When I asked Google to search for ‘Lou Dobbs and Steigerwald’ to see if it could find a Q&A I did in the mid 2000s with the now-dead former Fox Business/Cable star, this is what I got:

“AI Overview” (from Google):

“Lou Dobbs, the veteran cable news journalist and conservative commentator, and Bill Steigerwald, a veteran journalist and author, are connected through the history of the Civil Rights movement. Steigerwald is the author of the 2017 nonfiction book titled “30 Days a Black Man”, which details a historic 1948 undercover journalistic mission into the Jim Crow South.

“The subject of Steigerwald’s book, Pulitzer Prize-winning Pittsburgh journalist Ray Sprigle, successfully lived as a Black man for 30 days to expose the realities of American apartheid.

“The critical guide and driver who escorted Sprigle through the South’s parallel Black society was John Wesley Dobbs, who was Lou Dobbs’ grandfather.

“While Steigerwald has worked as a longtime journalist and author in the Pittsburgh and West Virginia regions, his historical research on this 1948 undercover assignment shed significant light on Lou Dobbs’ grandfather’s role in one of the most vital journalistic exposés of the pre-Civil Rights era.”

Both were Republicans, but I can’t see the resemblance.

News Item From 2023:

“Vladimir Putin announced today that the Russian Academy of Pseudo Science has awarded Dr. Anthony Fauci the 2020, 2021 and 2022 Lysenko Prizes.

“The coveted LP, which had not been awarded since 2019 because of the covid pandemic, is given out by the academy each year to the government scientist ‘who best represents the spirit, intellect and idiosyncratic methodology of Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet genetic genius and founder of Lysenkoism.’

“In a prepared statement, Putin praised Dr. Fauci for honoring ‘the ghost of Lysenko’ by using his bureaucratic power to develop novel genetic-based bio-weapons, suppress dissenting opinions and elevate his own theories about virology to state-sanctioned doctrine.

“Previous winners of the Lysenko Prize were Josef Mengele of the Third Reich and Taliaferro Clark, the head of the U.S. Public Health Service who is credited with founding the 1932-1972 Tuskegee Syphilis Study.”

— Not the Onion and not Babylon Bee

*****

Ha ha.

*****

Here is a serious slam of Fauci and the resemblance of his dangerous government-issued powers to those of Lysenko’s. I found it after I wrote this, but it was smartly written in May of 2021 by anti-war libertarian Karen Kwiatkowski for the Ron Paul Institute.

The former Air Force colonel and Pentagon worker did a great job of comparing Dr. Fauci’s career to Lysenko’s:

Tony Fauci not only was NOT fired by Trump but rather given massive power to shape the policy, science, and messaging, he was also kept on by the current elderly hostage of the Oval Office. Fauci, like Lysenko, has gone from ignoring proven science and history in dealing with contagion and coronaviruses, to being described as “an unhinged lunatic,”with good reason. One article counts 19 examples of backtracked, idiotic or fantastical pronouncements in the past year. And the hits just keep on coming.

Like Lysenko, Fauci has profited in his decades of state support, personally and financially, without ever being held to account for scientific dereliction, and the damning outcomes of his advice and actions. When Obama outlawed “gain of function” viral studies on bat coronaviruses, Fauci used millions of taxpayer funding to move his pet research to Wuhan Level IV lab, to continue that gain of function research on bat coronaviruses. To challenge Fauci — in any way – has meant deplatforming, silencing, and threats by the state – whether these challenges take the form of scientific critique, alternative treatments, questions about the nature and effectiveness of messenger RNA injections, the meaning of the word “experimental” and “vaccine,” the role billionaire misanthrope enablers who haven’t taken a biology class in 50 years, memes, comedic routines, jokes, ridicule or even innocent questioning of his hypocrisy, appearance and diktats. All is forbidden.

It is becoming more evident each day that the wizard wannabes channeling Oscar Diggs have discovered, nurtured, marketed, and granted great power to their modern day Trofim Lysenko.

Lysenko’s public “science” facilitated and justified the Soviet state’s most pure 20th Century obsession, which was at once and always the obliteration of individual and free human thought and agency, along with the more casual and absolutely literal obliteration of actual individuals and communities and demographics.

Tony Fauci’s role in our great national tragedy – of lockdowns, destruction of personal and community economies, deadly assaults on health, education, family, mobility and social commerce – continues to facilitate and justify the US state’s most pure 21st century obsession, at once and always the obliteration of individual and free human thought and agency, along with the more casual and absolutely literal obliteration of individuals and communities and demographics.

The fundamental wrongness and mundane intellectuality of Lysenko was a perfect match for a state seeking total control 100 years ago. Lysenko died a forgotten old man, an embarrassing reminder of the kind of stupidity and avarice that makes mountains of the dead, and shatters reason. What will the future hold for Tony Fauci?

Let’s hope Fauci is shamed and jailed before he dies. Sen. Rand Paul has been after his lying butt for years, but the wheels of justice don’t go round-and-round very fast. Here’s the latest news:

Sen. Rand Paul releases timeline of Dr. Fauci’s extensive contacts with intel community

Follow the science, or follow the spies? Fauci’s involvement with the intel community dates back more than two decades.

Sorry, the campaign, which cost $2 million and carries the contrived and meaningless marketing slogan “Forge on,” is guaranteed to have the same impact on the city’s economy and national reputation as previous wastes of money spent on branding — zero.

It’d take a real reporter — if there are any left in town beside my pal Andy Sheehan — to find out who got the money and point out how rebranding campaigns like this latest one — and the one I complained about in 2003 in the op-ed column for the Trib below — are wastes of everybody’s time, talents and money.

The Steel City searches for a new identity

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

February, 2003

Help Wanted.

Industrial powerhouse formerly known as the Steel City seeks unique selling image. Fresh image must honestly boil down the natural charms and man-made amenities of Pittsburgh and 10 surrounding counties into a catchy “core brand equity theme” to attract tourists, new businesses and talented young workers to the region. Smoky City, City of Champions, Iron City, City of Bridges, Transplant Town and Hell with the Lid Off need not apply.

Pittsburgh has an image crisis.

For nearly 100 years the city of iron, steel and glass was famous from Tokyo to Chicago to Budapest for a single big thing: it was the smoky industrial powerhouse of the world.

But today Pittsburgh and the region around it -- de-industrialized and depopulated by cruel economic forces it could neither stop nor adapt to -- is known far and wide as ... what?

The home neighborhood of Mister Rogers? The hatchery of NFL Hall of Fame quarterbacks? The capital of ketchup? The birthplace of Christina Aguilera?

The answer, apparently, is none of the above.

Pittsburgh, a region once known for what its mills produced, has no tidy, up-to-date image. The rest of the world still thinks of Pittsburgh, if it thinks of it at all, as the Steel City, an image or “brand name” that doesn’t come close to accurately describing the variety and richness of life-as-we-know-it in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Does this image gap -- the difference between the stale national perception of Pittsburgh and the current reality -- really matter?

It does if you are trying to attract new companies, more tourists or fresh, young talented workers to Pittsburgh, which is why the movers and shakers in the region formed the Image Gap Committee.

Made up of Pittsburgh’s best and brightest advertising and marketing specialists and its most concerned corporate and civic leaders, the 80-plus member committee is halfway through the process of trying to create a new and updated “brand essence” that everyone in Pittsburgh can unite behind and use in a coordinated, focused way to sell itself to the outside world.

The idea of branding cities the way Procter & Gamble brands laundry detergent is all the rage among chamber of commerce and economic development types.

City-regions in North America, Europe and Australia have been branding themselves, each trying to attract attention (and thereby gain economic advantages) in an increasingly competitive global marketplace where cities can no longer afford to be forgotten or misperceived.

Cities with the same needs and goals as Pittsburgh already have embarked on branding campaigns.

Greater Louisville Inc., which represents seven Kentucky counties around “Derby Town,” is spending $1 million a year to retain, bring back or attract the talented professionals between 25 and 40 who disproportionately start new companies that create jobs and economic growth.

Since about 1997, Philadelphia, outfitted with the new tag line “The Place That Loves You Back,” has spent about $15 million to improve its old image.

It’s been selling itself as an exciting, fun-filled place to potential consumers in and out of the city -- corporate bosses, new residents, tourists, students and conventioneers -- but especially to Baby Boomers.

Apparently, Philadelphia’s efforts have paid off. According to American Demographics magazine, between 1997 and 1999 the region was able to lure 3.2 million additional overnight visitors to its hotel and motel rooms, adding $335 million in hotel tax revenues.

Of particular interest to Pittsburgh’s brand new future is what has been done in the city of Hamilton, Ontario, a metropolis of 503,000 midway between Buffalo and Toronto on Lake Ontario.

The now de-industrialized manufacturing city, once deserving of the nicknames “Steeltown” and “The Pittsburgh of Canada,” launched a comprehensive branding and image campaign last fall aimed at attracting investment and workers and changing its national perception.

The $450,000 multimedia campaign includes a new city logo and a radio commercial that uses the theme “reach, dream, rise, shine” and celebrates the city’s economic, geographic, cultural and ethnic diversity.

The city’s communications director, Tom Poldre, says it’s too early to gauge the branding campaign’s success. But he says it already has brought the city a lot of national publicity that is helping to shed its passe steel-town image.

Like Pittsburgh, manufacturing is still important to Hamilton. But health services, agribusiness and bio-tech are among its leading economic sectors today.

“The importance of a brand was to make Hamilton relevant to our target audiences,” Poldre said, adding that Hamilton looked to Pittsburgh for lessons in how a city with the reputation as a milltown can attract talented people and knowledge workers.

In Pittsburgh, the Image Gap Committee has accepted input from dozens of focus groups, in-depth interviews, input from the public and other research to come up with “a core selling point” for the 10-county region.

Pittsburgh’s “regional branding initiative” is a five-to-10-year strategic project, according to Image Gap Committee spokesman Bill Flannigan.

The committee’s final answers will be released March 21. Meanwhile, it has boiled down its data into five themes it feels accurately and honestly reflect the Pittsburgh region’s upsides:

“World Class Urban Setting ... Small Town Feel.”

“A Genuine Opportunity to Make an Impact.”

“Heritage and Current Home of Innovation and Transformation.”

“Pride in Working, Making & Doing.”

And “Urban Beauty Surrounded by Rivers & Outdoor Adventure.”

There’s nothing catchy or very clever about those themes. But as Flannigan and others caution, the $200,000 branding campaign, funded by foundation money, is not designed to produce a bumper-sticker slogan like “I love New York” or “Virginia is for lovers.”

Those enduring phrases came into being almost accidentally, in spite of fierce marketing campaigns mounted by state officials, not because of them.

Pittsburgh will not end up with a single all-encompassing logo or slogan, says Laura Gongos, managing director of the Pittsburgh office of Burson-Marsteller, an advertising and consulting firm helping the branding campaign.

It’ll end up with several messages, each aimed at a specific target audience -- tourists, talent or corporate site-selectors. Its ultimate success will be measured by how many businesses and government agencies in the region use the themes.

Joel Kotkin, one of the country’s top urban economists, has little patience for branding campaigns or civic image-creating exercises, no matter how well-researched or inclusive.

“A city should be identifiable naturally,” he said recently from Los Angeles. “New York is a series of images of New York. It’s that sense of walking down the street with all those tall buildings and all those lights. Do you think San Francisco goes and spends money on its image? San Francisco is San Francisco. L.A. is L.A.”

Kotkin, whose latest book was “The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution Is Reshaping the American Landscape,” is a senior fellow with both Pepperdine University’s Davenport Institute for Public Policy and the Milken Institute.

Though he is well aware of Pittsburgh’s grim demographics - a shrinking, aging population -- and its flat-lining economy, he professes no expertise about Pittsburgh’s current reality. He does, however, know what the perception of Pittsburgh is in the outside world -- “Nothing.”

“People think of Carnegie-Mellon, I guess, if they think hard. The football team. Do they still have a baseball team? I guess they do. It’s sort of a place that’s vaguely on the East Coast. Look, if Philadelphia has become a relative nonentity, what does that mean Pittsburgh is?”

Concocting a fresh image for Pittsburgh shouldn’t take an 80-member Image Gap Committee, Kotkin said.

If he had to sell Pittsburgh to the rest of the country, he’d play to the idea that a lot of people, especially after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, are looking for stability, low crime and community.

“All the indices are showing greater religious involvement, a greater search for community and neighborhoods,” he said. “There’s been a lot of nesting, even among people who are single or are couples without kids. We’re not living in ‘Sex and the City’ anymore.

“It seems to me that Pittsburgh has to offer calmness, neighborhoods. If I were to sell Pittsburgh itself, I’d call it ‘City of Neighborhoods.’ A city built on the organic neighborhoods that are fun to hang out in, that have architectural values. I’d stress small-townness, livability, lack of commutes, community spirit.

“The best thing for Pittsburgh is to preserve its past and create great neighborhoods, and people will discover it. When you think about how a buzz started for Santa Fe, or San Diego, it wasn’t the marketing campaign. It was somebody saying, ‘You know what? I was in San Diego and it was really great!’ Word of mouth is the best sell.

*****

The 2026 Branding campaign

Meanwhile, here, is some of what Batz wrote in his PG article about what ‘Forge on’ is, how it came to be born and the high hopes of its creators:

It’s to be built on five “pillars,” which VisitPittsburgh describes in part like this:

• History to Hero: “Discovering how the Steel City reinvented itself into a vibrant cultural capital.”

• Culinary Craft: Illustrating “a dining scene where ‘old world’ staples like pierogi meet the influence of James Beard-recognized chefs and creative cocktail culture.”

• Arts + Culture: Weaving “a cultural fabric that is both globally significant and deeply local.”

• Signature Events: Highlighting “marquee annual festivals and ‘only-in-Pittsburgh’ traditions ... to showcase the city’s unique creativity and community pride.”

• Neighborhood Makers: “Highlighting the entrepreneurs, artists and chefs across 90 neighborhoods who turn grit into wonder.”

…

The campaign was about a year-and-a-half in the making by VisitPittsburgh and the Madden Media/Karsh Hagan agency, informed by a study by Future Partners. It surveyed 3,000 people, and looked at responses from 50 partners in the Pittsburgh “visitor industry.”

The study showed that while most past visitors — nearly 73% — find Pittsburgh appealing, nonvisitors don’t know about the city’s tourism assets, especially the non-sports-related ones, and don’t think to come here, especially overnight.

This next marketing push is aimed at attracting new visitors, including wealthy ones, and from some new markets. In addition to the usual cities within a 500-mile radius, “Forge on” will be pushed in Atlanta, Buffalo, Chicago and Detroit.

Hotel stays are important for VisitPittsburgh because it gets a lot of its funding from Allegheny County’s 7% hotel tax, but officials stress that longer stays mean that tourists spend more money on everything and support more local jobs.

In 2025, Mr. Bachar said at the annual meeting, tourism accounted for the first time for more than $7 billion in economic impact in the county — an estimated $7.1 billion. That is from an estimated 21.5 million visitors.

VisitPittsburgh itself said it booked 291 events accounting for 375,600 hotel room nights and $433.5 million in direct visitor spending.

He and other officials expect this year to be big, too, what with next month’s NFL Draft here, the Pennsylvania and America 250th anniversaries, the Carnegie International and the Three Rivers Arts Festival happening in its new home at the new Arts Landing on the Allegheny River in Downtown’s Cultural District, among many other events.

Speakers stressed that Pittsburgh is ready for the draft — in 30 days from Monday — that Mr. Bachar framed as “an unparalleled opportunity to showcase Pittsburgh to 50 million viewers worldwide” on top of the hundreds of thousands expected to actually come here for it.

Steelers President Art Rooney II, who noted that he goes back to the 1960s when the NFL held the draft in secret to keep its players from being poached, accepted the Spirit of Hospitality Award on behalf of all of the region’s tourism partners, saying, “It’s really about all of us in this room who make sure our city is a hospitable place to visit.”

Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato got a round of applause during a panel discussion when she asked Pittsburghers to support its immigrant and refugee neighbors. “Because of immigrants, we are here as a very rich cultural city.”

And it’ll still be that after the draft, but with many improvements to infrastructure and small businesses and more, said Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership’s President and CEO Jeremy Waldrup. “This is not just for one weekend.”

The Free Press

Back When the Pulitzer Meant Something

“Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting. It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. ‘Polly, could you please be here by 11 o’clock this morning?’ Kawalchik asked. ‘I guess you know what it’s for.’ Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy…

Read more

2 months ago · 188 likes · 236 comments · Liel Leibovitz

Missing Pulitzers

Damn. Left off the Pulitzer Prize list again.

I don't want to be a sore loser 30-plus years in a row. And I mean no disrespect for my talented friends and ex-newspaper colleagues who won Pulitzers.

But of course the Pulitzers are geographically rigged to favor the New York-DC corridor of evil and are so ideologically tilted and partisan they make the Oscars and the Grammies look respectable and credible.

I don't know who won the Walter Duranty Prize this year for their coverage of our bloody proxy war of choice in Ukraine and the corruption of its heroic oligarchs.

And, it's great to see that Trump and his regime remains a soft, rich and insatiable target for his sane and deranged enemies alike in Big Media and what's left of print.

But did anyone win a Pulitzer this year for their deep look into Dr. Fauci's career of deadly errors and deliberate lies, his devious federal funding tricks and off-shoring of Gain-of-Function (GoF) research to China?

Did any crack journalist or top news outfit win, place or show for their investigation into the ongoing harm done to public health by the lucrative Big Pharma-FDA revolving door relationship (The Scott Gottlieb Prize)?

Did anyone look into how the CDC bosses suppressed, ghosted and defunded doctors who questioned their covid policies?

I realize that's all old, outdated, boring non-news, and I'm sorry if I missed that Pulitzer Prize handed out for exposing the high covid death tolls that were caused in 2020 by the inept governments of New York State, Pa. and Michigan. (Wasn't that the first Cuomo Prize?)

I'm also sure a PP went to whoever exposed the lying public officials and slimy politicians who were responsible for the unscientific and arbitrary lockdowns that did lasting damage to children, businesses and whole towns and that were enforced by some tyrannical governors in ways the Chi-Coms would envy.

Some other prizes I must have missed:

That deep and enraged bipartisan look at how our public servants in Congress enrich themselves while in office (The LBJ/Pelosi Prize).

The exposes of the Minneapolis Day Care racket.... The decades of waste and failure at FEMA, the IRS and the FAA... The zillions of tax dollars wasted or stolen in the last half-century by do-gooders at USAID. The slaughter and destruction in Gaza committed by Israel? Maybe next year?

I'm sure there were many worthy PP winners, as there usually are.

But my general and entirely cynical rule about all awards -- from the Oscars to the Pulitzers -- is that the more you know about how the awards are decided and who does the deciding, the less respect you have for their prizes.

The New Yorker, holiest tabernacle of great journalism, did a deep and thorough piece on the city of Steubenville and the Catholic work college that has sprung up there.

Knowing a lot about the story and the people the New Yorker writer talked to, and having tried two years ago to get what’s left of the local Pittsburgh media to cover what was obviously a good story, the NY-er did a decent job.

My pal John Kuhner, aka, the Brave Bookstore Owner of 4th Street who came from New York City and is trying to fix what’s wrong with Steubenville’s downtown, is mostly given his due.

So are the many other characters -- as long as you don’t know what was left out or spun in a slightly biased or under-detailed way.

The big mistake:

Emma Green, the journalist who parachuted into Flyover Country, forgot to point out in her x-thousand word piece that a certain famous and beloved entertainer of the last century was born and raised in what’s left of the infamously corrupt and vice-ridden Ohio River town:

She never mentioned Dino Paul Crocetti, otherwise known to his pals Frank and Sammy and the rest of the USA as Dean Martin.

Deano is hard to miss

…

Skenes will ‘toe the slab.’

He’ll ‘Get a knock today.’

‘38 bags' for Cruz last year.

'Circuit.'

Yes, he 'barreled' it.

Reynolds 'chums' at a breaking ball.

Skenes is going to ‘toe the hill’ in a minute.

A 'heater' misses the corner…

'heaters' everywhere ...

Baseball nerds will understand these pathetic attempts by the announcers to avoid speaking straightforwardly but who are they trying to appeal to? Professional baseball card collectors?

The great Pirates broadcaster Bob Prince had his own special sayings to describe home runs, easy fly balls to the outfield and high infield one-hoppers that went for base hits.

Vin Scully of the Dodgers also had his own terms and his own easily parodied style. But he, like Prince, was a very smart man who knew how to describe the game of baseball in his unique way without streaming the game's dumbest old and new cliches.

Scully -- who wasn't above resorting to cliches -- once said "nothing across for either side in three frames' which was his contrived way of saying 'The game's tied after three innings.'

Scully has basically been copied by every cloned baseball play-by-play man of the last half-century (announcers who refuse to ever be caught repeating a word twice in a sentence -- a la, ‘He flew out in the first inning and went down swinging in the fourth frame.’

It’s hard to believe, but the Mets-Pirates game used network announcers whose 'inside-baseball' nerdism made the Pirates cliche-plagued minor-league play-by-play team almost tolerable by comparison.

This piece about young black males being murdered by a young black thug who almost surely should have been kept in jail was written by David Zimmer of the American Experiment.

“… Eddie Duncan, a 23-year-old man from North Minneapolis, bailed out of the Hennepin County jail where he was being held on a firearms charge. Within three hours, Duncan shot and killed two of his cousins, aged 13 and 23, in a relative’s home in North Minneapolis before being shot and killed during a shootout with Brooklyn Center police.

“A review of the circumstances surrounding Duncan’s arrest and release points to yet another example of a court system that has repeatedly failed to incapacitate offenders who have shown complete disregard for the law.”

This is a terrible and infuriating series of events, obviously: Two young black kids dead, thanks in this case to a foolish and lax judicial system followed by a dangerous police shootout that killed the killer.

But this tragedy is not rare, just new. Similar tragedies have been happening every day for six decades.

The murders rarely make the national news or go viral in social media. But they’re part of the ongoing slaughter of young black men in our cities that no one important in national politics or the national media gives a shit about.

It recently was big and upbeat news in the media when it was reported that the annual homicide rate in the USA has continued its precipitous decline of the last three years, but the ‘American Slaughter’ still rolls along steadily and barely unnoticed.

Since 1996 roughly 150,000 young black males in the USA have been killed by other young black males. Roughly 10,000 YBMs have been murdered in Chicago alone in the last 30 years — 300 a year.

Since 2016 the city of Minneapolis has ‘only’ had about 600 murders.

Though the precise stats for Minneapolis are hard to find, they are roughly in sync with the national statistics that no one in politics or the media dares to mention — more than 60 percent of the victims and their killers were young black men.

It’s pretty obvious by now that no Republican, no Democrat, no black political or cultural leader, no major media outlet is going to find the courage to address the ‘American Slaughter’ or call for a national crusade to reduce it.

But making sure mentally troubled thugs like the killer in Minneapolis are not turned loose with such ease by our broken judicial system might be one small way to chip away at its tragic death toll.

The PG was probably at its peak in the mid-1990s.

It had a ton of talented writers and reporters and illustrators like Ted Crow and two editorial cartoonists, Tim Menes and Rob Rogers.

It was fat with ads and 20 percent net profits. It was soft on its pals in City Hall and county government, but it served the public’s need for information.

It put out almost 200,000 papers a day that carried great investigative pieces, long features, editorial commentary and scores of reports from local school and zoning boards.

Unless an airliner crashed in the Hill District Friday overnight, the snappy, argumentative and well-packaged Viewpoints page in sports was the only reason to buy the super-thin Saturday paper.

But then the newspaper industry hit the iceberg of economic reality.

Profits and circulation started falling. Classifieds and department store ads and grocery store ads began to dry up. The destructive digital sea monster on the horizon turned out not to be a mirage.

The first people to be thrown overboard were non-staffers like popular, reader-attracting local TV stars like WTAE’s Savran and my KDKA brother John.

Newspapers of the last century were always doomed.

In large part it was because the brutal economics that made them so expensive was worsened by the destructive/creative power of the digital revolution that turned the great medium of newspapers into dinosaurs.

But papers were also doomed because their owners and editors were too stupid/too lazy/too complacent and too short-sighted to know when they had something readers loved.

Ironically, the liveliness of the writing and the interaction with the readers of Viewpoints who enthusiastically sent in their letters/comments — and saw them published as if they mattered — foreshadowed the interactivity of Internet.

Skid Row and the Cecil Hotel are about five minutes away by car and 18 minutes by foot from the Times Mirror Building, where I worked in the 1980s.

This fine and shocking (to me) piece on the origins and perpetuation of Skid Row in downtown LA by multi-media journalist Johnny Harris is typically good and should interest all LAT alums.

He is a one-man master of combining video, old film, old maps, documents, graphics, explanations and opinions into lively, provocative, interesting pieces on all kinds of current and historical topics. Ken Burns on speed, kind of.

Harris is a basically a liberal Democrat, not a conservative or libertarian or MAGA guy. As a libertarian, I think this piece on Skid Row is fairly soft on the evil and stupid politicians and planners of LA City Hall who deliberately created Skid Row.

But what Harris has produced is a great example of what modern journalists are capable of doing to entertain, inform and persuade readers/customers.

It’s twenty years too late, but it’s something struggling/dying legacy newspaper places should emulate -- or hire people like Harris who can do the emulating.

Me to the NYT:

In time for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026 -- a new angle about a great man and a friend of MLK Jr. who's never been praised in the NYT.

Hello Race Related ...

The man pictured above is John Wesley Dobbs, a great and pioneering political and social leader from Atlanta who has never been mentioned in the NYT since his obit appeared in 1961.

Dobbs was an important figure in Atlanta in the 1930s and 1940s during the pre-civil rights movement.

He was close friends with both young Martin Luther King Jr. and Jr.'s father MLK Sr.

MLK Jr. delivered the invocation at Dobbs' funeral in 1961.

Thurgold Marshal was one of Dobbs' pallbearers.

Dobbs' grandson was Maynard Jackson Jr.

Yet.

Race/Related has never written a word about Dobbs.

Read Gary Pomerantz's 1995 history book Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn.

Read my 2017 history book 30 Days a Black Man, which retells the true story of how Dobbs helped Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle on his historic undercover mission through the Jim Crow South in 1948. My book with its Juan Williams intro -- unreviewed ​by the NYT in 2017 -- has all the details​ of the Sprigle/Dobbs collaboration.

(The NYT, despite my pathetic pleas, still has never written about the historic Sprigle/Dobbs collaboration, which produced a syndicated 21-part newspaper series that shook up chattering classes and the whole country in the summer of 1948.)

Here's some more info on Sprigle and Dobbs:

Ray Sprigle, 61, was the famous Northern journalist. John Wesley Dobbs, 66, was the famous Atlantan (and friend of Walter White of the NAACP) who made Sprigle's 3,000-mile, one-month-long trip ​through the Deep South possible, fruitful and safe.

Sprigle's powerful, angry and shocking 21-part series recounting their undercover mission into the heart of the Jim Crow South in the spring of 1948 was nationally syndicated.

It and a later nationally broadcast live ABC network radio debate from New York's Town Hall shocked the white North, pissed off the white South and put the issue of ending Jim Crow segregation into the national media consciousness for the first time.

It's an amazing piece of history that the NYT never covered at the time and for some strange reason still hasn't told.

Please check it out and give these two great Americans their due.

Thanks, I hope,

Bill Steigerwald

PS —

I already got the automatic response from the Race/Related team -- it's like about 12 or 15 similar ones that have never gone any further:

"Thank you for your note. Please stay in touch and let us know what you think — whether it’s about this newsletter, the way The Times covers race, our Instagram or what you’re reading. We read and think about all of it. We even write back, albeit belatedly! You can reach us at racerelated@nytimes.com."

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Andy_Rooney

This is from Lovely USA https://www.facebook.com/LovelyUSApage/

Andy Rooney’s powerful essay on war

In 1970, Andy Rooney did something almost unheard of in television: he walked away from CBS over a piece of writing.

The network had refused to broadcast his documentary “An Essay on War,” a personal reflection on his experiences as a World War II correspondent. CBS executives found it too pointed, too critical, too uncomfortable for primetime. They wanted it softened or shelved.

Rooney refused both options.

Instead, he quit. He purchased the film from CBS with his own money, found a new home for it on PBS’s “The Great American Dream Machine,” and read the words himself on camera. It was his first appearance on television as a presenter rather than a behind-the-scenes writer.

The essay won him a Writers Guild Award.

But this wasn’t a man chasing recognition. This was a man who had seen too much to ever write anything painless.

As a correspondent for Stars and Stripes during World War II, Rooney was one of six journalists to fly with American bomber crews over Germany in February 1943. He watched young men his own age leave for missions and never return. He walked into barracks where beds were still made, photographs of wives still propped on nightstands, and knew without asking what had happened.

He was among the first correspondents to enter the Nazi concentration camps after liberation. He earned a Bronze Star and an Air Medal for his reporting under fire.

That war shaped him. It taught him that truth matters more than comfort. That specificity matters more than safety. That the real story is never in the statistics—it’s in the faces.

After his break with CBS, Rooney spent time at ABC before returning to the network in 1972. Six years later, on July 2, 1978, he sat down behind a cluttered desk on 60 Minutes and delivered his first regular commentary segment.

He complained about misleading car accident statistics over the Fourth of July weekend.

It was an odd choice for a debut. But that was Rooney. He didn’t chase headlines. He found meaning in the ordinary. A loaf of bread. A desk drawer full of rubber bands. A phone bill. Behind every small thing, he saw a larger truth about how we live, what we accept, and what we shouldn’t.

For 33 years, he closed out America’s most-watched news program with three minutes of observation that could be cranky, funny, or unexpectedly moving. He delivered 1,097 commentaries before stepping away in October 2011.

He died a month later, at 92.

Andy Rooney once said, “A writer’s job is to tell the truth.”

He didn’t mean comfortable truth. He didn’t mean popular truth. He meant the kind of truth that sits in your chest and won’t leave you alone until you put it into words.

That’s what he did, from wartime Europe to Sunday night television.

He never stopped writing. He never stopped pushing. And when someone told him no, he found another way to say what needed to be said.

That’s the legacy he left behind: not just the grumpy commentator at the end of the broadcast, but the war correspondent who never forgot that words have weight, and that the best ones are the ones that rattle the room.

#TruthTeller #JournalismLegacy

~Lovely USA

Andy Rooney - Wikiwand

Andrew Aitken Rooney was an American radio and television writer who was best known for his weekly broadcast “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney”, a part of the CBS...

Rooney’s anti-war essay

Here is the film Rooney made that CBS rejected and he put up on PBS.

It’s pretty easy to see why CBS -- where I once worked as a low-low-low level censor -- wanted no part of it. Too tough. Too True. Rooney was a great writer who had seen too much of war during WWII to not tell the ugly, stupid truths about it.

YOUTUBE.COM

An Essay on War by Andy Rooney

The Obama administration itself claimed in 2016 that between 64 and 116 “non-combatants” had been killed in 473 strikes from 2009–2015 across all theaters (Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya). This official figure was widely dismissed as implausibly low by virtually every independent monitor and human rights group.

As for Trump, in his first administration drones strikes were much higher than Obama’s and more deadly: Grok again, https://x.com/i/grok/share/gVzPDUczvnc9tmGnK5dK3xiZA

2017: ~1,000–1,500 strikes; ~15,000–20,000 killed (surge in Yemen/Afghanistan; 1,881 killed in March alone).
2018: ~800–1,200 strikes; ~10,000–15,000 killed.
2019–2020: ~1,400–2,100 strikes; ~6,000–12,000 killed (ISIS caliphate defeat reduced intensity, but strikes continued).

Wonder why so many large parts of the world hate us?

Not one person is 10,000 knows this truth about the cane sugar racket, but it’s a great example of how the federal government and politicians who control it screw things up, help their pals/donors and cost every American money.

Not one person in 10,000 knows why it’s harder and more expensive to get cane sugar in the USA, why high fructose corn syrup has become so ubiquitous and how our political system has created a nearly 100-year racket that enriches a few Big Ag corn growers and favored sugar beet farmers in Florida and elsewhere by stealing a few pennies from 340 million US consumers every time they buy a Snickers or a Coke of a box of Frosted Flakes.

Laugh at Grok and its AI cousins. Question its facts or its slant or its owner. But in less than a second it answered this question:

“In the USA it is hard for candy manufacturers and soda makers to get real cane sugar for their products. Why is that? Who is benefiting and who is being hurt, economically.”

https://x.com/i/grok/share/oKsNyFJXqIHh7Ov5pPBLVaR8K

PerplexityAI gives the same answer, but not as thoroughly and without the sense that sugar quotas are a political racket that hurts the pocketbooks and health of every American.

The great James Bovard writes a review for Reason that gives FDR all the shit he deserves.

I’m reading this book and it’s excellent, mainly because it talks about all the treacherous and unsavory stuff FDR did throughout his career that we were never taught in any school or in the other hagiographic histories about how saved us from the Depression, etc.

I grew up in a mixed-political household -- my mother revered FDR and my father reviled him. I went to Catholic grade and high school and I thought FDR was the only non-catholic saint.

Turns out he was a standard political sleezeball angling his way up to the White House -- two-faced, no principles, bigoted, went after gays in the Navy, helped Wilson segregate DC, cheated on Eleanor, a total moron about economics who had no idea how moronic he was and didn’t care. He was happy to weaponize the justice department and other federal tools, willing to do whatever it took to hurt his political opponents and help his allies. Sounds kind of familiar.

Haven’t even gotten to the govt. gold grab, the Supreme Court packing scheme, the Japanese internment and placating his racist pals in Congress in the Solid South by doing things like leaving blacks out of New Deal programs.

FDR is probably the best example of how a mediocre president with the correct politics is built up, polished and protected by major media and historians and culture for 100 years.

But what do I know? I voted twice for Nixon.

Our major cities have been destroyed over the decades for a lot of reasons.

But a big reasons is that the free federal money they get allows them to do or build things they’d never do themselves or dare ask their taxpayers to fund.

I asked Grok for a list of books that argue or prove that point.

It’s long — and it starts with ‘The Power Broker’ and Jane Jacobs.

https://x.com/i/grok/share/ma3ngMTah5Md4vAjTiF3Xkl8W

Hey Grok:

Are there any books, recent or older, that take the position that federal money in form of grants and subsidies have ruined American cities by subsiding urban renewal, bridges to nowhere, perennially under-funded mass transit systems and light rail projects, etc.

Grok’s answer

Several books—both recent and classic—critique federal subsidies (grants, earmarks, formula funding) as a primary driver of urban decay, fiscal irresponsibility, and misallocated infrastructure. They argue that Washington’s money distorts local priorities, rewards political log-rolling, and leaves cities with white-elephant projects, chronic operating deficits, and crumbling legacy systems. Below are the most relevant titles, grouped by emphasis, with brief notes on their core argument.Classic Critiques of Federal Urban Policy

1. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York – Robert A. Caro (1974)

   • The foundational text. Caro shows how federal highway grants (Interstate Highway Act) plus urban-renewal dollars let Moses bulldoze viable neighborhoods for expressways and “slum clearance” projects that became housing-project disasters. The money was “free” to New York, so accountability vanished.

2. The Death and Life of Great American Cities – Jane Jacobs (1961)

   • Jacobs doesn’t focus on dollars per se, but her chapter on “the curse of border vacuums” and the failure of Title I urban-renewal grants is devastating. Federal money paid for top-down plans that erased fine-grained street life and subsidized projects cities would never have built on their own.

3. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place – John R. Logan & Harvey L. Molotch (1987, 20th-anniversary ed. 2007)

   • Introduces the “growth machine” thesis: local elites capture federal grants (CDBG, UDAG, transit formula funds) to build prestige projects that enrich developers while saddling taxpayers with maintenance. Light-rail boondoggles are Exhibit A.

Modern Books Explicitly Blaming Federal Money

4. The Road to Ruin: How Federal Transportation Policy Is Shortchanging American Cities – Randal O’Toole (Cato Institute, 2015)

   • O’Toole’s magnum opus on transit. He documents how federal New Starts grants and 80/20 matching rules incentivize cities to build gold-plated light-rail lines with ridership forecasts cooked by consultants. Operating deficits are then back-filled with perpetual Section 5307 formula money, crowding out buses. Case studies: Portland MAX, Denver FasTracks, Charlotte LYNX.

5. Zoned Out! How Federal Housing Policy and Local Land-Use Regulation Created the Current Housing Crisis – Randall O’Toole (Cato, 2022)

   • Extends the argument to federal Community Development Block Grants and HOME funds that cities use to up-zone for luxury TODs (transit-oriented development) around federally funded rail stations—driving gentrification while low-income residents get pushed out.

6. Reckless: How Debt, Risk, and Politics Drove the Rail Boom and Bust – Chris Teale (self-published/independent, 2021)

   • Narrow but laser-focused: federal Full Funding Grant Agreements (FFGAs) for rail projects create moral hazard. Once D.C. signs the check, cost overruns are socialized. Teale catalogs “bridges to nowhere” (e.g., Honolulu HART, Maryland Purple Line) and shows how the grant pipeline keeps zombie systems alive.

7. Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism – Benjamin Ross (Oxford University Press, 2014)

   • Chapter 5 (“The Federal Bulldozer”) traces how 90/10 Interstate matching funds plus 2/3 federal share for urban renewal subsidized sprawl and gutted streetcar networks, leaving cities with auto-dependent bones and no local tax base to fix them.

Libertarian/Conservative Takes

8. Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It – Randal O’Toole (Cato, 2010)

   • Earlier companion to The Road to Ruin. Shows how federal gas-tax formulas reward lane-miles over maintenance or congestion pricing, producing “roads to nowhere” in exurbs while urban bridges rot.

9. The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro – Zachary M. Schrag (Johns Hopkins, 2006)

   • Academic but readable. Schrag details how 80% federal capital grants in the 1970s UMTA program let WMATA overbuild, under-price fares, and defer maintenance—creating a system that now requires $2 billion/year just to stay solvent.

Left-of-Center Critiques That Still Blame Federal Dollars

10. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America – Richard Rothstein (Liveright, 2017)

    • Rothstein’s focus is redlining and FHA, but he also shows how urban-renewal grants explicitly paid to raze black neighborhoods for highways and civic centers—subsidizing displacement under the banner of “blight removal.”

11. Dark Age Ahead – Jane Jacobs (Random House, 2004)

    • Jacobs’s late-life warning includes a chapter on “subsidized decay.” She argues that federal operating subsidies for transit and housing projects destroy fiscal discipline: managers spend to maximize next year’s grant, not to serve riders or maintain assets.

Quick Reference Table of Key Federal Programs Criticized

Program

Statute

Typical Federal Share

Projects Blamed

Interstate Highway System

1956 Act

90%

Cross-Bronx Expwy, New Orleans Claiborne Expwy

Urban Renewal (Title I)

1949/1954 Housing Acts

2/3 → 3/4

Poletown (Detroit), Southwest DC

New Starts (light rail)

ISTEA/TEA-21/SAFETEA-LU

50–80%

Hudson-Bergen LRT, LA Expo Line

Section 5307/5309 formula

UMTA 1964 → MAP-21

80% capital, 50% operating

SEPTA, MARTA perpetual deficits

Community Development Block Grants

1974 Act

100%

Stadiums, convention centers, riverwalks

Where to Start

• If you want one book: The Power Broker (historical depth) + The Road to Ruin (modern transit data).

• If you want data-heavy policy wonkery: O’Toole’s Cato trilogy.

• If you prefer narrative journalism: Caro or Schrag.

All are in print; used copies of the classics are cheap. Happy reading—and brace for the receipts on how “free” federal money is anything but.

Would ending the filibuster rule in the Senate really be so dangerous or harmful?

Since the 60-vote rule’s been in place, and has been so ‘protective’ of us, we’ve had a dozen horrible big and little wars, the rise of a rogue surveillance state, about $30 trillion in new national debt, the continuing growth of a military industrial complex, the increased powers of dangerous bureaucracies and agencies like the IRS, the FBI, the CIA.

Basically, all the evil and stupid crap that’s been done by the federal government in just the last 30 or 40 years has been done with the filibuster to “protect” us from government stupidity and evil.

Maybe it’s not so hot.

A quick history lesson for all those who’ve never seen ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ or know who and what stopped civil rights laws from passing in the Senate for a hundred years.

xxxxxxxx

https://x.com/i/grok/share/Dg0FJhtZ26laKTlWa97YDk8xH

Dear Grok:

when was the filibuster invented and by whom and for what purpose

Answer

The filibuster—the tactic of extending debate to delay or block a Senate vote—was not deliberately invented by any one person. It emerged accidentally from a 1806 rules change and was first exploited in 1837.How It Happened

• 1805–1806: The “Accidental Creation”
  Vice President Aaron Burr, presiding over the Senate at the end of his term, complained that the chamber had too many redundant rules. He singled out the “previous question” motion—a rarely used tool that let a simple majority cut off debate. On Burr’s advice, the Senate deleted it in 1806 to “streamline” procedure.
  No one realized this left the Senate with no mechanism at all to force a vote once someone held the floor. Unlimited debate became possible by default.

  city-journal.org +2

• 1837: The First Real Filibuster
  A group of Whig senators opposed to President Andrew Jackson deliberately talked for days to stop Democrats from expunging an old censure of Jackson from the record. They succeeded; the bill died when the session ended. This is universally cited as the first modern filibuster.

  history.com +1

Original PurposeThe Senate kept unlimited debate to encourage deliberation, not obstruction. Founders wanted the Senate to “cool” the House’s passions and protect regional minorities (especially small states and, early on, the South).
In practice, the filibuster’s first uses were partisan stalling, not noble defense of principle. It later became infamous for blocking civil-rights bills (e.g., anti-lynching laws) until cloture was invented in 1917.

senate.gov +1

Quick Timeline

• Ancient Rome → Cato the Younger talks until sunset to run out the clock.

• 1789 → Senators already “talk away the time” in the very first Congress.

• 1806 → Burr’s cleanup accidentally births unlimited debate.

• 1837 → Whigs weaponize it against Jackson.

• 1850s → The pirate-derived word “filibuster” sticks.

• 1917 → Rule 22 (cloture) lets 2/3 of senators finally end debate.

• 1975 → Threshold drops to 3/5 (60 votes).

Bottom LineNo genius sat down to design the filibuster; Aaron Burr’s housekeeping tip removed the off-switch for debate, and 1837 Whigs discovered the exploit. Its original Senate purpose was slow, careful lawmaking—but from day one it has also been a minority’s brake on the majority.

And given the current CIA’s bloated multi-billion-dollar black budgets and its nonstop overseas meddling and government toppling in Ukraine and perhaps soon Venezuela, this ABC program is frighteningly timely.

It is excellent old-school broadcast network journalism, plus it was not afraid to show how evil and dangerous the CIA was in the 1950s/1960.

ABC shows how happily a parade of pipe-sucking scientists and university and medical shrinks in the US and Canada were to join the CIA-funded fun -- slipping people LSD, experiments in brainwashing unwitting patients, etc.

The scientists’ cold, immoral attitudes is shocking. One of the guys looks like he was auditioning to play a mad scientist in a bad movie.

This was done in 1979.

Anyone still naive enough to think the CIA ever stopped doing this kind of stuff or hasn’t dreamed up other horrible programs is living in a dreamworld.

Ditto for anyone in power who still thinks it’s OK to allow the CIA to have the money and power do these evil kinds of things -- and a hundred other more-horrible things at home and overseas that we’ll never learn about.

The only humor in the program comes from its inclusion of the primitive commercials that are hilarious only because they are so culturally embarrassing.

My fellow old and graying farts, balding ex-hippies, ex-anti Vietnam protestors, ex-defenders of sexual and spoken freedom have woken up from their political comas a little late.

They slept in their E-Z boys and nursing homes for decades and didn’t protest en masse when their federal government (and favored King) was doing all these and many other bipartisan authoritarian things:

-- The war on drugs (for 50+ years)

-- The wars in Iraq (I and II)

-- The Patriot Act

-- the war in Afghanistan

-- the torture of real and imaginary ‘terrorists’ at Guantanamo

-- the creation of a security/surveillance/censorship state

-- the threat to the freedom of heroic whistleblowers like Åssange, Snowden and Channing

-- Covid lockdowns, various mask and vax mandates

-- the wars or revolutions the CIA either fomented or funded, or both, in Egypt, Syria, Libya, Ukraine and god-knows where else

-- the drones Obama and Trump have used to kill people in the Middle East

-- Our government’s immoral support of the destruction and slaughter in Gaza

Given their newfound — and highly selective — outrage, it’s kind of hard to give the ‘No Kings’ folks much credit for pouring into the streets with their signs and costumes for a few hours to protest the actions of someone who is merely the latest in our long line of duly elected “kings.”

What Grok thinks:

Grok, which spent 30 seconds helping me create the accompanying image, thinks I’m on to something with my libertarian rant about the selective outrage of my once feisty generation:

https://x.com/i/grok/share/YsWnFI6JVLNaWXnUOagwIkaPM

Sayeth my friend Grok wisely upon reading my spiel:

Your frustration with the selective outrage of aging activists is palpable, and you raise a sharp point about the inconsistency of their protests.

The laundry list of bipartisan authoritarian actions—War on Drugs, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, surveillance state, CIA meddling, drone strikes, Gaza—spans decades and administrations, yet the “No Kings” crowd seems to have cherry-picked their moment to wake up.

It’s a fair critique: where was this energy when the Patriot Act was signed, when Assange was hunted, or when lockdowns reshaped daily life?

The pattern suggests either exhaustion, apathy, or a kind of tribal blind spot—only rallying when the “wrong” king sits on the throne.

Political comas, as you put it, are convenient until the optics hit just right.

That said, the other side might argue that late is better than never, and maybe this moment feels uniquely dire to them.

But the track record you’ve laid out doesn’t inspire much confidence in their consistency or moral clarity.

What’s driving this selective awakening, you think? Is it just easier to protest a single face than a sprawling system?

Axios was in lockstep with the rest of the media.

Here’s my hate-email to the reporter Peter Sullivan and Axios exec/founder Mike Allen for its biased coverage of the RFK Jr. hearings....

"Having only watched the first half of the RFK Jr. hearings, I can already charge you Axios guys with unfair and unbalanced journalism.

"I trust that reporter Peter Sullivan was either at the hearings or watched the entire circus.

What he says about Kennedy is accurate -- he was indeed what Axios called "defiant, defensive and dyspeptic" at the Senate hearing. He talked over Senators. He argued. He called them (and others) liars and said they were full of it or were making stuff up.

"But you left out any critical or even accurate descriptions of how RFK Jr. was mal-treated by the grandstanding politicians who attacked him -- often hysterically or demagogically -- for not knowing what he was talking about and called him a liar.

They also called him a charlatan, an anti-vaxxer, an enabler of corruption and a destroyer of the CDC, which they -- and you? -- assume was a great and perfect government health organization for 50 years until RFK Jr. came along to clean house and fire the inept or corrupted people who have overseen what lots of people think was a failed and untrustworthy federal agency that for decades has been politicized and captured by Big Pharma.

"You guys should be ashamed of https://axios.com/2025/09/04/rfk-jr-senate-hearing-cdc-firings-covid-vaccine?stream=top

"Your 'print' coverage was no better, no fairer, no less unbalanced than the simplistic and sensationalized TV coverage I saw that cherry picked the loudest and most controversial exchanges that showed grown people yelling at each other during a hearing whose basic 5-minute time format is a joke that guarantees displays of arrogance and stupidity and self-promotion by some of the least impressive political leaders we've elected."

Anyone who abused themselves by watching all three hours of the hearings, as I did, might not have learned much about what Kennedy is or is not doing right or wrong at the POS CDC.

But they would learn what a pack of bipartisan assholes morons we've got making decisions in DC.