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Showing posts with label William Rivers Pitt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William Rivers Pitt. Show all posts

Saturday, October 1, 2022

William Rivers Pitt

 

"I'll look for you in old HonoluluSan Francisco or AshtabulaYou're gonna have to leave me, now I knowBut I'll see you in the sky aboveIn the tall grass in the ones I loveYou're gonna make me lonesome when you go"
~ Bob Dylan



  ~ From Truthout:

 

William Rivers Pitt Dared To Hope For Our Future. Let's Do Right By His Memory 

 

 " In sitting down to the impossible task of memorializing William Rivers Pitt, Truthout’s illustrious and brilliant lead columnist whose work I edited for 15 years, I’m suppressing the urge to grab my phone and call Will.

“I don’t know how to begin your eulogy,” I would say.

“Easy!” he’d reply. “Lead with a trusty classic. You know the one.”

And I’d know what he meant — the Irish blessing Will often shared with our staff in tough times. This is Will’s slightly adapted version of that old prayer, whose author is unknown:

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind be always at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face;

May the rains fall soft upon your fields.

And until we meet again,

May God (or Whatever) hold you in the palm of their hand.

I love the blessing because it captures something about how Will connected with his readers: He saw the act of writing as an act of care. In his columns, even as he condemned Trump and excoriated complicit Democrats, even as he spoke out against imperial war and corporate greed and racism and the destruction of the environment, he made his audience understand that they deserved the warmth of the sun and the nourishment of the rain, just by virtue of being human.

Even as he raged against evil, Will loved humanity, and the Earth itself, with an even greater fervor.

Will wrote of how that great love hummed at the core of his being: “I came into this world a human tuning fork, humming with the tones surrounding me entirely against my will. I cannot stop it, and would not if given the chance. Mine is wonder, and awe, and I am overtaken by it, as if the air itself is transformed into high waves breaking on the beach. I drown daily, hourly, in minutes and in seconds, I drown in moments, and smile as I sink, because it is beautiful beyond words and space and time.” He contrasted that love with the remorseless darkness that, too, pervades the world. But, Will assured his readers, even in the face of horror and heartbreak, “You are not alone. Reach for the light, always. It is there. I know. I’ve seen.”

Those words are from a eulogy Will wrote for actor Robin Williams. Will wrote many eulogies, because he was not afraid to confront deep pain, and hoped to help ease the pain of others — and also because he wanted to memorialize each person who, as he put it in a tribute to peace activist Jerry Berrigan, “cared an awful lot.”

 How do you eulogize a eulogist? A person who wrote such moving, compassionate, exquisitely articulated tributes that you wished the honoree could come back from the dead to read them?

How do you eulogize a proclaimer, a person with a singular gift for characterizing a moment, a feeling, a political climate, a global climate in a way that made you feel just a little bit better — because he found the words that echoed the turmoil burning inside you, too, and called you to action?

How do you eulogize a wordsmith, someone who coined a new expression in every column, often sending me, his editor, frantically searching through the Oxford English Dictionary for clues as to the adage’s origin … only to realize it was actually Will’s spontaneous invention?

All I can do is tell you: Will was all of these things, and he was also more than the sum of them. Will Pitt was a gem at the center of Truthout. At the time of his death, Will had been at Truthout for over 20 years. He left his job as a high school English teacher to tackle the horrors of the Bush era, writing with a pure, raging fire, dutifully cataloguing every injustice the Republicans of that epoch perpetrated. As the Bush regime ended, Will urged us not to lose our memory of those injustices, in an open letter to the former president: “We have tasted the soot and smelled the blood on the wind; we have seen how fragile our way of government is when placed in the hands of low men such as you, and because of that, you will be remembered for all time.”

Will Pitt was a leading voice in exposing the outrages of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Beyond his Truthout columns that touched millions of people, he was a bestselling author of several books focused on the Iraq war, including War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know (co-authored with Scott Ritter), The Greatest Sedition Is Silence, House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America’s Ravaged Reputation, and The Mass Destruction of Iraq: The Disintegration of a Nation, Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible (co-authored with Dahr Jamail).

Our greatest electoral politics analyst, Will knew the ins and outs of Washington far better than the back of his hand, and blogged through every election for the past 15 years. He also knew the limits of party politics: Will was the Republicans’ most comprehensive denouncer, but he also warned of the enormous dangers of “moderate” Democrats.

Will persistently sounded the alarm on the climate crisis for many years before the mainstream media took real notice. He urged us to recognize that the catastrophe was not simply a phenomenon of the future: “The future is now,” he wrote, “and it is hot, thirsty, windy and dangerous. This truth is baked into tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow again…. How much worse it gets depends upon us.”

He repeatedly reminded us of Trump’s danger, even at times when many on the left wanted to simply laugh. “They laughed at Mussolini, too,” Will wrote, “until it became a crime to do so. After that, the joke was on the world.” And the signs of the January 6 coup attempt were clear to Will nearly two years before that day came to pass.

When pandemic times hit, Will dedicated himself to covering COVID — he wrote nearly a hundred columns about it — even when it became the unpopular topic, the one people wanted to move on from. He emphasized the ways in which the pandemic was entwined with the crisis of corporate power. At each pandemic peak, he reminded us, “[COVID] has not gone away and returned; it never left, and swells every few months whenever we decide to let our guard down because capitalism must be fed.”

Will was not a commentator for comment’s sake: He wanted his words to spur deeds. He urged readers to go beyond simply reading, no matter how small their actions, and he recognized that even seemingly small actions can save lives. “There is much to be done just within reach of your arm,” he was fond of saying, when speaking of the climate crisis. “Do that, and you’ll have one hell of a story, along with, perhaps, people left to hear the telling.”

Will reminded us that when things are hardest, when fascism is ascendant, when war is imminent—that is when we must “dig in,” must “embrace the winter,” must dissent, dissent, dissent.

Will dissented against injustice through his writing, but he also dissented against our culture of individualism and competition through his striking generosity of spirit, which blossomed over time, particularly after he became a father. Anyone who knows Will knows his wholehearted, wholeminded dedication to his daughter. His stubborn hope for our shared future was tied to his determination to help build a world in which his daughter would “get the chance to know what it is to reach, to fly, to rise, to become.”

Will strove to teach his daughter to “do the right thing when nobody is looking,” and within Truthout’s staff, he did just that. He reached out to people regularly when he learned they were going through a rough patch, and was always quick to drop inspiring words into our group chat in times of collective crisis. He evolved a humble and amiable writerly spirit. As an editor, I am not used to hearing the words, “You’re right!” But Will was not afraid to acknowledge that a paragraph should be cut here or there. He also acknowledged his interpersonal mistakes, and became a profuse apologizer (even when he’d done nothing wrong!); he believed in accountability and sought to put this belief into action on the micro level, with both humor and sincerity. Will Pitt saw the point and the power of relationships; he knew that, in these cataclysmic times, we must learn to work together, if life on Earth is to survive.

Will’s understanding of the perilousness of life on Earth pervaded each piece he wrote. Yet so did the reality that we can’t predict the future: We have to do the future. Last year, in a column commemorating his 20th anniversary at Truthout, Will wrote:

If I could make any wish, it would be to get another 20 years to do this, if only for the chance to sit here two decades hence and talk about all the good shit that went down after we cured COVID, kept Trump out of office, vanquished fascism, found a way to turn CO2 and methane into marijuana fertilizer, and shot all that sea-bound plastic into space.

Likely as not, though, I’ll be back here in 20 years talking about the day we lost Boston and New York to the Atlantic Ocean. Or maybe not.

That’s the thing about tomorrow: It’s only a rumor. The rest is up to us.

William Rivers Pitt reminded us that the fate of the world is not decided. We have a choice: Will we speak out even when we’re not sure our words will make a difference? Will we gather the courage to act in the face of injustice? Will we admit when we’ve screwed up, and transform the circumstances to create more beauty and love in the wake of mistakes? Will we commit acts of radical kindness even when no one is looking? Will we put our faith in humanity, even when the odds look grim? For Will, the answers were yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Will often ended his columns with the gentle encouragement, “Stout hearts!” It was a reminder that although we can’t always mentally strategize our way out of turbulent times, we can get through them together using deeper human tools: compassion, vulnerability, real feeling, righteous anger, righteous love.

As we face the impossibility of this larger-than-life man’s death, we must turn to those tools. I’m going to let myself feel Will’s death fully. I’m going to cry angry tears for a long time. I’m going to rededicate myself to the work of transforming this screwed-up world, in community with all of you.

As Will taught us, “All I have, all you have, all we have, is the power to do good and right within our own reach.”

We’ve worked with Will’s family to create this fundraiser in the hopes of raising some money to support his 9-year-old daughter Lola’s needs, including her future education. All funds raised will go directly to a trust for Lola. Please give what you can."

 

~~~~~ 

William Rivers Pitt

 

"I'll look for you in old HonoluluSan Francisco or AshtabulaYou're gonna have to leave me, now I knowBut I'll see you in the sky aboveIn the tall grass in the ones I loveYou're gonna make me lonesome when you go"
~ Bob Dylan



  ~ From Truthout:

 

William Rivers Pitt Dared To Hope For Our Future. Let's Do Right By His Memory 

 

 " In sitting down to the impossible task of memorializing William Rivers Pitt, Truthout’s illustrious and brilliant lead columnist whose work I edited for 15 years, I’m suppressing the urge to grab my phone and call Will.

“I don’t know how to begin your eulogy,” I would say.

“Easy!” he’d reply. “Lead with a trusty classic. You know the one.”

And I’d know what he meant — the Irish blessing Will often shared with our staff in tough times. This is Will’s slightly adapted version of that old prayer, whose author is unknown:

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind be always at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face;

May the rains fall soft upon your fields.

And until we meet again,

May God (or Whatever) hold you in the palm of their hand.

I love the blessing because it captures something about how Will connected with his readers: He saw the act of writing as an act of care. In his columns, even as he condemned Trump and excoriated complicit Democrats, even as he spoke out against imperial war and corporate greed and racism and the destruction of the environment, he made his audience understand that they deserved the warmth of the sun and the nourishment of the rain, just by virtue of being human.

Even as he raged against evil, Will loved humanity, and the Earth itself, with an even greater fervor.

Will wrote of how that great love hummed at the core of his being: “I came into this world a human tuning fork, humming with the tones surrounding me entirely against my will. I cannot stop it, and would not if given the chance. Mine is wonder, and awe, and I am overtaken by it, as if the air itself is transformed into high waves breaking on the beach. I drown daily, hourly, in minutes and in seconds, I drown in moments, and smile as I sink, because it is beautiful beyond words and space and time.” He contrasted that love with the remorseless darkness that, too, pervades the world. But, Will assured his readers, even in the face of horror and heartbreak, “You are not alone. Reach for the light, always. It is there. I know. I’ve seen.”

Those words are from a eulogy Will wrote for actor Robin Williams. Will wrote many eulogies, because he was not afraid to confront deep pain, and hoped to help ease the pain of others — and also because he wanted to memorialize each person who, as he put it in a tribute to peace activist Jerry Berrigan, “cared an awful lot.”

 How do you eulogize a eulogist? A person who wrote such moving, compassionate, exquisitely articulated tributes that you wished the honoree could come back from the dead to read them?

How do you eulogize a proclaimer, a person with a singular gift for characterizing a moment, a feeling, a political climate, a global climate in a way that made you feel just a little bit better — because he found the words that echoed the turmoil burning inside you, too, and called you to action?

How do you eulogize a wordsmith, someone who coined a new expression in every column, often sending me, his editor, frantically searching through the Oxford English Dictionary for clues as to the adage’s origin … only to realize it was actually Will’s spontaneous invention?

All I can do is tell you: Will was all of these things, and he was also more than the sum of them. Will Pitt was a gem at the center of Truthout. At the time of his death, Will had been at Truthout for over 20 years. He left his job as a high school English teacher to tackle the horrors of the Bush era, writing with a pure, raging fire, dutifully cataloguing every injustice the Republicans of that epoch perpetrated. As the Bush regime ended, Will urged us not to lose our memory of those injustices, in an open letter to the former president: “We have tasted the soot and smelled the blood on the wind; we have seen how fragile our way of government is when placed in the hands of low men such as you, and because of that, you will be remembered for all time.”

Will Pitt was a leading voice in exposing the outrages of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Beyond his Truthout columns that touched millions of people, he was a bestselling author of several books focused on the Iraq war, including War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know (co-authored with Scott Ritter), The Greatest Sedition Is Silence, House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America’s Ravaged Reputation, and The Mass Destruction of Iraq: The Disintegration of a Nation, Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible (co-authored with Dahr Jamail).

Our greatest electoral politics analyst, Will knew the ins and outs of Washington far better than the back of his hand, and blogged through every election for the past 15 years. He also knew the limits of party politics: Will was the Republicans’ most comprehensive denouncer, but he also warned of the enormous dangers of “moderate” Democrats.

Will persistently sounded the alarm on the climate crisis for many years before the mainstream media took real notice. He urged us to recognize that the catastrophe was not simply a phenomenon of the future: “The future is now,” he wrote, “and it is hot, thirsty, windy and dangerous. This truth is baked into tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow again…. How much worse it gets depends upon us.”

He repeatedly reminded us of Trump’s danger, even at times when many on the left wanted to simply laugh. “They laughed at Mussolini, too,” Will wrote, “until it became a crime to do so. After that, the joke was on the world.” And the signs of the January 6 coup attempt were clear to Will nearly two years before that day came to pass.

When pandemic times hit, Will dedicated himself to covering COVID — he wrote nearly a hundred columns about it — even when it became the unpopular topic, the one people wanted to move on from. He emphasized the ways in which the pandemic was entwined with the crisis of corporate power. At each pandemic peak, he reminded us, “[COVID] has not gone away and returned; it never left, and swells every few months whenever we decide to let our guard down because capitalism must be fed.”

Will was not a commentator for comment’s sake: He wanted his words to spur deeds. He urged readers to go beyond simply reading, no matter how small their actions, and he recognized that even seemingly small actions can save lives. “There is much to be done just within reach of your arm,” he was fond of saying, when speaking of the climate crisis. “Do that, and you’ll have one hell of a story, along with, perhaps, people left to hear the telling.”

Will reminded us that when things are hardest, when fascism is ascendant, when war is imminent—that is when we must “dig in,” must “embrace the winter,” must dissent, dissent, dissent.

Will dissented against injustice through his writing, but he also dissented against our culture of individualism and competition through his striking generosity of spirit, which blossomed over time, particularly after he became a father. Anyone who knows Will knows his wholehearted, wholeminded dedication to his daughter. His stubborn hope for our shared future was tied to his determination to help build a world in which his daughter would “get the chance to know what it is to reach, to fly, to rise, to become.”

Will strove to teach his daughter to “do the right thing when nobody is looking,” and within Truthout’s staff, he did just that. He reached out to people regularly when he learned they were going through a rough patch, and was always quick to drop inspiring words into our group chat in times of collective crisis. He evolved a humble and amiable writerly spirit. As an editor, I am not used to hearing the words, “You’re right!” But Will was not afraid to acknowledge that a paragraph should be cut here or there. He also acknowledged his interpersonal mistakes, and became a profuse apologizer (even when he’d done nothing wrong!); he believed in accountability and sought to put this belief into action on the micro level, with both humor and sincerity. Will Pitt saw the point and the power of relationships; he knew that, in these cataclysmic times, we must learn to work together, if life on Earth is to survive.

Will’s understanding of the perilousness of life on Earth pervaded each piece he wrote. Yet so did the reality that we can’t predict the future: We have to do the future. Last year, in a column commemorating his 20th anniversary at Truthout, Will wrote:

If I could make any wish, it would be to get another 20 years to do this, if only for the chance to sit here two decades hence and talk about all the good shit that went down after we cured COVID, kept Trump out of office, vanquished fascism, found a way to turn CO2 and methane into marijuana fertilizer, and shot all that sea-bound plastic into space.

Likely as not, though, I’ll be back here in 20 years talking about the day we lost Boston and New York to the Atlantic Ocean. Or maybe not.

That’s the thing about tomorrow: It’s only a rumor. The rest is up to us.

William Rivers Pitt reminded us that the fate of the world is not decided. We have a choice: Will we speak out even when we’re not sure our words will make a difference? Will we gather the courage to act in the face of injustice? Will we admit when we’ve screwed up, and transform the circumstances to create more beauty and love in the wake of mistakes? Will we commit acts of radical kindness even when no one is looking? Will we put our faith in humanity, even when the odds look grim? For Will, the answers were yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Will often ended his columns with the gentle encouragement, “Stout hearts!” It was a reminder that although we can’t always mentally strategize our way out of turbulent times, we can get through them together using deeper human tools: compassion, vulnerability, real feeling, righteous anger, righteous love.

As we face the impossibility of this larger-than-life man’s death, we must turn to those tools. I’m going to let myself feel Will’s death fully. I’m going to cry angry tears for a long time. I’m going to rededicate myself to the work of transforming this screwed-up world, in community with all of you.

As Will taught us, “All I have, all you have, all we have, is the power to do good and right within our own reach.”

We’ve worked with Will’s family to create this fundraiser in the hopes of raising some money to support his 9-year-old daughter Lola’s needs, including her future education. All funds raised will go directly to a trust for Lola. Please give what you can."

 

~~~~~ 

William Rivers Pitt

 

"I'll look for you in old HonoluluSan Francisco or AshtabulaYou're gonna have to leave me, now I knowBut I'll see you in the sky aboveIn the tall grass in the ones I loveYou're gonna make me lonesome when you go"
~ Bob Dylan



  ~ From Truthout:

 

William Rivers Pitt Dared To Hope For Our Future. Let's Do Right By His Memory 

 

 " In sitting down to the impossible task of memorializing William Rivers Pitt, Truthout’s illustrious and brilliant lead columnist whose work I edited for 15 years, I’m suppressing the urge to grab my phone and call Will.

“I don’t know how to begin your eulogy,” I would say.

“Easy!” he’d reply. “Lead with a trusty classic. You know the one.”

And I’d know what he meant — the Irish blessing Will often shared with our staff in tough times. This is Will’s slightly adapted version of that old prayer, whose author is unknown:

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind be always at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face;

May the rains fall soft upon your fields.

And until we meet again,

May God (or Whatever) hold you in the palm of their hand.

I love the blessing because it captures something about how Will connected with his readers: He saw the act of writing as an act of care. In his columns, even as he condemned Trump and excoriated complicit Democrats, even as he spoke out against imperial war and corporate greed and racism and the destruction of the environment, he made his audience understand that they deserved the warmth of the sun and the nourishment of the rain, just by virtue of being human.

Even as he raged against evil, Will loved humanity, and the Earth itself, with an even greater fervor.

Will wrote of how that great love hummed at the core of his being: “I came into this world a human tuning fork, humming with the tones surrounding me entirely against my will. I cannot stop it, and would not if given the chance. Mine is wonder, and awe, and I am overtaken by it, as if the air itself is transformed into high waves breaking on the beach. I drown daily, hourly, in minutes and in seconds, I drown in moments, and smile as I sink, because it is beautiful beyond words and space and time.” He contrasted that love with the remorseless darkness that, too, pervades the world. But, Will assured his readers, even in the face of horror and heartbreak, “You are not alone. Reach for the light, always. It is there. I know. I’ve seen.”

Those words are from a eulogy Will wrote for actor Robin Williams. Will wrote many eulogies, because he was not afraid to confront deep pain, and hoped to help ease the pain of others — and also because he wanted to memorialize each person who, as he put it in a tribute to peace activist Jerry Berrigan, “cared an awful lot.”

 How do you eulogize a eulogist? A person who wrote such moving, compassionate, exquisitely articulated tributes that you wished the honoree could come back from the dead to read them?

How do you eulogize a proclaimer, a person with a singular gift for characterizing a moment, a feeling, a political climate, a global climate in a way that made you feel just a little bit better — because he found the words that echoed the turmoil burning inside you, too, and called you to action?

How do you eulogize a wordsmith, someone who coined a new expression in every column, often sending me, his editor, frantically searching through the Oxford English Dictionary for clues as to the adage’s origin … only to realize it was actually Will’s spontaneous invention?

All I can do is tell you: Will was all of these things, and he was also more than the sum of them. Will Pitt was a gem at the center of Truthout. At the time of his death, Will had been at Truthout for over 20 years. He left his job as a high school English teacher to tackle the horrors of the Bush era, writing with a pure, raging fire, dutifully cataloguing every injustice the Republicans of that epoch perpetrated. As the Bush regime ended, Will urged us not to lose our memory of those injustices, in an open letter to the former president: “We have tasted the soot and smelled the blood on the wind; we have seen how fragile our way of government is when placed in the hands of low men such as you, and because of that, you will be remembered for all time.”

Will Pitt was a leading voice in exposing the outrages of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Beyond his Truthout columns that touched millions of people, he was a bestselling author of several books focused on the Iraq war, including War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know (co-authored with Scott Ritter), The Greatest Sedition Is Silence, House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America’s Ravaged Reputation, and The Mass Destruction of Iraq: The Disintegration of a Nation, Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible (co-authored with Dahr Jamail).

Our greatest electoral politics analyst, Will knew the ins and outs of Washington far better than the back of his hand, and blogged through every election for the past 15 years. He also knew the limits of party politics: Will was the Republicans’ most comprehensive denouncer, but he also warned of the enormous dangers of “moderate” Democrats.

Will persistently sounded the alarm on the climate crisis for many years before the mainstream media took real notice. He urged us to recognize that the catastrophe was not simply a phenomenon of the future: “The future is now,” he wrote, “and it is hot, thirsty, windy and dangerous. This truth is baked into tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow again…. How much worse it gets depends upon us.”

He repeatedly reminded us of Trump’s danger, even at times when many on the left wanted to simply laugh. “They laughed at Mussolini, too,” Will wrote, “until it became a crime to do so. After that, the joke was on the world.” And the signs of the January 6 coup attempt were clear to Will nearly two years before that day came to pass.

When pandemic times hit, Will dedicated himself to covering COVID — he wrote nearly a hundred columns about it — even when it became the unpopular topic, the one people wanted to move on from. He emphasized the ways in which the pandemic was entwined with the crisis of corporate power. At each pandemic peak, he reminded us, “[COVID] has not gone away and returned; it never left, and swells every few months whenever we decide to let our guard down because capitalism must be fed.”

Will was not a commentator for comment’s sake: He wanted his words to spur deeds. He urged readers to go beyond simply reading, no matter how small their actions, and he recognized that even seemingly small actions can save lives. “There is much to be done just within reach of your arm,” he was fond of saying, when speaking of the climate crisis. “Do that, and you’ll have one hell of a story, along with, perhaps, people left to hear the telling.”

Will reminded us that when things are hardest, when fascism is ascendant, when war is imminent—that is when we must “dig in,” must “embrace the winter,” must dissent, dissent, dissent.

Will dissented against injustice through his writing, but he also dissented against our culture of individualism and competition through his striking generosity of spirit, which blossomed over time, particularly after he became a father. Anyone who knows Will knows his wholehearted, wholeminded dedication to his daughter. His stubborn hope for our shared future was tied to his determination to help build a world in which his daughter would “get the chance to know what it is to reach, to fly, to rise, to become.”

Will strove to teach his daughter to “do the right thing when nobody is looking,” and within Truthout’s staff, he did just that. He reached out to people regularly when he learned they were going through a rough patch, and was always quick to drop inspiring words into our group chat in times of collective crisis. He evolved a humble and amiable writerly spirit. As an editor, I am not used to hearing the words, “You’re right!” But Will was not afraid to acknowledge that a paragraph should be cut here or there. He also acknowledged his interpersonal mistakes, and became a profuse apologizer (even when he’d done nothing wrong!); he believed in accountability and sought to put this belief into action on the micro level, with both humor and sincerity. Will Pitt saw the point and the power of relationships; he knew that, in these cataclysmic times, we must learn to work together, if life on Earth is to survive.

Will’s understanding of the perilousness of life on Earth pervaded each piece he wrote. Yet so did the reality that we can’t predict the future: We have to do the future. Last year, in a column commemorating his 20th anniversary at Truthout, Will wrote:

If I could make any wish, it would be to get another 20 years to do this, if only for the chance to sit here two decades hence and talk about all the good shit that went down after we cured COVID, kept Trump out of office, vanquished fascism, found a way to turn CO2 and methane into marijuana fertilizer, and shot all that sea-bound plastic into space.

Likely as not, though, I’ll be back here in 20 years talking about the day we lost Boston and New York to the Atlantic Ocean. Or maybe not.

That’s the thing about tomorrow: It’s only a rumor. The rest is up to us.

William Rivers Pitt reminded us that the fate of the world is not decided. We have a choice: Will we speak out even when we’re not sure our words will make a difference? Will we gather the courage to act in the face of injustice? Will we admit when we’ve screwed up, and transform the circumstances to create more beauty and love in the wake of mistakes? Will we commit acts of radical kindness even when no one is looking? Will we put our faith in humanity, even when the odds look grim? For Will, the answers were yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Will often ended his columns with the gentle encouragement, “Stout hearts!” It was a reminder that although we can’t always mentally strategize our way out of turbulent times, we can get through them together using deeper human tools: compassion, vulnerability, real feeling, righteous anger, righteous love.

As we face the impossibility of this larger-than-life man’s death, we must turn to those tools. I’m going to let myself feel Will’s death fully. I’m going to cry angry tears for a long time. I’m going to rededicate myself to the work of transforming this screwed-up world, in community with all of you.

As Will taught us, “All I have, all you have, all we have, is the power to do good and right within our own reach.”

We’ve worked with Will’s family to create this fundraiser in the hopes of raising some money to support his 9-year-old daughter Lola’s needs, including her future education. All funds raised will go directly to a trust for Lola. Please give what you can."

 

~~~~~ 

Thursday, July 15, 2021

Adios Precious Vaquita - Maybe All of Us Too - Update on June & July TIJ Execution Stats High Numbers

 

Courtesy Greenpeace


Although IBT entitles their report "Mexico Announces New Plan to Protect Near Extinct Porpoise",

AP cuts to the quick:

 

 ~ From AP via KAMC:

Mexico Abandons Fishing-Free Zone For Endangered Porpoise

  

"MEXICO CITY (AP) — The Mexican government officially abandoned the policy of maintaining a fishing-free zone around the last 10 or so remaining vaquita marina.

The measure announced Wednesday replaces the fishing-free “zero tolerance” zone in the upper Gulf of California with a sliding scale of punishments if more than 60 boats are seen in the area on multiple occasions.

Given that Mexico has been unable to enforce the current restrictions — which bans boats in the small area — the sliding-scale punishments also seem doomed to irrelevance.

Environmental experts say the move essentially abandons the world’s most endangered marine mammal to the gill nets that trap and drown them. The nets are set for totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder is a delicacy in China, and sells for thousands of dollars per pound (kilogram).

Alex Olivera, the Mexico representative for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the rules establish a sliding scale of responses to a situation that shouldn’t be allowed to occur in the first place. For example, the Agriculture and Fisheries Department says it will use 60% of its enforcement personnel if 20 fishing boats or less are seen in the restricted area.

“This is stupid. They are waiting to count boats in an area designated as ‘zero tolerance,’ where there shouldn’t be a single boat,” Olivera said. “They are letting in dozens of boats.”

“This is the end of the concept of zero tolerance,” Olivera said. “There is just going to be dissuasion.”

One conservation expert who is familiar with the case, but who cannot be quoted by name for fear of repercussions, said the new rules “imply not protecting the vaquita.”

“It appears that fisheries authorities want to drive the vaquita to extinction,” the expert said.

Two ships from the conservationist group Sea Shepherd have worked with Mexican marines to try to grab banned fishing nets from the area, but they are frequently outnumbered and attacked by fishermen, who have no fear at all of the marines.

In January, two fishermen rammed their small boat into a larger vessel used by Sea Shepherd to haul out nets. Sea Shepherd said its vessel, the Farley Mowat, was pulling illegal gill nets out of the waters of the gulf, also known as the Sea of Cortez, when people on a group of about a half dozen small, open fishing boats began tossing gasoline bombs at the vessel, setting the bow and another part of the ship afire.

The nets confiscated by Sea Shepherd vessels are expensive, so fishermen often harass the conservationists’ boats to try to get them back. The fishermen claim they have not received compensation from the Mexican government for lost fishing income. Groups representing fishermen were not immediately available to comment.

The upper Gulf of California is the only place the vaquita lives.

Mexico’s Environment Department had previously said the drop in the number of vaquitas and the area where they have been seen in recent years justified reducing the protection zone, which in theory once covered most of the upper Gulf.

Formally known as the vaquita “reserve,” that zone starts around the Colorado river delta and extends south past the fishing town of San Felipe and near Puerto Peñasco.

But as vaquita numbers dwindled to a few dozen, and then to less than a dozen, scientists and environmentalists decided to make a last-ditch stand in the ‘zero tolerance’ zone, a far smaller area where the last vaquita were seen.

Their numbers are confirmed by subaquatic listening devices that graph the squeaks and squeals the animals make, even as visual sighting become rare."

 

Haven't seen anything on this from Zeta, yet.

 

~~~~~~ 

Don't mean to make matters worse than they already are....but it is possible that all of us are doomed along with the precious Vaquita:

 

 ~ From Truthout: 

 

Trump Supporters' Anti-Science Crusade Is Threatening Us All

 

 "The number of new COVID-19 infections in the country topped 26,500 yesterday, a two-week increase of 111 percent. Experts broadly agree the reasons behind this new infection spike are twofold: (1) The Delta variant of COVID is highly infectious and on the verge of becoming the dominant strain in the U.S.; (2) Millions of people continue to refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks.

Note well, there are plenty of people who remain unvaccinated for very comprehensible reasons: They live in areas where the shot is still difficult to obtain, or they are prevented from doing so for unavoidable work/life requirements, or they have vaccination hesitancy that is deeply rooted in an understandable distrust of medical experts who have grossly abused their communities for generations.

The problem, however, is that millions of people remain unvaccinated — and won’t wear masks — because they think Donald Trump won the 2020 election, because Trump says he did. The way they have chosen to combat the ocean of criticism earned by the Trump presidency is simple, and utterly lethal: If Trump is good, that means science is bad, so screw science and screw you, too. If this self-destructive practice is not interrupted, we may be in for another long and brutal winter.

“Vaccines have been available to most Americans for months,” reports CNN, “but still only 48.2% of the country is fully vaccinated, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — and the rate of new vaccinations is on the decline. Meanwhile, case rates have been going up dramatically. In 47 states, the rate of new cases in the past week are at least 10% higher than the previous week, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Of those, 35 have seen increases of over 50%. Officials and experts have said disinformation is largely to blame for the high number of unvaccinated Americans, a group which is now seeing the largest impacts of the pandemic.”

Matters are becoming dire enough to spur the largest nurses’ union in the U.S. to urge the reinstatement of the mask mandate. National Nurses United executive director Bonnie Castillo transmitted a letter to the CDC warning, “The Covid-19 pandemic is far from over.” The letter goes on to lay out a swath of terrifying infection numbers. “NNU strongly urges the CDC to reinstate universal masking, irrespective of vaccination status, to help reduce the spread of the virus, especially from infected individuals who do not have any symptoms,” pleads the concluding message.

“Officials and experts have said disinformation is largely to blame for the high number of unvaccinated Americans,” reported CNN. But why? Qui bono? Who benefits? As it turns out, the same old right-wing hucksters are the ones who benefit the most, the ones who will say anything in order to dent the conversation and increase their own power, no matter how many of their own people they trick into an early, gasping grave. Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg News explains it:

It works like this. A fringe group of the party seeks to differentiate itself from the mainstream. To do that, its members set out to prove that they are the True Conservatives and everyone else is a wishy-washy Republican in Name Only at best, and a collaborating liberal at worst. However, by now the mainstream of the party has become so conservative that there are no easy moves to make that involve pushing one or another policy preference….

The key point here is that there is no counter move available to the rest of the party. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer can say that they oppose such-and-such a policy because they are liberals, not socialists. There’s no parallel move for the Republican congressional leaders, Kevin McCarthy in the House or Mitch McConnell in the Senate. That doesn’t mean that mainstream conservatives always go along, but within the norms of the party they’re not allowed to call anyone too conservative, let alone any more negative characterization.

How do you set yourself outside and above the conservative pack? Start by refusing to wear a mask. Follow that by refusing to get vaccinated. Not long after, begin making spurious claims that the vaccinations are deadly, and when people don’t die in sufficient numbers to support that egregious lie, downshift to the argument that vaccinations and masks are the newest iteration of Nazi fascism.

I do not see an easy solution to this problem, especially in a country that prides itself on freedom of opinion, even monstrously self-destructive opinion. How do you fix this when the governor of Florida is selling t-shirts attacking Anthony Fauci, the government’s lead COVID expert, even as that state endures 3,000 new COVID hospitalizations a day? New infections in Florida are up 429 percent over the last two weeks, a number only matched by Tennessee, where the government has all but declared the topic of coronavirus to be off limits.

The way things are headed, we could soon be forced back into our masks for all occasions, back into seclusion, and worse, forced to bear witness to a segment of the population as it kills itself in the culmination of 40 years of nihilistic Republican ideology. One wonders if it really could have ended any other way."

 

~~~~~ 

Mike is against mandating the vaccination, I think it should be mandated. Kind of reminds me of when General Patton (who was unfortunately an extreme racist but a great commander) wanted to keep on and push the Russians all the way back to Russia. Too bad he was a racist.

 

 ~ From Hollywood ! 

 

 

~~~~~

Finally , a tally of Tijuana execution stats from June & July:


 ~ From Zeta:

 June High Numbers:

 Reportan Seis Homicidios Mas en Tijuana 

 Destacados miércoles, 30 junio, 2021 1:27 PM


"With the death of six more people in the course of Tuesday and the morning of this Wednesday, June 30, the statistics of intentional homicides swelled to 189 victims in June and 1,033 so far in 2021.

Among the violent events that occurred yesterday, the discovery of a charred body in the vicinity of the Pedregal de Santa Julia neighborhood stands out, in addition to the remains a threat written on a cardboard was left.

The report originated around 6 in the morning, when it indicated that on a stretch of dirt road on Francisco I Madero Street and Libramiento Sur there was a body under the flames, and next to the body, his perpetrators left him a cardboard with a message that said: " THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO ALL THE FUCKING PEOPLE KE ANDE DE CHAPULÍN IN EL PEDREGAL, LET'S GO FOR YOU PABLITO ATTE: LA MERA VERGA."

Later, inside a house located in Lino Rocha and Albino García alley, Guerrero neighborhood, a man of approximately 45 years of age was found dead. The victim, unidentified, had tattoos on his head, abdomen, arms and legs; He had a lesion on the left cheekbone. Four casings were found at the crime scene.

While in the facilities of the General Hospital of Tijuana, a man between 45 and 50 years old died. It is unknown where he was attacked.

Finally, this Wednesday the 30th around 11 in the morning, the cowering body of a woman was found inside a white van, of recent model, California plates, which was abandoned on Cañón de la Pedrera street, in the neighborhood of El same name.

In none of the events are detained persons reported."

 

~~~~~

 Just about midpoint this month:

 

 Encuentran Restos Humanos en Tambo en la Colonia Independencia 

 

Destacados jueves, 15 julio, 2021 7:58 AM

 

 "From 11 a.m. on Wednesday, July 14, residents of the Independencia neighborhood in Tijuana notified the police authorities that unknown persons had abandoned a  blue colored plastic container on Juan Aldama Street and San Antonio de los Buenos Avenue that gave off foul odors and had traces of blood.

However, according to residents of the area, police elements arrived at the scene eight hours later and confirmed that it was the mutilated body of a male person.

“Since they left the container it was reported to the authorities; but hours passed and nothing  happened, the government came. One came closer and it smelled very strong and there was blood. The police just said they were on their way and nothing. There was an operation in the Independencia neighborhood, downtown area, but no one was arrested, ”one of the residents told ZETA.

According to the police report, inside the container which was lying on the road, there was a black plastic bag and a blue blanket and human remains inside. Elements of the Prosecutor's Office processed the crime scene around 9:00 p.m.

Another of the violent events recorded yesterday Wednesday was the discovery of the body of a person on a dirt road between the Vía Rápida and Alamar in the Alamar neighborhood. The deceased was wrapped in blankets and covered with black plastic bags. So far the identity of the victim is unknown as well as the events that caused his death.

So far in July, 92 intentional homicides have been registered and 1,108 in 2021."

 

 ~~~~~ 

Don't miss all of the news & reports from Zeta.

 ~~~~~

 

Meanwhile, the Australian Dream Cream really isn't doing anything great for me .  So, it is slow going. See you guys later. 

 

Adios Precious Vaquita - Maybe All of Us Too - Update on June & July TIJ Execution Stats High Numbers

 

Courtesy Greenpeace


Although IBT entitles their report "Mexico Announces New Plan to Protect Near Extinct Porpoise",

AP cuts to the quick:

 

 ~ From AP via KAMC:

Mexico Abandons Fishing-Free Zone For Endangered Porpoise

  

"MEXICO CITY (AP) — The Mexican government officially abandoned the policy of maintaining a fishing-free zone around the last 10 or so remaining vaquita marina.

The measure announced Wednesday replaces the fishing-free “zero tolerance” zone in the upper Gulf of California with a sliding scale of punishments if more than 60 boats are seen in the area on multiple occasions.

Given that Mexico has been unable to enforce the current restrictions — which bans boats in the small area — the sliding-scale punishments also seem doomed to irrelevance.

Environmental experts say the move essentially abandons the world’s most endangered marine mammal to the gill nets that trap and drown them. The nets are set for totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder is a delicacy in China, and sells for thousands of dollars per pound (kilogram).

Alex Olivera, the Mexico representative for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the rules establish a sliding scale of responses to a situation that shouldn’t be allowed to occur in the first place. For example, the Agriculture and Fisheries Department says it will use 60% of its enforcement personnel if 20 fishing boats or less are seen in the restricted area.

“This is stupid. They are waiting to count boats in an area designated as ‘zero tolerance,’ where there shouldn’t be a single boat,” Olivera said. “They are letting in dozens of boats.”

“This is the end of the concept of zero tolerance,” Olivera said. “There is just going to be dissuasion.”

One conservation expert who is familiar with the case, but who cannot be quoted by name for fear of repercussions, said the new rules “imply not protecting the vaquita.”

“It appears that fisheries authorities want to drive the vaquita to extinction,” the expert said.

Two ships from the conservationist group Sea Shepherd have worked with Mexican marines to try to grab banned fishing nets from the area, but they are frequently outnumbered and attacked by fishermen, who have no fear at all of the marines.

In January, two fishermen rammed their small boat into a larger vessel used by Sea Shepherd to haul out nets. Sea Shepherd said its vessel, the Farley Mowat, was pulling illegal gill nets out of the waters of the gulf, also known as the Sea of Cortez, when people on a group of about a half dozen small, open fishing boats began tossing gasoline bombs at the vessel, setting the bow and another part of the ship afire.

The nets confiscated by Sea Shepherd vessels are expensive, so fishermen often harass the conservationists’ boats to try to get them back. The fishermen claim they have not received compensation from the Mexican government for lost fishing income. Groups representing fishermen were not immediately available to comment.

The upper Gulf of California is the only place the vaquita lives.

Mexico’s Environment Department had previously said the drop in the number of vaquitas and the area where they have been seen in recent years justified reducing the protection zone, which in theory once covered most of the upper Gulf.

Formally known as the vaquita “reserve,” that zone starts around the Colorado river delta and extends south past the fishing town of San Felipe and near Puerto Peñasco.

But as vaquita numbers dwindled to a few dozen, and then to less than a dozen, scientists and environmentalists decided to make a last-ditch stand in the ‘zero tolerance’ zone, a far smaller area where the last vaquita were seen.

Their numbers are confirmed by subaquatic listening devices that graph the squeaks and squeals the animals make, even as visual sighting become rare."

 

Haven't seen anything on this from Zeta, yet.

 

~~~~~~ 

Don't mean to make matters worse than they already are....but it is possible that all of us are doomed along with the precious Vaquita:

 

 ~ From Truthout: 

 

Trump Supporters' Anti-Science Crusade Is Threatening Us All

 

 "The number of new COVID-19 infections in the country topped 26,500 yesterday, a two-week increase of 111 percent. Experts broadly agree the reasons behind this new infection spike are twofold: (1) The Delta variant of COVID is highly infectious and on the verge of becoming the dominant strain in the U.S.; (2) Millions of people continue to refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks.

Note well, there are plenty of people who remain unvaccinated for very comprehensible reasons: They live in areas where the shot is still difficult to obtain, or they are prevented from doing so for unavoidable work/life requirements, or they have vaccination hesitancy that is deeply rooted in an understandable distrust of medical experts who have grossly abused their communities for generations.

The problem, however, is that millions of people remain unvaccinated — and won’t wear masks — because they think Donald Trump won the 2020 election, because Trump says he did. The way they have chosen to combat the ocean of criticism earned by the Trump presidency is simple, and utterly lethal: If Trump is good, that means science is bad, so screw science and screw you, too. If this self-destructive practice is not interrupted, we may be in for another long and brutal winter.

“Vaccines have been available to most Americans for months,” reports CNN, “but still only 48.2% of the country is fully vaccinated, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — and the rate of new vaccinations is on the decline. Meanwhile, case rates have been going up dramatically. In 47 states, the rate of new cases in the past week are at least 10% higher than the previous week, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Of those, 35 have seen increases of over 50%. Officials and experts have said disinformation is largely to blame for the high number of unvaccinated Americans, a group which is now seeing the largest impacts of the pandemic.”

Matters are becoming dire enough to spur the largest nurses’ union in the U.S. to urge the reinstatement of the mask mandate. National Nurses United executive director Bonnie Castillo transmitted a letter to the CDC warning, “The Covid-19 pandemic is far from over.” The letter goes on to lay out a swath of terrifying infection numbers. “NNU strongly urges the CDC to reinstate universal masking, irrespective of vaccination status, to help reduce the spread of the virus, especially from infected individuals who do not have any symptoms,” pleads the concluding message.

“Officials and experts have said disinformation is largely to blame for the high number of unvaccinated Americans,” reported CNN. But why? Qui bono? Who benefits? As it turns out, the same old right-wing hucksters are the ones who benefit the most, the ones who will say anything in order to dent the conversation and increase their own power, no matter how many of their own people they trick into an early, gasping grave. Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg News explains it:

It works like this. A fringe group of the party seeks to differentiate itself from the mainstream. To do that, its members set out to prove that they are the True Conservatives and everyone else is a wishy-washy Republican in Name Only at best, and a collaborating liberal at worst. However, by now the mainstream of the party has become so conservative that there are no easy moves to make that involve pushing one or another policy preference….

The key point here is that there is no counter move available to the rest of the party. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer can say that they oppose such-and-such a policy because they are liberals, not socialists. There’s no parallel move for the Republican congressional leaders, Kevin McCarthy in the House or Mitch McConnell in the Senate. That doesn’t mean that mainstream conservatives always go along, but within the norms of the party they’re not allowed to call anyone too conservative, let alone any more negative characterization.

How do you set yourself outside and above the conservative pack? Start by refusing to wear a mask. Follow that by refusing to get vaccinated. Not long after, begin making spurious claims that the vaccinations are deadly, and when people don’t die in sufficient numbers to support that egregious lie, downshift to the argument that vaccinations and masks are the newest iteration of Nazi fascism.

I do not see an easy solution to this problem, especially in a country that prides itself on freedom of opinion, even monstrously self-destructive opinion. How do you fix this when the governor of Florida is selling t-shirts attacking Anthony Fauci, the government’s lead COVID expert, even as that state endures 3,000 new COVID hospitalizations a day? New infections in Florida are up 429 percent over the last two weeks, a number only matched by Tennessee, where the government has all but declared the topic of coronavirus to be off limits.

The way things are headed, we could soon be forced back into our masks for all occasions, back into seclusion, and worse, forced to bear witness to a segment of the population as it kills itself in the culmination of 40 years of nihilistic Republican ideology. One wonders if it really could have ended any other way."

 

~~~~~ 

Mike is against mandating the vaccination, I think it should be mandated. Kind of reminds me of when General Patton (who was unfortunately an extreme racist but a great commander) wanted to keep on and push the Russians all the way back to Russia. Too bad he was a racist.

 

 ~ From Hollywood ! 

 

 

~~~~~

Finally , a tally of Tijuana execution stats from June & July:


 ~ From Zeta:

 June High Numbers:

 Reportan Seis Homicidios Mas en Tijuana 

 Destacados miércoles, 30 junio, 2021 1:27 PM


"With the death of six more people in the course of Tuesday and the morning of this Wednesday, June 30, the statistics of intentional homicides swelled to 189 victims in June and 1,033 so far in 2021.

Among the violent events that occurred yesterday, the discovery of a charred body in the vicinity of the Pedregal de Santa Julia neighborhood stands out, in addition to the remains a threat written on a cardboard was left.

The report originated around 6 in the morning, when it indicated that on a stretch of dirt road on Francisco I Madero Street and Libramiento Sur there was a body under the flames, and next to the body, his perpetrators left him a cardboard with a message that said: " THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO ALL THE FUCKING PEOPLE KE ANDE DE CHAPULÍN IN EL PEDREGAL, LET'S GO FOR YOU PABLITO ATTE: LA MERA VERGA."

Later, inside a house located in Lino Rocha and Albino García alley, Guerrero neighborhood, a man of approximately 45 years of age was found dead. The victim, unidentified, had tattoos on his head, abdomen, arms and legs; He had a lesion on the left cheekbone. Four casings were found at the crime scene.

While in the facilities of the General Hospital of Tijuana, a man between 45 and 50 years old died. It is unknown where he was attacked.

Finally, this Wednesday the 30th around 11 in the morning, the cowering body of a woman was found inside a white van, of recent model, California plates, which was abandoned on Cañón de la Pedrera street, in the neighborhood of El same name.

In none of the events are detained persons reported."

 

~~~~~

 Just about midpoint this month:

 

 Encuentran Restos Humanos en Tambo en la Colonia Independencia 

 

Destacados jueves, 15 julio, 2021 7:58 AM

 

 "From 11 a.m. on Wednesday, July 14, residents of the Independencia neighborhood in Tijuana notified the police authorities that unknown persons had abandoned a  blue colored plastic container on Juan Aldama Street and San Antonio de los Buenos Avenue that gave off foul odors and had traces of blood.

However, according to residents of the area, police elements arrived at the scene eight hours later and confirmed that it was the mutilated body of a male person.

“Since they left the container it was reported to the authorities; but hours passed and nothing  happened, the government came. One came closer and it smelled very strong and there was blood. The police just said they were on their way and nothing. There was an operation in the Independencia neighborhood, downtown area, but no one was arrested, ”one of the residents told ZETA.

According to the police report, inside the container which was lying on the road, there was a black plastic bag and a blue blanket and human remains inside. Elements of the Prosecutor's Office processed the crime scene around 9:00 p.m.

Another of the violent events recorded yesterday Wednesday was the discovery of the body of a person on a dirt road between the Vía Rápida and Alamar in the Alamar neighborhood. The deceased was wrapped in blankets and covered with black plastic bags. So far the identity of the victim is unknown as well as the events that caused his death.

So far in July, 92 intentional homicides have been registered and 1,108 in 2021."

 

 ~~~~~ 

Don't miss all of the news & reports from Zeta.

 ~~~~~

 

Meanwhile, the Australian Dream Cream really isn't doing anything great for me .  So, it is slow going. See you guys later. 

 

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

What A Legacy You Dumb Toad - The Only President In U.S. History to Be Impeached - Not Once, But TWICE ! - Historical Lowdown On McConnell From Juan Cole - Historian Tim Snyder On Democracy Now !

Of course we all know Trump will deny everything and claim it was Anti-Fa & BLM who created hell in the Capitol, not him and his innocent White Supremacists.  Doesn't matter, history has marked and noted - Trump's name is mud.

 I know, what many of us wanted was the invocation of Article 25 and it didn't happen, but here is the latest:

 

 ~ From The New York Times: 

And, let's hope and pray  that "...two thirds or more members present (in the Senate) vote to convict.  Trump is guilty.  Separate votes would be needed to prohibit Trump from receiving benefits given to ex-presidents and to bar him from future political office." 


The Trump Impeachment

 

 

 ~ From CNN: 

 

House Impeaches Trump For Role In Deadly Capitol Riot 

 

By Meg Wagner, Melissa Macaya, Mike Hayes, Melissa Mahtani, Fernando Alfonso III and Veronica Rocha, CNN

Updated 6:06 p.m. ET, January 13, 2021
 
 
~~~~~
 
Don't forget about the fact checks:
 
 ~ From CNN:
 
 
 Updated 5:43 PM ET, Wed January 13, 2021
 
~~~~~
 
Have to run, another litter of kittens showed up yesterday, what a disaster and  need to make dinner - Callendars' Chicken which is yummy on these cold nights although a bit fattening.  However, I have some excellent reports coming up on the ratboy McConnell & our amigo from Truthout. Until then....
 
Stay Safe Y'all.
 
~~~~~
 
Update/edit: About Ratboy McConnell that guy...I know what he said but he is so slick that with him, you never know what to believe :

 ~ From Informed Comment:

 
 
 
 
"Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – In Chapter 7 of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the enormously wealthy Jay Gatsby becomes concerned about word getting out that he is having an affair with Daisy, who is married to Tom, and abruptly stops having the big parties he had been throwing, to which assorted society flotsam and jetsam had come, people he had barely known. Tom cheats on Daisy with Myrtle. Then Gatsby lets Daisy drive his car and she accidentally runs over and kills Myrtle, her husband’s mistress. By chapter 9 Tom, wrongly convinced that Gatsby had struck and killed with his car Tom’s own mistress, murdered the millionaire in his pool. Virtually no one comes to his funeral.

Gatsby was always fated to be a parable for the Trump presidency. I think we’re now at that point in the story where nobody is coming to his parties any more and his paramour (the militias) has run over her rival (Congress).

Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman and Nicholas Fandos at the NYT got the scoop that Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is done with Donald Trump, furious at him, and pleased that the Democrats are impeaching him. He is clearly releasing Republicans in Congress to vote to impeach, as well, if that is what they want.

The immediate trigger for this epochal blow-up between the two GOP leaders is Trump’s having sicced the white supremacists and Nazis on McConnell and other congressional representatives and senators on 1/6 (the date of the Capitol Insurrection), endangering their lives.

Trump has been siccing supremacists and Nazis on people for four years, however, and McConnell never batted an eyelash.

When ICE agents were tearing babies out of their mothers’ arms, Mitch wasn’t breaking with Trump over that.

In fact, for all of the last four years McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao has been Trump’s secretary of transportation. She initially did not divest from her investments in road building materials, and she is alleged to have pursued policies at Transportation that would benefit her family’s Chinese shipping business.

She came home from the office stinking of Trump after having been at cabinet meetings with him where he went on white supremacist rants (which must have offended her). But the McConnell-Chao gravy train did not stop running for an instant.

McConnell was never a Trumpist, but he was perfectly willing to use Trump to get what he wanted. McConnell is a servant of the billionaire class and the big corporations. He does not actually represent Kentucky so much as he represents Charles Koch and others in the Fortune 500. His job was to bend the Senate and thus the country to the will of the plutocrats, and say what you like about him, he was very good at his job.

McConnell wanted the massive tax cut on the superwealthy, which he got in 2017.

He wanted to install a steady stream of deeply conservative and youngish federal judges, some of them obviously unqualified, so as to ensure the GOP control of the Federal judiciary for decades. McConnell had shot down Obama’s nominees for Federal circuit judges and refused to allow vacancies to be filled. He then filled all the vacancies. McConnell’s 200 judicial appointments were 85 percent white and 75 percent male. This wasn’t a judicial approval process, it was a fourth “Back to the Future Movie” where he transported us all to 1955. A third of all federal circuit court judges were appointed by Trump, and not one is Black, even though their decisions will dictate the parameters of the lives of the some 43 million African-Americans. That’s like conspiring to ensure that Spain (pop. 46.9 mn.) had no Spanish judges.

McConnell wanted a Republican-controlled Supreme Court that would help corporations further de-unionize American workers and would strike down government regulation, including environmental regulation, as well as supporting the GOP campaign of voter suppression waged against minorities and the less well-off. Again, mission accomplished.

But Trump went to Georgia and told his initiates that the election was rigged and they could not expect justice, which likely depressed the vote as his base did not come out in the numbers the GOP needed. Why should they bother to vote in a corrupt election where, he told them, Dominion voting machines would just erase their vote (they wouldn’t).

By his crazy conspiracy theories and insistence that he won a second term (he didn’t), Trump handed the senate to the Democrats for at least two years (and very possibly for many more) and demoted Mitch from Master of the Universe to bored little boy whose teacher is making him sit in the corner and not breathe a word.

Then on top of that Trump sent Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and that guy with the horns and face paint to kidnap or kill McConnell and his colleagues.

McConnell’s goal (and that of Charles Koch and his other billionaire donors) is to take back the House and the Senate in 2022 and emasculate Biden the way he stopped Obama from accomplishing almost anything. Then he wants back the White House in 2024.

Trump had taken over the Republican Party and clearly intended to run in 2024, though. Since Trump is so popular among the Republican base, with a majority supporting the Capitol Insurrection, there will be no peace in the party for the next few years if Trump remains viable. He can prevent Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley and other would-be presidential contenders from plausibly getting in the ring and from attracting the big campaign money from donors. Why bet against Trump when he has a lock?

But Trump has already demonstrated that he is too dysfunctional to win a second term, whether in 2020 or 2024, which may mean the Republicans are facing long years in the wilderness. Trump could even make them so unpopular with his Mussolini schitck that the suburbs are spooked again in 2022 and the GOP can’t get back the House.

The Democrats in the meantime can undo the 2017 tax cut, can start filling the federal judgeships of retiring GOP appointees, replacing them with Democrats, and can perhaps convince Breyer to retire so as to avoid losing another SCOTUS seat. They can also back wind and solar and electric vehicles, effectively destroying the oil empire of Charles Koch and other big donors to the GOP over the next decade.

Trump was extremely useful to McConnell for four years, and McConnell swallowed the extreme right white supremacy promotion for all that time, because thereby he could serve the billionaire class.

Now, Trump is extremely inconvenient. It isn’t just about 1/6, though that is part of it. McConnell and his backers are far, far better off with Trump politically destroyed, now that he has outlived his usefulness.

Tom is coming for Gatsby as we speak."

——-

Bonus Video:

CNN: “McConnell believes impeachment push will help rid GOP of Trump” 

 

Question: Wasn't Chao's father a Chinese shipping magnate who some accuse of being involved in the Drug Trade?  Or, was that just a rumor ??

 

~~~~~ 

 

Mark his advise:

 ~ From Truthout:

 

GOP Is In Turmoil But we Shouldn't Underestimate Ongoing threat Of The Right 

end edit.

  

 
 
Maybe it's too early for this one, still... in anticipation of the complete Trump exile: 
  

day of