By Merrill Lynn Hansen I know everything I need to know about the people who stormed the Capitol Building, other than their names  and whether they are going to be prosecuted. I long ago ceased having any curiosity about their psychological makeup, or how Donald Trump was able to tap into their grievances, and justify them. It’s a tired old cliché by now: they distrust our country's institutions, and they believe that there is no way Trump could have lost the presidential election, because "their people" voted for him. I've always believed there was a potential for thousands of Trump supporters to be violent, and I've always believed that Trump is entertained by that kind of loyalty.  But I must admit I don’t understand why some people remain loyal to the President and Melania. As I was watching the mob take over the Capitol Building I was almost in tears. At that point, one of the correspondents announced that the First Lady’s Chief of Staff, Stephanie Grisham, had resigned  "effective immediately.” My first thought was,  Could the woman who helped Melania pick out her I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?  jacket be resigning because a mob is trying to overturn our government? Is it possible she didn't like what some of them were wearing?  I was sick to my stomach seeing their CAMP AUSCHWITZ T-shirts, but I wasn't surprised.  Grisham has worked with the Trumps long enough to know that Trump loves neo-Nazis because they love him.  She wrote that she was very proud of the accomplishments of the Trump Administration, which was ironic  in view of the fact that she was resigning in the middle of one. The media said that there would be more resignations coming, and sure enough, among them, was the White House Social Secretary, Rickie Nicita, whose resignation was also effective immediately. My guess is that while she was watching the mob, it dawned on her that Trump really had lost the election, and she wasn't going to be the event planner for any more Covid-19 super spreaders or the next White House Easter Egg Hunt. And the resignations kept on coming.  I don’t doubt that some of those resignees were truly upset by what they'd witnessed at the Capitol Building, but I couldn't help but wonder if they didn’t wish they had joined the Lincoln Project months earlier. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao resigned and said the attack "has deeply troubled me in a way that I simply cannot set aside".  She failed to mention that her husband, Mitch McConnell, helped create the Trump monster. And oh yes, that she learned the day before the attack that Mitch was no longer going to be the Senate Majority leader, in large part because of Trump. And then there was the resignation letter I found the most ironic, the one written by Secretary of Education  Betsy DeVos, who, along with her family, had paid millions of dollars to have Trump appoint her to destroy public schools. She wrote that "impressionable children are watching all of this, and they are learning from us. I believe we each have a moral obligation to exercise good judgment and model the behavior we hope they would emulate."   Maybe DeVos doesn’t know that she and her family contributed to political organizations that encouraged people armed with assault weapons  to storm Michigan's Capitol with their "impressionable children” and declare they have a constitutional right to spread Covid-19 throughout the state. Hopefully, millions of parents will now find it easier to keep their children from emulating Trump (and her). But it was former Attorney General Bill Barr's press release the day after the  mob takeover that made it necessary for me to remove all sharp objects from the room; I was flailing around so much, I thought I could hurt myself.  Barr, who resigned just before Christmas, said that Donald Trump's actions in orchestrating a mob to pressure Congress is “inexcusable” and ]"a betrayal of his office and supporters.”  Prior to his tardy resignation, Barr did everything he could to create Trump's dream of a lawless presidency, including interfering with investigations of Trump, and trying to ruin the lives of the President’s enemies.  Barr lied for Trump on countless occasions, and the only difference between him and Trump was he couldn't bring himself to lie and say there was widespread evidence of election fraud. That, and the fact that Barr doesn’t color his hair with mascara, are the only things that distinguish him from Trump's attorney, Rudy Giuliani. Of all of these deathbed conversions, though, I'm most frustrated by the anonymous sources who have confided to the press that Trump has been “mentally incapacitated” since the election.  CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta reported that one GOP source who speaks with Trump regularly told him that Trump is "out of his mind.” I can't stand these anonymous "we've always known he's crazy" confessions.  During the past four years, I have told hundreds of people that Trump is crazy, and I've never done it anonymously.  I expect that some people in the Administration are going to falsely claim that they were anonymous sources, because they're embarrassed they stayed loyal to Trump.  ("I swear I never liked him.") In the meantime, I’m paying close attention to the people who have not resigned.  I suspect they're hoping Trump will issue them preemptive pardons before they go. Is Stephen Miller still there? Merrill Hansen is a legal assistant, living in West Bloomfield, Michigan. She describes herself as a frustrated writer, who wishes she could be Nora Ephron (when she was alive), if only for a day. She is a news-, political- and FB-junkie, a combination that requires a constant reminder that she needs to take deep cleansing breaths when responding to people who don't agree with her.

A plea to acting Attorney General Rosen Jeffrey Sachs and Mario Marazziti | January 11, 2021 |  CNN.com Editor's Note: Jeffrey D. Sachs is a professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. Mario Marazziti is part of the Community of Sant'Egidio, co-founder of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, and author of Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty (Seven Stories Press). The opinions expressed in this commentary are their own. View more opinion on CNN. (CNN) Last Wednesday's insurrection left five dead. More than 3,000 Americans are dying on average each day from Covid-19, partly because of President Donald Trump's disregard for public health. Less known is that Trump has also unleashed a mad rush of federal executions, with three more scheduled for this week at the Terre Haute federal prison facility in Indiana. This, even as demands rise for Trump's immediate departure from office. These rushed executions must be stopped so that the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden can review these cases and the federal policy on death sentences generally. Trump's frenzy of federal executions began last year. There had been no federal executions since 2003. Since July, the federal government has executed 10 people, more than in any presidency since 1896. The federal spree took place in a year with a 37-year low in executions nationally, just seven by the states. If there was any lingering doubt about Trump's use of American institutions for his personal delusional motives, there should be none now. Trump's support for the unleashing of federal executions is a reflection of the same apparent glee that led Trump to pay for full-page ads calling for the state to adopt the death penalty after the infamous Central Park Five case in New York in 1989. Lisa Montgomery is scheduled for execution on Tuesday for murder. She would be the first woman to be executed on federal death row for a murder committed by a person that society should have given support and treatment since childhood, and never did. Court documents show that Montgomery herself was a victim of incest, child sex trafficking, gang rape, physical abuse and neglect, largely at the hands of family members, and has resulted in "incurable and significant psychiatric disabilities." Those who kept her in slavery for half her lifetime were never punished. Dustin Higgs is scheduled to be executed on Thursday for his involvement in the kidnapping and murder of three women. Higgs did not personally kill the victims, and the person who did received life without parole. Corey Johnson is also scheduled for execution on Thursday for his involvement in the murder of seven people. His lawyers argued in a brief in December that he is intellectually disabled. "When he was in his early twenties, achievement testing measured his grade-equivalent levels no higher than second grade in reading and writing. When he was last tested at age 45, Mr. Johnson was still at an elementary school level," his lawyers wrote. This is important to note because Johnson's co-defendant was spared the death penalty because of his intellectual disability. To be clear, we are not arguing that these three people haven't done terrible things. They have, but details of their cases should be enough not to rush their deaths. While we oppose the death penalty as a matter of principle, those who favor it should never overlook powerful reasons to spare a life. The executions this week can and must be stopped. Trump bent the Department of Justice to his bloody plans while it was under former Attorney General William Barr. Now the last three executions are in the hands of acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen, and could also be postponed by the warden of the Terre Haute federal prison complex, T. J. Watson. Each execution could also be a Covid-19 super-spreader event that puts at risk the guards, inmates, lawyers, journalists, relatives, observers, general population, and spiritual counsellors. A fact that Watson is surely aware of, since a federal court recently stayed the executions at Terre Haute until Covid-19 protections could be put in place. In mid-December it was reported that Higgs and Johnson tested positive for the virus. The attorney general or the warden need only to say the word, and the scheduled executions will be postponed until the Biden administration. To allow these executions to proceed at this moment would be a life-defining tragedy of acting Attorney General Rosen. We call on Rosen to put a halt to these judicial murders. We call on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to call on the Department of Justice to desist, and to make it clear that it is the will of Congress that we have suffered far too many deaths as a result of decisions by Trump. Justice requires that all three scheduled executions be stayed until President Biden and his attorney general can decide on these three cases and on federal death sentence policy generally. https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/11/opinions/stop-federal-executions-attorney-general-rosen-sachs-marazziti/index.html

By Andy Borowitz January 12, 2021 WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—A majority of Americans call Donald J. Trump’s second impeachment their favorite Trump impeachment, a new poll finds. According to the poll, conducted by the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, Americans who liked Trump’s first impeachment prefer his second one by a wide margin. Although respondents expressed some sadness that this would most likely be the last Trump impeachment they would witness, they were overwhelmingly pleased to see the series go out on a high note. “According to these responses, Trump’s second impeachment is that rare example of a sequel being more popular than the original,” Davis Logsdon, who supervised the poll, said. “This is not ‘Wonder Woman 1984.’ ” Andy Borowitz is a Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes The Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news.

By Doug Dworkin As I write this, our country is still in the middle of the crisis created by the invasion of the U.S Capitol, and Congress is preparing to impeach Donald J. Trump a second time to ensure our safety during his final days. As Simon Schama wrote in the Financial Times, “the stain on his time in office is deep and indelible.” History will render the ultimate verdict, but after the stench of tear gas dissipates from the Capitol and the crocodile tears of his enablers dry up, our democracy will still be in grave danger. We must not let the relief and euphoria engendered by his departure blind us to the problems we face. Whether or not Trump is a viable political figure after this debacle, there are still 74 million people who voted for him, and Trumpism will likely continue to exist. Clearly, his supporters are not all violent thugs, and many are probably repelled by what they saw. But the actors who gave rise to his brand of politics will persist in stoking the resentments and grievances of his followers into a toxic brew. Even in these early days after the D.C chaos, this is happening on certain news channels and web sites. And we must remember that the history of tyranny shows that it often has its genesis in a violent minority. Unless we act, it’s only a matter of time until other autocratic figures will co-opt his movement and exploit it to their own ends. What can we do? It is not possible in a short space to discuss the many policies needed to address the issues that gave rise to this movement, such as income inequality and duress, the propagation of bogus conspiracy theories and fake news, the susceptibility of many people to the age-old “Big Lie” propaganda technique, the failure to understand the continued impact of racism in our society, tribalism and fears that continue to plague our country in contrast to our ideal of a vast “melting pot,” the mistrust and misunderstanding of expertise, and the deep polarization of our dialogue. What I would suggest is that our political and social discourse—and the policies we propose—endeavor to adhere to the attitudes and approaches of some of the great leaders we admire, like Lincoln, Mandela, King, Gandhi or Malala Yousafzai. Some might say this is Pollyanna and Kumbaya kind of stuff, and that the principles espoused by these leaders are not tough enough to deal with the likes of Trump and his minions. But Lincoln presided over four of the bloodiest years in American history. He sent men into battle to kill and be killed. Yet, in the end, he was still able to utter these words in his Second Inaugural. “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and for his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Likewise, Mandela spent 26 years in prison, but forgave his captors and won in the end. Martin Luther King Jr. has been lionized for his “I Have a Dream” speech, but many have forgotten how militant he was. He and Gandhi believed in nonviolent civil disobedience. Those who have seen films of King having bottles and stones thrown at him in Cicero or John Lewis being beaten in Selma know how tough you have to be to adhere to that philosophy. Malala, who was shot by the Taliban and recovered, was asked by TV host Jon Stewart how she reacted when she learned that the Taliban still wanted her dead. Her response: “I started thinking about that, and I used to think that the Talib would come, and he would just kill me. But then I said, 'If he comes, what would you do Malala?' then I would reply to myself, 'Malala, just take a shoe and hit him.'  But then I said, 'If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty and that much harshly, you must fight others but through peace and through dialogue and through education.' Then I said I will tell him how important education is and that 'I even want education for your children as well.' And I will tell him, 'That's what I want to tell you, now do what you want.' ” You can’t ask for more courage and toughness than that. What does all this have to do with Trump, his followers, and the nuts and bolts of policy? The people I cited demonstrated toughness, but they also demonstrated something equally important: empathy. The only way to counter the polarizing forces that are driving us apart is to implement policies that bring in Trump voters, or at least bring them into a constructive dialogue. Trump voters were convinced that he was helping them economically, even though he did nothing to help low-wage workers or workers in changing industries. Democrats have not done enough either. Implementing policies that show empathy with all workers, black and white, can go a long way towards bringing disaffected white workers back into the fold and reducing some racial animus. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s March was intended to be just that—a poor people’s march, not just poor black people. This is just one example of policies that can serve constituencies that overlap party and race. Getting big corporate money out of politics is another. Low-income workers of all races are victims of policies that have kept wages from significantly growing in the last 20+ years, widening the income gap. Some may say this approach is naïve. I know that politics is about power, but in this country votes are power. Ask Stacey Abrams. Racism is one of the most difficult problems to address, but perhaps we can work on that too, by trying the reverse of the “Big Lie.” How about the “Big Truth”? Certainly we can make some progress by more widely promulgating and repeating the stories of post-Civil War policies that institutionalized Jim Crow and terrorized blacks with more than 4,000 lynchings. And we should try to minimize stories that have an accusatory tone, since so many whites ask why they are responsible now for what happened then. Rather, stories should be focused on arousing empathy. We need new strategies and policies based on toughness (especially never tolerating violence or cruelty) and empathy if we want to expand the rolls of like-minded voters and diminish those of now and future Trumpists. Doug Dworkin is a former junior high school teacher, encyclopedia editor, and IT executive at IBM. Now retired, he Is beginning a new career as a professional dabbler and dilettante.

One film journalist’s stream-of-consciousness cinematic journey through the pandemic, Part 25 By Laurence Lerman The footage of last week’s violent breach of the Capitol Building by a rioting mob was a horrifying vision and one that most Americans never want to see again. A week on, I’ve been considering how the ugliness of the actions—which resulted in such shocking but comprehensible physical damage as shattered windows, splintered furniture, broken doors, vandalized statues and shredded papers—has quickly proven to be so much more potent and unforgettable than the large-scale destruction we’ve seen descend upon Washington D.C. numerous times previously, courtesy of Hollywood. Of course, what happened last week was real, and what happens on storytelling screens big and small is not. But it is worth noting that something like the tearing down of the Arlington Memorial Bridge in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) or the ripping apart of the National Mall in G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013) doesn’t come close to packing the punch that the actual desecration of one the country’s most glorious architectural landmarks does. While it’s a miracle that only five people died from the insurrection, and that our democracy was upended, if only for a few hours, the images of our own undoing will remain with us for a long time to come. They’re already more deeply implanted than those of our capital city and its famed buildings being decimated by all manner of aliens and spaceships and monsters and, yes, evil humans (as in the F.B.I. Federal Building’s decimation by a domestic terrorist’s bomb in the 1999 thriller Arlington Road). The safety valve of knowing that it’s all a fiction makes D.C.’s movie mayhem eminently enjoyable, as can be seen in this far-from-inclusive breakdown: When ruthless aliens in their 15-mile-long ships descended to terra and completely blew up the White House in Roland Emmerich’s 1996’s Independence Day, the era of the over-the-top, CGI-fueled national landmark destruction was born. As it turns out, Emmerich was just getting started: he later moved on to New York City, trashing the Chrysler Building in 1998’s Godzilla, and then the Statue of Liberty in The Day After Tomorrow (2004), before laying waste to the whole planet in the ultra-apocalyptic 2012 (2009). Emmerich doubled-down on even more White House carnage when he shot up the joint in the 2013 paramilitary invasion flick White House Down with Channing Tatum, but it was director Antoine Fuqua who wreaked infinitely more havoc on the country’s most famous residence in that same year’s Olympus Has Fallen, starring Gerard Butler as a Secret Service defending 1600 Pennsylvania against a North Korean terrorist group. There’s been no dearth of destruction in the last decade of supersized comic book-based superhero movies. Though there’s been plenty of devastation in capitals across the world, none been as plot-driven or location-specific than that found in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), wherein Michael Fassbender’s Magneto bizarrely uses his powers to transport the outer structure of D.C.’s Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium across town to use as a barricade around the White House. Movie obsessives looking to spoil everyone’s fun were quick to point out that RFK was shown being prepped for a baseball game, but as the movie is set in 1973—two years after the Senators left for Texas—there was no baseball team in town to play there. Second place in the comic book wars goes to Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011), which finds the malevolent robot Megatron blasting the Lincoln Memorial’s statue of Honest Abe and anointing the remaining marble chair as his new throne. Drubbed upon its release in 1996, Tim Burton’s big-budget, all-star comedy, sci-fier send-up Mars Attacks! has since elevated its status to cult favorite. Jack Nicholson is the President; Glenn Close, the First Lady; and yodeling falsetto Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call” is the song that saves the world from an invasion of bulbous-brained Martians who manage to take out the White House and the Washington Monument before Slim’s not-so-dulcet tones trigger their bloated heads to explode. Mars Attacks! is actually a send-up of the “B”-est ever entry in the 1950s cycle of alien invasion B movies, 1956’s beloved Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, which features the inimitable stop-motion special effects of the great Ray Harryhausen. Working on a reported $4,300 F/X budget, Harryhausen pumps startling life into an invading armada of flying saucers, whose range of movement, sense of purpose and all-out aggression are for more engaging than the performances of costars Hugh Marlowe and Joan Taylor. Like Burton’s Martians, Harryhausen’s aliens also do a number on the Washington Monument during the film’s climactic battle sequence, which also sees the saucers crashing into D.C.’s Union Station, the Supreme Court Building and the Capitol Building’s House of Representatives chamber and dome. One even splashes down into the Potomac. The decimation of the Capitol in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, like most of Harryhausen and other F/X masters’ creations, looks magnificent, particularly as it comes at the end of a harrowing made-up story that marks the defeat of the invaders who would bring the nation harm. Then there’s what happened in Washington last week, which was all too real. With the country on the brink of moving forward into what will hopefully be a clearer, healthier and safer future, now is the time to make the good guys’ triumph a reality for all of us. Laurence Lerman is a film journalist, former editor of Video Business--Variety's DVD trade publication--and husband to The Insider's own Gwen Cooper. Over the course of his career he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major director working today, including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Kathryn Bigelow, Ridley Scott, Walter Hill, Spike Lee, and Werner Herzog, among numerous others. Once James Cameron specifically requested an interview with Laurence by name, which his wife still likes to brag about. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com.

By Tobye S. Stein January 12, 2021 Dear Donnie, I’ve thought about writing to you many times, but I wasn’t sure you were ready for some good honest feedback. I realize that you don’t know me personally, so let me introduce myself. I am a licensed counselor in the Great State of Michigan. It’s the one where the Lower Peninsula looks like a mitten and is surrounded by the Great Lakes. It’s the one with the women you hate, especially the Governor, Secretary of State, and Attorney General. During my long career in human resources, I’ve worked with a lot of executives like you, incompetent, self-serving, and like you, eventually fired. They each had trouble with the managers reporting to them and experienced frequent turnover. Donnie, you’ve just experienced another failure. Your coup attempt was a total disaster. You not only lost the presidential election, the popular vote for the second time, but this time, to use your words, you also lost the Electoral College in a landslide. In addition, you helped the two Republican Georgia Senators lose their runoff elections, in large part because of their loyalty to you. If we’ve learned one thing during the past five years, it’s that you value loyalty above honesty, integrity, and competence. I’m not sure you understand the last three. The bigger problem, Donnie, isn’t just your recent failure; it’s all of your failures over the years. You’ve bankrupted casinos and stolen money from your own charity, and gotten caught. Your vodka business went bankrupt, as did Trump University and your steak business. You’re known for your failure to pay contractors for completed work and then bleeding them dry in court when they try to collect. You’ve failed to pay attorneys, who will now no longer represent you, and you’ve built quite a reputation for doing that. But enough about your little failures. I don’t think Dad would be happy that you failed to match up to the big boys you so admire, including Vlad, Xi, and Kim, your little Rocket Man, to name just a few. Those guys have guts. They poison, behead, and jail those who oppose them. They know how to get the job done. They don’t like journalists? No problem for them. They lock them up or kill them. You don’t like protestors, well, they don’t bother with tear gas and rubber bullets, they use lethal gas and real bullets and tanks. You wanted to be a badass, and you had a little success, but when it came to having a kill shot (as they say in tennis and you play almost as much tennis as golf), you just didn’t have it in you. You wanted to be a dictator and president for life, just like those guys, but you failed again, you failed bigly. Those damn Americans and their Constitution. Repeatedly, you’d say, the Constitution is getting in my way. I’ve seen people fail in their jobs when they really had no idea what to do. Your job as president was to govern our country. Unfortunately, you had no idea what was required at the bare minimum, and you have no leadership skills. You could have surrounded yourself with knowledgeable people, but you failed in selecting your cabinet as well as other senior-level positions. You hired yes-men and women, which might have worked if any of them had the knowledge and skills to do their jobs, but again you failed in selecting competent people. Anyone who was competent but disagreed with you was fired. While some turnover in the White House is expected especially between the first and second terms of a presidency, you had a constant revolving door for cabinet members who stole from the government (we the people), chiefs of staff, intelligence and military personnel. Those you fired or who left, because they realized how inept you are, were always criticized for not being up to the job and being disloyal. Your first national security advisor lasted less than a month. Really Donnie, after a while, you have to realize it can’t be everyone except for Javanka who is wrong. I think this is a good time for an intervention. You won’t concede your loss, but you did say there will be a peaceful transfer of power. Now it’s time to hold you accountable for all of your failures. It’s time to hold you accountable for treasonous behavior. I know you watch a lot of TV. Did you watch what happened at the Capitol Building on Wednesday? You promised your faithful that you would walk with them to the Capitol. I imagine you were envisioning Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis walking arm-in-arm in our nation’s capital or Selma, Alabama leading their people and getting into good trouble. Donnie, is that what you had in mind? If you did, again, you failed. You didn’t even show up. And after roving bands of anarchists broke into the Peoples’ House, defaced and vandalized it, and threatened the lives of your very loyal Vice President, as well as fellow GOP elected officials and Democrats, all you said to the anarchists was, I love you, now go home. Oh, and how can I forget your reference to the allegedly stolen election? Donnie, accept it, you failed. You failed to get the popular vote again, and this time you failed to earn the Electoral College vote. You FAILED. No one stole anything. You actually gave the election away with your failure to manage the coronavirus, your failure to help the working-class people you claim to love, your failure to safely keep schools open, and your manifest failure to enact any legislation that helped anyone except your family, corporations, and the very wealthy in our country. You failed to protect America from Russian interference in our elections and to protect national security. Donnie, you failed in business, you failed as president, and you failed on the international stage with our allies. Donnie, I have good counseling and management skills, but I don’t think I can help you until you accept that no matter what you’ve done in life, the only thing you’ve achieved is FAILURE. If you’re ready to do some really hard work, call me, I’m one of those smart, articulate women in the Great State of Michigan. Honestly yours, Tobye Stein Tobye S. Stein retired as Chief Human Resources Officer from a California-based financial services organization. She once landed a job by replying to the age old question, “Why should I hire you instead of the other two candidates” by simply stating “I’m funnier than most people.” It worked.

By Joel Dzodin Like millions of others around the world, I spent Wednesday night in Israel glued to the computer screen, incredulous at the scenes of mayhem unfolding at the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C,, and aghast at the abject and inconceivable demagoguery of the American President. Even the excesses and outrages committed by Donald Trump and his Administration over the past four years didn't prepare me for the pictures of anger and malevolent rampage being broadcast around the world. Both local and international media conveyed the unbelievable images as they unfolded to Israelis, against the backdrop of the upcoming trial of Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on corruption charges. The country faces the imminent prospect of a fourth national election within a two-year period, after the previous three failed to lead to a stable and workable government. Confronted with the necessity of dealing with the new Biden Administration, there is great concern among right-wing politicians that relations between Israel and the United States might return to the icy days that prevailed during the Obama era. They are apprehensive that Netanyahu's continuing program of expanding settlements in the contested West Bank will be much less palatable to the incoming Biden Administration, which will likely include many people who served under Barack Obama. The specter of what occurred in Washington this week is also causing some Israelis to wonder if a similar assault by Netanyahu's right-wing base could also happen here. In a Haaretz news analysis column this week by Amos Harel, parallels are drawn between Trump’s ability to mobilize and even to weaponize, his loyal supporters and what Netanyahu or his supporters might be tempted to do: “The daily deluge of coronavirus news was shunted aside Wednesday night by the unbelievable scenes in Washington. What had initially looked like another cluster of nut-job conspirators outside the White House became, in the wake of President Donald Trump’s speech, a Bastille-type assault on the Capitol. Insufficient, failed preparedness on the part of the security forces, despite the sensitive timing of the ratification of the results of the presidential election, enabled hundreds of rioters to burst into the building, stop the proper functioning of American government and threaten the safety of the elected officials... It Can’t Happen Here is the title of a well-known novel published by American author Sinclair Lewis in 1935. The dystopian plot is about an American dictator’s rise to power in the period that European countries were beginning to adopt fascism. Trump and his followers were apparently blocked overnight on Wednesday, and it is very possible that the events at the Capitol were the last dangerous but pathetic move of his time in office. However, Israelis who watched the events during the night, glued to CNN (the Israeli networks hardly bothered at all), apparently could not help but ask themselves whether similar scenes also await us here in the future... The more palpable the danger of his imprisonment becomes; the more Netanyahu is fanning the flames here in a way that is quite similar to the way his American friend did it.” With impeachment hearings potentially beginning this week, the situation is quite fluid. We here in Israel, along with the rest of the world, will be watching. Joel Dzodin is a former Detroiter now living in Israel. At different points in his life he has worked as an archaeologist, an IT Help Desk guy, and an online English teacher to adults around the world. Photography has long been a major passion and theme in his life, since taking his first photos at the age of 6, using a Kodak box camera. A lot of Joel’s photographs focus on the small unexamined details of everyday life, such as the beauty of minute water condensation that forms on cold bottles in the hot Israeli weather. During Joel’s time in Israel, he has been fortunate to photograph the activities of the NGO PeacePlayers International, Middle East, witnessing firsthand how authentic friendships can be forged between Jews and Arabs despite long-standing and severe religious, cultural and ideological barriers. He is an inveterate hoarder of technological antiques, so that his young children once referred to his home office as "The NASA Control Room." One of Joel’s major pleasures during normal times is to wander the fields and trails of Israel, stumbling over prehistoric and historic evidence of previous human settlement. During the pandemic, he has had to occupy himself at home by shooting portraits of ants and spiders also sheltering in place, using a mid-1970s Nikon close-up lens adapted for today's digital cameras. Today, Joel lives near Tel Aviv with his wife Susanne, whom he met on a kibbutz in 1975. They have two adult children, one living in the U.S. and the other in Israel. During the current (second) lockdown, he has to practice social distancing outside with his three grandchildren, two of whom are already speaking English.

By Mitchell Polstein Jr. Gerald Bruskin was a cockney Englishman I met in 1979. He passed away from Covid-19 a few weeks ago at age 84. I still play tennis with his son. This is a story about “English Jerry.” A buddy and I were walking up Lexington Avenue in New York in 1979. At East 81st Street, he wanted to stop in at a hair salon and say hello to a friend from the Central Park Tennis Courts, That’s when I first met English Jerry. We both played tennis at the same courts for years without knowing each other. We talked about London and discovered we had something rather remarkable in common. Back in 1962, Jerry was a hairdresser in London, and involved in Jewish charities. B’nai Brith was holding a fundraiser and someone on the committee suggested they hire a group from Liverpool all the kids liked, called the Silver Beatles. John Lennon negotiated four first-class rail tickets and £400 to do the gig. Jerry met the pre-Fab Four and saw the show. Fast forward to New York, 1979. Linda McCartney walks into Jerry’s salon by chance. While doing her hair, Jerry jokingly tells her the story about how he had given her husband Paul his start in show business. The English call that “taking the piss.” She called his bluff, and phoned Paul, who arrived shortly thereafter. A good time was had by all. Well, not to be outdone, I had my own improbable 1960s story.. February 9, 1964. I’m walking up Broadway with my mother and sister after seeing a movie in Times Square. It’s cold. I’m 10 years old. As we pass the Ed Sullivan Theater, a horde of screaming girls engulfs us and sweep me away. I’m pressed up against the rear window of a limousine. I can’t move. I look in through the tinted window and there are four guys with the strangest haircuts I have ever seen. Somehow, I squirm out of the mob, find Mom, and we get out of there. That night, along with the rest of America, I watched the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. The four mop tops in the limo. And if that weren’t a crazy enough coincidence, Jerry also mentioned the day we met that he had moved his young family from London to Jerusalem, where he had opened a hair salon and a laundromat in 1969. I asked Jerry the location of his laundromat. When he told me, I was gobsmacked. I had been in Jerusalem a decade later, staying at the YMCA. I had asked the front desk where the closest laundromat was. They gave me directions, but I got there too late on a Friday afternoon. They were closed for the Sabbath. I didn’t go back. That laundromat, I suddenly realized talking with English Jerry, was the same one I had tried to visit a long time ago. I knew English Jerry for over 40 years. We had a lot of good times together. He would have found humor even in his own Covid Zoom funeral. He will be sorely missed. Mitch Polstein Jr., a native Manhattanite, was the men’s tennis coach at Hunter College in New York City.

By David Weiss | January 7, 2021 | From Deadline Detroit The writer, a Los Angeles freelancer, grew up in Oak Park. He has written for Newsweek, the LA Herald Examiner and Men's Journal and co-founded the band Was (Not Was). Perhaps the most corrosive effect of the Trump era is not the wholesale degradation of our cherished institutions and ideas, it’s that it all began with the election of a man better qualified to sell rotgut, self-branded vodka and inedible steaks than by one deeply motivated by patriotism or a sense of service. It’s government by infomercial host, not by a statesman. Anybody passingly familiar with modern literature will at least remember the title of Samuel Beckett’s bleak one-act play, “Krapp’s Last Tape,” wherein the excrementally-named 69-year-old hero plays recorded audio snippets of himself while sitting alone in his den. Like most of Beckett’s work, it is alternately harrowing and hilarious. And sad -- very, very sad. When it became clear in the last year that our addled and beleaguered chief executive might be headed to a similarly dark and solitary place, I started to imagine writing an “answer play” to Beckett’s entitled “Trump’s Last Tweet.” Picture Dick Nixon downing shots of booze and talking to the White House paintings while “Victory at Sea” blared from the hi-fi. Oh yes, Nixon apparently played tapes of himself as well, the very recordings that helped end his felonious reign. Life imitating art, one of my favorite earthly phenomena.' Now, instead of Krapp or Nixon, picture our putative hero, Donald J. Trump, barricaded in the White House behind that Pee-wee Herman “tiny desk,” pecking away at his phone as the final hours of his term expire. One can only imagine the last snippets of bitterness and bile left in his tawdry soul, but I’m almost sure he’d be filing through his own personal enemies list and getting in his last licks before Joe and Jill show up to paint over his gilded house of horrors. Again, as craven and selfish as Trump has proven to be, this too is a very sad – if not outright depressing -- tableau. Curtain. Back to reality for a moment: I have been contending for a while now that the rise and fall of Donald Trump is a tragedy without a proper hero, at least in the Greek or Shakespearean mold. Many have invoked the memory of King Lear’s descent into madness to find a parallel to Trump’s last days, but I disagree. Lear was a once-great man whose tragic flaws finally did him in, leaving him alone in a raging storm with his faithful Fool ever by his side (one of the great love stories in all of literature for my money). Smoke, mirrors and illusion Contrarily, Donald Trump was never great or powerful, but more resembled the infamous Wizard of Oz, operating behind a curtain of lies, fraud and bankruptcies, with smoke and mirrors and the illusion of television stardom to burnish his image as a brilliant, self-made mogul. Blame Roy Cohn and Mark Burnett for turning a run-of-the-mill real estate grifter into the most powerful con man in the world (after his mentor Vladimir Putin, of course). But again, warts-and-all real life is so much superior to mere works of the imagination, both in its comic and tragic aspects. And Donald Trump – master showman that he is – penned an ignominious last act to his absurdist drama, by having a last go at ginning up the MAGA diehards before going noisily into the dark night of his post-presidency. “Big protest in DC on January 6th,” he tweeted on December 20th. “Be there, will be wild!” Of course, what ensued two weeks later was an abomination to those with even an atom of respect for what was left of American democracy, as locked-and-loaded louts and loudmouths stormed the Thunderdome of the U.S. Capitol and rousted the assembled lawmakers (good and bad people on both sides of the aisle, of course) before they could bring the paper guillotine down on King Donald’s head. And where was the great and mighty royal while his muttering minions did his nefarious bidding? After using the plural pronoun (as in: “Let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue”), Bunker Boy retreated to the safety of the White House, turned on his seventeen TVs and sat down with a six-pack of Diet Coke and a crate of Pringles to watch what fine chaos he’d whipped up. The rest, as we are fond of saying, is history. Of course, Krapp – that is, Trump – also fired up his tiny keyboard and tweeted a few last cowardly salvos before being suspended from the platform. “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Remember this day forever.” Caligula in a golf shirt In the manner of Jerry Springer (one of Donald’s reality TV role models, no doubt), here’s an unasked for final thought: While Donald Trump has lived a life of utter selfishness, greed and avarice, his final act as president (notwithstanding what surprises the wizard has up his sleeve in the next two weeks), might just have been his most charitable! How so? Count Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham among the primary beneficiaries of Donald’s coded call for anarchy and violence. What better way to detach themselves from Death Star Trump than to be shocked and awed by his vindictive and dangerous behavior? They held their noses and golfed alongside the polo-shirted Caligula for four long years, while counting up the federal judges and Supreme Court justices they’d notched. And now they could wax morally indignant at his seditious behavior and finally agree to call poor Joe Biden president. While the credits roll, I have to give a thoroughly ambiguous shout-out to the vicious enemy that Donald calls the China Virus. Without the arrival of Covid -- and his administration’s gross mismanagement of same -- chances are good that we would be staring down four more years of Trump and Barr and Kushner and DeVos and Mnuchin and the rest of the dramatis personae of the most nightmarish drama our frail democracy has ever endured. Heaven forfend, as Shakespeare wrote. And as Trump kept uttering at those ghastly daily press conferences, one death is too many, but maybe the great dramatist in the sky had to summon what they used to call a “deus ex machina” to right what was wrong with our world, at whatever mortal cost to humanity. Measuring but 70 nanometers across, the lowly coronavirus felled the Man Who Would Forever Be King and banished him to twitter-limbo forevermore. Small favors, indeed.

January 8, 2021 Jeffrey D. Sachs | Project Syndicate The storming of the US Capitol by predominantly white supporters of President Donald Trump was in keeping with a long tradition of mob violence directed by white elites in the service of their own interests. The difference this time is that the rioters turned on their own. NEW YORK – The storming of the US Capitol on January 6 is easily misunderstood. Shaken by the ordeal, members of Congress have issued statements explaining that America is a nation of laws, not mobs. The implication is that the disruption incited by President Donald Trump is something new. It is not. The United States has a long history of mob violence stoked by white politicians in the service of rich white Americans. What was unusual this time is that the white mob turned on the white politicians, rather than the people of color who are usually the victims. Of course, the circumstance of this rioting is crucial. The aim was to intimidate Congress into stopping the peaceful transition of power. This is sedition, and in stoking it, Trump has committed a capital offense. In the past, such mob violence has been aimed at more traditional targets of white hate: African-Americans trying to vote or desegregate buses, housing, lunch counters, and schools; Native Americans trying to protect their hunting lands and natural resources; Mexican farmworkers demanding occupational safety; the Chinese immigrant laborers who previously built the railways and worked the mines. These groups were the targets of mob violence stoked by Americans from President Andrew Jackson and the frontiersman Kit Carson in the nineteenth century to Alabama Governor George Wallace in the twentieth. Viewed in this historical light, the mob of righteously indignant “good old boys” who stormed the Capitol had a familiar appearance. As Trump put it in his speech fomenting the riot, they were out to “save” America. “Let the weak [politicians] get out. This is a time for strength,” he declared, deploying familiar riffs. “They also want to indoctrinate your children in school by teaching them things that aren’t so. They want to indoctrinate your children. It’s all part of the comprehensive assault on our democracy.” Throughout American history, most mob violence has come not as a spasmodic explosion of protest from below, but rather as structural violence from above, instigated by white politicians preying on the fears, hatreds, and ignorance of the white underclass. As the historian Heather Cox Richardson documents in her brilliant new book, How the South Won the Civil War, this variety of mob violence has been a critical part of upper-class white America’s defense of a hierarchical society for more than 150 years. America’s culture of white mob violence goes hand in hand with its gun culture. The hundreds of millions of privately owned firearms in the US disproportionately belong to whites; and as the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz points out powerfully in Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, “gun rights” have long been invoked by vigilante white mobs to suppress blacks and Native Americans. Stoking mob violence against people of color is typically how rich whites channel poor whites’ grievances away from themselves. Far from being a specifically Trumpian tactic, it is the oldest trick in the American political playbook. Want to pass a regressive tax cut for the rich? Just tell economically struggling whites that blacks, Muslims, and immigrants are coming to impose socialism. Trump has done precisely this throughout his presidency, warning that without him in office, Americans will “have to learn to speak Chinese.” At his rallies, he routinely champions the Second Amendment and rails against nonwhites, telling congresswomen of color to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” He has urged his followers to manhandle opposition demonstrators, and to throw them out – not just from his rallies, but from the country itself. He has praised white supremacists as “very fine people.” After his Confederate-flag-waving mob stormed the Capitol, he said, “We love you, you’re very special. The Republican Party fully backed Trump and his politics of incitement right up until the afternoon of January 6, when the mob swarmed the Capitol. But Republican leaders’ fealty to Trump has not been driven merely by his hold on the party’s base. Trump represents the essence of the American right. His assigned role has always been clear: to stack the judiciary, cut taxes for corporations and the rich, and push back against demands for social spending and environmental regulation, all while inciting the baying mob to fight “socialism.” January 6 went awry because the white mob turned on the white politicians themselves. This was unacceptable, but not unpredictable. Trump has repeatedly told his followers that they are losing America; and the Republicans’ loss of Georgia’s two Senate seats to an African-American and a Jew doubtless added to the rage. Trump may have been unusually crude in his race-baiting, but his approach has been perfectly in keeping with that of the Republican Party at least since the party’s “Southern strategy” in the 1968 election, in the wake of that decade’s civil-rights legislation. Until last year, Trump was getting the job done for his party’s plutocrat donors, bosses, and business allies. The 2020 election was his to lose – and lose it he did. But the reason was not that he was too racist toward people of color; it was that he was overwhelmingly malevolent and incompetent in the face of a killer pandemic. In the grand sweep of history, America is indeed turning the corner on its past of racism and white mob violence. Barack Obama was elected to the presidency twice, and when Trump won in 2016, he received fewer votes than his opponent. Between Kamala Harris’s election as vice president and Georgia’s Senate elections this week, there is strong evidence to show that America is gradually shifting away from white oligarchic rule. By 2045, non-Hispanic whites will constitute only around half of the population, down from around 83% in 1970. After that, America will become a “majority-minority” country, with non-Hispanic whites accounting for around 44% of the population by 2060. For good reason, younger Americans are more cognizant of racism than previous generations were. The Trumpian virulence on display at the Capitol may have been dismaying. But it should be seen as a desperate, pathetic last gasp. Fortunately, the America of racist white rule is receding, if still far too slowly, into history. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-mob-capitol-familiar-scene-of-white-mob-violence-by-jeffrey-d-sachs-2021-01?%20fbclid=IwAR11eG8aukyt7Ne3mvyxFlB2m4Dhq39rDW9On6iF0rFyLuZjUh7FJfKzvO8

FRED PLOTKIN is one of America’s foremost experts on opera and has distinguished himself in many fields as a writer, speaker, consultant and as a compelling teacher. He is an expert on everything Italian, the person other so-called Italy experts turn to for definitive information.  Fred discovered the concept of "The Renaissance Man" as a small child and has devoted himself to pursuing that ideal as the central role of his life. In a “Public Lives” profile in The New York Times on August 30, 2002, Plotkin was described as "one of those New York word-of-mouth legends, known by the cognoscenti for his renaissance mastery of two seemingly separate disciplines: music and the food of Italy." In the same publication, on May 11, 2006, it was written that "Fred is a New Yorker, but has the soul of an Italian."