Future Trump Tower?
We talked about Trump getting his fourth indictment. His pal Rudy Giuliani is listed just after him on the list of those being indicted. They both have quite a bit of bad company on that indictment list. We also talked about COVID-19 deaths rising over the past fortnight. We all have to wait another two months to get our next booster shot. I plan to update this Web page a bit more so check back for those updates.
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? Well, I do.
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 will be on Wednesday September 13, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. That meeting will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 48 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
We had a LSB meeting this past Wednesday August 9. I gave a Treasurer's Report and the written version is here. The General Manager solicited LSB members to help to do some things related to the station's financial situation. I don't know how effective that's going to be.
The WBAI/Pacifica elections are going on. If you contributed enough, $25, to become a member by June 30, you'll get to vote. There is apparently a Candidates' Debate on WBAI today from 4 PM to 6 PM.
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, so we have the following schedule:
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. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
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. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
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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?
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Trump had scored his third indictment for our last program and his Lawyer John Lauro had said that Trump was legally immune from prosecution. Interesting idea for a lawyer, that some are above the law.
Trump scored his fourth indictment for this program. The indictment, brought in Georgia for Trump's attempts to steal votes in that state, cites Trump and 18 other co-defendants on 41 separate RICO charges (RICO is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act). Ironically Giuliani when he was a federal prosecutor prosecuted a lot of organized crime members using the RICO statute. I am reading that some of them are laughing now that Giuliani is joining them as a target of a RICO prosecution. Some of the charges are: solicitation of violation of oath by public officer, false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, forgery in the first degree, criminal attempt to commit influencing witnesses, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, conspiracy to commit election fraud and perjury - among others.
They're fighting over when to have that trial, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis wants it to start on March 4, next year, the day before the Super Tuesday primaries. Trump wants it to start in 2026!
Trump has been lashing out as usual at the judge, the Attorney General who's indicted him and lots of other people. There's an interesting part of the RICO statute which says that defendants may be freed pending trial only if a judge rules there is no significant risk
they would seek to intimidate witnesses or others connected to the case. Trump may have been violating that part of the RICO statute already. And he has announced plans to hold a press conference on Monday where he promises to completely refute all of the charges. His announced said, A Large, Complex, Detailed but irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia is almost complete & will be presented by me at a major News Conference at 11:00 A.M. on Monday of next week in Bedminster, New Jersey.
He said that after he releases his report All charges should be dropped against me & others.
After that he plans to hold a bund rally in Alabama. Of course Trump's lawyers urged him not to do that both because knowing him they figure that he'd probably violate the RICO conditions but also because anything he says in his so-called report could be used against him in this and maybe other trials he's facing. But I'm seeing a report from Bloomberg that says that Trump has relented and listened to his lawyers and is not going to issue his 100 page request to become the first former president who was held in pre-trial detention. Aw, too bad.
I'm also seeing that Bernard Kerik, former NYC Police Commissioner and more recently a convicted felon who agreed to plead guilty to committing eight federal felonies who was sentenced to four years in prison and actually served three, and who was granted a full pardon for the federal convictions by President Donald Trump just before he left office is also being listed as one of the 30 unindicted co-conspirators in the Georgia case.
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The CDC Web site isn't giving us all that much information about COVID-19 in America, although they're saying that Total Deaths in Americas are at 1,137,742 which means that 1,269 people have died of COVID-19 since our last program two weeks ago, which averages out to about 635 deaths per week. That's an uptick from the previous number we'd announced two weeks ago. I'm hearing that there is a general increase in hospitalizations for COVID-19 too. The CDC is talking about the Autumn booster shot, they're saying it may be available by mid-October, just in time to be given with the flu shot. And everyone will be eligible for the new COVID-19 booster. I'm seeing that there's a new strain called Eris.
The pandemic is not over. Pickles of the North and I are still keeping our masks on. We've both gotten our bivalent vaccinations, and our bivalent booster shots. When the new boosters are put out in the Autumn I'm sure we'll get those as soon as we can too.
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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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