Chappelle Is Right: It’s “Mad Max” on Our City Streets

Dave Chappelle was at San Francisco's Chase Center on Thursday night, reveling in the crowd's adoration and his "cancelled" status. (As he advised on stage, anyone who thinks he's a hater should watch his recent Netflix show from beginning to end.) Chappelle loves the Bay Area -- it's where he perfected his act. But like any visitor to SF, he was blown away by the sight of growing human misery on our streets. "It looks like 'Mad Max,'" he "joked" at the sold-out Chase Center. "What the fuck has been goin' on around here?"

What's been goin' on is detailed in this SF Chronicle editorial and in a recent report by the Southern California chapter of the ACLU. After years of spiking real estate prices and federal retreat from the housing market since the Reagan era, the Golden State is facing a massive homeless crisis. According to the most recent study, more than 160,000 people are homeless on a single night in California.

Instead of treating this as the major public disaster it is, the ACLU report points out, too many communities in California and elsewhere are criminalizing those who have lost their homes. Cities have passed multiple ordinances that punish the victims. As a result, states the ACLU, the unhoused must be legally viewed as a discriminated population, with all the Constitutional protections of any minority group.

But we must go further than that, as I've long argued. We must declare that housing is a human right, just as food, health care and education are. We don't allow people to starve on our streets. Why do we allow people to be deprived of shelter?

As this Chronicle editorial points out, many of our fellow citizens suffer from "denialism" about the unhoused. They tell themselves that the homeless on our streets are from out of state or mentally ill. Not true. The vast majority of the desperate people you see on the streets of San Francisco once had homes in our city. Many of them were evicted by greedy landlords in the past decade after the new tech work force started pouring into the city -- following Mayor Ed Lee's 2011 "Twitter tax break" -- with little new housing to accommodate them.

Market forces and corporatized politics created the homeless crisis. And the only way out of it is massive public intervention in the housing market, to ensure that enough affordable housing is built. As the Chronicle editorial reads: "It will take years to adequately address the housing crisis, even under the most optimistic scenarios. But to end massive homelessness, we need to think in terms of multi-year investments. And, as with the climate crisis, we will need federal assistance to scale up response to the necessary level."

The misery right outside San Francisco’s City Hall

Will Democrats Get the Left Message?

The sky is falling! That's what the New York Times and the rest of the liberal pundit class are screaming today after Terry McAuliffe got defeated by a Republican in the Virginia governor's race. On NPR, James Carville predictably bashed the left wing of the Democratic Party for Tuesday's losses. But here's the thing: McAuliffe is no progressive. Like Carville, he's a washed-up Clintonite, a corporate Democrat from a bygone era. As President Biden tries in vain to find a middle path in Washington, it was a bad day indeed for centrist candidates.

Meanwhile, in Boston, ardent progressive Michelle Wu trounced her moderate rival by 28 points to become that city's next mayor. As the Times pointed out, Wu had ample time during the campaign to steer toward the middle. But she remained steadfastly connected to her progressive principles, championing rent control and climate action among other issues.

The Times won't say this today so I will. The Democrats better deliver on the big reforms promised by Biden, or they will indeed get rolled in next year's midterms -- and then no legislative progress will get made in our deeply fucked-up country.

Tax billionaires, expand Medicare, roll back the climate apocalypse, grant new parents decent family leave, fight Big Pharma's price gouging, give hardworking immigrants in our country a path to citizenship. These are hugely popular issues. And unless the Democrats can deliver on them, voters will decide the party is useless.

“Someone Would Have Talked” (cont.)

This is the line that the lazy and the cowardly and the compromised in the media and other halls of power have bleated for years, by way of insisting the "case is closed" in the JFK assassination. But numerous people with inside information HAVE indeed talked during the last 50-plus years... but nobody at the New York Times or CNN or the White House, for that matter, has been listening. The latest insider to spill secrets about the Kennedy assassination is the son of a former Cuban exile hitman under contract to the CIA named Ricardo Morales. Before he himself was murdered in 1982, Morales revealed what he knew about the events leading up to Dallas.

Morales, who felt the walls closing on him, confessed to his son that he was a CIA sniper instructor at a secret camp in Florida -- and that among his trainees was young Lee Harvey Oswald. According to Morales, there was no way that Oswald could've pulled off "the magic bullet" feat in Dallas because he was not a skilled marksman.

This connection between Oswald and the CIA's deadly covert war on Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba immediately became the investigative focus of then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy after the murder of his brother. Other anti-Castro Cuban militants like Antonio Veciana have also tied Oswald to the CIA. As Senator Richard Schweiker famously said after he investigated the Kennedy assassination for the Church Committee in the 1970s, "the fingerprints of intelligence" were all over Oswald. He was set up to take the fall for the "murder most foul" -- he was, as he shouted to the press in the Dallas police station, nothing more than "a patsy."

Will the New York Times take notice of this latest revelation about the Kennedy assassination? After all, it's a well-reported article in the Miami Herald. Don't hold your breath. Will it compel President Biden to finally abide by the law and release thousands of JFK documents that are still being hidden by the CIA? Again, don't count on it.

The Kennedy coverup by the political ruling order and the corporate media has been long and vast. But the truth has an inconvenient way of leaking out.

Everything is broken in America. Trump's vile rule made that shockingly clear. And we still can't fully confront existential issues like the climate crisis, the growing gap between the super rich and the rest of us, and the grotesque disinvestment in our national future. The bad guys won in Dallas in November 1963 -- and they are still winning.

But if we can take control of our past, maybe we still have a future.

Ricardo Morales, known as “Monkey,” second left, and his “cleanup” crew posing with CIA-provided sniper rifles. The date and the location of the photo are not known.

Let Us Now Praise Mort Sahl

Mort Sahl, who died yesterday at his Mill Valley, CA home at age 94, gets to go to comedy heaven, where the crowds are always standing room only. My colleague Karen Croft and I had the pleasure of getting to know Mort while we were researching our book Brothers. Mort, a famous news junkie, had often bumped into my Dad, actor Lyle Talbot (a fellow newsie), at a sprawling news stand in Studio City (remember those?) But I got to know Mort because he sacrificed his lucrative entertainment career to raise public awareness about the JFK assassination.

Mort was a lovely, warm, genuinely funny man. I remember the lunch that Karen and I enjoyed with him several years ago at San Francisco's legendary Zuni Cafe. Mort was bemoaning the City's slide into banality since his golden years at the hungry i nightclub in North Beach in the 1950s and early '60s, with the likes of Lenny Bruce and very young Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand. Just then a nude bicyclist went rolling merrily by right outside the Zuni's big picture window. Mort took notice of the spectacle, paused as only a great standup comic can, and said, "Then again..."

Here is a passage from Brothers about Mort. He was a hero, a bold truth-teller to the end -- and I salute his courage and talent.

Comedian Mort Sahl emerged as the most prominent critic of the Warren Report in the entertainment industry, putting his career on the line by turning his popular nightclub act into a running critique of the official investigation and charging that JFK was the victim of a government plot.

... Sahl had supplied JFK with gags during the 1960 presidential campaign but had fallen out with the Kennedy camp after the election, when he switched back to his role as political satirist and began tweaking the new president. Old Joe Kennedy thought you were either with the family or against it. He didn't laugh when Saul sent him a congratulatory telegram: "You haven't lost a son. You gained a country."

But Jack was different. He knew how to laugh at himself. Sahl admired his grace and humor. He thought his "Peace Speech" at American University should be taught in schools. He thought his murder was "the foulest event of our lives." That sort of thing was not supposed to happen in America. And where were the watchdogs of the American press? He was revolted by the sentimentalization of Kennedy's death, the way that Walter Cronkite led the nation in an orgy of "communal crying." He took a savage view of the news media's supine acceptance of the Warren Report. "Hitler said that he always knew you could buy the press. What he didn't know was you could get them cheap." When District Attorney Jim Garrison announced he was reopening the case, Sahl flew to New Orleans and volunteered to help him. Finally, someone was doing something to solve the crime of the century.

Revisting the JFK Coup

JFK Revisited... You can now watch the trailer for Oliver Stone's eye-opening new documentary about the JFK assassination -- which, I'm told, has finally found a U.S. distributor. I'm honored to be included in the film, along with such leading JFK truth-tellers as Dr. Cyril Wecht, Dr. Gary Aguilar, John Newman and Jefferson Morley.

Stone's 1991 dramatic feature, JFK, blew the American people's minds (including mine) and forced Congress to release thousands of Kennedy documents, many of which I used in writing my books Brothers and The Devil's Chessboard. (Many other relevant Kennedy documents are STILL being hidden by the CIA, in blatant defiance of the law.)

Watch the trailer -- and the documentary when it comes out. You have a right to your own history.

(Thanks to producer-writer James DiEugenio, who made JFK Revisited possible.)

Bannon and Trump: Lock Them Up!

Now that Congress has finally found Steve Bannon in contempt, it's long past time to prosecute Donald Trump for his myriad crimes against democracy. As David Brock points out on today's NYT editorial page, Trump never went away -- despite liberals' head-in-the-sand wishes. And his incendiary statements about his "stolen" presidential election are the peak of his criminal offensive.

"The insurrection took place on Nov. 3, Election Day," Trump has lied. "Jan. 6 was the protest!"

Trump continues to aggressively sabotage American democracy. And the Republican Party has become his willing tool, with its dozens of voter suppression laws, its constant cries of election fraud, and its scorched-earth strategy to contest (or recall) every winning Democratic candidate.

As Brock writes, the Republicans are no longer a "normal" party -- and Trump is far from a normal political leader. He's a thuggish despot, and he means to take back America.

We need to wake up and stop him.

A Three-Dot Item on John & Yoko

I miss John Lennon. And I miss Herb Caen! The glory days of newspaper columnists are long gone. Nowadays cities don't know what they are any longer, in part because of the disappearance of the likes of Caen in SF, and NYC's Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin. Anyway, here's a great Herb Caen item about Lennon and Yoko Ono's stay in Frisco in 1972. (I know, I know, Caen said never to call it that -- but he wasn't always right.) The item was undoubtedly slipped to Caen by Facebook friend Craig Pyes, who always had (and has) a nose for news.

Rachel Maddow, Voice of the People

If you want to know what's wrong with the "liberal media," just take a look at Rachel Maddow's new $30 million annual deal with NBCUniversal. Maddow, who will reportedly step away from her nightly show next year, is actually being paid a lot more to work a lot less.

In The Paper (an excellent movie about the glory days of New York newspapers), Robert Duvall, playing an ink-stained managing editor, says to a disgruntled colleague, "People like us don't make the money." That's true of nearly all journalists -- but not ones like Maddow.

Journalists who make $30 million a year are owned. Oh, I'm sure Maddow doesn't see it that way. But she is a corporate asset. Maybe she would compulsively bash the Russians anyway. Maybe she would still have policed the Democratic Party, making sure that the likes of Bernie Sanders and other outspoken socialists never got anywhere near the top. But that $30 million a year ensures that she will remain a voice of the Democratic establishment, at a time when we desperately need unbought, articulate media voices.

When I was running Salon, I could've sold out to Jeff Bezos and Amazon. I could have turned Salon into a small satellite of the New York Times or Time-Warner. But (as my family often wryly reminds me), I never got rich off my media venture. We remained rigorously and giddily independent. And years later, I still have no regrets -- even though at age 70, I have no family savings to speak of.

Some journalists value their work higher than their bank accounts. Near the end of the film version of The Crucible (another good movie), the character played by Daniel Day-Lewis says he can't sign a bogus confession "because it's my name." He says it with great agony because it means he will be executed. I never faced the same life-or-death stakes. But that scene deeply moved me.

Laughing all the way to the bank

Zoom in for the Next American Revolution

Native American warrior Madonna Thunder Hawk (pictured with her daughter Marcy Gilbert) will be one of the highlights on the UC Santa Cruz Zoom panel on revolutionary activism then and now. It's happening Tuesday evening at 5:30 PM Pacific time. And you can register for free here.

Madonna will be joined by radical legends Heather Booth, Dolores Huerta, and Bill Zimmerman -- all of whom are featured in the new book by Margaret Talbot and me, By the Light of Burning Dreams. Join us!

I Watched Chappelle’s Show - And… It’s Complicated

OK, I actually watched Dave Chappelle's show last night ("The Closer"). And, as they say in Facebookland, it's complicated. Yes, he walks a knife's edge and sometimes goes gleefully falling off. He insults (or provokes) not just LGBTQ people but his "Asian brothers and sisters," women, Jews and others. That's what edgy comics do -- and Chappelle is one of our edgiest... and best.

So I understand the anger of LGBTQ people, who see the show as a clear-cut case of further victimization. But here's the thing. I don't think it is. I think Chappelle -- in his sometimes crude, fucked-up but brilliant way -- is trying to spark a dialogue between the LGBTQ and African-American communities. (The fact that many trans people are Black seems to confuse him.)

Bottom line: is Chappelle "transphobic?" No. Should he be cancelled? Hell, no!

But I DO wish he'd use his scathing talents against the truly powerful more often. (At one point in the show, Chappelle approvingly quotes a trans friend saying that Dave does not hit up or down.) Tearing to shreds the likes of McConnell, Manchin and Sinema and our whole corrupt, money-driven political system; soulless Big Oil, Big Tech and Big Pharma corporate masters; merchants of death (the makers of military weapons marketed for overseas and domestic use); reactionary Texas and Florida lawmakers; the CIA; and the bloodthirsty, perpetual, imperial American war machine.

Now THAT would make me laugh.

Chappelle and Netflix: Hit Up, Not Down

Media gatekeepers agonistes... Netflix execs are on the defensive for strongly defending comic Dave Chappelle's new stand-up show, in which he again goes off on trans people, women and lesbians. I'm going to watch Chappelle's show (while I still can), because I'm a big fan of his comic brilliance and because I hate being told what to watch -- whether it's by Republican mullahs or by cancel culture lefties. But I must confess, I'm getting tired of Chappelle hitting down -- pummeling people who have very little voice in how America is actually run. People who are often the targets of discrimination and even violence. Chappelle is at his cutting best when he trashes white racism and the smugness of the powerful. But trans people? Come on, Dave, pick on someone your own size -- or bigger.

While we're on this theme, Netflix chief execs Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos should stop giving themselves credit for being so brave. If you're a regular viewer of Netflix -- or other streaming services like Amazon's Prime Video -- you know how safe and banal they generally are. Take the subject of war and espionage, my own areas of interest. When have these big entertainment channels ever offered truly challenging shows on national security? The answer is never. All of their programs -- whether documentaries or dramas -- look like they've been vetted by the big CIA office in Hollywood. Their Cold War spy thrillers always present the Americans as dashing heroes and their enemies as dark villains. Our spies are never shown overthrowing democratic governments or assassinating elected leaders. (For a reality check on the CIA, read my book The Devil's Chessboard.)

It's time for Chappelle -- and for Hastings and Sarandos -- to begin hitting up. If they've got real guts.

The Progressive Caucus vs. the Hyde Amendment

Men are hypocrites. And sometimes they get exposed. When I was running Salon back in 1998, we revealed that Rep. Henry Hyde — the Republican leader of the House Judiciary Committee who was sitting in judgment on President Bill Clinton for his sexual recklessness with a White House intern — was himself guilty of an adulterous affair with beautician Cherie Snodgrass that broke up her family with three young children. When Hyde tried to write off the destructive, five-year affair as a “youthful indiscretion” — though he was in his 40s at the time — he became the laughingstock of late-night TV. Salon did not venture lightly into the shark-infested waters of sexual politics. But we decided that Hyde’s sexual hypocrisy — at a critical juncture for the nation when even the New York Times was heralding him as a “lion of Congress” — made him fair game.

But Henry Hyde has gone down in history for another rank exercise in sexual hypocrisy — the so-called Hyde Amendment that for decades has cut off Medicaid funding for poor women needing abortions. President Joe Biden finally decided not to renew the noxious amendment. But Senator Joe Manchin, the wolf in Democratic clothing, is trying to hold the president hostage on his Build Back Better legislation by (among other things) forcing him to revive the Hyde Amendment.

To the credit of the House Progressive Caucus, they are standing firm against Manchin’s bullying. Caucus leader Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, one of the Congress members who recently spoke out about her own experience with abortion, vowed that progressive legislators will not cave to Manchin’s demand on the Hyde Amendment — and so far Biden has been siding with them. (Caucus members are willing to make some compromises on the funding of social programs, front-loading the expenditures.)

For too long, men in Washington like Henry Hyde, Joe Manchin — and Brett Kavanaugh — have been dictating women’s reproductive decisions, after availing themselves of women’s bodies. It’s time to end this revolting male supremacy. Politicians like these should get their grubby hands off women’s bodies, once and for all.

The media picked up on Salon’s expose.

$enator Kyrsten $inema Is All About the Benjamins, Baby

Everyone knows that Senator Joe Manchin might as well have corporate decals all over his business suits like a NASCAR driver. But Senator Kyrsten Sinema -- the OTHER, less infamous Democrat on the verge of sabotaging President Joe Biden's national renewal bills -- is just as owned by corporate America. Among her main objections to Biden's bills, says Sinema, is they would tax the wealthy to pay for social spending and they would also control Big Pharma profiteering. Both of these provisions are hugely popular with voters, including Republicans and independents. So don't buy Sinema's line that she is trying to appeal to a broad swath of the electorate in purple Arizona. Sinema's opposition to Biden's bedrock legislation is all about the Benjamins.

Among Sinema's corporate underwriters are the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the main Big Pharma lobbying group, which also happen to be leading the campaign against Biden's legislation. In addition, Sinema is financed by Goldman Sachs, Comcast, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Alphabet (the corporate parent of "don't do evil" Google) and other big business brand names.

Sinema began her political career as a Green Party activist and she identifies as bisexual. So she's cool, right? That's what Emily's List, the backer of women candidates, and the LGBTQ Victory Fund, and the League of Conservation Voters think. They've all given money to her, proving once again that single-issue politics will be the death of the progressive cause in America.

As long as Big Money can buy politicians like Kyrsten Sinema, there will be no sweeping progress in America. We are doomed as a nation to keep driving on crumbling roads and bridges, to endure devastating climate havoc, to underinvest in education and our children's future -- in short, to be a backward shithole of a country where the rich get richer and the rest of us get fucked.

But, hey, Kyrsten sure looks sassy in those lavender dresses, doesn't she?

The CIA Wanted to Kill Julian Assange Too

A big round of applause to Yahoo News (!) and the Intercept for breaking this story on how President Trump's CIA plotted to kidnap and assassinate Wikileaks’ Julian Assange. (The spy agency also contemplated targeting journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, who aided whistleblower Edward Snowden, as enemies of the state,)

The CIA is a dangerous, rogue agency and has been ever since it was created -- as Presidents Truman (who reluctantly approved its founding) and Kennedy (we know what happened to him) publicly stated. JFK should've followed through on his threat to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." But Kennedy's enemies -- led by Allen Dulles, the psychotic former CIA chief -- shattered his head in Dallas before he could remake the national security state.

Now there is no presidential will to rein in the CIA. And there is no popular movement to wind down the U.S. empire. We're truly fucked.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo considered Assange a legitimate assassination target

Defeat Racist Republican Recall Campaigns

Cheers to San Francisco Chronicle columnist Justin Phillips for calling it like it is. The Republican efforts to recall progressive elected officials -- like SF District Attorney Chesa Boudin -- are part of a Jim Crow revival to disenfranchise Black voters. Funded by fat-cat hedge fund and Silicon Valley billionaires, these recall campaigns double down on their cynical racism by hiring African Americans to gather signatures for the recall initiatives. Despite their shameless racial window dressing, these Republican recall campaigns generally harm minority citizens. Boudin, for instance, has taken steps to reduce the city's nonviolent prison population, which is disproportionately nonwhite and poor, through alternative programs. America's teeming prison-industrial complex is another grotesque manifestation of the new Jim Crow era. As Van Jones declared years ago, we need more books and fewer iron bars.

If the big-money Republican effort to oust Chesa Boudin gets on the ballot this fall, voters should overwhelmingly defeat it -- just as Californians crushed the recall campaign against Gov. Gavin Newsom. As Phillips wrote, these recalls are racist attacks on our democracy by elite white interests. By contrast, Chesa Boudin is For the People.

Criminalizing the Climate Crisis - It’s Time to Name Names

The mainstream media finally recognizes that the global climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity. But newspapers and news channels still refrain from pointing fingers at the chief culprits behind the rapidly escalating meltdown, namely Big Oil executives and their political puppets, who are STILL lobbying against deep climate reforms as the world burns and drowns. We know that MORE THAN FOUR DECADES have passed since Exxon managers were informed by their own scientists about fossil fuel burning's contribution to environmental catastrophe. And yet they did nothing -- or rather these executives did worse than nothing, bankrolling climate crisis denial campaigns and pliable politicians who blocked serious reform efforts. ExxonMobil, under current CEO Darren Woods, continues to lobby against legislative measures to deter environmental disaster.

So kudos to journalist (and friend) Mark Hertsgaard, who is helping lead a media effort to criminalize the powerful men who are destroying Earth. As Mark points out in this article, there is no better time than the upcoming climate summit in Glasgow in November to name these global criminals and to demand they finally be brought to justice. The climate crisis is a crime beat. A small number of corporate executives and politicians are profiting enormously from humanity's growing distress. No more.

Wanted for crimes against nature and humanity: Big Oil CEO Darren Woods

Whew! I’m Turning 70!

Goodbye to the swinging 60s. On Wednesday I’m turning 70. And I’m hugely relieved that I made it this far. I should’ve been dead by now… several times. As I wrote in my memoir, Between Heaven and Hell, I was fully prepared to check out in November 2017 when I had my stroke. I was saying serene farewells to my family as they gathered around my hospital bed. But just like Al Pacino in The Godfather, when you think you’re out, they pull you back in. I have a very insistent — persistent — family.

All in all, I’m glad to still be alive — despite it all. Despite a country and a world that seems to keep finding fresh hells. A dismayed friend told me yesterday that his 92-year-old mother thinks this is the worst America’s ever been in her lifetime. I’m not sure about that. I remember the assassinations and bloody uprisings and endless foreign war and dark shadow of the Bomb — yes, the swinging 60s. But back then we also had a movement and a counterculture and the music. What do we have today? A world on fire. A Republican America that has gone completely bonkers. And a woke cancel culture that cannibalizes itself. Ugh.

And yet we beat on, boats against the current. I take pleasure in the creative achievements of those around me. Our Bernal Heights bungalow continues to churn out movies, books, music videos, street art, pop-up meals, etc. If dreams were thunder and lightning was desire, this old house would’ve burned down a long time ago. During the ‘60s and ‘70s, right here in San Francisco, we tried to build an alternate reality, inside the dying flesh of the old world. And we partly succeeded. (I wrote about it in Season of the Witch.) We’re still doing that at our house, like countless other families, collectives, bands.

The goal is the same, I’ve told my family and friends. To survive, to thrive, we need to go tribal. We need to take care of each other. We need to create the new world that we want to live in.

I couldn’t be there on the Paramount lot when my son Joe recently directed a music video for a big singer, which will be out later this year. (He’s between movies.) But I loved hearing how he assembled a crew of esteemed friends, family members and colleagues, and what a fun ship he reportedly captained. When he was a boy, Joe watched my wife, Camille Peri, and I do the same thing with many of our closest friends in journalism, after we launched Salon, the pioneering web publication. We were always on the verge of bankruptcy, often the target of Republican vipers. But we sailed merrily on together for a decade. (Miraculously, Salon still sails on today with a mostly different crew.)

So what are my words of wisdom as I approach the 70th-year milestone? Celebrate your survival. Stick with your tribe. Inhabit the world you desire.

I’m from Hollywood originally. I’ve always wanted my books to become movies, TV series. I’ve always believed the best story wins. And now my dream is coming true. At age 70, I’m suddenly a screenwriter and a producer. You live long enough and impossible things start to happen. Go figure.

Btw, this is a photo of me, at age 23 I’m guessing. I lived in a Venice, California bungalow with the creative and beautiful Zheutlin sisters. I always look stoned in old photos. But we were just high on life. I suppose I still am.

I’m a Californian First - An American Second

Today’s recall election in the biggest state in the union brought it home for me — again. I’m a Californian first and foremost. So I voted no. No on Trumpism, climate denial, public health selfishness, scientific ignorance, racial bigotry, misogyny… in short, all the “values” that animate Red State America. Seventy-four million Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2020. He only lost reelection — after everything that Americans knew about him — because of a record turnout for Joe Biden. That’s why I can’t proudly call myself an American.

It’s true that California, once you leave the deep-blue cities, is also Trump territory. And we had to suffer through a Republican recall campaign — another assault on our electoral system — because of California’s wacky populism, despite the fact that Republicans are becoming as extinct as the state’s once mighty grizzly bear. But Gavin Newsom is going to win BIG today, because a lopsided majority of my fellow state citizens embraces facts and progress, instead of the shibboleths of the past.

Look, Gavin Newsom will NEVER be a hero of the left. He will never place PG&E under state ownership no matter how many wildfires that the big utility sparks through its mismanagement. He will never crack down on Airbnb and greedy landlords, no matter how bad the homeless crisis and evictions become. He will never do the research on the RFK assassination case that would prompt him to uphold the parole of Sirhan Sirhan. But he is still more advanced than any other state leader in America.

Back in 2017, when I was writing a column for the San Francisco Chronicle, I did a pointed interview with then Lieutenant Governor Newsom, pushing him hard on his cozy relations with the wealthy elite, his soft spot for Big Tech, and his reputation as a lightweight (or “haircut in search of a man,” as some critics unkindly put it). Newsom held his own, and after the column was published did the smart political thing by texting me. “Appreciated the balance in today’s article — good/tough questions,” he wrote.

As a media entrepreneur and San Francisco journalist, I had known Gavin over the years and always found him interesting, even when wanting. Back in 2004, when my publication Salon threw a party at the Democratic Convention in Boston, every party bigwig in attendance — including openly gay Rep. Barney Frank — snubbed Newsom, not wanting to be photographed with the San Francisco mayor who had given George W. Bush and Karl Rove a big wedge issue by legalizing same-sex marriage. My political editor Joan Walsh and I, feeling sorry for Newsom, greeted him and had a drink with him, or he might have been left all alone at the party. Sometimes Gavin does the right thing, even when it’s not the political thing.

That’s why I replied this way to his text in 2017: “I’m rooting for you to be the JFK/RFK I know is inside you.” I knew that would mean a lot to him — his dad, a state politico, had worked on Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential primary campaign. And Gavin clearly was touched by what I texted. “I appreciate that, seriously!” he wrote back.

I’m still rooting for Gavin. Yesterday, on the campaign stump in Long Beach, he found his voice. He connected with his audience in a much more visceral way than the sometimes wonky, dyslexic politician has in the past. I want him to crush the Republican recall — as he probably will. Then I want him to continue making California a beacon of national enlightenment, as the governors of Texas and Florida and Red State America drag their citizenry backwards to a dark past.

I no longer expect big things from America. Joe Biden’s incremental opposition to our massive social and ecological collapse is about as good as we’re going to get in my lifetime. But I do expect California to keep lighting the way forward. We need to keep Gavin Newsom in office. And we need to keep pushing him to do the right thing.

Yes, Joe Biden IS a Gold Star Father

You gotta LOVE the New York Times (not). In its latest cri du coeur for America's rapidly declining empire, the Times features a Sunday front-page story by Katie Rogers attacking President Biden for still mourning the loss of his eldest son, Beau. Serving with the Delaware National Guard, Beau Biden was stationed on Balad Air Base in Iraq, where Dick Cheney's firm, the military contractor Halliburton, burned 140 tons of waste a day -- including body parts, used bandages and other medical garbage, plastics, old tires, you name it -- in open-air burn pits.

The Times quotes William McGurn -- a speechwriter for President George W. Bush (both of whom should burn in an open pit of Hell) -- who had the temerity to scold President Biden in a Wall Street Journal column. "Mr. Biden is not a Gold Star father and should stop playing one on TV," sneered McGurn.

But Joe Biden IS a Gold Star father -- and he should come out and say it loud and clear. As he himself suspects, his son Beau died from a rare brain cancer 18 moths after returning home from Iraq after inhaling the toxic fumes from the Balad burn pits day in and day out. As veterans groups now suing the Pentagon and Halliburton know, countless numbers of U.S. soldiers -- as well as Iraqi and Afghan people -- were poisoned by the fumes from the burn pits.

Army veteran Joseph Hickman conducted a lengthy investigation of the burn pit medical crisis -- which he calls the Agent Orange scandal of the War on Terror. His work resulted in a book that I had the honor of editing.

Thousands of sick and dying veterans and their families know the truth. So does Joe Biden. His son was another victim of the endless war in the Middle East. He died from the “friendly smoke” — as I call it — of war. As a Gold Start parent, Joe Biden should let the world know about his son's sacrifice.

And yes, fuck the New York Times, which lacked the courage to even mention the burn pit scandal, despite widespread knowledge about the circumstances of Beau's death.

Joe Biden bids farewell to his son Beau

Apocalypse Now?

When I was a high school senior at Oakwood School in North Hollywood, I was cast in the lead role of a musical by my talented classmate Richard Saul called Apocalypso! As I recall, it was a crazy mashup of a Fred Astaire spectacle and an end-of-the-world drama. (I was cast because I was the new guy in the artsy school, after being forced out of a military prep school. I could sing but wasn’t much of a dancer.) Dystopia was always in the back of our young minds then. There was always the shadow of the Bomb, of course. But, as we usually forget, the 1960s and early ‘70s were also a graveyard of dreams: endless war, assassinations, racial uprisings. And still, it all seems like a rosy dawn compared to the grim realities of today.

The climate crisis is now officially front-page news. Every day. Hurricanes, biblical downpours, drought, hellfires, orange skies… end of world stuff. But the human race — or more specifically our political and corporate elites — have proven incompetent to deal with these apocalyptic threats. While President Biden tries to push through a massive public works bill to bolster our overwhelmed infrastructure, what are the executives of Disney, Pfizer, ExxonMobil and countless other corporate brand names doing? They’re lobbying against the essential bill, because it modestly raises corporate taxes. A bill that is already hanging by a thread because the science and reality-denying Republicans are only one senator away from blocking any and all progress in the U.S.

Meanwhile, the New York Times — which is supposed to be the voice of reason in America — seems more hysterical about the Taliban than the actual end of the world. The Times revealed its true imperial colors by freaking out over President Biden’s declaration that the era of U.S. overreach in the world is over. As Biden boldly put it, the U.S. must no longer launch “major military operations to remake other countries.” Times reporter Mark Landler scrambled to get a platoon of pundits to denounce Biden’s anti-imperial policy, including, get this, Tony Blair (!) That’s right, the former British PM so disgraced by his groveling partnership with the Bush-Cheney war juggernaut that he can’t show his face in public in England.

Meanwhile, House Democrats sided with Republicans to beat back a Biden attempt to modestly cut the Pentagon budget. It’s enough to make you give up on pathetic American democracy.

I never thought I’d say this, but old, doddering Joe Biden might be our last chance to save America. He seems a different man in the White House. He’s 78. He lost a beloved son to that endless war in the Middle East. He seems to be a man scuffed by life and as it nears the end, with nothing to lose. Yes, he’s still a corporate toady in some respects. Yes, he’s still too enamored of the long-dead rituals and niceties of Capitol Hill. But there’s some kind of new bold streak in the man that feels like our last best hope.

So I’ll say it again. Fuck the New York Times and all the whining voices of neoliberalism. I’m with Joe. I have kids and maybe someday grandkids too. I want them to live.