A Judgment Came Down
It's Saturday afternoon, May 30, 2026, 14:37, and I've updated this page a little bit with a bit of what we'd said on the program about CBS and 60 Minutes. I'm hoping I can do more updates soon. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ Rushing to get this posted again. More Trumpian grift, more high seas murders, but some judges are resisting. Is there hope after all?
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday June 10, 2026, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. We had an LSB meeting this past week, on May 13, and it got messed up at the start by two of the usual disruptors. We heard from the National Election Supervisor regarding the elections that start at the end of June. There's a problem in that only a third of WBAI Unpaid Staff have been registered to vote in these Pacifica elections. Three of WBAI's sister stations have 100% registration, one has 50% and WBAI, the Executive Director told us, only has about a third registered. The deadline for everything is May 31. For listeners you can still make sure that you get to vote by donating $25 or more to WBAI.
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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We had some breaking news just as we got ready to start recording this program, the judge has re-opened Trump's $10 billion case against the Internal Revenue Service! The judge, Kathleen M. Williams, said that she wanted to investigate the circumstances surrounding Trump's attempt to settle the lawsuit in a way that benefitted him and his pals.
In her order reopening the whole damned case Judge Williams said she was, empowered to investigate serious misconduct,
in any case before her. So she ordered Trump's lawyers to tell her by June 12, whether the lawsuit should be formally reopened because the court was the victim of a fraud.
The Judge's decision came in response to court papers filed on Wednesday by a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges who urged her to bring the case back to life and dig into the details of the agreement to settle it.
So those judges see this for the scam that it is.
Judge Williams' has also ordered Trump's lawyers to respond to the question of whether he had colluded with his own government to settle the case, to avoid judicial scrutiny.
Oh, that's good.
Before judge Williams issued her order reopening the case a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia had temporarily blocked the Trump administration from taking any further steps to set up the slush fund or disburse money from it. So that's showing that some parts of the judiciary are on the ball.
I'm also reading that Trump's lawsuit was filed after the statute of limitations had elapsed, so the entire case was moot! Now Trump is an ignoramus, but there are plenty of lawyers with him and they all should have been aware that there was no case. Trump's former personal lawyer Todd Blanche, who is now acting Attorney General, is sure looking bad here.
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Trump and Hegseth's flagrant murders of people in boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean have reached a death toll of 196 now.
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This week the CBS editor in chief Bari Weiss appointed a guy named Nick Bilton to be the executive producer of 60 Minutes. He will replace Tanya Simon, who's been working on 60 Minutes for more than 30 years. Her contract still had a year to go, but apparently Ms. Weiss really wants this Bilton guy in there.
Ms. Weiss also fired reporters Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi this week. Alfonsi was the one who's piece on the hell hole prison in El Salvador to which Trump had sent a bunch of Venezuelans who had been caught up in ICE raids.
It's being reported that this Bilton guy has never worked in broadcast TV news before. He was a technology columnist at The New York Times and he's directed and produced documentaries for HBO and Netflix. The billionaires really don't want a broadcast news magazine stirring things up.
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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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The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2026, R. Paul Martin.
