In what may be one of the most credible, powerfully written and delivered speeches in recent times, Caroline Kennedy calls on the US Senate to reject RFK,Jr’s nomination as HHS Secretary.
Caroline Kennedy urging the US Senate to reject the nomination of her cousin, RFK Jr., for HHS Secretary. The link below is to her entire 6+ minute speech delivered on social media.
Police Officer Harry Dunn (top photo) & Police Officer Michael Fanone.
It’s past time for the National Democratic Party to stop wringing its collective hands over Trump’s election and his Gestapo-like roll-out of Project 25—which he repeatedly lied about –and pick two authentic American Heroes to be the new Co-Chairs of the Democratic Party: Capitol Police Officers Michael Fanone and Harry Dunn.
Yes, I know they are not “official” candidates, nor do they have long-standing Democratic operative “bonafides” to run the Party. That’s what makes them so freakin’ perfect.
The more the Democratic Party retreads the same old faces of pols or political cronies who have been around forever and making peoples’ eyes glaze over for just as long, the more Trump and his made-for-television MAGA-monsters will clean our clock. Now is the time for all creative, law-loving out-of-the box thinkers to come to the aid of our Country.
Just think of how the selection of Fanone and Dunn would frame the fundamental respect for the Rule of Law issues facing this country for the next four years: “Democrats Defend the Law; MAGA Mauls It.” Videos of the Violence of January 6, 2021, could be put on a permanent loop on Tik Tok and YouTube, to underscore the urgency of our time. Fanone’s and Dunn’s faces would be everywhere, and they’d be the new face of the Democratic Party.
By selecting Fanone and Dunn as National Democratic Party Co-Chairs the result would be immediate and electrifying (not like the illegal MAGA Stun Guns used against them) and could instantly change the whole national political—and legal—ballgame. Overnight, it would be toxic for a Convicted Felon in the White House to pardon convicted felons who attacked—and caused the death of—police officers.
Fanone and Dunn’s positions atop the Dem Party would scream out the message loud and clear: Democrats are the Party For the Law. Every time either one would speak in public, on TV or Social Media, or attend any event, the very sight of them would shout: “WE’RE FOR THE LAW, AND THEY ARE NOT.” Imagine their power to communicate to Police unions, Law Enforcement organizations and Veterans groups.
Just looking at Fanone & Dunn would be a constant reminder that the criminally violent January 6 MAGA attack on the US Capitol and on both of them, and their colleagues, really did happen—despite the recidivist Trump’s White House attempts to whitewash it.
So think about this Democrats, while you are in process this week of culling through the line-up of the boring, “officially” declared candidates. Yes, I know that neither Fanone nor Dunn have any “administrative” experience. Did that stop Trump and MAGA from picking Pete Hegseth to run the $800 billion Defense Department with 3 million employees? To quote, Trump’s new, wily Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, “that’s what staff is for.”
There are plenty of Democratic political operatives who’ve run party organizations before, or national campaigns, and they can handle the day-to-day operations of the National Democratic Party.
But there is only ONE Michael Fanone, and ONE Harry Dunn.
The message their selection to lead the Democratic Party—the Party For The Law– into the future would send would be clear and unmistakable. It would forcefully flip the tables on the many MAGA felons whose only connection to the men and women in Blue, is when they violently attacked them, making them black and blue, under the direction—and pardon power protection– of a Convicted Felon in Chief
Fanone and Dunn would be a constant reminder of that, forcing people to decide if they are on the side of the law, or the lawless.
On January 6, 2021, violent supporters of Donald Trump broke into and vandalized the U.S. Capitol Building. They smashed windows to take over the Capitol Rotunda, where they proceeded to defecate and urinate throughout the national historic site.
On January 20, 2025, Donald J. Trump will be sworn into the the office of President on the very same site where his supporters defecated and urinated 4 years earlier, preparing the way for Trump’s return to power, as convicted Felon.
Here’ s a complete video of the January 6, 2021, violent takeover of the Capitol Rotunda:
(“Hedwig & the Angry Inch” was the brilliant stage musical of 1998—turned into a film three years later—written by the talented actor John Cameron Mitchell, with music and lyrics written by Stephen Trask. It’s the story of a Queer performer whose life took a different cut then they expected. The unique musical and film were the inspirations for this poem).
Zuckwig and his Insecure Inch,
Ungrateful for his billions, like a Grinch.
Nevermind he bought half of Kauai for swimmin,’
He measures his worth by how he trashes women.
A college flunky who couldn’t ask for dates,
Zuckwig is consumed with piles of vile self-hate;
Makes an App to anonymously give girls a rating,
Saving him from their sneers and nerd/weakling hating.
“I’ll show them” says Zuckwig,
“I’ll become very rich.”
“I’ll make them like me,
Not give me the ditch.”
So, he sprinkles some Winklevoss dust on their photos,
And vows not to look like some creepy Quasimoto.
Training his voice to sound like Theranos’ Lizzy Holmes,
Zuckwig vows to stop being a gnarly little gnome.
He takes martial arts, testosterone too,
Wears $900,000 watches, such a masculine brew.
He feels Joe Rogan’s biceps, hardens his rump,
Then schleps his little ass, to bow before Trump.
In with “Masculine Energy,”
Out with “Toxic Masculinity,”
Shouts the Artificial Hunk,
Who only ‘virtually’ lost his virginity.
Zuckwig declares war on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion,
And considers “All-Gender” banos to be too much of an intrusion.
His Tiny Little Inch, feeling suddenly insecure—
Suppose a Trans Man came in, with something not so demure?
Now, he can sit with the big boys,
With Trump, Bezos and Musk,
Flash his BIG expensive watch,
And brandish his false tusks.
His deep Elizabeth Holmes voice
Revealing nary a flinch,
No one could suspect,
Zuckwig has only one, tiny Insecure Inch.
(President Jimmy Carter convenes the opening meeting of the first Presidential Commission on Hunger in 1978. Harry Chapin, who persuaded Carter to create the first—and only—Hunger Commission of it’s kind in US History, is the bushy haired guy pictured in the top right of the photo. Bess Myerson, former NYC Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, is seated in the white jacket, in the center of the photo.)
Tomorrow is the National Day of Mourning for President Jimmy Carter who died just before 2025 began, at 100 years old.
Over the past several years, as he endured brain cancer, the death of Rosalyn, his wife of 77-years, and long-term hospice care, Carter has quietly, often silently, been teaching all of us a daily lesson on the dignity of dying after living a deeply purposeful and humanitarian life.
The National Day of Mourning for Jimmy Carter, will be attended by world leaders and ordinary citizens who had great admiration for his life of self-less service, and it comes in one of history’s most jarring juxtapositions, on the day before President-elect Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions will be affirmed by a Court, making him the first Felon ever elected to the Presidency, and the most self-serving individual to ever occupy the Presidency.
The contrast between moral good and evil—fundamental values in which Carter, a devout Christian, believed deeply—could not be more clear. Even many of the white, fundamentalist Christians who supported both Carter and Trump will have to sit up and take notice.
While we all love the later years of Jimmy Carter, I was never a big fan of his as either a candidate for President, or as President.
With the exception of his commitment to renewable energy, and his brokering of the Camp David Peace accords between Israel and Egypt in 1977, Carter was too politically conservative for me; too much of an incrementalist; not the kind of tough, crusading advocate for justice, human rights and the Rule of Law that many of us craved, following the corrupt times of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and Watergate.
Post-presidency, Carter would grow into a towering international human rights leader, and as a Jew uncomfortable with Israel’s lurch into right-wing fundamentalism, I applauded his early and courageous conclusion that the Israeli government’s deprivation of equal rights for Arab-born Israelis and Palestinians, amounted to Apartheid. Other Jews condemned Carter for his candor.
Years later, he would rail against the US Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, as heralding the establishment of the United States as an oligarchy, for sale to the highest bidder. Trump’s 2024 election, with a quarter-of-a billion dollar campaign contribution from the world’s richest man who does billions of dollars of business with the federal government, only proved Carter to be prophetic once again.
But, back in 1974, Democrats, across the country swept into near veto-proof power in Congress in the mid-term elections, adding 49 new seats in the House, giving them a commanding 291-seat majority; in the Senate, Democrats picked up 4 seats, producing a filibuster-proof majority of 61.
With the rise of progressivism in Congress few Democratic activists wanted a milquetoast candidate for President in 1976, even if the candidate was a Washington outsider with a winning smile who promised he’d never lie to us.
Many in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party wanted a tough, populist champion like Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma, or Rep. Mo Udall from Arizona to lead the Democratic National ticket in 1976. To many, Jimmy Carter was just far too cautious.
Even singer/songwriter Harry Chapin, who would later persuade Jimmy Carter to create the nation’s first and only Hunger Commission, and himself served on that unique Commission from 1978-1980, had his doubts.
Chapin was a delegate to the 1976 Democratic National Convention for the fiery liberal and environmental advocate Rep. Mo Udall, who advocated breaking up Big Oil and enacting National Health Insurance. Udall finished second to Jimmy Carter in six presidential primaries.
A few years back I interviewed social activist Bill Ayers, a former Catholic priest in the great social justice tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and the Berrigans.
Ayers, a NYC-area radio DJ and an authentic “radical priest”, co-founded World Hunger Year (WHY) with Harry Chapin in 1975. It was the team of Bill Ayres, Harry and Sandy Chapin and former Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, which brought the idea of creating the very first US Hunger Commission to the newly-elected President Carter.
Harry Chapin’s family—with ancestors like his grandfather Kenneth Burke, the literary giant and semanticist, and his great-aunt Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the Catholic Workers movement, was far more radical on social issues than many fans of Harry’s music were, and much more of an ardent advocate for change than Jimmy Carter, who, oddly, liked the lyrics of many of Bob Dylan songs for social change.
Chapin was determined to “do something” with his life—in addition to his music—and was eager to use his celebrity to alleviate hunger and suffering.
In my 2018, interview with Bill Ayres, Harry’s hunger-fighting partner, Ayres told me that:
“ What Harry didn’t like about Carter for one thing, was that he stacked the Pres. Hunger Commission with a whole bunch of people who were not the people who were going to solve hunger. But, the people that were on from the Congress were people we knew—Leahy, being the primary one, Rick Nolan (from Minnesota), the other Dem; Ben Gilman, the Republican, and Bob Dole. Dole grew up in Kansas during the Great Depression, when farmers were losing their farms. We (WHY Hunger) honored him and Senator George McGovern one night. Dole told me that “my Republican friends have never forgiven me for allowing food stamps to be free.”
Among the Commission members for whom Chapin had little patience was it’s Chair, former Xerox Corporation Chairman Sol Linowitz who, Harry believed, was watering down this historic Hunger Commission’s final report and only paying “lip service” to the underlying causes of hunger. Chapin and two other progressive members of the Commission—Senator Leahy and Rep. Nolan—were frequent dissenters on key sections of the Presidential Hunger Commission Report.
In one notable dissent of the report, published 45 years ago, Harry and his two colleagues protested:
“The most glaring issue not addressed is the most important—the interrelationships between our economic and governmental policies and hunger…
Only through expeditious action emanating from the highest levels of policymaking can we hope to map out an integrated program identifying the near-term, intermediate and long-range components of a comprehensive strategy to alleviate hunger…Poverty, not hunger, constitutes the central strand in the web of underdevelopment.”
Many of the Commission’s corporate members were not willing to push the envelope that far, nor did they share Harry’s single-mindedness of purpose for immediate action.
Bill Ayres described it this way:
“Harry never missed a meeting. (Despite a crushing performance schedule). I went to some of meetings with him. I listened. A whole bunch of people that Carter had chosen. Some good, some not so good. Bess Myerson never came.”
By the summer of 1980, after the final Hunger Commission report was published and put on a shelf, and Jimmy Carter’s attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran failed, Chapin began to get disillusioned. He saw Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate for President, as an uncaring & opportunistic charlatan, and Carter as a decent and well-meaning human being, but an ineffective public official.
Harry was passionate about federal action on poverty as essential to tackling world hunger, and became frustrated by the lack of urgency coming from others.
Bill Ayres summed it up well:
“Yes. And part of that was– let’s go to Washington and shake the tree! So the presidential hunger commission was a real breakthrough. Nobody had done that before. Again, that was Sandy’s idea. And it was a Presidential Commission on WORLD Hunger, so it was not Domestic Hunger so much. The Commission’s work went from1978-1980, when they finished their work and put out a document. The document didn’t go anyplace because Reagan got elected.”
“ Harry and I watched the 1980 election results together and we cried, and I said, “Shit. 3 years down the drain.” But he didn’t see it that way. He said, “Nope. We got to get back again and fight the bastards some more!” He wasn’t giving up.”
Harry Chapin never did give up; nor did Bill Ayres, the Chapin family, WHY Hunger, or any of the Harry Chapin Food Banks around the country…nor did Jimmy Carter. Some 45 years after the creation of the only Presidential Hunger Commission in US history, and five decades after the creation of WHY Hunger, the work of fighting hunger, poverty and powerlessness envisioned by Harry and Sandy Chapin and Bill Ayres continues, assisting thousands of families struggling to survive, and increasing food security for millions more.
Carter and Chapin came from dramatically different families, cultures and backgrounds, with sharply different personalities and approaches to social and political change. Yet, their lives’ work and legacies intertwined during Jimmy Carter’s Presidency, and beyond.
The year after Carter lost the Presidency, Harry Chapin lost his life in a tragic car crash at the age of 39. But Chapins’ work of reducing food insecurity and empowering the hungry lives on, as does Jimmy Carter’s extraordinary international efforts in advancing public health, ensuring democratic elections abroad, and his undaunted domestic work through “Habitat for Humanity,” still providing housing security for many of this country’s most vulnerable families—many of the same families who have come to rely upon the Harry Chapin Food Banks for their next meals.
Harry Chapin and Jimmy Carter were an unlikely, but powerful, ticket for long-term, structural change, and their lives, and legacies, are instructions for all the good that decent human beings can bring into this world, despite enormous challenges.
The first women elected Lt. Governor of NYS was one of my earliest mentors and inspirations to answer the call to public service. She died this week at 92, but her legacy lives on.
One of my early mentors and inspirations in government and politics, Mary Anne Krupsak, has died at the age of 92. Her death, coming just a few days after Jimmy Carter’s at age 100, underscores my belief that all the wrong people are dying.
Sam Roberts of The New York Times has written an elegant tribute to her, which took me back some 54 years when I first met Mary Anne as she campaigned for State Assembly in upstate New York, and I was a college Junior at the University at Albany, SUNY. My college friend Tim Palmer who worked for Mary Anne and was devoted to her, invited me to campaign with them, and we hammered up posters and handed out flyers across the Assembly District. Mary Anne, an original progressive populist, won in a landslide, despite opposition from Democratic Party bosses locally, and across the State..
Two year later, in 1972, Mary Anne also bucked party leaders (including Albany’s Mayor Erastus Corning, and NYS Dem Party Chairman Joe Crangle) when she backed my insurgent primary campaign for State Assembly in Albany County. Her endorsement called me “an articulate, effective fighter for reform of the Legislature, who will continue the momentum we’ve begun to open up our institutions of government…”
Tim Palmer chaired my campaign, and Carol Villano (then Carol Jacobson), was the largest contributor to my insurgent candidacy with a $75 donation. I had to deny that I was marrying her for her money, which I did on the steps of Albany City Hall.
We were all full of ourselves in those days, following our involvement in the anti-war movement, and the women’s rights movement in NYS, and Mary Anne Krupsak’s encouragement to run was the final push I needed. After all, she had introduced me to the legendary Allard Lowenstein–the man who led the ‘Dump Johnson’ movement– at a political event, so anything seemed possible.
“We need good people in government,” she said to me. And that, to the fearless Mary Anne Krupsak, was all that mattered, party bosses be damned. Even her mother Mamie, a life- force in her own right, gave me a $25 contribution and penned a handwritten letter saying that ” I hope you make it, since we need people like you in the Assembly.” Just in case I didn’t know who she was, Mamie followed her name with a parenthesis (“Mary Anne’s Mother.”)
I was 23-years old at the time, and the Chair of the Albany County, NY, New Democratic Coalition, a “reform” group of Kennedy/McCarthy Democrats from the 1968 Presidential campaigns which pushed President Lyndon Johnson out of the race over the War in Vietnam. We were a rag-tag bunch of feisty progressives, outnumbered Dems, those of us in the Albany County NDC, including Cindy Urbach, Reszin Adams, James Gallagher, Leon Cohen, Muriel Morgenstern, and a few other fellow political troublemakers.
Despite the fact that my opponent in the Democratic Primary was a conservative woman, who was a local Democratic Assistant DA, all of the State’s Women’s political groups–Women’s Political Caucus, Coalition for a Free Choice–endorsed me, since I was the only pro-choice candidate on the ballot. Having Mary Anne Krupsak, and the remarkable Sarah Kovner, in my corner helped a bit, as well. It was also the year before Roe v. Wade was decided by the US Supreme Court.
It was a fun adventure campaigning in the Republican towns of Colonie and Guilderland, and the heavily Old Democratic small cities of Cohoes and Watervliet, that hugged the Mohawk River. I loved going door to door in the ethnic neighborhoods of Cohoes, with plumbers piping serving as handrails for each working class, mill town home.
On one memorable afternoon, I met a family of registered voters who only spoke Italian. They saw my last name and welcomed me into their house, pumping me full of homemade wine, while Carol Villano and Tim Palmer were looking for me up and down the blocks outside. When I finally emerged from the old rowhouse, I could barely walk straight. Carol and Tim escorted me back to our car, and helped me home to sleep off a busy day of grassroots–or winegrape–campaigning.
I lost, of course, to the well established, well-funded, well-oiled Albany Political machine by a 2-1 margin, in the same June 20, 1972, Democratic primary where George McGovern ran against Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Corning and the Albany Democratic Machine backed HHH, making Albany County the ONLY county in New York State that McGovern didn’t carry. It was my one and only run for public office.
Two years later, in 1974, at the Statewide New Democratic Coalition convention (nicknamed “November Don’t Count,” by Mario Cuomo) I was a 25-year old “Youth” Vice-President, and supported Mary Anne for Lt. Governor against Manhattan City Councilmember Antonio Olivieri and some little-known lawyer from Queens named Mario Cuomo.
Cuomo gave a boring, plodding speech at the NDC nominating convention and came in a distant 3rd. Mary Anne went on to win the Democratic Primary and the election as the State’s first female Lt. Governor in NYS history.
Years later, when I worked with Mario Cuomo from 1985-1993, I would tease him about how ineffective he was at the NDC, and that if it wasn’t for Mary Anne Krupsak challenging Hugh Carey in 1978–and for Assemblywoman Jean Amatucci refusing Carey’s offer to her to replace Mary Anne on the ticket in 1974 (another upstate Democratic woman)– he’d never have been Governor. Cuomo’s rejoinder was always: “NDC: November Don’t Count.”
Politics was fun then, and human, without incessant polling or political consultants, or unrelenting social media, and you could stop and enjoy a glass of wine or two, when you campaigned door-to-door.
The emphasis then, as opposed to now, was making human connection, being as positive, people friendly and problem-solving as you could be, and for earning free media coverage for the good ideas you represented, not the number of terrible lies you could spread.
Mary Anne Krupsak, and later Mario Cuomo, were big parts of that, and of my life, and of the proud, honorable work of serving others, instead of just yourself.