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Nineteen-year-old Florida resident Alexander Jerich was looking for a way to commemorate the birthday of his hero, Donald Trump. Simply driving around West Palm Beach in his white Chevy pickup truck, with its giant Trump flag flying proudly from its bed, just didn’t seem to make enough of a statement.

Even so, on June 14, 2021, he joined a parade of 30 or so like-minded individuals to pay homage to Trump’s birth date by loudly demonstrating their fealty in a noisy parade of motor vehicles, all organized by the Palm Beach County Republican Party. The idea (apparently) was to rub Trump in the faces of the liberal townfolks: to provoke an outraged response, just like Trump used to do.

As he passed through the intersection of Northeast First Street and Northeast Second Avenue, all newly painted with the bright colors of LGBTQ pride (a memorial to the victims of the 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando, when a gunman opened fire in a gay nightclub, killing 49 people and wounding 53), Jerich was struck with a moment of inspiration: Why not deface the mural with his truck tires? What better way to show his allegiance to Donald Trump than by “sticking it to the Libs” with such a cruel, “in-your-face” gesture?

The painstakingly crafted rainbow mural adorning the intersection, paid for by the Palm Beach County Human Rights Council and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, had only been there for two days. So this seemed the perfect time to vandalize it, being Pride Month and all. No better way to honor Donald Trump’s birthday and legacy than to publicly mutilate some piece of art celebrating the gay community. Well, no one was in Mr. Jerich’s head at the time, so we’re left to guess at what his motives truly were.

But someone did happen to have a smartphone to record Jerich’s act of senseless vandalism for posterity. That video is below:

As set forth in the police affidavit, summarized by Jaclyn Peiser for The Washington Post:

As he drove over the mural, Jerich “intentionally accelerated the vehicle in an unreasonable unsafe manner in a short amount of time, commonly referred to as a ‘burn out,’ ” the affidavit said. “The Chevy truck continues to recklessly skid sideways.”

The skidmarks extended for about 15 feet, causing damage to the mural that would require over $2,000 to repair. (A witness told police he heard another member of the “parade” egging Jerich on to “tear up that gay intersection,” suggesting that Jerich’s act of vandalism was more spur-of-the-moment than premeditated.)

Either way, what Jerich didn’t count on was the fact that his license plate tags were clearly visible to anyone watching at the time. According to the Palm Beach Post, after the video was provided to police Jerich (now 20) was contacted, turned himself in, and was promptly arrested. He posted bond and last week ended up in front of Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Scott Suskauer.

As Jane Musgrave, reporting for the Palm Beach Post, explains, Jerich has agreed to pay restitution for the damage he’d caused. He also pled guilty to criminal mischief and reckless driving charges, and appeared quite remorseful about his actions, crying during his initial hearing and claiming he’d always had trouble making friends and that his behavior in this Trump rally was an effort to “fit in.”

Last Thursday Judge Suskauer put off Jerich’s sentencing hearing until June 8, but in the interim he ordered Jerich to write a 25-page essay about the Pulse Nightclub shooting, with special emphasis on each of the 49 victims murdered in that mass shooting. As Musgrave reports:

In addition to researching the backgrounds of the 49 people who died and the loved ones they left behind, Suskauer told Jerich to offer his own views about why such tragedies occur.

“I want your own brief summary of why people are so hateful and why people lash out against the gay community,” he said.

Peiser’s report for the Post notes that hate crime charges were not brought against Jerich because “Florida’s [hate crime] statute states there must be a specific victim targeted.” Prosecutors have requested the judge sentence Jerich to 30 days in jail, with five years probation, which the judge agreed to consider. But Palm Beach’s residents—particularly the gay community, understandably livid at what seems undoubtedly a hate-inspired crime—are urging a longer prison sentence.

The judge has indicated, however, that he doesn’t want to assign a felony conviction due in part to Jerich’s age. He has said he wants Jerich to do volunteer work for some community LGBTQ-supportive organizations, although Rand Hoch, the president of the Human Rights Council, reportedly told the judge that “none of the groups he deals with are interested in having Jerich as a volunteer.” 

Further, even though Hoch asked that Jerich be banned for life from the intersection he defaced, Suskauer said it might be good for the young man to be reminded of the damage he caused. He said he may order Jerich to visit the site weekly, accompanied by his father, to keep it clean.

Outside the courtroom, Hoch said he was pleased that Suskauer was taking the case seriously.

As Peiser’s article notes, beyond his excuse of wanting to “fit in” and be “accepted,” Jerich has provided no specific reason for his actions. Interestingly, neither Peiser’s Washington Post article nor Musgrave’s piece for the Palm Beach Post spend any effort connecting the context of Jerich’s behavior to the fact that he was demonstrating his loyalty to Donald Trump at the time. Perhaps they believe that readers will draw their own conclusions.

In the meantime, Jerich’s essay is due in court on June 8.

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President Joe Biden did not disappoint at the White House correspondents’ dinner on Saturday, which was the first time since 2019 officials have been able to host the event after cancellations resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Biden transitioned from poking fun at former President Donald Trump, calling him “a horrible plague, followed by two years of COVID” to jabs at Fox News and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “I’m not here to roast the GOP,” Biden said. “That’s not my style. Besides, there’s nothing I can say about the GOP that Kevin McCarthy hasn’t already put on tape.” (That was a personal favorite.)

But the true star of the evening was hardly the president. No, that honor belongs to comedian Trevor Noah, who was still trending much of the morning on Sunday. He joked while underscoring real issues the Biden administration should be prioritizing from student loan forgiveness to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ brand of discrimination.

RELATED STORY: Biden Pummels Trump And Fox News With Jokes At White House Correspondents Dinner

Noah started with an acknowledgement that none of the more than 2,500 journalists, commentators, and political officials in attendance really should have been there. Vice President Kamala Harris announced on Tuesday she had tested positive for COVID-19.

“You guys spent the last two years telling everyone about the importance of wearing masks and avoiding large, indoor gatherings,” Noah joked. “Then the second someone offers you a free dinner, you all turn into Joe Rogan, huh?”

Rogan is a podcast host who infamously spread misinformation about the pandemic, and with the mention of his name, “The Daily Show” host was off.

Spoilers of only some of his punchlines that night:

• “I know a lot of you are worried and, yes, it is risky making jokes these days. We all saw what happened at the Oscars. I’ve actually been a bit worried about tonight, I won’t lie. What if I make a really mean joke about Kellyanne Conway and her husband rushes up on the stage and thanks me?”
• “What I like about Ron DeSantis is if Trump was the original Terminator, DeSantis is like the T-1000. You’re smarter than him. You’re slicker than him. You can walk down ramps. Trump said he won the election, but everyone was able to look at the numbers and see that he was wrong. That’s why Ron DeSantis is one step ahead. First you ban the math textbooks, then nobody knows how to count the votes.”
• “Interesting fact: Even as first lady, Dr. Biden continued her teaching career, the first time a presidential spouse has ever done so. Congratulations. You might think it’s because she loves teaching so much, but it’s actually because she’s still paying off her student debt. I’m sorry about that, Jill. Guess you should’ve voted for Bernie.”
• “Think of all the journalists whose careers have been hurt by the Biden presidency. People like Daniel Dale. He used to be CNN’s fact-checker on TV every day but now there’s barely anything to check. Same for Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post. On the way here, I saw him offering four Pinocchios for a dollar. Mr. President, that’s on you. What about Maggie Haberman? For four years, it was exclusives. … Now look at her. She spends all day fighting with random people on Twitter like a common political reporter.”
• “Fox News is sort of like a Waffle House. It’s relatively normal in the afternoon, but as soon as the sun goes down, there’s a drunk lady named Jeanine threatening to fight every Mexican who comes in.”

Watch every bit of Trevor Noah’s remarks. It will be time well spent. 

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This article was originally published at Prism

Farmworkers in Florida are turning up the pressure on Wendy’s. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a worker-based human rights organization, has been calling for a national boycott of the fast food chain since 2016 for their refusal to join the Fair Food Program (FFP), a partnership among farmers, farmworkers, and retail food companies that ensures humane wages and working conditions for farmworkers growing the produce used in retail establishments. Fourteen national buyers, including fast food giants like McDonald’s, Burger King, and Taco Bell, have all joined the FFP since the program started in 2011. But despite years of protests, Wendy’s continues to evade national pressure. Now, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is partnering with Majority Action to press Wendy’s shareholders to vote against the board and ensure the protection of workers in its food supply chain.

“Not signing with the FFP puts the corporation at risk, [because] there may be complaints of forced labor, sexual harassment, or sexual assault,” said Lupe Gonzalo, a senior staff member with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. “We want investors to know that joining the FFP is an advantage they can have as a corporation.”

This month, over 800 farmworkers and consumers took to the streets in Palm Beach near the home of Nelson Peltz, the majority shareholder and board chairman for Wendy’s. In anticipation of Wendy’s shareholder meeting on May 18, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is hosting a rally and street theater protest May 12 in front of the headquarters for Trian Partners, Wendy’s largest institutional shareholder, in New York City.

Peltz has the power to sign Wendy’s up for FFP but has been making excuses for not joining since 2013. At the time, Peltz claimed all the Florida tomatoes purchased by Wendy’s came from suppliers who already participated in the FFP. But according to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the claim “rings hollow” and is unverifiable and meaningless because in the event that one of the suppliers is suspended from the program for violating worker safety conditions, Wendy’s would be under no obligation to shift its purchases to another supplier, as it would under the FFP rules.

Shareholder rights and worker safety

In 2015, Wendy’s moved its tomato purchases from Florida to Mexico. The following year, Harper’s Magazine reported that Wendy’s purchased tomatoes from a Mexican tomato grower with documented modern-day slavery conditions, where workers were forced to work without pay; trapped in scorpion-infested camps, often without beds; fed scraps; and beaten when they tried to quit. That next year, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers began its boycott of the fast food chain. In 2018, Wendy’s announced they were moving their tomato purchases to greenhouses in the U.S. and Canada. But moving to greenhouses is not enough for Gonzalo, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and shareholders—they want long-term accountability.

“That’s not what workers’ rights protect,” Gonzalo said. “There could still be wage theft, there could still be sexual harassment, and other human rights problems. It’s not just having shade, it’s about protecting the human rights of workers in general.”

In 2021, the Franciscan Sisters of Allegany, New York, filed and passed a shareholder resolution in conjunction with Investor Advocates for Social Justice seeking a report on Wendy’s protections for workers. That same year, the Department of Labor fined a U.S. tomato greenhouse owned by Wendy’s supplier Mastronardi for wage theft and discrimination, which was subject to a U.S. Customs Border and Patrol ban due to forced labor concerns.

“Since that time, even though there was a majority vote on the shareholder proposal, the company has failed to adequately respond to or implement what the proposal directly calls upon them to do,” said Eli Kasargod-Staub, the executive director and co-founder of Majority Action. “This is an issue, not only of farmworkers’ safety, but also of shareholder rights.”

Majority Action and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers are encouraging investors to vote against directors on the board of Wendy’s to hold them accountable for their failure to respond adequately to the majority vote shareholder proposal.

“The entire dynamic rests on the decision-making calculus of Nelson Peltz and client partners because, though they only have a minority stake in the company, they have outsized influence over the way this board works,” Kasargod-Staub said. “We’re not witnessing fully rational corporate decision-making here. We believe that Wendy’s requires a shift in thinking by the Trian leadership in order to actually get where we need to go.”

The benefits of the Fair Food Program

The stakes of holding Wendy’s accountable are high for farmworkers. For 12 years, Gonzalo’s average day as a farmworker in Immokalee, Florida, began before the crack of dawn. She would wake up at 4:30 AM, have breakfast, walk to the parking lot, and wait for buses to transport her to the fields where she would spend her day harvesting the nation’s produce for meager pay. At the farm, she and other farmworkers would receive 50 cents for every 32-pound bucket they harvested. By the end of the 12-hour day, she would have harvested anywhere between 100-150 buckets, totaling $250-375 a week and less than $15,000 a year.

Gonzalo said everything changed once the FFP began implementation at the farm she was working for.

“They just see us as tomato-producing machines,” Gonzalo said. “They didn’t care so much if we had water or if we were feeling hot or if women were facing sexual harassment situations. To hear about this program and to hear that for the first time women could report harassment and that the consequences were not going to be for us, that was very powerful for me. It felt like a new day.”

Gonzalo began attending Coalition of Immokalee Workers meetings and in 2013 joined the team as a worker educator, teaching farmworkers about their rights.

“We ourselves are going to do the education sessions because we have the confidence to talk to the workers, because we come from that same experience,” Gonzalo said. “That is what has given the program great success, because we know what the conditions are and we know that it can be changed, if the workers report and are encouraged.”

The demands for Wendy’s include paying 1 cent more for each pound of tomatoes, given directly to the workers as a bonus at the end of the week, and commit to sign a code of conduct that was created by the workers themselves, which includes basic rights such as having shade, breaks, clean water to drink, and a process for workers to report sexual harassment and modern slavery conditions.

“The worker’s voice should be heard,” Gonzalo said. “The program only works if they are listening to the voice of the worker because the workers are the experts. They are the ones who know what problems are happening on the ranch, they are the ones who know if the program is working for them, so that is why it is important to always be listening to them.”

According to FFP, since 2011, they have received and resolved 3,110 hotline complaints of worker conditions and addressed 9,357 audit findings. If a rancher is found to be noncompliant with the code of conduct, such as sexually harassing farmworkers, then the FFP speaks with the contractor and instructs them to fire the rancher. If the contractor refuses to fire the rancher, FFP harnesses the power of the market and informs the corporations not to buy from that supplier because they are noncompliant with the code of conduct.

“It is a very effective way to protect workers’ rights,” Gonzalo said. “It’s a big deal to have someone that powerful walk out of a company over a report. It sends a message to all the contractors and supervisors who for years had controlled the power that they can’t do that anymore.”

Gonzalo hopes that Wendy’s will sit down with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and join the FFP, and that consumers think critically about where their food comes from and the conditions the workers may be living in.

“Vegetables do not arrive alone in our refrigerator,” Gonzalo said. “There are hands that harvest it and process it until it reaches our table. Corporations only show the pretty side, but not the side where there is suffering.”

Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. We’re committed to producing the kind of journalism that treats Black, Indigenous, and people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and other invisibilized groups as the experts on our own lived experiences, our resilience, and our fights for justice. Sign up for our email list to get our stories in your inbox, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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In a move we’re only hearing about after the fact for obvious security reasons, it has now been publicly revealed that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi traveled to Kyiv, Ukraine, to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday. Pelosi led a small congressional delegation that included House Intelligence chair Adam Schiff and House Foreign Affairs chair Gregory Meeks.

Zelensky posted footage of the trip early Sunday:

The Pelosi trip is another bold statement of commitment to Ukraine’s cause, and follows the approval of a lend-lease program to Ukraine. That authority allows the federal government to ship as much artillery ammunition, drones, heavy weapons, and whatever else Ukraine is deemed to need without having to ask Congress for further approval, and that equipment is now flooding into Ukraine not just from the United States, but from NATO allies.

Any Russian thoughts of achieving something that can be held up as a modest victory on May 9 are well and truly gone; not only are Russian forces continuing to be depleted in exchange for little to no on-the-ground progress, each passing day brings more NATO-provided weaponry to the Ukrainian frontlines. Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s next major decision is whether to begin a general mobilization, ordering Russia’s vast numbers of inexperienced, poorly-trained reservists over the border.

Such a move would be all but necessary if Russia still hopes for a face-saving partial victory, as the Ukrainian government and public are in no mood to entertain thoughts of ceding towns to Russia after Russian war crimes were discovered in the Ukrainian towns Russia has been forced to retreat from. It will also, however, compound Russian logistical problems that have already proved intractable. There’s little reliable information at this point as to what equipment even exists for the reservists to use, and Russian military troops manning popup security checkpoints in Ukraine have already been videotaped carrying bolt-action rifles and other antique equipment.

NATO nations are now sounding exceedingly confident in Ukraine’s ability to at least fight to a stalemate in coming months, though driving Russian forces back across the borders is still a tall order unless enough casualties can be inflicted to convince Putin and his military to declare victory and leave. Pelosi’s trip is just the latest in a series of trips by top U.S. and European officials showing hand-in-hand partnership with Ukraine’s government and military. It’s a far cry from where we started, with NATO nations quietly bickering among themselves about how much aid to give Ukraine, and how much would unnecessarily “provoke” the invading Putin.

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Reuters has an excellent report on pro-Trump Republicans who have attacked U.S. election systems, stealing voting data or attempting to do so under the supposed justification of searching for “election fraud.” Reuters counts eight known recent attempts, the most infamous being the case of Colorado election clerk Tina Peters, who now faces multiple felony charges after allowing voting data to be breached and stolen. But Peters isn’t the only pro-Trump official accused of attempted or successful thefts of voting data or unauthorized access to sensitive, must-be-secured-at-all-times election machines.

There is a trend of Republican officials and allies looking to breach election systems so that they can comb through voter data looking for “fraud” that they claim to be omnipresent simply because they refuse to believe Americans did not vote overwhelmingly to reelect the incompetent loudmouth Donald Trump. Cases include Adams Township in Michigan, where a QAnon-promoting clerk was found in possession of sensitive election tabulation hardware four days after it went missing; another Michigan episode in which a Republican activist impersonated a government official in an attempt to steal equipment; a Colorado election clerk caught on video making “forensic” copies of “everything on the election server”—the two hard drives the information was copied to have not been recovered. Pillow kingpin Mike Lindell features heavily as a financier of election conspiracy theories that have now morphed into pro-Trump crimes and attempted crimes.

It’s worth reading in full, if only as emphasis on how widespread the attacks on the validity of our elections have become and will become, but there are some key takeaways worth highlighting:

1. It is all based on conspiracy theories. Not sophisticated conspiracy theories, but QAnon or similar-styled ranting at clouds, bizarre claims with no evidence other than being passed around on the internet from crackpot to crackpot. The “evidence” the pro-Trump officials are looking for is not something that they can even describe; the goals are to obtain voting records or the secured software being used on election equipment so that it can be looked through and distributed to others, upon which the presumption is that “something” corrupt will be found. Like what? You know, something. And what are these suspicions based on? What tidbits of information are out there to suggest that stealing this information will result in exposing a conspiracy?

Not a damn thing. Literally nothing. The best the evidence ever gets is the sort of “looking for bamboo fibers in our ballots”-styled nonsense of the Arizona Republican audit; the tabulation machines are being targeted to look for secret “make Joe Biden win this thing” code, the 2020 election records are being targeted in the hopes that a grand conspiracy will be uncovered in which long-dead or nonexistent voters overwhelmed the vote counts through raw force of their nonexistence.

The people doing the crimes are conspiracy cranks who have either risen to positions of minor local party power or want to. They are … not scholarly people, to say the least. They are people who have been incited by the invented propaganda claims put on television by Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, House Republicans, Fox News, and Pillow Dude, and believe them simply because one of those aforementioned bozos managed to convince them through the sheer power of their televised hairlines.

2. Each case shows a brazen Republican disregard for the law. The Republican clerks and other local officials behind the data breaches and thefts are unapologetic; since they believe somebody else somewhere might be doing a crime, they assert they are justified in doing real crimes to expose the imagined ones.

Historically, this has tended to be a significant component of conservatism and is a blazingly obvious component of authoritarianism in all its forms. Enemies, named and unnamed, are “oppressing” us by secretly doing crimes. The crimes are so secret that they cannot be found, which only proves that even more crimes are being committed to hide them. Therefore the laws are now invalid and we’re going to break them in order to “level the playing field” between the imaginary crimes and our real ones, rinse, repeat.

So you’ve got things going on like a local Republican official threatening to get an elections official fired if that elections official doesn’t let the Republican have access to secured voting equipment that by law nobody is allowed to have access to because then it wouldn’t be secure. Election integrity can simply be disregarded if it is in service to Republicanism, especially Republicanism that is itself obsessed with proving that our election integrity is faulty.

It turns out that having a “president” willing to break laws regularly, alongside party-devoted lawmakers who are eager to simply scrub out enforcement of whatever rules he breaks, may result in more widespread party beliefs that Criminality Is Good Now. Given the number of Republican lawmakers still willing to spout the same arguments and a justice system that has gone from apathetic pursuit of crimes committed by public officials to near-silence, there is no indication this will not get much, much worse.

3. These criminal efforts are more coordinated than they might look. The tell here is the simple note that Mike Lindell, the aforementioned Pillow Dude, is pouring a lot of money into convincing people like these local Republican conspiracy theorists that Republican election conspiracy theories are so dire that extraordinary action needs to be taken to combat them. In Texas, a big Republican donor is now under indictment for financing a supposed “investigation” into election fraud that saw one of his investigators run a random Texan off the road and hold him at gunpoint on the bizarre belief that the man’s truck was stuffed with fake ballots.

The crimes are all committed due to a belief in a handful of nebulous, nonsensical conspiracy theories that came from top Trump propagandists and which continue to be repeated now as core movement beliefs. The reason those beliefs continue is because there’s a whole lot of Republican money being poured into making them continue.

There are also legislative efforts to make such tampering the new normal, Republican-controlled state legislatures have now passed a bevy of new laws that allow them to simply seize control of whatever local election offices have reported back with vote totals that Republican partisans find suspicious. Here’s a tip: Counties that tend not to vote for Republican candidates are the ones being singled out as “suspicious.” Elections officials who object to partisan party hacks thumbing through secure data are either being voted out of office by the Republican base or are being stripped of their authority, and the lawmakers writing those laws are being quite clear that they’re taking those actions because of party conspiracy theories being propped up by, well, themselves.

Reuters is reporting on a wave of conspiracy-minded Republican cranks now looking to target the nation’s election systems by stealing sensitive data, but the broader context here is that the party is looking to legalize those sorts of breaches, not tamp down on them. The problem they’re trying to solve is that, in states like Georgia, Americans aren’t voting for Republicans in sufficient numbers for Republicans to win. The solution they’ve come up with is to declare that if a Republican candidate doesn’t win, it’s because there was a secret conspiracy to fudge the numbers—thus requiring Republican “investigation” into votes against them.

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What better way to kick off the month of May than with a birthday tribute to Mabel Louise Smith, better known to R&B, blues, gospel, jazz and rock fans as Big Maybelle? Born on May 1, 1924 in Tennessee, Big Maybelle’s musical output was prolific during a career that ended with her death at the age of 47. It’s difficult to place her discography in one single category. And sadly, like far too many Black female artists who were musical groundbreakers, her legacy and impact on multiple genres has been obscured, and virtually forgotten.  

It’s hard to believe, given Maybelle’s drawing power among the Black community during the height of her career, that not one biography has been written about her, and certainly no biopic starring famous musicians of today. But at least we’ve got her extensive catalog of music to listen to.

So for this #BlackMusicSunday, let’s do just that, as we celebrate Ms. Maybelle, the American Queen Mother of Soul.

I was pleased to find this tribute to Big Maybelle from YouTube’s Soul Facts. The web series is a creation of Mike Boone, who bills himself as the “Chancellor of Soul,” and describes himself as “a music historian and storyteller from Harlem.” His work focuses deeply on the work of “unsung or unnoticed” musicians.

As Boone explains, while singing in churches and carnivals as a child, Maybelle was “discovered” by bandleader Dave Clark in the early 1930s.

Boone’s video launched me onto a small detour into the story of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm; historians, including Boone, note Maybelle toured with the group early in her career. Daily Kos Community Contributor Charles Jay showcased the Sweethearts in 2021, and this 30-minute documentary about the Sweethearts from 1986 was produced by Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss.

Oddly, Big Maybelle is not mentioned.

Finding mentions of Big Maybelle longer than a paragraph or two is difficult. Harlem World Magazine offers an exception, picking up her career as she reached adulthood.

In the early forties Mabel was part of pianist Christine Chatman’s orchestra (a decade later Chatman was a session pianist on some of Hank Ballard & The Midnighters sides for King) and made her first recording with that group in 1944 for Decca Records. Soon she toured with the Tiny Bradshaw band, and her work with him and Oran “Hot Lips” Page led to a couple of appearances on record for King in the late nineteen forties. By the start of the new decade she was now working as a single, but bookings were sporadic and recording sessions were non-existent. At an appearance with Jimmy Witherspoon at Detroit’s Flame Show Bar in 1952, the struggling performer gained notice, and soon it paid off.

Here’s that first record from 1944—when, just 20 years old, she was still billed as Mabel Smith.

Back to the Harlem World story:

Okeh Records, the newly revived R & B offshoot of Columbia records was developing a roster of recording talent when word was passed about the blues belter based in Cincinnati, Mabel Smith. The people at Okeh liked what they saw and heard, and so the newly renamed Big Maybelle was signed to the label in September of 1952. Her first session for the label produced the song “Rain Down Rain” written by promising composer Lincoln Chase on #6931. The flip side was “The Gabbin’ Blues”. This very first session produced the first success of Maybelle’s career. “Gabbin Blues” along with Chuck Willis “My Story” resulted in the biggest month for the label ever and the first time Okeh had two top ten sellers on the list at the same time. Maybelle was an in person smash in Philadelphia, first for a week at the Earle Theater along with Willie Mabon, and then at a number of nightclubs in that city including Pep’s and Emerson’s cafe.

Gabbin‘ Blues, her 1952 Okeh debut, is a very Black shade-slinging session between Maybelle and Rose Marie McCoy, the tune’s cowriter.

It opens with McCoy saying, “Here come ol’ evil chick, always telling everybody she come from Chicago. Got Mississippi written all over her,” before Maybelle’s powerful vocal comes in. McCoy keeps up a steady stream of trash-talking and cackling in response to each sung stanza.

Dave Penny offers an anecdote about Maybelle’s risque humor, displayed one night at The Apollo.

“She became a super favourite at The Apollo; they loved her not only for her singing – she’d tear the place apart – but also for her comedic work. One joke she used to tell all the time : at that time there was a product on the radio, a detergent called Duz whose slogan was “Duz Does It!”. Maybelle said, ‘I’m gonna go to work and make commercials for a new cleaning detergent. It’s called Fug, and if Duz don’t do it, then Fug it!’”   Fred Mendelsohn (producer and friend) DVD of the Newport Jazz Festival 1958

In 1956, Okeh Records dropped Maybelle due to lagging record sales, but she got picked up immediately by Savoy. There she would record the hit Candy, which would become her signature tune. Maybelle posthumously received a Grammy Hall of Fame Award for the song in 1999.

Most fans of early rock and roll are very familiar with Jerry Lee Lewis’ 1957 hit, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, which is lauded as one of the founding classics of the genre. I actually saw him perform the song live as a teenager, at Atlantic City’s Steel Pier. He was a curiosity for me; it was odd to see a white guy playing Black music with a country twist. But few know that the song originated with Big Maybelle.

Here’s Big Maybelle’s rendition, which was recorded two years before Lewis’, in March 1955. The song was produced by a young Quincy Jones.

Thanks to the 1959 documentary Jazz On A Summer’s Day—filmed at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival—we get to see Big Maybelle at her best, and in color!

Here’s the audio of the entire session:

As for Maybelle’s personal life and struggles, they were many. The most dangerous was her ongoing battle with heroin addiction, as well as with her weight—which she was taunted for most of her life—and diabetes. Even as her health declined, Maybelle had one last unlikely hit with a cover of 96 Tears in 1967, made famous by the Mexican American garage rock band, ? and the Mysterians.

In 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Big Maybelle shouted out the pain that people around the globe were feeling. Paul Devlin wrote about her for The Root in 2011, dubbing her tribute “The Best Martin Luther King Jr. Anthem Ever.”

A better candidate for the best-ever MLK tribute title: Big Maybelle’s visceral, angst-ridden dirge, “Heaven Will Welcome You, Dr. King,” a searing shriek from the depths of the soul. Unlike “Abraham, Martin and John,” “Heaven Will Welcome You, Dr. King” was not designed for AM radio. The lyrics (by Jack Taylor) are very simple. They don’t rely on poetic devices. They appear to have been straightforwardly written and recorded while the pain of the moment was still overwhelming.

The song seems to have lain dormant for years. It was released on iTunes and Amazon.com in 2009 on a two-song “album,” along with her cover of “Eleanor Rigby” (which certainly deserves to be known by Beatles fans far and wide). “Heaven Will Welcome You, Dr. King” doesn’t even sound as if it was fully produced, and that feels appropriate; the rawness of the sound mirrors the rawness of the emotion. It is less pristine, clear-sounding, marketable, music-business commodity than intensely and authentically felt horror and anguish. The anger and sadness in her voice is matched by the playing of the musicians. It adds up to a mighty lament, an expression of darkest funerary gloom, unimpeded by any sweetness or light, evoking the emotions of what that April 1968 morning must have been like.

Have a listen for yourself.

Big Maybelle would be welcomed into the heavenly band of angels in January 1972, her life ending in a diabetic coma. She is buried in Evergreen Memorial Park Cemetery, in the Cleveland, Ohio, suburb of Bedford Heights.

In 2019, Maybelle was honored in her Tennessee hometown with a historical marker.

Please join me in the comments for lots more music from Big Maybelle, and to celebrate this first day of May. Be sure to post your favorites!

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We start today with Nicholas Confessore of The New York Times and his three-part profile of Tucker Carlson of Fox News.

…Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful. Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice — “We don’t judge them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,” Mr. Carlson explained to an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty — his show teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain. When refugees from Africa, numbering in the hundreds, began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the Trump administration, he warned that the continent’s high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever.” Amid nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Mr. Carlson dismissed those protesting the killing as “criminal mobs.” Companies like Angie’s List and Papa John’s dropped their ads. The following month, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-rated cable news show in history. […]

Alchemizing media power into political influence, Mr. Carlson stands in a nativist American tradition that runs from Father Coughlin to Patrick J. Buchanan. Now Mr. Carlson’s on-air technique — gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning himself as his aggrieved viewers’ partner in victimhood — has helped position him, as much as anyone, to inherit the populist movement that grew up around Mr. Trump. At a moment when white backlash is the jet fuel of a Republican Party striving to return to power in Washington, he has become the pre-eminent champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising power of Black and brown citizens. To channel their fear into ratings, Mr. Carlson has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas. Mr. Carlson sometimes refers to “legacy Americans,” a dog-whistle term that, before he began using it on his show last fall, appeared almost exclusively in white nationalist outlets like The Daily Stormer, The New York Times found. He takes up story lines otherwise relegated to far-right or nativist websites like VDare: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has featured a string of segments about the gruesome murders of white farmers in South Africa, which Mr. Carlson suggested were part of a concerted campaign by that country’s Black-led government. Last April, Mr. Carlson set off yet another uproar, borrowing from a racist conspiracy theory known as “the great replacement” to argue that Democrats were deliberately importing “more obedient voters from the third world” to “replace” the current electorate and keep themselves in power. But a Times analysis of 1,150 episodes of his show found that it was far from the first time Mr. Carlson had done so.

One of the more interesting facts in this profile is how Carlson used to to have guests on his show with opposing viewpoints but it was discovered that Fox News viewers did not want to hear opposing viewpoints so the show did away with them.

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is back. And we are still in the Age of COVID. I guess…

Paul Krugman of The New York Times writes that so much of the student debt burden felt by those seeking loan relief is because of false promises.

How much relief will he offer? I have no idea. How much relief should he offer? I’m for going as big as political realities allow, but I understand that too generous a debt write-off might produce a backlash. And I have no confidence that I know where the line should be drawn.

What I think I do know is that much of the backlash to proposals for student debt relief is based on a false premise: the belief that Americans who have gone to college are, in general, members of the economic elite.

The falsity of this proposition is obvious for those who were exploited by predatory for-profit institutions that encouraged them to go into debt to get more or less worthless credentials. The same applies to those who took on educational debt but never managed to get a degree — not a small group. In fact, around 40 percent of student loan borrowers never finish their education.

But even among those who make it through, a college degree is hardly a guarantee of economic success. And I’m not sure how widely that reality is understood.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr of The Boston Globe writes in a similar vein to Krugman about student debt but centers Black attendees and graduates.

Stay in school. It’s an American maxim, the path to the so-called American Dream. Or so we’re told.

“What is the master narrative that we tell ourselves over and over again, in policy conversations, in our national conversation? That master narrative is: If you go the college, and borrow student loans, you’re going to get a return on those student loans through your degree and the labor market,” says Jalil Bishop, co-author of the Education Trust’s report “Jim Crow Debt: How Black Borrowers Experience Student Loans” and co-creator of the National Black Student Loan Debt Study. “Well, that’s not happening for a lot of students, and it’s really not happening for Black students.”

We know there’s a gaping wealth chasm between Black and White American households.

We also know a key factor driving the financial gap is the staggeringly high cost of college and post-graduate education. Unequally distributed by race, this cost is often paid through student loans that saddle graduates with crippling debt.

That debt often means Black Americans, who already begin with a fraction of the wealth of White Americans, start their working lives financially underwater. These factors harm their credit; their ability to gain assets, and start and grow businesses; save for retirement; or pass on generational wealth — ensuring that the racial wealth gap persists for generations.

Sigal Samuel of Vox looks at several different Guaranteed Income (GI) programs taking place across the nation.

The point of running pilots is to amass evidence that an intervention works so you can then make a convincing case that it should become policy. In a sense, GI pilots targeting parents are all tryouts for an idea that we’ve already implemented as federal policy: the expanded CTC.

The CTC proved extremely effective. In July 2021, when the first checks went out to parents, the child poverty rate dropped from 15.8 percent to 11.9 percent, the lowest rate on record. And yet, that evidence wasn’t enough to make the CTC permanent. Although polling found a bipartisan majority of voters wanted it to be permanent, Congress let it lapse — with Sen. Joe Manchin’s opposition dealing the final blow.

So you might wonder whether there’s much point in continuing to run pilots aimed at amassing more evidence. Maybe a lack of evidence isn’t the constraining factor. Should the movement for GI focus its efforts on something else, like building political will?

Charles P. Pierce of Esquire writes that Republicans throwing around the name of George Orwell in protest of a Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security are simply full of it.

Spare a thought for Nina Jankowicz, who has stepped up to lead this effort at the Department of Homeland Security. Volunteering to be a piñata takes a certain amount of gumption. And yes, for the record, I am concerned what this operation would look like under, say, President DeSantis, and there had to be a more deft way to roll it out than having DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas just drop it into his testimony before a House committee. (The Senate will have its turn at him next week.) And there had to be a better name for it than the Disinformation Governance Board, a monicker that sounds as though it were made of steel, concrete, and barbed-wire. Why are Democrats so bad at naming stuff? The Republicans are terrific at naming stuff, even though, most of the time, those names are perfect examples of…disinformation. We should all talk about this seriously at a later date.

But I am not going to listen to it at the moment from the party of insurrection, the party of book-banning and library-scouring, the party of dangerous myth-making bullshit about “grooming” and (eek!) “critical race theory,” the party full of people who still bend the knee to the Prince of 30,000 Lies down in Florida. Hell, this is a party that lies to itself. Isn’t that right, Never-To-Be-Speaker Kevin McCarthy? Regain your sanity, folks, before you start throwing around George Orwell’s name in defense of your absolute right to launder and launch all the fantastical tales spun by Macedonian teenagers. Orwell would eat you all on toast and still have room for bangers and mash.

Oliver Milman of the Guardian writes that climate change may become the catalyst of the most extreme extinction event for marine life in 250 million years.

The world’s seawater is steadily climbing in temperature due to the extra heat produced from the burning of fossil fuels, while oxygen levels in the ocean are plunging and the water is acidifying from the soaking up of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

This means the oceans are overheated, increasingly gasping for breath – the volume of ocean waters completely depleted of oxygen has quadrupled since the 1960s – and becoming more hostile to life. Aquatic creatures such as clams, mussels and shrimp are unable to properly form shells due to the acidification of seawater.

All of this means the planet could slip into a “mass extinction rivaling those in Earth’s past”, states the new research, published in Science. The pressures of rising heat and loss of oxygen are, researchers said, uncomfortably reminiscent of the mass extinction event that occurred at the end of the Permian period about 250m years ago. This cataclysm, known as the “great dying”, led to the demise of up to 96% of the planet’s marine animals.

“Even if the magnitude of species loss is not the same level as this, the mechanism of the species loss would be the same,” said Justin Penn, a climate scientist at Princeton University who co-authored the new research.

Dave Zirin of The Nation thinks that in light of the release of Trevor Reed from Russian custody, perhaps now is the time to make some noise about the detainment of WNBA star Brittney Griner.

The Trevor Reed story should focus our attention on another imprisoned US citizen in Russia, WNBA All-Star Brittney Griner, and indeed, judging by trending across social media, it has. Since mid-February, Griner has been detained in Russia awaiting a May 19 trial date where she faces 10 years behind bars—five years at hard labor—for the alleged crime of having hashish vape cartridges in her bag at the airport. With Reed’s release, Griner’s supporters want to know that she is next.

If you’ve been reading this space, you know that I believe we need to understand Griner as a political prisoner, partly because she has been paraded in front of Russian state media like some sort of six-foot-nine prize, partly because 10 years for allegedly having cannabis cartridges is obscene. Factor in that Griner is a Black queer woman in a country where national minorities and LGBTQ people have been victims of targeted harassment, and the urgency to secure her freedom only grows.

The State Department and the WNBA has preached silence in the hope that Griner would not become the kind of high-profile political prisoner Russia could use like a pawn on a chessboard. But that’s wishful thinking. Of course Griner was always going to become a political prisoner. This was easier to predict than the success of an attempted Griner slam dunk. It is past time that supporters shed their silence and spoke out for her return. They only need take a cursory look at Trevor Reed’s case and the activism of Reed’s parents—done with one-millionth of Griner’s cultural capital—to see that this could prove to be a positive approach—or at least more positive than doing nothing. The possibilities could be seen in how the release of Reed spurred a long-overdue public discussion about Griner. The State Department commented on the matter, with spokesperson Ned Price saying to CNN, “When it comes to Brittney Griner, we are working very closely with her team. Her case is a top priority for us. We’re in regular contact with her team.”

Timothy Snyder writes for The New Yorker about the long history of colonialism and Ukraine.

Ukraine is a post-colonial country, one that does not define itself against exploitation so much as accept, and sometimes even celebrate, the complications of emerging from it. Its people are bilingual, and its soldiers speak the language of the invader as well as their own. The war is fought in a decentralized way, dependent on the solidarity of local communities. These communities are diverse, but together they defend the notion of Ukraine as a political nation. There is something heartening in this. The model of the nation as a mini-empire, replicating inequalities on a smaller scale, and aiming for a homogeneity that is confused with identity, has worn itself out. If we are going to have democratic states in the twenty-first century, they will have to accept some of the complexity that is taken for granted in Ukraine.

The contrast between an aging empire and a new kind of nation is captured by Zelensky, whose simple presence makes Kremlin ideology seem senseless. Born in 1978, he is a child of the U.S.S.R., and speaks Russian with his family. A Jew, he reminds us that democracy can be multicultural. He does not so much answer Russian imperialism as exist alongside it, as though hailing from some wiser dimension. He does not need to mirror Putin; he just needs to show up. Every day, he affirms his nation by what he says and what he does.

Catherine Belton and Greg Miller of The Washington Post write that a number of Russian oligarchs are getting fed up with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine

At least four oligarchs who made it big in the more liberal era of Putin’s predecessor, President Boris Yeltsin, have left Russia. At least four senior officials have resigned their posts and departed the country, the highest ranking among them being Anatoly Chubais, the Kremlin special envoy for sustainable development and Yeltsin-era privatization czar.

But those in top positions vital to the continued running of the country remain — some trapped, unable to leave even if they wanted to. Most notably, Russia’s mild-mannered and highly regarded central bank chief, Elvira Nabiullina, tendered her resignation after the imposition of Western sanctions, but Putin refused to let her step down, according to five people familiar with the situation.

In interviews, several Russian billionaires, senior bankers, a senior official and former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, described how they and others had been blindsided by their increasingly isolated president and feel largely impotent to influence him because his inner circle is dominated by a handful of hard-line security officials.

“…his inner circle…of hard-line security officials,” the siloviki.

Finally today, Bobby Ghosh of Bloomberg writes that the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Africa may not be limited to food shortages.

The war has cut off Africa from two major sources of grain. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, 14 African nations depend on Russia and Ukraine for half their wheat, with Eritrea (100%), Somalia (over 90%) and Egypt (nearly 75%) topping the list. Overall, wheat imports make up 90% of Africa’s $4 billion trade with Russia and almost 50% of its $4.5 billion trade with Ukraine, according to the African Development Bank. In an interview with Al Jazeera, the bank’s president, Akinwumi Adesina, warned of a growing food crisis that could “destabilize the continent.”

In addition to crimping wheat supplies, the war has caused a price surge in a wide range of commodities, sending inflation soaring even as nations struggle to recover from two years of economic suffering caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This poses a threat to governments throughout the developing world, but especially in Africa, which is already experiencing a democratic retrenchment and a resurgence of military coups.

Everyone have a great day!

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And there goes another month. Goodbye winter, hello spring. Ending April with a smile, we are back with the Joy Collective, a collection of the cutest, funniest clips we can find on the Internet.

Social media is filled with funny moments and stories. Sometimes we just need to step away from the seriousness and take some time to relax; lighter posts allow us to mentally recharge.

As part of a weekly series that aims to make you laugh, Daily Kos will be compiling and sharing viral funny videos from across social media platforms. The news cycle can be a bit much at times. Self-care is needed. We all need balance, so let’s have some joy where we are able. 

Share your videos and your favorites with us for the next round-up!

Starting off with some cuteness! A TikTok a video of a cow having a “spa day” has been named one of the most viral videos on the Internet. 

In the video, @l.thomas2020—also known on TikTok as LT—goes through several steps of pampering her cow. She scrubs her hooves with a toothbrush before polishing them, gives her coat a deep brushing, and then lays milk-soaked strawberry slices across the blissed-out cow’s head and back. 

Her treatment leaves many viewers commenting: “Can I be treated like your cow.”

So you thought polar bears are cute right? Well, they are about to get even cuter. Check out this one special bear who is kindly petting a dog.

According to Mashable, the two were spotted hanging out by the water in Manitoba, Canada.

Polar bears don’t seem to be the only ones who can hang out with dogs. Take a look at this duck’s playtime with this dog.

I don’t know about you but I am definitely ready for the beach. This elephant definitely makes me more excited about it, too.

Honestly, the accuracy in this. Welcome to my mornings.

Clearly, I cannot get enough of these puppy videos.

But I am still a loyal cat mom and lover.

And now for some community favorites!

This adorable parrot from @CrimsonQuillfeather

This prank video from @abluerippleinohio

And a fun music video, too, just for kicks. 

This “cheetah brothers” video from @Lefty Coaster.

And this adorable dog video from @bobdevo:

Have any funny videos you think will bring more joy to Daily Kos readers?

You know the drill! Send them over to me at [email protected] or comment below and I’ll try to feature them in the next roundup!