Trump's After 60 Minutes
It's Saturday afternoon, July 5, 2025, 13:38, and I have updated this Web page with the link to that free book that I recommended on this program. I may be adding some more to this Web page at some point. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ Well, I must say, this was pretty stupid! I got this Webb page all ready and everything and then I forgot to post it! It was all done at around half past three this morning. Well, better late than never, I suppose. Although we had recorded a substantial amount of this program before friday you can probably still hear some fireworks going off during the parts that were only recorded yesterday. The Paramount+/CBS/60 Minutes business is troubling. Their capitulation to Donnie Bonespur
Trump may signal the start of an open season on media outlets that don't favor right-wing billionaires. That would be very bad for democracy in the United States of America. We also have a little bit on Kilmar Abrego Garcia's claims of torture at that notorious prison in El Salvador that Trump's ICE had illegally sent him to. There's a bit more I want to get on this Web page, and it's possible that I may actually post it here. So it might be worth your while to check back here at some oint to see if there's been an update.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday July 9, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday night 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. Good luck.
Since the former General Manager 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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Paramount has caved to Donnie Bonespur
Trump, and is selling out 60 Minutes, so they can sell CBS, and more, to a film maker who has a media conglomerate. Paramount owns CBS which owns 60 minutes. Paramount will need approval of the sale of their properties to the company Skydance Media which is owned by David Ellison the son of billionaire Larry Ellison, who is the co-founder of the Oracle Corporation and is reportedly the third-wealthiest person in the world and who is also a big Trump supporter.
Trump sued CBS for $10 Billion because he didn't like their interview with Kamala Harris last year. Shari Redstone is the non-executive chairwoman of Paramount. She's been going after 60 Minutes since last year. In April she maneuvered things around so that the executive producer of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, resigned rather than submit to having his journalistic independence compromised. In May the CBS News division's president, Wendy McMahon, was forced out of CBS. So this past week CBS and Paramount settled Trump's lawsuit, described by legal experts as trivial, frivolous and unwinnable, and running counter to long-established First Amendment protections for the American press. The settlement has CBS/Paramount giving $16 Million to Trump's future presidential library. F.C.C. commissioner, Anna Gomez said that Paramount's settlement Marks a dangerous precedent for the First Amendment, and it should alarm anyone who values a free and independent press.
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Kilmar Obrega Garcia says he was tortured in that hellish prison in El Salvador. The Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States forbids cruel and unusual punishment,
which certainly includes the torture that Abrego Garcia and others who were sent there from the United States have had to endure. I think that Abrego Garcia should sue over this and I think he should get a huge settlement. This case should also should go to the United States Supreme Court somehow. If it does it will be interesting to see what the right-wing super majority rules on it.
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This is one of those free E-Books I recommend from time to time. It's titled A Confederate Surgeon's Letters to His Wife, and it was published in 1911. It's an edited set of letters from Dr. Spencer Glasgow Welch of South Carolina who was with the Thirteenth South Carolina Volunteers McGowan's Brigade in the American Civil War.
Dr. Welch was a fervent believer in the Confederacy. He owned slaves. I suspect that he probably could have avoided serving in the Confederate Army but instead, from his letters, he seems to have been a fervent booster for the Confederacy and all of those things it stood for. The letters cover a period from May 16, 1862, to May 2, 1865, when he writes about the surrender of the rebelling forces.
The unattributed Introduction starts out, Many of the letters written from the battlefield, camp, bivouac or during a halt on the march were lost. It has been necessary to condense those that were received in order to form them into a small volume. This was done by eliminating only the most uninteresting, personal matter that the letters contained and arranging them consecutively. With these exceptions, they are shown here exactly as they were written.
Dr. Welch's daughter was the President of the Daughters of the Confederacy for the State of South Carolina, and I suspect that her position in that organization is the reason why this little book of letters from her father to her mother was published.
Dr. Welch is very confident of an outcome of the war that would favor the Confederacy in the early letters. He eventually writes of the surrender of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox in his final letter. There's a lot of history in this book. Dr. Welch was in many of the major battles that Lee fought. He also records some of what we used to call Stupid Shit
when I was in an army 104 years later. Anyone in any army will experience Stupid Shit
, although as an officer Dr. Welch encountered different Stupid Shit
from what a private would have had to endure, and he would have gotten less of it.
So I'm recommending this book as both a epistolary history of a small part of the American Civil War and as an example of what can happen on personal levels. The book is available here, and of course it's free because it's from Project Gutenberg, which offers tens of thousands of public domain books.
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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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