Volume 266 | No. 26

Mon, Sept 12

2008—Former Goldman Sachs boss Hank Paulson tells Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers execs the Fed will leave them twisting in the wind. 1996—Bob “Bob Dole” Dole’s “Clinton accountability team” loses an unpaid advisor: Roger Stone resigns after tabloids report he and his wife had advertised for group sex partners. 1994—Frank E. Corder, 38, dies at 1:49 a.m., crash-landing a stolen Cessna on the White House grounds after a day-long beer and crack spree. 1983—Puerto Rican nationalists Los Macheteros rob a Well Fargo depot in West Hartford, Conn. of $7 million. They throw some cash from the roof to display their disdain for capitalism. 1970—Tim Leary …

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Sun, Sept 11

2016—The GOP nominee for President tweets “best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th.” 2012—Benghazi!!! 2006—At Ground Zero, for a photo op, President Bush and the First Lady stand on an American flag carpet. 2001—Four American airliners are hijacked by Saudies and crashed; thousands die. George W.[MD] Bush scurries to safety, Donald Rumsfeld looks for excuses to attack Iraq, and Dick “Dick” Cheney authorizes the shooting down of civilian airliners. 1973—Salvador Allende, duly-elected President of Chile, is overthrown by CIA-backed thugs. 1957—A Denver H-bomb factory burns, releasing a pound of plutonium particles. The AEC, lying, says there’s only …

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No Normalizing Trump’s Criminality

Dear Editor: Every American should be troubled, attentive, and very concerned about the mishandling of classified documents by the former president discovered by the FBI during their lawful investigation at Trump’s resort in Florida. Politics aside, the slow but steady erosion of respect for state secrets and the uneven prosecution of those who willfully violate long-standing laws governing security of classified material; in particular, the coddling of the powerful and the harsh punishment of subordinates creates the inevitable extension of our seriously broken system. In 2003, on two separate occasions, Samuel (Sandy) Berger entered the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and stole sensitive government documents, …

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Why I Like to Watch Bike Racing

by W.D. Ehrhart For the past week and a half, I’ve been watching La Vuelta a Espana, the Tour of Spain bicycle race. I’ve watched Le Tour de France every July for the past twenty-five years, and since the coronavirus showed up, I’ve taken to watching la Vuelta as well. I enjoy watching sports in general because you never know how it’s going to end until it ends. And I especially like watching bike racing because it is so international with riders from all over Europe, the Americas, New Zealand, and even the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. And though there are teams sponsored …

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It Takes Two to Tango, and a Couple Hundred to Overturn An Election

If only all our problems could be solved by jailing #45…. Even if the roll call at Leavenworth were to include the name of a former President in 2024, that would hardly assure that the nation had returned to normal operations. Equally-deranged replacements seem to be springing up like poisonous mushrooms after a toxic rain. On Wednesday, the nerds at fivethirtyeight.com reported that “From the Carolinas to California, Montana to Florida, election denialism has spread across the country. Candidates who support former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen will appear on ballots in nearly every state this fall.” After reaching …

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The Self-Exonerating Tyrant

A 2013 glossary of military slang defines a “self-licking ice cream cone” as a “military doctrine or political process that appears to exist in order to justify its own existence, often producing irrelevant indicators of its own success. For example, continually releasing figures on the amount of Taliban weapons seized, as if there were a finite supply of such weapons. While seizing the weapons, soldiers raid Afghan villages, enraging the residents and legitimizing the Taliban’s cause.” Military historian Norman Friedman coined the term to describe certain weapons systems during the Gulf War of 1991-1992. Astute readers, though, will readily see that it could accurately have …

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