August 16, 2023

Wednesday, August 16, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Joe is always busy.

President Biden says 'every asset we have will be available' to those impacted by Maui fires (2 minutes 18 sec.)

The President and First Lady will also go to Hawaii.

Our “Dark Brandon” President struck back on confirmation obstructionist Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, who is being challenged about what his home state really is.

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Random information and reactions on the Georgia Cases.

Those indicted in Georgia:

Donald Trump

Rudy Giuliani, Trump lawyer

Mark Meadows, White House chief of staff

John Eastman, Trump lawyer

Kenneth Chesebro, pro-Trump lawyer

Jeffrey Clark, top Justice Department official

Jenna Ellis, Trump campaign lawyer

Robert Cheeley, lawyer who promoted fraud claims

Mike Roman, Trump campaign official

David Shafer, Georgia GOP chair and fake elector

Shawn Still, fake GOP elector

Stephen Lee, pastor tied to intimidation of election workers

Harrison Floyd, leader of Black Voices for Trump

Trevian Kutti, publicist tied to intimidation of election workers

Sidney Powell, Trump campaign lawyer

Cathy Latham, fake GOP elector tied to Coffee County breach

Scott Hall, tied to Coffee County election system breach

Misty Hampton, Coffee County elections supervisor

Ray Smith, Trump’s local attorney of record

One more thing.

Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee will oversee a sprawling new criminal case charging former President Donald Trump and his allies with violating the Georgia RICO law for their efforts to upend the election results in the state—putting a relatively new jurist in Trump’s line of fire as the former president has repeatedly disparaged judges and prosecutors handling cases against him.

KEY FACTS

Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp appointed McAfee to the Superior Court bench in December to fill a vacancy.

Prior to his appointment, McAfee spent almost two years in the state inspector general’s office, which is responsible for preventing fraud, waste, abuse and corruption in state government.

In June, McAfee sanctioned a former attorney who helped launch legal challenges to Trump’s 2020 losses, Lin Wood, for violating an order that sought to prevent him from attacking his former law partners—in a case unrelated to Wood’s ties to Trump.

McAfee previously worked as a federal prosecutor in the Northern District of Georgia, where he worked on major drug trafficking cases, fraud and illegal firearms investigations, according to a press release announcing his appointment in 2021 to the Office of Inspector General.

McAfee—a native of Kennesaw, Georgia, and a graduate of Emory University and University of Georgia law school—also worked in the Fulton County District Attorney’s office, which is handling Trump’s prosecution, serving as a senior assistant district attorney from 2018 to 2021, according to his LinkedIn profile.

McAfee, like all judges in Georgia assigned to specific cases, was randomly selected to oversee Trump’s case, according to multipleoutlets. (Forbes)

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Yesterday, I posted that the kids won on Climate Change in Montana.

Today, this op-Ed by Diana Nyad makes clear we need many more victories.

What It’s Like to Swim in an Ocean That’s 100 Degrees, by Diana Nyad.

Ms. Nyad grew up in Florida, swimming year-round. In 2013, at age 64, she became the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage.

For a moment, as I followed the stories of this summer’s devastating global heat wave, I found it hard to accept that our climate crisis has already become this catastrophic. The tragedies in Greece. The unrelenting, monthlong, historic high temperatures through wide corridors of the United States. The emerging forecasts that none of this is likely to be an aberration.

Then, a few weeks ago, the ocean temperature off Miami hit 95 degrees. A visceral alarm gripped my entire being. I kept repeating the number in stunned disbelief. It couldn’t possibly hold, I told myself — and it didn’t. By the end of the month, at least one reading had soared past 100 degrees.

Through all recorded time on planet Earth, humans have stood at the ocean’s edge, gazing out at the horizon, in awe of the blue jewel we call home. Even from their vantage point a quarter million miles away, astronauts have expressed sheer wonder at the sight of our special pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan so eloquently put it.

Yet in recent weeks that blue dot has been suffering through a climate calamity most of us simply weren’t prepared for. Yes, we’ve read about the accumulation of greenhouse gases that are warming our atmosphere. But I dare say, for many of us, the radical heating of our oceans is a frightening new juncture in human history that has gone largely unnoticed.

Millions of people dating back to ancient days have waded and bobbed and frolicked close to shore for exercise, peace and pleasure, and to connect with perhaps the grandest of all of Mother Nature’s majestic features. But to step into the water off Miami late last month was akin to stepping into a hot Jacuzzi, the antithesis of refreshing and inspiring. Years from now, we may well remember the summer of 2023 as the beginning of an era when many of our oceans stopped serving as a glorious place of recreation.

My childhood was spent in the very waters off the Florida coast that recently registered temperatures in the triple digits. Growing up in Fort Lauderdale, the memories that loom largest are oceanic — spending all day splashing in the surf, laughing with my brother and sister, dunking one another, riding waves and playing endless underwater games, racing out to this or that buoy, flopping into bed at night exhausted and exhilarated by the magic caress of our irreplaceable backyard playground.

At age 9, after the Cuban Revolution, I searched the horizon to catch a glimpse of Cuba, this suddenly forbidden island. My mother pointed out across the ocean and said to me: “There. Havana is just across there. It’s so close that you, you little swimmer, you could actually swim there.” Later, after five attempts over 35 years, I finally did make that crossing. But I couldn’t have made that swim last month. In such hot water, the body heat I’d generate from the duress of the effort — a continuous 52 hours and 54 minutes — would quickly lead to overheating and failure. And danger. Hyperthermia would conquer even the strongest of wills.

Of course, that would only be one small consequence of swimming in these heated waters.

Years ago, the Chambers of Commerce along Florida’s shores were surely consumed with worries about the increase in jellyfish swarms that have come with warmer waters. Now they’re no doubt huddled in meetings, contemplating the disaster that will ensue if these uncomfortable water temperatures drive tourists away for good.

And Florida is far from the only place where water temperatures are rising. Across the lower latitudes near the Equator, this marine heat wave has been massive. From southern Mexico through the Caribbean and to the western Indian Ocean, 40 percent of the world’s oceans have already fallen victim to the blunt force trauma of climate change. As of late June, it was warm enough to meet the criteria for a marine heat wave.

But somehow it’s escaped our notice — overshadowed by the dire warnings of geophysicists who have described much of New York City going underwater and the scientists who chronicled the precipitous loss of habitat for animals that prowl the Arctic, as global warming shrinks the ice sheets they once used to hunt and fish. Every summer, it seems, we hear more about wildfires and the horrific toll they take: the loss of lives and homes. As fires ravaged the Australian bush, we witnessed in collective terror thousands of helpless animals running for their lives through burning forests.

It might be harder for us to relate to marine life, but the coral reefs, vital to the existence of many shallow water fishes, have been bleaching and dying practically overnight. Picture the dead fish floating on the ocean surface, the dead lobsters on the ocean floor: This is what the shores of Florida look like now. These creatures are fighting for their lives, much like the deer in the forests.

I’ve swum in every ocean except the Arctic, and I’ve often been asked to name my favorite one. But today I am not waxing poetic about their breathtaking beauty. I am grief-stricken at what we human beings have carelessly and greedily done to our home, our magnificent planet. Today I look across the vast expanse of any ocean and, beyond the majesty and mystery, I worry about ocean warming that will horrify us, that will diminish or even destroy our daily relationships with our blue jewel. (New York Times).

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What is happening in the Women’s World Cup?

Yes, it is still happening even if we Americans aren’t engaged.

Television global world ratings have broken record after record.

Yesterday, there was an upset, as Spain beat favored Sweden 2-1.

Today, England will play Australia in a highly anticipated semifinal match with the British Lionesses favored against host Matildas. This is the first time the Australian women have played in a semifinal game.

Stadium Australia in Sydney will be filled with more than 75,000 fans.

England vs. Australia

Kickoff time: 6 a.m. ET/11 a.m. BST Wednesday. Fox Sports.

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Depressing but wise analyses about the Right in America.

These 2 articles 👇 focus on the worst we have and are.

Together with Hillary’s article in The Atlantic, The Weaponization of Loneliness, they make clear some of the political challenges we face, that led to and were amplified by Trump.

The Lost Boys of the American Right by David French.

It keeps happening. Since the ascendance of Donald Trump, with depressing regularity, right-wing men have been outed for using the most vile rhetoric. In private chats and sometimes in full view of the public on social media, they’ll engage in blatantly racist, sexist and homophobic speech, flirt with fascist imagery and then often disavow their words and actions the instant they’re caught.

The examples are legion, and they’re not coming from fringe outlets on the American right. For example, last month, the Ron DeSantis campaign parted ways with a young speechwriter named Nate Hochman who reportedly inserted a Nazi sonnenrad symbol into a pro-DeSantis video online. Hochman was previously under fire for telling Nick Fuentes, a notorious white supremacist, that Fuentes was “probably a better influence” than the conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro “on young men who might otherwise be conservative.”

In comments about the conversation, Hochman responded, “I said some really stupid things, which I don’t actually believe, that signaled agreement with Fuentes, even though I couldn’t disagree more with his vision of the world.” Roughly a year after that incident, according to Axios, he created the sonnenrad video.

Was Hochman fringe? Hardly. Before he joined the DeSantis campaign, he worked as a staff writer at National Review and interned at The Dispatch, where I worked as a senior editor before joining The New York Times. He even once wrote for The Times.

Hochman is not alone. In June the right-wing publication Breitbart published group chats and private messages from Pedro Gonzalez, a popular online influencer and DeSantis supporter, which included comments like “Whites are the only hope nonwhites have of living civilized lives” and “The only tactical consideration of Jews is screening them for movements,” along with a host of other comments not suitable for a family publication.

This month HuffPost reported that Richard Hanania, an influential anti-woke writer, published a series of pseudonymous posts at racist publications in the late 2000s and early 2010s. In a Substack post he rejected his old comments, but close observers of his contemporary work were hardly surprised by the revelations. Just this past May, for example, he postedin a thread on crime that America needs “more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of Black people.”

The September issue of The Atlantic contains Graeme Wood’s fascinating and disturbing profile of a man named Costin Alamariu, better known online as Bronze Age Pervert, who has a cult following among the young right. Alamariu argues, writes Wood, “that the natural and desirable condition of life is the domination of the weak and ugly by the strong and noble. He considers American cities a ‘wasteland’ run by Jews and Black people, though the words he uses to denote these groups are considerably less genteel than these.” (Alamariu has claimed to be Jewish, and Hochman was raised Jewish as well.)

Terrible stuff. And even more terrible is the realization that I could fill this entire column with other examples of right-wing bigotry, from Christian nationalists, a former Trump speechwriter, a former Daily Caller editor and one of Tucker Carlson’s former top writers. And this is hardly a complete list. The problem is so widespread that Aaron Sibarium, a rising star reporter for The Washington Free Beacon, recently posted, “Whenever I’m on a career advice panel for young conservatives, I tell them to avoid group chats that use the N-word or otherwise blur the line between edgelording and earnest bigotry.”

What is going on? Why are parts of the right — especially the young right — so infested with outright racists and bigots?

Some readers might respond to my question with a question: Why am I surprised? The right has always been infested with racists and bigots, you might argue. Yet while I freely acknowledge that there was more racism on the right than I was willing or able to see before the rise of Trump, there has been a distinct change in young right-wing culture. It is dramatically different from what it was when I was in college, in law school and starting my legal career.

As I survey the right — especially the young, so-called new right — I see a movement in the grip of some rather simple but powerful cultural forces. Hatred, combined with masculine insecurity and cowardice, is herding young right-wing men into outright bigotry and prejudice. Contrary to their self-conception, they’re not strong or tough or courageous. They’re timid sheep in wolves’ clothing, moving exactly where the loudest and most aggressive voices tell them to.

To understand the cultural dynamic, I want to introduce you to an obscure online concept, no enemies to the right. A tiny fringe adopts this mind-set as a conscious ethos, but for a much larger group, it is simply their cultural reality. In their minds, the left is so evil — and represents such an existential threat — that any accommodation of it (or any criticism of the right) undermines the forces of light in their great battle against the forces of darkness. Attack the left in the most searing terms, and you’ll enjoy the thunderous applause of your peers. Criticize the new right, and you can experience a vicious backlash. The result is a relentless pull to the extremes.

In fact, one of their prime reproofs of what they might call the zombie right, the Reagan right of their parents’ generation, is that it was simply too accommodating. As they see it, classical liberal politics, which preserve free speech and robust debate as a priority, emboldened and empowered the left. Compromise, in their view, ran only one way, and conservatism conserved nothing. The left, in their mind, is winning the culture war in a rout.

And here’s where masculine insecurity enters the equation. To the new right, their opposition to the left is so obviously correct that only moral cowardice or financial opportunism (“grifting”) can explain any compromise. To fight on the right — mainly by trolling on social media or embracing authoritarianism as the based alternative to weak-kneed classical liberalism — is seen as strong, courageous and cool. It’s a sign of a fierce and independent mind.

Thus, the troll isn’t just a troll; he’s a man. He’s a warrior.

But what happens if you disagree? What happens if you ask: Wait, are we going too far? Well, then, you’re weak and small. You become the grifter. You don’t know what time it is. All of the social sanctions you inflicted on others come crashing down on you. And if the new right is good at anything, it’s good at bullying its critics. It’s a core aspect of the entire movement.

Worse still, even when one initially embraces bigotry “only” as a form of social transgression, marinating in that environment soon turns trolling into conviction. In contrite comments to The Washington Free Beacon in response to additional revelations from his private messages, Gonzalez said, “What starts off as joking can very quickly become unironically internalized as an actual belief.”

How true, especially when dissent is constantly characterized as weakness or cowardice. So in the name of strength, these young men capitulate until their minds and hearts are warped beyond recognition.

It’s difficult to break the hold of bigotry and fury on the online right, but as is so often the case, the solution to online evil can be found in offline relationships, the family and friends who keep us grounded to the real. Indeed, in his mea culpa, Gonzalez credits “fatherhood and learning to live for my kids” with pulling him back from his darkest thoughts. Time will tell whether he has truly changed or if he’s experiencing the fake sorrow of the freshly shamed, but it remains true that encountering people in full, rather than as mere online avatars for hated ideas, can indeed soften hearts and change minds.

In the meantime, these angry online sheep can still bite. They’re using their platforms to whip countless Americans into their own frenzy of fear. We should expect more bigotry and more revelations. Dark words spoken in secret will spill out into the public square. The lost boys of the American right corrupt our culture. Full of fury against their opponents and afraid of running afoul of their “friends,” they poison our politics and damage their own souls. (The New York Times).

Why an Unremarkable Racist Enjoyed the Backing of Billionaires by Jamelle Bouie.

In 1923, Princeton University Press published “A Study of American Intelligence” by Carl Campbell Brigham, a eugenicist and professor of psychology at the university.

Brigham, like many men of his class and station at the time, believed in race hierarchy — of a natural order of humanity, with some groups at the top and others at the bottom. He was part of a national effort, among elites and ordinary citizens alike, to improve the “racial fitness” of the American people by restricting immigration and removing the undesirable through sterilization.

As one like-minded eugenicist, Robert M. Yerkes, wrote in his foreword to Brigham’s book, “The author presents not theories or opinions but facts. It behooves us to consider their reliability and their meaning, for no one of us as a citizen can afford to ignore the menace of race deterioration or the evident relations of immigration to national progress and welfare.”

As a scientist, Brigham would bring the laws of heredity and the study of intelligence to bear on the question of race hierarchy. He would purport to show, with scientific precision, the inherent superiority of so-called Nordic Americans above all others.

“His four major groups consisted of native-born whites, total whites, foreign-born whites and Negroes,” explains the historian Nell Irvin Painter in “The History of White People.” “Within these groups, Brigham differentiated between the above-average foreigners and the below-average foreigners. Turks and Greeks just barely improved on the foreign-born average, while men from Russia, Italy and Poland ranked at the bottom with the ‘Negro draft.’ Northwestern Europeans topped the chart.”

It was the traditional Anglo-American race hierarchy, illustrated with the charts, graphs and calculations that elevated the claim from everyday, casual prejudice to an objective account of society. And it served its intended purpose: to naturalize inequality of status and resources in an era defined by its yawning gaps between haves and have-nots.

It should come as no surprise to learn, as Adam Cohen notes in “Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck,” that “John D. Rockefeller Jr., the world’s wealthiest man, funded scientific research into how what he called the ‘defective human’ could be bred out of the population.” Or that, as Edwin Black explains in “War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race,” eugenicists drew from “almost unlimited corporate philanthropy to establish the biological rationales for persecution” of the so-called unfit.

I mention all of this as context for Richard Hanania, a rising star among conservative writers and intellectuals. For years before appearing in the pages of newspapers and publications like this one, Hanania wrote articles for white supremacist publications under a pseudonym. According to a recent investigation by Christopher Mathias of HuffPost, Hanania:

expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.

Hanania no longer writes for those publications. And though he may claim otherwise, it doesn’t appear that his views have changed much. He still makes explicitly racist statements and arguments, now under his own name. “I don’t have much hope that we’ll solve crime in any meaningful way,” he wrote on the platform formerly known as Twitter this year. “It would require a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it.” Responding to the killing of a homeless Black man on the New York City subway, Hanania wrote, “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits.”

Hanania sees his claims as uncomfortable truths. “The reason I’m the target of a cancellation effort is because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races,” he recently wrote. But his supposedly transgressive views are little more than the warmed-over dogmas of the long-dead ideologues who believed in the scientific truth of race hierarchy. Of course, those men, their peers and their followers lost their appetite for that talk in the wake of the Holocaust, when the world got a firsthand look at the catastrophic consequences of state-sponsored racism, eugenicism and antisemitism.

But more interesting than either Hanania — whose recent notoriety has not lifted him too far from his previous obscurity — or his rancid views are his backers. According to Jonathan Katz, a freelance journalist, Hanania’s organization, the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, has received at least $700,000 in support through anonymous donations. He is also a visiting scholar at the Salem Center at the University of Texas at Austin — funded by Harlan Crow.

A whole coterie of Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires have lent their time and attention to Hanania, as well as elevated his work. Marc Andreessen, a powerful venture capitalist, appeared on his podcast. David Sacks, a close associate of Elon Musk, wrote a glowing endorsement of Hanania’s forthcoming book. So did Peter Thiel, the billionaire supporter of right-wing causes and organizations. “D.E.I. will never d-i-e from words alone,” wrote Thiel. “Hanania shows we need the sticks and stones of government violence to exorcise the diversity demon.” Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican presidential candidate, also praised the book as a “devastating kill shot to the intellectual foundations of identity politics in America.”

The question to ask here — the question that matters — is: Why does an otherwise obscure racist have the ear and support of some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley? What purpose, to a billionaire venture capitalist, do Hanania’s ideas serve?

Look back to our history, and the answer is straightforward. Just as in the 1920s (and before), the idea of race hierarchy works to naturalize the broad spectrum of inequalities and capitalist inequality in particular.

If some groups are simply meant to be at the bottom, then there are no questions to ask about their deprivation, isolation and poverty. There are no questions to ask about the society which produces that deprivation, isolation and poverty. And there is nothing to be done, because nothing can be done: Those people are just the way they are.

If some groups — and really, if some individuals — are simply meant to be at the top, then there are no questions to ask about their wealth, status and power. And as my friend John Ganz notes in his newsletter, the idea of race hierarchy “creates the illusion of cross-class solidarity between these masters of infinite wealth and their propagandist and supporter class: ‘We are of the same special breed, you and I.’” Relations of domination between groups are reproduced as relations of domination between individuals.

This, in fact, has been the traditional role of supremacist ideologies in the United States — to occlude class relations and convert anxiety over survival into the jealous protection of status. The purveyors of supremacist ideologies have worked in concrete ways to bind the two things, survival and status, together; to create the illusion that the security, even prosperity, of one group rests on the exclusion of another. (The history of segregated housing in this country is testament enough to the success of that ideological project.) With enough time to grow and take root, these ideologies branch out with a life and logic of their own, reproduced by people who believe they have something new, novel and forbidden.

Why are billionaires backing an unremarkable racist as he tries to find a place in polite society? Because his interest in a hierarchical society built on racism serves their interest in a hierarchical society built on class — and ruled by capital.

It’s the same, then, as it ever was. (The New York Times).

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A musical theatre giant has died.

Tom Jones Dead: 'The Fantasticks' Lyricist and Librettist Was 95 - Variety.

Tom Jones. 2011. Walter McBride/Corbis, via Getty Images.

Tom Jones, who wrote the book and lyrics for the longest-running musical “The Fantasticks,” died Friday at his home in Sharon, Conn. He was 95.

Jones’ son Michael told The New York Times the cause was cancer.

Jones and the late composer Harvey Schmidt created the musical allegory “The Fantasticks,” which opened in 1960 in Greenwich Village and ran off-Broadway for a staggering 42 years. The musical is known for its opening song, “Try to Remember,” as well as “Soon It’s Gonna Rain,” made popular apart from the show by Barbra Streisand.

Jones was born in Littlefield, Texas, on Feb. 17, 1928. He attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he first met his longtime collaborator Schmidt.

After serving in the Korean War, Jones moved to New York and began his theater career by writing for the revues being staged by the impresario Julius Monk. He also worked with composer John Donald Robb, with whom he developed “Joy Comes to Deadhorse,” a musical western loosely based on Edmond Rostand’s 1894 play “Les Romanesques.” The two had a falling out over creative differences, so Jones turned to Schmidt to continue working on the piece, which eventually evolved into “The Fantasticks.”

In 1959, Jones and Schmidt presented a one-act, pared-down version of their show as “The Fantasticks” at a summer festival at Barnard College. Producer Lore Noto saw the production at Barnard and brought the musical, expanded to two acts, to the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, where it opened on May 3, 1960. The original cast included Jones as Henry, the Old Actor, and Jerry Orbach as El Gallo, the narrator, who performs “Try to Remember.”

Although “The Fantasticks” received mixed reviews, the musical ran at Sullivan Street for more than 17,000 performances until 2002, making it the longest-running musical in U.S. history.

In addition to “The Fantasticks,” Jones and Schmidt worked together on “I Do! I Do!” and “110 in the Shade,” which opened on Broadway in 1963 and ran for 330 performances. Jones earned Tony nominations for “I Do! I Do!” and “110 in the Shade,” and won the Drama Desk Vernon Rice Award for “The Fantasticks” in 1961.

Their most famous show found a reach far beyond off-Broadway when a “Hallmark Hall of Fame” presentation took “The Fantasticks” to a national TV audience in 1964, with stars including Ricardo Montalban, John Davidson, Bert Lahr and Stanley Holliday.

A film version of “The Fantasticks” was shot in 1995 by director Michael Ritchie with New Kids on the Block’s Joey McIntyre and Jean Louisa Kelly as the young romantic leads, Joel Grey and Brad Sullivan as the fathers, and Teller (of Penn & Teller), Jonathon Morris and Barnard Hughes filling out the cast. The late ’90s represented a low ebb for live-action movie musicals, though, and after test screenings, the film was shelved for five years. In 2000, Frances Ford Coppola did his own edit of the movie, with Ritchie’s approval, and it received a small theatrical release. Both the Ritchie and Coppola cuts came out on a Twilight Time Blu-Ray.

A revival of “The Fantasticks” opened in 2006 and ran for more than 4,300 performances until 2017. The off-Broadway production was directed by Jones, who also reprised his role as Henry, the Old Actor.

“Soon It’s Gonna Rain” was recorded by Streisand on her debut album. She had reportedly tried out for the original off-Broadway production of “The Fantasticks,” but obviously wasn’t so rankled by not getting cast that she held it against the song. At one point early in his marriage to Streisand in the ’60s, Elliott Gould discussed doing a movie version that would have paired the two of them on screen; Gould had toured the show earlier with Liza Minnelli.

Others who recorded “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” included Tony Bennett, Duke Ellington, We Five, Mandy Patinkin and Julie London.

“Try to Remember” became an international hit in 1975 in the hands of Gladys Knight & the Pips, who made a medley of it with “The Way We Were.” Others among the song’s roughly 200 cover versions include renditions by Josh Groban, the Temptations, Roy Orbison, the Four Tops, Liza Minnelli, Patti LaBelle, Harry Belafonte, Rick Nelson, Ed Ames and the Kingston Trio.

Jones is survived by his sons Michael and Sam Jones from his second marriage to choreographer Janet Watson, who died in 2016. (Variety).

One more thing.

Harvey Schmidt died in 2018.

Here is the New York Times obituary.

Harvey Schmidt, Co-Creator of ‘The Fantasticks,’ Is Dead at 88

Tom (left), Harvey - photo is undated.

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How to help the people of Hawaii.

Touch the image President Obama posted.👇

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