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In a party that officially condemns dog-whistle appeals to racism, Joe Biden is running on Orwellian eggshells. Whether he can win the Democratic presidential nomination may largely depend on the extent of “doublethink” that George Orwell described in 1984 as the willingness “to forget any fact that has become inconvenient.”

It is an inconvenient fact that Biden has a political history of blowing into dog whistles for racism. More than ever, the Democratic electorate is repelled by that kind of pitch. If his dog-whistling past becomes a major issue, the former vice president and his defenders will face the challenge of twisting themselves into rhetorical pretzels to deny what is apparent from the video record of Biden oratory on the Senate floor that spanned into the last decade of the 20th century.

White men rule!

That’s the uber-message quietly emerging from the new anti-abortion laws recently passed in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio and Missouri, no matter that the public remains predominantly supportive of safe, legal abortions.

That doesn’t matter, see. The fact that the Republican Party controls the legislatures in so many states where it lacks majority status, not to mention is able to put presidents in office who fail to win the popular vote, indicates that we live in a rather limited-definition democracy: rule by the most determined cheaters. Or as some would put it, rule by divine decree.

As Ari Berman pointed out recently in Mother Jones, this divine decree is achieved primarily by voter suppression and gerrymandering, as exemplified last year in Georgia’s gubernatorial race.

Albion Winegar Tourgée may be best known now, though not in his lifetime, as the lead attorney in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, which was a set-up, a staged incident, with the cooperation even of the railroad company, to get a man arrested for sitting in the wrong car, take the matter to court, and end segregation on trains — except that it backfired horribly and legalized apartheid for over 50 years.

Tourgée’s work was not one incident alone, and his positive influence hasn’t ceased. His was one of the most influential white voices for equal rights for blacks in the decades following the U.S. Civil War. I want to quote and consider a short section found in one of his novels, A Fools Errand. The book was a runaway bestseller in 1879, published anonymously “by one of the fools.”

US prosecutors yesterday flew to the Ecuadorian embassy in London and grabbed the personal belongings of political asylee Julian Assange, co-founder of Wikileaks, while Ecuador provided quasi-legal cover for the extraordinary violation of his human rights.

Before being arrested a month ago by the UK in the Ecuadorian embassy, Assange was detained in the embassy for nearly seven years, 19 June 2012 to 11 April 2019, where he had received political asylum, and where the United Nations found him to be arbitrarily detained by the UK for refusing to honor his refugee status to permit him to travel freely on to his host country. A change in Ecuadorian leadership prompted the reversal of the government from granting him asylum to violating his asylum status under pressure from the United States.

So in a recent theater review I revealed my guilty pleasure: Reading tell-all tomes about geniuses’ private lives. Herein I shall divulge my biggest recurring mistake as a reviewer. Because of my dread of plot spoilers (as all my loyal readers are well aware of) when I receive an invitation from a publicist to attend a show and see in it something, such as the topic or talent involved, that convinces me to critique it, I immediately stop reading said invite and RSVP. Usually, this preserves the cherished element of surprise (that too many publicists, as well as critics, ruin by giving away too much) and those plots remain unspoiled for me when it’s show time.

However, this perilous practice backfires on your humble scribbler about 10% of the time, when - due to this desire of avoiding plot spoilers I don’t complete perusing those press releases, et al - and later realize (after it’s too late), that had I finished reading those invites I probably would not have fought the L.A. traffic and made the trip all the way into urban hell to see a production I actually had no interest in, after all. Woe is moi!

On 4 April 2019, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, better known as NATO, marked the 70th anniversary of its existence with a conference attended by the foreign ministers of member nations in Washington DC. This will be complemented by a meeting of the heads of state of member nations in London next December.

“Over these last few years, given the wars it has waged and the international treaties it has arbitrarily reneged on, the U.S. government perfectly fits its own definition of a rogue state.” — Arundhati Roy