People My Age Should Be Celebrating Their Better Selves By Embracing Bernie And Rejecting Trump And The Democrats' B-Team-- Biden, Buttigieg And Bloomberg

On Christmas Eve, the Washington Post published a report by Sarah Pullian Bailey about the civil war inside American evangelism sparked by the now widely-know Christianity Today editorial on the Trump’s immorality and unfitness to serve in office (including an unambiguous call to the Senate to remove him from office). It was read by millions of Christians and was debated on radio and TV talk shows. Trump called the magazine, “left-wing” but the cancellation of subscriptions by his Jesus-denying followers was overwhelmed by new subscriptions, presumably by Christians who agree with their premise.

Journalist Napp Nazworth, who has worked for the Christian Post website since 2011, said he quit his job Monday because the website was planning to publish a pro-Trump editorial that would slam Christianity Today. Nazworth, who sits on the editorial board as politics editor, said the website has sought to represent both sides and published both pro- and anti-Trump stories.

“I never got the gist they were gung-ho Trumpian types,” Nazworth said. “Everything has escalated with the Christianity Today editorial.”

Nazworth, who has been critical of Trump and suggested leaders who supported him have “traded their moral authority,” said he doesn’t know what he will do next.

“I said, if you post this, you’re saying, you’re now on team Trump,” he said. He said he was told that’s what the news outlet wanted to do.

“I’m just shocked that they would go this path,” he said, adding that even though he felt “forced” to make the decision to quit, the parting was a mutual agreement between him and the outlet.

…Since the editorial, many Trump supporters have decried Christianity Today as irrelevant and even “elite.” On Sunday, 200 evangelical leaders and other Trump supporters issued a letter slamming the publication. It was signed by many on the president’s evangelical advisory committee, pastors of Pentecostal and Southern Baptist churches, and Christian musicians such as Brian and Jenn Johnson and Michael Tait. Other evangelical leaders published a letter in support of the magazine on Tuesday.

Dalrymple said Monday that the magazine has lost 2,000 subscriptions but gained 5,000, with the latter coming from a younger, more diverse and more global audience.

“We don’t like to lose anyone,” he said. “We need to stay in conversation with one another even when we disagree.”

Dalrymple, who wrote a piece Sunday about the editorial, said editors have received an “enormous outpouring of notes and messages speaking in deeply emotional terms about their gratitude.”

“Clearly, there was a profound yearning for some evangelical institution or leader to stand up and say these things,” Dalrymple said. “One of the most consistent phrases was ‘stay strong.’ People had rallied to the flag, and they were afraid we would abandon them, afraid we’d buckle under the pressure and bend the knee, and then their disillusionment would be even worse than before.”

...Even the children and grandchildren of the late evangelist Billy Graham, who founded Christianity Today, appear divided over the editorial on social media.

Exit polls from the 2016 election showed that 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump. An NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll from this month found that 75 percent of white evangelicals approved of Trump, compared with 42 percent of Americans overall.

Among the small number of prominent evangelical leaders who have openly opposed Trump, many, like Galli, are retired or planning to retire soon. The group includes Minnesota pastor John Piper, who has called the president “unqualified,” and Texas pastor Max Lucado, who said in 2016 that Trump didn’t pass a “decency test.” Spokespeople for Piper and Lucado said they were not available Monday.

Doug Birdsall, an evangelical leader who gathered a group of influential institutional leaders at Wheaton College last year to discuss the Trump era’s impact on the evangelical movement, said his decision to hold the event has affected him personally. Birdsall, who is honorary chair of Lausanne, an international movement of evangelicals that was started by Billy Graham, raised $21 million for a gathering of evangelicals in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2010 for “a congress on reconciliation.” Now, he said, many of those donors are alienated from him. He said he has had to self-fund some ministry work he’s doing using $400,000 in savings and home equity.

“I think people have been waiting for someone of [Christianity Today’s] stature to say something,” Birdsall said. “I think Mark’s piece inspires others to be courageous.”

Obviously, evangelical Christians aren’t the only Americans facing internal dissension over Trump. Alex Henderson, writing for Alternet, also on Christmas Eve, noted that “The conservative movement in the United States used to pride itself on having intellectuals like George Will and the late National Review founder William F. Buckley, who spoke with a posh Mid-Atlantic accent that sounded quasi-British. But these days, many right-wing politicians and media figures champion a certain anti-intellectualism-- and journalist Christian Schneider, in an article for the conservative website The Bulwark, notes that some Republicans go out of their way to butcher the English language even if they have Ivy League educations. ‘Saying Democrat instead of Democratic has become a shibboleth-- a verbal handshake to signal that you’re on Team Red Hat,’ Schneider explains. ‘It’s about as annoying as people rolling their r’s when ordering a burrito to prove they once vacationed in Cozumel. But whatever. Triggering Democrats has become so important to Republicans that they’re willing to assault the English language if the people who like good grammar are the bad guys.’ Schneider observes that saying Democrat Party instead of Democratic Party ‘doesn’t make sense on any linguistic level’ because ‘Democrat’ is a noun and ‘Democratic’ is an adjective-- and ‘one should not use one in place of the other,’ he writes.”

“Low-key shittiness is now a rite of passage for calling yourself a Republican,” Schneider writes. “And with a tidal wave of nonsense coming from the right on a daily basis, it’s impossible to correct the micro-idiocies. And so, here we are.”

Bernie grew up in my neighborhood and comes from a family very much like mine. Although he’s got a few years on me, we went to the same elementary school and the same high school. That background makes me feel like I know him-- much more than the couple of times I’ve actually spoken with him. His adherence to democratic socialism is the same ideology I learned from my grandfather. Journalist Dave Lindorff is around our age as well, and he wrote this week about how frustrated and disappointed he is that people in our age group are shying away from Bernie’s idealism and gravitating to the calculated conservatism of career-long corporate whore, Status Quo Joe Biden. Or worse-- “Mike Bloomberg or some other ossified mainstream Democratic pol. Speaking as a 70-year-old Baby Boomer myself, and increasingly an admirer of Sanders, I gotta ask: OK Boomers, what's happened to you?”





He asks his readers to “Think back: What were you doing back in the late 1960s when you were in your teens or early 20s as the Civil Rights Movement was finally winning the right to vote for Black people, when the Vietnam War was raging and classmates of yours were coming home in body bags? Where were you when President Nixon in 1970 urged Ohio Republican Governor James Rhodes to send the Ohio National Guard onto the Kent State Campus to put down a student protest against his illegal invasion of Cambodia, expanding an ugly war to yet another country, and the ‘heroic’ guardsmen shot and killed four unarmed students? Where were you when we were all shattering the walls of prudery, experimenting with sex, the mind-freeing wonders of marijuana and yes, even LSD? Where were you as women and their male supporters suddenly stood tall and said that just having the vote wasn't enough; they demanded equality with men on the job, in the home, in politics and in their relationships? … [W]e were,” he added, “for the most part I would argue, happier and freer than we are today.”

Somehow, in the intervening years since the victory of the Vietnamese over the country's US invaders, the impeachment hearings and resignation of Nixon, the end of the draft, passage of the Voting Rights Act and creation of Medicare and Medicaid, and the at least partial liberation of women, we've lost our way. We got married, raised families, fretted over the size of the IRA and 401(k) plans we and our weakened trade unions if we still had them, were forced to rely on instead of the real pensions workers in an age of stronger unions used to have. And even worse, we became consumers instead of people, morphing into better-off versions of our own parents. Some of us even became Republicans or Neo-liberal Democrats, worried more about our own gain than about those who were being left behind or crushed by what we used to call the "System," and ignoring what our nation was and still is doing to the world.

During all these intervening years, as we've lost our way, Bernie Sanders has stayed the course. Four years too old to be officially a Baby Boomer, Sanders, born in 1941, hails from that demographic cohort that, during the Nixon years, to its undying disgrace, came to be known, and even to self-identify, as the Silent Generation consisting of those born between the wars or during WWII. Sanders, though, has never been silent. He protested and faced arrest as a student defending the rights of American blacks and opposed both US apartheid and the Vietnam War. He then entered politics as a socialist, winning election as mayor of Burlington, VT (which under his leadership become known jokingly as "the People's Republic of Burlington" " and admiringly as one of the best US cities to live in). Later he moved on to Congress, first as a representative and then as the state's junior senator-- a position he still holds.

Bernie Sanders, my fellow Boomers, is the person we had intended to be as we grew older and wiser: Obstinate and outspoken defenders of the downtrodden, rejectors of consumerism, and advocates of the notion that we all are better off when we demand that government help those who are the neediest, not those who are the most wealthy and powerful. Sanders may have on occasion failed to remember our Edwin Starr mantra "War: What is it good for? Absolutely Nothin!," but he seems to be coming around to that view again in this race for the presidency.

We Boomers as a group need to do the same. In fact, those of us who are not supporting Sanders in this coming election year need to do some soul searching about who we really are and what we really stand for.

Maybe my insurance plan (at a significant cost) is really great, but that is no reason for me to oppose expanded and improved Medicare for All as proposed by Sen. Sanders. Not only would Medicare for All cost me a lot less than I pay now for healthcare coverage, but with Medicare for All I would know that everyone else in this nation-- all my fellow citizens-- would have the same access to free high-quality health care as me.

Maybe if the government subsidized the installation of point-of-use electrical generating equipment (wind, geothermal or solar panels) on all US homes, I'd be paying higher taxes, but our air would be vastly cleaner, our cars would all be electric and virtually cost-free to drive, and we'd no longer have power bills from climate-change-inducing and pollution-causing power plant operator. A Green New Deal that promises to find jobs for those displaced by the urgent shutdown of greenhouse gas polluters, as advocated by Sanders, even if jarring for some, would be good for everyone.

If we ended our national imperial policy of endless wars and slashed military spending, maybe the U.S. military and the arms industry would lay off a lot of people, but Americans would be viewed a lot better by the rest of the world, and our nation would be able to spend a trillion dollars a year or more in productive rather than destructive ways-- like engaging in a crash program to save the earth from human-caused mass extinction.

When we were younger and more idealistic, we always talked about "peace, love and understanding," remember? Now we talk about Russiagate, Trump, terrorism, the next recession, how or when we're going to retire, and our next Caribbean cruise.

I'm not sure how it happened, but we as a generation have lost our way and our soul. We urgently need to "get back, get back, get back to where we once belonged."

Bernie's been there all along, and now we need to not just support but to join him. We don't want or need a corporate lacky and banker's best friend like Joe Biden who was opposing busing while Bernie was joining anti-discrimination sit-ins, and who came up with the racist and classist idea of mass incarceration that has made the US the nation with the most people in jail in the world. Nor do we want or need a guy like Michael Bloomberg who as Mayor of New York saw his wealth grow from $4.6 billion to $36.7 billion, and who, when he was in charge of that city's struggling public college system, the City University of New York, chose to donate $1.8 billion not to CUNY but to Johns Hopkins, a wealthy private university in Baltimore with a $3-billion endowment at that time! And we don't want or need a guy like Pete Buttigieg who is backed by dozens of billionaire capitalists, and who spent his formative years working for firm, McKinsey, that makes its profits by advising companies on how to ditch massive numbers of their workers, and who calls for sending the U.S. troops into Mexico!

…Now, I hear all the time when I mention Sanders to people my age-- generally liberal Democrats-- that Sanders "has no chance to win," that his socialist ideas like Medicare for All are "too far left for most voters," and that he's "a one- or at best two-issue candidate: Medicare for All and break up the banks." Meanwhile, the media are now claiming, on the basis of ignorance about the UK and of lazy thinking, that the drubbing of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party on Dec. 12 is "a warning" for Democrats not to nominate a left-wing presidential candidate. So let me address these erroneous tropes. First of all, Sanders has been a combination of viciously attacked, ignored and/or misrepresented by the corporate media, and especially the liberal media. MSNBC has actually misstated his poll standing repeatedly. The New York Times has written more about Bloomberg (polling 0-1%) and Yang (polling 5% at best) lately than about Sanders who is in the lead in California polls and in second place or even leading in nationwide in some national polls. Don't believe me? Check out Real Clear Politics, which runs poll averages instead of just single polls. Don't think the media are being unfair in their reporting on Sanders? The LA Times actually was forced a few weeks ago by massive reader protests to correct a headline that said Warren and Biden were losing ground in California, but failed to mention that it was Sanders who was taking the lead!

The truth is, Sanders is leading or gaining ground in the primaries nationally and in key states like South Carolina, California and Florida. Also true is that he is speaking not just to progressives, but to the core working class voters who abandoned the Democratic Party and voted for Trump last time. I saw this at work in 2016 driving through upstate NY in small towns where everyone is either Republican or independent but typically conservative, but where many, many people also depend upon Medicaid or lately, the ACA if they have jobs, to pay for their medical care. During the 2016 Democratic primary, the area sported lots of Sanders signs on lawns and bumpers. After Clinton won that primary, the signs and bumper stickers upstate switched to Trump or to "Lock her up!" signs. That should tell you all you need to know.

As for my leftist friends who think Sanders is too squishy and liberal, check out his enemies: Virtually the entire mass media, Mayor Bloomberg, the $56-billion Man who joined the race for president fearing that the party might, god forbid, nominate an anti-capitalist like Sanders or and anti-billionaire like Elizabeth Warren. Remember two things: A candidate can be defined best by the enemies he or she makes, and perfection in a candidate means election failure.

Sanders in 2020!

Timberrrr by Nancy Ohanian

Sometimes I Cry When I Write-- This Was One Of Those Times... But Not Because John Bolton Was Fired

Early this morning, Señor T tweeted that he had fired Bolton. Can you think of another good thing he's done this year? Don't worry, less than 40% of voting age American can either. According to the new Washington Post/ABC News poll, Trump's job approval is down to 38%. 56% disapprove. "His average rating since taking office," wrote pollster Gary Langer, "remains the lowest on record for any modern president at a comparable point in his term, and he is the first never to have achieved majority approval." The Post noted that "Trump is ending a tumultuous summer with his approval rating slipping back from a July high as Americans express widespread concern about the trade war with China and a majority of voters now expect a recession within the next year."

Wondering why Trump finally did fire Bolton? Is he actually seeing the light on the evil that he's surrounded himself with? Don't be ridiculous. Secretary of State Pompeo told hinted, gently, that if he didn't fire Bolton, he (Pompeo) would quit and run for the open Kansas U.S. Senate seat. After Trump's rally in North Carolina last night, Bolton called him to whine about Iran and either Trump fired him (Trump's version) or Bolton quit (Bolton's version). Bolton was Trump's 4th National Security Adviser since Putin put him in the White House. Trump, as you know, hires all the best people.

CNN published an alarmingly essay by Zach Wolf this morning about how Trump is stressing out the constitution. Wolf wrote that by his simultaneous existence as a real estate tycoon and "president," Trump "continues to test the U.S. Constitution in ways that the founding fathers didn't anticipate and for which the current legal and political systems are completely unprepared. The founders didn't specifically anticipate a hotelier President pushing his golf resort as the ideal location for an international meeting of heads of state. They didn't specifically say an Air Force crew couldn't use taxpayer dollars to stay at a resort owned by the President in a foreign country, which may or may not be suffering as a result of his presidency. They didn't anticipate the Air Force more generally starting to send more flights in need of refueling to the financially troubled airport closest to that resort, eschewing military bases that might provide cheaper fuel. They didn't anticipate the President's subordinates would begin serially staying at his properties or planning parties at them, potentially currying favor with their boss. And they didn't anticipate a President who would be so willing to push every rule to the breaking point-- or be so cavalier about the appearance of self-dealing. But the real problem is that Congress hasn't, either. There's nothing on the books curtailing any of this-- which means that the President could be in violation of the Constitution without breaking the law."





John Pavlovitz published a different type-- but not unrelated-- essay on his website today: . It's incredibly powerful... like the song. I suggest you read the whole thing but, basically, this is what those 38% of Trump supporters are teaching their children:

• People don’t matter. Human beings are things, wielded in battles you manufacture in order to win.
• Never apologize. When you are found to be wrong or speak in error-- never admit it.
• Diversity is dangerous. The more differences around you, the more there is to fear.
• It’s all about you. Forget the advice of your teachers and pastors and story books, and discard that all nonsense about loving your neighbor as yourself or doing unto others and you’d have done to you. Other people’s experiences unimportant.
• Compassion is a flaw. To feel empathy is to show weakness
• America is the world.
• Women are less valuable than men.
• Whiteness is better.
• Your convictions are for sale.
• Laws don’t apply to you.
• Religion is a prop. Faith is simply a costume to put on when it profits you; a shiny veneer to cover yourself in,  in order to ingratiate yourself into community with genuinely spiritual people who will think the best of you, and thus be easily fooled.
• When in doubt, lie.

"A generation of children is learning these things from the people most entrusted to show them how to be human," concluded Pavlovitz. "They are forming the lenses they see the world through from birth. It will be almost impossible for them to discern reality."

There Was A Red Wave-- In Ohio

You know where there was no blue wave this cycle? Ohio-- not even a ripple. It was another status quo election in Ohio, as though nothing at all was going on in the country-- nothing at all. Just... same ole/same ole. All the incumbents in the gerrymandered congressional districts-- each one carefully designed to return incumbents-- were reelected. And in the one contest where there was no incumbent, the party stayed the same. The 12 Republicans were reelected and the 4 Democrats were reelected. Meanwhile Sherrod Brown was reelected Senator over self-funding far right Congressman Jim Renacci:

The same voters decided to elect Republican Mike DeWine governor over Democrat Richard Cordray. Compare the numbers in the Senate and gubernatorial races:

Schizophrenic electorate? Or just very, very conservative-- not just politically, but even more profoundly, just wanting nothing to change much. Ohioans elected another Republican Attorney General, Dave Yost, another Republican Secretary of State, Frank LaRose, another Republican Treasurer, Robert Sprague and another Republican State Auditor, Keith Faber. The Republicans maintained their supermajorities in both the state Senate and the state House.

And while the rest of the country is passing liberalized criminal justice and marijuana laws, Ohio Issue 1, the Drug and Criminal Justice Policies Initiative, failed overwhelmingly-- 2,716,958 (63.4%) to 1,568.347 (36.6%).

2016 was really ugly in Ohio too. In the Democratic primary voters picked the dull establishment status quo candidate over Bernie, 56.5% to 42.7%, ands then defeated her in all but 7 counties in the general. It was Trumpanzee 2,771,984 (52.1%) to 2,317,001 (43.5%) for Hillary. And these kinds of results play out badly in real life. Ohio's a screwed up mess.

I bet you never heard of Ron Hood or Nino Vitale, right? They're both really extreme right-wing legislators in the Ohio House. The two introduced HB 565, the purpose of which is to trigger a Supreme Court case that overturns Roe v Wade. Their bill proposes the death penalty for a woman who gets an abortion as well as for a doctor that performs one-- with no exceptions for rape, incest, or even danger to a woman’s life. So far there are 20 Ohio legislators who support it.

Cincinnati's City Beat reported that the 2 principal sponsors, "Hood and Vitale say the measure is meant to protect the lives of the unborn and, according to Vitale, protect women from the 'trauma' of abortion."

The legislation clearly flies in the face of interpretations of the U.S. Constitution set up by the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which guarantees access to abortion up until a fetus is viable outside the womb. In the (as of now) unlikely case that HB565 was passed into law, it would almost certainly set up a legal battle that could go to the U.S Supreme Court. That's something many boosters of the bill and similar legislation would actually like to see, however. After President Donald Trump's appointment of two conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices, some conservatives believe that the high court might amend or overturn Roe entirely, given the right case.

Hood has made it clear HB565 and the "heartbeat" bill are both aimed at this goal.

“House Bill 258 is the vehicle that is needed to revisit Roe v. Wade,” Hood said in a statement following the heartbeat bill's passage. “The House passage of the bill is a critical step in that long-awaited process."

Abortion access advocates have strongly criticized the measure.

"Anti-choice extremists from the Ohio Statehouse to the White House are lining up their dominoes to topple Roe v. Wade and punish those who seek or provide abortion care," NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio Executive Director Kellie Copeland said in a statement following the bill's initial introduction in March this year.

Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio spokesperson Danielle Craig called it "the worst intrusion on a woman's reproductive rights by the Ohio legislature to date" and "blatantly unconstitutional" in a statement earlier this year. Craig said if passed, the legislation would cost Ohio millions in court costs. Ohio has already spent several million in court battles over less-restrictive abortion regulations lawmakers have passed, often losing.

So where were women voters and progressive voters, millennials, minorities and the woke masses who helped the Democrats flip control of the House this month? Not in Ohio, that's for certain. Hood's district is southeast of Columbus, entirely within the 15th congressional district, represented by anti-Choice nut Steve Stivers. Hood was reelected November 6 against Democrat Amber Daniels 28,619 (67.9%) to 13,549 (32.1%). Vitale's district is northwest of Columbus-- and entirely within the red hellhole known as OH-05, Jim Jordan's sad excuse for a congressional district. The results were even worse there. Vitale was reelected against Democrat Garrett Baldwin 28,077 (72.9%) to 10,452 (27.1%).

Yesterday, Ron Brownstein, writing for CNN, seemed to discount the ability of a political party being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Maybe he's correct, since he was writing about the Democrats. He posed the question about the party concentrating on winning back Rust Belt voters or winning over Sun Belt voters. They really do have to do both. Certainly the Democratic Party was extremely successful in the midterms in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota Iowa and Wisconsin-- even if they bombed in Ohio and Indiana. "Though the 2018 election opened intriguing opportunities in the Sun Belt," wrote Brownstein, "new data suggest the shortest path back to the White House for Democrats may be through the three Rust Belt swing states that President Donald Trump dislodged from the 'blue wall' two years ago... [E]xit polls showed that in [Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania] Trump not only faced surging opposition from college-educated white women, but also suffered notable attrition among the blue-collar white women who were critical to his success there last time... Democrats held a Senate seat and won the governorship in each state, while also gaining a net of five House seats in Pennsylvania and Michigan combined."

[T]he most daunting Rust Belt results for Democrats came in Ohio. Though Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, a potential 2020 contender, won re-election, his margin was narrower than expected and Republicans comfortably held the governor's mansion. In the exit poll, 52% of Ohio voters approved of Trump's performance. And while college-educated white women tilted slightly away from him (with 52% of them disapproving), he retained very strong numbers there among non-college white men (67% approval), college-educated white men (62%) and non-college white women (59%).

But, if anything, Trump's continued Ohio strength among those groups only underscored his more precarious position with them in the other key Rust Belt battlegrounds of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

"I think Ohio is much more of a core red state than the other three," says John Brabender, a Pennsylvania-based GOP strategist. "The other ones are at their hearts blue states that will sometimes vote Republican. And it better be an awfully good year."

Bonus quiz: Ohio gave the U.S. eight presidents-- William Henry Harrison, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, and Warren G. Harding. What did all eight of these presidents have in common, besides being from Ohio?

Teach Your Children Well

I was a dj on my college radio station, WUSB. I was also the chairman of the Student Activities Board and put on all these great concerts by bands like the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, the Dead, the Airplane, the Byrds, Joni Mitchell, Otis Redding, The Four Tops, Ravi Shankar, Muddy Waters, Love...

I got tapes in the mail... like everyday. In 1969 I was getting ready to cut out and go the Europe before officially graduating. I had heard this new group's first song, "Marrakech Express," and I remember it because I was planning to go there. But I wasn't moved enough by it to ask the band to play, even though I was a big fan of David Crosby from when he was in the Byrds doing songs like 8 Miles High-- which he definately was when the band arrived 2 hours late for a concert. But Crosby, Stills & Nash... eh, I thought.

"Teach Your Children" was on their next album, the first with Neil Young, Déjà Vu. It came out in May of 1970. I had already left Europe (and left Marrakech) and was driving across Asia towards Afghanistan singing...

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good-bye.
Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by

Someone had sent me an advance tape. It spoke to me... big time. After all, I was on the road, driving through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal... I had a code to live by too. I sang along to that song every day. And it was a hit in my van, even though it wasn't out yet.

Sunday I heard former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Fareed Zakaria's CNN show talking about what CSN&Y had been singing about almost 4 decades ago:

"I tell many stories about the kids I talk to and how they're growing up learning not to hate rather than learning to hate. So what we have to do is focus on our young people. Some of the old folks... if that's the way they feel, that's the way they feel; they're not going to change. But we' have to make sure that we're teaching all of our children, in schools, in the home, everywhere, that it is not right to hate in this country. This is a country of love. This is a country of kindness. This is a country that we reach out to each other and we reach out to the rest of the world."

Yes, he's aware of the current regime and who runs it. That's the point of that hippy speech he just made. Watch as he talks about the constitutional "We the people" rather than Trump's narrow, self-serving "Me the president." (Up top.) But is there any reason to believe that Colin Powell's plea to teach the children to love instead of to hate is going to work any better now than it did when Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sang it in 1970? Trump has the bully pulpit and what the children are hearing today is, I'm afraid, hate, hate, hate. That's what sits in the White House, after millions and millions of our fellow countrymen voted for him-- the ones whose parents, apparently never took "Teach Your Children" all that seriously, if they even heard it at all.

GOP Legislators Are Not Scientists. Nor Are They Musicians. Dan Levitin Is Both

Unless you've taken any classes from him at Stanford or McGill, chances are if you know who Dan Levity is, it's because of one of his best-selling books, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, and The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. Dan is a a cognitive neuroscientist specializing in music perception and cognition. Although I've known him since the early '80s, this is the first guest post he has done for DWT. -- Howie


Music Education

by Dan Levitin

Howie is one of my oldest and dearest friends. We go back to the San Francisco punk scene in 1981, when he used to come to the Mabuhay Gardens to see my punk band The Mortals (later, we called ourselves Judy Garland). I became his Director of Artists and Repertoire at 415/Columbia Records in 1983 and that began a close friendship that included a standing dinner once a week for many years. Howie taught me more than I can fathom, about music, business, relationships, and politics.

It breaks my heart that his current medical crisis has taken him away from the thing that he loves most in the world, blogging full-time about progressive candidates for DWT. I offer this guest blog to honor him and to help fill the huge void his temporary absence has left.

There is a political issue that does not get much discussed, and that gets lost among the many priorities we have. It is not the intransigent racism that we are still seeing in some parts of the country; unwarranted police brutality; the widening gap between wealth and poverty; the dysfunctional legislative process in congress; or vast indifference to climate change. It's something many agree with but few do much about, even though it has the potential to help us solve all of these problems. I'm talking about arts education in K-12 public schools in general, and music education in particular.

It is no secret that music programs have been cut throughout the U.S., victims of wide-spread budget cuts, tax laws that erode the tax base for schools, and an apathetic voter participation. I grew up in a small dusty rural town in Northern California (where cows grazed on green hills adjacent to our school). This was not a community with a large tax base, but still we had free music starting in 3rd grade, and a room full of district-owned musical instruments that we could take home with us for years at a time. We had private music lessons and ensembles. We did it because it was fun, the way that sports are fun. We didn't know then, but there is an emerging science that now shows that learning music creates biological changes in the brain that improve children's lives and makes them better citizens.

Those are big claims. What is the evidence?

Children who learn to play a musical instrument have an advantage when it comes to reading: they learn to read at an earlier age and at a faster rate. Children who learn to play a musical instrument exhibit fewer behavioral problems, and appear to be more socialized. Most of the evidence so far obtained is correlational, meaning that we see these effects on children who take music, but we aren't sure if it's the music that makes students better or that the better students end up taking music. It is probably a little bit of both, but like the link between smoking and cancer (also correlational) there is a growing consensus that music education may actually be driving these behavioral advantages.

Why might this be?

Learning a musical instrument exercises a number of different brain circuits. Before making a sound, our brain activates prediction devices, neural circuits that attempt to predict what sound will come out of the instrument. Then we make the sound and a comparitor circuit comes online to compare what we did with what we thought we did. A third set of neural circuits then gets activated to make any corrections to bring the two closer together. All of these operations are important for developing problem solving skills.

Playing an instrument with others draws us outside ourselves because we have to coordinate what we're doing with what others are doing-- to listen to them and predict when they are going to make a musical note so that we can synchronize with them. Playing music in synchrony with others causes our neurons to physically synchronize with each other's, causing feelings of connection and bonding. In this way, music can defuse interpersonal tensions and rivalries, and teach us the joy and power of interpersonal connection and cooperation.

Art education in general teaches us to see the world differently, to realize that there are different perspectives on things, and that people can have different emotional reactions to the same works of art, the same encounters, the same experiences. This leads to greater open-mindedness, which in turn leads to greater tolerance and acceptance of others. Art exercises us in the skill of balancing the creative with the practical, getting ideas out of our heads and out-there-in-the-world. Art teaches us to make connections between things that we didn't see as connected before. And that's actually what most problem solving involves: seeing connections between things that we hadn't previously seen as connected.

The big problems that face the world today do not have easy solutions-- if they did, they would have been solved. But I think our best bet for solving them is to turn them over to people who are open-minded, tolerant, appreciate the power of cooperation, and can see connections between things that hadn't been seen before. Arts education does not ensure that we will be able to solve these big problems, but my bets are on it to give the next generation of leaders the best possible chance to formulate creative, practical, solutions. Art education should not be political and it should not be a partisan issue.

My own arts education may have begun in public school, but it was immeasurably enhanced by Howie, one of my greatest music teachers.

CROSBY, STILLS, NASH & YOUNG VS BUSH, CHENEY, RUMSFELD & ROVE

In 1999 I was still president of Reprise when a quartet of college faves of mine, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reunited to record, release and tour behind LOOKING FORWARD. So long ago... remember what it was like in the world before George Bush? The new CSN&Y tour, Freedom of Speech Your '06, is very different from the LOOKING FORWARD Tour.

Ben Werner of the Orange County Register doesn't want to mince words. "The quartet of 60-somethings has rallied around a decidedly strident work, Young's LIVING WITH WAR, easily the most bluntly outspoken response to the president and the Iraq war yet recorded. Slammed out in a six-day rage, the disc's nine straightforward anthems (and choir rendition of "America the Beautiful") scream for CS&N's harmonies and willingness to take a similar stand... Trust me, these won't be your grandfather's CSN&Y shows. Yeah, across 30-plus songs in two sets, they typically toss in 'Our House' and 'Helplessly Hoping' to temper the attack. But with the majority of Young's fed-up firebombs alternating with Vietnam-era staples like 'Ohio' and 'Chicago' and 'For What It's Worth,' this throwback to change-the-world rock will surely be the most protest-heavy series of shows since 2004's Vote for Change.

Crosby was interviewed by Werner and he pointed out that "part of our job is just to rock you, and part of our job is to be like troubadours, carrying the news from one town to another, like town criers. And that part of our job this time is much stronger because Neil came with an entire album of immensely strong songs. And they're very direct songs, man. They're not complex and wispy and out there. They're not 'Guinnevere.' They are right in your face. You know, Neil's (angry). He doesn't think this is a just war, and neither do we. A lot of people in this country feel like they've been hoodwinked. If they're Democrats, they feel that the elections were stolen. If they're Republicans, they feel like their party got swiped and dragged off to the extreme right. There are a lot of people who are unhappy about the lies that have been told. There's a huge mistake going on there, man. It's war for profit rather than principal, and that's really, really a gross thing. The way we feel-- we think that the young people who go to war are some of the best ones we've got. They're the ones who believe in this country enough to put their lives on the line. And to send them over there so Haliburton and Bechtel and Exxon can make a profit, man? That's just not good enough. This administration has been disrespectful to those soldiers all along-- unless they're behind them on the TV cameras. To them, they're just cannon fodder. But to us they're human beings, and every one of them has a mother."

Werner points put the Republican bastion of Orange County is (finally) receptive to and ready for this message but he asks Crosby how the mood of their audiences compare to how it was during the Vietnam era.

It's very similar, man. The country is very, very polarized. There are two distinct sides, and they have very strong feelings. And the administration that is in power is doing a lot of the very same things that were going on during the Nixon years. What people seem to dislike most is having this administration try to marginalize them, tell them that if they don't agree with their politics, then they are being un-American.

Which is just nonsense. We don't agree with this administration, but we love the country. And the people in our audience seem to feel the same way. They believe in this country, in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence. They love this place, and they don't like having it swiped away. We don't either... I guarantee you we will make some people leave. And I'm fine with that. I'm very happy to see that sort of dissent. I heard, actually, that there were going to be people picketing us at some of the places. I think that'd be great, but I haven't seen it yet.

Watch this awesome 9 minute documentary about the tour and the why its relevant to the war and the Bush Regime:



After you watch, if you feel like helping Patrick Murphy's campaign... here you go.

SO WHAT DO THE REPUBLICAN DEAD-ENDERS THINK OF THE NEW NEIL YOUNG ALBUM?

With Bush's job approval ratings in free fall and heading into the teens-- like Cheney's-- is this the time for Republican loyalists to start rockin' out in the free world? As you probably know by now, Neil Young's new album, LIVING WITH WAR, is filled with criticism for Bush and his policies. Vit Wagner, the pop critic for the TORONTO STAR, has noticed that American right-wingers aren't too happy with Neil or his new album.

Neil Young's new album, LIVING WITH WAR, might not trigger the downfall of U.S. president George W. Bush, but it has served to sort out any lingering confusion about the legendary singer's nationality.  A Canadian calling for the impeachment of a U.S. president will tend to do that.

Young, born in Toronto and raised in Winnipeg, is a Canadian.  This will not come as news to anyone on this side of the border, where the 60-year-old tunesmith is revered as one of Canada's greatest musical sons. But the distinction is sometimes lost down south, where — if you believe long-held conventional wisdom — it is assumed that Young, who has lived in the U.S. for 40 years without taking citizenship, is an American.

It's hard to gauge the extent of this misconception.  But it's a safe bet that it's less common now than it was before "Let's Impeach the President," the most controversial of the 10 tracks on /LIVING WITH WAR, started streaming for free on Young's Web site a week and a half ago.

The album, which arrives in stores today, has provoked a flood of commentary outside the usual music press circles, much of it focused on whether Young is even entitled to have an opinion about the commander-in-chief.

"Neil Young is not a U.S. citizen.  He's Canadian," protests the online edition of conservative weekly, THE NATIONAL REVIEW. "He can't even vote. He's been in America for 40 years, and has never bothered to take out citizenship. And this interloper from the land of moose and Mounties is telling us to impeach our president! For goodness' sake.  If it's not Mexican fence-jumpers trying to dictate legislation to us, it's fur trappers from the wilds of Ontario insulting our head of state."

On Fox News, host Mike Gallagher complained, "Neil Young is rich and famous because the country he's trashing made him so.  Wouldn't his words carry a little more clout if he bothered to become a citizen of the country that made him rich and famous?"

Another Fox commentator, John Gibson, accused Young of disrespecting the memory of 9/11.  Gibson suggested the singer take in a screening of United 93, not realizing, apparently, that Young paid tribute to the victims of that flight with his 2002 song, "Let's Roll."

The blogosphere is predictably awash with similar sentiments, replete with derisive remarks about back bacon and other Canadiana.  Young has had his defenders, too, including Illinois Senator Barak Obama, endorsed by Young on another of the disc's songs, "Lookin' for a Leader."

This is not the first time Young has disturbed the waters politically.  "Ohio," a response to the killing by National Guardsmen of four Vietnam War protestors at Kent State University in 1970, was a hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young that has endured as an anti-war anthem.

A decade later, Young made waves by offering a positive assessment of then-president Ronald Reagan.  Disillusioned though many liberals were by this revelation, few, if any, suggested that Young's citizenship disqualified him from voicing an opinion.  Conservatives, for the most part, were delighted.

The irony is that while Young might not technically qualify as a U.S. citizen, LIVING WITH WAR is written from an entirely American perspective.  The album's criticisms of government policy are framed by the assumption that America is a fundamentally good, freedom-loving nation being led astray by corrupt, misguided leadership.  The concluding track, after all, is an irony-free rendition of "America the Beautiful."

Tracks from the disc will serve as a focal point for the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young trek that stops at the Air Canada Centre on July 10. Even the name of the tour, "Freedom of Speech '06," has a decidedly American ring.

In any case,LIVING WITH WAR isn't nearly as incendiary as Steve Earle's 2002 powder keg, JERUSALEM, flung directly into the teeth of 9/11's highly patriotic aftermath, or his 2004 follow-up, THE REVOLUTION STARTS HERE.

Many of the same pundits also slammed Earle, particularly for his sociologically empathetic portrait of Taliban conscript John Walker Lindh.  But there's a world of difference.  Earle, who has unabashedly identified himself as a Marxist, is calling for a revolution.  In "Looking for a Leader," by contrast, Young floats the less-than radical-assertion that maybe Colin Powell would be a better president than Bush.

The political climate is different now, too.  With Bush's approval ratings slithering, Young isn't the only U.S. resident contemplating impeachment. The thought has probably crossed the mind of the odd Republican. Judging by Bush's plummeting popularity even among conservatives, disenchantment with the administration runs deep. In that sense, the political views expressed on LIVING WITH WAR are more mainstream than right-wing commentators let on.

It's easier to dismiss the messenger as an unworthy interloper than deal with how widely the disillusionment is shared.

Besides, it isn't as if Young eagerly sought the mantle of national conscience.

"I was waiting for someone to come along, some young singer 18 to 22 years old, to write these songs and stand up," Young told THE LOS ANGELES TIMES. "I waited a long time. Then I decided that maybe the generation that has to do this is still the Sixties generation."

Or maybe, in the spirit of free trade, the job just fell to a Canadian.