Do You Trust Liberty Vote?
Okay, here are two of the topics we covered on this radio program. A right-wing Republican will now control the balloting in the United States of America. Will he be like Trump and disregard the law and ethics? Will we never again see an election where anyone but the right-wing candidates win? Will ICE be there to suppress the votes of American citizens even before they get to the voting machines? We also talked about this sixth attack on some sort of small vessel in the Caribbean Sea. After killing everyone on board the first five times there are two survivors this sixth time. Now it may get complicated. I plan to update this Web page over the next week,s o be sure to check back for those updates.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday November 12, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. We had a LSB meeting this past week on Wednesday, October 8. Members of the LSB had a long back and forth with the WBAI interim General Manager and interim Program Director about some issues. That back and forth took up most of the meeting. I got only three minutes to give a Treasurer's Report, but then there wasn't all that much to report since we haven't been having the usual number of meetings and we haven't been getting much in the way of financial information we can share.
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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Dominion Voting Systems has been bought by a rich Republican named Scott Leiendecker. He's the sole owner and now calls the company Liberty Vote.
This is not good. I'm reading that a part of the acquisition agreement to sell Dominion Voting Systems was that the company will drop several remaining lawsuits against various right-wing stars. So Dominion Voting Systems is in the process of dropping the remaining litigation with that guy who got rich by selling a pillow he patented, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell and One America News Network (OANN).
Dominion Voting Systems had previously reached a $67 million settlement with Newsmax Media Inc. It had also agreed to settle a lawsuit against Fox News for $787.5 million. I don't know if this Scott Leiendecker is going to give all of that money back or what.
More importantly, will Liberty Vote
now be used by the Trump administration to suppress some votes? Will the right-wing now use their access to the vote counting apparatus to just make sure that they never lose another election? A quote has been variously attributed to Boss Tweed and Joseph Stalin: It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the vote.
Will ICE be there to intimidate people waiting to vote? Will right-wing zealots have their political thumbs on the scales of the voting machines? I sure as hell do not trust them.
The current right-wing state of affairs could become permanent. The United States of America, as the world has known it, may soon be over and done with.
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The head of the US Southern Command, Admiral Alvin Holsey is stepping down. The The New York Times says that he's spent less than a year in a position that was expected to last for three years. It's being reported that Admiral Holsey has expressed reservations about the Trump administration's operations in Central and South America targeting non-military ships. Admiral Holsey has been in the Navy for 37 years.
Meanwhile Trump has blown up a sixth boat in the Caribbean. But he wasn't bragging so much about this one. On Friday Trump had a meeting with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Reporters asked about a Reuters story that a sixth vessel had been destroyed in the Caribbean Sea and Trump confirmed that the strike had happened on Thursday. The New York Times is reporting that what they call, a semi-submersible vessel
was blown up this week. In the first five strikes Donnie Bonespur
Trump bragged about the hits and acknowledged killing 27 people. In this one they're admitting that two more people were killed, bringing Trump's high seas murder toll up to 29. But this one's different. In this one there are two survivors. Things are now much more complicated.
The administration now has to decide what to do with those two people. Do they return them to their country of origin? Do they detain them as drug smugglers in preparation for prosecution? Do they call them illegal combatants in a war and hold them in Guantanamo for an indefinite period of time without any legal recourse? Do they send them to some other country? Will they force them to confess to whatever the Trump administration wants them to say and parade them around? If they are treated as criminals and subjected to the legal system then there is no reasonable cause for them and the others to have been treated as something other than criminals and not as illegal combatants in a war. And of course Congress has not declared war nor has it authorized killing people in boats like this.
Yeah, a submersible is fishy, but that would be a criminal action, not an act of war by another nation.
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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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