Breaking News07/06,13/2023 "What's Up with Woke" - Speech given to the Lyme Library on July 6th with and an encore performance on July 13th. The videos vary slightly with the key difference being the audience participation. Please click here for the text of the speech. 11/16/2022 ADF
Interviews award-winning journalist Maggie Haberman
about her new best-selling
book,
"Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking
of America" for
Silurians
Press Club.
01/06/2022
January 6 Was a Bigger Threat to
Democracy Than September 11 On September 11, 2001, as a
correspondent for CNN, I was four blocks away as I watched
the north tower of the World Trade Center crumble. At the
time, and until last January 6, I was certain that that
slaughter of nearly 3,000 people was the Pearl Harbor of my
lifetime. I was wrong. It was an attack on the Western
capitalist system being waged by a small terrorist group
headquartered nearly 7,000 miles away. While the
counterattack by the US has been long, painful, and
unimaginably expensive as life changed to embrace a huge
security and surveillance society most evident at the
airports, the Osama bin Laden crowd was never going to be
able to sustain a prolonged assault on our shores. The terrorist assault on the US
Capitol on January 6th by American-born traitors was far
worse and already has had more catastrophic consequences for
the American public. The traitors started here inside the
White House and remain here on the loose, growing, piling
one lie on another as they aim to destroy the electoral
process. Sadly, the Republican Party,
under the corrosive, corrupting influence of Donald Trump,
has become a vast criminal enterprise with no interest in
preserving democratic institutions. The Koch brothers’
network and a host of other ultra-rich secretive donors
support Trump’s treacherous undermining of the nation
because they aim to destroy the citizens’ trust in
government and its ability to tax them. They are The Enemy
Within. As Trump repeatedly demonstrated
during the campaign of 2016 and his presidency, he was
drawing record crowds to the monkey house while the snakes
like Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) were busy doing dirty deals
in the dark in the reptile house. The cynical political
operatives who propelled Trump to the presidency knew his
constant greed and incessant need for attention were ideal
for them to operate in his shadow.
Coached by his father, Trump grew
up learning how to lie, cheat, and steal — and discriminate
against minorities — until it was the only way he knew. When
his golf buddies at Winged Foot Golf Club tried an
intervention to curtail his constant cheating on the course,
he responded: “I cheat in business, I cheat on my wives, why
shouldn’t I cheat at golf?” For decades, Trump was a
relatively harmless tabloid creature, a buffoonish
embodiment of greed who only hurt the people unfortunate
enough to think they could do business fairly with him. Once
upon a time, his outlandishness was seemingly
inconsequential since he was always quotable and colorful,
even if he “exaggerated” — a term the press customarily used
to avoid calling him an outright liar. He became a master of playing the
suckers by cultivating publicity and corrupting the press.
Gossip columnists like Cindy Adams incessantly touted him
while being fed — literally and figuratively — by him. His
belief that the press was corrupt derived from his role in
corrupting the press: giving free rides to his Atlantic City
casinos and later to Palm Beach, FL, on his jet, and comping
stays at Mar-a-Lago and his other resorts. Most news organizations have
conflict-of-interest standards that prohibit acceptance of
freebies and other financial inducements. Those ethical
standards, if they even exist at many Trump-supporting media
companies such as Fox News, quite possibly are being
ignored. Now we can only hope that the defamation lawsuits
filed by Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems will uncover
the true financial relationships between Trump and Fox News
anchors such as Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Laura
Ingraham, Maria Bartiromo, and Lou Dobbs, my one-time boss
at CNN. How many free plane rides, rounds of golf, dinners,
and free or discounted memberships at Mar-a-Lago or other
Trump properties did these people receive? How much were
media companies controlled by Rupert Murdoch and others
paying the Trump Organization to stay on his corruptible
good side? The public deserves answers. Discovery in these cases could be
ripe with information that would be vital to the public’s
understanding of the motivations of the Fox News personnel.
My guess is Fox and the other broadcasters being sued will
settle the minute any legal team gets close to obtaining
access to those financial records, which, as part of a
criminal enterprise or civil conspiracy case, should not be
subject to so-called First Amendment protections.
The arrangements between Trump
and the insurrectionist US senators and representatives will
be far more difficult to unravel. All those parties are
beholden to the same dark, hidden financial sources whose
interests are in limiting or destroying the government’s
power to tax, regulate, or investigate them. We can only
hope that traitors like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Sen. Josh
Hawley (R-MO), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) , et al. will wither
in the disinfecting sunlight of investigative fact-finding. Finally, the prosecution of Trump
and his closest thug allies is mandatory. My hope is that
the upcoming work of the Select Committee to Investigate the
January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol will begin
to enlighten the millions of Trump supporters who so far
have resisted rationality. Trump’s public seems to be
impervious to facts. I attribute his popularity, in part, to
how much of the mainstream press discounted his celebrity
during the 2016 campaign and underplayed how he and the
Republicans were clearly waging the Second Civil War.
Trump’s embrace of bigotry emboldened racists and others
defiantly proud to be stupid. The people Trump and his
rightwing GOP minions fired up to attack the Capitol and
brutalize police officers proclaim that buying his lies
promoting the overturning of fair elections is an act of
patriotism rather than treason. The Democratic Party also seems
to underestimate the power of Trump’s enabling of racist and
vigilante behavior. During the 2016 election, the Democratic
Party failed to grasp the power of old-fashioned lawn signs
and hats that gave the Trump supporters the feeling that
they belonged to something special. They marketed like crazy
while the Democrats continued their long losing streak of
failing to dictate the language of political debates and
understanding the need to coin political cliches, such as
MAGA, that have staying power. It is way past time for a
Democratic sloganeer to come up with a catchy pejorative for
Trump and the Republicans to counter the onslaught of “Let’s
Go Brandon” paraphernalia already polluting the political
environment. Likewise, out of fear of being
labeled religious bigots, the press and the Democrats
greatly underplayed the insidious alliance between the
Catholic Church and evangelicals as they sought to pack the
courts with judges who oppose abortion. Perhaps more
important to the religious organizations and less
well-covered by the press is the new willingness by the raft
of Trump-appointed judges and Supreme Court justices to
deconstruct the legal barriers maintaining the separation of
church and state. Expect more judicial findings that allow
religious groups to sap the public treasury for education
and other activities. Now we have gone far beyond the
point where Trump’s lies do not count. For a long time Trump
has had the habit of looking in the mirror and attributing
his worst qualities to his opponents. So, when he and his
cronies cooked up “Stop the Steal,” it was an outgrowth of
his success in stealing the election in 2016. Once he entered 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue, the Trump Organization’s desire to steal as much as
possible — including the remaining integrity of election
officials everywhere — became evident. While the
investigations of Trump and his private financial empire by
the district attorney in New York City and by the New York
state attorney general may well turn up numerous
prosecutable violations of long-ago behavior, my guess is
the charges may not have sufficient impact to do more than
slow down Trump while emboldening his followers to engage in
more physical attacks on government. For me, the hope is that the
district attorney in Atlanta will bring criminal charges
against Trump, his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and perhaps
other defendants who were involved in trying to illegally
reverse the 2020 federal election results in Georgia. The
evidence is on distinctly audible tape, and the motivation
and criminal intent of the 45th president is crystal clear.
As Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger:
“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we
have…” This is the pure case where the
stakes are clearest: the power of the presidency of the
United States for four years… or more, if Raffensperger had
changed the vote count. This outrageous crime by Trump is
now the model for the Republican Party for a brute force
attack on election officials everywhere. However, it may be
the only case where the US Supreme Court — now dominated by
McConnell-confirmed and Trump-nominated justices — might
actually remember a flicker of constitutional law and the
power and independence that lifetime appointments are
supposed to bring. Ultimately, it will be up to the
justices to decide whether they will protect the rule of law
that gives them power in the first place, or whether they
will succumb to obliging and protecting a former president
who, given the opportunity, would also destroy their
institution and the Republic. Allan Dodds Frank is an
Emmy-winning investigative correspondent who covered Capitol
Hill and The White House in the 1970s and early 1980s for The
Washington Star and Forbes magazine. He
investigated various aspects of Donald Trump’s finances for Forbes and
for ABC News as Trump was approaching bankruptcy. 04/14/2021
How Bernie Madoff, the ‘Man Without a Soul,’ Hustled His
Victims From the Shadows
04/16/2021
John Maxwell Hamilton Examines The Birth And Legacy Of
American Propaganda
02/09/2021
Exclusive Briefing with Harvard
Constitutional Law Professor Tribe on Trump's Impeachment
Trial
02/09/2021
A Ted Cruz Protégé Rides Shotgun for The Seditionists
01/25/2021
Time for a Congressional Hearing with Lt. General Charles A.
Flynn
01/17/2021
2020 Hindsight: Civil War Interrupted in Former Capital of
The Confederacy
01/13/2021
Virginia Braces for Armed Protests on MLK Day
10/23/2020 Collaboration with
WhoWhatWhy
Investigative Journalism Website - Apprentice Training on
Interviewing
03/21/2020
COVID-19: US Politicians’
Insider
Trading? Indus News | Scope with Waqar Rizvi
03/2020
Memories of Covering the Teamsters and the Mob
02/07/2020
Impeachment
Trial: Does Trump Stand Victorious. Indus News | Scope with Waqar Rizvi
Allan Dodds Frank on Donald Trump09/13/2017
Flynn could face new pressure in Russia probe as Dems allege
he concealed contacts
06/21/2017
Trump Organization seeks hefty tax break for Westchester
golf club
11/02/2016
Mystery woman in Trump military academy photo unveiled
10/23/2016 The Yogi Berra Election, the Real Stakes on Nov. 8 10/17/2016 Donald Trump’s All-Star Sexual Harassers Team
03/01/2016
Donald Trump: Press Siren, Silurian News
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