Michael Meeropol
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How many listeners remember the TV show “Hogan’s Heroes”? Set in a POW camp during World War II, it was, if you can believe it, a comedy about American and British POW’s running rings around bumbling Nazis at the camp. One major character was a fat German Sergeant named Shultz who when observing the shenanigans of Hogan and his heroes would loudly proclaim I KNOW NOTHING…. NOTHING!
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Last month a murder suicide by gunfire occurred in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, a suburb of the city of Springfield in the Western part of the state.
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Some listeners from back in 2015 and 2016 may remember that I made the following statement about Trump: “I think he’s a fascist.” I did it because to me, being brought up in what was called the “old left” --- all four of my parents were communists --- FASCIST is an extreme epithet for right-wing individuals and policies.
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I am a bit of a fossil when it comes to the media. I still subscribe to the print edition of the New York Times. Thus, when something appears online, I often have to wait a couple of days to read it. On June 1, an opinion piece by climate scientist Andrew Dressler dropped entitled, “Oil and Gas Companies are Trying to Rig the Marketplace.”
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I am 81 years old. Back in 1969, I was a 26-year-old graduate student having studied economics and history for nine years. In all those years taking all those courses, I had probably spent no more than a handful of minutes even THINKING about air and water pollution.
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Imagine for a moment that instead of daily reports from a New York Courtroom where Donald Trump is on trial for falsifying business records to describe a payoff to a woman with whom he had a brief affair in 2006, we would be getting daily reports from a Washington, DC courtroom where the US government is presenting chapter and verse about how Donald Trump encouraged and enabled an attempt to overthrow the will of the voters and deny Joe Biden the Presidency on January 6, 2021.
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The day I recorded this commentary, the print edition of the New York Times published an OP ED by Michelle Cottle entitled “Inside the MAGAverse on the Eve of Trump’s Trial” (April 17, 2024: A20). In it, Ms Cottle captured the self-satisfaction of the cult-members she interviewed at a Trump rally Saturday, April 12 in rural Pennsylvania.
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I was moved to tears watching a discussion on television about the six immigrant workers who lost their lives filling potholes on the Key Bridge in Baltimore when that giant container ship lost power and knocked the bridge down. I thought of the loss of crucial bread-winning family members. I was impressed that all of these men were immigrants specifically from Central America and Mexico. I was impressed that they were deep in the fabric of American society many having been here for 18 yeas or more, yet, at the same time, they were regularly sending money back to “the old country,” just as countless European immigrants did in the 19th century.
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Have you seen advertisements on TV celebrating American technology and then warning ominously that “some in Washington” want to stifle our technological progress? I have seen many --- they usually feature small business owners praising American technology and warning about bad plans floating around Washington.
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This week I have so many things I want to talk about ---- immigration, the war in Gaza, the Presidential election, the Supreme Court’s decision to delay Trump’s Washington, DC trial ---- but I am going to restrict myself to talking about the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that fertilized eggs in In Vitro Fertilization clinics are BABIES.