Wednesday, January 8, 2025. Annette’s News Roundup.
Be a hero for Democracy in 2025.
Fight MAGA Judge, Aileen Cannon.
Judge Cannon blocks the release of Jack Smith’s final report on the documents investigation of Trump.
The federal judge who handled President-elect Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case temporarily barred the special counsel, Jack Smith, on Tuesday from releasing his final report on the investigation to the public.
In a brief ruling, Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee who dismissed the documents case in its entirety this summer, enjoined Mr. Smith from sharing his report outside the Justice Department until a federal appeals court in Atlanta, which is now considering a challenge to her dismissal of the case, makes a decision about how to handle the report.
On Monday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers and lawyers for his two co-defendants began a multipronged effort to stop the release of Mr. Smith’s report, which they claimed was “one-sided” and part of a “politically motivated attack” against the president-elect.
Mr. Trump’s legal team wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland asking him to stop the release of the report, which was set to be made public as soon as Friday. In a separate move, lawyers for Mr. Trump’s co-defendants in the documents case, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, went directly to Judge Cannon, of the Southern District of Florida, asking for an emergency order blocking the release.
The legal scrambling continued on Tuesday, as Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira asked the appeals court hearing the case to weigh in on blocking the report and Mr. Trump sought to join their motion in front of Judge Cannon.
With the case already dismissed, the report would essentially be Mr. Smith’s final chance to lay out damaging new details and evidence, if he has any, about how Mr. Trump mishandled a trove of classified documents after he left office in 2021.
Judge Cannon threw out the case in July, ruling, in the face of decades of precedent, that Mr. Smith had been unlawfully appointed special counsel. Mr. Smith quickly challenged that decision in front of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.
But after Mr. Trump won the election in November, Mr. Smith dropped the appeal where Mr. Trump was concerned, effectively ending his part in the matter. Mr. Smith did not drop the appeal against Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira, and federal prosecutors in Florida intend to pursue it once Mr. Smith steps down and disbands his team. (New York Times)
One more thing.
According to legal commentator, Joyce Vance, “ But here’s the problem: Judge Cannon already dismissed the case against Trump and his co-defendants based on his lawyers’ argument that the Special Counsel’s appointment was unconstitutional. That means she no longer has jurisdiction over the case, and she can’t issue an order to anyone regarding it. Her order here shouldn’t have any force.”
Overwhelm the Justice Department with demands that Jack Smith’s Report be released!
Fight Trump. Fight for Democracy. Share this with friends.
Write to Merrick Garland and ask him to fight to release the Jack Smith report. You can do it here. 👇
Select “Messages to the Attorney General” from the drop down menu👇
https://www.justice.gov/doj/webform/your-message-department-justice
Now, it’s up to us.
Zuckerberg of META announces the end of Fact Checking on Facebook. 👇 He also named three more MAGA supporters to his advisory board.
Get ready to be a citizen activist on FB to fight for Democracy by correcting MAGA lies.
Jimmy Carter lies in state in the Capitol Rotunda.
His funeral will take place tomorrow, and the flags on all federal buildings will still fly at half-mast on Inauguration Day.
Trump is always crazy, greedy and deranged.
A New York Times headline nails it.
A reminder of what Trump hopes to do in our name.👇
Trump Floats Using Force to Take Greenland and the Panama Canal.
In an hourlong news conference at his Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect delivered a hodgepodge of grievances, complaints and false claims.
President-elect Donald J. Trump refused on Tuesday to rule out the use of military or economic coercion to force Panama to give up control of the canal that America built more than a century ago and to push Denmark to sell Greenland to the United States.
In a rambling, hourlong news conference, Mr. Trump repeatedly returned to the theme of American sacrifice in building the canal and accused China, falsely, of operating it today. When pressed on the question of whether he might order the military to force Panama to give it up — in violation of treaties and other agreements reached during the Carter administration — or to do the same with Greenland, he said: “No, I can’t assure you on either of those two.”
“We need them for economic security — the Panama Canal was built for our military,” he said. Asked again if he would rule out the use of military force, he said: “I’m not going to commit to that. You might have to do something.”
Mr. Trump’s statements propelled his repeated calls for expanding American territory to a new level, one that is bound to roil three American allies — Panama; Denmark, which handles Greenland’s foreign and security affairs; and Canada, which he has mocked as America’s “51st State.” On Tuesday he made clear, though, that he was not joking, suggesting that if Canada remained a sovereign state the financial cost to its trading relationship with the United States could be crushing.
Perhaps Mr. Trump was posturing, for negotiating advantage. Yet not since the days of William McKinley, who engaged in the Spanish-American War in the late 19th century and ended up with U.S. control of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico, has an American president-elect so blatantly threatened the use of force to expand the country’s territorial boundaries.
It was a reminder that Mr. Trump’s definition of “America First” is anything but isolationist. He comes to American foreign policy with the mind of a real estate developer, with a penchant for grabbing territory.
He insisted he would not be deterred by the treaty signed with Panama, which was ratified by the Senate in 1978 by 68 to 32, just beyond the two-thirds vote required by the constitution. He asserted that the return of control of the Canal to Panama was a bad idea — arguing that he was reluctant to say so while the nation was burying former President Jimmy Carter, who negotiated the deal. He then returned, repeatedly, to criticizing Mr. Carter’s judgment.
“He was a very fine person,” Mr. Trump said. “But that was a big mistake,” he added. “It cost us the equivalent of a trillion dollars.”
On Canada, Mr. Trump, when pressed, threatened to use “economic force,” not the military, to join Canada and the United States together, implying that the United States would pare back its purchases of Canadian products.
He declared he would use tariffs to hamper Canada’s ability to assemble cars and sell them in the United States, and then charged that Canada contributed insufficiently to American defenses. He made no reference to NORAD, the combined American and Canadian defensive effort that is considered a military model for an interoperable, joint military early-warning system, run equally by two allies. It is at the core of American air and missile defense.
He continued his push on Tuesday evening, posting maps on social media showing Canada as part of the United States.
He also said at the news conference that he would “tariff Denmark at a very high level” if it did not give Greenland to the United States, before casting doubt on whether Denmark has a legitimate claim to Greenland at all.
The threats, vague and unformed as they may be, were only part of the series of declarations Mr. Trump made about his plans when he takes office in less than two weeks. He said the Gulf of Mexico would be renamed “the Gulf of America,” though it was unclear how serious he was about the effort.
He declared that members of NATO, who were slow to fulfill a commitment to spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, should now prepare for a world in which they needed to spend 5 percent.
“They can all afford it, but they should be at 5 percent, not 2 percent,” he said, before again threatening to not defend any NATO ally who did not, in his view, pay into the system sufficiently. Mr. Putin has used such threats in the past to sow divisions within NATO, an alliance he has been loath to take on directly even as it helps arm Ukraine.
But it was Mr. Trump’s views on American territorial expansionism that were most striking in the news conference, and so untethered from international law.
In December, when Mr. Trump ramped up his calls for the purchase of Greenland and voiced his complaints about how American shipping was treated as it traversed the Panama Canal, Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group noted that the case Mr. Trump was making had echoes of the justifications President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia made for invading Ukraine.
But piecing together Mr. Trump’s series of social media posts on these issues, and hearing his complaints at his private Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, one thing is clear: He is building a national security case for why an American takeover of Greenland and the Panama Canal Zone is necessary.
He noted on Tuesday that Chinese and Russian ships were appearing around Greenland, an apparent showing of the countries’ growing interest in shorter polar shipping and military routes after global warming loosened and shrank ice fields, making them more passable. He argued that China, which controls two ports near the canal, was operating the canal itself; it is not.
After Mr. Trump responded to the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday by writing on social media that “many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State,” Mr. Bremmer noted in a post on X that “American imperialism is so back.”
In fact, it often sounded that way at the news conference, as Mr. Trump dismissed the declarations of Denmark’s leadership that Greenland is not up for sale, and similar comments from Panama. The only question now is whether he is increasing the pressure for negotiating purposes, or would actually make good on his threats. (New York Times)
—————
Looking at Trump’s bizarre foreign policy.
What Trump has been mouthing off about - taking over Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal - can be viewed as just an aberrant rendering of his most wacko rants of the past.
But, as Simon Rosenberg summarized the situation in his newsletter today, “Trump’s repeated threats against the sovereign nations of Canada, Greenland and Panama are a direct attack on the post WW II American-led global order.”
His war-mongering and greed are matched too by his counterpart Musk’s escalating attacks on the pro-Western, pro-US governments of Canada, Germany and the UK.
These plots are no random rants, but are part of a unified, well thought out view of foreign policy by Trump and Musk. What we are learning is that the strange bedfellows who are on top of the Trump regime seem hellbent on splitting the globe with Russia and China, to form a new world order built on force and domination, not freedom and democracy. These boys are united in their determination to control and rape the world. Power and greed are the subtext.
This is not a state of affairs we could have predicted o even imagined. It is much worse. Depending on how the wind blows, we need to get ready. We should expect quite a fight ahead to stop Trumpian imperialism.
(Annette Niemtzow, Annette’s News Roundup).
Trump says he plans to use "economic force" to make Canada a state pic.twitter.com/fNxQ59FQlS
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 7, 2025
An historic settlement.
This settlement is happening.
Makes me hopeful that one day America will make amends for all our terrible sins, including the sin of slavery.
Will reparations to those formerly enslaved one day also be positioned as settlements for class action suits?
Pentagon agrees to settle historic lawsuit with LGBTQ+ veterans over discharge status.
Despite that the ban on gay troops ended more than a decade ago, a surprisingly small fraction of the tens of thousands of vets affected have accessed benefits they are due.
The Pentagon has now agreed to settle a class action lawsuit that may change that for about 35,000 veterans.
"This settlement is not just about correcting records; it's about restoring the honor and pride that LGBTQ+ veterans have always deserved but were denied," said Lilly Steffanides, a U.S. Navy veteran and plaintiff in the case. "I hope this brings justice to others who served with courage, only to face exclusion and discrimination."
Steffanides told NPR in 2023 that the stigma of being suddenly "outed" to their family in 1988, led to years of addiction and homelessness. Having an "other-than honorable" discharge meant no automatic access to VA benefits or health care. It's a scarlet letter when employers ask about military service; many veterans would deny they ever served rather than reveal paperwork that showed they were kicked out for homosexual activity.
Discharged over sexual orientation, military still owes thousands of vets.
In 2011, after a long campaign by LGBTQ veterans and activists, the Obama administration ended the ban. In the years since, the integration of gay and lesbian troops has been heralded as a huge success with no effects on unit cohesion or combat readiness, according to the Pentagon. But the plaintiffs in the lawsuit say the lingering stigma and a mountain of red tape kept many veterans from even applying to upgrade their military discharge status and get the benefits they had earned.
The Pentagon announced a proactive review of discharges under "don't ask, don't tell" — the 1993 Clinton administration policy that banned troops from being open about their sexuality — last October, but this proposed settlement agreed to Monday will speed up that process considerably if approved by California's Northern District Court. Instead of individual applications, the settlement will allow veterans to have their records reviewed in large groups, delivering access to VA benefits and Honorable Discharge papers as early as this summer.
This proposed settlement delivers long-overdue justice to LGBTQ+ veterans who served our country with honor but were stripped of the dignity and recognition they rightfully earned due to discriminatory discharge policies. It marks a crucial step in addressing this deep-seated injustice and ensuring these veterans receive the acknowledgment and respect they have long been denied," said Jocelyn Larkin, an attorney on the plaintiffs' legal team.
The Pentagon referred questions to the Department of Justice, which declined NPR's request for comment. (NPR)
Will the future of theatre finally include women?
The title, Two Female Playwrights Arrive on Broadway. What Took So Long? appeared in New York Times, on March ,2017.
The article notes both playwrights had won Pulitzer Prizes, but neither has had a play on Broadway, where money and popular recognition accrue to a playwright.
The article continues:
“Indecent” and “Sweat” are the only new plays by women this Broadway season; by contrast, there are eight new plays by men (none of whom has credentials comparable to those of Ms. Vogel and Ms. Nottage). The disparity is sometimes worse; in 2013-14 there were no new plays by women. Such imbalance remains a striking incongruity for Broadway, where an estimated 67 percent of the audience is women.
On December 20, 2024, this article appeared in The Beast.👇
Female Playwrights Are Finally Taking Over Broadway Stages.
I have been covering the theater world a long time by now, so I can say, with some authority, that never have the stages been as filled with strong women…both on and behind the scenes.
Sunset Boulevard focuses, of course, on one Norma Desmond; Suffs gives us the women who fought for and eventually won the vote; Audra McDonald is the stage mother of all time in Gypsy; The Hills of California follows another domineering mom and her four daughters; Cult of Love, by Leslye Headland, is about one of those not so merry family reunions; Delia Ephron’s memoir on stage, Left on Tenth is a love story mixed with hovering death; Jen Silverman’s The Roommate stars Mia Farrow and Patti Lupone in a shaky relationship; Death Becomes Her, a musical about women trying to stay young, is leaving audiences LOL-ing; and Sanaz Toosi’s Pulitzer Prize winning drama English arrives in January.
That is all on Broadway. (Where women, by the way, make up 65 percent of ticket buyers.) Off-Broadway, the hills are also alive with feminine voices. In the last few months I’ve seen The Amazon Warehouse, Vladimir, Bad Kreyòl, Walden, The Light and the Dark, The Blood Quilt, and The Counter, all penned by women. (At least three deal with climate change.) Another new one is January about the aftermath of traumatic violence.
There was a time when we had Wendy Wasserstein (The Heidi Chronicles, The Sisters Rosenweig) and that was about it. (That’s not counting Lorraine Hansberry, who made history with A Raisin in the Sun—and who died during the run of her second Broadway production.) These are strong shows dealing with pressing, personal, often political issues.
“It was slow in coming but it is much more than a trend,” says Daryl Roth, considered by many the most influential woman in New York theatre. (With one venue even named for her downtown.) “They are writing stories about their own hills and valleys and audiences are relating.“
Roth is currently producing Left on Tenth, and is soon bringing The Picture of Dorian Gray, Sarah Snook’s one-woman play, to Broadway. And she is working with playwright Anna Deveare Smith on a show about a hugely famous black woman who tried telling the truth in our judicial history. (No spoilers allowed)
“Of course, these stories, written by women, are going to be different,” adds producer Dori Berinstein, who recently produced Russian Troll Room, which featured Christine Lahti. “They bring unique perspectives that inherently differ from those of men. And, hardly a surprise, women playwrights are much more likely to prioritize female protagonists, providing more diverse and nuanced representations. Essential stories that must be told!”
Several years ago, I compiled a list for an entertainment site (not this one) about the women who’d had an impact that year. I tried to include playwrights, but basically was told, “No one cares about theatre.” Well, I fought for and finally got Lynn Nottage included. The next year, I fought for, and won, a slot for Suzan-Lori Parks. Her latest show, Sally and Tom (think slavery) had a hit run at the Public Theater this past season and likely will move on and up to Broadway.
Both of those women were big prize winners, and both are Black—as are Katori Hall, whose The Blood Quilt, about a family of Southern women, is now playing at Lincoln Center, and Dominique Morriseau, whose latest, Bad Kreyòl, is also about reuniting relatives. (In that play, the characters are of Haitian descent. “Kreyòl is anti-colonialism as a language,” Morrisseau wrote in the show’s program. ”It is a language of resistance and freedom. So, though I speak bad Kreyòl, there is only good that can come from allowing a people the dignity to choose their own master tongue.”
Hall believes things are better but, well, it’s all relative. “If there is sexism in the world, there is most definitely still sexism in the theatre,” she told me. “I do feel as though there is a realization that our theatres have often been run by men—white men to be exact—and there is a slight correction I see. Like, how many Black women are being put in artistic director leadership positions?” Daryl Roth insists, “There are more female artistic directors each season, and that matters.”
Another current show is Room 1214. This one comes from Michelle Kholos Brooks. She has written several others, including, War Words and Hitler’s Tasters: tough and truth-based pieces from a sweet, petite woman who happens to be married to Max Brooks (author of World War Z) and is the daughter-in-law of Mel Brooks.
But Room 1214 is no laughing matter. It is based on an actual history teacher who experienced the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018. (She was teaching a class about the Holocaust, ironically.) “I think the conversation about gun violence is going to be timely until we put a stop to it,” says the playwright. “Most Americans believe in reasonable gun laws. We just need to have the will. And until we have the will, we should have the conversation.” (Kholos-Brooks told me this just a week before New York was virtually paralyzed awaiting the capture of a shooter.)
There was a time when we had Wendy Wasserstein (The Heidi Chronicles, The Sisters Rosenweig) and that was about it. (That’s not counting Lorraine Hansberry, who made history with A Raisin in the Sun—and who died during the run of her second Broadway production.) These are strong shows dealing with pressing, personal, often political issues.
“It was slow in coming but it is much more than a trend,” says Daryl Roth, considered by many the most influential woman in New York theatre. (With one venue even named for her downtown.) “They are writing stories about their own hills and valleys and audiences are relating.“
Roth is currently producing Left on Tenth, and is soon bringing The Picture of Dorian Gray, Sarah Snook’s one-woman play, to Broadway. And she is working with playwright Anna Deveare Smith on a show about a hugely famous black woman who tried telling the truth in our judicial history. (No spoilers allowed)
“Of course, these stories, written by women, are going to be different,” adds producer Dori Berinstein, who recently produced Russian Troll Room, which featured Christine Lahti. “They bring unique perspectives that inherently differ from those of men. And, hardly a surprise, women playwrights are much more likely to prioritize female protagonists, providing more diverse and nuanced representations. Essential stories that must be told!”
Several years ago, I compiled a list for an entertainment site (not this one) about the women who’d had an impact that year. I tried to include playwrights, but basically was told, “No one cares about theatre.” Well, I fought for and finally got Lynn Nottage included. The next year, I fought for, and won, a slot for Suzan-Lori Parks. Her latest show, Sally and Tom (think slavery) had a hit run at the Public Theater this past season and likely will move on and up to Broadway.
Both of those women were big prize winners, and both are Black—as are Katori Hall, whose The Blood Quilt, about a family of Southern women, is now playing at Lincoln Center, and Dominique Morriseau, whose latest, Bad Kreyòl, is also about reuniting relatives. (In that play, the characters are of Haitian descent. “Kreyòl is anti-colonialism as a language,” Morrisseau wrote in the show’s program. ”It is a language of resistance and freedom. So, though I speak bad Kreyòl, there is only good that can come from allowing a people the dignity to choose their own master tongue.”
Hall believes things are better but, well, it’s all relative. “If there is sexism in the world, there is most definitely still sexism in the theatre,” she told me. “I do feel as though there is a realization that our theatres have often been run by men—white men to be exact—and there is a slight correction I see. Like, how many Black women are being put in artistic director leadership positions?” Daryl Roth insists, “There are more female artistic directors each season, and that matters.”
Another current show is Room 1214. This one comes from Michelle Kholos Brooks. She has written several others, including, War Words and Hitler’s Tasters: tough and truth-based pieces from a sweet, petite woman who happens to be married to Max Brooks (author of World War Z) and is the daughter-in-law of Mel Brooks.
But Room 1214 is no laughing matter. It is based on an actual history teacher who experienced the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018. (She was teaching a class about the Holocaust, ironically.) “I think the conversation about gun violence is going to be timely until we put a stop to it,” says the playwright. “Most Americans believe in reasonable gun laws. We just need to have the will. And until we have the will, we should have the conversation.” (Kholos-Brooks told me this just a week before New York was virtually paralyzed awaiting the capture of a shooter.)
She is among the many women who are giving us muscular works that deserve conversation. Penned by Sarah Gancher, the play Russian Troll Farm was set in St. Petersburg, where, in fact, an internet company was attempting to interfere in our 2016 election. Playwright Sarah Gancher,an Obie-winning playwright, told me that the idea for her play came out of her confusion in 2016 over what she was often seeing on her internet feeds mixed with anxiety about how Donald Trump was obviously being helped from afar. Jenny Lyn Bader’s Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library, directed by Ari Laura Kreith, is at Off-Broadway’s WP Theater for a limited five-week run. That one is based on the jailing of German-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt.
Erika Sheffer created the muscular Vladimir because of her parents’ immigrating to the U.S. from the Soviet Union. “They survived programs, the Gulag, state surveillance and relentless antisemitism,” she writes in the program. ”The most recent rise of extremism and violence in American politics has left me in turns enraged and mystified. How did we get here? How do we move forward?” Her play scares us and helps us seek answers.
I recently visited London to see A Face In The Crowd, a new musical based on the classic 1957 movie. Written by Sarah Ruhl, it could not be more timely and Trumpian.
Even a piece like Delia Ephron’s “Left on Tenth” is more than your basic ‘feel good after almost dying’ love story. “It’s full of joy but has tremendous threat in it,” says Ephron. “I don’t think of my work as being political, per se, but because I always write smart characters, it proclaims a belief in the strength of women. Theatre is more open to women than film and television.”
Female playwrights, in fact, have become first choices. A stage adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 is in development and aiming for Broadway. This one will be adapted by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Martyna Majok. Bradbury’s book, of course, is an anti-censorship manifesto that was written during the McCarthy era.
And here’s a punchline. Even a feminist take on Death of a Salesman” is coming. It begins the day Willy dies, and dramatically wonders what Mrs. Loman will do. The production is written by Barbara Cassidy and directed by Meghan Finn. I rest my case,
Why now? “Well, since our stories have basically been hidden from half our history, it’s about time,” says Dale Franzen, who won a Tony for producing Hadestown and is part of the Left on Tenth team. Amen—or A-women—to that. (Michele Willens, The Daily Beast)