I was seventeen, almost 18, when the Democrats held their convention in 1968. Afterwards I heard about the protests and the police brutality, but that’s not what I remember about the convention. We still had a black and white TV. I watched the opening of the convention. Here’s a music trivia question for you, “Who sang the National Anthem at the Democratic National Convention in 1968?”
I’m surprised that question is asked more.
The Manafort trial is with the jury and they are asking questions that is apparently typical of a jury in this sort of trial. Things like, “What is a reasonable doubt?”
Meanwhile John Brennan, the former CIA Director who had his security clearance stripped by Trump, is saying that anyone who doesn’t think there wasn’t collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians is “Hogwash.” Others have said, and maybe he has too, that the only question is, “Does it meet the legal definition of a crime?”
I’m glad to see we are back where we started asking this central question. A new book is out about Trump, the Russians, and Putin. It points out that Trump has been taking Russian money for three decades and laundering it. There are whole floors in Trump Tower and around the world that have condos purchased for cash by Russians.
For me the central question is about the servers in Trump Tower. The ones that were set up to talk to AlfaBank during the campaign. They were set up in a very peculiar way; so that they’d only be able to talk to AlfaBank. The traffic on them was very high before a primary and before the Republican Convention. Why is that? What was being transmitted? We know it was a lot of data.
When the Trump organization was asked about it, they denied any such server existed. The server immediately went silent. Only to have another server that looked just like it come up. When asked about that server; it was denied, and it went silent. Someone had to set up those servers. Who? I’ll bet Paul Manafort knows.
Who else in the Trump organization knew about those servers? Certainly, Trump Sr knew. Did Donnie? How about Betsy DeVos? Her health care companies had the data that allowed Trump to link social security numbers and names to Facebook accounts. Certainly, Nigel Farage knew something. He was caught coming out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and couldn’t recall why he had been in there. The next day Julian Assange released Clinton emails. None of the people mentioned are smart enough technically to have set up those servers or crisscrossed the data. Someone was; who was it? Did Trump get someone from one of those Russian condos to come in and do it? Was it one of the GRU folks indicted in the Mueller probe? We don’t know, yet.
As to the person who sang the National Anthem at the Democratic Convention in ’68 – Aretha Franklin.
The way she sang it; no one could follow the timing. She didn’t sing in the pocket, but rather held back so she could let run and hold the last note of a line. The crowd was confused because they had tried to sing along. They eventually stood there smiling comically, because when Aretha sang you weren’t going to sing along. You were going to listen. She was in the class of Mahalia Jackson, Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, and Ella Fitzgerald.
I can see her in – was it The Blues Brothers? – where she’s walking on the lunch counter singing? Classic.
Aretha. Classic. Period.
1,003 Days to Go
PS Skull!
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