Chris Hedges's Blog, page 465

Rosenstein Denies That He Proposed Secretly Taping Trump

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein denied a New York Times report Friday that he floated the idea of using the 25th Amendment to remove President Donald Trump as unfit for office and suggested secretly recording the president to expose the chaos in the administration.

The Times cited several people, who were not named, who described the episodes that came in the spring of 2017 after FBI Director James Comey was fired. The newspaper’s sources also included people who were briefed on memos written by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

Rosenstein is a frequent target of Trump’s attacks and the story could add to the uncertainty about his future at the Justice Department, despite his denial.

“The New York Times’ story is inaccurate and factually incorrect,” Rosenstein said in a statement. “I will not further comment on a story based on anonymous sources who are obviously biased against the department and are advancing their own personal agenda. But let me be clear about this: Based on my personal dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment.”

The 25th Amendment to the Constitution spells out that a president can be declared “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” upon a majority vote of the vice president and the Cabinet.

A person who was in the room when Rosenstein made the 2017 comment, and provided a statement through the Justice Department, said Rosenstein was “sarcastic” and that he “never discussed any intention of recording a conversation with the president.”

The newspaper reported that Rosenstein, frustrated with the hiring process for a new FBI director, offered to wear a “wire” and secretly record the president when he visited the White House. He also suggested that McCabe and other officials who were interviewing to become the next FBI director could also perhaps record Trump, the newspaper reported.

McCabe’s lawyer, Michael Bromwich, said in a statement that his client had drafted memos to “memorialize significant discussions he had with high level officials and preserved them so he would have an accurate, contemporaneous record of those discussions.”

McCabe’s memos, which were later turned over to special counsel Robert Mueller’s office, had remained at the FBI until McCabe was ousted in January and McCabe doesn’t know how any reporters could’ve obtained those memos, Bromwich said.

Rosenstein has been a target of Trump’s ire since appointing Robert Mueller as a Justice Department special counsel to investigate potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election.

He chose Mueller for the job one week after he laid the groundwork for the firing of Comey by writing a memo that criticized Comey’s handling of the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server. The White House initially held up that memo as justification for Comey’s firing, though Trump himself has said he was thinking about “this Russia thing” when he made the move.

As deputy attorney general, Rosenstein oversees Mueller’s work and has made two public announcements of indictments brought by the special counsel — one against Russians accused of hacking into Democratic email accounts, the other against Russians accused of running a social media troll farm to sway public opinion.

On Friday, Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump, Jr., tweeted the Times’ story and said: “Shocked!!! Absolutely Shocked!!! Ohhh, who are we kidding at this point? No one is shocked that these guys would do anything in their power to undermine @realdonaldtrump.”

The story elicited an immediate response from members of Congress.

Rep. Mark Meadows, a North Carolina Republican who chairs the conservative Freedom Caucus, said in a tweet that “if this story is true, it underscores a gravely troubling culture at FBI/DOJ and the need for FULL transparency.”

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said the Times story “must not be used as a pretext for the corrupt purpose of firing Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein in order install an official who will allow the president to interfere with the special counsel’s investigation.”

Millions of Brazilian Women Unite Against Misogynistic Presidential Candidate

Millions of women are coming together to lead the charge against right-wing Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, joining the #NotHim movement amid growing anger over his misogynistic and fascist policies that have led many to compare him to U.S. President Donald Trump.

As the country heads for an October 7 general election, women have mobilized to speak out against Bolsonaro’s attacks on their rights and ever-larger crowds are expected at upcoming rallies to denounce him.

The candidate, who is leading recent polls with 26 percent of likely voters backing him in a crowded field, has proudly stated his opposition to equal pay for women and has expressed a desire to roll back women’s right to abortion care. He’s been condemned by the country’s Superior Court of Justice for misogynist comments he made about Congresswoman Maria do Rosario, and has dismissed women as “idiots”—statements that many women, who make up 52 percent of Brazil’s population, vow he will regret come election day.

“We need everyone to pull together to stop this disaster happening to our country,” one woman, Maíra Motta, told The Guardian.

Nearly 50 percent of Brazilian women disapprove of Bolsonaro, with 17 percent reporting that they back him.

As Brazil-based journalist Glenn Greenwald noted earlier this month, lower-income women are a significantly contributing to the mobilization against Bolsonaro, with middle to high-income men among his biggest supporters.

Amazing: “if the Brazilian electorate were composed only of men” with middle-to-high incomes, the fascist Bolsonaro, “would be elected in the first round with more than 50% of the total votes.” Only overwhelmingly opposition from poor women prevents this: https://t.co/sGJ7uevbHP

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 15, 2018

Within 24 hours of the creation of a Facebook group called “Women United Against Bolsonaro” last month, 600,000 women had joined. The group now has 2.5 million members who vow to organize and attend protests against the candidate.

“It is terrifying to think we might have a president who doesn’t care about gender equality, who supports the idea that women should be paid less than men,” Ludimilla Teixeira, the founder of the group, told The Guardian.

The group is aimed at defeating politicians who espouse “misogynist, prejudiced, and truly fascist” ideas, according to The Guardian. Eduardo Bolsonaro, who is running his father Jair’s campaign while he recovers from being stabbed at a rally earlier this month, has dismissed the group as “fake news,” borrowing U.S. President Donald Trump’s favored method of shrugging off reports of his historically low approval ratings.

A journalist based in Rio de Janeiro posted on social media about demonstrations taking place on Saturday, while a number of rallies are planned for September 29.

“Women against Bolsonaro” protests to take place across Brazil tomorrow (but also in Paris, Canada, the US..) Considering Bolsonaro’s high rejection rate, esp among women, we can expect a big turn up. https://t.co/3t0jlSaekd

— Diane Jeantet (@dianejeantet) September 21, 2018

Thousands of women in Spain, Australia, Portugal, and the United Kingdom are also planning to demonstrate in solidarity, according to multiple Facebook event pages.

The hashtag #EleNao or #NotHim has also taken off on social media, with prominent entertainers and other public figures joining in the call to defeat Bolsonaro.

To all my fans in Brasil…it is important to be involved and let your voice be heard! Make sure you VOTE in the upcoming Presidential election and stand up for Equality, Respect and Love. I love u all. Te Amo

Jane Fonda Is a Living, Breathing Rebuke of the Patriarchy

It was all but inevitable. On Friday morning, with the fate of his Supreme Court nominee hanging in the balance, Donald Trump took to Twitter to smear Christine Blasey Ford, a professor and psychologist who claims that Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her during his days at Georgetown Prep. “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents,” tweeted the president, who has been credibly accused of sexual impropriety by more than a dozen women. “I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!”

Ultimately, Trump’s attack is just the latest salvo in an ongoing dirty war by the right to defame and discredit Kavanaugh’s accuser, a campaign that reached its nadir Thursday when Ed Whelan, a contributor to the National Review online and a close personal friend of the federal judge, floated an elaborate conspiracy theory attempting to gaslight Ford.

If this scandal has taught us anything, it’s how little has changed since Anita Hill came forward to accuse Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment—an episode, like the Kavanaugh hearings, that actress and activist Jane Fonda likely watched in horror and disgust. As director Susan Lacy tells Robert Scheer, Fonda is a living, breathing rebuke of the patriarchy that is asserting itself so forcefully today (and movements like #MeToo are attempting to topple).

Lacy’s newest film, “Jane Fonda in Five Acts,” traces the performer’s political evolution from sex goddess for the male gaze in “Barbarella” to her turn in the anti-war classic, “Coming Home,” and her controversial trip to North Vietnam. What emerges is a portrait of a woman who never shies away from using her platform to address society’s most egregious injustices, even in the face of vicious criticism.

“She saw that movies could address social issues and change people’s minds, as well as marching in the streets,” observes Lacy. “She’s very smart, she’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.”

In the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” the director explores Fonda’s estranged relationship with her father, her mother’s suicide and the failed efforts of the men in her life to mold her to their desired image and purpose. Listen to the full interview or read the transcript that follows, and watch a trailer for “Jane Fonda in Five Acts” below.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. My guest today is Susan Lacy, discussing her documentary, Jane Fonda in Five Acts. I just want to say something about the director of this movie. First of all, let me say something about Jane Fonda, who I know well as a friend, full confession. And the series is based on a notion of American originals; out of the crazy-quilt of American culture, with all our different ethnic, racial, religious backgrounds, we’ve produced an incredible cast of characters. Certainly Henry Fonda, Jane’s father, was one such character. And I say “character” not in an unflattering sense; I mean really significant human beings who made a considerable contribution. And my guest, Susan Lacy, is someone who has followed this query about what makes America tick, and all these interesting people. And she is the creator of the very famous and laudatory PBS American Masters series; she’s directed movies on Spielberg, Judy Garland, Joni Mitchell, and others. So let me just open with that, why you picked Jane Fonda, how she fits into American life, American history. And what is the meaning of the title, Jane Fonda in Five Acts?

Susan Lacy: Well, thank you. First of all, it’s delightful to be here. The title, I actually got the clue for the title from Jane’s book, My Life So Far, where she basically, at the age of sixty, wanted to understand her life. And she went into a five-year period of researching her family background, getting her mother’s medical records, to understand more about all of that, that had happened in her childhood. And what she said in the book is she wanted to understand, you have to understand your first two acts in order to know how to live your third. So the notion of acts was embedded there. And when I started making the film, I realized that Jane’s life really was divided into the four men who had shaped her, and by whom she wanted to be shaped, starting with her father and her three husbands: Roger Vadim, the French director of Barbarella; and Tom Hayden, founder of SDS, and an activist; and then Ted Turner. And the last act is Jane. For me, telling this story was the story of a woman, which I think is in many ways a lot of women’s stories, which is part of what’s interesting. Jane said she wrote the book because she thought, if all these things can happen to me–I can have difficult with a parent, or difficulty with a child, or body image issues; she was bulimic for 30 years–unfaithful husbands, and I can come out of this alive, a lot of other people can probably be helped by my story. So the film I made was Jane’s–and I hate the use of this word, but I haven’t found a better one–Jane’s journey to herself. So that’s where the five acts come from.

RS: Let me just say something about this. I really loved the documentary, and I think you captured her. I have two quibbles with it. I don’t think any man every shaped Jane Fonda.

SL: [Laughs]

RS: And I know her really quite well; in fact, I was at her house for dinner recently, where she–I was with my wife, and we were there, and other people. And she said, oh, I’ve had it with men, and no more men, I’m free, independent, blah blah blah. And I said, Jane, you always were independent. I don’t care who you were with. And yes, obviously, well, she didn’t pick her father, and he was obviously strong and complex. But the reality is–and your film shows it–this was someone who was independent when she was one or two, you know, trying to ride a tricycle at three or something. And you mentioned about her mother, and the whole question of her female role model. She had a distant father, great actor, Henry Fonda; and a mother who committed suicide.

SL: Yeah.

RS: And that’s an experience she never got over. And why don’t we just begin with that? I mean, this was a real rough way to enter the world.

SL: Well she was, I think, 11 when this happened. She did not have a happy childhood. Her mother was in and out of institutions; Jane did not know why, or what they were; she was too young, she just thought her mother was sick all the time. And not there. And her father wasn’t there a lot of the time; he was off making movies, or doing Mr. Roberts on Broadway. And she was really raised by governesses and her grandmother. So when her mother came home one day from the institution with a keeper, Jane was upstairs with Peter playing a game, and her mother said, where are my children? I want to see my children!

RS: Peter Fonda, her brother, and a great actor in his own right, yeah.

SL: Peter Fonda, excuse me, her brother. And Jane said, “I’m not going down. I’m not going–you go, Peter. I’ll let you win if you go. I don’t want to go, I’m mad at her. We should be mad at her.” So she didn’t go down. And that’s the day her mother went back to the institution and slit her throat with a razor blade. That is hard to get over. I don’t think you really ever do get over that. And I think Jane’s exploration of her mother, to really try to find out who her mother was, was revelatory for her. She found out that this woman, who she had always thought of as a sick woman, had been the life of the party. I mean, men loved her; the family adored her; everybody wanted to be with her. And she was like, my mother? Really? I had no idea. And then she got hold of her mother’s medical records from the institution. And her mother had written a little story about her life story, and Jane learned things about her mother there.

RS: How old was she when she was reading all this about her mother?

SL: She was in her sixties. When she went to visit her mother’s grave, and allowed me to go with her, it was the first time she had ever visited her mother’s grave. Sixty-two years or something, you know; it’s a long time to wait to visit your mother’s grave. And it was a very touching moment for her, I think, and for me.

RS: You know, the interesting thing is, you’re telling this story basically through these strong men, but they all were disappointing, as people will be when you idolize people, male or female; they’ll be disappointing. But it was startling how disappointing they all were, because they presented as matinee idols, as people who had it all together. And indeed, what is questioned in the movie is the whole idealized version of the American family, and American life. And that’s how Henry Fonda was seen by the world, and you have wonderful scenes in your movie where he’s given an award for being a great father, and all that stuff. And Jane and her brother, who ends up being quite a social critic himself, they see the other side of it. They see a distant father, they see a very uncertain father, insecure in many ways; a mother who is basically hurt by the father’s indifference. And so Jane always has to reinvent herself when she leaves these men. That’s another Jane. And basically, this is a tale of one woman’s liberation, constantly.

SL: Exactly, exactly. And it’s not a tale–the movie isn’t told through their stories. I divided it into acts because in each–well, Henry, of course, is just a pervasive influence. But each man she married represented a different point in her life’s journey, so to speak. And she did, in fact, she became who they wanted her to be; that doesn’t mean she lost herself completely. But I don’t think she was encouraged to be who she was. I mean, when she tells the story of Sydney Pollack asking her opinion on a script, in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, this was the first time anybody had ever asked her opinion about anything. Troy sort of says, her son Troy later in the film says that she was, you know, not exactly an orphan but came pretty close. She did not have those kind of strong roots that you get from parents who are there for you, who support you, who tell you how wonderful you are. Little Girl Blue is the person I saw in the telling of this story. Doesn’t mean that she’s stuck there, doesn’t mean that she hasn’t gotten past that. But she didn’t have what, the foundation, I think, that is what people need in their childhood. She didn’t have that. So she was ready to be molded by somebody who was going to love her. And she said she thought she had to be perfect in order to be loved. And “perfect” meant that she had to be who they wanted her to be. Now, I agree with you; I think Jane was always in there. But she didn’t know it. And I think finally the realization that that was there all the time, is part of the story.

RS: OK, but she got a very early education that a lot of the great American family, happiness, success, celebrity, was hollow.

SL: Yes.

RS: And contradictory. And she could see that from day one. And I remember one time, I don’t know, there’s a story that Josh Logan was a family friend, and she was sent to Josh Logan to–

SL: Who was a great producer.

RS: –yeah, and to launch her career. And he looked at her and talked and everything. And he said the first thing we have to do is break your jaw. Wait a minute! Yeah, you can’t be an actress if you don’t have the jaw that Hollywood is looking for. So a woman can’t have a strong jaw, she can’t suggest some other attitudes. And when you look at your movie, it’s really a movie about the failure of men–the men who made the Vietnam War, the men who run the country, on every issue. Health, fitness, eating disorders, and all that. It comes out of, basically, a male-dominated society, a need to please men.

SL: Mm-hmm.

RS: Right? And then there’s this woman in your movie who just comes through it. And comes through it stronger. In that sense, it’s a very positive role model of story. I want to get more into the detail of the movie. But I was thinking of the flashpoint of this movie, and controversy, is when Jane goes to Hanoi and sits on a–

SL: Aircraft, anti-aircraft–

RS: –anti-aircraft thing, and also has meetings with POWs and so forth, and this is the great controversy of her life. Which is unfortunate in one respect, because as you look through your movie, she was a woman of social conscience and commitment and concern, whether it was to Native Americans very early on, to farm workers and Cesar Chavez; you could go through the whole list. She was there for women’s confidence with her exercises, you go down the list. But in an odd way, she is made by the society to feel embarrassed, ashamed, apologetic, over what I think is the most heroic thing, and incredible thing, she did. Which is to dare do what Jesus asked us to do in the tale of the Good Samaritan: think of the other.

SL: I’m 10 years younger than Jane, but I was also very involved in the antiwar movement; she was a kind of hero to me. She was late in coming to this; I mean, she had–the life she lived with Roger Vadim was not a political life, it was a, she said a very superficial, hedonistic life. And her eyes were opened living in France watching television and seeing what was going on in her own country, and being educated by Simone Signoret and these French intellectuals, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who were very political. And she wanted to come back to this country and get involved in that. And then from that moment on, she was a sort of boots on the ground activist. And this was before Tom Hayden; I think she got more deeply involved because of that marriage. But she doesn’t apologize for going to Vietnam. I think she’s very proud of the fact that she was calling Nixon and those guys out on the fact that they were going to bomb the dikes.

RS: Yeah, we should mention, the movie opens with the Nixon tapes, and Nixon is saying, this woman, her father is such a marvelous–

SL: “I feel sorry for Henry,” is what he said.

RS: Yeah, that’s right, “I feel sorry”–

SL: “What are we going to do about Jane Fonda? I feel so sorry for Henry.” It’s so condescending.

RS: Well, but think about–as a great American story, going back to your American Masters, you can’t have the pieces better. Here is Richard Nixon, who clearly worships Henry Fonda, you know, and the movie image of Henry Fonda, perplexed, genuinely perplexed that a daughter of Henry Fonda would be causing misery for Richard Nixon. [Laughter] Ignoring the fact, by the way, that Henry Fonda got famous playing rebels. I mean, the movies that young Jane as a child watched, right–Grapes of Wrath? It’s about–

SL: 12 Angry Men.

RS: Yeah. It’s about rebellion against power. And yet Nixon didn’t make that connection. But it’s a powerful way to begin the movie.

SL: I wanted to signal right off the bat that this wasn’t a film about a movie star. That it was going to be a different kind of film than that. And not that her movies aren’t mentioned in my film, but that’s not the heart of Jane. But I want to go back to that, because I agree; I don’t think she has to–she apologized for sitting on an anti-aircraft gun, because of the perception that that would cause. She was naive, she completely admits it; she was young, she was alone; she went alone to Vietnam, to North Vietnam. Had she had any kind of a person with her, a handler, it probably wouldn’t have happened. She was kind of manipulated into sitting on that gun. That doesn’t mean she excuses herself for it; she said she’ll take her regret to her grave, that she did that. But she does not apologize for going to Vietnam. I think she’s proud of what she did there.

RS: Yeah, I mean, let me just, you know, this is very difficult for me to so-called objectively look at this. I also went to Vietnam, but I went to South Vietnam very early, in ‘64 and ‘65 and so forth. But I also went to the North, and I saw the effect of the bombing, and the leveling of whole villages and bridges and everything, you know. So, were we the good Germans? I mean, what are we talking about? When do you rebel against your own government? [omission for station break] So, even though we’ve now gone halfway through our discussion, I’d like to go back to the beginning. You talked about her time in Paris. And I think that’s where her feminist consciousness developed, because she was Barbarella; she was married to this hotshot director, Roger Vadim; she could have gone totally for this crazy, sexist, wild life that was Paris of a certain set. My own sense of that period is, she felt she was thrust into a pose as Barbarella; she was supposed to be the sex object, she was supposed to be the twit. And she always had a big brain, and a questioning mind.

SL: Yeah. She did go to Vassar.

RS: Yeah.

SL: She left, she didn’t graduate, but she did go to Vassar, and she speaks incredibly beautiful French.

RS: Yeah. And so she gravitated to people on the other side of that spectrum, as you mention. So when she came back from France, she was Barbarella informed, first of all, about sexism and trivialization of women, which never left her. On the other hand she was aware, you know, after all, the French had been in Vietnam before the U.S.; what we had done is picked up on the French, it was French colonialism that the whole war was originally about. And she was conversant. When you say she was this naive–yeah, no, I would say that when Jane came back from France, she knew a lot more about the history of the war, the French role. Because they were the great critics, now, of what the U.S. was doing; their writer Jean Lacouture, Nouvel Observateur, all these people. And I think she knew a lot more than members of Congress.

SL: Oh, she did. One of my favorite stories and images is that the person who taught her, who opened her eyes, was the French actress Simone Signoret, who she got to know, who was a very famous French actress, probably not known to young people at all today. She was married to Yves Montand. Jane was watching television, very confused about what was going on in her own country; she’d been Miss Army Recruiter of 1954, she was a solid American, believed, you know, we could do no wrong. And now she’s watching, what’s going on? And she’s confused. And she went to Simone’s farmhouse, and Simone opened the door and said, I’ve been waiting for you. And she taught her. She told her, she gave her the whole history. So I think you’re absolutely right, that Jane was much more informed, and much more aware of why this was an unwinnable war. I do have to say this, and I don’t think that Jane would have said this if it wasn’t true. Yes, I think–I think she understood the trivialization of women, and the objectification of women through the movie Barbarella, which is really just a kind of camp, cult movie now. But she admits that she came to feminism very late in her life. She thought it was a distraction, the women’s movement she thought was a distraction from the real issues, and the real issues were antiwar, economic equality–which of course now really is a woman’s issue. But she didn’t see it that way. She actually says she thought of it as a distraction. And it was while she was married to Ted Turner that she became a real feminist. And that was late in coming.

RS: OK. I’m going to bow to your expertise, and–

SL: I’m just saying, that’s what Jane tells me.

RS: No, I understand. But–actually, I knew her at that time, when she had come back. And she was making, I think it was Steelyard Blues, in Oakland. And you could not be in the Bay Area, San Francisco, and not be aware of the women’s movement at that time. And she was working with actors that had been at the committee, this great acting group, and others. I forget all their names; Alan Myerson was the director, I think, of the movie. And it just was so much in the air, that this was the failing of the sixties. It was sexist, and yeah, it was great for the guys, but what about the women. Jane was always a tough cookie. I just resist the word naive.

SL: Mm-hmm.

RS: Think, OK, you know, she does that and she says that, and all that. But she always thought she could take these strong men and wrestle them to the ground.

SL: [Laughs]

RS: That’s my view.

SL: Yeah, yeah. Well, you knew her during that time, so you’re probably right. I mean, she’s certainly not a shrinking violet by any means. But she was insecure. I mean she, it took her a long time to–

RS: Well, that’s what the culture does to women. And that actually is the basis of the feminist movement, and it’s the basis of Jane, is the recognition that our culture was not a healthy culture for women.

SL: Mm-hmm, I think you’re absolutely right.

RS: It was a male-dominated, exploitive culture, even if you were a celebrity, even if you were famous, even if you were wealthy; you were a woman, you were marginalized. She worked with very–you have Paula Weinstein in your movie, a very tough woman–

SL: Yeah. Her best friend.

RS: –and Paula’s mother was a very tough woman in Hollywood. There was the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee. People like Barbra Streisand worked with, and Marilyn Bergman, who won three or four Academy Award with her husband Alan. There were strong women around. I think she found these men interesting. They were complex, they had energy, they were not boring. But I never thought for a second that she though they could run over her. And it was interesting, I had a discussion with her quite recently about the #MeToo movement. And there were some people at this dinner party who were younger in Hollywood, and they were saying yes, it’s been terrible and blah blah blah. And Jane said, you know, but in all honesty, she had not been attacked in this way by men. And I think she gave off an air of “don’t mess with me” that was always there. Ted Turner knew it from day one; Tom Hayden knew it from day one; Roger Vadim knew it from day one. That no, this woman will fight back. And it didn’t have a label, it didn’t have a name. But you know, if you look at the exercise, the whole thing of the exercise–I remember when she was doing that–was to empower women. You can control your body. And yes, there were contradictions in that, because there’s a Hollywood standard, a common standard of how you have to look, and what your breast size should be, and what your nose should look like, and everything. But basically, fitness was an answer to that for Jane. Eat right, exercise, control your body. That was the healthier answer than mutilation.

SL: And she was one of the first to do that.

RS: Yes, yes. You in your movie say she invented the video business–

SL: Well, she was given an award for–she was the only woman in the Home Video Hall of Fame, and they credited her with inventing the video business. Because up ‘til then it had been, rent the movie, return it the next day, or two days later; people wanted to hold on to these tapes, so–because they wanted to use them every day. That was the first instance where people really wanted to own it. It’s still, to this day, the biggest-selling home video of all time.

RS: Yeah. And the interesting thing, we haven’t, we’ve talked about the war, and we’ve talked about feminism and so forth. We could talk about Native Americans; she was very active in Alcatraz, and so forth. But there’s one thing here that, in the movie, that reminded me, that I tend to forget. The proceeds of her exercise movie went to the Campaign for Economic Democracy.

SL: Exactly.

RS: This was way before the Great Recession, way before all the housing meltdown and everything, that Jane Fonda devoted this enormous amount of money–it’s the most successful videos in the history of, what, self-help videos, or–

SL: Well, people aren’t buying videos anymore, but I think it sold close to 20 million videos. If you think about that for a moment, it’s a lot of money.

RS: Yeah. And all of the money went to something for a Campaign for Economic Democracy, which is a hot issue right now. People should remember that, and here I will give Tom Hayden credit for being involved in this. She did the exercise tapes as a way of making money to support a Campaign for Economic Democracy, which is as up-to-the-moment as Bernie Sanders and some of these younger people running for Congress.

SL: Absolutely. Totally prescient.

RS: You know, I don’t think Jane gets enough credit for her smarts. The movie–here’s my only, really only criticism of the movie. I think Jane always had a terrific sense of humor. I always felt that way. Ah, she had–

SL: But it comes across in the film, she’s very funny.

RS: It does, but, you know–

SL: But she’s also very serious.

RS: She’s very serious. But in her most serious moments, she had a deep sense of irony, of comedy, of the other side. And every time I would talk to people, they’d say oh, Jane, she’s always so grim, blah blah blah, and scolding. That wasn’t her at all. And you do capture it in your film, because you have her with her fellow actresses, right, in that–

SL: Oh, that wonderful scene with Lily Tomlin. [Laughs]

RS: Yes, and it’s fabulous. And that is, I think, the real Jane. Sarcastic, sees the other side, can make fun of herself. And a lot of what, this insecurity, is also realistic. She had a sense of, don’t put us on a pedestal. And I think Jane grew up with that. Her father was not the man on the screen, she was not going to be the woman, she wasn’t the woman being pictured. There’s a realism to this woman that informed her life. That in an odd way, she didn’t take herself too seriously. She was kind of an anti-celebrity celebrity.

SL: But she also understood the power of celebrity. And I think it’s one of the reasons that she went to Vietnam. At one point, she was going to give up movies. And just, she was just about going to–this was long before she actually did give up movies for 15 years. And I can’t remember who it was who said to her, no, Jane, we’ve got plenty of people activists, but we don’t have a lot of celebrities; you’ve got to keep making movies so we can use the power of your celebrity, it will be very helpful. And let’s also not forget that she became a producer of movies. She produced 9 to 5; she produced The China Syndrome. She saw that movies could address social issues and change people’s minds, as well as marching in the streets. She’s very smart, she’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. And she studies hard. She doesn’t wing it; she really gets to know the issues, and reads the papers, and you know, studies the–she’s quite amazing.

RS: None of this came easy. Whether it was her acting, her involvement with different causes, and so forth. What comes through is that she needed the, I forget the line from a Bob Dylan song, know your song well before you start singing. Practice, practice, practice. Maybe she got it from her father; know your script, know your lines. But I do want to end on mentioning one movie that you just mentioned, 9 to 5. That movie was a pioneering movie in dealing with women as members of the workforce, as providers for a family, issues of discrimination and harassment on the job. I went back and looked at it quite recently–

SL: She produced it.

RS: She produced it. And so, and she shaped it, it wasn’t just her name on it–

SL: Yeah, very much so. She’s the one who–she picked Lily, she picked Dolly, she knew who she wanted in that cast. You know, she’s–

RS: What a profound choice, to have Dolly Parton be in a movie talking about–

SL: Wasn’t that, isn’t that brilliant?

RS: –ordinary women in the workplace being harassed, and trying to get ahead. OK, that’s a–

SL: And there’s going to be a remake of 9 to 5.

RS: Well, that’s another thing. Let’s end on that note. She–here’s Jane, still out there doing it all, right? I mean, this is not a farewell–

SL: I mean, it’s a [sequel]–it’s not a remake, it’s a–I think it’s–maybe it’s a remake.

RS: Yeah, but the point you made about when she said, I’m on my last chapter–but this is quite an exciting chapter of her life.

SL: Well, let’s also remember that Jane says she’s still a work in progress.

RS: Well, that’s a good point on which to end. I’ve been talking to Susan Lacy, who has received multiple Emmy and PGA awards. She created the PBS American Masters, and she’s made a number of important movies. But this one is a terrific one on Jane Fonda, done for HBO. Our producers are Joshua Scheer and Isabel Carreon. Our engineers here at KCRW are Mario Diaz and Kat Yore. I’m Robert Scheer and I’ll see you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.

Pound Plunges as EU Rejects British Brexit Plan

LONDON—British Prime Minister Theresa May accused the European Union on Friday of creating an “impasse” in divorce negotiations by bluntly rejecting her blueprint for Brexit, sending the value of the pound plunging as worries about a chaotic U.K. exit from the EU soared.

With British newspapers declaring that May had been “humiliated” by EU leaders, the prime minister used a televised statement from 10 Downing St. to insist she was prepared to take Britain out of the bloc without a deal if it did not treat the country with more respect.

Declaring that “we are at an impasse,” May said the EU must lay out “what the real issues are and what their alternative is.”

“Throughout this process, I have treated the EU with nothing but respect,” she said. “The U.K. expects the same. A good relationship at the end of this process depends on it.”

The pound fell 1.5 percent to $1.3066 on May’s comments, which seemed to make the prospect of an economically disruptive “no deal” Brexit more likely.

May’s strong words belied her weak position: She is a prime minister without a parliamentary majority, caught between the EU and a pro-Brexit wing of her Conservative Party that threatens to oust her if she makes a compromise too far.

May’s combative remarks were calibrated to appease euroskeptic Conservatives ahead of what’s likely to be a bruising annual party conference at the end of the month.

May’s statement followed a fraught EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, which dashed hopes of a breakthrough in stalled divorce talks with only six months to go until Britain leaves the bloc on March 29.

European Council President Donald Tusk said at the meeting that parts of the U.K.’s plan simply “will not work.” French President Emmanuel Macron called pro-Brexit U.K. politicians “liars” who had misled the country about the costs of leaving the 28-nation bloc.

The judgment of British newspapers was brutal. The broadly pro-EU Guardian said May had been “humiliated.” The conservative Times of London said: “Humiliation for May as EU rejects Brexit plan.”

The Brexit-supporting tabloid Sun branded bloc leaders “EU dirty rats,” accusing “Euro mobsters” Tusk and Macron of “ambushing” May.

UK Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab said the bloc had “yanked up the handbrake” on the negotiations.

But despite all the heated British rhetoric, the EU’s position was not new.

May’s “Chequers plan” — named for the prime minister’s country retreat where it was hammered out in July — aims to keep the U.K. in the EU single market for goods but not services, in order to ensure free trade with the bloc and an open border between the U.K.’s Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland.

EU officials have been cool on the plan from the start, saying Britain can’t “cherry-pick” elements of membership in the bloc without accepting all the costs and responsibilities.

Yet British politicians and diplomats were taken aback by Tusk’s blunt dismissal of the Chequers plan on Thursday — and by his light-hearted Instagram post showing Tusk and May looking at a dessert tray and the words: “A piece of cake, perhaps? Sorry, no cherries.”

In a statement Friday, Tusk said the bloc’s position had “been known to the British side in every detail for many weeks.” He said EU leaders regarded Chequers as “a step in the right direction” but had been taken aback by May’s “uncompromising” stance in Salzburg.

Tusk said in Salzburg that an EU summit on Oct. 18-19 would be the moment of truth, when an agreement on divorce terms and the outlines of future trade would be sealed or would fail.

The biggest single obstacle to a deal is the need to maintain an open Irish border. Failing to do so could disrupt the lives of people and business on both sides, and undermine Northern Ireland’s hard-won peace.

Britain and the EU have agreed on the need for a legally binding backstop to guarantee there is no return to customs posts and other border checks. But Britain rejects the EU’s proposed solution, which would keep Northern Ireland inside the bloc’s customs union while the rest of the U.K. leaves.

May said Friday the EU was “making a fundamental mistake” if it believed she would agree to “any form of customs border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K.”

May said she wanted to reassure people in Northern Ireland “that in the event of no deal, we will do everything in our power to prevent a return to a hard border.”

She also said more than 3 million EU citizens living in the U.K. would retain their rights even if Britain left the bloc without an agreement.

“You are our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues. We want you to stay,” May said.

Dealing with the EU is only part of May’s problem. Pro-Brexit Conservatives, including former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, hate the Chequers plan, saying it would keep Britain tethered to the bloc, unable to strike new trade deals around the world.

Conservative lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg, an arch-Brexiteer, praised May for “standing up to the EU bullies,” but urged her to ditch the Chequers plan for a much looser “Canada-style” free trade agreement.”

Pro-EU politicians don’t like the Chequers plan either, saying it will cut the U.K.’s vast services sector out of the EU’s single market. Many are pushing for a new referendum that would let voters choose between accepting whatever deal she manages to negotiate with the bloc and staying in the EU.

Labour Party Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer said May was “in denial.”

“I don’t understand why she’s failed to hear the message that the Chequers proposal wasn’t going to be accepted by the EU and frankly it’s not going to be accepted by her own party,” he said.

Despite the somber mood music, Britain and the EU hinted there could be a way forward.

“I remain convinced that a compromise, good for all, is still possible,” Tusk said. “I say these words as a close friend of the U.K. and a true admirer of PM May.”

May said a solution required “serious engagement on resolving the two big problems in the negotiations” — trade and the Irish border.

“We stand ready,” she said.

___

Associated Press writers Danica Kirka and Carlo Piovano contributed.

Flooding Prompts More Evacuations in South Carolina

WILMINGTON, N.C.—A new round of evacuations was ordered in South Carolina as the trillions of gallons of water dumped by Hurricane Florence meanders to the sea, raising river levels and threatening more destruction.

With the crisis slowly moving to South Carolina, emergency managers on Friday ordered about 500 people to flee homes along the Lynches River. The National Weather Service said the river could reach record flood levels late Saturday or early Sunday, and shelters are open.

Officials downstream sounded dire alarms, pointing out the property destruction and environmental disasters left in Florence’s wake.

“Although the winds are gone and the rain is not falling, the water is still there and the worst is still to come in the Pee Dee,” South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said Friday, referring to the eastern part of the state.

Georgetown County Administrator Sel Hemingway warned the area may see a flood like it has never seen before. “We’re at the end of the line of all waters to come down,” he said.

In North Carolina, where about 100 people were evacuated by boat and air after the Cape Fear River breached a levee and flooded the town of Kelly on Thursday night, a familiar story was unfolding as many places that flooded in Hurricane Matthew in 2016 were once again inundated.

Two years ago, flooding ruined the baseboards and carpet of the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant in Spring Lake. The congregation rebuilt, This year, water from the Little River water broke the windows, leaving the pews a jumbled mess and soaked Bibles and hymn books on the floor.

“I’m so sad just thinking about all the work we put in. My gut is turning up,” church member Dennis DeLong said. “We put a lot of heart and soul into putting it back up.”

Gov. McMaster estimated damage from the flood in his state at $1.2 billion in a letter that says the flooding will be the worst disaster in the state’s modern history. McMaster asked congressional leaders to hurry federal aid.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said he knows the damage in his state will add up to billions of dollars, but said with the effects on the storm ongoing, there was no way to make a more accurate estimate.

Duke Energy said a dam containing a large lake at Wilmington power plant had been breached by floodwaters from Florence, and it was possible that coal ash from an adjacent dump was flowing into the Cape Fear River.

Meanwhile, the National Hurricane Center said it was monitoring four areas in the Atlantic for signs of a new tropical weather threat. One was off the coast of the Carolinas with a chance of drifting toward the coast.

About 55,000 homes and businesses remain without power after Florence, nearly all in North Carolina, and down from a high of more than 900,000 in three states.

Florence is blamed for at least 42 deaths in the Carolinas and Virginia, including that of an 81-year-old whose body was found in a submerged pickup truck in South Carolina. Well over half the dead were killed were in vehicles.

Potential environmental problems remained. Aside from the Duke Energy breach, state-owned utility Santee Cooper in South Carolina is placing an inflatable dam around a coal ash pond near Conway, saying the extra 2.5 feet (76 centimeters) should be enough to keep floodwaters out. Officials warned human, hog and other animal waste were mixing in with floodwaters in the Carolinas.

In Wilmington, things kept creeping back closer to normal in the state’s largest coastal city. Officials announced the end of a curfew and the resumption of regular trash pickup.

But they said access to the city of 120,000 was still limited and asked people who evacuated to wait a few more days. They also warned people to not get caught off guard as rivers that briefly receded were periodically rising back.

The storm continues to severely hamper travel. Parts of the main north-south route on the East coast, Interstate 95, and the main road to Wilmington, Interstate 40, remain flooded and will likely be closed at least until nearly the end of September, North Carolina Department of Transportation Secretary Jim Trogdon said.

More than a thousand other roads from major highways to neighborhood lanes are closed in the Carolinas, officials said. Some of them have been washed out entirely.

The flood has been giving so much warning to Horry County, South Carolina, that officials published a detailed map of places that flooded in 2016 and warned those same places were going underwater again. One man had time to build a 6-foot-high (1.8-meter) dirt berm around his house.

The Waccamaw River has started its slow rise in the city of 23,000, and forecasters expect it to swell more than 3 feet (0.90 meters) above the previous record crest by Tuesday while still rising. Some areas could stay underwater for weeks, forecasters warned.

___

Derosier reported from Spring Lake. Associated Press writers Jonathan Drew, Martha Waggoner and Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh; Jeffrey Collins and Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina; Michael Biesecker in Washington and Jay Reeves in Atlanta contributed to this report.

___

For the latest on Hurricane Florence, visit https://www.apnews.com/tag/Hurricanes.

Our Tendency to Believe Comfortable Lies

It’s easy — and not wrong — to think that truth is in dire danger in the era of Donald Trump.

His own record of issuing breathtaking falsehoods from the exalted platform of the White House is unprecedented in American history. So is his consistent refusal to back down when a statement is proven false. In Trump’s world, those who expose his lies are the liars and facts that show he was wrong are “fake news.”

In this war on truth, Trump has several important allies. One is the shameful silence of Republican politicians who don’t challenge his misstatements for fear of giving offense to his true-believing base. Another is a media environment far more cluttered and chaotic than in past decades, making it easier for people to find stories that fit their preconceived ideas and screen out those they prefer not to believe.

These trends come in the context of a more general loosening of the informal rules that once put some limits on the tone and content of political speech. American politicians have always done plenty of exaggerating, lying by omission, selecting misleading facts, and using slanted language. Typically, though,if not always, they tried to avoid outright, provable lies, which it was commonly assumed would be politically damaging if exposed.

Nowadays, the cost of being caught lying seems less obvious. Somepoliticians show no apparent embarrassment about lying. Take, for instance, Corey Stewart, the Republican candidate trying to unseat Virginia’s Democratic senator, Tim Kaine. Stewart unapologetically told the Washington Post about a doctored photograph his campaign distributed, “Of course it was Photoshopped.”

In the altered photo, an image of a much younger Kaine is spliced in to make it appear that he is sitting with a group of armed Central American guerrillas. The caption under the picture says, “Tim Kaine worked in Honduras to promote his radical socialist ideology,” suggesting the photo proves that he consorted with violent leftist revolutionaries while working at a Jesuit mission in Honduras at the start of the 1980s.

In reality, the guerrillas in the original photograph (which dates from well after Kaine’s time in Central America) were not leftists and not in Honduras, but right-wing Contra insurgents in Nicaragua. So the visual was a double fake, putting Kaine in a scene he wasn’t in and then falsely describing the scene. When I read the story, I wondered whether Stewart would think it legitimate if an opponent Photoshopped him into a picture of American Nazis brandishing swastika flags. (If anyone asked him that question, I have not found a record of it.)

It may still be uncommon for a politician to acknowledge a deception as forthrightly as Stewart did, but it does seem that politicians today feel — and probably are — freer to lie than they used to be.

So, yes, truth is facing a serious crisis in the present moment. But two things are worth remembering. First, that crisis did not begin with Donald Trump. It has a long history. Second, and possibly more sobering, truth may be more fragile and lies more powerful than most of us, journalists included, would like to believe. That means the wounds Trump and his allies have inflicted — on top of earlier ones — may prove harder to heal than we think.

An Early Lesson

I began learning about the fragility of truth many years ago.

George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, taught me an early lesson. In the spring of 1964, less than a year after his notorious “stand in the schoolhouse door” attempt to block two black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama, he came to Maryland as a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary (not to be confused with his more widely remembered presidential runs in 1968 and 1972).

His real target wasn’t the presidential nomination but the 1964 Civil Rights Act, then being filibustered in the Senate. There were plenty of segregationist Democrats in Maryland then and Wallace calculated that scoring a significant vote there (as well as in a couple of other states) would send a message to Senate Democrats that supporting civil rights was politically perilous.

I was 23 that spring, barely halfway through my second year as a reporter, when I was assigned as the (very) junior half of the Baltimore Sun‘s two-man team covering the primary campaign. I was under the direction of the Sun‘s chief political reporter, an old-timer named Charlie Whiteford. But Charlie didn’t hog all the big stories, as would have happened on most newspapers. In an effort to show balanced and even-handed reporting — an appearance the Sun in those days went to extreme lengths to maintain — he switched off with me, so that his byline and mine would appear alternately over stories about each candidate. As a result, young and green as I was, I got to cover Wallace’s rallies on a roughly equal basis with my senior colleague.

From the start, I heard the governor saying things about the civil rights bill that weren’t just misleading or slanted in ways I was already accustomed to hearing, even that early in my reporting life, but unequivocally false. After the first rally I attended, I got a copy of the bill from the Sun‘s library and carried it with me for the rest of the campaign, so I could accurately cite Wallace’s misstatements as I was typing my stories.

The first time I nailed his lies in print, I was smug. Maybe he can get away with this stuff in Alabama, I remember thinking, but the Baltimore Sun will keep him straight in Maryland. Very soon, though, I found out that I couldn’t have been more wrong. The people Wallace was speaking to believed him, not the Sun, and Wallace knew that. He didn’t care in the least what I wrote about him and kept right on offering his untruths about the civil rights bill.

More than a half century has passed since I learned that lesson, and it’s still sobering: when people like a politician’s lies better than they like the truth, it’s tough to change their minds, and even after lies are proven false, they can remain a powerful force in public life.

Learning Another Lesson, Far from Home

Thirteen years later, in a factory on the other side of the Earth, I had anothermoment of truth that taught what might be an even more chilling lesson: lies can still have power even when we know they’re lies.

That moment came during my first trip to China in May 1977, eight months after the death of that country’s leader, Mao Zedong. As the Sun‘s correspondent in Hong Kong, still under British rule at the time, I had been writing about Chinese affairs for nearly four years. But that visit, seven days in and around the city of Guangzhou (then commonly called Canton), was the first time I was able to look with my own eyes at a country still largely closed to the outside world.

On one of those days, my minders took me to the Guangzhou Heavy Machinery Plant, which manufactured equipment for oil refineries, chemical and metallurgical factories, and other industrial facilities. Its walls were plastered with posters showing standard images of Chairman Mao and of soldiers, workers, and peasants heroically struggling to realize his socialist ideals. The scene I saw from a catwalk over the factory floor, however, looked nothing like those melodramatic images. A few workers were tending machines or trundling wheelbarrows across the floor, but most were standing around idly, sipping tea, chatting in small groups, or reading newspapers.

I was startled by that very unheroic scene and even more startled when it dawned on me why I was so surprised. It wasn’t discovering that those propaganda images were false. I knew that already. Instead, I realized that even knowing that, I had still unconsciously expected to see workers looking like the men and women shown on those posters, faces glowing with devotion while giving their all to carry out “Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line.”

Until that moment I would have said with absolute certainty that I was immune to such Chinese propaganda. I had seen too many of its crude falsifications, such as the doctored photographs of Mao’s funeral that had run only months earlier in the same publications that regularly showed those heroic workers. Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing, and her three principal associates had been in the front row of mourners when the photos were taken. Only a couple of weeks later, they were arrested and denounced as counter-revolutionary criminals. The Chinese media kept on publishing those funeral photos, but with Jiang and her allies — now labeled the Gang of Four — airbrushed out. Blurred smudges or blank spots appeared where they had been shown in the originals, while vertical rows of x’s blotted out their names in the captions. (Had anyone asked about the retouching, it’s a safe bet that Chinese authorities would have answered with the 1976 equivalent of “Of course they were Photoshopped.”)

Having seen those and so many other transparently false words and images, I could not believe I would ever confuse any official Chinese lies with reality. Still, there I was on that factory catwalk, stunned to realize that those propaganda images had shaped what I expected to see, even though I knew perfectly well that they were unreal.

That moment, too, taught me a lasting lesson: that truth could be a fragile thing not just in the outside world but inside my own mind and memory.

An Immunodeficiency Disease?

By these recollections from four or five decades ago, I don’t mean to suggest that there’s nothing new about the immediate crisis. Quite the opposite. President Trump’s outlandish untruthfulness, an increasingly chaotic media landscape, and the decline of traditional habits of political speech unquestionably represent a new and deeply alarming threat to public discourse and the foundations of democratic government.

One element of that crisis might be considered analogous to what doctors call an immunodeficiency illness — a disease that destroys or weakens the body’s ability to cure or control its symptoms. The immunodeficiency disease in today’s political and cultural wars is the campaign to undermine public trust in journalists and other watchdogs, the very people who are supposed to counter fake facts with real ones.

That campaign isn’t new. Attacks on news organizations (most prominently from the right but also from the left) go back at least to the 1960s. Under Trump, however, that assault has become uglier, more intense — and more dangerous.

Calling journalists “enemies of the American people,” for example, doesn’t just raise echoes of past totalitarian regimes. It gives aid and comfort to present-day officials and lawmakers who want to avoid being held publicly accountable for their acts.That applies not just in the United States but internationally. Trump’s anti-media rhetoric abets repressive rulers across the world who suppress independent, critical reporting in their countries.

A recent column by the Washington Post‘s Jackson Diehl documented the worldwide impact of Trump’s anti-media assault. He reported that his search for examples “turned up 28 countries where the terms ‘fake news’ or ‘false news’ have been used to attack legitimate journalists and truthful reporting” during Trump’s time in office. Around the world, Diehl found, authoritarian leaders like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Cambodia’s Hun Sen, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan have explicitly endorsed the American president’s attacks or echoed his exact words while cracking down on press freedom in their own countries.

Journalists have responded to Trump with an outpouring of indignant commentary — an understandable reaction, though it’s far from clear whether it helps or hurts their cause. A gesture like the Boston Globe‘s initiative last month that led more than 300 newspapers across the country to publish editorials on the same day calling for freedom of the press and attacking Trump’s stance on the media raised valid challenges to the president’s charges, but also may have cemented in place a kind of equivalency in the public mind: Trump is against journalists, journalists are against Trump.

Beyond reasonable doubt, that equivalency reinforces Trump’s side more than it defends good reporting or strengthens public knowledge. For his supporters, it validates his posturing as a president besieged by a hostile media — and his repeated insistence that stories he doesn’t like are “fake facts.” Pious editorials declaring journalists’ devotion to truth and fervently exalting the First Amendment may be justified, but as a practical matter, eloquent self-righteousness seems unlikely to be an effective weapon in the war against the war on truth.

It would be nice to think that tougher, more factual reporting would be more helpful, but as I learned covering the Wallace campaign all those years ago, that has its limits, too.

How to Be Right (Always)

I couldn’t read George Wallace’s mind in 1964 and can’t read Donald Trump’s 54 years later. So what follows is speculation, not verifiable fact. With that qualifier, my impression is that Trump’s falsehoods come from a different place and have a different character than Wallace’s. If there’s a Wallace reincarnation on the landscape today, it would be someone more like Corey Stewart. Wallace might not have said it to a reporter — though I did sometimes sense an unseen wink in our direction when he delivered some outrageous statement — but I strongly suspect that “of course it was Photoshopped,” adjusted for the different technology of that era, exactly reflected his attitude.

President Trump looks like a quite different case. He clearly lies consciously at times, but generally the style and content of his falsehoods give the impression that he has engaged in a kind of internal mental Photoshopping, reshaping facts inside his mind until they conform to something he wants to say at a given moment.

A recent report in the Daily Beast described an episode that fits remarkably well with that theory.

As told by the Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng, at a March 2017 White House meeting between the president and representatives of leading veterans organizations, Rick Weidman of Vietnam Veterans of America brought up the subject of Agent Orange, the widely used U.S. defoliant that has had long-term health effects on American soldiers and Vietnamese villagers.

As Suebsaeng reconstructed the discussion, Trump responded by asking if Agent Orange was “that stuff from that movie” — a reference evidently to the 1979 film Apocalypse Now. Several veterans in the room tried to explain to the president that the scene he remembered involved napalm, an incendiary agent, not Agent Orange. But Trump wouldn’t back down, Suebsaeng recounted, “and proceeded to say things like, ‘no, I think it’s that stuff from that movie.'” His comment directly to Weidman was, “Well, I think you just didn’t like the movie.”

What makes the Daily Beast report particularly revealing is not just that Trump was ignorant of the facts and would not listen to people who clearly knew better. That behavior is all too familiar to anyone even casually aware of Trump’s record. The argument with the veterans was different because his misstatement did not arise from any of the usual reasons. He was not answering a critic or tearing down someone who frustrated him or making an argument for a policy opinion or defending some past statement.

Sticking to his version of Agent Orange was purely a reflection of his personality. On a subject one can safely assume he had not thought about until that moment, he seized on a fragmentary memory of something he’d seen on a screen years earlier, jumped to a wrong conclusion, and was then immediately convinced that he was correct solely because he had heard himself saying it — not only certain that he was right, but oblivious to the fact that everyone he was talking to knew more about the subject than he did.

In effect, this story strongly suggests, Trump’s thought process (if you can call it that) boils down to: I am right because I am always right.

Lots of people absorb facts selectively and adapt them to fit opinions they already hold. That’s human nature. But the president’s ability to twist the truth, consciously or not, is extreme. So is his apparently unshakable conviction that no matter what the subject is, no one knows more than he does, which means he has no need to listen to anyone who tries to correct his misstatements. In a person with his power and responsibilities, those qualities are truly frightening.

As alarming as his record is, though, it would be a serious mistake to think of Trump as the only or even the principal enemy of truth and truth-tellers. There is a large army out there churning out false information, using technology that lets them spread their messages to a mass audience with minimal effort and expense. But the largest threat to truth, I fear, is not from the liars and truth twisters, but from deep in our collective and individual human nature. It’s the same threat I glimpsed all those years ago at George Wallace’s rallies in Maryland and on that factory floor in China: the tendency to believe comfortable lies instead of uncomfortable truths and to trust our own assumptions instead of looking at the evidence.

That widespread and deep-rooted failure of critical thinking in American society today has helped make Trump and his enablers, like other liars before them, successful in the war against truth. In the words of the mid-twentieth-century cartoonist Walt Kelly’s comic-strip character, Pogo the Possum, “We have met the enemy and it is us.” That’s a powerful enemy. Whether there’s an effective way for the forces of truth to oppose it is far from clear.

America’s Political Pollsters Could Be Missing the X Factor in the 2018 Elections

Four months after last November’s statewide elections in Virginia, Echelon Insights, a voter polling, data and analytics firm working with Republicans, finally knew how badly the 2018 electoral landscape was going to be for their party.

By March, the state of Virginia had updated its statewide voter file with who had voted in the fall election that saw Democrat Ralph Northam win the governor’s race by 9 points and the Republicans lose 15 seats in GOP-gerrymandered House of Delegates. Compared to the previous midterm baseline, Echelon’s analysis began by noting that Democratic voter turnout was up 16.7 percent, while Republican turnout was up 0.5 percent.

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“The news was grim for Republicans,” their report continued, but especially so when it came to people who skipped primaries but voted in November. Turnout among these Democrats was up 14.6 percent, while for Republicans it was down by 9.0 percent. In short, Echelon’s report, which is a slick way to pitch its services to 2018 candidates, outlined the contours of the upcoming General Election’s blue voter wave.

“Turnout exceeded midterm benchmarks the most amongst nonwhites, particularly emerging voter blocs like Hispanics, Asians and those of another race,” it reported. “Female turnout was stronger in every group except for Asians. And overall, black turnout outperformed white turnout…”

Echelon conclusions were not that unique about what voter blocs to watch for this fall—especially since these are the very cohorts that have been insulted, offended or targeted in many ways by the president’s abrasive words and repressive policies. So why have a notable number of polls missed their ascension and impact in 2018’s primaries?

In Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise defeat of Rep. Joe Crowley, D-NY, in June, the New York Times reported a pre-election poll three weeks out had put the longtime Queens political boss 36 points ahead. She won by 15 points—in an election where Democratic voter turnout was exceptionally low, with 13 percent of the registered party members participating, but where voting by non-whites was crucial.

In Florida’s late August gubernatorial primary, there was lots of polling, but almost none saw the energy and momentum of Blacks who turned out in record numbers across the state to help Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, an African-American, beat a crowded field of more centrist Democrats. A week out from that primary, polls predicted Gillum would get 12 percent; he ended up winning with 34 percent.

Hidden Voters, Mistaken Assumptions

Part of the problem with polls in these races—and this holds true for November—is that pollsters have a hard time with what’s often called hidden voters. That’s slang for people without voting histories. Some are new—or first-time voters. Some are registered but vote infrequently. And in low-turnout races like primaries, they are hard to detect, let alone reach for questioning over phone lines—especially younger people on digital devices. And if they are hard to detect, and hard to reach, then pollsters cannot adjust their raw numbers—which they all do—based on what they think mirrors the likely electorate.

“Polls missed youth turnout, and that happened in other races like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s,” longtime Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told Vox.com, when asked about what was missed by pollsters in Gillum’s race. “The campaign also targeted campuses that just got back [to school]. Polls missed the enthusiasm and solidification of the African-American vote and the base Andrew had there.”

Polling is an imprecise science, pollsters endlessly say. But as Echelon Insights’ March report makes clear, 2018’s engaged voting blocs are not exactly a mystery. No matter what will happen with Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, you can be sure that women are watching and many will vote in November. In many other races, social media can offer clues about voter enthusiasm—although these platforms’ strengths for campaigns remain with targeting likely voters, not forecasting who will vote. (That is because numerous voters don’t post their political views online.)

The question that keeps emerging is who is not on pollsters’ 2018 radar. That matters greatly because between now and November’s vote, there will be a tsunami of horse race coverage delivered in authoritative tones. However, pollsters will tell you that their analyses are more vaporous; that they are merely snapshots in time of voter sentiment, in part based on answers given (that aren’t always true) and in part based on their assumptions about how big slices of this fall’s electorate will be.

This mix of statements, assumptions and math can be useful for campaigns in ways that the public will never see—such as deciding where in their districts they are weak, need to redeploy resources, where to send their candidate and buy advertising. However, what’s good for a campaign is not necessarily good for the public. That is especially true when media organizations treat their polls as gospel; don’t discuss their poll’s assumptions, strengths and weaknesses; and gloss over their margins of error.

That’s what happened in 2016, when, as almost everyone knows, polls repeatedly deemed that Hillary Clinton would be president. Obviously, that didn’t happen, pushing the American Association for American Opinion Research (AAPOR) to launch a deep self-examination and issue a detailed post-2016 report, whose takeaways are instructive for the fall midterm election. Particularly telling was the assumption department, where many pollsters tweaking raw results gave too much weight to college graduates widely supporting Clinton—thus underestimating Trump’s support. And then some slice of Trump’s base fell into that hidden category, because they were infrequent voters.

The result was 2016’s final national polls were largely correct—predicting Clinton would win the nationwide popular vote by 2 percent. She won by 3 percent. But the national picture is not the same as state-level polls, where, when all was said and done, Trump won by total of 80,000 votes in three states to secure an Electoral College victory in a race where 135 million presidential ballots were cast.

“Polling is really not going to help you with that—once you get down to small sample sizes, the chances of a fluke are too great,” said Colin Delany, Epolitics.com editor and a Campaigns & Elections columnist. “I think people are quick to say polls are wrong when they really weren’t. The Clinton-Trump race is a perfect example. It got the broad outline of the electorate right. It just didn’t get those 80,000 people in those three states.”

“Most pollsters, myself included, seeing the clear lead for Hillary Clinton in the national numbers, more or less forgot about paying attention to the Electoral College,” said Kathy Frankovic of YouGov, a respected national polling firm. “We assumed that a lead of two to three percentage points in the national vote would certainly provide an Electoral College majority. After all, it always had before! That’s a pollster problem.”

Additionally, Frankovic pointed to the AAPOR report that not only cited a paucity of polls in the three states—Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—but the mistaken weighting of college graduates. Polls in “some states neglected to use education as a weighting variable (most national polls did) and that underrepresented Trump supporters,” she said by email.

So how seriously should the public take polls this fall—amid all the horse race coverage to come? As 2018’s elections enter their final stretch, voters should be skeptical of overly definitive pronouncements tied to polls. That can be somewhat less true if the polls reach sizable numbers of people at the district level. But most of the more localized polls are closely held by campaigns and are not released.

That’s the takeaway after talking to consultants and pollsters like Delany and Frankovic. Polls have many uses for campaigns, the press and even the public. But they also have blind spots—which is why they are to be viewed cautiously as the election crests.

In 2016, those blind spots—what’s been loosely called hidden voters—included many Trump supporters. This year, it appears the voters that are hiding from pollsters—at least in the primaries—are the infrequent or new voters that are helping Democrats, especially non-whites and women. However, the final polls should be tighter, Frankovic said.

“I expect greater primary poll errors,” she said. “Voters are less attentive in primary campaigns and far fewer vote. They make up their minds later and pollsters can miss them.”

Single Polls vs. Averaged Results

Despite the caveats, Delany said the way some polls were presented were better than others. First, polls that relied on interviews—not automated calls or digital messaging—were better, he said. But the best approach was to average the results of polls, which can give you a better impression of a race’s momentum and direction.

“You can get a sense of a direction things are going,” he said. “Now, I’ve never been one to think that a half point in a poll is worth much. That’s why the polling averages by FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics are more useful, because they will even out the hills and valleys. But hardly anybody is doing that at the congressional level [in 2018]. You are lucky to get many polls.”

But even high-profile races, with many polls, have to be viewed provisionally. Take the U.S. Senate contest in Texas. The latest poll by Quinnipiac gives incumbent Republican Sen. Ted Cruz an almost 9-point lead. The RealClearPolitics average of 12 polls since last spring gives Cruz a 4.5-point lead. But even as Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s numbers seem to be climbing, the Quinnipiac poll only surveyed 800 people—with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percent. That’s in a state with 15.2 million registered voters, where millions will vote in lowest-turnout years.

Where does this leave Cruz and O’Rourke’s supporters? The honest answer is hoping and working hard to bring out their respective bases, especially as midterm turnout in Texas has been historically low. O’Rourke has run an internet-savvy campaign. He is betting on more youthful and non-white voters, the exact cohorts that pollsters overlooked in some 2018 primaries and who are among the hardest for pollsters to reach (as they use mobile devices). But if Beto is behind by 4.5 percent, if that’s accurate, that’s still hundreds of thousands of votes short of winning—if one-third of the registered voters turn out.

If polling sounds like a 20th-century political campaign tool that has a hard time getting precise voter data, what about all the 21st-century micro-targeted data and personal profiles that websites like Facebook have compiled on users and sell to advertisers—including political campaigns?

“If we believe that social media targeting is based on the actual posts and shares of individuals, clearly they have more information at hand about a potential voter” than polls, Frankovic said. “It also extends over a longer period of time. That’s great for targeting. But I’m not sure how useful it is for prediction, especially when there are voters on social media who aren’t doing political postings at all.”

“All it shows you is activity,” Delany said. “Activity doesn’t translate into votes. It can. But so far it hasn’t consistently worked. Again, you will see people make claims—like Bernie before Iowa in 2016—that social media predicted it. But if you turn around the next month, it [social media sentiment] will be the opposite” prediction and result.

If anything, the best pollsters are trying to use a mix of traditional and digital tools to reach voters. If you look at the fine print of polls, the better ones will say they use actual callers—not robotic devices—to reach people, including on their cell phones. There are also polling firms that have used online panels to tray to gauge sentiment, or specialize with parsing social media data.

Not on the Radar?

But the biggest challenge facing pollsters, and indeed the campaigns themselves, in 2018 is what hidden voter cohort will drive turnout—or tilt the results into electoral victories. Simply stated, who is not on their radar—for whatever reason?

“Republican survival depends on strong, disciplined campaigns that keep defections to a minimum, and using analytics to identify and mobilize Republican voters at risk of sitting out 2018,” Echelon Insights said, pitching its services to Republicans. “Simply letting pollsters’ telephone response rates tell us may not be enough. Trump’s approval rating and the midterm ballot has improved in polls taken in 2018, but Republicans have continued to underperform in special elections to the same degree they did in 2017.”

It seems that Republican analysts like Echelon have a pretty sober view of the coming blue voter wave—and which voter blocs will be decisive. Whether that is true of the pollsters working for Democrats or major media organizations remains to be seen.

This article was produced by Voting Booth , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The Trump Administration’s Latest Tax Scam for the Rich

Hard to believe, but the Trump administration is proposing yet another massive tax windfall for the rich.

It would be to reduce their capital gains taxes. Those are taxes on the increased value of their stocks and bonds, businesses, and other valuables, when they sell them. Trump would do this by eliminating whatever portion of that increased value was due to inflation.

Here are three reasons why reducing capital gains taxes would be another tax scam for the rich.

1. The people who’d get most of the benefits are already richer than ever and pay a lower effective tax rate than they have in decades. An estimated 63 percent of the benefits of this proposal would go to the wealthiest one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans, while the bottom 80 percent of us would get only 1 percent of its benefits, according to a University of Pennsylvania Wharton School analysis.

If anything, Congress should raise capital gains taxes, not lower them. The capital gains tax rate is already lower than the rate on ordinary income. Yet the wealthy now own most of the nation’s assets and enjoy most of the capital gains. In 2016 (the most recent date for which data are available), the richest 10 percent owned 84 percent of the entire stock market.

2. The cost of this change would be a whopping $10 billion a year, for the next 10 years. That’s just about the yearly cost of funding free lunches for 20 million poor kids. Yet the federal debt is already ballooning. Over ten years, this proposal would increase it by an estimated $100 to $300 billion.

3. Trump and his administration say they have the power to make this change by themselves without even being authorized to do so by Congress. Rubbish. Congress has already decided that capital gains taxes should not be indexed for inflation. That’s why, when the same idea came up during the George H.W. Bush administration, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel stopped it cold.

It’s another big handout to the wealthy, another huge increase in the federal deficit, and it’s illegal. Don’t let Trump and his enablers get away with this tax scam for the rich.

Donald Trump Is Lying to You About China

Trump uses the fake news of “intellectual property theft” to justify his tariff war on China. He boasts that he is going to stop the Chinese stealing that victimizes Americans. In yet another way, he will be the savior of Americans’ economic future, a savior who needs/deserves their votes and donations. He takes his cues from the televangelists.

The claim that the Chinese are stealing our intellectual property – chiefly production technologies – is largely bogus. Yet many are duped. All economic development across the millennia has included the dissemination of new technologies from those who have them to those who want them. The dissemination works via buying and selling products, copying production processes and products, sharing production facilities, exchanging access to resources and markets for access to technology, and yes, no doubt, some downright stealing too. Disseminators include workers and bosses, merchants and manufacturers, students and professors, journalists and politicians, and just plain travelers.


Often, when those who want another’s technology get it, they develop it further, whereupon the developed technology in turn gets disseminated elsewhere (likely including back to where it originally came from). Greece disseminated technology to Rome, Rome to middle Europe, Europe to America, and yes America to Asia among countless other disseminations, past and present. Recently, the Rolls-Royce luxury car company’s CEO attacked Aston-Martin and other companies for stealing their concepts. A few decades ago, the cry went up in the US about Japanese stealing our technology. More decades back, the US stole technology from Great Britain according to the British.

Demagogues, especially the nationalist variety, try to make political capital out of recycling stories of awful “foreigners stealing” our technologies. It allows them profitably to pretend that they can “protect the nation and its economy.” Dissemination happens, one way or the other, and never more easily than now with the global internet, world trade, and jet travel. The fakery of proclaiming against it has never been more glaring.

It has always been a presumption of most economics that dissemination of intellectual property (more or less open flows of new products and technologies) is good for economic development everywhere. The copyrights, patents, and trademarks that block dissemination all have limits: they expire after a time, they only block copies not variations, and so on. Those limits are a recognition that the spreading of knowledge – intellectual property – should be enabled and encouraged.

Capitalist enterprises routinely buy, study, and copy parts of other companies’ products, especially those of their successful competitors. Economic theories stress that often such replication of successful competitors’ products and technologies is how enterprises survive. It is a regular part of capitalist competition and serves a social purpose of lowering average costs of production and thus prices to consumers.

Within today’s world economy, capitalist enterprises in less developed economies confront a choice. They can use an inferior technology to produce commodities to sell in their own markets as “infant industries” protected from global competition. Their commodities will be inferior to and/or more expensive than their excluded competitors’. That is one possible development path. An alternative path offers to share the local market and local resources (especially cheap labor) with foreign competitors in exchange for sharing (gaining access to) the latter’s superior technology. If that offer to share is mutually profitable, a deal may be struck. For demagogues later to refer to such arrangements as “stealing” is, to be extremely polite, a misrepresentation.

US universities have for years faced a crisis of dwindling numbers of US students applying for graduate work. The cause was and is shrinking job opportunities for new PhDs (as US colleges and universities shifted to hiring cheap adjuncts instead). Many universities sought and welcomed paying Chinese students whose arrival kept graduate programs afloat. During the years that such students spent in US universities, their teachers, fellow students, studies, and travels provided all sorts of access to “intellectual property” in the US.  Neither Mr Trump nor anyone else can know what bits of knowledge were in any meaningful sense “stolen” as opposed to learned, shared, read in professional journals, acquired through lab experiments, etc.

The narrow, legal usage of ‘Intellectual property theft” – such as violating copyright, patent, or similar protections of idea, concepts, products, etc. – is a problem at least as old as capitalism itself. Such violations exist everywhere, inside and outside the US, and are prosecuted in courts around the world all the time. We do not know whether China experiences such violations, on a per capita basis, more than other countries or more vis-à-vis US intellectual property than that of other countries. Thus the application of even the narrow legal meaning of intellectual property theft term to China’s behavior is not warranted.

Suppose finally that Trump’s tariff war succeeds in somehow blocking China from acquiring US intellectual property. That will provide incentives for China to (1) make more deals with non-US companies, (2) further and more quickly develop its own intellectual property and block the US from it, and (3) deny US firms access to the Chinese market and to Chinese laborers because China’s access to US firms’ technology is blocked. Such steps all carry costs and risks for US companies and the US economy now and in the future. Moreover, it is highly likely that the US’s blocking efforts will fail to reach their objective. Too many avenues for transmission of intellectual property will still be active, officially and unofficially, formally and informally, legally and illegally.

We are left with the question: why then pursue a strategy of trade wars to block intellectual property theft if it is mostly fake news? The answer has two parts. First, the accusation of intellectual property theft (often paired with “forced technology transfer”) amounts to a demand for better terms of access for US firms who want to produce and/or sell in China. If they must share their technology, for example, they want bigger shares of profitable joint ventures, etc. The Trump tariff war aims to coerce better terms from China for US companies active there. Trump expects and gets approval from US companies so long as they believe they may gain more from concessions forced on China than they lose from tariff-caused disruptions of their currently profitable global supply chains

The second reason for Trump’s tariff war on China is that it serves a useful political purpose for Trump/GOP posturing. The simple logical story runs as follows: America’s “greatness” was undone by bad deals made by establishment politicians in the past. These allowed the Chinese (and others) to take advantage of the US by means of intellectual property theft. Trump is putting an end to that theft by his headline-dominating tariff wars. Thereby America will become great again. And perhaps China, after 20 years of spectacular economic growth, will be “contained,” in the arrogant jargon right-wing pundits like to indulge.

This logic is neatly packaged and promoted politically. Integrated with big budget outlays for the military, big tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and big proclamations of patriotic chauvinism, the integrated package may suffice to win elections in 2018 and 2020. But the fakery of intellectual property theft accusations will be exposed, as it has in the past, and likely soon. The accumulating chickens of multiple false accusations will then come home to roost. A personally enriched Trump can then retire to Mar a Lago.

Sentencing Options for Cosby Include Prison, Jail, Probation

PHILADELPHIA — Bill Cosby could be sent to prison next week for drugging and molesting a woman at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004 in what became the first celebrity trial of the #MeToo era.

Cosby is due in court Monday for a two-day sentencing hearing that follows his conviction in the spring on three felony counts of aggravated indecent assault.

The judge’s options are broad, because the state guideline range of about one to four years spans the gamut from a prison term to a jail stint to house arrest or probation. The maximum term is 10 years per count.

Lawyers for the 81-year-old, legally blind Cosby will no doubt stress his age, health problems, legacy and philanthropy as they plead to keep him at home, while prosecutors hope to call other accusers to paint Cosby as a sexual predator deserving of prison.

Montgomery County Judge Steven T. O’Neill may aim straight for the heart of the guidelines to blunt public criticism from both sides and avoid being overturned on appeal, legal experts said.

“If you give a sentence in the middle, almost no one can complain,” said Daniel Filler, dean of Drexel University’s Kline School of Law, who studies sex assault issues. “And because the case has mitigating factors and aggravating factors, that’s the most likely outcome.”

Cosby should learn his fate by Tuesday.

THE SENTENCE

Jurors convicted Cosby of sexually assaulting Andrea Constand without consent, while she was impaired and after incapacitating her. Though each count carries a 10-year maximum sentence, O’Neill will likely merge them since all three stem from the same encounter, in effect weighing only one charge, legal experts say.

State guidelines call for a base 22-to-36-month sentence. The judge can add up to a year for aggravating factors – such as the 60-some other accusers, Cosby’s denials and lack of remorse, and even his defense team’s repeated attacks on the judge and prosecutor. Then O’Neill could deduct up to a year for mitigating factors – Cosby’s age, health and perhaps even the $3.4 million he paid to settle Constand’s related lawsuit.

The Associated Press does not typically identify sexual assault victims without their permission, which Constand has granted.

PRISON, JAIL OR HOUSE ARREST?

If Cosby gets even a day more than two years, he’ll enter the state prison system, with a first stop at SCI Phoenix, a new $400 million, 3,830-bed prison in suburban Philadelphia where staff would assess his physical, medical and security needs. Cosby could end up in a long-term medical care unit there or elsewhere. If he’s deemed at risk because of his celebrity or as a risk to others, he’d be held in solitary confinement, spending most of the day alone in his cell.

Otherwise, he’d likely share a two-person cell, leaving for meals, exercise, counseling and other activities. He’d be free to bring a personal tablet for music or games but wouldn’t have internet access, corrections spokeswoman Amy Worden said.

If Cosby gets two years or less, he’d likely go to the Montgomery County Correctional Facility in nearby Eagleville, a 2,080-bed site that also has a medical unit. Or O’Neill could give him less than a year and let him serve some or all of the time on home confinement, typically with an ankle monitor or probation.

The key question, if Cosby gets time, is whether O’Neill lets him stay home while he appeals his conviction. The violent nature of the crime works against him, but Cosby’s age might work in his favor.

“You don’t want your client to go to prison and find out that (in) those twilight years of their life they shouldn’t have had to spend there in the first place,” said Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson.

THE ACCUSERS

More than 60 other women accuse Cosby of sexual misconduct during his 50-year show business career. O’Neill allowed five of them to testify at trial, while others came to watch the court proceedings. District Attorney Kevin Steele wants some of them to speak at the sentencing.

O’Neill on Wednesday ruled out the testimony of most of the other accusers, other than the five trial witnesses. But whether any of them testify, he already knows their stories well after presiding at both trials and several intense pretrial hearings over their “prior bad act” testimony.

“The judge knows a ton about Mr. Cosby whether or not the D.A. puts on a single witness,” Filler said.

THE JUDGE

O’Neill, who is married and has three adult sons, took the bench in 2002. He has watched the Cosby team’s attacks on the court system intensify, and grow more personal, as the stakes grew.

When the first trial ended in a deadlock in June 2017, the defense attacked the judge and prosecutor from the courthouse steps. In court in April, moments after his conviction, Cosby called Steele an expletive and said he was “sick of him.”

Then, just this week, Camille Cosby filed a state ethics complaint against O’Neill, invoking a long-ago romance to allege he had a bias in the case. She has called him “arrogant,” ”unethical” and “corrupt.”

Lawyer Samuel Stretton, who often represents Pennsylvania judges in disciplinary hearings, called O’Neill an even-keeled professional who “understands human nature.” He doesn’t think the attacks will influence the sentence – but said Cosby’s lack of remorse might.

“Obviously, if no one is repenting, that’s a factor to consider. And if they’re so unrepentant they’re name calling, blaming anyone but themselves,” that’s a problem, Stretton said.