BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Hi, we’re Bubba and Bubbette and we’re rootin’ tootin’ card carryin’ Republican rallyin’ MAGA KAG kinda folks and we’d like to take a few words to explain to you flamin’ Dem Libs why we like this Trump guy so much. First off, he tells it like it is. He doesn’t need fancy long words to get his point across. He makes us feel like he’s one of us. Always makes us feel like he’s talking straight to us hard working white folks. With Mr. Trump we never feel like there’s any shading of the truth. […]
OP-ED: The New Abnormal
EDITOR’S NOTE: Gonna be doing a weekly OpEd for Philly Mag until this shit show is over and I can go back to my day job. Whatever that is. Here’s the first one. PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE: At a press conference back in 1986, President Ronald Reagan famously declared “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help’” setting into motion the austere neoliberal in-free-markets-we-trust, get-a-job-you-bum zeitgeist that held sway for the next 34 years. That is until the COVID-19 pandemic finally breached the walls of fortress America and quickly metastasized into […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR: Apocalyptic novelist Max Brooks is something of an expert on planning for pandemics and other disasters. The author, whose books include World War Z, Germ Warfare and the forthcoming Devolution, has toured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and has reviewed government response plans related to various emergency situations — all in the course of research. “We have a network in place that we as taxpayers have been funding to get us ready for something just like this,” Brooks says of the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But, he adds, “we have been disastrously slow and […]
WARNING: Something Wicked This Way Comes
BLOOMBERG OPINION: The problems of how to accommodate rising aspirations for equality through inequality-generating economies were particularly acute for nation-states such as Germany, Italy and Japan, that were trying to catch up with economically advanced Western countries. Once the series of economic shocks that began in the late 19th century climaxed in the Great Depression, the elevation of the far-right to power, and intensified conflicts between states, was all but guaranteed. In our own conjuncture, all ingredients of the previous calamity are present, if ominously on an unparalleled scale. For decades now, de-industrialization, the outsourcing of jobs, and then automation, […]
CINEMA: The MAGA Hunters
THE HUNT (Directed by Craig Zobel, 89 minutes, USA, 2020) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC The Hunt is a guns-blazing riff on the classic humans-hunting-humans short story The Most Dangerous Game, with a very relevant Age of MAGA twist. The plot revolves around a Pizza Gate-style conspiracy called “Manor Gate” — an email chain conspiracy theory about a farm where a group of liberal elites hunt Trumpers after giving them a weapon and a head start into the woods. While the film is careful not to invoke Trump’s name in the film, it’s pretty clear who these right-wing folks voted […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: Supreme Injustice
FRESH AIR: A new book examines the conservative direction the Supreme Court has headed in over the past 50 years, ever since Nixon became president. The author, my guest Adam Cohen, writes, for five decades, the court has, with striking regularity, sided with the rich and powerful against the poor and weak in virtually every area of the law. He says, in campaign finance law, the court has opened the floodgates to money from wealthy individuals and corporations. In election law, it’s upheld rules and practices that make it more difficult for the poor and racial minorities to vote. In […]
How Bloomberg Ate Biden’s Lunch In Philadelphia
PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE: As you may have noticed if you’ve been near a TV recently and it was turned on and dialed in to pretty much any channel, ever since Mike Bloomberg formally announced his intentions back in November to throw his hat into the Dem presidential ring, he’s been aggressively prosecuting a coast to coast air campaign, carpet bombing swing states and inflection points all along the primary map with a vast arsenal of pithy, pointed anti-Trump television spots that run with the kind of ubiquity and perpetuity that you’d have to be a billionaire many times over to […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: “The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups and freelance operatives who are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage leaves behind could be irreparable.” That’s what my guest, McKay Coppins, writes in the new issue of the Atlantic in his article “The 2020 Disinformation War: Deepfakes, Anonymous Text Messages, Potemkin Local-News Sites, And Opposition Research On Reporters – A Field Guide […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR: The stories of the hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal to silence them about their affairs with Donald Trump were first reported in The Wall Street Journal by my guest, Joe Palazzolo and Michael Rothfeld. Last year, their “Hush Money” series won a Pulitzer Prize. Palazzolo and Rothfeld have expanded on that reporting in a new book called “The Fixers: The Bottom-Feeders, Crooked Lawyers, Gossipmongers And Porn Stars Who Created The 45th President.” The hush money payments were made on behalf of Donald Trump with Trump’s knowledge during the 2016 […]
UPDATE: we’re up to 4.2 MILLION unique visitors since this was made.
How The CIA Overthrew The Duly Elected Prime Minister Of Iran in 1953, AKA Why They Hate Us
NPR: On Aug. 19, 2013, the CIA publicly admitted for the first time its involvement in the 1953 coup against Iran’s elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The documents provided details of the CIA’s plan at the time, which was led by senior officer Kermit Roosevelt Jr., the grandson of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Over the course of four days in August 1953, Roosevelt would orchestrate not one, but two attempts to destabilize the government of Iran, forever changing the relationship between the country and the U.S. In this episode, we go back to retrace what happened in the inaugural episode […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Impeachment Of Trump Is Too Important To Be Left Up To The Senate
Artwork by HOPE GANGLOFF PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER: But the greater takeaway on the eve of the president’s impeachment has been just how far the rule of law has broken down in America. McConnell’s abandonment of the foundational notion of the Senate as a check on monarchical power has put a hard stamp on this betrayal, as we watch 243 years of democratic tradition plunge over the guardrails. Congressional Democrats, who’ve done a mostly skillful job in managing the impeachment process so far, insist there is still leverage to establish rules for a fair trial in which the evidence against Trump can […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Impeach The Motherf*cker
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Just when you thought the Feces in Chief and his Make America Gag Again minions couldn’t get any more mephitic: 1. The four-time draft dodging oval office outhouser has declared that henceforth he will play hind-endmost judge, jury and get-out-of-jail-free(er) in all things “war crimes related” … that have ALREADY been adjudicated by the armed services’ highest courts. Huh? Okay, I think I get it: it’s an inbred inclination of his to want to protect, preserve and defend all acts of deceit, immorality and/or cowardice. 2. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal Ukraine quid pro quo purveying […]