Hallelujah, gonna sue ya: Trumpublican misinfomercial abuses Leonard Cohen's most famous song

You took his greatest song in vain
Though we'd made our refusal plain
You think you got away with it, now do ya?
You used this song to spread Trump's blight
You violated copyright
So now it seems we just might have to sue ya
Have to sue ya
Have to sue ya
Have to sue ya
Have to sue-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ya.

[Apologies to the estate of Leonard Cohen]

The Trumpublican misinfomercial, more commonly known as the 2020 Republican National Convention, has come and gone, thank goodness. The list of lies spewed, shouted, or screamed during that gaudy four-day spectacle, as well as the violations of various laws and norms, have been well covered. These are pretty big issues, to be sure. But since I am a nearly lifelong fan of the late singer/songwriter/poet/novelist Leonard Cohen, and have mentioned him numerous times on this Whirled over the years, I'm going to focus on what is, in the larger scheme of things, one of the more trivial violations. That would be the RNC's misuse -- not once, but twice -- of Cohen's most famous and most-covered song, "Hallelujah" (originally released on his 1984 album, Various Positions).

Leonard Cohen died one day before the most disastrous presidential election in modern US history, though the world didn't hear about his death until a couple of days after the election. Cohen has had a very devoted following for decades, a following that arguably has only increased and intensified since his death. So it's not surprising that fans were furious over the co-opting of "Hallelujah" by the RNC.

Yet, as anyone who is actually familiar with the lyrics knows, there is also unintentional humor in this song choice. For despite the repeated use of the word "Hallelujah," this song is not triumphant or celebratory, except perhaps in an ironic sense. Nor is it a religious or holy song, at least not in the traditional "Christian" self-righteous sense embraced by so many republicans and fake-embraced by Caligula himself -- though it does reflect Cohen's longstanding themes of the symbiotic relationship between eroticism and holiness. The point is that "Hallelujah" is in essence a breakup song. It is all about disillusionment, cynicism, bitterness, and ultimately resignation in the wake of a failed love affair.

I have little doubt that Cohen himself would not have approved of this exploitation of his song by the RNC. When I first wrote about this on Facebook on August 28, 2020, I mentioned that I would be interested to see if there are any responses from his estate and/or from Cohen's children, Adam and Lorca. I also expressed curiosity as to whether the Trump campaign paid applicable licensing fees for the public performances of this song (or any other copyrighted songs they've used, for that matter). After all, music copyright holders are pretty fussy about these matters. You have to pay a licensing fee for public performance of a copyrighted song, and even for quoting song lyrics in a book.

Some of my questions were subsequently answered. Representatives from the RNC had indeed approached the Cohen estate to obtain permission for a live performance of "Hallelujah." Their request was denied. But they went ahead anyway, with a recorded cover by Tori Kelly on the third night of the show, and, following Trump's 70-minute, lie-filled rant on the final night, a live performance by opera singer Christopher Macchio. The Cohen estate was not pleased.

Michelle L. Rice, the legal representative for the Cohen Estate, said the family was “surprised and dismayed that the RNC would proceed knowing that the Cohen Estate had specifically declined the RNC’s use request, and their rather brazen attempt to politicize and exploit in such an egregious manner ‘Hallelujah’, one of the most important songs in the Cohen song catalogue.” As such, the Cohen Estate is “exploring legal actions.”

Rice added that “had the RNC requested another song, ‘You Want it Darker’, for which Leonard won a posthumous Grammy in 2017, we might have considered approval of that song.”

Leonard Cohen is far from the only artist whose work has been co-opted by the Trump campaign without the permission of the artists and/or other copyright holders. From Vulture.com, here's a rundown of that growing list. (And as a bonus, also from Vulture.com, here's a list of performers who reportedly turned down an invitation to perform publicly at Trump's 2017 inauguration.)

I've never been one to advocate litigation to resolve every conflict or disagreement that comes along, but in this case, I hope Cohen's estate aggressively pursues legal action. After all, the Trump campaign has been suing and threatening to sue a number of media outlets and individuals for years in a desperate but ultimately futile attempt to control the narrative about Trump -- even going so far as to sue a tiny TV station in Wisconsin for a political ad. Litigation seems to be their life's blood. So... fair's fair.

Related on this Whirled:

• November 13, 2016: And even though it all went wrong...
  I wasn't the only one to view Leonard Cohen's death as darkly symbolic of the looming era of Trumpism.
• November 10, 2016: You want it darker
  I wrote this one shortly after I found out about Cohen's passing.
• November 9, 2016: Mourning in Amerika, and what to do next
  Written the day after the election. Even then we knew it would be bad, but our expectations have been surpassed many times over in the years since then.
  

And even though it all went wrong...

What a week.

On Monday we lost the man who wrote that democracy is coming to the USA, though we didn't learn about it until Thursday, the day he was quietly buried in his native Montreal. On Tuesday we learned that democracy may be leaving the USA.

And on Saturday, on the cold open for Saturday Night Live, the truly lovely and talented Kate McKinnon paid a poignant tribute to both events by singing a few verses from Leonard Cohen's most-covered song, "Hallelujah."

I'm far from the only person to be grieving over both the election loss and the loss of Cohen, and certainly far from the only writer to see the interwoven themes they present.

In The Guardian Jonathan Freedland wrote:

...Cohen's songs often told of gloom and defeat and darkness, but his voice was one of consolation – of sharing the loss by finding another who felt it too, of discovering the glimmer of love or light that might get you through.

My word, do we need that now. Cohen died on Monday, slipping out before he had to glimpse the news that has convulsed the world. He saw a lot in his 82 years, but he never had to see the words President-elect Trump. With his impeccable timing, Cohen spared himself that ordeal. But his songs anticipated how the rest of us would feel. Looked through the paper. Makes you wanna cry.

The Trumpists and their sycophants outside the US taunt those of us who are fearful. Boris Johnson says we need to get over our collective “whinge-orama” and embrace the new reality. Iain Duncan Smith says Barack Obama was a cold fish anyway, and he’s glad to see the back of him. Nigel Farage chooses to describe America’s first black president as a “creature”. Why, Trump’s arrival could even be a good thing, they say: he might offer the UK a decent post-Brexit trade deal.

This is not only pathetic in its cravenness, grovelling to a bigot when the moment demanded some of the moral steel shown by Angela Merkel – who extended her hand to Trump, but only on condition that he accept basic human values including respect for the minorities he had so copiously insulted – it is also unforgivably myopic. It fails to see there is a much larger picture here...

A much larger picture indeed, which is why I find it both sad and intensely annoying to read sneering comments on social media -- even from people whom I'd considered to be friends or at least allies -- calling the anti-Trump contingent spoiled crybabies who are merely "butt-hurt" because "their" team didn't win. "Get over it," we're scolded, and some of the scolds aren't even US residents and will not have to reside in Trump's America.
 
And here's Andrew O'Hehir on Salon.com:

I don’t know how much attention the great Canadian troubadour paid to current events during his final days in this vale of tears. I can only imagine he was both horrified and mordantly amused by the rise of Donald Trump, a cartoonish would-be despot who seemed to have been conjured out of Cohen’s darker visions. (I have no particular objection to Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, except one: Leonard Cohen deserved it more.) All those disgruntled and downtrodden white people we’ve heard so much about apparently felt that everybody besides them had gotten a box of chocolates and a long-stemmed rose. So they ordered their own — and boy howdy, did they ever get them! Now, it’s true that the chocolates have a funny smell, almost as if they were made of something else that’s about the same color as chocolate. And the delivery guy bears a distinct resemblance to Freddy Krueger. As Cohen observed, that’s how it goes.

In the title song of Cohen’s now-classic 1992 album “The Future,” he outlined a litany of terror-nostalgia that captures our present era even better than it did that one: “Give me back the Berlin Wall/ Give me Stalin and St. Paul/ Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima.” I think he really was a Jewish prophet (turned Buddhist monk) who could see the future. That human yearning for moral certainty and clarity, even at the risk of extinguishment or fiery damnation, runs through Cohen’s lyrics. There is a great deal of that spirit behind the unlikely election of a real estate tycoon and TV star, who possesses no understanding of policy or governance and no aptitude for public discourse, as president of the United States.

The "box of chocolates" bit was a reference to lyrics in a song I've often quoted myself (here and here, f'rinstance): "Everybody Knows," which appeared on Cohen's 1988 release I'm Your Man.

Years ago I read an article that I can't seem to find online, in which the writer described Cohen as "the hoarse man of the Apocalypse." And indeed he was, having earned that title by virtue of both his "golden voice" and songs such as the aforementioned "The Future."



Back in the early 1990s, when "The Future" was still a work in progress, I read a Cohen interview that mentioned the song, which at the time was titled, "If You Could See What's Coming Next." This October 2015 post on the wonderful Cohencentric blog quotes the original opening lines:

If you could see what's coming next
If you could see the hidden text
You'd say, Give me love or give me Adolf Hitler
And you'd say, Give me back the
Berlin Wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
You'd say, Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima
Just get me out of this mirror.

Cohen was clearly inspired by the heady events that had been unfolding throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unraveling of the Soviet Union, the deaths of tyrants. So many of us who were alive and aware back then were downright giddy, and some observers even suggested that we had for all practical purposes reached "the end of history" and that it was, by and large, a happy ending, because the good guys were triumphing at last.

Clearly, Cohen knew better, and while some might have merely found his message in "The Future" congruent with his own long history of being a brooding poet/novelist/troubadour, he framed it in a compelling way that cut into my own giddiness. I've long since accepted that in history and politics, as in Scamworld, there are no neat and tidy endings.

Yet on the very same album on which "The Future" appeared, Cohen also sang about democracy coming to the USA, and he offered another anthem of hope, titled, appropriately enough,"Anthem."

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, there is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

Well, yes, there is that. And as Kate-as-HRC said at the end of her song on SNL, "I'm not giving up and neither should you." For sure, Kate, I'm not giving up.

I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay
I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the USA.

And I'm thinking that if we can survive and even push back on the autocracy, there may be hope yet for democracy.

Addendum 15 November 2016: A.J. Goldman penned a thoughtful and lovely tribute to Cohen's work and why it matters now more than ever: Why We Mourn Leonard Cohen in the Age of Trump.

Beggars and pretty women

The tag line for today’s Salon feature about Oprah’s cheerleading for The Secret sums it up pretty well: "By continuing to hawk ‘The Secret,’ a mishmash of offensive self-help cliches, Oprah Winfrey is squandering her goodwill and influence, and preaching to the world that mammon is queen." It’s an article that I think is well worth reading.

Having been in on numerous discussions about the controversies surrounding The Secret, I can’t help thinking of a verse from one of Leonard Cohen’s most widely covered songs, "Bird On the Wire":*

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch,
He said to me "You must not ask for so much"
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door,
She cried to me "Hey, why not ask for more" **

For some reason, I’d always envisioned the woman in Cohen’s song as an Amsterdam hooker. But these days I tend to think more about the New-Wage hustlers of both genders who are selling not sex, but bright shiny promises of untold wealth. "Ask, believe, receive. That'll be $1,000.00, please."

Like Cohen, most of us live our lives with our attention focused somewhere between the beggar and the pretty woman. At any given time in our lives, our heads can be turned by either one. But The Secret and its promoters seem to be strongly encouraging us to ditch the beggar completely and turn all of our attention on the woman, who, all too often, is also a beggar – just a far richer and slicker beggar, who only pretends to have our best interests at heart.

Meanwhile, one of the stars of The Secret – and, it might be argued, a leading promoter of mammon – has said he is hurt because in the wake of his success and newfound fame, some of his old friends have turned into anti-Secret warriors. As one of those old friends, though hardly what I’d call a warrior, I’m truly sorry to hear he is hurting. But maybe, just maybe, he brought some of this hurt on himself.

PS - Just to prove that I am not totally a "negative thinker" or a "naysayer," I want to share with you an aggressively cheery, militantly positive site I just stumbled upon. Crank up your speakers and give a listen to "Musivation" innovator Michele Blood, who uses the "Lor Of Attraction" to get information to your brain 300 times faster than other methods! Go ahead! Have a whole-brain experience! And then go out and cure some cancer! Or at least manifest a new mansion or two for yourself!
* Those of you who know what a fan I am of his writing (though not so much his singing) probably knew that sooner or later I’d bring a Leonard Cohen quotation into this.
** Copyright © by Leonard Cohen Stranger Music, Inc.

Five years after

Today, out of respect for the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, I am taking a brief break from my cosmic potshots. I guess I don’t really feel like trying to be funny today. But rest assured I’ll be back tomorrow, or the day after, in full Cosmic Connie mode.

Since we in the Western world have a tendency to break our history down into decades, and therefore into half-decades, this anniversary is a particularly significant one, and people all over the world will be observing it in special ways. Most will be mourning, though some, unfortunately, will be celebrating.

It comes as no surprise that politicians are exploiting the heck out of this anniversary, a notable example of such exploitation being the partisan ABC "docudrama," The Path to 9/11, the first part of which aired last night. (I found it noteworthy that the show was presented with "few commercial breaks," when most movies on network TV are interrupted every three minutes with five minutes of commercials.) Although the version that we saw was edited and toned down, perhaps due to protest from the Democrats – though ABC apparently will not comment on that – the show still seemed to clearly communicate the idea that the 9/11 attacks were the fault of the Clinton administration. At least that’s the impression I got. Specifically, the message seemed to be that the attacks happened in part because President Clinton was so distracted with lying about getting blow jobs from a White House intern that he couldn’t focus on the obvious threat posed by bin Laden and his minions. The larger message was that he was just too wimpy to give the order to kill bin Laden.

Call me intolerant of the other side’s p.o.v., but I quit watching shortly after the totally gratuitous scene showing the two guys sitting in the limo watching Clinton’s "I did not have sex with that woman" statement on TV.

An email I received from Moveon.org a few days ago stated, "It's not just that ABC's movie is slanted. Big parts of it are simply untrue. The producer himself even admitted to simply improvising a key scene which depicts the Clinton administration letting bin Laden go when they had him in their sights—a complete fabrication." Furthermore, "….the movie's star, Harvey Keitel, said ‘It turned out not all the facts were correct.’" (Here's an interesting blog with more information.)

In all fairness, let me add that I am well aware 9/11 has been exploited – and distorted – by the "other side" too, a notable example being Michael Moore’s infamous Fahrenheit 9/11. I actually enjoyed that one, although I recognize Moore’s blatant agenda, and am aware that the film contains inaccuracies. However, the scene with W reading from My Pet Goat was priceless…

The 9/11 anniversary is also being exploited by the giants of the self-help industry (although in the case of the linked site, you have to register or log in for the privilege of seeing what Himself has to say about 9/11 and related matters of consequence). Not surprisingly, the new-age / metaphysical folks have their own take on it too. 9/11 was all part of some great karmic pattern, and/or it was indicative of the galactic shift, and/or it happened because we arrogant humans did not listen to what Archangel Michael, Saint Germain or Nostradamus had to say. Naturally, many contemporary healers and seers saw 9/11 coming, but no one would listen to them. Maybe if you buy some of their products, you can help prevent another 9/11 or something worse. The Bible thumpers, too, have their own spin, mostly having to do with the End Times.

I heard on TV that the "official" song for the worldwide commemorations today is the Beatles classic "All You Need Is Love." That’s a fine sentiment to be sure, but I think a far better choice would have been "Imagine," though of course the implications regarding a world government would make some folks nervous.* I remember the song that was going through my head all day on September 11, 2001. It was Leonard Cohen’s "The Future," the title song of the 1992 album that I think is his best. I read in a 1991 interview with Cohen that the original title of the song, which he began writing around the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet empire, was, "If You Could See What’s Coming Next." The opening lines were, "If you could see what’s coming next / if you could read the hidden text…" That was scrapped in the final, but these lines remained: "Give me back the Berlin Wall / Give me Stalin and Saint Paul / I’ve seen the future, brother; it is murder."** The message of the song was that someday soon we'd all be longing for the relative simplicity of the "good old days" of the Cold War.

Unlike Cohen – or, for that matter, the cosmic seers and healers I cited above – I haven’t seen the future, but I have a sinking feeling that the future is now and I am just afraid to look. I may feel differently tomorrow, but I can’t say for sure today. The endless public expressions of mourning aside, and notwithstanding the crass efforts of some to exploit 9/11 for financial gain, we have all been profoundly affected in some way by 9/11. Even if, as some have argued, the attacks did not change the world, they almost certainly changed many people's perception of the world. And that is potentially a foundation for real change, maybe even for the better, although I am not too optimistic at this point.

It’s a pretty safe prediction that we will all be talking or writing or singing about September 11, 2001, for years to come. Meanwhile, if you want some serious discussion about the significance of 9/11 – discussion that goes beyond political bickering and finger pointing – check out today’s post on Steve Salerno’s SHAM blog.

* My own personal favorite Beatles song, and the official Beatles song for this blog, is "Across The Universe." Jai Guru Deva om! Or, perhaps more appropriate to one of the points I danced around on this post: "Nothing's going to change my world."

** © 1992 by Leonard Cohen Stranger Music, BMI. Here are the complete lyrics. Granted, this song is a bit "End-Timey" too (one critic described Cohen as "the hoarse man of the Apocalypse"), but, for some odd reason, I can tolerate apocalyptic musings from a Buddhist Jew much better than I can from a Christian fundamentalist.
The song that Cohen actually wrote for 9/11, "On That Day," which appeared on his album Dear Heather, was kind of a cop-out, IMO. It started out provocatively and then he just cut it off…

This looks like good news

So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed
it would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed
It's like our visit to the moon or to that other star
I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.
~ Leonard Cohen ("Death of a Ladies' Man," from the album of the same title, 1977)

"I will not start the fight, but I will finish it!"
~ Leonard Coldwell, everywhere on the Interwebz, constantly


I published a very abbreviated version of this post -- just the above graphic, no text -- when I first received the news on May 19, via email and supporting PDF, that not-doctor Leonard Coldwell, ex-b.f.f. of imprisoned serial scammer Kevin Trudeau, had, through his attorneys, voluntarily dismissed his civil defamation case against me (and several other defendants). [Case number 15-CVS-2791, filed in the General Court of Justice, Superior Court Division, Guilford County, North Carolina]

For more details about this suit, see this post (under "Cosmic Connie and the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad lawsuit").

On the following day I temporarily removed the present post for a couple of reasons, though not before receiving a comment suggesting that the picture of the dismissal was fake (see comments). I assure you it is real. Okay, so I did embellish it with a picture frame and Lady Justice, but the document itself is real. I have since received a print copy of said document in the mail, unframed and un-embellished, directly from the lawyer's office. But you don't have to take my word for it, Florian (and any of you other doubters). If you want to verify its reality for yourself, feel free to contact the attorney in question, William F. May of the Greensboro, North Carolina law firm Culbertson & Associates (also known on some Google sites as May & Culbertson Attorneys at Law), whose contact information is on the Notice of Voluntary Dismissal document. Or contact Mr. Coldwell himself, if he hasn't blocked you.

Make no mistake, though: I am not gloating about this. I do not feel that I have "won," mainly because, due to my inability to afford a lawyer and my reluctance to go forth without one, I never really got into the fray. All I did was file a couple of motions on a timely basis, pro se. I first filed a motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction. Ignoring that motion, the Plaintiff's attorney apparently tried to plunge ahead into discovery -- evidently not giving a flip that discovery works both ways and that his client would have shriveled under real discovery. He even subpoenaed Google for my personal account information, and I was obliged to file a motion to stay discovery pending resolution of the motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction. (That second motion did manage to get Google's legal department off my back -- not that they were ever really on my back, because Google doesn't even necessarily respond to subpoenas, of which it receives thousands per year. Here is more information about that subject.)

However, my motions were never calendared (by me), and consequently were never heard or ruled on (by the Court), and the Plaintiff's voluntary dismissal makes them moot. The attorney, when I asked him for a reason for the voluntary dismissal of Leonard Coldwell's defamation suit against Schmidt et al., simply responded that a "non-waivable conflict of interest" had "developed" between the Plaintiff and the law firm, and that the firm of Culbertson & Associates will not be representing Mr. Coldwell with regard to any matter going forward. Make of that what you will. I did not and will not ask Mr. May for details.

But I am not complacent. While it may seem like good news, the truth is that I won nothing. And "without prejudice" means, of course, that Coldwell is perfectly free to turn around and file another sham lawsuit, which I will also be obligated to deal with. On the other hand, neither did Coldwell win anything, except some more legal bills and, possibly, more fodder for lies or distortions, should he foolishly choose to exploit this case the way he did his sham suit last year against Jason Jones (Salty Droid) and Omri Shabat (Glancingweb), whom the suit mistakenly named as being one and the same person. (In fact, Coldwell was exploiting the failed Droid/Glancingweb case even in the service of bragging about this 2015 North Carolina case, falsely stating on Facebook that Jason had been hiding from service for well over a year. Nothing could be further from the truth.)

Early in this case, Coldwell boasted about it several times on Facebook. Most of the boasts were soon taken down; I speculate though do not know for sure that this was at the advice of his lawyers. But the bragging lives on, in screen shots. Here are two that were up briefly -- posted on February 6, 2015 -- but were soon taken down:

The first picture, which contains a mug of poor beat-up Bernie O'Mahony of GINtruth.com, is particularly disingenuous, not only because of the way that Coldwell had previously misappropriated and publicly lied about that picture in order to falsely and publicly portray Bernie as a child rapist, but also because Bernie was never part of this North Carolina case at all, as he explained in a recent post. In fact despite numerous threats against Bernie, Coldwell has never sued him and more than likely never will, due to a little thing called jurisdiction. When he's not setting Europe on fire with spurious "'Dr.' C. book tours", Coldwell is in the U.S. for the most part (hiding out in one or both of the Carolinas) -- while Bernie lives in Japan, happily, as he has been doing since 1999, contrary to Coldwell's claims that Bernie is "hiding out" in the Land of the Rising Sun. I am pretty certain, however, that if Bernie were in the U.S. he would find a way to sue Coldwell for those outrageous false claims about child rape.

The second picture, the one with the tiger and the threatening "RUN BITCH" watermark, was posted to Coldwell's buddy Abe Husein's page under Coldwell's former alias "Rudi Kauder." Coldwell has written other ridiculous public posts under that name and once he even sent me a personal threat via Facebook using the same alias. "Rudi's" account has since been deleted.

In addition to the general boasts about the lawsuit, Coldwell spewed several profoundly absurd posts specifically about Jason on Facebook, e.g., the usual nonsense about Jason being "in hiding," and other even wilder and crazier false claims about him. I'll leave it to Jason to share those if he wishes to do so.

While the above two Facebook posts are gone, this one, from March 13, 2015, still exists as of May 31, 2015. You can see how Lenny's little group of sycophants is cheering him on (as always, click on pic to enlarge):

 

And lest you have any doubt that Coldwell was talking about Jason and me in the above, there's this, also from the same day and purportedly written by Coldwell's half-brother Jens Wilhelm Anskohl, whose fake name Coldwell never can seem to spell the same way consistently (Nicholas? Nicolas? Nicky? Nicki?). (Jens, or Nicholas, or Nicky, or Nicki, or whatever you want to call him, is a good-looking ladies' man (reportedly) who, I think, lives in Germany and Las Vegas. Do you really believe he spends his time writing posts on Lenny's Facebook page? Me neither.) Anyway, this post also disappeared soon after its appearance; either Abe wiped it away or Lenny did so himself.
 



On a video posted on April 1 (an appropriate day to be sure), Coldwell can be heard telling conspiracy-fringe radio host Jeff Rense about arrest warrants against un-named perps who were supposedly defaming Lenny, and he mentions having spent... well, I can't quite understand him, but it sounds like he's either saying he spent $6,000.00 or $106,000.00 on legal fees last year in order to finally make these arrests happen. It starts at about 36:00, but if you have some time to waste you really should listen to the whole hilarious thing.

Anyway, to be clear: The case that has just been dismissed was a civil case, not a criminal case. Coldwell never filed any criminal case against Salty and me and the other defendants -- not now and not in the past (even though he has been boasting for years that civil and criminal actions against Salty, me, and various other bloggers are in process). So either Coldwell was flat-out lying about that criminal litigation and those arrest warrants, or, perhaps inspired by false hope imparted to him by his "legal team," he was counting his chickens before they hatched, or even before he had a hen to lay the eggs. Granted, there were indications -- things going on in the background that I'm not going to write about yet -- that Coldwell and his lawyers were trying to trump up some sort of wacky criminal case, but that never happened. And Coldwell's lawyer Mr. May assured me that new pleadings his firm had been working on were also rendered moot by the voluntary dismissal of Case Number 15-CVS-2791.

Although I did not discuss arrest warrants with Mr. May, I can assure you that there never were any arrest warrants for any of the defendants in the case that Mr. May was involved in and that Coldwell had been boasting about on Facebook -- so, again, that clearly seems like a deliberate lie from Coldwell. But maybe you are in Lenny's inner circle and you know something I don't. Fine. If you can present me with evidence that there is or ever was a warrant out for my arrest, or for Jason Michael Jones, or for anyone involved with Rational Wiki (the other main defendant), I will be glad to publish it. For now, I think it is safe to assume that once again Leonard Coldwell was lying about arrest warrants being issued for "defaming" him. Now, that's a big surprise.

Look, I know that many of you are probably tired of reading about this. And indeed, I have so many other things to write about on this blog besides Leonard Coldwell. Heck, even Google -- the search algorithms, not their legal department -- wants to steer me away from Leonard Coldwell and towards a much more popular, much more successful, and much more frequently Googled Leonard C, Leonard Cohen. Google is always trying to complete my search term for me when I'm typing, whether I'm signed in or not, and Google apparently likes Cohen a lot better than Coldwell. Me too.

But I stand by every word I've written about Leonard Coldwell and will continue to do so until and unless I receive credible information that will lead me to modify or retract any of the content. On my numerous posts about Coldwell (as on all of my posts), I have provided abundant screen shots and/or links that you can easily follow yourself and make up your own mind about the subject.

What I am trying to say is that I don't want to bore you any more than necessary -- or any more than I already have -- with this particular subject.


But I suspect this story isn't really over, and as I said, I am not complacent. None of us should ever be complacent where potential SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) actions are concerned. Equally as important, we should never be complacent about the continual abuse of our legal system by public figures such as Leonard Coldwell who file frivolous lawsuits to bully and try to intimidate writers... just because they can. Jason Jones said it quite well in last year's memorandum in support of his motion to sanction Coldwell and his then-lawyer, Dennis J. Kellogg of Chicago:

The legal system should not be a weapon wielded by wrongdoers in the face of well-meaning whistle-blowers, stifling important discussion about matters of public concern, though too often, that is exactly how our system is used. There can be few better examples of suits interposed for improper purposes than the present frivolous and unreasonable Complaint brought by Plaintiff...

...Much judicial ink is spilled opining about the possible "chilling effect" that a given piece of legislation, or legal precedent, might have on the marketplace of ideas. But as the speech function of the fourth estate has become increasingly diffuse, with modern technologies removing most of the traditional barriers to publishing and public participation, the vanguard in the fight for the free exchange of ideas has moved from the newsroom to the living room. It is the constant threat of frivolous, and prohibitively expensive, litigation that is of principal concern for the individual citizen journalist without access to media lawyer representation.

If you haven't read Jason's entire motion, I urge you to do so. It's worthwhile not only for the arguments, backed by case law, but also for the exhibits, which clearly display Coldwell's primary objective of using litigation as a bullying tool. (Coldwell even refers to me in some of those exhibits, e.g., as Jason's "playmate" or simply "the slut.") Despite Coldwell's crowing about the case, Leonard Coldwell's attorney Dennis J. Kellogg filed a motion to withdraw from the case ("for professional reasons") less than three weeks after it was filed, and that motion was granted on March 17, 2014. Coldwell spun that on social media as his having learned that the case was actually a Federal criminal case and therefore he was hiring new lawyers to prosecute it. He also lied that Jason was scared and hiding from him because of the lawsuits, making it impossible to properly serve Jason. And as indicated above, Coldwell continued his lie about Jason being a fugitive from justice when he (Coldwell) was spinning tales about the now-dismissed North Carolina case 15-CVS-2791. His attorney for the North Carolina case apparently even bought that lie for a while, or pretended he did, as Jason wrote about on his February 19, 2015 blog post.

To my knowledge Jason did not follow up on his 2014 motion to sanction Leonard Coldwell and attorney Dennis J. Kellogg, even though legally he could have. This is probably because Judge Lynn M. Egan's dismissal of the case "for want of prosecution" rendered it moot. "For want of prosecution" basically means that nobody -- neither Coldwell the Plaintiff, nor an attorney appearing on his behalf -- even bothered to show up for the hearing that had been scheduled by the Court. And Jason, having been a resident of Ohio for more than a year by that time, didn't want to have to keep going back to Chicago to attend hearings, which he would have had to do had he pursued the sanctions motion. He has a life, after all. But he did file the motion to sanction Leonard Coldwell and Dennis J. Kellogg in the Court, and it is on public record, so Coldwell's recent claim that Jason was lying about the sanction motion is inaccurate.

At any rate, I just thought I should let you know, in case you were wondering, that yet another lawsuit that Lenny was bragging about has ended -- as another Lenny might put it -- on a deeply unimpressive note. 

PS ~ You can view the original Complaint and the Notice of Voluntary Dismissal here.

Even snarks celebrate Thanksgiving

Good gosh, is it time for another Thanksgiving post already?* Seems like I just wrote one of those things a year or so ago.


Although I snipe and snark a lot on this blog, there is, believe it or not, at least one point on which I am pretty much in agreement with the conspicuously enlightened, the aggressively motivated, and the tyrannically positive. And that point has to do with the power of gratitude. As you may very well be aware, there is even research that indicates being grateful may be good for you in more ways than you might think. I know, I know, it's an appealing concept, and it sells books. Even worse, the gratitude industry is a whole new area to be exploited by New-Wage hustlers. But, as Canadian songwriter/singer/poet/novelist Leonard Cohen wrote, "That don't make it junk" (yes, I know, he wrote that in a totally different context than what I'm talking about, but I thought this blog was a bit overdue for a quotation from LC).

I'm not going to bore y'all with my own gratitude list; I'll just say that once again Ron is at the top of that list. I'm also grateful for my family and friends – in short, all of the people in my life, including the four-legged ones.

Other than that, I'm not going to go on and on about gratitude, except to say that I am grateful for other bloggers who, over the past week or so, have provided some entertaining and informative links. I now gladly pass those links on to you. You may have already seen these, but if not, click away.

The first one comes from Amy, commenting on Lana Helmuth-Walker's blog. This is a link to a video that skewers The Secret. It's one of the funnier videos I've seen.

The second link, provided by Steve Salerno on his SHAMblog, is a bit more serious. It's a McGill University student's look at The Secret and self-help culture. (By the way, Leonard Cohen attended McGill University. Just thought some of y'all might want to know.)

And finally there is this link, which was on Blair Warren's blog yesterday. It's a link to a blog post about happiness, which seems relevant somehow to my own post today.

Enough blogging already. I'm off to spend some time with my family, and then Ron and I are heading out to his daughter's place, where there will be plenty of great food and great friends – including, of course, some four-legged pals. I hope all of y'all who celebrate the holiday have a good one!

PS ~ And I will deliver on my promise to inflict "Beast meets West, Part 2" on y'all. Just not today.
PPS ~ And...here's a bonus link I'd meant to add earlier but forgot to: fashion and makeup tips for women, from a very funny (if somewhat crude) guy's point of view. It has nothing to do with Thanksgiving, but...hey, I thought it was funny. (Warning: it is a bit R-rated...but then again, this blog is supposedly NC-17.) So enough warning. Here it is. (I have to say, though, that I do not agree with the writer's assessment of bitchiness. I think being a bitch is a GOOD thing.)

*I realize that it's not Thanksgiving for all of y'all who are reading this, but it is for me, and, after all, this is my Whirled.

Mike Adams and the fact-free press step up to defend "legitimacy" of Drumpf reign

The bad news: Donald Trump is still the not-my-president-elect, and Leonard Cohen is still dead. The good news: For the time being, the other Leonard C who has occupied space on this blog -- the truly stupid and evil LC, Not-Doktor Leonard Coldwell -- seems to be suspended from Facebook once again, as recently celebrated on UK wag Longdog's hilarious blog. This time it appears that the suspension isn't limited to his main English Language Facebook page, "Leonard Coldwell," but also to his main German language page, "Dr. Leonard Coldwell," his totally fake-profile page "Eyn Rand," and the English-language page for his failed GIN ripoff, the IMBS-ing U Master Baiter'sSociety. So that is a small bright spot.

But this blog negotiates a landscape that is more often marred by bad news than brightened by good. And there's more bad news to report (granted, it's also amusing news, but bad news nevertheless): the fact-free press, led by cynical conspiracy monger, frauduct peddler and Trumpian rabble-rouser Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, has stepped up to "defend the legitimacy" of the Trump presidency, calling upon the conspiracy-theorist-in-chief to use his presidential power to "blockade" the "lying mainstream media."

You'll notice that the last link in the paragraph above leads to the aforementioned Not-Doktor Stoopid's "blog," which rarely contains original content but is mostly a curation of misinformation from other sites. In this case, LoonyC curated a post from Mike Adams' Natural "News" site. Both the re-post and the original post on Adams' site were published on December 2.

In an "open letter" to His Unholy Orangeness, Adams urges Trump to refuse to let the mainstream press corps into his (ultra)White House at all. After all, declares Adams (repeating by rote what every faithful Trumpian knows), the mainstream media are Drumpf's enemy and "they will do anything and everything to destroy you." Says he:

It's time to deprive those lying, deceptive media outlets of all the oxygen in the room. Blockade them from all White House announcements and presidential events. Bring in the real media... the independent publishers, radio hosts and bloggers who are truly the only remaining free press in America.

We all have teams of writers, video editors, bloggers and researchers ready to report the real news about the successes of your new administration. We will defend your legitimacy as President and help defend the Republic against the assaults of the Fidel Castro-worshipping lunatic fringe left.

My own network of online sites includes Trump.news, WhiteHouse.news and hundreds of others. Combined with Infowars.com, PrisonPlanet.com, DrudgeReport.com and others, we already dwarf most of the mainstream media outlets in terms of reach. We absolutely dwarf all mainstream media in terms of the public trust factor.

He forgot to mention "in terms of the utter-disrespect-for-inconvenient-facts factor." They've got it all over the "lying" mainstream media on that one.

Adams also uses his post as an opportunity to boast to Trump about his own search engine, GoodGopher, which, he writes without any apparent irony, "excludes all the mainstream media liars and news fabrication propagandists working for CNN, WashPost, NYT, MSNBC and so on. We already have an authoritative list of who's who in the independent media. Compiling a contact list would only take a day or two."

"What good is a totally censored search engine?" you may be asking. All the good in the world, it seems, if you feel a need to lower a cone of ignorance over yourself every time you do an Internet search. It's sort of like the cone of silence in the old Get Smart TV series, except instead of preventing the escape of secret information, it prevents the infiltration of facts. Or maybe it's more like parental block, except instead of protecting kids from online exploitation it protects willfully stupid adults from learning real facts.

Facts may be stubborn things, but they're not nearly as stubborn as those who like to make up their own "facts."

Adams, like everyone else in the conspiracy biz (not to mention the basket of gullibles who embrace and spread phony conspiracies on social media), seems to have a very casual relationship with the truth, and that is putting it charitably. To advance his own agendas he isn't above perpetuating distortions and libelous falsehoods (e.g., his recent smear campaign against Dr. David Gorski, aka "Orac," as I wrote about in April of this year). Nor is he above casually posting complete misinformation that doesn't libel anyone but is simply, ludicrously inaccurate.

If Adams were just another blog-fodder blowhard there wouldn't be much cause for concern. But there are larger and more serious issues that stretch far beyond cranky little blogs like this.
For Adams is both riding the crest of an enormous wave of disinformation and making that wave bigger. He's part of the "alternative" press/"independent" media that are the vanguard of the
"post-truth" era. These are the media that are tailor-made for Trump, and he for them. It's a match made in infotainment (with the emphasis on "tainment") heaven. 

Granted, the mainstream media have made serious missteps themselves, and we shouldn't let them off the hook. And I'm not just talking about the insane amount of non-critical attention and free promotion the media have consistently handed to Trump on a silver platter, or the way they embraced the "Crooked Hillary" narrative and made a huge deal about the non-issue of her emails. I'm also talking about the way major news outlets such as Washington Post may have lent undeserved legitimacy to a questionable group, PropOrNot, in their own reporting about "fake news." The conspiracy lunatics and the alt-right and the Trumpians are all over that one, but Rolling Stone and Fortune also weighed in critically. Even so, it would be folly to discount the possible roles played by Russian operatives in influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and certainly foolish to dismiss the influence of fake-news sites and the under-informed voters who take these sites seriously. 
 
Apart from the dumbing-down issues there are more serious matters of public safety at stake. On Sunday, December 4, 2016, Edgar M. Welch, a 28-year-old white gunman from North Carolina, apparently fueled by the ludicrous and debunked "Pizzagate" conspiracy narrative, walked into Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in northwest Washington D.C., and fired from an AR-15 rifle. He had driven six hours from his home to "investigate" rumors that the pizzeria was harboring young children as sex slaves, as part of a child-abuse ring led by Hillary Clinton. Yes, there are idiots who truly believe that; Ron and I just got scolded by a couple of them on Facebook within the past few days. If you ask me there are far too many people who seem to be unhealthily obsessed with pedophilia, and it's not the Clintons and their cronies.

Fortunately Welch was arrested before anyone was hurt, but what about the next angry nutcake who walks in? Comet Ping Pong has reported that they have received lots of disturbing threats in the wake of Pizzagate, and even some of the neighboring businesses have received threats as well.

Pizzagate is far from the only blatantly false conspiracy tale making the rounds, and what is disturbing is that Donald Trump himself seems to be a big believer in conspiracy theories and conspiracy web sites, and is stocking his administration with others who have a fondness for fake news sites and conspiracy stories. And if that doesn't worry you, just a little bit... then what are you doing on this blog?

Once again without irony, Mike Adams concludes his December 2 post thusly:

 It’s time to #TakeDownCNN once and for all. The network doesn’t deserve to operate in any free society (but they might feel right at home in North Korea). And it’s time to support the rise of the new, independent media in America.

Uh-huh. Freedom of the press is an inalienable right in America, but only freedom of certain types of press: the fact-free, totally self-serving-to-cynical-scammers-and-hatriarchs variety.

But if you care about actual freedom of the press, and about responsible journalism, there's plenty you can do. Start with becoming a fact-checker yourself. Read with a critical eye, especially if the content seems to fit too neatly into someone's preferred narrative (even or especially your own). And hold the mainstream media's feet to the fire, but don't dismiss them just because they're mainstream. This isn't to say that you should automatically dismiss a source just because it's "alternative" or "independent," but keep your eyes open and your b.s. detector active, always.

Otherwise, Trump and his cynical champions and surrogates may lead all of us around a corner from which there will be no turning back.

PS added on 19 December 2016: Here is some background information about the traditions of irrationality and hysteria that ultimately gave rise to Pizzagate. Waves of hysteria have been part of American history, not just for decades but for centuries. The problem is that today, the popularity of social media makes it easier than ever to spread the hysteria, and fake news sites make the irrationality much more difficult to battle. 

 

Even darker: it's deja screw all over again, but even worse than last time

 Congratulations, Trump voters. I'm very much afraid that this is what awaits most of you, and unfortunately most of the rest of us too:

(If the embedded video doesn't play, here's a direct link. )

And yes, I know I cited this very video in my Election Day post on November 5. But it bears citing again, just because.

* * * * *

One of my Whirled posts in the early daze following the disastrous 2016 US presidential election was titled, "You want it darker." That was a reference to the title, and title song, of a then-new collection by Canadian songwriter/singer/poet/novelist/artist Leonard Cohen, who had passed away just one day before the aforementioned disastrous election. Having been a lifelong Cohen fan, I was as devastated by the revelation of his death as I was by the news that Mango Mussolini had won, and I wrote at length about both events a few days after the "Darker" post.

Well, Leonard, things have just become even darker. Trump won. As CNN summed it up:

The former president will return to the White House in a moment of historic consequence for American democracy. He’ll head back to to the nation’s highest office four years after losing the 2020 election, attempting to overturn the results, facing two presidential impeachments, a criminal conviction and many other criminal charges.

Yes, and now we get to see just how far into fascism this country will really descend. It doesn't look pretty. We were screwed in 2016, but it looks as if we're even screwed-er now.

But we're not storming the Capitol, and Vice President Kamala Harris has delivered her gracious concession speech. It's a speech that's far more hopeful than I feel right now, but maybe I'll catch up to her optimism at some point.

It's not that none of us saw this coming. After 2016, and then eight long years of hearing Trump's increasingly unhinged rhetoric that still didn't seem to alienate his cult followers but only made them love him more, we always knew that another Trump victory was a distinct possibility. Yet it was still a shock.

Journalist Jonathan M. Katz wrote in a "morning after" piece for The Racket:

The thing I knew most of all, the thing that is the most embarrassing to confront in the cold light of this unnervingly hot November day, was the lesson that decades of imperialist violence and dehumanization abroad comes home, sure as the sun, in the form of fascism. I wrote a whole book about it, a book that is still very much in print. For years I was bellowing at anyone who would listen: No, we are not immune. Yes, it can happen here. There were many off-ramps we could have taken. I wanted to believe, even still, at this late date, that somehow a loud enough series of warnings — from the former president’s former staffers, from the former president on the campaign trail himself — would spur enough people in enough states into action. What I did not know, and what I should have known, is that these warnings wouldn’t be enough. We will know soon enough if the critical margin who meandered into his camp, and those who did not go to the polls, understood what they voted for and will like it once they see it in action. But for now, it was not a dealbreaker, and that was enough.

You can lead voters to the truth, but you can't make them think. Especially if they're devoted cult members, so blinded by the orange that they can't see the multiple shimmering colors of that truth.

I know that it wasn't just the hardcore cultists who pushed Cantaloupe Caligula past the finish line. Other voters were sucked in by his erratic messaging and relentless fearmongering, many if not most of them no doubt driven by the same cognitive biases that I discussed on my previous post (here's that link again): negativity bias ("awfulizing" the current administration, the state of the economy, etc.); and euphoric recall (forgetting how genuinely awful the first Trump administration was).

Some have suggested that a combination of irregularities in tallying the votes, various forms of voter suppression, and foreign interference were the real causes of Harris' defeat. If there's even a remote possibility that any of these things occurred, or there's any doubt about the results, I would expect legal challenges and recounts.

For now, I'm going to take Trump's "victory" at face value, even though it casts a horrendous light on the faces of millions of American voters. Is this really "who we are" as a country? Jordan Zakarin, writing for Progress Report, says we might as well own up to it.

Americans knew Donald Trump, were fully aware of his mendacious personality and mental instability, the hateful crew of ideological madmen who accompany him, and had a clear idea of what he'd do in office. And they chose to make him president again, anyway.

It’s a painful thing to admit, but this is just who we are as a country, at least right now. A majority of voters experienced all four excruciating years of Trump’s presidency — the scandal and corruption, mass pandemic deaths, the elevation of three vicious Supreme Court justices, and an actual attempt to overthrow the government — and either enjoyed the depravity or did not see it as a dealbreaker when they chose a new president.

But in a thoughtful piece on Meidas News, Ron Filipkowski suggested that it wasn't just the Trump voters who are to blame, and he offered a list of the major mistakes and missteps by Biden, Harris, and the Democrats that helped lead to the unfortunate election results. Several of these blunders were in essence messaging failures; numerous opportunities were missed to adequately counter the attacks and outrageous lies by Trump and the republicans. It's a list well worth perusing.

Like Harris, however, Filipkowski refuses to give up hope, viewing the devastating loss as an opportunity to revive the Democratic Party. After all, as the sub-head in the article says, we do have the talent to win, and win big.

The Trump presidency will likely be a complete disaster for the country if he is able to implement even 10% of what he has proposed. The people he plans on bringing in to the government are arguably even worse tha[n] he is in many respects. I believe this second Trump Admin will seek to radically transform our institutions, alliances overseas, budget and tax code, economy, environmental regulations, health care, the food supply, separation of church and state, along with all the usual drama that surrounds Trump and his minions.

While all of that is bad for the country, so much so that many of us have dedicated our lives over the last 5 years trying to prevent it, it will also provide an opening for Democrats to reposition themselves to take back the presidency, House and Senate in 2028.

But we can only do that if we stick together, remain united while hashing out differences in good faith, and broaden our coalition. Americans will be hungry for a change after four more years of MAGA and Trump toxicity, and we have to be a party that appeals to them for reasons other than the fact that we aren't them.

It won't be easy, but it's doable, provided of course that dissenters don't all get thrown in jail by the Mango Mussolini regime before they can accomplish anything.

Jonathan Katz, whose "morning after" post I quoted above, concluded his post with this:

The main thing I’m keeping in mind is that this is the same country it was yesterday. We are just now seeing it in a new light. Tens of millions invited this future in, yes, but ten of millions more tried to choose a different path. We may be more constrained in making them now. But there will still be many more choices to come.

Let us hope. I'm grieving now, but as I said eight years ago, I am definitely not giving up. And as I also said eight years ago, I don't want you to give up either.

Before you leave...
All politics aside, this has been, for several reasons, a nightmare of a year for me personally. Money, alas, cannot make the nightmare go away, but it can make it far easier to bear. Now more than ever, donations are urgently needed and profoundly appreciated. Here are some ways to do it:

• New: Venmo -- username @Connie-Schmidt-42. Here is a direct link to the Venmo page.
• New: PayPal -- Here is a direct link to my PayPal page.
• Old but still good: You can click on the "Donate" icon that currently appears on the right-hand side of every page of this blog on the Web version. There's also a donation link at the end of many of my older blog posts. In the case of both the icon and the links on the older posts, as well as the link in this sentence, this is also a PayPal link, but it references the email account of my husband, RevRon -- which is cool, because it all ultimately goes to the same place.

NOTE: If you are donating by PayPal, please specify that your contribution is a gift, which it is (as opposed to a conventional purchase, for which PayPal deducts a percentage for their fee).

Whether you can donate or not, thank you for visiting this Whirled.