Journalism

Donald Trump has been bad for America but good for American book publishers.  Dozens of books about Trump were published in 2020, some selling millions of copies.  Here is a highly personal assessment.
Best book that doesn’t mention Trump until the end:  “A Promised Land” by Barack Obama.  During the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill crisis, Obama reports, Trump called to suggest that he be put in charge of plugging the well to stop the leak.  Told that the well was almost sealed, he offered instead to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House grounds. . . .
continued at LATimes.com, HERE

Forty years after his murder in New York City, we remember John Lennon’s record of political engagement as a champion of the anti-war movement and a self-styled “instinctive socialist” — which brought him into conflict with Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover. 12-8-2020
Read at Jacobin.com: HERE

I know it’s unlikely that Trump would change the channel from Fox to Netflix and watch the new Aaron Sorkin film The Trial of the Chicago 7. . . . But if he did, he might call his attorney general, Bill Barr, and say, “Why don’t we do to the leaders of Black Lives Matter what Nixon did to the Chicago 7?”
. . . continued at The Nation, 10-30-2020, HERE

With the Democratic National Convention meeting virtually this year, the fate of another longstanding political tradition is also in jeopardy.
For decades, protesters have brought their issues to the streets of the Democratic convention’s host city, demanding that the party address controversial issues it might rather ignore. . . .
1960 was the year of the first big demonstrations at a Democratic convention. That year, the event was held in Los Angeles, and the party nominated John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson at the brand-new Sports Arena. Outside the arena, Martin Luther King Jr. joined thousands of marchers picketing to demand a strong civil rights plank in the Democratic platform.
…continued at the LA Times 8-16-20 HERE

July 4, 1969, was a day of festive parades and picnics across Southern California: Pacific Palisades had its annual “Americanism” parade, the West Covina parade had two Vietnam vets for its grand marshals and Claremont had an “Old Tyme Parade.”
Venice didn’t have a parade at all.
continued at LATimes, HERE

Take our LA-in-the-Sixties quiz:
1. “Tanya” was:
A. Gidget’s best friend
B. a Rolling Stones song
C. the nom de guerre of Patty Hearst in the Symbionese Liberation Army
D. A legendary back-up singer for Ike and Tina
. . . continued at the LA Times HERE  5-24-2020

Driving past the Fountain Valley hospital south of Los Angeles, you see something new: a huge white tent in what was the parking lot. To Angelenos, it looks something like the tent that appears downtown Beverly Hills for the Vanity Fair Oscar party. But this one, and others like it outside hospitals throughout Southern California, is not a party tent; it’s a temporary structure designed to deal with the overflow of Covid-19 cases at the hospital—a “triage tent.” . . .
continued at TheNation.com, 4-16-2020, HERE

The underground press of the Sixties is often described as self-indulgent; critics said it “trampled the tenets of accuracy and fairness,” while the mainstream media of the era is often portrayed as bland and cautious, and as practicing a phony objectivity. That was not true of the newspaper landscape in Los Angeles. The LA Times was firmly and loudly right-wing, while the LA Free Press (the “Freep”), the first underground paper of the era, and the most successful, was often a voice of reason, albeit a passionate one. A simple comparison of the coverage of the 1965 Watts uprising reveals a great deal.. . .
Excerpt from “Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties,” continued at the LA Review of Books HERE

It’s been another tough political season for the pundits. Take Super Tuesday. On the Monday before the vote, a typical headline read something like this one from The Hill: “Sanders Poised for Big Super Tuesday.”
On Wednesday, those headlines were replaced by ones like this from CNBC: “Super Tuesday results: Joe Biden shocks the world.”
Predictions gone wrong are nothing new for the punditocracy, of course. . . .
. . . continued at LATimes.com, HERE

A year ago, I wrote a piece headlined “2019 will be the worst year of Trump’s life.” Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit smug about my prescience. A wiser man might retire from the prognostication game on that high note, but instead I’m going to double down with a new prediction: 2020 will be the worst year of Trump’s life.
Contined at the LA Times HERE
1-1-2020