James Irsay
It's Saturday morning, February 17, 2024, 15:50, and I have updated this Web page a bit more. I may update it even more soon. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ Oh, this Web page is getting posted after the program! I fell asleep and only woke up just before the program ended. We talked about the below topics and more. I'll be updating this Web page so be sure to check back for those updates.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday February 14, 2024, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. We had a LSB meeting this past Wednesday night. We had a minute of silence for Ralph Poynter who died in late December. We also determined who was going to run for seats on the Pacifica National Board from WBAI. This is actually very important stuff. I ended up giving a very fast Treasurer's Report which one operative of the so-called Justice & Unity Campaign tried to talk over as I began.
The Final results of all of the LSB officer elections we held last month are in.
At the January 10, 2024, LSB meeting the election was begun for Directors from WBAI who will sit on the Pacifica National Board (PNB) for the next year. That election has been concluded. The results of those elections are below.
Listeners: Paul DeRienzo, Jim Dingeman, Cerene Roberts
Staff: Shawn Rhodes
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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Program note: If you tuned in to hear this radio program on or soon after February 10, 2024, you didn't hear it come on at 5 AM. It came on about six and a half minutes after five. Not our fault, but accidents will happen. The archive was messed up a little but the WBAI Web master fixed it for us. Thanks, Chris!
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Long time WBAI producer James Irsay died this past week. He was doing a program named Morning Irsay for the past few years. James had been at WBAI before I showed up a mere 42 years ago. He was a classical music scholar and he played concert piano. He also did free form live radio, which is what we're supposed to be doing. He did all of those things very well. For a little while he was the lead-in program to the lead-in for this program when it aired on Sunday night/Monday mornings. The news rebroadcast was in between us. He brought a lot of listeners to those of us airing programs after midnight. I remember one time in particular when I was in the station and he came in looking a bit frenetic and he went on the air and spent the entire two hours talking about his experience with meeting a woman near Coney Island on the street in the wee hours of the night and telling about how he was falling in love with her. He in fact ended up in a relationship with her. He told that story so well. None of us could stop listening. He was a major asset to WBAI, and good person and he did excellent radio. He is missed. WBAI will do a 24 hour memorial to James Irsay on Sunday March 3. There's also a 2018, interview with him on line that I'll link to on the Web page for this radio program.
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Donnie Bonespur
Trump is not immune to the law! This week the three judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected in a 57-page ruling Trump's absurd claim that he couldn't be prosecuted for any crimes that he committed or any actions taken while serving as President. He claimed that what he did on January 6, 2021, was perfectly legal. They wrote, We cannot accept former President Trump's claim that a President has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power — the recognition and implementation of election results,
and, We (cannot) sanction his apparent contention that the (president) has carte blanche to violate the rights of individual citizens to vote and to have their votes count.
The court also rejected Trump's claim that he could not be criminally prosecuted because he was acquitted at a Senate impeachment trial.
Trump now has until February 12, to get a ruling from the Supreme Court to hear a potential appeal. If the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, it would delay things while a ruling is awaited, and it could result in that trial being put off until after the presidential election this November.
Trump's campaign lawyers denounced the ruling saying, Prosecuting a president for official acts violates the Constitution and threatens the bedrock of our Republic,
and they said that they'd appeal it. So now they're saying that what happened on January 6, 2021, was an official act of Trump as president. I wonder if that assertion of Trump's lawyers can be used in his prosecution?
There's a good chance that the Supreme Court will decline to review this appeal ruling. In that case the trial could start sometime around late April. And the right-wing super-majority on the Supreme Court may just calculate that if they say that a president can do anything at all and not be put on trial for it that this would allow President Biden to have all six of them removed from the court in a very permanent, illegal manner. It's also being speculated that the right-wing on the court wants to give Trump the right to be on that ballot and so balance that with not letting him have immunity for all crimes that he commits. If the Supreme Court doesn't decline to review this case then it's probably going to push off the trial until after the election in November.
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The CDC Web site says that as of their last reading, the death toll in America from COVID-19 was 1,176,639. Which means that 2,013 people have died from COVID-19 since our last program a week ago. So the weekly death rate is down a bit, 467 lower than the rate a week ago. Well, that's good. In Winter infectious diseases usually spread more rapidly and efficiently I'm wondering if the weather is having an effect on that. Of course some people are oblivious to COVID-19 because they think that the pandemic is over and that's another factor.
The pandemic is clearly not over. Pickles of the North and I are mostly still keeping our masks on. We've gotten our new shots, we don't want to get this disease.
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We only mentioned Life Day on this program. Here's a link to a program we did about R. Paul's personal holiday called Life Day that we did a couple of years ago.
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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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