This program was recorded on SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4 at about 4:30 AM. Due to Covid-19, shows are being prerecorded beginning March 13th and until further notice. We miss our live call-in participants, and look forward to a time we can once again go live.
Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show airing live every Monday night from 3-4 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston). My co-host and Editor is Andrew Ferguson.
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For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:
- An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.
- You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.
SIGNOFF QUOTE[s]: “At one point he [Trump] started to attack the press and I said, ‘You know, that is getting tired. Why are you doing this? You’re doing it over and over and it’s boring and it’s – it’s time to end that. You know, you’ve won the nomination and, uh, why do you keep hammering at this? And he [Trump] said, ‘You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.’ He said that. So, put that in your head for a minute.” ~ Lesley Stahl (“Deadline Club”, May 21, 2018). Excerpt from “Kasie DC”, May 27, 2018
TOPICS: Early Voting Starts on October 13; Drive-Thru Voting in Harris County; ‘A healing place’: New plan would transform [a] downtown Houston park into lynching memorial; Trump’s Covid Treatments Are Aimed at Preventing Severe Illness ; Covering Trump the Reuters Way; The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free; Twitter bans posts wishing for Trump death. The Squad wonders where that policy was for them; In Nagorno-Karabakh, New Risks in an Old Ethnic Conflict; More.
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- “… [A]sk not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country!” ~ John F Kennedy, Inaugural speech, January 20, 1961
- The Secrecy Voting Envelope: https://www.youtube.com/embed/oxaXleNeQKA
- According to current court rulings, there will be NO straight-ticket voting in this election.
- The next election is the General Election on November 3rd, 2020
- VOTING FAQ – In Texas, Early Voting Starts October 13-thru-30!
- VOTETEXAS.GOV – Texas Voter Information
- Last Day to Apply for Ballot by Mail (Received, not Postmarked): October 23, 2020
- VOTING BY MAIL: INSTRUCTIONS
- HARRISVOTES.COM – Countywide Voting Centers, (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965), Harris County Clerk
- DRIVE-THRU and 24-HOUR VOTING will be available at some early voting sites. More info at HARRISVOTES.COM!
- Make sure you are registered to vote!
- On the possibility that the courts make you eligible to vote by mail on Election Day due to the Covid-19 virus, make sure that you are ready with an application to mail in. These are available from HARRISVOTES.COM. Follow directions carefully.
- For personalized, nonpartisan voter guides and information, consider visiting VOTE.ORG. Ballotpedia.com and Texas League of Women Voters are also good places to get election info.
- If you are denied your right to vote any place at any time at any polling place for any reason, ask for (or demand) a provisional ballot rather than lose your vote.
- HARRISVOTES.COM – Countywide Voting Centers
- HARRIS CTY – IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED FOR VOTING: Do not possess and cannot reasonably obtain one of these IDs?
- Fill out a declaration at the polls describing a reasonable impediment to obtaining it, and show a copy or original of one of the following supporting forms of ID:
- A government document that shows your name and an address, including your voter registration certificate
- Current utility bill
- Bank statement
- Government check
- Paycheck
- A certified domestic (from a U.S. state or territory) birth certificate or (b) a document confirming birth admissible in a court of law which establishes your identity (which may include a foreign birth document)
- HARRIS CTY – IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED FOR VOTING: Do not possess and cannot reasonably obtain one of these IDs?
- You may vote early by-mail if:
- You are registered to vote and meet one of the following criteria:
- Away from the county of residence on Election Day and during the early voting period;
- Sick or disabled;
- 65 years of age or older on Election Day; or
- Confined in jail, but eligible to vote.
- Make sure you are registered:
- Ann Harris Bennett, Tax Assessor-Collector & Voter Registrar
- CHECK REGISTRATION STATUS HERE
- CLICK How to register to vote in Texas
- Outside Texas, try Vote.org.
- CHECK REGISTRATION STATUS HERE
- In local news: ‘A healing place’: New plan would transform [a] downtown Houston park into lynching memorial; by Zach Despart | HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM | Tuesday, Sep. 29, 2020 Updated: Sep. 29, 2020 6:25 a.m.
- Harris County Commissioners Court on Tuesday is expected to approve a plan to transform a one-block park in downtown Houston into a memorial to four African-American men who were lynched during the Jim Crow era.
- The proposal by Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis would use the entire block that contains Quebedeaux Park — between Fannin, Congress, San Jacinto and Franklin streets — into a place where he said visitors can remember racial terror of the past and reflect on the continued effects of discrimination. …
- A major focal point of the site will be four lynching markers donated by the Equal Justice Initiative, which also runs a museum in Montgomery, Ala., that showcases the history of enslavement and oppression of African-Americans. The Legacy Museum depicts 4,400 racially motivated killings between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to 1950.
- Commissioners Court unanimously approved the installation of the markers in 2018.
- MIKE – The regime that cries “wolf”:
- Trust is the first casualty of dishonesty: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
- Can we believe anything we’re told by Trump’s people?
- First impressions when it was announced that Trump had contracted COVID (Source of some material NY Times.)
- It’s a ploy to avoid the next two debates with Biden where his mic might be turned off when he speaks out of turn.
- Is his condition serious, or are his symptoms minor? Or even fictitious?
- Is he needing oxygen or not?
- Why is Trump receiving Regeneron’s© experimental antibody therapy?
- Is he also receiving Gilead’s© antiviral drug remdesivir
- When was he actually tested as positive? We are getting conflicting timelines.
- When was he treated? We are getting conflicting timelines.
- Trump’s Covid Treatments Are Aimed at Preventing Severe Illness – Outside experts pointed to the therapies as signs that the president’s health may not be as good as his doctors said. His age, weight and gender put him at high risk. By Gina Kolata and Apoorva Mandavilli | NYTIMES.COM | Oct. 3, 2020 Updated 7:13 p.m. ET
- [P]atients can sometimes get experimental drugs from a company if a doctor requests them and the F.D.A. and the company agrees. That is how Mr. Trump got the antibodies from Regeneron.
- It is unclear how long Mr. Trump had been infected. The doctors would not disclose when he received his last negative test result …
- That combination, said Dr. Michelle Prickett, a pulmonary and critical care specialist who has treated hundreds of Covid-19 patients at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, is “uncharted territory.”
- Mr. Trump’s doctor also indicated in a release that the president had been taking a combination of over-the-counter drugs: zinc, vitamin D, famotidine or Pepcid — a drug that blocks the production of stomach acid — as well as melatonin and aspirin.
- Infectious disease experts looked askance.
- Zinc, vitamin D, and famotidine, have been touted as helping fight the coronavirus, but the evidence is far from rigorous.
- “They are not helpful for Covid,” Dr. Kalil said. And, he added, “they could have interactions,” that make the disease worse.
- “There are drugs that could have harmful effects in Covid that are not harmful in other settings. I would suggest avoiding them.”
- Dr. Finberg agreed. “If it was me, I wouldn’t take them,” he said.
- MIKE: So, what are we to believe? Is Trump being treated with semi-quackery? Is he actually directing his own treatment? Is he doing well, or is he actually in serious condition?
- This is the Regime That Cries Wolf. Can we even believe anything they say or their surrogates say, good or bad, even if those surrogates are doctors?
- By the time this show airs, you will know more than I can at this time.
- On Feb 2, 2017, REUTERS published this message to its staff about covering the Trump regime: Covering Trump the Reuters Way – In a message to staff today, Reuters Editor-in-Chief Steve Adler wrote about covering President Trump the Reuters way; By RPB | REUTERS.COM | February 2, 2017, 1:47 PM, Updated 4 years ago
- The first 12 days of the Trump presidency (yes, that’s all it’s been!) have been memorable for all – and especially challenging for us in the news business. It’s not every day that a U.S. president calls journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth” or that his chief strategist dubs the media “the opposition party.” It’s hardly surprising that the air is thick with questions and theories about how to cover the new Administration.
- So what is the Reuters answer? … Reuters is a global news organization that reports independently and fairly in more than 100 countries, including many in which the media is unwelcome and frequently under attack. … in places such as Turkey, the Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Thailand, China, Zimbabwe, and Russia, nations in which we sometimes encounter some combination of censorship, legal prosecution, visa denials, and even physical threats to our journalists. … We don’t know yet how sharp the Trump administration’s attacks will be over time or to what extent those attacks will be accompanied by legal restrictions on our newsgathering. But we do know that we must follow the same rules that govern our work anywhere …
- Now, a topic brought up to me by Andrew: The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free – The political economy of bullsh!t. By Nathan J. Robinson | CURRENTAFFAIRS.ORG | filed 02 August 2020 in Editor’s Notes
- Paywalls are justified, even though they are annoying. It costs money to produce good writing, to run a website, to license photographs. A lot of money, if you want quality. Asking people for a fee to access content is therefore very reasonable. You don’t expect to get a print subscription to the newspaper gratis, why would a website be different? I try not to grumble about having to pay for online content, because I run a magazine and I know how difficult it is to pay writers what they deserve.
- But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free! You want “Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets,” “The Moral Case Against Mask Mandates And Other COVID Restrictions,” or an article suggesting the National Institutes of Health has admitted 5G phones cause coronavirus—they’re yours. You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the paywall. This doesn’t mean the paywall shouldn’t be there. But it does mean that it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of [BS] is completely free. …
- This means that a lot of the most vital information will end up locked behind the paywall. And while I am not much of a New Yorker fan either, it’s concerning that the Hoover Institute will freely give you Richard Epstein’s infamous article downplaying the threat of coronavirus, but Isaac Chotiner’s interview demolishing Epstein requires a monthly subscription, meaning that the lie is more accessible than its refutation. Eric Levitz of New York is one of the best and most prolific left political commentators we have. But unless you’re a subscriber of New York, you won’t get to hear much of what he has to say each month.
- MIKE: The article goes further into different kinds of intellectual property – science, the arts, etc. – but that’s another story, so to speak. The link to the full article is above, if you wish to read it.
- Twitter bans posts wishing for Trump death. The Squad wonders where that policy was for them; By Donie O’Sullivan and Alaa Elassar | CNN | Updated 2:21 PM ET, Sat October 3, 2020
- The four progressive Democratic congresswomen known as “The Squad” expressed surprise on Friday night when Twitter posted about its policy against wishing harm or death to someone in light of President Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis.
- Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts have all spoken out about the threats they receive on social media and say Twitter isn’t doing enough about it.
- Responding to media reporting Friday about people wishing death to the President, a verified account run by Twitter’s spokespeople tweeted, “tweets that wish or hope for death, serious bodily harm or fatal disease against *anyone* are not allowed and will need to be removed.”
- “Seriously though, this is messed up. The death threats towards us should have been taking more seriously by [Twitter],” Rep. Rashida Tlaib tweeted in response.
- Members of The Squad have often been victims of brutal social media attacks, including posts that have expressed wishes for their deaths. …
- The policy highlighted by Twitter’s press shop on Friday is not a new one. But tweets that violate Twitter’s rules are often missed or not removed by the company, as CNN regularly reports.
- “At Twitter, it is our top priority to improve the health of the public conversation, and that includes ensuring the safety of people who use our service. Abuse and harassment have no place on Twitter,” a Twitter spokesperson told CNN.
- “Our policies — which apply to everyone, everywhere — are clear: We do not tolerate content that wishes, hopes or expresses a desire for death, serious bodily harm or fatal disease against an individual or group of people. If we identify accounts that violate these rules, we will take enforcement action.”
- Twitter said Friday that publicly wishing someone “death, serious bodily harm or fatal disease” does not result in an automatic permanent suspension from its platform. Users who repeatedly send tweets like this may eventually be permanently suspended, however.
- Twitter accused of double standards over ban on tweets wishing death on Trump – Ava DuVernay among those highlighting platform’s lack of action over abusive tweets, by Aaron Walawalkar | THEGUARDIAN.COM | Sat 3 Oct 2020 11.28 EDT
- Twitter is facing a growing backlash in the wake of Donald Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis as users accuse it of double standards in the way it polices those who wish death on others.
- The filmmaker Ava DuVernay and the former children’s laureate Malorie Blackman were among thousands of Twitter users accusing the platform of failing to protect women and minority users from abuse.
- MIKE: This is not a new problem. Many users have been swarmed with abuse after saying one thing or another. While I ‘get’ that it’s really hard to monitor billions of tweets every day, suddenly starting to enforce it for Trump is a remarkable departure from Twitter’s usual hit-or-miss monitoring.
- In Nagorno-Karabakh, New Risks in an Old Ethnic Conflict – Fighting in and around the breakaway enclave shows signs that a local ethnic dispute is spiraling into a regional conflict. By Andrew E. Kramer | NYTIMES.COM | Oct. 3, 2020
- Fighting broke out a week ago in Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway region in Azerbaijan with an Armenian majority, setting off alarms about the risks of a wider war that might draw in Russia, Turkey and Iran.
- The conflict had simmered for decades in a remote mountain region of the Caucasus without much strategic importance to anyone. Why is this escalation in fighting over the past week any different from the sporadic violence of the past?
- One big distinction: A more direct engagement in the conflict by Turkey in support of its ethnic Turkic ally, Azerbaijan, in a region of traditional Russian influence.
- The fighting comes as Turkey increasingly flexes its muscles in the Middle East and North Africa, adding to the dangers of regional escalation in what had been a mostly local, if venomous, ethnic conflict. And, distracted by the coronavirus pandemic, international mediators missed warning signs as tensions mounted in Nagorno-Karabakh over the summer, analysts say. …
- A war that began in the late Soviet period between Armenians and Azerbaijanis set the stage for the fighting today in Nagorno-Karabakh. The ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan declared independence and was nearly crushed in the ensuing war before its fighters captured large areas of Azerbaijan in a series of victories leading up to a cease-fire in 1994. …
- The settlement reached 26 years ago, always meant to be temporary, left about 600,000 Azerbaijanis who had fled the area stranded away from their homes and Nagorno-Karabakh vulnerable to attack by Azerbaijan, which has vowed to recapture the area.
- MIKE: It’s worth noting that there is a piece of Azerbaijani territory stock on the west side of Armenia (Nakhchivan) with no land contiguity to Azerbaijan, putting it in the same geopolitical position as Nagorno-Karabakh. You might thing that creates an opportunity for diplomacy and cooperation. … You’d think.
- These two countries are bordered by Russia, Georgia, Turkey, and Iran. SO much potential for this to grow as various nations take sides based on religion, ethnicity, and geopolitics. And lots of opportunity here for non-adjacent countries to make further mischief.
Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig 
