Uncategorized

HEY BABY, THERE AIN’T NO EASY WAY OUT

Until last night, Graham Platner was the Democratic candidate for the Maine U.S. Senate seat now held by Susan Collins.

He won the party primary with a populist campaign that resonated with Down Easters (am I allowed to write that if I’m a New Yorker who’s visited Maine twice?). Among his stances are supporting a woman’s right to an abortion, getting big money out of politics and bolstering the state’s struggling business – including fishing, which is what he does.

But Platner had issues from the start. He reportedly hasn’t been the most loyal husband. He has been accused of sexual misconduct with women he dated. He supposedly had a tattoo on his chest that was a Nazi symbol, something he has since covered up.

On the other hand, Democrats – both in Maine and around the nation – desperately want to win this race. This is one of the more flippable Senate seats in a year in which Democrats don’t have lots of opportunities. 

And Collins, the incumbent, is especially vexing. Most prominently, she cast a decisive vote for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh after saying she was assured that Kavanaugh believed Roe v. Wade was established law. Which, thanks to Kavanaugh’s vote on the Dobbs case, wasn’t true.

So the Democrats wanted the strongest possible candidate for the Maine seat. And Platner seized the opportunity, running a more responsive campaign for the seat than his primary opponent, Gov. Janet Mills. If they’re still online, watch a Platner campaign appearance if you want to see someone who knows how to talk to angry voters.

Not to mention – and this is important to keep in mind – Platner is about half as old as the octogenarian Mills. He trounced her in the primary last month.

But now, with new accusations of sexual misconduct, Platner bowed out. He didn’t have much choice. Prominent Democrats who supported him – including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren – rescinded their endorsements. The state party needed an answer quickly so that it could legally put up another candidate.

Of course, there’s a lot of hand-wringing about all this. It’s the old “everybody should have known” routine – once a few accusations surfaced, Platner’s candidacy should have been doomed.

But it wasn’t. Not until the latest accusations, whose credibility seems to be strong, did people wonder why Platner got this opportunity.

The answer to that is seven paragraphs up.

Democrats – and a lot of independents and non-MAGA Republicans – feel an incredible urgency about this midterm election. It might be the last chance this nation to save itself from a Trump dictatorship. To save itself from decades of retrogression on civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, health security, climate change and immigration reform.

A Democratic Senate won’t approve Trump’s nominees for judicial and executive positions – men and women who have formed a kakistocracy unimaginable even in the first term. It can join a Democratic House in investigating a presidential family that has made more than $1 billion profiting from office.

Platner sounded like a winner. He had a common sense wisdom and a terrific stump style. It’s not hard to imagine that if Collins chose to debate him – and my guess is she wouldn’t – he would have made her look dotty and out of touch.

Now, as Democrats ponder what to do next, they’re facing questions about why they let this happen to them. Why didn’t they come up with somebody more ethical than Platner?

For starters, very few people have perfect pasts, Think about what you wouldn’t want people to find out about you if you chose to run for office. Whether it’s an old relationship, a bad job experience, an encounter with the law.

And it costs money. A lot of money. Maine is not a big media state. Portland, which includes the 11 counties surrounding it, is the 78th largest media market in the country. 

And yet, thanks to the Super PAC money that will flow like 100 Poland Springs, the cost of this campaign could be around $400 million, according to AdImpact. That’s just a chunk of the $11 billion that will be spent on the midterms between now and November.

So Democrats feel a lot of pressure to win. And the polling and sentiment seemed to be that Platner had a better chance to beat Collins than anyone else who tried or was even thought to be a candidate.

We’ll find out in the next few weeks how this will turn out,

But the Maine race is just one part of the problem for Democrats. In Michigan, a Muslim candidate with strongly progressive views had been leading the race for the Senate nomination. But one of the two more moderate candidates dropped out, and the race is now a toss-up.

That’s happening in lots of Senate and House races around the country. Democrats are so intent on stopping Donald Trump that all they want is the best chance to win.

The problem is that Democrats on who that should be. Should we find the least objectionable candidate in an effort to try to sway what few fence-sitters there are left in the electorate?

Or should we vote our hearts? Should we double down on ideology and support people who are not part of the Democratic political establishment? By infusing the election with new blood, with guys like Platner and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, will Democrats lure voters who are frustrated with the status quo and juice the turnout?

There’s also the age thing. Democrats already see what going younger can mean – 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani is wildly popular in New York because none of us have seen a mayor with this much energy and commitment to do good things. 

What if there are hundreds of Mamdanis in this country, ready to help Democrats rebuild from the rubble of Trump?

There’s no easy way out. But we can’t back down. Hopefully, Maine Democrats will figure out the right thing to do.

favorites:
Standard
Uncategorized

250 YEARS  OF ELLIOTTS

My first visit to London in 1983 came the year after “E.T., the Extra Terrestrial” captured the world’s imagination.

One day, the movie came up in a discussion with a friend and I asked what impressed Europeans the most about it. He did not say the cute alien or even the depiction of American suburban life.

He said it was Elliott, the free-spirited preteen who finds and befriends E.T. 

European kids are not like him at all, he said. They don’t talk like Elliott, they don’t think like Elliott, they don’t act like Elliott.

That’s what comes to mind as the United States reaches its 250th anniversary as a nation.

This nation is not great because it can wipe civilization from the planet. This nation is not great because it’s sinfully wealthy. This nation is not great because the world sings our songs.

All these great things emanate from a people who are imbued with the spirit that permeates Elliott, his annoying little sister, his big brother and all their bike-riding friends. 

It’s a misnomer to call our modus operandi “The American Dream.” Dreams are accidental – they happen in our sleep when we’re not conscious, and they’re randomly infiltrated by the thoughts we have in the course of a day. 

What we aspire to is a victory for the American imagination. It’s what we think about when we’re wide awake. When a young woman opens a nail parlor in Pittsburgh, or a kid is turned on by the sound of a trumpet in Iowa, or a boy or girl watches the Knicks’ ticker-tape and imagines making the winning shot in a championship game.

We get that imagination from the fact that we’re not all the same. We were one of the first countries to be that way. We started out with settlers from England, slaves from Africa and people already on the land who thought they were just sharing it – not giving it away. 

Eventually we added folks from other parts of Europe. Including my ancestors from Italy. Then people from Asia with visions of sending gold back to their hometowns. People from the Middle East and from the countries south of us that were predominantly a mix of Spanish and indigenous.

All with the same idea. Making a better life. Working hard and sacrificing so that your kids, your grandkids and generations you couldn’t imagine were prosperous and at peace.

And happy. Happiness is embodied in our DNA – its pursuit is in the second paragraph of our Declaration with a capital H. It was one of the first – if not the first – expression of that idea, that achieving happiness is an inalienable right from our creator. Whoever or whatever we think that creator may be.

Because our motto is “E Pluribus Unum,” – out of many, one – we created the blueprint for raising the standards of the world. We created or perfected technological marvels, from the telegraph to the Internet. We cured diseases that were the scourge of the planet. 

We went to the damn moon!

We’re not the only nation with such pedigree. It’s Canada Day as I write this, a day to celebrate the independence of our nation who shares a lot of our values but comes up with things as different as poutine and Joni Mitchell. 

When I returned to Britain two years ago, I noticed the food was better. A lot better than my first trip 40 years prior. Then I looked around and saw that the diversity that makes America great is making the U.K. great as well. It’s happening throughout the world – the spreading of ideas as people seek better lives in places where they weren’t necessarily born.

Are we perfect? Hell, no! Not close. We took a break after slavery, then enforced Jim Crow laws that took nearly 100 years to unravel. We took more and more land from the people who were already here, disregarding the care with which they stewarded this beautiful land. We specifically told people from China, through a law naming them, that we didn’t want them here. 

We didn’t let women vote until my grandmother’s lifetime. We didn’t let people of the same sex marry until this century.

And there are those among us who have no idea what the country is really about. They think this is some white Christian theocracy and have no clue how much Frederick Douglass and Wong Kim Ark and Tito Puente made America what it is. 

When the Supreme Court ruled this week – way too narrowly, by the way – that birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, they railed about some fallacy called birth tourism. As if people coming here to escape tyranny and poverty all have some sinister design to deprive Americans of something, instead of helping grow our abundance.

As I said, we’re not perfect. But it’s also in our DNA to try to be. In the preamble of our Constitution, we talk about forming a more perfect union. Not a perfect one. A more perfect one.

Elliott probably wasn’t thinking about all this when he helped E.T. go home. All he did was let his friend use the phone. 

But it’s in the spirit of that goodness that we find the better America, the more perfect America we seek. We embrace the people around us and join forces to conquer – not other people, but challenges and innovations.

It’s the thing we’ve done well for 250 years as of Saturday, And if we remember the sense of wonder that Americans inspire – whether it’s in Europe or whatever planet E.T. came from – we can endure as a great nation for as long as there’s a planet to call home.

favorites:
Standard
Uncategorized

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

I’m surprised Trump and his cult want all of the nation to celebrate the 250th anniversary of independence.

The key word in the above sentence is celebrate.

It’s hard to think of people more miserable than Donald Trump, the kakistocracy that comprises the U.S. government and his mean-spirited MAGA supporters. If you told me they all suffer from chronic constipation, I would believe it.

Two prime examples of recent Trumpgrump:

— Apparently, Trump thinks you don’t work enough. The guy who put a cage match on the White House lawn for his birthday said that there are too many non-working holidays and they’re bad for the nation’s economy. 

He said this, of course, on Juneteenth, a recently created holiday to mark the anniversary of when slaves in Galveston, Texas, finally found out they weren’t slaves anymore. Yeah, why would Trump want to celebrate that?

But he couldn’t mention Juneteenth specifically because that would mean he’s a racist – although, note to Donald, that’s not particularly well-hidden. Instead, he said that there are too many holidays in general, and we need to get rid of some of them to make our economy great again.

Ha! No workers in the developed world take as little time off as Americans. There are countries that shut down for entire months in the summer. There are countries that give parents six months or a year of time off for a newborn or adoption.

Trump thinks 10 paid holidays a year is too much. He’s on board with not taking all your vacation time at work. You have to make him and his friends more money. That’s your purpose in life.

— One of the biggest reasons that young people don’t want to start a family is that they can’t afford a home for kids to have the same quality of life they did.

In a lightning bolt of bipartisanship, Congress passed a measure aimed at making homes more affordable. Among its provisions, limits on investment firms purchasing residential housing, one of the things driving the tight market.

It’s a win for Republicans in a time when wins are hard to get. You would think Trump would just take the gift of a chance to look like a leader that the Democrats helped give him.

Nah.

Trump canceled a ceremony to sign the bill because he wants to push his divisive bill on voter ID that would, among other things, disenfranchise married women.

So a happy moment of accomplishment turns into another head-butting stupor.

The funny thing is that the only way Trump can stop this bill from going into effect is vetoing it and forcing the bill’s advocates to come up with a two-thirds majority to override. And somebody would be embarrassed by that – either Trump, because for once Republicans would stand up to him, or the Republicans, because they would capitulate to Trump once again, helping Democratic campaign writers again.

————–

Joy is not lost.

In New York, a million people turned out to celebrate the New York Knicks’ NBA championship. In Chicago, the opening of the Obama Presidential Center was marked with amazing musical performances and a wonderful tribute to the former president from the former First Lady.

Throughout the country, visitors from around the world attending the World Cup are discovering that most Americans are not as miserable as Donald Trump. The joyous celebrations of the Scots in Boston, the Norwegians here in New York, among others, are giving the lie to the notion that American cities – especially those in blue states -are hellholes.

It’s also Pride Month. And despite no official recognition from their president and the sour pusses of people like the San Francisco Giant pitchers who are trying to use the Bible to “reclaim the rainbow,” the celebration of love for whoever you want to love continues full bore.

You know, it’s fun to be happy. It makes you feel better. It makes you like the people around you more.

Maybe that’s why Jefferson threw in that line about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” when he wrote the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago. It’s in our national DNA to seek good times. To try to smile.

Trump and his ilk should try it sometime. Instead of complaining about a nation of immigrants and differing ways of looking at the world. Instead of aspiring to some ridiculous notion of warriorism.

You know, instead of being jerks.

favorites:
Standard
Uncategorized

HE BROKE IT, WE OWN IT

Of course Donald Trump gave Iran $400 billion to end the war he started. It’s not his money.

It’s ours.

Trump has been great at spending our money on stuff we don’t want. Tariffs with countries we don’t have any beef with. Ballrooms and UFC fights at the White House. Rounds of golf in Palm Beach and Bedminster. 

And, of course, the war we won 40 times but are somehow paying reparations to end. 

The second Trump administration is not designed to give us healthcare, affordable housing, lower food and oil prices or infrastructure. It’s not designed to make the world safer or trade farer. It’s not designed to solve the immigration problem, but rather bludgeon it.

It’s about ruling and not governing. Dictating instead of legislating. Reward sycophants and donors instead of unifying the country.

Now, there’s this crappy agreement that will end a war wanted by only a small percentage of Americans – mostly MAGA zombies and people who think Benjamin Netanyahu is a statesman and not a grifter just like Trump.

And we’re going to take 400 billion really useful American dollars – money we can spend for just about everything the people of this country they want – and give them to Iran. To rebuild the country under the guidance of the same theocrats who we were supposed to be deposing.

We also gave them control of the Strait of Hormuz. Almost as important, we gave their leaders a major victory over the country it has called “The Great Satan” since the infamous hostage crisis of 1979. A victory they can now rub in the face of anyone who dares oppose them.

Trump turned 80 last week and, given actuarial tables and the cankles above his feet, he’s not going to be around all that long. But we’re unfortunate enough that he makes it to 100. we’ll be paying the price for his stupidity and mendacity for decades.

Our kids will be paying it. Hell, your grandkids (I don’t have any so far) will be paying it. That $400 billion is going to take decades to make its way to Tehran and environs.

Current and future generations will also be paying for other Trump boondoggles. We still haven’t figured out what the hell our country did to Venezuela when 2026 started. We don’t even talk about that anymore.

It’s gonna cost a fortune to scrape off the gold frosting and deconstruct the garish touches Trump has added to the White House. And we’re going to pay if he builds his Arc de Reddition (look it up!) in Virginia to embarrass the heroes buried at Arlington.

Hopefully, the courts will stop us from paying the people who tried to take our democracy away  on January 6, 2021. To not provide the smarmy $1.776 billion fund to compensate these people for the pain they supposedly suffered at the hands of the law enforcement officers they tried to kill.

I’m not sure the United States ever completely recovered from what happened in Vietnam. A country that never really lost a war seemed to have done so despite having the world’s most powerful military.

But Vietnam looks like a triumph next to what transpired in Iran. We spent a fortune on the war – it destroyed Lyndon Johnson’s economy – but we didn’t need to give Hanoi money after we evacuated Saigon in 1975. Vietnam now makes our clothing and my son’s girlfriend vacationed there earlier this year.

That’s not going to happen in Iran. Trump has made the clerics our daddies. The clerics are going to rise up the ranks of world powers and make even more mischief throughout the Middle East and even in Africa and the rest of Asia.

Trump broke it. He broke the world order and he spent our money to do it. We own it – and reemerging as the moral leader of the world will take a very long time.

If it happens at all.

favorites:
Standard
Uncategorized

SUPERPOWER

What 80th birthday gift do you get the man who wants everything?

Donald Trump somehow believes he’s entitled to anything he sets his mind to. Some soccer club’s tournament trophy. A young woman’s Olympic gold medal in a sport he probably doesn’t know exists. Republican nominees for office who think the way he wants and not for themselves.

It’s an amazing state of being and it boils down to a simple fact: the man is incapable of guilt.

It is, in fact, his superpower.

You and I – and just about everyone I’ve ever met – lie awake at night. Did we hurt somebody’s feelings with our words and actions? Did we cause inconvenience or hardship some we work with, for or who works for us? Did we look or sound ridiculous in front of a lot of people? Have I done anything to hurt, embarrass or sadden someone I love?

We have a sense of guilt. It’s been instilled in us by our parents. Or by our religious beliefs. Or it comes naturally from living in an imperfect world and being bothered by people in some kind of pain.

Trump is immune from this stuff, to a degree that is shocking and – for those of us who hate his guts – infuriating.

The evidence of it is strewn, much like the debris he’s created on the White House grounds, all over the past week.

Start with the beginning of the week – and his interaction with NBC’s Krysten Welker. He started in again on the idea that the 2000 election – the one he lost to Joe Biden by nearly 8 million votes and more than enough Electoral College votes – was somehow from him. 

For 5-1/2 years, he’s said he’s got evidence to prove it – and has never managed to show it. Or proven his case before impartial observers and judges.

Yet he persists. When Welker corrected him, Trump went ballistic. “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid,” he told her. Both those things are insults, particularly to the integrity of an American journalist. The misogynist frosting on this was his telling her, “Thank you, darling!” as he stormed away from the interview.

Do you think Trump, for a second, thought, “Hey, I’m the most powerful person in the world and I belittled someone”? Do you think he lost a wink of sleep over his behavior?

Wait, let me rephrase that – do you think that stuff, as opposed to the other crap he posts on his pet social media site at 1 a.m., kept him awake the way it would do that to you or me?

Speaking of being awake, Trump – oblivious to the impact a presidential trip has on other people – accepted an invitation from clueless New York Knicks owner Jim Dolan. 

Not of that mattered to Trump, who probably thought Willis Reed still played for the team. He forced a massive shift in security, inconveniencing the people who pay real money to see a team trying to win an NBA championship.

Trump was booed and heckled on his way into Madison Square Garden. He was booed and heckled inside the Garden, even during Avery Wilson’s stirring rendition. And he visibly fell asleep during a back-and-forth basketball game.

Does he care? Was he embarrassed? Did it matter?

It’s honestly impressive to have that little guilt. To be dozing off in some luxury box while American servicemen and women were risking their lives trying to rescue helicopter pilots shot down by Iran near the Strait of Hormuz.

Which used to be a free passageway before he started a war with Iran three months ago. 

A war CNN pointed out this week has ended 37 times according to Trump. Usually wars only end once. And when you win, the other side doesn’t launch attacks or counterattacks.

Is there any sense of humility about this war from Trump? Does he lose sleep wondering about putting American lives at risk? (It seems way too much to ask whether he loses sleep about Iranian children dying.)

It’s an amazing power to not feel guilt or shame or anguish. Yes, he’s angry all the time. But that’s when he doesn’t get something he wants, or when someone dares to confront him with the lies, the hypocrisy, the incompetence.

He never loses or is at fault. Never. There’s never a moment of regret. I don’t even think sadness is available to him – anger, yes, sadness, no.

You can try all you want to be that way. I don’t think you can get there. You’d feel guilty about missing your son’s wedding. You’d write anguished notes to the families of those who die in the war you started. You’d wonder if maybe those tariffs I inflicted are eating away the paychecks of working Americans.

That’s why I think it’s naive to believe the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files will chasten or embarrass him. Raping a 14-year-old? “I’m entitled to it.” “What a lucky girl!” “She enjoyed it.”

What to get the 80-year-old man who wants everything?

The ability to say “I’m sorry” or “it’s my fault.” Good luck with that.

Standard
Uncategorized

THE LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD

St. Petersburg, Russia, is 655 miles – as the drone flies – from Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. It’s closer to Helsinki, Finland.

And yet, the home region of Vladimir Putin found itself under attack this week from drones launched by the Ukrainians.

If I had written that sentence four years ago, when Russia launched its war against Ukraine, expects would have said I was nuts. I would have thought I was nuts. There was no way Ukraine could outlast what was then perceived as one of the world’s two or three most powerful militaries.

Shame on the experts. Shame on me.

There are few things to feel good about in 2026. One of them is the valiancy of the Ukrainian people and their leader, the Winston Churchill of the 21st century, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. They have survived far longer than anyone believed possible when Russia started rolling tanks across their border.

In fact, there are many experts who believe Ukraine is winning this war. The drone attack on St. Petersburg, undeterred by Russia’s supposedly impenetrable air defense, is a prime example. Ukrainian drones have struck Moscow and other parts of the vast country as well. Their range is growing.

And Ukraine has become a leader in anti-drone defense, franchising its technology to other countries looking to fend off unwanted attacks.

According to the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies, Russia has paid an amazingly high price for its aggression. The estimated death toll is something in the area of 300,000. By contrast, the United States lost 58,000 people in the Vietnam War – and we thought that was a disaster. Counting those injured, Russia’s casualty count exceeds 1 million.

That’s got to reach the point that it affects every town, village and hovel. Where almost everyone knows someone who has suffered from this debacle.

Russia’s economy is shattered. Its reputation in the world is wrecked. But just like in Pete Seeger’s song about Vietnam, “The Big Muddy,” the big fool – in this case, Putin – says to push on.

Not that Ukraine hasn’t suffered. Far from it. Many of its cities are piles of rubbles, resulting from aerial bombardment, missile attacks and drones. Way too many civilians – and way, way too many children have been killed or maimed. The scars of this will take generations to heal.

Ukraine has been bolstered by the help from the world’s democracies. Particularly the European Union, Canada and Japan, with unflinching support from London to Warsaw to Ottawa to Berlin to Tokyo to Rome. The bad guys in World War II are the good guys this time.

We used to be among the good guys. President Joe Biden and many in Congress, on a bipartisan basis, stood up for Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians. They were treated like the world heroes they are – Biden traveling to Kyiv clandestinely to show his support, Zelenskyy speaking before a joint session of Congress.

Now it’s hard to tell which side the United States is on. Zelenskyy is probably still smarting from the humiliating treatment he received from Trump and Vance when he came to the White House last year.

And Republican talking points on social media include posts bragging – bragging! – that Ukraine is no longer getting generous funding from the U.S. When I saw one of these posts on my feed recently, I was tempted to ask the poster what the weather was like in Novosibirsk.

Of course, Trump has been too busy causing trouble in the rest of the world. There’s the idiotic war against Iran, the grab for oil in Venezuela and the saber rattling against Cuba and – and this is even more confounding than thinking Ukraine would stand up to Russia – Canada and Greenland.

Hopefully, the midterm elections will change some of this trajectory. But November seems like forever away. Five more months of death, destruction and Trump still seeing Putin as some kind of model for world leader conduct.

As frustrating as are all the domestic debacles perpetrated by the second Trump mishegas, the fact that we are the wrong side in plain battles of evil vs. good is pathetic. When Ukraine wins its war against Russia – and I’m among those now convinced that it’s Zelenskyy, not Putin, who holds the cards – we will not deserve the credit and the gratitude that others in the West will garner.

Not from the country that, in 2026, is becoming the leader of the free world.

Standard
Uncategorized

SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES

Four days after his 71st birthday, saxophonist Sonny Rollins was scheduled to play a concert in Boston. The date was September 11, 2001, and before he could leave his apartment in lower Manhattan, the planes crashed into the World Trade Center.

The concert was postponed, but five days later he played to a crowd trying – like the rest of us – to recover from the trauma. The recording of that album, “The 9/11 Concert,” is another Rollins masterpiece.

Recording masterpieces is what Rollins continued to do for another decade plus – until his pulmonary problems forced him to retire. This week, he died at the age of 95, after sharing his musical genius with the world for 65 years.

As a septuagenarian myself, I fully subscribe to the idea that creating – whether it’s music or writing – is something I can do until either my mind and/or body fails. 

The mental faculty it takes to process the world and present your view of it probably diminishes with age. But it doesn’t completely go away. Bruce Springsteen, at 76, still performs three-hour concert in multiple cities to packed houses. I just a saw a video of Robert Caro, age 90, working on the final volume of his Lyndon Johnson master opus – 983 pages are written so far and he still has a ways to go.

But there’s another mental process that does fade and become compromised as we get older.

That’s the ability to make decisions.

Making decisions is hard work. And especially if you have to make a lot of them – and those decisions are literally life and death for some people.

Barack Obama used to say that – other than the tan suit brouhaha – he never picked out his own clothes. Someone else went through his closet and set out his wardrobe for the next day. It was one less decision he had to make and he needed to save his energy for the choices that mattered.

I get it. I’ve been making decisions about all kinds of things for 72 years. And, having been an editor and desk manager in a real-time newsroom, I’ve had to make multiple decisions about what’s a story and what’s not, what belongs in a story and what needs to be left out, what’s a fact and what’s a mistake, and what word best conveys the idea.

It’s tiring. For me, I developed mental blocks that caused me to make mistakes. When I screwed up a monthly housing report at age 59, it made me question whether I needed to stop doing what I was doing. As it turned out, I did.

There’s one other thing about an older mind. It’s kinda stuck on ideas of what’s what.

Jon Stewart points out that Trump only seems to go after the late-night guys who are network TV – Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers. It seems as though he has no idea who Stewart or John Oliver are. They’re not on legacy networks.

Trump knows there’s cable – he is, after all, the backbone of Fox News, Newsmax, One America and other right-wing outlets. 

Unfortunately, this country has decided that age is no obstacle to leadership.

For the first 26 years of my life, the oldest president in U.S. history was William Henry Harrison. He was 68 when he was inaugurated. He was also 68 when he died. Immediately after his inauguration, Harrison contracted pneumonia – he died a month later.

It was until Ronald Reagan that anyone older became president who was older than Harrison. And Reagan was 69 when he took office in 1981.

Our last three presidential elections have seen our nation elect men who were older than 70. In both 2020 and 2024, the winner was 78. Joe Biden turned 80 in the White House and Donald Trump turns 80 in the next month.

The problem here is that the presidency is a conflict. You can’t be inaugurated unless you’re at least 35 years of age.

But as we’re seeing, there’s a possibility that you can be too old. I thought Biden was a tremendous leader. But Jill Biden’s new book is probably going to make a lot of people think he aged too quickly and lost his way – as demonstrated in that godawful debate in June 2024 when Biden seemed lost and befuddled.

In Trump’s case, his incompetence at making decisions and his outdated notions of what the world is doing these days is compounded by his basic narcissism and inability to think about anybody other than himself.

Those are traits that also get worse as you get older, and stop caring about what other people think. I’m 72 – or, in his case, 80 – and I’m going to do as I damn well please. I’m not here that much longer anyway.

The point of all this is that if there’s ever been a time for a generational change in leadership, it’s now. The initial success of 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani as New York’s mayor is proof that a younger generation, one that’s attuned to contemporary ideas and sees how important the future is, needs to get control of the works.

And it’s not as if old people should be put out to pasture. Sonny Rollins created great music into his 70s. Paul McCartney still writes songs in his 80s. I’m going to see James Taylor in a few weeks – he can still do great concerts.

It’s time for our generation to leave the hard work to the youngsters. Because we’ll screw things up with our old, faltering ways of thinking.

Standard
Uncategorized

STEPHEN

IF you read this after 12:35 a.m. ET on Friday, May 22, “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” is now just television history.

In fact, the Columbia Broadcasting System’s effort to come up with an entry for late-night TV is over. It began in the late 1960s, when the network realized that the old movies airing on its owned stations as “The Late Show” couldn’t match the juggernaut that was NBC “The Tonight Show.”

But both Merv Griffin and Pat “Wheel of Fortune” Sajak couldn’t puncture the market. It wasn’t until 1993, after Johnny Carson retired and Jay Leno succeeded him, that CBS went all-in. They brought in the man thought to be Carson’s heir apparent, David Letterman, and installed him in the 11:30 p.m. time slot.

It worked. Letterman and Leno slugged it out for ratings. Letterman was the more television-savvy guy, understanding that the key to late-night success was creating a buzz that had people staying up late so they could talk about it at work the next day.

Stupid Pet Tricks. Stupid Human Tricks. Larry “Bud” Melman. Hello, Delly. The Top 10 List.

Letterman revered Johnny Carson, who ultimately is the man responsible for late-night TV being an institution. He hosted “The Tonight Show” for more than 30 years. Letterman did his variations on Carson’s comedic touches for the show – such bits as Carnac the Magician and the Mighty Carson Art Players. 

So did Leno. But “The Tonight Show” is the New York Yankees of late-night television. It occasionally reaches for topical humor, but its bread-and-butter is the a-list and b-list stars who come on to promote a movie or TV series.

Carson was more into interviewing authors and politicians when he hosted the show from 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York. When he moved “Tonight” to California in the 1960s, it became much more of an entertainment vehicle.

That was – and is – “Tonight”‘s legacy, and Leno was probably better suited to continue it than Letterman, who had hosted daytime and late-late-night shows on NBC. 

Freed from the “Tonight” constraints, Letterman appealed to a younger audience and his bits were positioned perfectly for the media change from over-the-air to online that mark the early 21st century. How many times have you watched Letterman and his guests as they come up randomly in the reels of your Facebook feed?

After 30 years, Letterman gave up his show, most likely because Stephen Colbert just finished his historic run on “The Colbert Report” and was out there waiting to be plucked.

Colbert gained some of his political sensibilities from working with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” Those were heightened when Donald Trump – from all indications, diametrically opposite in personality and ethics from Colbert – rose to power in 2016.

Because Colbert and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel are both on legacy networks, something Trump understands, they have been at each other from the beginning of the first term. When Trump regained the White House in the 2024 election, there’s little doubt Colbert and Kimmel were on some sort of hit list.

Trump failed with Kimmel. His sycophants tried to drive Kimmel off the air after he made a less-than-reverent remark about the murder of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk. The flap, which included remarks threatening ABC by tame FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, led to Disney suspending Kimmel’s show indefinitely.

Protests forced Disney to back down and Kimmel returned to the air.

But Trump likely succeeded with Colbert. CBS was taken over by Paramount under the aegis of David Ellison, the son of tech billionaire and general asshole Larry Ellison. His company, Skydance, now wants control of Warner Discovery, the parent of CNN, HBO and Warner Bros.

To get that approval, the Ellisons needed to make nice with Donnie Thinskin. And while Skydance claims “The Late Show” loses oodles of money, most people in the industry call BS.

Letterman, in a recent interview, said “I’m just going to go on record as saying: They’re lying. They’re lying weasels.”

—

My soft spot for Colbert goes beyond the fact that we share an alma mater and Northwesterners stick up for one another. He’s not only funny, he’s compassionate, animated and seemingly interested in everything.

More important, he, Kimmel, Stewart, Seth Meyers and John Oliver have done something that the other institutions that we counted on did not.

They stood up to Donald Trump.

The legacy news networks can’t say that. Even the cable networks – CNN and MS Now – can’t. Newspapers like The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times can’t say that. Our universities, with few exceptions and including my alma mater, can’t say that.

But these comedians – and you can add Jimmy Fallon, who walks the NBC tightrope as well as he can – have taken the blows of Trump and his henchmen. Because they’re part of the megamedia, the odds are stacked against them.

They moved late-night television from pure entertainment to becoming the way a whole generation learns what’s going on in the world. They’re trusted more than Bari Weiss’ pet anchorman on CBS or the other non-entities on network news. And no one is taking seriously Fox’s late-night mess, Greg Gutfeld, who is to “comedy” as “poison ivy” is to “vegetable.”

Colbert never flinched. Neither has Kimmel, Meyers or Oliver. They’re out there to reflect the anger that has boiled over from the nonsense Trump has perpetrated since January 20, 2025 – and even those four years before the Biden Sanity Interlude.

— 

One final point: There’s a good chance you won’t see much of the Colbert archive starting now. The other side in this is petty. They control the rights to his material.. They can bury it – and I suspect that’s what they’re going to do.

So I hope you have some old tapes or Colbert files on your computer. That’s how you’ll remember his fantastic 11-year run on CBS – until his next act surfaces. 

Standard
Uncategorized

WHAT THEY’RE COMING FOR NEXT

It’s now been four years since the six Republican toadies on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended safe legal abortion in a large swath of the United States.

It’s now been only a couple of weeks since those same six dolts eviscerated 60 years of progress in giving representation to Black people over pretty much the same territory.

Both of these rollbacks of justice were entirely predictable. They have been the goals of the folks pandering to white nationalism and evangelical excess. The people with privilege who say legislation should not help people of color who don’t share their privilege. The people who wail about freedom of religion because stores say “Happy Holidays!” but insist that everyone abide by their fundamentalist beliefs.

They will tell you they reaped their reward for putting their faith in God. What they did was reap their reward for putting their faith in Donald Trump.

The Preamble to our Constitution says we’re trying to form a more perfect union, establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility. That’s not what these folks want. They want the status quo – the great that they want America to be again – not from the recent past, but from the early 1800s.

They’ve been playing a long game ever since the first sprouts of progress in civil rights. Americans usually only vote every four years – for president. They can’t be bothered with votes on school boards, community boards, town councils, village trustees, lower court justices, highway superintendents. Then state legislatures and Congress.

Those are the elections on which they focused their attention. Once they had control, they shaped their constituencies to their benefit. AKA gerrymandering. 

That’s the mess we’re in now.

And if you think they’re done, if you think they’re content with blocking abortions and making sure cities with mostly non-white populations have no representation, you’re nuts.

The coalition of unbridled corporate greed and America-is-a-Christian-nationites has targets on several other things that have improved life in our countries in my 72 years. The kinds of things that other developed nations – Britain, France, Canada, et cetera – take for granted.

They are, in no particular order:

— Same-sex marriage: Other people’s happiness matters not a whit to these people. They’ve been trying to tee up the Obergefell decision since Anthony Kennedy wrote his brilliant opinion in 2015. 

They have the votes to overturn it. Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t like the decision when it came out. You know Alito and Thomas are chomping at the bit to eviscerate it. And Trump’s Three Stooges will do whatever the right wing that got them their robes asks.

Sane-sex marriages are marriages. Two people fall in love, commit their lives to one another, and are happy. That is all that matters. And that happiness is not to be judged by anyone else.

But, unchecked, the my-way-or-the-highway clowns will try to undo that happiness, no matter how much it hurts people and the legal mess it would create after 11 years.

— Interracial marriage: It’s probably hard for most young people to believe – in a world of Mariah Carey, Derek Jeter, The Rock and Barack Obama. But in much of this country, interracial marriage was proscribed until the early 1960s, when the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia.

There are few things that stick in the craw of white supremacists as much as seeing black-and-white, Asian-and-white, indigenous-and=white and other racially mixed couples. Watching them walking hand-in-hand or, gasp, getting pulled by their two kids through Disneyland.

The term “racial purity” makes me want to throw up. But that’s what these people seek. If there’s a way to overturn it, they’ll try to find it – even if it means that Clarence Thomas will have to find an exception to allow him to keep his white wife.

— Birth control: Again, it would hard for young people to grasp that the idea of limiting procreation through drugs and medical devices is not a given. It was the Griswold v. Connecticut case in 1965 that permitted married couples to use contraception, and the Eisenstadt v. Baird (In this one, Baird is the good guy) case that extended that to unmarried couples.

In this administration, you’ve just heard the idiot known as Dr. Oz spew the idea that Americans are “underbabied.”  You’ve heard the nut case known as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bemoan what he says is a deficiency in teen sperm counts. 

These people want more children – actually, they want more white children. It would be a counterbalance to the fact that the U.S. is on track to become a majority-minority nation (Horrors!). 

— Family and childbirth leave: Since the mid-1990s, you’ve been able to take time off from work to care for a newborn or a sick family member. 

At first, it was mostly unpaid. But then companies looking for a competitive hiring advantage decided to start offering that leave as a paid benefit.

They hate doing that. It cuts into profits, no matter how obscene they are. Trump’s corporate enablers are looking for ways to end the Medical and Family Leave Act.

—————

Well, just don’t sit there. Do something.

First off, make sure you’re registered to vote. Right now. Don’t wait to check on it in the fall.

Because there are voting opportunities even before November. 

Here where I live, there’s a school board election next week. Voting in those elections is just as important as voting for Congress. If you want to stop the crazies in your area from book bans and enabling Turning Point USA propaganda, make sure they’re not in positions that allow them to use your tax dollars to support them.

There are also primaries. Pick the candidate who best represents your position on these matters. But make sure you vote – the bad guys have gotten where they are because of our complacency. That’s got to end.

That’s especially true in the way this country treats its Black citizens. These folks work as hard as everyone else. They pay their fair share in taxes – more than you can say about the billionaires Trump took on his junket to China.

They deserve representation. They deserve a voice. The states that legislated predominantly Black congressional districts out of existence obviously don’t care enough about what fair-minded people think of their actions. 

Don’t go there. There’s no reason to visit Tennessee. New Orleans can wait. You can make toasted ravioli without going to St. Louis. These people who have gerrymandered their states to achieve perfect whiteness don’t serve you to cast your dollar vote for them.

That also applies to businesses in their states. If you see products are made in Tennessee or Louisiana or Missouri, don’t buy them.

It is not enough to gird for the fights that are coming. It’s time to make the white Christian supremacists pay a price for their out-and-out evil.

Standard
Uncategorized

FITNESS FOR REAL

If Trumpers weren’t so homophobic. they would adopt Peter Allen’s “Everything Old Is New Again” as their theme song.

Because it seems their goal is to bring back a lot of crap from the past, under the pretense of making America great “again.”

There are some pretty serious bad things Trump’s trying to make a comeback. Criminalizing abortion. Wiping out Black representation. Tariffing the hell out of everything. Good old insider trading. 

What might not seem as egregious, but which caught my attention this week, is the decision to reinstitute the Presidential Fitness Test.

Few things rake the muck in my soul as much as “physical fitness.” That’s because I suffered lacked it as a child – I was a really big kid who was taller and heavier than everyone else. By a lot.

There were things I just couldn’t do. Because of that, the class I dreaded more than any other – even more than science – was phys ed, aka gym.

It was in gym that I couldn’t tumble. I couldn’t climb the ropes. I couldn’t lift myself on the parallel bars. I couldn’t outrun the kid in my class who was on the track team.

When we did the wrestling unit, they couldn’t match me with anyone else because I was so much bigger. So they matched me with a state champion who weighed more than 100 pounds less. He flipped me over because he was a goddamn wrestler and I had no interest.

The most dreaded part of gym was, you guessed it, the Presidential Fitness Test. When I was taking it, it consisted of four parts – running a mile, straddling lines to demonstrate agility, pushups and sit-ups.

I was moderately capable at sit-ups. And because I didn’t want to be the class loser who got a zero on the Presidential Fitness Test because I couldn’t do any of the other parts, I went all-in on the sit-ups.

So much so that 24 hours afterward, my father took me to the hospital emergency room because I was in such pain from overexerting myself on sit-ups. I still only got 4 out of the 10 possible points.

The Presidential Fitness Test and mandatory gym classes are why we fail kids when it comes to their physical well-being. They’re afterthoughts and meant to pat the heads of kids who can do well in them.

But children who need help with improving their health and fitness are reduced to humiliation and failure. They’re bullied into accepting that there’s a pecking order in the gym and your actual fitness is not something you should be helped with – it’s something you either have or you don’t.

That’s why the test was abandoned by experts who look at countries that don’t have such tests and wonder why their people are healthier. It could be that they discourage athletic competition until children grow into their bodies and have a chance to find the best way they can attain fitness.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I got the urge to be more physically active. I wasn’t ordered to or told to. I wasn’t compared to other men my age.

I just thought it might be fun to run a little. And then I did it almost everyday for years. I ran – OK, that’s being charitable, but I sure as hell finished two New York City Marathons and dozens of races from 3 miles to half-marathons.

Not through some badgering by a teacher who couldn’t wait to coach his football players. But because I loved it. I felt better and experienced the joy of sweating for fun.

I’m 72 now. I don’t run regularly any more because of arthritis in my knees, but I did try to jog a mile or so when my wife and I visited Kauai in March. I do, however, ride a stationary bike every single day – 481 days in a row, to be exact – and it has revived my feeling of wellbeing.

When I did it yesterday, the instructor on the class video that’s part of the bike experience said something that resonated with me.

Exercise isn’t punishment. Exercise isn’t something you do because you’ve failed at something. 

It’s something you do because you want to.

That’s why reviving the Presidential Fitness Test is yet another stupid Trump idea. If you do well on it, you’re supposed to. If you don’t, you’re officially unfit – and left to wallow in that unfitness, because no gym teacher is going to help you figure out how to do what’s best for you.

It’s about winners and losers. And this is one of those things for which there should be no losers. Not if the goal is a happy, healthy country – which, come to think of it, is something that is anathema to the Donald J. Trump administration..

Standard