This morning I wrote about the use of the Comstock Act and other zombie laws to help the right take America back to the 1890s. Get a load of this one:
A government watchdog group filed suit in Delaware federal court this week, seeking to compel the Justice Department to produce records that may determine whether Hunter Biden should be further investigated under a 1910 law relating to “prostitution or debauchery.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project petitioned the same Wilmington bench where Biden was found guilty on gun charges this month, contending that there is a significant amount of evidence the first son was being probed on Mann Act grounds.
The law, stemming from a time when prostitution was more prevalent in urban areas, states it is a felony to “knowingly transport… in interstate or foreign commerce… any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery.”
The legal brief, obtained by Fox News Digital, includes part of a 2023 interview transcript from IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler before the House Ways & Means Committee.
Ziegler recounted efforts by the Justice Department to assess potential Mann Act violations, speaking of a “West Coast assistant” of Biden’s, whom “we knew … to also be in the prostitution world or believed to be in the prostitution world – and he deducted expenses related to her.”
An unnamed lawmaker then asks about Biden “paying for the travel of an individual to fly out to California or wherever,” to which Ziegler responds, “Or Boston or wherever he was at. [Washington, D.C.] I think one of them – he flew someone for the night.”
Ziegler said he understood the Justice Department to be “compiling” potential violation allegations that had been referred to them but that he did not know the ultimate outcome.
Oversight Project attorney Kyle Brosnan told Fox News Digital in a Thursday interview he believes the Justice Department, therefore, has the information and that it should be made publicly available.
Brosnan said the Oversight Project seeks records relating to Ziegler’s testimony, any communications with the probation office regarding the Mann Act, as well as “victim”-related inquiries.
“If you sort of peel back the layers of the onion, it’s absurd, because there is an overwhelming amount of information that already shows these records exist. [They’re] found on the Hunter Biden laptop, which was entered into evidence in his criminal case in Delaware,” Brosnan said.
These Trump bootlickers want to go after Hunter Biden for “debauchery.” You cannot make this stuff up.
This is where shamelessness really is a superpower. Anyone with a sense of shame would be too embarrassed to push this with all the rape and underage sex charges among Republicans politicians and evangelical pastors (just this week!) not to mention the presidential nominee’s own track record. But they won’t. Instead, they will no doubt hold hearings allowing Marjorie Taylor Greene to leer at big blow up pictures of Hunter Biden’s privates while screeching like a demented harpy about morality.
Trump keeps telling his fans that he doesn’t need any votes. He says he has more than enough. He says everything depends on stopping Democrats from “cheating” (by which he means voting.) So it makes sense that they wouldn’t be putting much effort into get out the vote. They figure they don’t really need it.
Bill Sher at the Washington Monthly discusses the Trump “ground game” here and it turns out that they’re outsourcing it to a grifter. Yep:
CNN reported that “Donald Trump’s campaign is taking a vastly different approach to 2024 compared with 2020, with plans for fewer staff and expenses [and instead] relying on wealthy conservative groups for data, infrastructure, and significant bank accounts.” It further noted that one of the most important of these groups is Turning Point Action, part of the Turning Point network that began with Turning Point USA.
Turning Point USA is a right-wing student group founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk, an 18-year-old soon-to-be college dropout, and Bill Montgomery, an elderly Tea Party activist.
He’s grifted almost a quarter of a billion since 2016 and while he’s good at putting on drooling Trump fest events, other than that…
In 2022, the Turning Point network entered the ground game business, mainly in Arizona, where it is headquartered. As the Arizona Republic reported, “Turning Point PAC, the political action committee started by Turning Point USA, spent $494,105 during the 2022 election cycle, including the primary elections. The bulk of that, $377,201, went towards the general election races for U.S. Senate, governor, and Secretary of State in Arizona.” Turning Point’s candidates lost all of those races.
What did Turning Point do to help on the ground? Per the Arizona Republic:
Outside of money, Turning Point Action, the advocacy arm of the parent non-profit, Turning Point USA, held a string of rallies in key legislative districts. Volunteers who showed up were handed materials provided by Turning Point PAC and sent out to knock on doors and engage voters.
And, though it did not advocate certain candidates, Turning Point USA, the parent non-profit, started its Turning Point Faith initiative in August 2021 that aimed at persuading Christians to become more civic-minded.
At monthly events held at a Phoenix megachurch, Kirk would speak about current events and cast political involvement as a spiritual duty to protect the nation from falling under the control of Satan. Excerpts of those events played as part of a half-hour radio show that began airing on dozens of Christian radio stations.
None of this had any discernible impact. In the Arizona gubernatorial race, Turning Point’s preferred candidate, Kari Lake, led the Democratic nominee, Katie Hobbs, by 2.4 percentage points in the final FiveThirtyEight poll average. Yet Hobbs won by a 0.7 percentage point margin. Underperforming the polls by 3 points indicates that Lake and her Turning Point comrades got beat on the ground.
Undeterred, Turning Point last year began shopping around a $108 million get-out-the-vote plan, now called “Chase the Vote,” focusing on Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Then-Chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, gave this plan the cold shoulder. Kirk launched blistering attacks on McDaniel, claiming she was a Democratic plant and urging Trump to dump her. According to Real Clear Politics, McDaniel told Trump that Kirk’s penchant for insulting African Americans, such as saying Martin Luther King, Jr. did not deserve a holiday, would hurt efforts with Black voters.
Kirk won the fight. McDaniel quit under pressure. Then Trump took Kirk’s suggestion to install his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as RNC co-chair.
This explains Kirk’s recent turn toward hyper Christian talk on his radio show and podcast. He’s targeting the evangelical base. Let’s just say that his professions of pious Christianity aren’t especially believable.
In today’s excellent newsletter, Brian Beutler is absolutely right about this. We know that most of the kvetching about the economy at this point is coming from Republicans and even then they are reporting that their own finances are fine it’s everyone else who is suffering terribly under the horrors of Joe Biden’s economy. There are some independents and Democrats who are complaining as well which is where the real problem lies.
Beutler points out that this phenomenon is asymmetric:
Every poll like this one from Monmouth will sweep in voters whose responses are tethered to facts, and others, mostly Republicans, whose responses are shaped by partisanship and tribalism. What we have here is evidence that Biden is fighting the issue to a draw despite that handicap. If people really just voted their pocketbooks, Biden would be winning handily. If Trump were to become president tomorrow, Republicans would experience catharsis, and economic sentiment would shoot above the waterline.
Political professionals should be able to see that coming miles away: Those same tribal poll responders will become big fans of the economy if Trump wins the election. They will outnumber their tribal opposites in the Democratic Party, and sentiment will invert before policy has changed at all.
Which means we know Biden doesn’t have a major economy problem—he has a Republican shit-talking problem.
Knowing that to be true, you would think that Democrats would not succumb to it but there is a raging debate among them about whether Biden should tell the truth about the economy or capitulate to these “vibes” that are telling people it sucks.
I’m with Beutler:
Conceding to the shit talkers can’t be right as a matter of strategy or basic self-respect. Biden’s domestic policy agenda should be a source of pride, not embarrassment. It’s also troubling in a larger sense: If we ever mean to become a society where politics is bound by empirical reality, it’s not good enough to recruit good-faith actors with solid epistemic habits who abhor fanning lies. We need the bad guys to pay a price for their deceptions. That can not happen if Democrats concede to living in a MAGA-inflected, topsy-turvy world, where prosperity is deprivation, “help wanted” signs are evidence of unemployment, and the most expensive gas station in America reflects the real price per gallon.
Democrats might still win the election from a defensive crouch. But they’ll have a much harder time winning the battle for consensus about the economy or Biden’s record if they accept conventional-wisdom pessimism. We’ll be told they won despite poor economic sentiment, not that Republicans lost because their campaign was based fundamentally on mass- and self-deception. And if this is the mindset Democrats have about Biden’s policy triumphs, they are not going to do much better when they have the power to impose real accountability, and all the contention it will stir.
This is why it was so jarring to hear Democratic strategists (and seemingly only Democratic strategists) respond to Trump’s felony convictions by cautioning that calling Trump a felon might backfire, because it would feed Trump’s false claims of “politicization.”
We obviously don’t know what will work. None of us are soothsayers or oracles. But as Beutler points out, if Biden wins a close election, which seems the likeliest positive scenario, “winning narrowly without popular appeal, and without the will or the mandate to fix what Trump and his loyalists have broken” would be a very bad outcome. The status quo is not sustainable.
All over cable news today are breathless reports about how “momentum” has shifted toward Trump because he collected $141 million last month compared to Biden’s apparently paltry $84 million. But they fail to mention that most of Trump’s money came from 3 billionaires, one of whom was this guy:
Timothy Mellon, a reclusive heir to a Gilded Age fortune, donated $50 million to a super PAC supporting Donald J. Trump the day after the former president was convicted of 34 felonies, according to new federal filings, an enormous gift that is among the largest single disclosed contributions ever.
The donation’s impact on the 2024 race is expected to be felt almost immediately. Within days of the contribution, the pro-Trump super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., said in a memo that it would begin reserving $100 million in advertising through Labor Day.
The group had only $34.5 million on hand at the end of April, and Mr. Mellon’s contribution accounted for much of the nearly $70 million that the super PAC raised in May. On Wednesday and Thursday, the super PAC began reserving $30 million in ads to air in Georgia and Pennsylvania around the Fourth of July holiday.
Mr. Mellon is now the first donor to give $100 million in disclosed federal contributions in this year’s election. He was already the single largest contributor to super PACs supporting both Mr. Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running as an independent. Mr. Mellon has previously given $25 million to both.
CNN actually said that Mellon had changed teams when it’s been obvious from the beginning that he was backing RFK on behalf of Trump.
Trump is out there selling himself to the highest bidder explicitly promising rich people that if they give him huge sums of money he will take care of them, if you know what I mean. He told the oil company execs that if they give him a billion dollars he’ll make sure their taxes are slashed and their regulations are reversed. It used to be that such explicit quid pro quos were considered to be liabilities. Today, not so much.
Biden collected big bucks from billionaires too, including Michael Bloomberg who gave 20 million. But the idea that these huge numbers reflect anything about the electorate is ridiculous at this point. It certainly says something about our campaign system and capitalism but that’s a different story.
Anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of reproductive rights in America had heard of the antediluvian Comstock Act but I doubt most of them ever thought it would actually be back in use in the 21st century. The notorious “anti-vice” laws from 1873 banned the shipment of “lewd” written materials, contraceptives and any “instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing” for the purpose of abortion, had not been in force for many decades since the passage of various laws and the recognition of a constitutional right to abortion in 1973’s Roe v. Wade. Nonetheless, it remained on the books and leave it to the radicals putting together Project 2025 to exhume it the minute Samuel Alito and company gave them the green light.
My Salon colleague Amanda Marcotte wrote about the Comstock Act in depth a few months ago in the wake of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Mifepristone ruling (access to which was thankfully affirmed (for now) by the Supreme Court this month.) The original decision relied heavily on the Comstock Act to justify the decision to ban the drug, an issue which was left unresolved by the Supreme Court when they threw out the lawsuit on the basis of standing rather than the merits. So the Comstock Act remains on the books and is now theoretically constitutional since the reversal of Roe v Wade, at least when it comes to contraception and abortion. Other aspects of the law regarding obscenity are still unenforceable as they are protected under other precedents.
The Comstock Act is what’s known as a “zombie law” which is a law that has been neutered by subsequent High Court decisions that have found a constitutional prohibition against enforcing them but they remain on the books sometimes for centuries lurking around like the undead (hence the name) waiting for a chance to be reanimated by the Supreme Court overturning one of its own decisions. There are a lot of them which we just saw in a number of states that had draconian 19th century laws go into effect when the Court handed down the Dobbs decision.
In Arizona after Roe was overturned, the conservative state Supreme Court revived a near-total ban on abortion, invoking an 1864 law that only allowed abortion to save the mother’s life and gave prison time to doctors who perform them. The state legislature went through tremendous gyrations to finally repeal that 1864 law but the status of the state’s abortion laws remain in limbo and doctors and patients remain confused and anxious about the law’s requirements. A similar story has played out in all the states that had these zombie laws on the books.
The Comstock Act is a federal law, however, and it is still in effect and is ripe for the picking by anti-abortion zealots and others who want to further restrict reproductive freedoms, including contraception. From the moment the Dobbs decision came down legal experts and activists recognized the danger it posed with this radical right wing judiciary and they immediately started to work on repealing it. At the time a number of abortion rights groups asked them to stand down because of cases already in the pipeline that would have been affected. As Notus reported:
“There’s a lot of litigation playing out that’s specific to this that many of the reproductive rights groups are in the middle of. They’re actually wanting to, they’re not wanting to see [the Comstock Act] change in the middle of that litigation. So that was at the request of Planned Parenthood and other reproductive freedom groups that have been fighting this for a long time,” Democratic Representative Pat Ryan said.
That came as something of a surprise but the Democrats in congress complied with the request. However with the Mifepristone case decided they have decided to make the move.
According to the Washington Post, Democrats are now introducing legislation to repeal the abortion provisions of the Act with the backing of those major abortion rights groups. (They will apparently leave in some of the obscenity laws on which bans on child pornography are based.) The Senate bill has 20 co-sponsors, including Sens.Tina Smith, D-Minn., Elizabeth Warren, D-Ma., and Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev. and Reps. Becca Balint, D-Vt. and Cori Bush, D-Mo. introduced the legislation in the House. Although they haven’t spoken out, the assumption is that the Democratic leadership is supportive.
The Post article suggests that there may be some reluctance by the White House but the reasons are unclear although other unnamed Democrats fear that it will somehow distract from other issues, which is typical but foolish. I hope that’s not the case. The Comstock Act is a 19th century monstrosity that should be repealed because is grotesque and we are watching it be used to roll back Americans’ basic human rights. I
Obviously, the very pious Christian Nationalist Speaker of the House Mike Johnson will not let this pass. The Comstock Act might have been written by him personally. (This is a man who participated in one of those bizarre purity balls with his daughter, after all. ) So there’s no hope of passage this year. But this should be part of the debate going into the election and the Democrats must repeal it the minute they get the chance because we know the Republicans are planning to use it the minute they get theirs.
There are a lot of zombie laws on the books that are likely to be used by the conservative judicial activists in the next few years now that they’ve secured the right wing Supreme Court of their dreams. For instance, there are existing, unenforced laws against adultery, atheism and sodomy which could easily be reanimated under some of the right’s current crusades. Discriminatory housing covenants and outdated draconian drug laws could rise from the dead as well.
They are setting up test cases all over the country with an eye toward overturning precedents to make that happen. Just this week Louisiana passed a new law requiring that all schools display the Ten Commandments in every classroom (using a large font!) They hope to get it to the Supreme Court which has shown every inclination to destroy the separation of church and state. Any zombies from the 1950s will immediately go back into effect if they uphold this law as constitutional.
Democrats in state legislatures and at the national level would be wise to survey all the laws and repeal these dead ones wherever they can as soon as possible. If they don’t, there’s every chance the right’s various culture crusades will end up bringing them back to life.
Gov. Tim Walz (D) of Minnesota on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” this morning gave a tight “elevator speech” contrasting Democrats’ approach as caretakers of these United States versus the grievance and retribution agenda of a second Trump administration (transcribed so you don’t miss any of it in the X condensation):
You’re seeing the contrast in this when you get a Democratic governor versus a Republican governor. We don’t have the Ten Commandments posted in our classrooms, but we have free breakfast and lunch. Those are policies that the Biden-Harris administration are talking about going nationally. It makes a huge difference. We use what we learned during the pandemic on the child tax credit. Minnesota’s going to reduce childhood poverty by a third. We already have one of the lowest numbers. Those are things that make a real difference in people’s lives, money back in the pockets of the middle class, policies that are making a difference in our schools. There’s a big contrast. What do you hear from the Trump administration other than grievance, retribution? “Esteemed epidemiologist” Donald Trump did nothing during COVID. Now he’s going to solve the Middle East crisis and climate change on the first day? Immigration? Not going to happen.
It’s not the first time you’ve seen twisted souls reject partaking in the fruits of this country’s bounty rather than share them with people they hate, even if it means their own children go without.
Trump and MAGA Republicans don’t want to govern. They want to rule. They don’t want Americans to flourish. They want the “wrong” kind to shut up, obey, and remain marginalized. They serve up grievance and retribution neither they nor their children can eat.
Listen to Mark Robinson, North Carolina Republican candidate for governor in 2024, scream, “Christian patriots of this nation will own this nation and rule this nation.” Share the video.
Check out this condensed quote from Stephen Wolfe’s “The Case for Christian Nationalism“: “The issue here centers on whether a Christian minority can establish a political state over the whole without the positive consent of the whole. I affirm they can. … Non-Christians living among us … are not entitled to political equality, nor do they have a right to deny the people of God their right to order civil institutions to God and to their complete good. … The Christian’s posture toward the earth ought to be that it is ours, not theirs, for we are co-heirs in Christ.”
The ideas behind Project 2025 and Christian nationalism are as old as feudalism and just as irredeemably un-American.
We can choose that or choose an America where schoolchildren have enough to eat and the opportunity to flourish, an America where freedom means freedom, not enforced religious conformity.
A yard sign I passed yesterday while canvassing read, “Dictatorship or Democracy. Choose wisely.”
Gov. @Tim_Walz: You're seeing the contrast when you elect Democrats over Republicans. We're not forcing the Ten Commandments to be posted in classrooms, we're feeding kids free breakfast and lunch. Those are policies the Biden-Harris administration wants to take nationally. These… pic.twitter.com/rhD4e68zcN
“They pointed me out with the N-word…. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”
Listen to “Mr. October” describe his experiences as a Black professional baseball player beginning in the mid-1960s after passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. As Elie Mystal tweets, this is history that many people want buried.
This is why Republicans work so hard to keep history out of schools. They don’t want white children to know what their parents and grandparents did. https://t.co/N63z2eJ8h0
Brought onto a set Thursday to share memories of playing at a historic baseball stadium in Alabama, MLB Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson expressed raw, unsparing thoughts about the racism he experienced decades ago.
“I walked into restaurants and they would point at me and say, ‘The [n-word] can’t eat here.’ I would go to a hotel and they would say, ‘The [n-word] can’t stay here,’” the 78-year-old told a Fox Sports panel that featured recently retired major league stars Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz and Derek Jeter.
The comments came ahead of an MLB game between the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants staged at Birmingham’s Rickwood Field. Billed as the country’s oldest ballpark, it was home to the Negro Leagues’ Black Barons as well as the minor league Birmingham Barons.
“I wouldn’t wish it on anybody,” Jackson said several times.
The former slugger for the A’s, Orioles, Yankees and Angels credited a number of White teammates, plus then-manager John McNamara, with helping him get through that period. Jackson said he spent several nights a week for many weeks sleeping on their couches until they received threats to “burn our apartment complex down” if he didn’t leave. Jackson added that his Birmingham teammates — including Rollie Fingers and Joe Rudi, who went on to win three World Series with him in Oakland — saved him from getting into physical confrontations with Southern racists.
“I’d have got killed here, because I’d have beat somebody’s a–,” Jackson said Thursday, referring to the history of lynchings of Black people by White mobs. “You’d have saw me in an oak tree somewhere.”
“If that doesn’t hurt to listen to, you’re missing something as a human being,” responded X-user Greg Cantwell.
The same sort of people who want this history disappeared fueled the Redeemer movement, enforced Jim Crow laws, and kept alive the Lost Cause for well over 100 years to keep from confronting the sins of their grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great grandparents. They gave a new meaning to the term “whitewash.” It continues to this day. The legacy of slave patrols continues to this day.
Should our republic survive the fascist movement spreading here and abroad, people now engaged in the MAGA movement will put equally strenuous efforts behind burying the history of their seditious participation and that of their parents and grandparents. Just as before.
Generally, I don’t tear up every time I hear news of an actor’s passing. But this is one of those times:
With a heavy heart, I tell you that my father, Donald Sutherland, has passed away. I personally think one of the most important actors in the history of film. Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. He loved what he did and did what he loved, and one can never ask for more… pic.twitter.com/3EdJB03KKT
Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. Sounds about right. He was fearless, alright. And what a resume…where do you even start? Donald McNichol Sutherland was born in Saint John, Newfoundland/Labrador on July 17, 1935. I’ll admit that on occasion, I have completely forgotten that he was Canadian-born. But Sutherland himself certainly never forgot about his roots. From today’s obituary by the CBC:
Though he found international success, the actor maintained a professional and personal connection to Canada throughout his life. He narrated two documentaries for the National Film Board in the ’80s, lent his voice to the 2015 Canadian animated film Pirate’s Passage and returned to Toronto theatre — where he got his start — in the early 2000s. He was awarded a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2000.
“I’m a Canadian. The thing about Canada is that you go from east to west, from Nova Scotia to Vancouver. I go away, I will go and live in Paris or I will go and live in London or whatever — [and] even in the United States — but my humour, what I am as a person is here, is rooted here,” he said during an interview with CBC News in 1985.
Indeed, his comedic roles (and they were many) were infused with that uniquely Canadian style of deadpan anarchy.
While a large portion of the films he is most well-known for were U.S. -produced box office hits (especially in his later years), he was also a notable player in world cinema throughout his career. He worked with filmmakers like Bernardo Bertolucci, Federico Fellini, Claude Chabrol, Nicolas Roeg, and John Schlesinger.
I admired him for his political activism, which began in earnest when he joined Jane Fonda for her 1972 “FTA” (“Fuck the Army”) Vietnam War protest road tour that she organized for troops (as antithesis to the traditional rah-rah Bob Hope USO shows). It probably won’t come as a shock to Hullabaloo readers that his antiwar activism earned Sutherland a place on the NSA’s “watch list” for a period in the early 70s. He even joined the political blogosphere for a spell; writing some pieces for Huffington Post during the 2008 election.
As his son Kiefer wrote this morning, He loved what he did and did what he loved, and one can never ask for more than that. A life well lived. All I can add to that is that ultimately, the work of an artist speaks for itself. Bearing that in mind, here are some of my favorite Donald Sutherland performances (with additional “must-sees” listed below).
The Day of the Locust – Equal parts backstage drama, character study, and psychological horror, John Schlesinger’s 1975 drama (with a Waldo Salt screenplay adapted from the eponymous novel by Nathanaeal West) is the most unsettling Hollywood dream-turned nightmare this side of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.
Set in 1930s Los Angeles, the story revolves around a Hollywood newbie (William Atherton) who works in the art department of a major movie studio. He rents a cheap apartment housed in a complex chockablock with eccentric tenants, including an aspiring starlet (Karen Black) who lives with her ailing father (Burgess Meredith), a former vaudevillian who wheezes his way up and down hilly streets eking out a living as a door-to-door snake oil salesman.
The young artist becomes hopelessly infatuated with the starlet, but it quickly becomes apparent that, while she’s friendly toward him, it’s strictly a one-sided romance. Nonetheless, he continues to get drawn into her orbit-a scenario that becomes increasingly twisted, especially once she impulsively marries a well-to-do but socially inept and sexually repressed accountant (Donald Sutherland). It all culminates in a Grand Guignol finale you may find hard to shake off.
A gauzy, sun-bleached vision of a city (shot by ace cinematographer Conrad Hall) that attracts those yearning to connect with someone, something, or anything that assures a non-corporeal form of immortality; a city that teases endless possibilities, yet so often pays out with little more than broken dreams.
Don’t Look Now – This is a difficult film to describe without risking spoilers, so I’ll be brief. Based on a Daphne du Maurier story, this haunting, one-of-a-kind 1974 psychological thriller from Nicholas Roeg (Walkabout, The Man Who Fell to Earth) stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as a couple who are coming to grips with the tragic death of their little girl. Roeg slowly percolates an ever-creeping sense of impending doom, drenched in the Gothic atmosphere of Venice.
JFK – Be forewarned: Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 drama about President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination is not the place to look for a definitive portrait of JFK’s assassin (or “assassins”, plural), because, not unlike Agatha Christie’s fictional detective Hercule Poirot, Stone suspects no one…and everyone.
The most misunderstood aspect of the film, I think, is that Stone is not favoring any prevalent narrative; and that it is by the director’s definition a “speculative” political thriller. Those who have criticized the approach seem to have missed that Stone himself has stated from the get-go that his goal was to provide a “counter myth” to the “official” conclusion of the Warren Commission (usually referred to as the “lone gunman theory”).
Stone’s narrative is so seamless and dynamic, many viewers didn’t get that he was mashing up at least a dozen *possible* scenarios. The message is right there in the script, when “Mr. X” (Donald Sutherland, who delivers a riveting 15-minute monologue that nearly steals the film) advises New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), “Don’t believe me. Do your own work…your own thinking.”
Kelly’s Heroes –The Dirty Dozen meets Ocean’s Eleven in this clever hybrid of WW2 action yarn and heist caper, directed by Brian G. Hutton. While interrogating a drunken German officer, a platoon leader (Clint Eastwood) stumbles onto a hot tip about a Nazi-controlled bank with a secret stash of gold bullion worth millions.
Eastwood plays it straight, but there’s anachronistic M*A*S*H-style irreverence on hand from Donald Sutherland, as the perpetually stoned and aptly named bohemian tank commander, “Oddball”.
Also with Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, Carroll O’Connor, Gavin MacLeod and Harry Dean Stanton. Mike Curb (future Lt. Governor of California!) composed the theme song, “Burning Bridges”.
Klute – In the fullness of time (good god, I’m old) it’s easy to forget that respected Hollywood icon Jane Fonda toiled away in films for nearly a decade before she began to be taken seriously as an actor (her starring role in then-husband Roger Vadim’s 1968 sexploitation sci-fi trash classic Barbarella certainly didn’t help), There were two pivotal star vehicles that signaled that transition for Fonda as a creative artist – They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) and this lauded 1971 Alan J. Pakula film.
Fonda is “Bree”, a New York City call girl trying to transition out of the game. She becomes reluctantly embroiled in an investigation being conducted by an amateurish private detective named Klute (Donald Sutherland). Klute has been hired by a Pennsylvania-based CEO (Charles Cioffi) who wants him to track down an employee (and friend of Klute’s) who never returned from a business trip. The only clues Klute has is a stack of intimate letters written to Bree by the missing man.
While there is a definite mystery-thriller element to the story, the film is ultimately a two-character study of Bree and Klute as they develop a tenuous romantic relationship. Fonda and Sutherland are both excellent; Fonda picked up a Best Actress in a Leading Role Oscar that year for her work.
Little Murders – This dark, dark comedy from 1971 is one of my all-time favorite films. It was directed by Alan Arkin and adapted by Jules Feiffer from his own self-described “post-assassination play” (referring to the then-relatively recent murders of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy). That said, it is not wholly political; but it is sociopolitical (I see it as the pre-cursor to Paddy Chayefsky’s Network).
Elliot Gould is at the peak of his Elliot Gould-ness as a nihilistic (and seemingly brain-dead) free-lance photographer who is essentially browbeaten into a love affair with an effervescent sunny side-up young woman (Marcia Rodd) who is bound and determined to snap him out of his torpor. The story follows the travails of this oil and water couple as they slog through a dystopian New York City chock full o’ nuts, urban blight, indifference and random shocking acts of senseless violence (you know…New York City in the 70s).
There are so many memorable vignettes, and nearly every cast member gets a Howard Beale-worthy monologue on how fucked-up American society is (and remember…this was 1971). Disturbingly, it remains relevant as ever. But it is very funny. No, seriously. The cast includes Vincent Gardenia, Elizabeth Wilson, Doris Roberts, Lou Jacobi and Donald Sutherland (a hoot as a secular minister). Arkin casts himself as an eccentric homicide investigator.
Every, single, election this happens. It’s tedious and destructive.
Josh Marshall has a good piece today on the totally predictable phenomenon of Democrats running to the press to clutch pearls and wring hands over the campaign they think should be doing something different than they are. He notes this Axios piece that “presents a picture of a campaign cocooned from outside input, intolerant of dissenters who aren’t confident of a win and largely the work of Biden and top advisor Mike Donilon, who is portrayed as having a strategy that is little more than a preciously naive hope that in the end voters will “do the right thing.”
So typical. Marshall writes:
But the heart of the piece comes at the top with a quote (emphasis added) from someone described as a “Democratic strategist in touch with the campaign.”
“It is unclear to many of us watching from the outside whether the president and his core team realize how dire the situation is right now, and whether they even have a plan to fix it. That is scary.”
I spend a lot of time trying to avoid the twin perils of wallowing pessimism and empty optimism. But when I read this, I at first literally checked to see whether I had done a search of my email that had served up an Axios newsletter from last January. (Literally not kidding about this.) We’ve been reading about these fearful strategists for months.
Purely at a definitional level I don’t get how a tie race can be “dire.” How is that possible, even by the dictionary? Scary, yes. Not ideal, absolutely. But a tie can’t be “dire.” That’s just not what dire means.
Then yesterday evening a new Fox poll came out which showed Biden up by two points nationally. That’s a three point swing since May and a seven point swing since March. Perhaps it was just poor timing for Axios. But there’s something more going on here.
I was actually less surprised and impressed by the Fox poll than most people. After all, it’s just one poll. And that applies just as much for “good” poll results as “bad” ones. But there’s also been a slow but clear trend in Biden’s direction since the beginning of the year. So this wasn’t a huge surprise. Indeed, there’ve been a number of polls with Biden one or two points ahead. They just don’t tend to be the ones that garner lots of press attention, like the Times-Siena poll and the Fox poll.
The RCP average is often squirrelly, because it can give a pretty obvious preference to GOP-aligned ringer polls. But even their trendline is clear. (I use it here but they have a clearer trendline chart going back to the Fall.) This is since the peak back in January with my highly methodologically sound blue arrow added for clarity.
He reiterates that it’s a tie and that nobody should get too excited about that. He could lose. Of course. We all know that.
But this is important.
But I keep coming back to “dire.” There’s something legitimately clinical going on here. Some of it is DC journalists being attached to a narrative, one they’re invested in for various reasons. But Democrats and “Democratic strategists” play a role here too, whether or not they have the initials D and A. I’ve made my argument at some length that runaway pessimism has real world campaign impacts, in addition to simply being an Eeyore-ly and undignified way to live life.
But there is some disconnect here that is worth understanding, worth taking a hard look at quite apart from its potential negative impacts on the election outcome. I wish I could give a good explanation for it beyond the inherent GOP tilt of most national political press coverage and intrinsic Democratic worry-wart-ism, both of which are certainly playing a role. But I can’t. For now I can only point to it as a standout example of the way that certain press and political narratives can remain curiously immune to actual evidence.
I attribute some of it to “insider savvy” and media snotty bitchiness myself. There’s a real bias against earnestness in politics and Joe Biden’s earnest denunciation of the assault on democracy and his comments like “this is the United States of America and there’s nothing we can’t do…” is just eye-rolling to them. On some level they respect Trump for being a liar a cheat and a sore loser. It’s just cooler.
But this happens to some extent in every election. Democrtic garment rending is just expected and the media is well… the media.
Nonetheless, the race shouldn’t be this close because Trump is a monster and an imbecile and all the usual factors that signal a successful re-election are in place. And sure, both the Democratic Eeyoreism and Kewl Kidz journalism have something to do with it. But like Josh, I’m a little bit shocked at the fact that massive numbers of Americans now believe things that just aren’t true. From the MAGA conspiracy theorists who believe all of Trump’s lies to the normie Americans who are convinced that (the rest o)f the country is suffering from a terrible economy and crime is rampant.
It’s vibes, I guess. Pandemic PTSD. Disinformation. People dropping out of the political scene because it’s just too stressful. Maybe it’s a combination of all of that. Let’s hope reality is finally starting to bite.
For Tucker Carlson, it has to be the ultimate good-news, bad-news moment: A major publishing house has canceled a prominent political journalist’s upcoming biography of the far-right media figure.
The bad news, though, is that the cancellation stems at least in part from the belief that Carlson, once the biggest name on cable, no longer has the kind of cultural footprint to warrant a pricey, complicated book by a top-shelf writer. According to several sources in the publishing industry who have followed the project, a combination of delays and the changes in Carlson’s once dominant media presence caused a loss of enthusiasm on the part of a publishing house going through its own internal tumult.
The right-wing United Australia Party leader Clive Palmer announced in April that he was going to bring Tucker Carlson into the country for a nationwide tour of speaking engagements. The tour is about to begin this weekend through July 1, and ticket prices have been slashed due to lack of interest.
Apparently, he will be doing an “arena tour” this summer with the likes of Kid Rock, Glenn Beck and Marjorie Taylor Greene. I’m sure it will be all kinds of MAGA magic but as the Politico article suggests, that’s a fever swamp kind of event that has very little effect in the broader world.
There was a time when a lot of people were speculating that Carlson would run for president. Today he’s just another blathering celebrity on the wingnut welfare circuit. Good.
