Legendary Journalist Bill Moyers Says He Fears For The Nation For The First Time In His Life
By Mary Papenfuss November 10, 2019
Veteran journalist Bill Moyers said Sunday that for the first time “in my long life” — including the Depression and World War II — he fears for the nation’s survival.
A “society, a democracy, can die of too many lies — and we’re getting close to that terminal moment unless we reverse the obsession with lies that are being fed around the country,” Moyers told Brian Stelter on CNN.
Hope rests in citizens paying careful attention to the televised impeachment hearings beginning this week on Wednesday and Friday in the House, noted Moyers, who served for two years as President Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary. He has urged PBS to rebroadcast the hearings during prime time so that they more easily be seen by working people.
“Do facts matter anymore?” Moyers asked, referring to the impeachment investigation. “I think they do. I think they mattered in the Watergate hearings, in the Clinton hearings, and I think they’ll matter this time, too.”
He referred to Trump’s “astonishing” response from the crowd at a campaign rally last month in Louisiana.
“They believed everything he said,” Moyers noted. “I’m hoping only 10% of those people watch the hearings … They will see it is not a witch hunt, and they will begin to doubt their master. And they will begin to break off and maybe become a citizen again.”
Moyers believes Trump still has a “pretty good” chance of winning the 2020 election, but that only a “slight shift” in people who “begin to doubt” could make a significant difference.
Despite crisis, Trump threatens to pull federal aid for California
A melted basketball hoop is seen in a clearing after the Loma fire tore along a ridge top on Sept. 27, 2016 near Morgan Hill, Calif. Photo by Noah Berger/AP
Nearly a year ago, Donald Trump published a tweet that appeared to include a policy pronouncement. After complaining about California’s approach to forest management – an issue he only pretends to understand – the president wrote that he’d ordered FEMA to send the Golden State “no more money.”
We later learned that the Republican’s rhetoric had no relationship with reality. There was no such order – to FEMA or any other agency – and as we discussed at the time, the president’s bluster was hollow.
All of this came to mind over the weekend, when Trump’s rhetoric took on a familiar tone.
President Donald Trump offered a vague threat to pull California’s federal aid for combating dangerous wildfires on Sunday, sparking a response from Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom as the pair traded barbs through the day.
“The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management,” Trump tweeted early Sunday. “I told him from the first day we met that he must ‘clean’ his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him. Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers. Every year, as the fire’s rage & California burns, it is the same thing-and then he comes to the Federal Government for $$$ help. No more. Get your act together Governor. You don’t see close to the level of burn in other states.”
During a brief Q&A yesterday afternoon, Trump kept the offensive going, telling reporters, in reference to California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), “The governor doesn’t know – he’s like a child. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
I realize projection is a go-to move for the president, but I didn’t really expect him to bring his “no puppet” tactics to wildfire responses.
To the extent that reality has any meaning, Trump’s rhetoric didn’t make any sense. California’s latest wildfires, for example, haven’t burnt down forests. The president’s claims about water distribution were similarly wrong. Even the assertion about the Golden State getting “no more” federal aid is probably not to be taken seriously.
What I find important, however, is the bigger picture: Trump’s hostility toward the nation’s largest state has reached a ridiculous level.
In February, Politico ran a feature on “Trump’s War on California,” and it’s safe to say the problem has intensified in the nine months that followed. The White House has, after all, taken steps to revoke California’s right to set its own emissions standards, which came shortly before the Trump administration threatened to withhold federal highway funds from the state. Trump has also gone after California over homelessness in dubious ways.
The New York Times published this striking tidbit in September:
In recent months, the administration’s broader weakening of nationwide auto-emissions standards has become plagued with delays as staff members struggled to prepare legal, technical or scientific justifications for it. As a result, the White House decided to proceed with just one piece of its plan – the move to strip California of its authority to set tougher standards – while delaying its wider strategy, according to these people. […]
Mr. Trump … according to two people familiar with the matter, wanted to press forward with a policy that would punish California.
I’m just going to repeat that sentence for emphasis: “Trump … wanted to press forward with a policy that would punish California.”
It was 44 years ago this week that the New York Daily Newsran its infamous “Ford to City: Drop Dead” headline. Don’t be surprised if California headlines soon reflect a related sentiment from a different Republican president.
Remember D-Day’s African-American Soldiers on Veterans Day
By Linda Hervieux November 11, 2016
Wilson Monk (third from left) and other men from the 320th appear to be in deep thought as they peruse a document.Linda Hervieux / Wilson Monk
A few months ago I was speaking with an archivist at an Army museum who told me flatly, “There were no black men at D-Day.”
I had just explained to him that I’d spent six years researching and writing the story of D-Day’s only African-American combat unit.
The belief is pervasive that there were no soldiers of color on the beaches of France on one of the most important days of World War II. None of the many films made about D-Day like “Saving Private Ryan” show black soldiers storming Omaha Beach. Most history books don’t mention them.
It is a sore point among black veterans.
But they were there, landing under brutal fire early on June 6, 1944. The men of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion were packed tight with infantry troops aboard small metal boats that motored toward the Normandy coast obscured by smoke and fire. It was a harrowing ride, and even worse when they landed as early as 9 a.m.
George Davison scrawled the names of his buddies from the 320th on this snapshot taken in Octeville, France in July 1944. Davison noted his place in the back row.Bill Davidson / Linda Hervieux
They were charged with raising a curtain of hydrogen-filled balloons over the beaches anchored to steel cables. Tucked under the 125-pound gasbags were small bombs the size of a soda can. A dive-bombing German plane that hit the cable risked being blown to bits. But until the beaches were cleared of small arms fire, the balloon flyers were infantry troops. They dug trenches, rounded up German prisoners and prayed they would survive the worst day of their lives.
On this Veterans Day, it is important that we remember that the more than 1 million African Americans in uniform in WWII were ordered to fight for freedom and democracy abroad, while at home they were mistreated in an Army segregated by race.
They suffered daily humiliations at the hands of white commanders who considered them less intelligent and courageous than white men. An Army War College study concluded the black soldier “naturally believes himself inferior to the white.” This was the reason given for assigning the vast majority of black troops to labor and service units.
Author Linda Hervieux’s book “Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day’s Black Heroes, at Home and at War” (HarperCollins) tells the story of the only African American combat unit to land on D-Day.HarperCollins
An Army War College study concluded the black soldier “naturally believes himself inferior to the white.” This was the reason given for assigning the vast majority of black troops to labor and service units.
By the time the sun set on June 6, 1944, some 2,000 African Americans had landed in Normandy. They were engineers, stevedores, and gunners. They carried the wounded to safety and buried the dead. They drove ambulances, earth-movers and the trucks that would supply the front lines. Black quartermasters won praise from Gen. Dwight Eisenhower for salvaging their trucks sunk in deep water — and saving significant quantities of blood plasma and medical supplies that would save lives on Omaha Beach. Eisenhower praised the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion for carrying out its mission “with courage and determination” and said the men exposed like sitting ducks on the sand “proved an important element of the air defense team.”
The Hollywood director John Ford, who landed on Omaha with a Coast Guard film crew, watched in amazement as a black soldier unloaded supplies from a ship, ignoring the small-arms fire and mortar shells pocking the sand around him. Ford was too scared to leave his safe spot to film the soldier but he wrote, “By God, if anybody deserves a medal that man does.”
Among those brave young men steaming toward France early on D-Day was a 21-year-old medical student from West Philadelphia. Woodson didn’t wait for a draft notice. He left his studies at Lincoln University and signed up for the Army. He finished his training as a commissioned officer, but there were no positions available for him.
Waverly Bernard “Woody” Woodson, Jr.; The Men of the 320thLinda Hervieux
It was a common story: black officers in WWII were limited by quotas and the rule they not lead white officers junior to them. So he retrained as a medic with the 320th. Wounded twice as his disabled boat drifted toward Omaha, Corporal Woodson would save scores of lives until he collapsed 30 hours later. The black press dubbed him “No. 1 Invasion Hero” and Stars and Stripes wrote that Woodson and the four medics with him “covered themselves with glory on D-Day.” The black press began calling on the White House to award him the Medal of Honor.
A sole piece of paper exists today in the National Archives revealing that Woodson was, in fact, a candidate for the nation’s highest award for bravery. A note passed from the War Department to the White House reveals that Woodson’s commanding officer had recommended him for the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest award, but that the office of a US Army general in Britain had changed the recommendation to Medal of Honor.
A crack Negro barrage balloon unit from Camp Tyson, Tenn., is one of the many features of the mammoth “BACK THE ATTACK” Army show now sparking $15,000,000,000, Third War Loan Drive in Washington D. C.; Members of the unit demonstrate how barrage balloons are used to protect ships, installations, bridges and cities from strafing by low-flying enemy planes.” Roger Smith; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library.Linda Hervieux
“This is a big enough award so that the President can give it personally, as he has in the case of some white boys,” a War Department aide wrote. The nomination was significant because no African-Americans received the Medal of Honor in World War II. After an Army study found pervasive racism was to blame for the slight and President Bill Clinton awarded seven Medals of Honor to African-Americans in 1997. Only one man was alive to shake the president’s hand.
Waverly Woodson was not among them. He had to settle for fourth place, the Bronze Star. He died in 2005 without knowing there would be another push to recognize his heroism. U.S. Rep Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) has called on the Army to approve the Medal of Honor for Woodson.
In June 2015, President Barack Obama awarded the Medal of Honor to a long-neglected hero of the trenches of France in World War I. Sgt. Henry Johnson made headlines coast to coast after single-handedly fighting off a band of Germans raiders. He was a member of New York’s 369th Infantry Regiment — the legendary Harlem Hellfighters. At a ceremony at the White House, the president recalled this long-neglected hero. “It is never too late,” he said, “to say thank you.”
Woodson’s family has begun an online petition calling for him to be awarded the Medal of Honor. For more information, go to www.lindahervieux.com.
The Z-Bell Test® has become internationally recognized by eye experts and scientists, determines whether the environment is “in sync” or just plain confusing for patients.
Daniel Cameron Becomes the First Black Attorney General in Kentucky.
So election night has come and gone, and while we still have to wait a year—or less if we’re lucky—to rid ourselves of President Untailored Suit, Tuesday night was still rather eventful.
