Monday, November 25, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.
Listen to history. We have been through worse times.
We can fight back. We must fight back.
We are not powerless to stop MAGA. We have stopped evil before.
The run-up to the 2026 Election begins in 6-8 months during the summer of 2025.
Ali Velshi had the Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on his show today.
She spoke movingly about how we as a nation have overcome dark moments in our history before, for example over slavery which we stopped, Hitler and his Fascist reign which we ended. All may be bleak now, but history shows us we can win.
Velshi has not yet posted the Kearns-Goodwin interview, but I found his own earlier post on the same subject an inspiring reminder just as well.
America’s history shows us how defeat paves the way for triumph.
While it is a loss that your side did not win, it’s also simply a sign that your work is not yet done.
Nov. 11, 2024, 4:52 PM EST By Ali Velshi and Dina Moss
This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 9 episode of “Velshi.”
Politics is easier for most of us when the democratic ideals we cherish triumph — or at least persist. However, to be politically engaged is to not only risk losing in an election, but also to be prepared, and willing, to lose. It’s to put it all on the line knowing the outcome, at least the immediate one, might not be the outcome for which you worked so hard.
I know this lesson well. I learned it when I was 11 years old, working on my father’s first campaign in Canada in 1981. On election night, we expected the results to take some time, so we were in the car when the polls closed. When we turned on the radio, I heard the hosts say what I would learn to say years later when covering elections: It was too early to tell who would form the government. However, based on history, demographics and exit polling — things I was too young to understand at the time — they were able to project the results in one constituency: the one my dad was contesting.
But my father’s loss cut deep. Last week, I felt the depth of that cut.
Within the first minute of the broadcast, they announced he had lost. I was devastated. I looked at my dad and said, “I can’t believe we lost.” He turned his attention away from the road for just a moment to look at me and with a smile he said, “Of course, we lost. We were never going to win.” I asked, “Then why did we do this?”
“Because we could,” he told me. “We ran because we could. And more people voted for the other guy than voted for me. It’s OK. Life goes on.”
My father appreciated something I didn’t. He grew up in apartheid South Africa, where he couldn’t vote because of the color of his skin, let alone run for office. He ran because that’s what civic engagement looked like to him.
But my father’s loss cut deep. Last week, I felt the depth of that cut. This year’s election felt different from eight years ago when Donald Trump was first elected. That felt like an accident. This didn’t. There was so much on the line: Pregnant women are dying, the Earth is burning, wars are being waged and democracy is on the brink.
I’m fairly certain this country will see some dark days ahead, but you know what I don’t know? I don’t know where we are in this effort to forge a stronger democracy, a more perfect union.
Just as rebel colonists didn’t know on April 19, 1775, when gunfire erupted in Concord, Massachusetts. Or on Sept. 3, 1783, when the Revolutionary War ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris.
America had declared its independence from Britain seven years earlier, a date we think of as the start of the nation, and yet on July 4, 1776, this new nation was not even a quarter of the way through that war.
America didn’t know on April 11, 1861, before the first shot was fired on Fort Sumter, how long that fight would take or whether it would be much of a fight at all. Or on April 9, 1865, after an estimated 750,000 Americans died and Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. Back then, we still didn’t know what the future would hold.
History is steeped in examples of people who fought through the darkness, in the glow of candlelight. People who knew — like my father taught me that night in 1981 — that defeat paves the way for triumph.
In fact, many who have fought for human rights, freedom, liberty and democracy did not themselves live long enough to enjoy the fruits of their labor. But the seeds were planted and flourished after they were gone. They understood the fight was bigger than them. They understood it was important to nurture the seeds of democracy into a tree under whose canopy later generations could seek shelter and of whose fruit later generations would partake.
We fight not simply for ourselves, but also for the future of democracy.
Susan B. Anthony dedicated her life to social justice. For 45 years, she fought for women’s suffrage with little obvious success. In 1869, just after the end of the Civil War, the 15th Amendment to the Constitution eliminated voting discrimination based on race but not gender. (At least on paper.)
The overt exclusion of women was a huge blow to Susan B. Anthony and women across America. But they kept going. The 19th Amendment was first proposed eight years later, in 1878, yet it would take another 42 years for white women to vote freely.
During the Civil Rights Movement, countless individuals fought for years against segregation: Rosa Parks, Ruby Bridges, Thurgood Marshall, the Little Rock Nine, the Freedom Riders, John Lewis and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., to name a few.
Black Americans endured decades of discrimination, ridicule and violence. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 99 years after the end of the Civil War, that segregation was officially outlawed in public places and Jim Crow laws were banned.
Conflict often produces change, but change is slow. Sometimes, it may not even look like change at all, or in the case of last week’s election, it might look like a setback. But today’s setbacks are tomorrow’s comebacks — and the comeback is our work now.
As my father taught me all those years ago, the fact that your side did not win is not a loss; it’s simply a sign that your work is not yet done. In 1775, 1776, 1783, 1861, 1865 and 1964, our work was not done. It may never be done, because democracy is dynamic. We will confront issues in the future we didn’t know would be issues — but we will continue to fight.
I know that one of the toughest things to reconcile is the fact that half of America made a choice you inherently disagree with. Maybe you found out that your neighbor, a friend, maybe even your mom or your brother, voted for the guy who wants to take your freedoms away.
We fight not simply for ourselves, but also for the future of democracy.
That is a tough reality to come to terms with. As James Baldwin once said, “We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”
Votes were cast by people who would oppress and deny the humanity of some of us — but that fact is not true of all of the more than 74 million people who voted for Trump. There are people out there who fell for his lies but, I believe, don’t wish to see pregnant women bleed out in parking lots, or the planet burn up, or migrants deported.
And those are our fellow citizens with whom we must engage.
There is neither time nor space for cynicism about politics today. The right to engage in politics is a privilege; one with which my parents did not grow up. It is a privilege we cannot give up and one of which we cannot tire.
This is going to be a challenge. The end of the tunnel is there but, right now, it’s too far away to see the light. So, we will use flashlights until we get closer to the other side, and we will hold them for each other.
But what you have, what we have, is agency. America chose a republic over a monarchy 248 years ago, and we still have that republic, but, as Benjamin Franklin’s admonition comes back to remind us time and again, we only have a republic if we can “keep it.”
And now that is our work. (MSNBC).
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I Starred in ‘Cabaret.’ We Need to Heed Its Warning! by Broadway Star, Joel Grey.
This past week marked 58 years since the opening night for the Broadway premiere of “Cabaret” in 1966. At the time, the country was in deep turmoil. Overseas, the Vietnam War was escalating, and at home, our most regressive forces were counterpunching against the progress demanded by the civil rights movement. The composer John Kander, the lyricist Fred Ebb and the playwright Joe Masteroff wrote “Cabaret” in collaboration with the director Harold Prince as a response to the era. The parallels between the rise of fascism in 1930s Berlin as depicted in the show and the mounting tensions of the 1960s in America were both obvious and ominous.
I played the Emcee — the Kit Kat Club’s master of distraction, keeping Berlin mesmerized while Nazism slipped in through the back door. Night after night, I witnessed audiences grappling with the raw, unsettling reflection that “Cabaret” held up to them. Some material was simply too much for the audience to handle. “If You Could See Her,” which has the Emcee singing of his love for a gorilla — a thinly veiled commentary on antisemitic attitudes — ended with the lyric: “If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”
When we first performed it, in Boston, audiences gasped and recoiled. It was too offensive, too raw, too cruel. Producers fretted and the line was changed to “She isn’t a meeskite at all,” softening the blow, yes, but also the impact. I resented the change and would often, to the chagrin of stage management, “forget” to make the swap throughout that pre-Broadway run.
I’m hearing from friends in the current Broadway production of “Cabaret” that the line is once again getting an audible response, but of a different sort. On more than one occasion in the past two weeks — since the election — a small number of audience members have squealed with laughter at “She wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” In the late 1960s, we softened the line because the truth was too hard to hear. Today, it seems the line is playing exactly as the Nazi-sympathizing Emcee would have intended.
My initial assessment, when word first reached me about this unusual reaction, was that these must be the triumphant laughs of the complicit, suddenly drunk on power and unafraid to let their bigotry be known. Now I find myself considering other hypotheses. Are these the hollow, uneasy laughs of an audience that has retreated into the comfort of irony and detachment? Are these vocalized signals of acceptance? Audible white flags of surrender to the state of things? A collective shrug of indifference?
I honestly don’t know which of these versions I find most ominous, but all of them should serve as a glaring reminder of how dangerously easy it is to accept bigotry when we are emotionally exhausted and politically overwhelmed.
The 1960s were a time of social upheaval, but also a time of hope. There was a sense that as a society, we were striving toward progress — that the fight for civil rights, for peace, for equality was a fight we could win. “Cabaret,” with its portrayal of a decadent society willfully ignorant of its own demise, provided a stark counterpoint to that hope. It was a warning against the seductive power of distraction, the dangers of apathy and the perils of looking away when history demands that we look closer.
Now, in 2024, we find ourselves in a different, far more precarious moment. The recent election of Donald Trump to a second term has left many Americans, particularly those who fought so hard against the forces of authoritarianism and hate, feeling drained and disillusioned. There’s a sense that we have seen this show before, that we know how it ends, and that we’re powerless to stop it. Or worse, a sense that even though we are facing dark times they won’t really affect our own day-to-day lives — echoing the tragically shortsighted assessment of so many European Jews in the 1920s and ’30s.
“Cabaret,” with all its humor, spectacle and tunefulness, has always been both the peanut butter and the pill hidden within. It’s an entertainment that seduces us into distraction. “Leave your troubles outside,” the Emcee implores in his opening number. “In here, life is beautiful.” It’s also a cautionary tale that forces us to confront the perils of falling prey to such distractions.
The current revival cleverly ramps up the seduction, staging the show in a fully immersive, champagne-soaked party environment constructed to beguile its audience. Only when the Nazis finally show up do we see how false our velvet-enrobed sense of security has been. We too have chosen not to see what has been directly in front of us.
The democratic election of an authoritarian figure, the normalization of bigotry, the complicity of the frightened masses — none of these are new themes. We have indeed seen this show before, and I fear we do know how it ends. It’s understandable to want to retreat, to find solace where we can, but we cannot afford to look away.
History is giving us another chance to confront the forces that “Cabaret” warned us about. The question is: Will we listen this time, or will we keep laughing until the music stops? (Op-ed, New York Times)
Your Daily Reminder
Trump is a convicted felon.
On May 30th, he was found guilty on 34 felony counts by the unanimous vote of 12 ordinary citizens.
The Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11th and September 18th. He will now be sentenced on November 26.
In a decision issued November 12th, Judge Merchan granted the stay until Nov. 19. He gave the prosecution until then to file an outline of appropriate next steps.
Last Tuesday was that day!
Manhattan prosecutors on Tuesday rebuffed President-elect Donald J. Trump’s request to dismiss his criminal conviction in the wake of his electoral victory, signaling instead their willingness to freeze the case while he holds office.
In a letter to the judge overseeing the case, prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office emphasized that a jury had already convicted Mr. Trump of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal. Prosecutors and judges are often loath to unravel a jury’s verdict.
But acknowledging the unprecedented nature of the case — Mr. Trump would be the first felon to serve as president — the prosecutors raised the prospect of a four-year freeze so that he will not be sentenced for his crimes until he is out of office.
The judge, Juan M. Merchan, will decide in the coming weeks whether to freeze the case or dismiss it outright, a momentous ruling that will shape the outcome of the only one of Mr. Trump’s four criminal cases that made it to trial.
For now this happened.
Whatever happens in the future, Trump is forever a Convicted Felon.
Donald Trump's New York hush money sentencing in doubt as Nov. 26 date canceled.
President-elect Donald Trump's scheduled sentencing in his New York hush money case was canceled Friday, in the wake of his November victory at the polls. Trump had been set to be sentenced this coming Tuesday, Nov. 26.
Merchan made the decision in a one-page order that directed Trump to file a formal motion to have the case dismissed by Dec. 2, and to have Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg respond by Dec. 9. Trump has indicated he plans to ask for the case to be tossed in order to facilitate the transfer of presidential power after his election victory.
Merchan still needs to rule on Trump's latest efforts to get the case tossed out and, if he rules against the former president, make a decision about future sentencing. Trump or Bragg's office could appeal those decisions.
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump, described the Friday order as a "decisive win" in a statement.
"All of the sham lawfare attacks against President Trump are now destroyed and we are focused on Making America Great Again," he said.
Bragg's office declined to comment.
Trump was convicted on May 30 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Daniels has alleged she and Trump had a sexual encounter back in 2006. Trump has denied her claim.
Whether and when Trump will be sentenced is an open question as Trump tries to get the case tossed out not only based on his election victory, but also based on the Supreme Court's July 1 presidential immunity ruling. Trump is arguing that some of the evidence that came into his trial ran afoul of that ruling.
The sentencing delay adds to the wins for Trump this month in his criminal cases. The Justice Department has been weighing how to wind down Trump's two federal criminal cases in the wake of the election. Department policy states that a sitting president can't be criminally prosecuted.(USA Today).