One thing I especially identified with the book Music is History by Questlove was how as he ages the new music wouldn't always hit him right off like it did when he was coming up and hot for EPMD or anything by the Bomb Squad. During his coming of age youth music wheelhouse; 16-24, usually. Eventually the hot new records or New Styles sound, initially, maybe too derivative, or somehow off, maybe disorienting, you're not sure you even like whatever hyped music until, not always but on special occasions, it incandescently gels into something epic and undeniable. J Dilla's Donuts is like that for me. I think I first thought more Neo-Soul DJ retrosheen. Okay, that's fine. The smeary production felt at first like a little bit of a put on; a primitivist affectation. Now it sounds like a break with the literalness of '90s sampling. Abstract shards of scratching playing the melody or punching the mix with dramatic jabs of sound. J Dilla's production style has been hugely influential on acts as different as Canadian rap superstar Drake or British dubstep ambient pioneers Burial. Donuts is a 21st century master DJ cut-up abstraction of Isaac Hayes's 1969 classic album Hot Buttered Soul. It's a Blaxploitation soundtrack of retro-Afrofuturist Black Power, without the politics. Like the perfect vibes music for a backyard party. When I try to name a great hiphop album from this century my go to for awhile now has been Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid, M.A.A.D City (2012). But Donuts has to be up there.
"Lou Antonellis, the business manager of the Massachusetts International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 103, added that the cuts to renewable energy projects in the U.S. [by Trump and Republicans and Project 2025] were not just cuts to funding. “[Y]ou’re pulling paychecks from working families, you’re pulling apprentices out of training facilities, you’re pulling opportunity straight out of our communities. Every solar panel installed, every wind turbine wired, every EV charger connected, that’s a job with wages, healthcare, and a pension that stands for dignity for the American worker. You don’t kill that kind of progress: you build on it.”
Trump recently issued an order to the FBI to focus on anti-immigrant policing and drop the "White Collar" cases.
I know Maga like the anti-immigrant part and this is NOT even close to the first time Trump has shown his contempt for really existing Blue Collar working people, wage workers, stiffing them, trashing unions, scoffing at cost of living concerns with his War by Tariffs shakedowns, shutting down the one department of government devoted to actually protecting consumers, slashing the IRS's ability to reduce tax evasion by lawyered up richies, etc.
I've seen polls for taxing the rich nearing super majorities while Trump is pardoning all White Collar crime. I really wish working class voters would figure this out. He may share your stupid bigotry but he is not on the side of your pocket book or bank account, as you apparently believe.
I never bought the bs about being a post-racial society but did think we were beyond this kind of openly racist/bigot fascist gov; beyond yet another episode of How The South Won The Civil War. I was wrong.
The videos coming out about ICE takedowns aren't popular. Some bystander lady in a hat in California wonders, "Where's the paperwork? This is crazy." Apparently, Trumpers voted for forced deportations but thought all of the people rounded up were going to be violent gang members, rapists, and murderers. Turns out there are not nearly so many bad guys out there as they made out on Fox and police intelligence about tattoo gang symbols is ridiculously crude and cruel ethnic profiling.
The civic education failures of social media and online culture and Fox and all corporate mainstream media is no small part of the polycrisis we're mired in. And Big Tech standing behind Grump at the inauguration is a handy police lineup for most these charges; just inventory for yourself a few of the gov actions they have endorsed: stopping green energy projects already started, abandoning public health and scientific research, slashing the gov workforce with DOGE.
A very old aunt, 90-something, and who I only wish peace and happiness for (and, well, maybe that she stop voting), told me she watched the news about the mass shooting in Minneapolis yesterday on Fox because they tell it like is. Yeah, I thought, they'll be sure to tell you that the killer was Trans but probably fail to mention they were also another Hitler fan, like several in the current regime she supports, and a big gun nut for the Sandy Hook mass shooter. The social pathologies we are now engulfed in are stunning and traumatizing, just like Russ Vought and Project 2025 called for.
Anyway, I maintain we have problems, big problems, many of them, if you like, but turning immigration into a humanitarian crisis, concentration camps and forced deportations without any legal protections, police state crackdowns in cities no one wants, funding genocide in Gaza, etc, are sadistic and tragic distractions and only make matters worse.
And, my point, they are being unbelievably shitty to some more poor working people again. Or put it this way: A lot of working class people might like Trump and the Republicans but Trump and the Republicans sure don't show much love for working class people.
In the spirit of the newsletter ending videos, don't forget Massive Attack, trip hop, electronic, 1991, drops of multicultural working class bohemia, the diverse margins of peak 1990s hiphop, "Daydreaming":
Sometimes I think Dr. Dre is The Chronic (1992), and his G-Funk was always leaning too much on the P-Funk, so to speak. But here is some of his production work from 1988, J.J. Fad's "Supersonic," an old school Boom bap girl group sound produced to perfection; reached 22 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart. Duly noted in collaboration with Dj Yella and the Arabian Prince but, at any rate, it is Dre with a crafty minimalist model of early '80s rap and NOT The Chronic. The J.J. Fad trio look underage but they show up later in the video as older ladies, appearing proud of the legacy of their song, "Supersonic," as they should be. They still perform too or did on the internet as middle age looking ladies, a girl group trio having fun on stage at a karaoke bar. I'd just arrived in Seattle in 1988 and I at first thought J.J. Fad were from Seattle and this was a promotional number for the local NBA team the Seattle SuperSonics, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. I could swear the song was used in Sonic promotions around that time but I can't find any evidence for that on the internet. At any rate, the hiphop-ya-don't-stop gleeful nonsense purity of "Supersonic" bubbles over with the vitality of "Rapper's Delight" and all the best rapping in the early 1980s; heretofore to be known as Hip Hop or rap before RunDMC or RBRD. Sugar Hill, Tommy Boy, Enjoy! Turning out the disco on the block, plug and play, turntables, sampling, drum machines, the rhyming is bold, seductive, full of braggadocio and swagger and often very funny. Turns out J.J. Fad were really from LA and "Supersonic" an early Dr. Dre production masterpiece, if late to the RBRD party and still refining the retrosheen that would become his bread and butter. "Supersonic" is a Hip Hop classic, anyway you slice it. J.J. Fad, MC J.B. (Juana), Baby-D (Dania), and Sassy C (Michelle), on the mic, 1988. Party in the House. Meanwhile, the SuperSonics, Bernie Bickerstaff's version of the '88 Sonics, finished 3rd in the Pacific Division that year and traded away Scottie Pippen for Olden Polynice in the draft. We need those Secret Base Dorktown guys to do one of their historical docs on the Seattle SuperSonics. Even so JJ Fad's "Supersonics" were a positive force vibe with that Supersonic team in '88, X-Man, Michael Cage, Dale Ellis, Nate McMillan, Derrick McKey, Avery Johnson, so much potential on that team! Not to be. But there will always be JJ Fad's "Supersonic."
"Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust," Oliver Wendell Holmes (1858)
"There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy," Prince Hamlet had disdainfully declared in Shakespeare. The 18th century German physicist and satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, dissatisfied with Hamlet's condemnation of philosophy, Georg adds, "But there is also much in philosophy which is found neither in heaven nor on earth." - Freud (1905)
Hopefully this will eventually feel dated but eight years later it couldn't be more timeless. Todd Rundgren and Donald Fagen, of Steely Dan, dark satirists of early 1970s Top 40 weigh in early on the Trump Era. They were not wrong.
"In forty years [since 1980], Republicans went from opposing Democrats’ policies, to insisting that Democrats were socialists who had no right to govern, to the idea that Republicans have a right to rig the system to keep voters from being able to elect Democrats to office. Now they appear to have gone to the next logical step: that democracy itself must be destroyed to create permanent Republican rule in order to make sure the government cannot be used for the government programs Americans want.
When Trump says that our history focuses too much on how bad slavery was, he is not simply downplaying the realities of human enslavement: he is advocating a world in which Black people, people of color, poor people, and women should let elite white men lead, and be grateful for that paternalism. It is the same argument elite enslavers made before the Civil War to defend their destruction of the idea of democracy to create an oligarchy. When Trump urges Republicans to slash voting rights to stop socialism and keep him in power, he makes the same argument former Confederates made after the war to keep those who would use the government for the public good from voting."
Diehard cynical Republicans, market fundamentalists, and hardcore libertarians really and truly believe, or so I'm told, that government programs and services, social security, public education, health care, all social safety net programs, basically, are just a Democratic scam to buy votes and lock-up winning political constituencies.
"Elitist thinking is widespread on the libertarian right, which depicts modern majoritarian democracy as a calculated project of coalition building by the“nonproductive” to exploit wealthy taxpayers," argues historian Nancy MacLean.*
Of course, pols regularly do stuff to preserve their power and office; typically, hopefully, within a rule of law intended to protect the public interest. But what if a democratically elected regime becomes entirely hostile to essential government human services that vast majorities would not have access to at all without government programs? Those services mentioned above are central but there are many more, natural disaster preparedness, environmental protections, basic scientific research, etc, all on the chopping block in the first six months of this US government. There is some waste in gov to be sure and it should be regularly reviewed and rigorously checked but government is crucial to protecting communities and building a sustainable future.
Building public infrastructure and providing community services that private industry will not or cannot has been a fundamental role of governments since at least WW1, and a central motive of democratic government long before there were any Robber Barons of private industry. What happens when these important roles of government are forgotten or abandoned or deliberately sabotaged? Trump and Musk's Big Tech oligarchy and Project 2025 are what happens.
Geared to gutting government and eradicating the Deep State the current rogue regime ruling over the US is the negative inverse of the Woke Mind Virus. It's radical market libertarianism turned into a death cult. To Republicans the response is: "Yay common sense government: let's burn it [civil rights and worker rights] all down." (What could go wrong?) To Democrats the response is: How do I oppose this lawless catastrophe without becoming a target of the violent reaction and alienating my billionaire donors?
(I'm adamantly opposed to blaming Biden for Trump's popularity or Republican or Big Tech crimes, which is how the endless election postmortem always hit me. Any media favoring Trump was/is fascist propaganda. But, must admit, as the election falls farther into the rearview mirror one monumental failure of the Biden admin stands out above the rest. He had to see through the prosecution of Trump. That's it, really. That was his one job. SCOTUS was poised to let Trump off, as they did. Biden had to see this, his Dem people had to see this, and fight back against it directly. Use his bully pulpit to make the case. His passive deference to Garland and SCOTUS still fuels the animus against the Dems now. They don't fight. They get run over by the Republicans. I also chafe some at all the fight rhetoric that has been going around for the last six months. Fight what, how? Just start swinging wildly, try to hit something, anything, seems to be the dominant sentiment. Newsom's direct engagement with the gerrymandering battle is at least a specific fight. But nothing has come a long yet as specific and big as the Biden fight to prosecute Jan 6 and his predecessor's repeated assaults on free and fair elections, and which Biden avoided in the name of separation of powers and democratic decorum. And probably, to some degree, because he was too damn old and unable to put up the fight necessary. There is some small comfort in seeing the new regime choke trying to swallow the whole US (deep) state but the violence and destruction of democratic institutions has obviously become the Republican MAGA Christian nationalist cause or fight. And half the country voted for this destruction, whether they realized fully the consequences of their bigot paranoia or not. And the rest of us are hoping they come to their senses before it's too late, if it isn't already.)
For now it's revenge of the Lost Cause and Confederacy and Jim Crow and radical billionaire libertarians and Neoliberal market fundamentalists. It's over a half a century of elite panic come home to roost and getting out of this fix I'm afraid is going to take more than a woman or democratic socialist POTUS, more than identity politics or a heroic class and social justice warrior.
In the past centrist American history has comforted us (see Hofstadter) that when this kind of violent reaction and plutocratic power grabbing is put on full display, put on the ballot, instead of hiding behind the scene (in the gears of the machine), it is soundly rejected (a la Goldwater in '64). Well, not any more or let's say not yet and try to hold onto a little hope.
And as I've said it before and I'll say again: American historian Heather Cox Richardson is a public service and national treasure. Support her work.
*- What's behind this push for unfettered abundance for capital and cost-cutting austerity for everyone else? Again, MacLean: "In the Koch case, [it] is a new ruthlessness from a particularly ideological and threatened fraction of the capitalist class: an extremist minority, anchored in fossil fuels, that is breathtakingly well-funded and determined to win at any cost– and to make the transformation it seeks permanent. Through radical rule changes up to and including alteration of the Constitution, they aim to lock in the unpopular program of a tiny, messianic minority. And to stop action on the imminent climate catastrophe."
English DJ, George Herbert Evelyn, better known as Nightmares On Wax, in his heyday, the late '90s, Smoker's Delight and Carboot Soul, the latter a personal favorite, he was as big a deal as most DJs get. I mean he packed clubs. He was not EDM stadium DJ big but he was big with the DJ music heads, the people into DJ Shadow and The Avalanches records. I'm pretty sure this one, NIGHTMARES ON WAX in a space outta sound, 2006, can fairly be called middle or later NoW, and by middle '00s a trip hop/downtempo backlash had set in, but the NoW sound system powered on. Rolling out deep salubrious ambient dub vibes, leaning too heavy on old Blue Note and Neo-Soul falsettos at times maybe, but in peak songs like "FYL"* the secular churchy deep soul techno groove is a DJ funky dub gold universal. Play on repeat and it is a hypnotic trance: "What are we supposed to do living in a time like this?" My best okay boomer translation: imagine Booker T & the MG's came up in England in the 1990s, rave music, massive reggae sound systems, and funky underground hiphop. Or perhaps better NoW is a churchy secular soul inflected homage to '90s underground crate diving hiphop, with oodles and oodles of left liberal peace & happiness vibes (overcoming too much pain and misery). Anyway, another deep track masterpiece from NoW. Discerning dad rockers with a taste for groove music should be counting them up. Hup two.*-other peak cuts, "You Wish," "I am You," "African Pirates."
Overlooked. Indomitable party jam from 1992. Now is the time of year to try it on.
Pharcyde a west coast branch of the De La Soul/A Tribe Called Quest school of Native Tongue golden age hiphop. That's my golden age, anyway, Run-D.M.C. to Pharcyde, 1984ish to 1992ish. I've always felt like The Chronic in '92 changed everything, not for the better. It set the blinged out gangster stage that ended in the violent deaths of Biggie and Tupac Shakur. I kept up with and liked the G-funk singles but something felt lost in the imperial chart busting warlord melodrama of the hiphop world after '92. But much bigger authorities than I consider, by contrast, the whole 1990s the real golden age of hip hop, and the second half even better than the first half.
I'm not ready to draw that conclusion yet but admit one reason I can't is because I wasn't listening to as much hiphop after 1992. Why? I got married. Playing blustering raps about "niggas" and "bitches" when hanging out with the wife didn't work. I tried a few times on car trips. The Wu-Tang Clan was too much cursing.
So I'm still learning about a huge explosion in local underground hip hop after the Chronic that goes way beyond what I knew. Just in Seattle. Vitamin D. Tribal Productions. 14 Fathoms Deep. Do The Math (1996). I'm sure the herb helps but the laidback grooves, the warped late night soul classics vibe, the cut-up funk of the serious hiphop DJ head, works for me. I dig, as we used to say.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand, bumped into Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde again recently. It is Daisy Age hiphop gold and not to be missed by fans of the genre. Pharcyde keep that funky group music making thang going; Sly and George Clinton proud godfathers. And there's more than "Soul Flower" on the album: "Officer," "Ya Mama," "Passing Me By," "I'm That Type of Nigga" (which I usually don't go for, as I've already established, but they are so funny and on the nose).
Here's a version with The Brand New Heavies featuring The Pharcyde from the same year, '92, but maybe came out before Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde:
"Having been forsaken by Dame Luck, he degenerated into a Lame Duck."
"Wendell Phillips, according to a recent biography by Dr. Lorenzo Sears, was on an occasion lecturing in Ohio, and while on a railroad journey going to keep one of his appointments met in the car a number of clergymen returning from some sort of convention. One of the ministers, feeling called upon to approach Mr. Phillips, asked him, "Are you trying to free the n-words?" "Yes, sir; I am an abolitioinist." Well, why do you preach your doctrines up here? Why don't you go over into Kentucky?"
"Excuse me, are you a preacher?" responded Phillips. "I am, sir." "Are you trying to save souls from hell?" "Yes, sir, that's my business." "Well, why don't you go there?"
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious--
"I believe that whatever the motive which actuated the child when it began such playings [taking pleasure in nonsense words], in its further development the child indulges in them fully conscious that they are nonsensical and derive pleasure from this stimulus which is interdicted by reason. It now makes use of play in order to withdraw from the pressure of critical reason."
"Playing with words and thoughts, motivated by certain pleasures in economy, would thus be the first step of wit. The further development of wit is directed by these two impulses; the one striving to elude reason and the other to substitute for the adult an infantile state of mind."
"The psychogenesis of wit has taught us that the pleasure of wit arises from word-play or from the liberation of nonsense, and that the sense of wit is meant only to guard this pleasure against suppression through reason."
"The economized expenditure corresponds exactly to the now superfluous inhibition... The hearer of the witticism laughs with the amount of psychic energy which was liberated by the suspension of inhibition energy; that is, he laughs away, as it were, this amount of psychic energy."
"The essence of irony consists in imparting the very opposite of what one intended to express, but it precludes the anticipated contradiction by indicating through the inflections...that the speaker means to convey the opposite of what they say."
"It has seemed to us that the pleasure of wit originates from the economy of expenditure in inhibition, of the comic from the economy of expenditure in thought, and of humor from the economy of expenditure in feeling. All three activities of our psychic apparatus derive pleasure from economy. They all strive to bring back from the psychic activity a pleasure which has really been lost in the development of this activity which we are thus striving to obtain is nothing but the state of a bygone time in which we were wont to defray our psychic work with slight expenditure. It is the state of our childhood in which we did not know the comic, were incapable of wit, and did not need humor to make us happy."
"The dream serves preponderantly to guard from pain while wit serves to acquire pleasure; in these two aims all out psychic activities meet."
"The answer to the question, Why do we laugh at the actions of clowns? would be that they appear to us immoderate and inappropriate; that is, we really laugh over the excessive expenditure of energy."
"With the elucidation of the technique of wit we asserted that the processes of condensation with and without substitutive formation, displacement, representation through absurdity, representation through the opposite, indirect representation, etc, all of which we found participated in the formation of wit, evinced a far-reaching agreement with the processes of "dream work."
"The interesting processes of condensation with substitutive formation, which we have recognized as the nucleus of the technique of word-wit, directed our attention to the dream-formation in whose mechanism the identical psychic processes were discovered."
In other words, word-wit or jokes work like our dreams, they condense information and substitute symbol images from their original context. This makes them, jokes and dreams, communicatively potent but also confusing, and crucially a source of relief from repression. The displacement or substitution enables jokes and dreams to get around censors, both social and deeply personal ones.
"The power which renders it difficult or impossible for the woman, and in a lesser degree for the man, to enjoy unveiled obscenities we call "repression," and we recognize in it the same psychic process which keeps from consciousness in severe nervous attacks whole complexes of emotions with their resultant affects, and has shown itself to be the principle factor in the causation of psychoneurosis.
We acknowledge to culture and higher civilization an important influence in the development of repressions, and assume under these conditions there has come about a change in our psychic organization which may also have been brought along as an inherited disposition."
Which is to say, for me, the key to the continuing relevance of Freud is in this recognition that sexual repression in the individual always has a social or cultural component or the limiting context of civilization.
This isn't to suggest that there is some repression free individual existence or repressionless society, like Harold O. Brown argues, bless his heart, but liberation from neurotic repression, say, like the recognition of gay or Trans human rights, will always butt up against the repressive norms of society. Or, to put it even more simply, liberation from neurotic repression is, ultimately, to a degree always political.
It could be argued that the decline of psychoanalysis into cults of personality around guru analysts in the US after WW2 is a side effect of trying to depoliticize Freud's critique, which admittedly Freud tried to do as well to establish the medical legitimacy of the psychoanalytic therapeutic process, the talking cure. But the result of this movement was to neutralize the radical liberatory social implications of psychoanalysis.
It's still there, this liberatory potential in Freud, but this is why it has been culturally marginalized, because of the threat it poses to unhealthy forms of social repression.
"This whole ideology of ‘government is bad, government is the problem’ has I think provided cover for rich people and rich firms to take advantage of things for their selfish benefit.”
"The history of baseball is very important," Ichiro said. "We're able to play the game today because of players of the past. I really want to understand them and know more about them. I think we all need to know the game of the past, things of the past, so we can keep moving it forward."
Ichiro's plaque in the Hall suggests the closing of a historical, cultural, and symbolic loop that fuses two great baseball cultures:
It was the converging of paths, joining the practice of yakyu [Japanese baseball], with echoes of the code of the samurai, the game Ichiro began playing at age 3, and the pastime of American baseball, the game he played with an ornate, highly ritualistic, flamboyantly stylistic, and yet still always in perfect discipline and equanimity.
For all of the cultural significance and the historic nature of Ichiro's induction, it's this work ethic and his singular style that is almost certainly going to be his greatest legacy. And it's one that spins into the future, as he blazes a path to serve as a guide for the Japanese and American stars of the future. This exquisite balance of baseball skills fundamentals and personal style. I can't say this is a salient feature with every Japanese baseball player but there is no denying it in Ohtani.
Before Shohei Ohtani, there was Ichiro. Before Ichiro, there were many but none who followed the path that perhaps only he could. He played professional baseball for 27 years, the last 19 in MLB, 14 for the M's. Amazing contact hitter, fast, great arm, but his athletic skills were not what separated him. It was his expert game. His craft and style.
Ichiro like his mononymous name was a one of a kind baseball player.
I’ve argued at various points that TPM was ahead of the curve roughly during the Obama years because we paid a lot of attention to what was then sometimes called The Crazy — the subterranean world of GOP and far-right politics; the colorful, weird and almost-always super racist congressmen (and sometimes women) from obscure rural districts. That was portrayed as a sort of moving circus, cheap laughs, click-bait — not real politics. We were often criticized for giving it so much attention. I never thought that was right. And unfortunately the Trump presidency itself vindicated our read of that era. The Crazy was the reality of Republican politics. It was the John Boehners and Paul Ryans who were a kind of respectable veneer placed over its true engine of power and motive force. From the outside, it appeared that these leaders had to run the GOP while wrangling the far-right Freedom Caucus. In fact it was the Freedom Caucus that ran the GOP through a tacit collaboration with presentable and ultimately tractable figures like Boehner and Ryan. Trump’s intuitive political genius was to see that you could ditch the front man and run the GOP directly from the Freedom Caucus, which has been the story of the Trump Era.
That lawsuit [Hogan's Peter Thiel backed $140 million libel suit against Gawker over a sextape] was a critical event of our time, and Gawker’s destruction was a body blow to the First Amendment. Hogan’s lawyer, Charles Harder, wasn’t just any libel lawyer. He had whole new ways of going about it. After Harder’s victory for Hogan, his new approaches to attacking media companies were quickly folded into the Trump political movement, not just the strategies but Harder’s firm itself. You see them again and again in numerous Trump and MAGA world lawsuits.
Josh Marshall @ TPM (doing a fundraiser right now, journalism worthy of your support)
The Hogan/Thiel takedown of Gawker in 2016, dawn of the Trump era, does look now pivotal.
Big Tech realizes it can buy control of the online social media space. As if the whole fake news hoax conspiracy politics of Trump was in some sense rooted in billionaires figuring out how to press manage Silicon Valley Babylon. I've always been partial to the image of Trump as the revenge of the repressed id of the republican party; the paranoid style in American politics in its most garish and grotesquely imperialist form. And there is some of that in there for sure but "front" for the Freedom Caucus is actually a far better historical detail. From the "birther" thing on of course he was going to be their guy.
But it's the totality of the takeover of the republican party that still so astonishes me. It goes to show, again, the pursuit and defense of political power, as Walter Karp argued, Schumpeter, Machiavelli, etc, can so easily overwhelm whatever democratic values or ideological pieties or even burning current issues.
Realpolitik, basically, is the pursuit and holding on to power to no end other than holding on to it at any cost.
On this day [August 5] in 1965, the Voting Rights Act became law. It became such a fundamental part of our legal system that Congress repeatedly reauthorized it, by large margins, as recently as 2006.
But in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts struck down the provision of the law requiring that states with histories of voter discrimination get approval from the Department of Justice before they changed their voting laws. Immediately, the legislatures of those states, now dominated by Republicans, began to pass measures to suppress the vote. In the wake of the 2020 election, Republican-dominated states increased the rate of voter suppression, and on July 1, 2021, the Supreme Court permitted such suppression with the Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decision.
A little case history for calling this the worst SCOTUS in US history:
DC v. Heller, 2008: Declares for first time Second Amendment protects individual right to bear arms.
Citizen's United v. FEC, 2010: Spurs latest orgy of super PACs and dark money in politics.
Shelby County v. Holder, 2013: Guts Voting Rights Act protections against racial discrimination.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 2022: Strips women of individual reproductive rights.
Trump v. United States, 2024: Court gives immunity to POTUS as long as what they do can be construed as part of their "official duties," which then somehow exempted Jan 6 and trying to change votes in Georgia and refusing to relinquish top secret national security documents, etc. So, in other words, POTUS is now above the law.
There's more but this list is enough to make the case, if you ask me. Republicans, with McConnell and Trump in starring roles, packed the Robert's Court with conservative ideologues and we are now living with the results: fascist, Christian nationalist, plutocratic rule in America. The blueprint: Project 2025. Only rivals, possibly, Taney Court 1836 to 1864, setting up the Civil War, or the Waite Court 1874 to 1888, basically, undermining the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution.
From a compilation of 1990s Seattle hiphop music, that I almost completely missed. I knew a little Source of Labor, not much more. The creative center here is one Vitamin D, impresario over a home studio known as The Pharmacy, and a bunch of alum of Garfield High School, the collective braintrust behind Tribal Music Inc or Tribal Productions. The groups include names like B-Self, Sho Nuff, The Ghetto Children, Samson S & H-Bomb, Union of Opposites, and Phat Mob in the sample track below, and all of them play together like they like making music together. Phat Mob epitomizes the laidback and deep grooves vibe that pervades; first words: "listen to a story of a drum set,"..."tappin' and tappin', ... "first a drum set." It's the Hiphop side of '90s downtempo electronica, as if De La Soul and Native Tongues spawned urban hiphop scenes all over the country and Tribal Productions are the proud Seattle Edition. Also shares that easy going deep grooves vibe with the same late '90s vintage Soulquarians (J. Dilla, Questlove, Erykah Badu, etc) but much more rap-centric; Gang Starr, Blackalicious, and I'm sure many more I don't know. Less celebrated than another local rap comp from around the same time, 14 Fathoms Deep (1996), Do The Math goes down like "butter and chocolate." Night music. Check it out.
"Wrong Number," Phat Mob (1996):
Phat Mob are sampling The Stylistics 1972 version of "You'll Never Get To Heaven (If You Break My Heart)":
Dionne Warwick's original version, written and produced by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, and released in 1964: