Mansplain on the Hill

Giant impeach begins, so for some relief--here are Lou Reed, The Beatles, Aretha, and The Supremes. Plus: upcoming films and a cool folk-rock memoir.

Jokes about Trump attorney Bruce Castor are rampant, following his presentation at the trial on the Hill yesterday, and we understand Trump was shouting at the screen while watching. Speaking of criticism—it continues to be directed at Bruce Springsteen for doing that ad for Jeep, so it’s fun to go back a few decades and re-visit Lou Reed’s walk on the wild side…for Honda scooters. Also below, more hot takes, another Tulsa Massacre doc, and music from Ben Harper, Joe Arthur and Dhani Harrison. Please comment or share—and subscribe (it’s still free).

Politics

Historian Michael Beschloss: “Bruce Castor is like the old Ohio Senator of whom it was said that his brain was a giant empty cavity in which there were a few wandering cliches.”

John Oliver on The Late Show mocked Trump’s lawyers: “I gather that the first lawyer engaged in a kind of freestyle beat poetry for a while and then the second threatened civil war, is that right?”

Trevor Noah: “BREAKING: The powerful video of the Jan. 6 insurrection has reportedly swayed Susan Collins from ‘mildly concerned’ to ‘moderately concerned.’”

Jake Tapper: "What if a member of Congress or Vice President Pence had been killed? I honestly don't think that anything would be different on the floor of the Senate." Tony Schwartz: “44 Republican senators voted consistent with their conscience today. Problem is, they have no conscience.”

Note on “marching to the Capitol”: First time I did that was November 1969, dropping a large card with the name of an American soldier killed in Vietnam—in one of dozens of casket near the Capitol steps—the night before the massive peace march, with vet leader John Kerry nearby. Photo above.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, who is presiding over the trial, has been in office so long he co-hosted a party for my first book in a committee room on the Hill back in 1981, along with young Al Gore. Party was sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies, then run by Jamie Raskin’s dad, Marcus Raskin.

Michigan's GOP Senate majority leader still says the Capitol insurrection "wasn't Trump people," and calls it "staged" and "a hoax." His last name: Shirkey.

Yes, this did happen: “Rep. Devin Nunes was briefly locked out of his Twitter account Tuesday night after he failed to solve a simple puzzle designed to prove that he is a human being.” (Thanks to Daily Beast for that wording.)

Stephen Colbert: “I long for a simpler time, when people hiding from Nazis and not leaving their house for months were just the plots of Jojo Rabbit and Parasite.”

Rex Chapman on Neera Tanden, Biden OMB pick, testifying before Congress: “Today Republican senators made a woman apologize for her tweets. Not once in four years did these cowards ever hold the president of the United States to the same standard.” And imagine! Tanden had called Sen. Tom Cotton “a fraud" and that "vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz.” Paging Politifact!

I have written widely against capital punishment for more than 20 years—including in a book written with Robert Jay Lifton, Who Owns Death?—and I see today an argument persists: While there have been many released from Death Row after proof of innocence, there is still not a single “definitive” case of a clearly innocent prisoner being put to death. Now here is a new piece that claims to find just such a case in Tennessee, from 2006.

LA Times exclusive: Ammon Bundy, veteran of armed standoffs, builds national militia network on COVID backlash.

Legendary, scabrous, 1960s “underground” cartoonist S. Clay Wilson has died at 79.

Yesterday we noted that Big John Fetterman had announced that he would run for the U.S. Senate in 2022 in Pennsylvania. Immediately reports re-emerged of an incident, almost a decade ago, when he chased a black jogger in his pickup truck, armed with a shotgun, after allegedly hearing shots in his neighborhood. No weapons were found on the jogger and he was released. Here’s a full NY Times story and Fetterman’s new response.

Quaker Oats changed its racial stereotype portrait of good old Aunt Jemima awhile back but now is giving up the branding completely. Its famous pancake mix and syrup will now come from the safe but lame “Pearl Milling Company.”

Media

CNN: Please put Abby Phillip on every show and panel. New profile here.

See the deeper probe into the firing of NY Times reporter Don McNeil (which I have covered for the past week) by the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple. What really happened on that student tour abroad? Did the offense rise to the level of a firing? What precedent does it set when “intent” is to disregarded? And why didn’t the Guild get more involved? You be the judge.

Now that he’s retiring, Marty Baron, editor of the Post, finally admits: "We had to be much more forthright about Trump’s mendacity, his lies over the course of the administration. We needed to call them that from the very beginning."

The prestigious DuPont Awards for broadcast journalism were announced last night.

Music

Oh, I believe in yesterday…and that it marked the 57th anniversary of The Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. Okay, everyone knows that was important but…did you know their first full concert was two days later, in D.C.? And that you can watch it in its entirety below in a restored cut?

Barry Blitt, renowned cartoonist for The New Yorker, imagines Springsteen’s next TV spots.

Yesterday I noted the death of original Supreme, Mary Wilson. My favorite Supremes song was their final release, “Someday We’ll Be Together”—which was also used by some black activists, including Fred Hampton, as a we-must-come-together rallying anthem. In the video below you will see Mary and Cindy with Diana—but, I now learn, they did not sing on the actual record! It was meant to be Diana’s first solo single, with other background vocalists (including Johnny Bristol, the co-writer), but Berry Gordy changed his mind at the last moment and released it as a Supremes farewell. Enjoy anyway…

Film

Trailer dropped last night for the upcoming four-part series on Aretha Franklin, coming to NatGeo on March 21. Cynthia Erivo stars, with Courtney B. Vance, David Cross and others.

On the heels of PBS re-airing it’s old Tulsa Massacre doc (which I previewed this past Monday), comes word of a new film on the subject coming from busy Nat Geo, also to mark the sad 100th anniversary in June. It’s from Dawn Porter, who last year gave us the excellent John Lewis: Good Trouble doc.

"As a filmmaker, following the evidence where it leads and giving a voice to those directly affected by the Red Summer's tragic events is an incredibly delicate undertaking. There is so much our society is currently reckoning with, but seeking the truth about the damage wrought by unchecked and unsanctioned mob violence against the Black community, is a starting point to acknowledge these wrongs and make room for healing to take place."

The excavation of a possible mass grave in Tulsa is funded in part by the National Geographic Society and will be covered in a future issue of National Geographic magazine. Red Summer also features archival footage and interviews with survivors, as well as new interviews with historians and others.

The shortlists for several Oscars categories were released last night, including the one I have the most interest in, documentary features. List is here. My pick: Collective. Several others very good, several more rather overrated. Shocked that the song Rod Lurie co-wrote for his The Outpost did not make it, especially after winning a major industry award this month. Also expected to see Lyn Goldfarb’s Eddy’s World (which we featured last week) on the list for doc shorts. BAFTA also released all of its shortlists, including for best film and actors.

Books

My wife alerted me to a new book by Ellen Harper, mother of Grammy-winner Ben Harper, after hearing them on NPR’s Fresh Air over the weekend. I’ve known about Ben for many years and liked a lot of what I’ve heard from this unusually wide-ranging musician and writer but did not know about her. Turns out she was a songwriter herself and promoter of the so-called “folk music revival” of the 1960s, which is not often associated with the L.A. where she lived and raised Ben. In the book she reveals anecdotes involving Dylan, Baez, Seeger, Hendrix and others. Later she recorded a duo album with Ben. She still runs the Folk Music Center in Claremont, which her son bought years ago to keep it in the family.

Among my favorite Harper songs was this truly fabulous one he co-wrote and recorded with the short-lived Fistful of Mercy group that he formed with my pal Joseph Arthur and Dhani Harrison (son of George). Great live performance here, with Ben on lap guitar, and relevant lyrics:

Maybe it's soft inside of hard
Fistful of mercy
Maybe it comes from where we are
Land of the thirsty, the hungry

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and now has written and directed his first feature, Atomic Cover-up, which will have its American premiere at a festival this spring.