The Reichstag Fire
We really only covered two topics during this program: the Covid-19 pandemic and President Trump's shenanigans over the past week. Both of Trump's actions were criminal in nature. I plan to update this Web page in the near future.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of some of the WBAI LSB meetings?
I have also posted a whole lot of the minutes of the Pacifica National Finance Committee on this Web site. I'm a member of that committee because I'm the WBAI LSB Treasurer.
The next WBAI LSB meeting is scheduled to be held on Wednesday, January 13, 2021, it will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the nine previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, December 9, 2020.
We held elections. I got reelected LSB Treasurer. Nobody else wanted to do it. Carolyn McIntyre was reelected Chair, Jack DePalma got elected Secretary and the Vice-Chair election is going on now, virtually.
Before the meeting I had put out a written Treasurer's Report for all to read.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday of every month, subject to change by the LSB, which gives us the following schedule:
All of these meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. You can take a look at it and see if I've been able to post anything on it lately. There are still some limitations, but I am assured that I can plug in the archive blurbs that were lost in the latest upgrade.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Yeah, it looks like they'll have some alternating program's name prominently there, but if you have the right date it'll be our program. Good luck.
Since the General Manager has banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. There is another program in the alternate week's time slot.
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Our friend, fellow WBAI producer and Saddle Pal Uncle Sidney Smith has been banned from WBAI by General Manager Berthold Reimers. The General Manager will not say why. He won't even tell Sidney why he's banned! This is grossly unfair to Sidney and constitutes abuse of Staff. Why did Berthold ban Sidney?
More to come.
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We wondered during the last program if there might be some shenanigans at the ceremonial, joint session of Congress held on January 6, 2021, where the usual rubber stamp approval the Electoral college vote on the election was supposed to take place. We mentioned that Trump was calling for all of the violent right wing creeps to converge on Washington, D.C. that day. We figured it was an attempt to boost Trump's ego and maybe allow the right-wing to have a show of force in the nation's capital. Well, they certainly showed up, all right. One hotel that's been a favorite place for the so-called Proud Boys group to stay at in Washington, D.C. shut down rather than accommodate the right wing hate group. They found other hotels though.
Trump and his pals held another of his disease spreading bund rallies on the Ellipse that morning. The damned thing lasted for more that four hours. It has been observed before that dictators love to have big events where they can rant for hours at a time. Trump was playing true to that form on the morning of January 6.
I've looked at some of that bund rally. It was an amazing event full of people telling the crowd lies. And some were real whoppers. Trump, Trump Jr. And Rudy Giuliani all got the crowd riled up with one outrageous lie after another, mostly about how Trump's landslide election victory was stolen. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani got up and said that what the Trump crowd, and other Republicans, needed to engage in was trial by combat
in order to overturn the election results from the Electoral College. When Trump himself got up to speak, for an hour and seven minutes, he talked repeatedly about the election being stolen from him and he added that the two Senate seats that the Republicans had lost the night before had been stolen the same way.
Trump directed the thousands of people at this rally to go to the Capitol Building where the ceremonial counting of the Electoral College votes were being held and do something to get him the election victory he had not been able to win at the ballot box. And so they went and they became an insurrectionist mob, breaking into the Capital Building, assaulting the Capitol Police and threatening the members of Congress.
Interestingly the Republicans who had expressed such approval of the rally and its intentions did not stay out of the deep bunkers that all of the Representatives and Senators had been herded into and go stand with the insurrectionists.
The Capitol Building was trashed, the rioters left urine and feces all over the building. Various things were stolen and a total of five people died in the hours that the mob held the Capitol Building. Law enforcement is now looking for a lot of these people.
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We had thought that the big Trump-related story of this week was going to be Trump's obviously illegal attempt to rig the November 2020, election in his favor by getting Georgia's secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to change the vote totals for Georgia in that election.
Trump wanted Raffensperger, who is a Republican, to find
11,780 votes so that Trump could win Georgia by one vote.
Of course the Electoral College had met on December 14, and had made the drama-free determination that the Biden/Harris ticket had won the election by 306 electoral votes to Trump and Pence's 232. Trump spent over an hour whining to Raffensperger about how he needed those votes. The Washington Post broke the story of this obviously illegal attempt to rig an election after someone had sent them a recording of it. In the recording Trump said, The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry, and there's nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you've recalculated.
Raffensperger replied, Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.
And after that Trump supporters started to demonstrate outside the office building where Raffensperger was and some people carrying rifles were spotted milling about on the other side of the building, so Raffensperger and his staff left their workplace because they feared violence from these people. Well, we thought that was going to be the big Trump story of the week.
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
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