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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
The off year elections have been positive for the Dems:
Looking ahead to 2024, Democrats concede some cause for concern — including President Joe Biden’s anemic approval rating and early polls forecasting a repeat race against former President Donald Trump in which Biden either ties or trails, due in part to a notable chunk of undecided voters and apprehension over Biden’s age and acuity, which he has repeatedly dismissed.
But Democrats also say that based on 2023 so far, they see plenty of reason for optimism about their chances with voters.
An analysis from FiveThirtyEight found that in 38 special elections held so far this year, Democrats have outperformed the partisan lean — or the relative liberal or conservative history — of the areas where the races were held by an average of 10%, both romping in parts of the country that typically support the party while cutting down on GOP margins in red cities and counties, too.
For instance, the Democratic candidate in a Wisconsin State Assembly special election last month lost by just 7 points in an area where Republicans have a 22-point edge and where Trump beat Biden by almost 17 points in 2020.
In a New Hampshire special election in May for a state House seat, the Democrat won by 43 points, far beyond the party’s estimated 23-point edge in the district.
The data from FiveThirtyEight does not include regularly scheduled off-year elections, including the Wisconsin Supreme Court race earlier this year in which the liberal candidate, now-Justice Janet Protasiewicz, won by 11 points — in a state famous for its wafer-thin election margins.
“I think when you when you look at things like this, one special election doesn’t mean much on its own. But when you start to see real consistency, it can certainly become predictive of the next election cycle,” said Ben Nuckels, a Wisconsin Democratic strategist who consulted on Protasiewicz’s campaign.
For comparison, according to FiveThirtyEight, Democrats outperformed the weighted partisan lean by about 4% in special elections held between the 2018 midterms and the 2020 elections, when Biden won the White House by 4.5% but Democrats underperformed in House races.
Conversations with eight Democratic and Republican operatives in swing states show some repeated explanations for this success: the public’s general support for abortion access after the Supreme Court reversed the national guarantee for the procedure last year along with angst and anger over Trump’s comeback bid, given how divisive he remains — two factors which might even overcompensate for Biden’s sagging approval ratings.
“Republicans have not had a good election night since before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And, honestly, it seems like post-Roe Republicans couldn’t find their groove even if a DJ played their favorite song on repeat,” Nuckels said. “So I think Democrats are in a very good position here going forward.”
They did elect Glenn Youngkin in 2022 and created the myth that he’s the Great Whitebread Hope but other than that they haven’t done much of anything.
This does not mean that Biden is a shoo-on. But the negative politics associated with abortion policy and Trump goes a long way toward mitigating the age question. And the economic news is actually good and getting better.
But it’s going to be a pitched battle, don’t ever doubt it. Almost half the country has lost its collective mind.
So Trump has a government funded office that nobody knows about and it’s piled up with his “boxes.” And the people who have worked there, paid for by the government, are part of his campaign, which is a no-no. Of course:
Several Trump aides on the payroll of his Save America political action committee, his 2024 presidential campaign or both have worked at the post-presidential office since it opened two years ago, according to campaign finance records and people familiar with the office. Cheung did not respond to a follow-up email seeking details about the office and its operations, including whether aides on Trump’s political payroll who have worked there are also paid by the government or a private noncampaign entity.
It is possible for one person to split time between a campaign and government work, according to election finance experts. For example, most executive branch employees — including political appointees — can participate in certain partisan political activities outside of work, so long as they don’t use government resources. And it could be that Trump’s aides are careful not to mix political work with official business.
But there is a strict prohibition on performing political duties on government time — or in a government-occupied building or room. It is not clear what steps Trump is taking to ensure a wall of separation between official and campaign business for aides who are on his political payroll.
“The general rule is, even where dual-hatting is allowed, and even when it’s being done without pay on either or both jobs, you definitely cannot conduct [political] work in your government office,” said a former Federal Election Commission lawyer who asked to remain anonymous to discuss the Trump situation. “That is pretty close to an ironclad rule.”
Most former presidents don’t have to contemplate mounting a legal defense and a presidential campaign as their aides reply to correspondence from fans and dignitaries.
“Donald Trump is the first ex-president of our time who has declared for re-election. At the same time, his political fundraising committees are contributing money to his personal legal defense,” said Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian.
“Since Nixon’s rocky and much-criticized first months out of office, American ex-presidents have abided by fairly strict traditions and practices,” Beschloss said. “Such practices would not include non-government officials using American taxpayer-funded office space and services to conduct an ex-president’s campaign or to work on his private legal defense, if either of those things happened.”
Political Payroll
When a surprised-to-be-packing Trump left the White House in January 2021, his aides scrambled to collect the items he wanted to take with him and ship them to multiple locations, including Mar-a-Lago and a temporary transition office in the Washington suburbs.
Toward the end of the six-month transition process, Trump aides worked with GSA to relocate the office in the Washington suburbs to West Palm Beach. Kathy Geisler, the GSA point person for the transition, noted in an email to Trump aides that the agency would pay for only one location — meaning that the “correspondence office” had to be either at a West Palm Beach suite or at Mar-a-Lago, not both.
“If the Former President’s Office determines that the Correspondence Office in West Palm Beach will be the single office that GSA provides and furnishes, furniture and other items from the Mar-a-lago location will need to be moved [from] the existing location to the new location,” Geisler wrote to Trump’s team in June 2021.
The office on North Flagler Drive appears to be the final location for that “correspondence office,” also known as the office of the former president. Trump, who continues to falsely claim that he won the 2020 election, does not refer to himself as a “former” president and his staff generally avoid that construction, as well.
It is “the only office space that GSA has rented for Former President Trump’s Office,” a GSA spokesperson said.
Several of his aides, all of whom worked in operations or correspondence roles at the White House, have been seen at the North Flagler Drive office since it opened in late 2021, according to two of the people familiar with the office. The set includes Beau Harrison, Molly Michael and Desiree Thompson, these people said.
Michael, who no longer works for Trump, was on the payroll of his Save America political action committee from July 2021 until September 2022, the month after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in search of classified documents. An attorney for Michael did not respond to questions about the work she did for Trump at the North Flagler Drive office.
Harrison was at times paid by Save America — for advance work, a year-end bonus, basic pay and reimbursement for travel and office expenses — according to the PAC’s federal finance disclosures. The last payment was on Aug. 15, 2022, a week after the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Harrison did not respond to a text message from NBC.
Cheung, the Trump spokesman, confirmed Wednesday that Thompson still works for Trump. She remains on Save America’s payroll, earning a salary of about $120,000 per year, according to the PAC’s most recent filing. Reached briefly by phone Friday, Thompson politely said she had to “refer” questions about the office. She did not call back.
Classified material
When the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, 2022, a box that contained Trump White House schedules, including some with classified markings, was sitting at a West Palm Beach office uninspected, The Guardian reported earlier this year.
According to the newspaper, a junior aide who went by the nickname ROTUS — receptionist of the United States — had moved the box from a Mar-a-Lago workspace to a government-leased West Palm Beach office when she was relocated to the office in 2022. She was later moved back to Mar-a-Lago, along with the schedules, and she had also scanned them into a laptop, the paper reported, citing two sources familiar with the matter.
ROTUS is a moniker used by Chamberlain Harris, who held the informal title at the tail end of the Trump administration. One of the people familiar with the office confirmed that she worked there for a time. Harris did not reply to a text message or a LinkedIn message seeking comment on her work at the North Flagler Drive office and asking her whether she moved the box of schedules to Mar-a-Lago.
Harris has been on the Save America payroll since July 2021 and has been on Trump’s re-election payroll since December 2022, according to campaign finance records. Together, Trump-affiliated political committees paid her $163,000, including travel reimbursements, from July 2021 through June 30, 2023, which is the last date for which campaign finance records are available.
In late 2022, federal investigators pressed Trump’s lawyers to turn over any remaining classified material in the former president’s possession. That prompted his legal team to hire a private firm to conduct searches at several locations, including the North Flagler Drive office, according to a person familiar with the probes.
The person said there were no additional classified materials discovered by the private team. There is no indication that the FBI ever searched the premises for classified documents or other materials that belong to the government under the Presidential Records Act.
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.
He’s a stickler for following the rules and the law to the letter so we don’t need to worry about any of this.
So the wingnuts are having a field day because Biden responded to a question about what he was going to do next by saying that he planned to go to bed. Naturally this is being spun as a further sign of his decrepitude. It’s actually the opposite as even Fox News reports:
Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy reported that President Joe Biden was “working through the night” despite constant attacks on his age.
Doocy revealed the 80-year-old president’s work schedule during a trip to Vietnam on Sunday.
During the live report, Doocy seemed annoyed by the presence of presidential envoy John Kerry in the moments before Biden was set to speak.
“And so, we expect maybe some climate talk here in Hanoi,” Doocy said. “We expect a short statement off the top, just about how the G20 went in India and how his meetings went here with the Communist Party in Vietnam. And then, as many questions as he wants to take.”
“He has been basically working all through the night, the equivalent of an all-nighter Eastern time,” he added. “So, he’s probably pretty tired, pretty jet-lagged. But, he should take at least a handful.”
He’s 80 and he’s pulling all-nighters with jet-lag. I couldn’t do that.
This from Eric Loomis at LG&M struck me because I just love the fact that unions are finally getting some traction after all these years. It’s a wonderful development and I have high hopes that this new generation will be successful in reforming the workplace through collective action. However, they do need to keep their eyes on the prize:
As a labor person who is not one of these lefty labor-intellectual types who think that the real goal of the labor movement or the left should be to “emancipate” ourselves from labor entirely, I am not of the utopian type frame of mind. I admit that my brain mostly works within the 20th century socialist framework much more so than the 21st century left-libertarian-individual freedom framework. So when I see odd collective bargaining demands from workers who are more of the individualistic mindset, it kind of breaks my brain. Workers can collectively bargain for whatever they want. But I am trying to imagine walking to negotiations and trying to work out the demands of these Philadelphia coffee shop workers. I am going to present here what the employers’ lawyer says, which you can dismiss if you would like. But then the workers themselves basically confirm that these are the demands, though they frame them in a slightly different way.
“We’ve been working through some very unusual union proposals,” Paisner said.
At Ultimo Coffee, for example, union leaders proposeda layoff procedure “not based on seniority or ability, but rather, on how much money employees claim to have in their bank accounts,” and a lateness policy that “would excuse employees from any consequence even if they arrive hours late for an unverifiable reason,” according Paisner, the employer’s lawyer.
Union negotiators agree that their approach is novel.
Is that real?
Kate Lord, lead negotiator for Ultimo Coffee’s union, says the union’s layoff language didn’t mention bank account balances but considered employees’ alternative income sources to avoid terminating “the people who would be the most greatly impacted by layoffs.”
She said the lateness policy idea wasn’t meant to allow tardiness for no reason but to “shift away from fear and toward building culture rather than having policies that are about force.”
“To call our proposals ‘unusual’ doesn’t mean that they are flawed in some way, it just means we’ve approached things a little differently, and we’re proud of that,” Lord said.
Well then.
The first thing that comes to my mind is that SHARING PERSONAL FINANCIAL WITH THE EMPLOYER IS THE WORST IDEA I HAVE EVER HEARD!!!! Seriously, there is nothing good that can come of this. If you want to critique the seniority principle for hiring and firing that unions have held to forever, well, there’s room to do that. The problem is coming up with something better. And allowing the boss to see your personal financial information to make those decisions is so rife with problems as to make my heart stop. DO NOT GIVE YOUR EMPLOYER MORE INFORMATION ABOUT YOU PERSONAL LIFE FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!!!
I’m old enough that I was once told that I couldn’t get a raise because I was young and didn’t have a family like my male co-worker who was married and he needed the money more than I did. I didn’t think that was fair because he was shitty worker and spent most of his time in the boss’s office talking about sports. And it wasn’t.
Kids you do not want to do this. I get that the “meritocratic” system is flawed but just wait until you are on the receiving end of this sort of decision which is always going to be subjective. Who can say who has “enough” money and who doesn’t?
Also, what Eric says. Don’t ever give your employer this kind of knowledge about you. My God, that’s stupid.
Then the lateness policy, I mean this is just completely unworkable, at least as far as I can tell. The reality is that unions have long been part of the force disciplining labor. That’s part of what collective bargaining does. It commits the workers to rules too. This is not emancipatory. This part of the reason why the Industrial Workers of the World always eschewed contracts. If your goal is to give the store over to the workers, well, I guess you can try to bargain that. But even if you had an employee-owned cooperative, there is no way this would work. In the end, you have to rely on people to show up, if to relieve other workers stuck there while you get around to coming in if for no other reason.
Sometimes, I have no words. It’s not often I sympathize with employers. And I don’t exactly sympathize with them here. But I can see how they would be completely flummoxed at figuring out how to deal with the specific demands of these workers. We are a long ways from pure and simple unionism.
Again, just wait until you’re forced to miss your class or your ride because your co-worker is repeatedly late to work. Or you’re forced to pick up the slack repeatedly during the busy time in the coffee shop and nothing can be done about it. A company can’t run if nobody knows what time people are going to show up.
I understand that people would like a humane workplace where no one is subject to coercion. Workers are often at the mercy of capricious bosses and it sucks. I’m sure there are ways to make it better but this isn’t it. Employers are often unfair but your co-workers aren’t always saints either.
And it’s not Tuberville
Wisconsin just re-elected this person.
Indicted former president gets a mixed welcome
All the red was not for him.
There were chants of U-S-A when TFG arrived Saturday at Jack Trice Stadium for the Iowa-Iowa State football game. But other football fans gave Donald Trump a less than warm welcome.
The former president entered the game to a mix of applause and audible boos, as a plane with a banner reading “Where’s Melania?” flew overhead — a nod to the absence of his wife from the campaign trail. Some attendees gave him the middle finger from the stands while he looked on from the glass-paneled box from which he watched the game.
Of aliens and alienation
The United States pulled itself together again somehow after the trauma of the Civil War. Or rather, slavery ended formally only to be replaced by a system that rendered the South’s once-enslaved persons free in name only for another 100 years. What persisted was one nation with two systems deeply divided by culture.
Those war’s psychic wounds were thinly disguised behind monuments to the Lost Cause that the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) spent decades planting across indivisible nation. Meanwhile, the Invisible Nation enforced white supremacy for nearly a century. The North won the Civil War, but the South won the peace, at least regionally.
The trauma of electing the country’s first black president in this century reopened the wounds to white pride that never fully healed after Appomattox. Donald Trump, his own psychic wounds worn on the outside, exploited that grievance to win the presidency immediately following Barack Obama’s White House tenure. Talk of a second civil war persists among Trump’s red-hatted brownshirts and did so even before Trump lost reelection in 2020. A New Lost cause was born. Or the old one got a makeover.
Where that leaves our indivisible nation now is anyone’s guess. How long it may take the country to recover from the MAGA insurrection I can only speculate. One wonders if even the appearance of space aliens could knit the country back together the way World War II seemed to, at least for a time.
Susie Madrak of Crooks and Liars posted that she’d recently rewatched Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). It was better than she remembered. I watched it last night, after decades. Susie’s right. It holds up pretty well. Steven Spielberg’s aliens (also E.T. from 1982) are quite a contrast with spiky, stabby black aliens from Apple TV’s series Invasion.
But one doesn’t suppose even a hostile alien invasion could mollify the intra-human grievances of centuries.
The sense of being alien in one’s own home is nurtured among a certain brand of Christian. There is us, the believers, and them, the unsaved tools or allies of the Devil. Or gays or transgenders or liberals or anyone distrusted as not “us.” Outsiderism is a defining identity reinforced in many churches weekly. An old (secular) friend who has worn that identity his entire life once said that if he ever found himself on the inside of some social group, he would have to create an outside just to feel normal.
As for our new(ish) faction of rebels, it is difficult to see how they embrace a common national identity once Trump is gone. Pondering how an even more alien species’ appearance could achieve that brought to mind a scene in “The Last Battle” from the C.S. Lewis Narnia series.
A multicultural society of humans and talking beasts, Narnia has been invaded by the Calormenes. The last Narnians have taken final refuge in a stable. But the dwarves have decided that they can trust no one but themselves. Aslan the lion (Lewis’ Christ figure) appears inside the stable to rescue his faithful, but in their bitterness and cynicism, the dwarves can no longer see him.
As blogger Brenton Dickieson put it:
Their skepticism isn’t just, “I need to be convinced by the evidence,” but “I will not be taken in, so I’ll just stick with my own kind.”
Readers do not reminding of the MAGA response to the country’s invasion by COVID-19.
The scene plays out:
Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn’t much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things you might find in a Stable. One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had got a bit of an old turnip and a third said he’d found a raw cabbage leaf. And they raised golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said, ‘Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of a trough that a donkey’s been at! Never thought we’d come to this.’
But very soon every Dwarf began suspecting that every other Dwarf had found something nicer than he had, and they started grabbing and snatching, and went on to quarreling, till in a few minutes there was a free fight and all the good food was smeared on their faces and clothes or trodden under foot.
But when at last they sat down to nurse their black eyes and their bleeding noses, they all said: ‘Well, at any rate, there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs!’
‘You see,’ said Aslan. ‘ They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they can not be taken out.’
There is no brotherhood of Man for MAGAstan, no solidarity, no coming together, not even in the name of preserving the country, humanity or their own lives. Their prison is their own minds.
I wonder what Franz Kafka would have to say about the social media phenom of “doxxing” (apart from “Whad’ya expect?!”). In case you missed it, here’s a chilling story from 2020:
By the standards of the pandemic, Thursday had been a normal day for Peter Weinberg. A 49-year-old finance marketing executive, he worked from his home in Bethesda, Maryland, right outside of the District of Columbia, staying busy with Zoom meetings and the new rituals of our socially isolated world.
Then, around 10 p.m., he received an irate message on LinkedIn from someone he didn’t know. He brushed it off, thinking it was probably just spam. Then he got another. And another. The third message was particular strange, as it mentioned something about the cops coming to find him. Perplexed, he watched as the messages continued to pile up. They were all so similar: angry, threatening, accusatory. His profile views suddenly soared into the thousands.
He began to panic. He decided to check Twitter. Although he’d had an account for more than a decade, Weinberg didn’t use the social platform very much. He mostly followed mainstream news outlets, politicians from across the ideological spectrum, entrepreneurs, and financial analysts. He had what you might call “low engagement.” But not anymore.
In his mentions, disaster was rapidly unfolding. People accused him of assaulting a child. Of being a racist. They shared a selfie he’d taken in sunglasses and his bike helmet and analyzed it alongside blurry images of another man in sunglasses and a bike helmet.
The other guy had been captured on video hitting children and ramming his bike into an adult after becoming enraged that they were posting fliers around the Capital Crescent Trail in support of George Floyd, the unarmed black man killed by white police officers in Minneapolis on Memorial Day.
Weinberg hadn’t seen the viral story about the trail where he regularly biked. He didn’t know that, for several days, the video had circulated online as law enforcement crowdsourced help in locating the suspect. Now that he had seen it, he didn’t think he looked anything like this guy. And he didn’t understand why anyone thought he was him. […]
As he attempted to piece together what was happening, Weinberg called the number for a detective provided by the Maryland-National Capital Park Police. “We are seeking the public’s assistance in identifying the below individual in reference to an assault that took place this morning on the Capital Crescent trail. Please contact Det. Lopez with any information,” read a tweet sent June 2 from the department and shared more than 55,000 times.
But the Park Police had made an error. “Correction, the incident occurred yesterday morning, 6/1/2020,” they wrote in a follow up tweet. As with most such clarifications, it had only a fraction of the reach: a mere 2,000 shares.
It was based on that initial, false information that Weinberg had become a suspect for the internet mob. To his surprise, the app that he used to record his regular rides from Bethesda into Georgetown via the Capital Crescent Trail shared that information publicly, not just with his network of friends and followers. Someone had located a record of his ride on the path on June 2, matched it to the location of the assault from the video, matched his profile picture — white guy, aviator-style sunglasses, helmet obscuring much of his head — to the man in the video, and shared the hunch publicly.
It took off. Weinberg didn’t know what “doxing” meant, but it was happening to him: Someone posted his address. Detective Lopez didn’t answer his call, but soon someone with the police department contacted Weinberg to let him know that officers would be patrolling the area around his home because he might be in danger.
Detective Lopez reached him around 11 p.m. and they agreed to meet the next morning. At 11:47, Weinberg tweeted, “I recently learned I have been misidentified in connection with a deeply disturbing attack. Please know this was not me. I have been in touch with the authorities and will continue to help any way possible.”
His fiancée in New York, he spent the night alone, refreshing Twitter, watching helplessly as people tried to destroy his life. And Weinberg wasn’t even the only one: Another man, a former Maryland cop, was wrongly accused, too. The tweet accusing him was retweeted and liked more than half a million times.
At 7 a.m., Weinberg brought his bicycle and his helmet with him to the police station. Detective Lopez told him he was free to go and the department would issue a report excluding him as a suspect. […]
On Friday, police arrested Anthony Brennan III, a 60-year-old from Kensington, Maryland, and charged him with three counts of second-degree assault.
Weinberg told a reporter he was “dizzy” after what he went through.
“You may hear more from me in time as I reflect on this experience,” he tweeted. “For now I will say this. We must align in the fight for justice and equality — but not at the cost of due process and the right to privacy and safety.”
As for the woman who shared his home address: She deleted it and posted an apology, writing that in all of her eagerness to see justice served, she was swept up in the mob that so gleefully shared misinformation, depriving someone of their own right to justice. Her correction was shared by fewer than a dozen people.
“Fewer than a dozen people.” It’s worth noting that there are 12 people on a jury. Inversely, the numbers in a mob are legion. When I originally read and shared the piece, I Tweeted:
Set in New York City, Hitchcock’s 1956 thriller stars Henry Fonda as a musician who is (wait for it) wrongly accused of committing a crime. It begins with a mundane errand; bereft of funds, Fonda applies in-person for a $300 loan against his wife’s (Vera Miles) insurance policy to help pay for her dental work. Unfortunately, once the insurance office staff gets a gander at him, they misidentify him as a slippery felon who has twice robbed their premises. A Kafkaesque nightmare ensues for husband and wife, turning their lives upside down.
Presented in a stark, docudrama style, The Wrong Man is one of Hitchcock’s more noir-ish entries, utilizing subjective techniques for Fonda’s character. Consequently, you feel yourself being inexorably pulled into the protagonist’s ever-escalating sense of helplessness; a sobering reminder that at any given moment, we are all subject to the Fickle Finger of Fate. This is Hitchcock’s only film based on a true story (the script was adapted from Maxwell Anderson’s non-fiction book The True Story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero , and co-written by the author and Angus MacPhail).
Speaking of Fate…it you’ve never seen The Wrong Man, TCM is airing it tonight (9pm PST, with an encore broadcast Sunday morning at 7am) as this week’s “Noir Alley” presentation, hosted by Eddie Muller. Also note that several more of the films on my list below are airing as part of a 12-hour Hitchcock marathon on TCM that begins Sunday at 3am. Set your DVR!
I won’t keep you in suspense…here are 9 more of my top Hitchcock picks (alphabetically).
The Lady Vanishes – This 1938 entry is my favorite Hitchcock film from his “British period”. A young Englishwoman (Margaret Lockwood) boards a train in the fictitious European country of Bandrika. She strikes up a friendly conversation with a kindly older woman seated next to her named Mrs. Froy, who invites her to tea in the dining car.
The young woman takes a nap, and when she awakes, Mrs. Froy has strangely disappeared. Oddly, the other people in her compartment deny ever having seen anyone matching Mrs. Froy’s description. The mystery is afoot, with only one fellow passenger (Michael Redgrave) volunteering to help the young woman sort it out.
The Master keeps you guessing until the end. Witty and suspenseful, with delightful performances all around. I could be wrong, but I suspect that this film was an influence for Wes Anderson’s 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel (particularly the production design).
Programming note: Airs on TCM at 5am (PST) this Sunday, August 10th.
Lifeboat – This taut 1944 war drama (adapted from a John Steinbeck story by screenwriter Jo Swerling) is essentially a chamber piece, centering on a small group of passengers who survive the sinking of their vessel by a German U-boat, which also goes down in the skirmish. A floundering survivor who is later pulled aboard the already overcrowded lifeboat turns out to be a member of the U-boat crew, which profoundly shifts the dynamics of the group.
A sharply observed microcosm of the human condition, with superb direction, great cinematography (by Glen MacWilliams), imaginative staging (especially considering the claustrophobic setting) and outstanding performances by the entire ensemble, which includes Tallulah Bankhead, William Bendix, Walter Slezak, John Hodiak, Mary Anderson, Canada Lee, and Hume Cronyn.
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog – Mrs. Bunting is a pleasant landlady, but we’re not so sure about her latest boarder. There’s a possibility he’s “The Avenger”, a brutal serial killer who is stalking London. Ivor Novello plays the gentleman in question, an intense, brooding fellow with a vaguely menacing demeanor. Is he or isn’t he? This suspense thriller has been remade umpteen times over the last eight decades, but for my money, none of them can touch this 1927 Hitchcock silent for atmosphere and mood. The screenplay was co-adapted from Marie Belloc Lowndes’ eponymous novel by Eliot Stannard and Hitchcock.Novello did a reprise as the mysterious lodger in Maurice Elvey’s 1932 version.
Marnie –I know it’s de rigueur to tout Vertigo as Alfred Hitchcock’s best “psychological thriller” (it just never floated my lifeboat) but my vote goes to this 1964 entry, which I view as a slightly ahead-of-it’s-time precursor to dark, psycho-sexual character studies along the lines of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and Robert Altman’s That Cold Day in the Park.
Tippi Hedren stars as an oddly insular young woman who appears to suffer from kleptomania. Sean Connery is a well-to-do widower who hires Marnie to work for his company, despite his prior knowledge (by pure chance) of her tendency to steal from her employers.
Okay, he’s not blind to the fact that she’s a knockout, but he’s also objectively fascinated by her as a kind of clinical study. His own behaviors slip as he tries to play Marnie’s employer, friend, lover, and armchair psychoanalyst all at once. One of Hitchcock’s most unusual entries, bolstered by Jay Presson Allen’s intelligent screenplay.
North by Northwest – I’m hard-pressed to find a more perfect blend of suspense, intrigue, romance, action, comedy and visual mastery than Hitchcock’s 1959 masterpiece. Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason and Martin Landau head a great cast in this outstanding “wrong man” thriller. Nearly every set piece in the film has become iconic.
Although I never tire of the crop-dusting sequence or the (literally) cliff-hanging Mt. Rushmore chase, my favorite is the dining car scene. Armed solely with Ernest Lehman’s clever repartee and their acting chemistry, Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint engage in the most erotic sex scene ever filmed wherein participants remain fully clothed (and keep hands where we can see them!). Bernard Hermann’s score is one of his finest.
Notorious – It’s a tough call to name my “favorite” Hitchcock movie (it’s like being forced to pick your favorite child). I can only narrow it down to three: North by Northwest, The Lady Vanishes, and this superb 1946 espionage thriller (no, I don’t have a man-crush on Cary Grant…not that there would be anything wrong with that). Grant does make for a suave American agent, and Claude Rains a villain you love to hate, but it’s Ingrid Bergman who holds my interest in this story of love, betrayal and international intrigue, set in exotic Rio. Bergman plays her character with a worldly cynicism and sexy vulnerability that to this day, few actors would be able to sell so well. Ben Hecht adapted the script from a John Tainter Foote story, with additional dialog contributed by Hitchcock and Cliffor Odets (both uncredited).
Psycho – Bad, bad Norman. Such a disappointment to his mother. “MOTHERRRR!!!” Poor, poor Janet Leigh. No sooner had she recovered from her bad motel experience in Touch of Evil than she found herself checking in to the Bates and having a late dinner in a dimly lit office, surrounded by Norman’s unsettling taxidermy collection. And this is only the warm up to what Alfred Hitchcock has in store for her later that evening (anyone for a shower?).
This brilliant thriller has spawned so many imitations, I’ve lost count. While tame by today’s standards, several key scenes still have the power to shock. Twitchy Tony Perkins sets the bar for future movie psycho killers. Joseph Stefano adapted the spare screenplay from Robert Bloch’s novel. Also in the cast: Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsalm, and Simon Oakland.
Programming note: Airs on TCM at 3pm (PST) this Sunday, August 10th.
Strangers on a Train – There’s something that Wim Wenders’ The American Friend, Rene Clement’s Purple Noon (and Anthony Minghella’s 1999 remake, The Talented Mr. Ripley) all share in common with this 1951 Hitchcock entry (aside from being memorable thrillers). They are all based on novels by the late Patricia Highsmith. If I had to choose the best of the aforementioned quartet, it would be Strangers on a Train.
Robert Walker gives his finest performance as tortured, creepy stalker Bruno Antony, who “just happens” to bump into his sports idol, ex-tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) on a commuter train. For a “stranger”, Bruno has a lot of knowledge regarding Guy’s spiraling career; and most significantly, his acrimonious marriage.
As for Bruno, well, he kind of hates his father. A lot. The silver-tongued sociopath is soon regaling Guy with a hypothetical scenario demonstrating how simple it would be for two “strangers” with nearly identical “problems” to make those problems vanish. The perfect crime! Of course, the louder you yell at your screen for Guy to get as far away from Bruno as possible, the more Bruno pulls him in. It’s full of great twists and turns, with one of Hitchcock’s most heart-pounding finales. The screenplay was adapted by Raymond Chandler, Czenzi Ormonde, and Whitfield Cook.
The 39 Steps – Many of the tropes that would come to be labeled “Hitchcockian” are fomenting in this 1935 entry: an icy blonde love interest, a meticulously constructed, edge-of-your-seat finale, and most notably, the “wrong man” scenario. Robert Donat stars as a Canadian tourist in London who is approached by a jittery woman after a music hall show. She begs refuge in his flat for the night, but won’t tell him why. Intrigued, he offers her his hospitality.
He awakens the next morning, just in time to watch her collapse on the floor, with a knife in her back and a map in her hand. Before he knows it, he’s on the run from the police and embroiled with shady assassins, foreign spies and people who are not who they seem to be. Fate and circumstance throw him in with a reluctant female “accomplice” (Madeleine Carroll).
Suspenseful, funny, and rapid-paced. Charles Bennett and Ian Hay adapted the screenplay from the novel by John Buchan.
Programming note: Airs on TCM at 3am (PST) this Sunday, August 10th.
Previous posts with related themes:
Tracks of my fears: Last Passenger and a Top 5 list
The Taking of Pelham, 1-2-3 (2009)
More reviews at Den of Cinema
— Dennis Hartley
And a grifter gets his gig
It’s football season and all the players and coaches are back on the field:
But Joe Kennedy won’t be among them. The assistant coach of the Bremerton High School football team in Washington state quit his job after participating in just one game last week. Kennedy’s employment status is generally not worthy of national attention on its own terms. This particular coach, however, waged an eight-year legal battle to reclaim that job and got the Supreme Court to reshape the balance between church and state in public schools along the way. He won the case, he got his job back, and then he quit almost immediately.
I have written before about the Supreme Court’s tendency in recent years to take what I have charitably described as “phantom docket” cases. But these might be more simply described as fake: They rest upon nebulous theories of standing, hypothetical injuries, and right-wing causes célèbre. Phantom-docket cases have allowed the court’s conservative majority to rewrite precedents while avoiding any immediate real-world consequences of their rulings. Yet even by those standards, Kennedy’s case might be the most phantasmal of them all.
The basic course of events was as follows. Kennedy worked as a part-time assistant football coach in Bremerton. He often prayed before and after football games, at first silently by himself and then with students. After the school district learned of the prayers with students many years later, they conducted an inquiry into the practice and, fearing litigation, tried to get him to hold nondisruptive private prayers instead. He eventually chose to hold public prayers with media figures and elected officials in defiance of the district’s requests.
After this escalation, the district put Kennedy on paid administrative leave and the head coach recommended that he not be rehired next season because of the disruptions he had caused. Kennedy declined to reapply for his job, then sued the school district for violating his First Amendment rights to free speech and religious practice. In those legal proceedings, Kennedy framed his case as one of a humble football coach whose quiet prayers were squelched by a hostile school district.
“The decision below reached the remarkable conclusion that the Constitution prohibits what it protects twice over,” he explained in his petition for review for the Supreme Court, referring to the lower-court rulings against him. “Petitioner Joseph Kennedy is a former football coach at a public high school who lost his job after kneeling at the 50-yard line after a high school football game to say a brief, quiet prayer of gratitude.”
This version of events was a powerful and apparently irresistible narrative for legal conservatives. Secular school administrators punishing a small-town high school football coach for quietly praying after a game is potent imagery, evoking a wistful Americana that is now threatened by godless liberalism. Unsurprisingly, conservative jurists went out of their way to denounce the school district for its actions and side with Kennedy at every stage of the case.
Judge Diarmund O’Scannlain, the dean of the conservative wing on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote an impassioned dissent from that court’s refusal to reconsider a panel’s ruling against Kennedy. The panel’s ruling, he claimed, “obliterates” Kennedy’s First Amendment rights “by announcing a new rule that any speech by a public school teacher or coach, while on the clock and in earshot of others, is subject to plenary control by the government.
“Indeed, we are told that, from the moment public high school football coach Joseph Kennedy arrives at work until the very last of his players has gone home after a game, the Free Speech Clause simply doesn’t apply to him,” O’Scannlain continued. He framed the situation in stark, minimalist terms: “Kennedy lost his coaching job because he refused to abandon his practice of kneeling on the field and uttering a prayer after each football game.”
But this interpretation of events, O’Scannlain’s colleagues noted, left out important context. Judge Milan Smith, a George W. Bush appointee, described at length how his colleague had omitted essential details and framed what happened in misleading terms. Kennedy, he noted, was not merely offering silent, private prayers but engaging in a much larger religious activity with students under his supervision and even coaches and players from other schools. Moreover, even as the school district tried to accommodate Kennedy’s religious practices, Kennedy chose to escalate them into a spectacle by declaring that he would pray in the middle of the football field immediately after the October 26 game.
“He advertised in the area’s largest newspaper, and local and national TV stations, that he intended to defy BSD’s instructions not to publicly pray with his players while still on duty even though he said he might lose his job as a result,” Smith recounted. “As he said he would, Kennedy prayed out loud in the middle of the football field immediately after the conclusion of the first game after his lawyer’s letter was sent, surrounded by players, members of the opposing team, parents, a local politician, and members of the news media with television cameras recording the event, all of whom had been advised of Kennedy’s intended actions through the local news and social media.”
Smith then chastised his colleagues by name for falling for Kennedy’s self-serving stories. “Unlike Odysseus, who was able to resist the seductive song of the Sirens by being tied to a mast and having his shipmates stop their ears with bees’ wax, our colleague, Judge O’Scannlain, appears to have succumbed to the Siren song of a deceitful narrative of this case spun by counsel for appellant, to the effect that Joseph Kennedy, a Bremerton High School (BHS) football coach, was disciplined for holding silent, private prayers,” Smith wrote in a concurring opinion from the Ninth Circuit’s refusal to rehear the case. “That narrative is false.”
Ultimately, the Supreme Court proved just as unable—or perhaps just as unwilling—to look beyond the falsehoods spun by Kennedy and his lawyers. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, described the saga in the opening paragraph of his majority opinion in almost unrecognizable terms—unrecognizable, that is, unless your understanding of the case’s facts comes entirely from Kennedy’s own briefs.
“Joseph Kennedy lost his job as a high school football coach because he knelt at midfield after games to offer a quiet prayer of thanks,” Gorsuch wrote, about events that never took place. “Mr. Kennedy prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters. He offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied. Still, the Bremerton School District disciplined him anyway.”
Along the way, Gorsuch used the opportunity to overturn Lemon v. Kurtzman, a Supreme Court ruling in 1971 that set up what was known as the “Lemon test” for establishment clause cases. Conservatives have long opposed the ruling on multiple grounds, including for the allegedly short shrift it gives to religious practices. In its place, Gorsuch emphasized the conservative majority’s preferred replacement test, which instead commands that “the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by reference to historical practices and understandings.”
The court’s liberal justices, like their lower-court colleagues, did not hesitate to call out the majority for the misleading portrayal of Kennedy’s case. “To the degree the Court portrays petitioner Joseph Kennedy’s prayers as private and quiet, it misconstrues the facts,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for herself and the other two dissenters. “The record reveals that Kennedy had a longstanding practice of conducting demonstrative prayers on the 50-yard line of the football field. Kennedy consistently invited others to join his prayers and for years led student athletes in prayer at the same time and location. The Court ignores this history.”
To underscore that point, Sotomayor included three photographs of Kennedy’s activities that clearly show him leading prayer circles with students and opposing-team players. She chastised the majority for its blinkered view of the case, which stripped out the context that made the school district’s concern about an establishment clause violation much more credible. She noted, for example, that several parents had later contacted the school district to say that their children only participated in the prayers because they felt obligated to do so. (Coercion is a well-established red line in school prayer cases.)
Kennedy’s grandstanding, Sotomayor pointed out, had also thrown the school’s football program into turmoil. “The head coach himself also resigned after 11 years in that position, expressing fears that he or his staff would be shot from the crowd or otherwise attacked because of the turmoil created by Kennedy’s media appearances,” Sotomayor noted. “Three of five other assistant coaches did not reapply.”
To make things even more awkward, Kennedy no longer even lived in Washington state by the time his case had reached the Supreme Court. He had since relocated to Florida, calling into question whether he even wanted his old job back. When asked by The New York Times last spring about relocating to the state furthest from Washington, Kennedy insisted he would be on the “very first flight back” and was eager to return to his old job. “The biggest honor of my life was coaching these young men,” Kennedy told the Times. “No lie, we had blood, sweat, tears and death in the Marine Corps, but I got way more out of coaching than anything else in my life.”
Last month, however, his tune had changed. Kennedy told NBC News that while he felt a duty to return after the long legal fight, he had a new life in Florida to live as well. That new life brought him a much greater degree of prominence than he had before the case. Kennedy’s book about the saga is coming out later this year, complete with a book tour. He claimed that Ron DeSantis, with whom he said he’d recently had dinner, had asked him to support his presidential campaign, but Kennedy declined because his “loyalty is to [Donald] Trump.” Coaching high school football is no match for being “the praying coach” who took on secularism and won. The life of a right-wing folk hero can be a busy (and profitable) one.
This is not to say that Kennedy was obligated to work as a high school football coach forever after the Supreme Court’s ruling. Indeed, it is to his credit that he even went back to coach a single game at all. It would have been much simpler to take the victory and move on. But refusing to coach another game would have deprived this entire charade of the fig leaf it so desperately needed.[…]
One of the most important limits on the Supreme Court’s power is that, under the Constitution, it can only hear actual “cases and controversies.” The justices can’t just wake up one morning and say X is constitutional and Y is not. They can’t issue advisory opinions based on what they think might happen or should happen. Someone has to bring them a real case with real stakes and real adversaries. Kennedy’s case shows how easily that check on their power can be obliterated if the justices want it to disappear, and how much they can reshape American law once it’s gone. All it takes is a story that is, both literally and figuratively, too good to be true.
Maybe he can join Kyle Rittenhouse on the wingnut hustle circuit. I’m sure he’ll make more money than he ever did as a part time high school football coach which may have been the plan all along. It was an excellent career move.