Author: A.T.

I meant to post this from the Los Angeles Times a year ago but it’s just as relevant today:

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Retiring California lawmaker reflects on Jonestown and Trump

When Jackie Speier was a lawmaker in Sacramento, before mass shootings became a sad and sick part of everyday life, she helped push through the first state ban on military-style assault weapons.

During a scorching debate, an opponent challenged her, wondering whether she’d ever fired one of the weapons targeted for extinction.

Her response was swift and sharp: “No. But have you ever been shot by an assault weapon?”

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She was at the Jonestown massacre in 1978 and on the floor of the House — literally — in 2021.

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Jones, she noted, convinced hundreds of true believers “to follow him into the jungle of Guyana. Once there, they became somewhat enslaved by him, and in the end, they didn’t commit suicide. They were murdered.”

Trump, she said, “created this cult of personality that allowed him to then telegraph to his supporters to do things that were illegal, destructive, personally harmful.”

Speier was in the House chamber on Jan. 6, 2021, when it was overrun by violent, jacked-up Trump supporters seeking to overturn the 2020 election.

“I remember pressing my cheek to the floor and feeling how cold it was and this whole sense of resignation kind of came over me,” she said. “I thought, ‘This is it. I’m going to die here in what we think is this sanctuary of democracy’” after surviving Jonestown.

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BONUS

Robert Reich’s 10 suggestions for 2024.

The first part of this interview is worth your time.  It’s with three former Trump aides, including his former Communications Director.

Brave Young Women – Part I 

But the second part — just 6 minutes — is what needs to be shared with anyone thinking of voting for Trump.  Your brother-in-law?  Your uncle?

Part II – What A Second Term Would Look Like

If you’d plunked down $9,125 for a share of Berkshire Hathaway in 1992 on Warren Buffett’s 62nd birthday and sold it 20 years later, you’d have hit a home run.  The stock was $126,183.

But had you held four more years, selling on his 86th birthday, you’d have been $100,000 better off.  (Four more years!  Four more years!)

Even then, selling when he was 86, you’d have left $322,498 on the table by not trusting his judgment.  On his 93rd birthday this year, the stock was $547,348.

For some jobs, wisdom and experience — and the team you’ve assembled beneath you — count more than vitality of gait.

Also worth noting, since this post is obviously not about Warren Buffett . . .

Joe has America finally beginning to revitalize itself with the massive bi-partisan infrastructure bill now beginning to roll out . . . the massive climate investment now just beginning to take hold . . . and the all-important CHIPs Act.

Most Republicans voted against all three (but will try to take credit for the projects in their districts anyway).

Meanwhile, the stock market, despite the drag of high interest rates, is at record highs.

Unemployment, despite the welcome “drag” of higher wages, is at record lows.

And we are producing more oil than any other country in the history of the world. 

That last one, while it would have Republicans cheering if they were willing to acknowledge it, needs context not to horrify those — like me — who see the climate crisis as urgent.

Here’s that context: until world demand for fossil fuels can be lowered by means of efficiency and met by means of renewables, someone needs to meet it . . . the profits from which will flow somewhere . . . enriching someone.  It doesn’t matter to the climate crisis whether it’s Iran or Russia or the U.S.  But as long as fossil fuels are needed, I’d rather it be us than them, not least so that we can use the tax revenue from those profits, and some of the profits themselves, to fund and expand the massive climate-change initiative Joe has launched.

Trump will of course tell us this is all fake news.  Climate change is not real.  Oil production has slowed to a trickle.  His Inaugural crowd was the largest in history.  He won reelection by a landslide.  Obama’s 5.1% unemployment rate was really 20% to 42%.  

The man has been lying and scamming all his life.

The examples are endless.

(Here’s yet another, set to go to trial later this month: “The lawsuit, filed in 2018, alleges Trump received millions of dollars in secret payments [promoting a since-failed maker of video phones, telling investors] “he had ‘experienced the opportunity’ and ‘done a lot of research,’ and that his endorsement was ‘not for any money.'” . . . “Not a word of this was true,” according to the plaintiffs.)

Trump is, according to one of his biggest Fox backers, “the undisputed world champion of destroying things.”

Biden, by contrast, has a team of 4,000 appointees, 1,200 of them Senate-confirmed, who have hit their stride.  They have restored dignity, civility, and competence; regained the respect of our allies; and set us on a course toward a brighter future.

I cede the balance of my time to Lindsey Graham (60 seconds).

Happy New Year!

Republican Congressman Ken Buck on Face The Nation (54 seconds).  “They’re lying.”

2012 Republican Presidential Nominee Mitt Romney (39 seconds).  “Are we going to abandon truth?”

Previously recommended: A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. 

Riveting.

Read (or listen at 1.25X speed).  I’m pretty sure you will find yourself wanting to share it with everyone you know.

It could not be more relevant today.

Wishing you a terrific weekend and a fever-breaking 2024.

Sixty seconds.

All it takes to save democracy — to answer that alarm — is courage.

Yet that’s easier said than done.

How many have had the courage to defy Putin?  Or Kim Jong Un?  Or any of the other dictators with whom Trump feels special kinship?

Thom Hartmann reports on how death threats keep Trump powerful.

Thanks for any help you may be able to pitch in.

SEPARATELY, AND VERY SAD TO SAY . . .

It’s time to “rusticate” Harvard’s president — as argued here in the Atlantic.

I’m 274 days into learning Spanish with Duolingo.

I can now say “I need to buy three pretty new green dresses.”

Also: “Feliz Navidad.”

This made me laugh (20 seconds).

A friend sent me this (60 seconds).

It’s not Christmas related — except that it is: because it’s joyful.

Plugged yesterday but worth repeating: the Bank of Dave, a true-ish story that Frank Capra would surely have loved, now streaming.

A couple of years ago I linked you to my friend Marc Fest’s widely lauded Elevator Pitch training.  You might still want to check it out.  What’s a few hundred bucks if it makes you more effective at selling whatever you’re selling, be it a new venture, surgical equipment, your school board candidacy, or the charity dearest to your heart?

Now comes Elvay –much the same thing, from the same guy, but only $9.95, enabled by artificial intelligence.

Cheaper than a martini, and if you don’t need any help selling yourself or your idea, what a gift for your kids or your sales force or someone you mentor.

. . . starting with the best Twelve Days Of Christmas ever.

Enjoy!

You’ve seen Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life.  Now streams the Bank of Dave, a true-ish story Capra would surely have loved.

Also of possible interest this time of year: Tim Alberta’s 60-second message to fellow Christians.

There was a low-budget film back in the mid-Fifties, whose name I can’t recall, where humanity is about to destroy itself in nuclear holocaust and all the world’s smartest thinkers have gathered to come up with a way out.  They eventually throw up their hands and, as a last resort, feed the problem into one of those massive new machines called “a computer.”

After several minutes’ blinking and beeping, it spits out the 10-part solution, which one of the actors, grabbing the tape, reads aloud as the music gradually swells. “Thou shalt not kill,” it begins . . . and goes on from there.

In real life, of course, far from solving mankind’s most devastating conflicts, religion has caused many of them.  Still, it’s a scene that has always stuck with me — brought to mind just now when I read this:

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Google revealed in April that one of its quantum computers had solved a problem in seconds that would have taken the world’s most powerful supercomputer 47 years.

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Twenty years ago, I wrote “Google is everything” and days later linked to Tom Friedman’s, Is Google God?

Well, hello: the singularity draws ever nearer.

And finally — because hunger and misery don’t stop for Christmas — Tom Friedman again: It’s Time for the U.S. to Give Israel Some Tough Love.

Tuesday, Bonnie Bossert suggested I read Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them.

Now that I have (with my ears at 1.25X speed, which took a quick round-trip flight to DC and one power walk), I can confirm it is a MUST READ.

I’m pretty sure you will find yourself wanting to share it with everyone you know.

Please do.

“Drown the government in a bathtub?”  Turns out: They may not need the bathtub.

And, yes, I’m mindful Monday is Christmas.  As long-time readers know, I love Christmas.  Not for the religion of it — although I do think Jesus was one of the two greatest Jews who ever lived, the best little boy in the history of the world, basically, yet one whose teachings seem largely to have been lost on many of his worshippers (see, for example, the millions of Klansmen-and-women whose story Egan tells, above) — but for the spirit of Christmas embodied in so many beloved songs and movies that celebrate love and family, peace and goodwill, hope and charity and the wonder in a child’s eyes.

May yours be merry and bright, in the words of Irving Berlin (Israel Beilin), even if the chances grow slimmer each year it will be white.

I opined in September that CREW would win its suit to keep Trump off the ballot — yesterday, it did — and that “when it gets to the Supreme Court” — as it shortly will — “at least five Justices will vote to affirm.”

We’ll soon see.

Justices who do vote to uphold Colorado’s decision will be risking assassination — that’s the world Trump has given us (“hang Mike Pence!”) — so they may not have the courage.  But Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment seems clear.  You can’t incite a mob to attack the Capitol with the goal of overturning what your own appointee has told you is the most secure election in our nation’s history . . . watch gleefully for three hours as it does . . . and then, under the terms of Section 3, hold office again.  Let alone be deemed to have fulfilled your Oath of Office.

Those who say the Court shouldn’t decide whether Trump can be president, the people should, may be forgetting that the people did — by a margin of 7 million.

If the Court does uphold Colorado’s decision, and with it, the Constitution on which our republic rests, the Secretaries of State elsewhere may have an easier time following suit.

And, no, the attack on the Capitol didn’t “just happen.”

As reported yesterday:  

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Jan. 6 Rally Organizers Lied About Plan to March to the Capitol, Report Finds

. . . On Jan. 4, Kylie Jane Kremer wrote in a text message: “POTUS is going to have us march there/the Capitol.” She added: “It can also not get out about the march because I will be in trouble with the National Park Service and all the agencies, but POTUS is going to just call for it ‘unexpectedly.’” . . .

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Worth reading in full.

(But can you blame them?  If you’re trying to stage a coup, you have to be deceptive.  Read Liz Cheney’s book.)

Finally, from Vanity Fair: Mike Johnson Wrote the Foreword for a Racist, Homophobic, Anti-Poor Book That Endorsed Pizzagate and Denigrated a Prisoner of War. He says he never read the passages in question and “strongly disagrees” with them.

Also worth reading in full.

(But would someone please remind Vanity Fair that it’s “foreword,” as I’ve corrected it here, not “foreward,” as headlined and in the body of the piece?)

If I don’t see you before Monday — I may be taking a couple of days off — please have a great weekend and a Christmas filled with love, peace, and goodwill.

If you bought some OPRT with money you could truly afford to lose, as suggested here, here, and here, and here, you’re either a little behind or ahead depending on what you paid.  (I’ve paid as much as $5.98 for a little and $2.33 for a lot.  It closed at $3.19 yesterday.)  And you may want to watch this video.

Executive summary: There’s a clear path to a triple or tentuple, though obviously no guarantee.

Bonnie Bossert:  “Have you read this?  Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them.   Scary parallels to today.”

I have not — but it gets a lot of stars.  I plan to listen.

Which of these FDR-created Democratic socialist things would most Americans want to ditch if they had the chance: the minimum wage? unemployment insurance? the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)? the Securities and Exchange Commission? Social Security?

And how about earlier socialist programs like public schools, public roads, and public libraries?  Or later ones like Medicare?   

Just saying.