked to tell their stories or even to knock doors.
Clinton’s local organizers tasked volunteers with calling potential recruits to come in and call potential volunteers to come in and call for more volunteers, etc., etc. The point of this hall-of-mirrors approach, it seemed, was to build a volunteer army to unleash at the 11th hour to get any Democrat who could fog a mirror to the polls once early voting started. What that base-turnout approach here missed was a lot of D-voters were going to vote R. Some of her local paid team were so disheartened by that plan that after hours they came to work with us, the local Democrats’ turnout operation. They wanted to go to sleep at night feeling they’d done something productive with their day.
While I hoped like crazy Clinton would prevail, I feared if she won using that campaign model, it would become the nationally recognized template for winning. So much for that concern.
Now, it’s 2020 and everybody wants to get in on the action. Again:
Some of the Democratic Party’s most powerful factions are joining forces behind a massive organizing program in six battleground states — an effort aimed at minimizing the damage from a potentially protracted primary and giving the party’s eventual nominee a fighting chance against Donald Trump’s political machine.
Dubbed Organizing Together 2020, the effort was assembled by one of Barack Obama’s battleground gurus, Paul Tewes, and is hiring hundreds of staffers in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina and Arizona. The party’s biggest union supporters and top progressive groups, as well as several governors, are powering the initiative, which has not been previously reported.
National co-chairs include Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Backing the effort are a spread of national groups like the NEA, SEIU, and Indivisible. Politico reports the group expects its efforts to “dovetail” with the efforts of other get-out-the-vote groups and the national party.
“It’s filling a gap so it’s not simply a candidate-centered effort,” said Color of Change spokesperson Rashad Robinson. “All the things that are unsexy about elections, if they don’t happen, and if you aren’t building that infrastructure, you’re going to face big challenges.”
Whether Organizing Together dovetails, duplicates, or dilutes other efforts, the problem with “building that infrastructure” is it is not built to last past the general election. The day after Election Day, money dries up and staffers go home. What remains are empty storefronts and surplus office supplies. In two years, the boom-bust cycle begins again.
Democrats’ model for winning elections is like waiting for the Olympics to start training. It relies too heavily on the campaign industrial complex to succeed. With a naturally talented and inspiring enough candidate atop the ticket, it can work. But it’s not a formula for winning back state legislatures ahead of 2021 redistricting. It’s not a recipe for advancing amateurs up the ladder from city council to county commission to state legislature to U.S. Senate or beyond. Lasting infrastructure is not connected to candidates’ messaging or election-year fundraising.
Political campaigns are not just contests of ideas. They are contests of skills. A lot of what wins elections is mastering the kind of unsexy nuts-and-bolts mechanics behind them. Those skills do not develop overnight by throwing money at campaigns. The only people who develop such skills in the existing model are semi-pro gypsies who live to campaign, or political staff who develop their chops working for elected officials. Where Democrats need those skills is at the real grassroots underfunded by state and national organizations because they are not sexy enough to fund long-term. Howard Dean got that.
I address a lot of how to correct that situation here and here and here. Get local and get busy, please. Don’t wait for a fat check from the DNC or George Soros. It ain’t coming.
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Eerily deserted street in Wuhan, China this week (Photo via Reuters)
This city is being closed off in a way that China has never done before — or even any other major modern city, really, hasn’t done it in recent times. [The Chinese government] quickly expanded it to not just Wuhan, but to other cities, so that there were tens of millions of people who were essentially forced to stay at home and not allowed to go out. They’ve just put in place the biggest lockdown that we’ve ever seen and what experts are saying is the biggest experiment in public health that they’ve ever seen.
That may read like a film treatment for an apocalyptic thriller, but it’s from a January 30th NPR broadcast of the New York Times-produced program The Daily. The comment was made by New York Times overseas reporter Javier Hernandez, who was being interviewed by the show’s host, Michael Barbaro. Hernandez was giving a chilling account as to what has been happening on the ground in China in the wake of the outbreak of coronavirus. Barbaro followed Hernandez’s comment with this observation:
It’s hard to imagine most any other country being able to mount that kind of a response. I mean, I’m just trying to fathom an American city somehow being locked down.
[Hernandez] So this is what it looks like when China’s authoritarian system is in full force. There’s no choice for people to leave. Many people are stuck there. They are going to hospitals that are overcrowded, but they can’t get the health care they need. Doctors are complaining about a lack of medical supplies and critical items like masks and goggles. And you get the sense that people are kind of stuck with what they have, and that’s the bargain they’ve made by living in this system. They have no choice but to follow the government’s orders. They can’t push back. They can’t swim against the current here. Everyone’s essentially forced to comply with this mass lockdown. […]
China has built this system, this ruthless system in which if you are an official in the Communist Party, you are expected to be almost perfect. If anything goes bad, you are the one who is going to take responsibility. You are the one who is going to fall. And this has created an incentive system where local officials fear saying anything about bad news. […]
[Barbaro] So by the time something like, say, a medical crisis gets really big, it may be too late for the local officials who have been trying to contain it themselves and keep it from Beijing.
[Hernandez] Exactly. These kinds of dynamics played a huge role in the scale of the SARS outbreak. It was clear in this case that local officials knew exactly what was going on. They knew that people were dying of this illness. But for months and months, they didn’t want to report it up the chain. Instead, they tried to cover it up. They tried to see if they could perhaps deal with it secretly, and maybe nobody would ever find out about it. They hoped that Beijing would know about it. But eventually it broke. […]
[Barbaro] So that [culture of covering up] had trickled down all the way to the frontline health care workers, who are supposed to be treating this and sounding the alarm.
[Hernandez] Right. They’re fearful of being seen as responsible for this crisis. They don’t want to stand out. And when you think about where this virus might be headed next — to other provinces, to other cities — you have to wonder if these same dynamics would be playing out again. If people will stay silent, if they will not report official cases, because they fear for their jobs and they fear for their livelihoods. […]
And so when you look at the culture, you wonder whether China can actually contain these viruses, whether we will continue to live in a world where the internal politics of the party are going to put lives around the world in danger.
Well, that is not…reassuring.
That said, China is not the source of every outbreak. And now that the coronavirus has officially been declared a “global health emergency” by the World Health Organization, any finger-pointing should be put on the back burner for now. Health officials worldwide have mobilized, necessary precautions are being taken wherever practical, and scientific research has begun in earnest regarding the possible development of a vaccine.
In the meantime, wash your hands, eat your Wheaties, and then wash your hands again. Oh BTW-did you hear that the Doomsday Clock is now at 100 seconds to midnight? With those cheery thoughts in mind, here’s a few “viral” films you might want to, erm…catch:
The Andromeda Strain– What’s the scariest monster of all? The one you cannot see. Robert Wise directs this 1971 sci-fi thriller, adapted from Michael Crichton’s best-seller by screenwriter Nelson Gidding. A team of scientists race the clock to save the world from a deadly virus from outer space that reproduces itself at an alarming speed. The team is essentially restricted to a hermetically sealed environment until they can figure a way to destroy the microbial intruder, making this one a nail-biter from start to finish.
Black Death– It is a time of pestilence, monarchs, serfs, and sociopolitical turmoil, ruled by widespread ignorance and superstition. No, I’m not referring to America in 2020…but Europe in 1348, when a plague swept across the continent. That’s the cheery backdrop for this dark period piece from UK director Christopher Smith. Visceral, moody and atmospheric, it plays like a medieval mash-up of Apocalypse Now and The Wicker Man.
Eddie Redmayne stars as a young monk who, at the behest of his bishop, throws in with a “religious” knight (Sean Bean) and his dubious band of mercenaries on an a quest to investigate why all the residents of a particular village seem immune to the “black death” (the Church suspects “witchcraft”).
Screenwriter Dario Poloni blurs the line between Christian dogma and the tenets of paganism, demonstrating that charlatanism and sleight of hand are no strangers to either camp. Whether one places their faith and hope into an omnipotent super-being or a bundle of twigs, perhaps it is that simplest of single-celled organisms, the lowly bacteria, that wields the greatest power of them all.
Contagion– Steven Soderbergh takes the network narrative formula that propelled his film Traffic and applies it to this cautionary vision of sociopolitical upheaval in the wake of a major killer pandemic. Patient Zero is an American (Gwyneth Paltrow) returning to the U.S. from a Hong Kong business trip, who at first appears to be only developing a slight cold as she kills time at an airport lounge.
However, Soderbergh’s camera begins to linger on seemingly inconsequential items. A dish of peanuts. A door knob. Paltrow’s hand, as she pays her tab. Ominous cuts to a succession of individuals in Hong Kong, Tokyo and London, who have all suddenly taken deathly ill, deliver a creeping sense of dread, which only warms you up for the harrowing, all-too plausible globe-spanning nightmare scenario that ensues.
By reining in his powerhouse cast and working from a screenplay (by Scott Z. Burns) that largely eschews melodrama, Soderbergh keeps it “real” (if clinical at times), resulting in a sobering exercise.
The Killer That Stalked New York-Despite dated trappings, Earl McEvoy’s low-budget 1951 film noir (based on a NYC smallpox outbreak in 1947 thwarted by fast-acting city health officials and a cooperative public) still makes for a gripping disease thriller.
Patient Zero is a diamond smuggler (Evelyn Keyes) who has just returned from Cuba. Unbeknownst to her, there’s a Fed hot on her trail; unbeknownst to both of them (initially), she is also carrying the smallpox virus. With its pseudo-documentary approach and heavy use of location filming, the movie recalls The Naked City.
A montage depicting how city officials administer the “Big Scratch” to every New Yorker proves how some things will never change (when a health department worker offers a shot to one distrustful fellow, he says “Ain’t nobody stickin’ a joim in my arm!”).
The Omega Man-This 1971 Boris Sagal film was the second screen adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend (the 1964 film The Last Man on Earth was the first, book-ended by I Am Legend in 2007). While all three adaptations have their strengths and weaknesses, I have a soft spot for this one, with ever-hammy Charlton Heston as a military scientist battling mutated albino plague victims in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles (the locale was switched to New York City in the 2007 Will Smith version).
In the wake of a deadly pandemic attributed to biological warfare fallout from a Sino-Soviet war, Heston injects himself with an experimental vaccine that appears to work. However, the main threat to his health is not so much the virus, but the rabid lynch mob of pissed-off albino freaks who storm his heavily fortified apartment building every night, led by a messianic ex-TV news anchor (Anthony Zerbe, chewing scenery like a zombie Howard Beale). Rosalind Cash is a hoot as a ass-kicking babe in the Pam Grier mold.
Panic in the Streets– While this is another film noir mixing documentary-style police procedural with disease thriller tropes (released in August of 1950, it actually precedes The Killer That Stalked New York by 5 months), it does differ in a few significant ways. For one, the locale is New Orleans. This is also a much slicker production, with a prestige director at the helm (Elia Kazan, who made another New Orleans based story the following year- a little film you may have heard of called A Streetcar Named Desire).
Noir icon Richard Widmark is the “good guy” in this one-a Navy doctor working for the health department, who has 48 hours to track down the killers of a murder victim carrying the Pneumonic Plague. This puts him at loggerheads with the police, who aren’t crazy about the deadline pressure. The deadly virus won’t wait, which gives the narrative its tension. This is one of Kazan’s most stylistically accomplished films, full of Wellesian tracking shots and great cinematography by Joseph McDonald. Look for Zero Mostel in one of his earliest roles, and Jack Palance (this was his big-screen debut).
Perfect Sense– David Mackenzie’s post-apocalyptic drama tackles that age-old question: Can a chef and an epidemiologist find meaningful, lasting love in the wake of a pandemic that is insidiously and systematically robbing every human on Earth of their five senses? This is a malady with a relatively leisurely incubation period. The afflicted have an indeterminate amount of time to adjust to each progressive sensory deficit, so it isn’t necessarily a “death sentence”.
The outbreak brings an epidemiologist (Eva Green) to a Glasgow lab to analyze data as cases escalate. Fate and circumstance conspire to place her and a local chef (Ewan McGregor) together on the particular evening wherein they both suffer the first warning sign: a sudden, inexplicable emotional breakdown. As they have both “taken leave” of their senses, they (naturally) begin to fall in love (insert metaphor here; or as the old Burt Bacharach and Hal David song goes – “…you get enough germs to catch pneumonia.”).
What makes Mackenzie’s film unique in an overcrowded genre is that while there’s still a sense of urgency to find a “cure”, the question becomes not “can humanity be saved in time?” …but rather “can humanity make lemonade out of this lemon it’s been handed?”
Restoration- Robert Downey Jr. gives one of his most underrated performances in Michael Hoffman’s lusty, richly textured and visually sumptuous recreation of 17th-Century England during the reign of Charles II. Downey plays a physician whose burgeoning medical career is put on hold after he “saves the life” of the King’s beloved spaniel. The grateful Charles invites him into his inner circle, encouraging the doctor to avail himself of the perks at his disposal.
Court politics eventually put the doc in the King’s disfavor, and his life takes twists and turns, ultimately bringing him back in London during the Great Plague, where he finds his mojo as a dedicated physician. The verisimilitude of the film gives you a sense of what it must have been like living with the horror and heartbreak of the Plague in that era.
Twelve Monkeys– Another wild ride from the vivid imagination of Terry Gilliam, this 1995 sci-fi thriller (inspired by Chris Marker’s classic 1962 short film, La Jetee) has become a cult favorite.
Set in the year 2035, it’s the story of a prison inmate (Bruce Willis) who is “volunteered” to be sent back to the year 1996 to detect the origin of a mystery virus that wiped out 99% of humanity. Fate and circumstance land Willis in a psych ward for observation, where he meets two people who may be instrumental in helping him solve the mystery-a psychiatrist (Madeline Stowe) and a fellow mental patient (Brad Pitt, in an entertainingly demented performance).
I like the way the film plays with “reality” and perception. Is Willis really a time traveler from 2035…or is he a delusional schizophrenic living in the year 1996? I’m not telling.
28 Days Later– Director Danny Boyle’s speed freak-in-a-telephone booth style of film making has rarely been so perfectly matched with subject matter than it is in this unsettling 2002 shocker.
In a memorable opening sequence reminiscent of The Omega Man, a man (Cillian Murphy) wanders alone through the streets of a deserted metropolis (London). He finds out soon enough that he is in reality not “alone”, and that the folks he runs into are far from human (although they started that way).
The malady is a highly contagious “rage virus”; unleashed by rampaging lab monkeys that have been liberated by unsuspecting animal rights activists. Murphy bands together with others who have managed to avoid contact with the affected, and they head out of the city in desperate search of sanctuary.
Somehow, Boyle’s disparate mishmash of disease thriller, popcorn zombie chiller and “conspiracy a-go-go” coalesces. At once gross and engrossing, it is not for the squeamish.
“I think there’s just a big difference between what the voters see and what the voters want and from what people maybe in Washington or in the media are calling for,” Kushner said. “What we’ve seen since impeachment started is that most people, by the way, are not paying attention to it.”
The President’s son-in-law pointed to recent poll numbers to bolster his point. “We’ve seen the President’s numbers go up by 7 points,” Kushner said. “We got polling numbers back last night that shows the President’s approval rating nationally is over 50%. It was the highest that it’s been since right after the inauguration.”
He’s lying:
Zakaria noted that 75% of voters wanted witnesses:
“I think that the poll is who wants witnesses,” Kushner said. “I mean, if you ask people, do you want more information or no? I think that’s right. If you ask, you know, voters, is impeachment helping your life or does it make a difference or should they actually have an election in, you know, I guess is it 10 months away, I think most people prefer that.”
Asked why so many officials have left the administration with hard feelings:
Kushner told Zakaria that, “What I have seen is that the cream has risen and — I’m not going to say what the word is — but that has sank.”
Kushner went on to say that Trump has “cycled out a lot of the people who didn’t have what it took to be successful here and a lot of the people who have come in and been excellent are not out there complaining and writing books because they’re too busy working.”
You’d think the stable genius would have been able to hire the best people from the beginning but I guess this is just part of his very stable genius process.
Then he whined like a toddler, just like Dear Leader:
“They investigated us for two years on Russia, which we said from the beginning we didn’t collude with Russia. They went through that for two years, they harassed the President, they harassed me, they harassed the White House, that turned out to be nothing,” Kushner said.
Speaking of Trump, he went on to say that Democrats “were saying they wanted to impeach him before he even got on the phone with the President of Ukraine, so I think it’s been a real embarrassment for our country, I think it’s a real shame. I think people want to blame the President for the country being divided, but I think they should look at the Dems and what they are doing.”
That’s so true. If only everyone would just shut up and go along with everything Trump says and does, we wouldn’t have these problems. When they disagree he’s forced to act like a barbarian to “fight back” and who’s fault is that anyway? Why do you make me hurt you baby?
And anyway, even if people can’t stand him, they will have to vote for him anyway:
“In the last election when Mitt Romney ran, 2 percent of the people who disapproved of him voted for him in the last election,” Kushner said, speaking of the Utah Republican senator who ran for the presidency in 2012. “Fifteen percent of the people who disapproved of Donald Trump as a candidate ended up voting for him,”
Kushner continued without providing evidence, “so look, I think his base is strong and getting stronger.””The energy that I’m feeling today is stronger than what we felt at the end of the campaign last year,” Kushner continued, mentioning a recent Trump rally in Iowa. Trump is “strong, he’s getting stronger, the campaign is running well, his supporters are fired up and I do think this November is going to be a very, very important election.”
He’s right about one thing. It’s going to be a very, very important election.
This piece by Andrea Bernstein in the New York Review of Books opens with a rundown of Chris Christie’s Bridgegate scandal in which he attempted to induce all the Democratic mayors in New Jersey to endorse him by offering favors. He wanted a “bipartisan” sheen so he could run for president in 2016. It worked with a lot of them. But not all:
[Mark]Sokolich, a Democrat, did not endorse Christie. That was when three former aides of the governor, steeped in this culture of raw displays of dominance, put the Bridgegate scheme into effect. Calling on the resources of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, they realigned lanes on the George Washington Bridge in a way that specifically punished Mayor Sokolich by creating “traffic problems in Fort Lee.”
They refused to take the mayor’s calls when four days of gridlock on the approaches to the world’s busiest bridge blocked ambulances and made children late on the first day of school. (One of Christie’s aides subsequently pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors, resulting in the convictions now being argued before the Supreme Court.)
The traffic scheme also had a more general purpose: to telegraph to every other Democratic official in New Jersey that it was better simply to fall in line with Christie’s political wishes than to cross him in any way.
She makes, the obvious connection:
This type of behavior is precisely equivalent to the conduct for which President Trump was put on trial. He called a democratically elected president of Ukraine, and asked him to “do us a favor though.” That “favor” was to open an investigation that would both discredit the prosecution of Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and so reinforce Trump’s narrative about the “Russia hoax,” and at the same time smear the man Trump considered was his chief political opponent in the 2020 presidential election: Joe Biden.
Like Sokolich, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was made to understand that the price for non-cooperation could be ruinously steep: losing vital military aid and an audience with the president at the White House. Trump’s aides, instilled with their own culture of raw displays of dominance, worked overtime to use the levers of government to enhance the power of their boss.
It now appears that both abuses of power will be sanctioned, with potentially crippling consequences for fighting corruption in America.
The piece goes on to point out how the Supreme Court has also validated this new system.
This is the political worldview of the strongman. It’s no surprise that Christie and Trump are the two most famous American practitioners. And, as we find in the schoolyard, the bully always has a group of sycophants and accomplices backing him up.
We’ve had experience with political bosses before in this country. But it’s been a while. We had thought our democracy and our political culture had evolved past this. But it hasn’t. We just saw the entire Republican Senate caucus wield it’s power ruthlessly and without apology to protect its corrupt, unfit leader.
