Roger O Green

Charlie Kirk was not MLK Jr.

‘the beloved community’

mlk targeted Here’s what I didn’t think I’d be writing a year ago. Charlie Kirk was not MLK Jr. To be fair, I wasn’t all that sure who Charlie Kirk WAS 12 months ago.

Some of Kirk’s supporters point to “opening” dialogue, like King attempted to do. “Social media is awash in AI fantasy-tributes of Kirk standing with fallen American heroes such as John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and even Jesus Christ himself.” Some I have seen are gagworthy.

But as John-Paul Hyde wrote on Substack, “Charlie Kirk isn’t Martin Luther King — He’s Nick Naylor.” Naylor is the protagonist in the movie Thank You for Smoking, which I saw and loved in 2006. “Canonizing a partisan spin doctor as an American Saint is just another layer of spin.”

One way Kirk was unlike King was that, even as King would attempt to prod the government to take action, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act, he wasn’t co-opted by Lyndon Johnson or other politicians.

Flip-flop

Whereas, “this is what we saw with Charlie Kirk whenever Trump changed narratives. Kirk beseeched America to turn away from a war with Iran. Then Trump bombed Iran, and Kirk applauded him as a ‘man made for the moment.’ Charlie Kirk was a staunch free-trader. Then Trump started pushing tariffs, and Kirk instantly became a protectionist. Charlie Kirk used to believe in the separation of church and state. Then Christian nationalism grew and merged with the MAGA movement, and Charlie Kirk became a Christian nationalist defender. “

Brian Recker wrote: “King spent his life battling for what he called ‘the beloved community,’ a world of racial justice, material equality, and peace. He worked to tear down the forces that rip us apart and the systems that dominate the vulnerable. His words inspired us to see the best in each other—towards empathy and solidarity…

“King showed us that we are ‘caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.’ His triumph was the Civil Rights Movement, which secured dignity and civil liberties for Black Americans who had long been denied their humanity. At the end of his life, he was marching with sanitation workers carrying signs that read, ‘I Am a Man.'”

Opportunist

Kirk was an opportunist. From WIRED:

Conservative activist and Turning Point USA cofounder Charlie Kirk has a lot of opinions on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In 2015, Kirk called him a “hero.”

In 2022, MLK was a “civil rights icon.”

In December 2023, speaking before a group of students and teachers at America Fest, a political convention organized by Turning Point USA, Kirk struck a different tone.

“MLK was awful,” Kirk said. “He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.”

“Kirk’s attempt to discredit civil rights law is an example of how ‘the fringe moves to the center at the speed of light’ in right-wing politics, says public policy scholar Jonathan Rauch.

“‘If they’re going to say the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the death of the Constitution and freedom in America, then that’s going to be extremely divisive, because a lot of people are going to say, ‘Well, if that isn’t racist, I don’t know what is,’’ Rauch says. ‘This is the federal law that ended segregation.'”

So was Kirk merely an opportunist, someone who was willing to take his Turning Point USA group in whatever direction the winds were blowing? Or is the litany of racist and sexist comments a real reflection of his bigotry?

MLK III

I’ll leave the final words to MLK’s son, Martin Luther King III, who “respectfully disagrees” with the MLK Jr/Kirk parallels.

King III pointed out instances in which Kirk had previously attacked what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for. “While King III admits Kirk had a right to his opinion, he says what he represented was quite different than his father, who King III said was about ‘bringing people together.’

“‘It’s not just about blackness,’ King III said. ‘The whole notion of what that means is sad that we are minimizing what made this country what it is, which is, I always say, a potentially great country, because I can’t universally say we are great as long as we’re mistreating people and we are.'”

January rambling: sneaky new strain

State TV

Doctors still recommend flu shot despite sneaky new strain

AI bubble

Writing versus AI and A World Without People

Older Americans Quit Weight-Loss Drugs in Droves — Side effects and cost continue to be significant obstacles

Just Before Publishing, a Reporter Receives a Crucial Tip. We were nearly finished with our narrative on a Cold War mystery. Then juicy new info suddenly emerged. Now what?

The U.S. Census Bureau is scheduled to hold a prerelease webinar about the 2020-2024 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates on Thursday, Jan. 22, at 1 p.m. ET. All datasets will be available to the public Thursday, Jan. 29, by 10 a.m. ET.

Frank S. Robinson’s blog suspension as a result of the comments on a 2017 blog post. BTW, I had replied to his post.

Starring Dick Van Dyke, streaming only until 1/31/2026

Claudette Colvin, who challenged Alabama’s segregation laws, dies at 86. As a 15-year-old, Colvin refused to give her seat to a white passenger. Her challenge presaged Rosa Parks’ and helped integrate Montgomery’s buses.

‘Dilbert’ Creator Scott Adams Dies at 68 After Cancer Battle. On one hand, his politics sucked. On the other hand, he died of the same thing my father died of, prostate cancer, a disease that “nobody” dies of except when they do

Frank Capra at Comic-Con 1974

Go, Bills!! Go, Bears! Go, 49ers. Go, Texans?

Wait, there’s an Australian version of Ghosts?

Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang

FOTUS and fiends

Lies, and more lies

Abandonment of Global Treaties, Including Landmark Climate Deal, ‘Threatens All Life on Earth’

Renee Good and Our Epistemological Crisis, and Who was Renee Nicole Good, the woman killed by ICE?

He asked Fulton County, GA, for a $6.2 million payout in attorneys’ fees and costs after the criminal charges against him were dismissed. He had been indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia by pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” 11,780 votes to give him a victory in the state of Georgia.

The Venezuela attack is a constitutional crisis for the United States, and the euphoria period and Imperialism Is Very Expensive

EPA could limit its own ability to use new science to strengthen air pollution rules

CDC sharply narrows routine childhood vaccine guidance

What Morbidity Hath Secretary Kennedy Wrought? — A choice is not a choice when swamped with vaccine disinformation

Cuts Billions in Federal Childcare Funds for Democrat-Led States

Hegseth starts proceedings against Mark Kelly over video remarks; Kelly is not backing down

America’s third consecutive K-shaped recovery (an economic rally where the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer)

Rogues’ gallery

Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Talk of Athens

Jan. 6 never ended: ‘Filled With Lies’: WH Releases False History and All that the rioters want is everything, and GOP hides the memorial

Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, 1/5/2026

Jordan Klepper on djt’s Tylenol Tirade and Elon’s DOGE-baggery | The Daily Show

Imperial Aggression in Venezuela: Corporate Media Fall in Line

Tony Dokoupil’s ‘embarrassing’ first days at CBS Evening News savaged by staff: ‘It’s state TV.’

MUSIC

Battle Hymn of the Empire – Marsh Family adaptation of Battle Hymn of the Republic

Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, first by Beethoven (op. 112) and then by Mendelssohn (op. 27).

Ameriican Requiem – Beyoncé

Dance to the music – Sly & The Family Stone –

The Sondheim Concert

Move On Up (Extended Version – Curtis Mayfield

Hang On Sloopy -The McCoys

You’ll Be Back – Lesli Margherita

Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season) – Nina Simone

Your Friendly Liberal Neighborhood KKK – Mitchell Trio feat. John Denver (1966)

The River by John Williams

The Red Bucket Follies’ opening number, December 2025

An der schönen blauen Donau, Walzer, Op. 314

Year-end pop music mashups 2025

New Year’s Eve edition of The Dinah Shore Show, which aired 12/29/61, featuring George Burns, Ginger Rogers, and my mom’s favorite, Nat King Cole

Movie review: Marty Supreme

Timothée Chalamet

My wife and I went to see the new movie Marty Supreme at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany in late December. It’s on many Best Picture lists. Rotten Tomatoes, which gives the film a 94% positive rating, says the director/co-writer Josh Safdie had “the uncanny gift of crafting extraordinary stories from life’s most mundane moments.”

This is a movie about “Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, who goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness.” His greatness lies in his skill at ping-pong or table tennis. His “hell and back” is almost entirely of his own making.

It is very loosely based on a guy named Marty Reisman. Reisman acknowledged that some elements in the movie were accurate, including the scenes with the Harlem Globetrotters.

You want to root for the underdog in a sports movie, and ultimately, this is one. Rudy should make it on the Notre Dame team. Ray should have people come to his Field of Dreams.

Or maybe it’s not. Critic Alan Zilberman wrote: “Safdie’s film is less of a sports drama and more of an anxiety-fueled nightmare, a sustained effort to put the audience into the mental and physical space of a fast-talking operator who only tells the truth when it is convenient.” True enough.

Unfortunately, I found I didn’t care if Marty “made it” or not because Marty is an ass who uses his friends, his family, women, and total strangers to achieve his goal. The fact that he hates his job as a shoe salesman, which he’s pretty good at, might have made him more likable. But no.

Shark Tank!

The character I liked the most is rich guy Milton Rockwell, played by the Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary, who serves a demeaning yet oddly justified punishment. There’s a New York Times article, How Kevin O’Leary Made His ‘Marty Supreme’ Character More Cutthroat, which is an interesting read.

Director Josh Safdie likes to use non-actors in his films. He’d watched a TED Talk Pico Iyer delivered on Ping-Pong as a guide to life and “came away thinking that no one might be better suited to playing a humorless, uptight, domineering British table tennis official in 1952.”

I will say that the table tennis play was reasonably entertaining.

But at the end, with the seeming payoff, I didn’t care. I didn’t believe that the final event transformed Marty. Partly, the 2.5 hours were too long. The late, great Roger Ebert noted that “no good movie is long enough and no bad movie is short enough.”

My blogging buddy J. Eric Smith wrote that he hadn’t seen Marty Supreme and won’t “Oscar voters (and the marketing shills who serve them) fall in love with certain performances/actors/musicians in ways that are absolutely inexplicable to me, often creating eye-rolling results in their awards. Currently/recently, among my film peeves, I’d say that the deeply, smugly, annoying Timothée Chalamet appearing as an Oscar contender/fave multiple years in a row is madness.” Sure, even though he spent an hour a day to get his acne-scarred face.

As someone who liked Chalamet in the Dylan film A Complete Unknown, I nevertheless get Eric’s point. The Rotten Tomatoes audience was only 83% positive about Marty Supreme. If you see it and like it, please let me know why.

Technostress

a dozen faucets

The last couple of months of the year were filled with technostress. As I noted here, I got a new router and modem from Spectrum at the end of October. But by mid-November, the Internet had become unreliable more often than not.

I followed all the instructions the bot suggested. So they dispatched a repair guy. Early on, he decided that the particular line of modems they gave me was crap. He got a new one from his truck, and lo and behold, everything seemed to be working for about a month.

On Christmas Eve, I noticed the Internet was spotty. I tried all the usual tricks (rebooting my router/modem and my computer), which worked for a New York minute. But the landline was out, too. We couldn’t use the Roku.

And I was even having trouble utilizing my cellphone, even though I set it up NOT to use the house Internet. (The phone worked fine two houses away from our home.)

This process was making me, usually a warm and fuzzy guy, cranky. I couldn’t write much for the blog or pay bills. My wife had time-sensitive info she needed to do for her mother.

Guy #2

Then a second repair guy arrived on December 27, after the nasty little snowstorm we had, and only 15 minutes late. He had looked over the previous tech’s records and determined that some old hardware downstairs was part of the problem.

He explained it as though it were a garden hose spliced to a dozen faucets. The Internet wasn’t dead, but it was overly worked. This explained why I could access Gmail but couldn’t open the links within it. He even climbed the utility pole to make sure a squirrel hadn’t compromised the equipment.

Okay, so it now works! Until the next morning! Arrgh. I rebooted the modem and router for, no exaggeration, at least the eighth time in a month. This time the fix seemed to “take,” knock wood.

Sunday Stealing Remembers the Good Old Days

Domingo Samudio

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

We’re going into the new year by looking back. Randy at GeneaMusings encourages us to reminisce. So the group remembers the Good Old Days.

When I Was Young

I used to say that I didn’t really like to wallow in nostalgia. But now it’s more of a mental exercise. Can I remember that stuff anymore?

1. Tell us about a time when your family got a newfangled invention (your first air conditioner, color TV, VCR, microwave, computer, etc.).

Our family got a color TV in either Christmas 1969 or Christmas 1970.

The only times I remember seeing color TV before that were some summer nights c. 1962/63. My sister Leslie had a best friend, Christine, who lived next door to my maternal grandmother.

They, I, and maybe my baby sister would be at Christine’s house watching this piece of furniture. It was usually the Wonderful World of Disney and Bonanza on Sunday nights on NBC. ABC and CBS weren’t broadcasting in color until 1966.

So when we got our color TV, I remember seeing The Wizard of Oz for the first time in color. I had watched it a dozen times before that, but I never saw Oz that way before. I finally got the “horse of a different color” reference; the equine used to be different shades of gray.

Pharaohs?

2. Is there a particular song that sparks a childhood memory?

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you know that there are HUNDREDS, maybe THOUSANDS of songs I can identify from when I was 4 to 18. And most of them generate a memory, many of which I have written about.

I don’t think I’ve ever written about Wooly Bully by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. I liked the song a lot, especially the countdown: “Uno, dos, one, two, tres, quatro.” Here’s an oddity: per Billboard magazine, it was the number one song of 1965. However, it never reached number one on the weekly Billboard charts, though it did top Record World.

It wasn’t the song as much as the outfits I was struck by as a kid. These guys weren’t Middle Eastern/Egyptian, were they? No.

Regarding the lead singer, “most sources refer to Domingo Samudio’s ancestry as Mexican-American. However, a 1998 Chicago Tribune article described Samudio as of Basque/Apache descent. In a 2007 conversation with music writer Joe Nick Patoski, Samudio described his grandparents fleeing the Mexican Revolution and settling in Texas, where his family supported themselves working in the cotton fields.”

Learning

3. What is something an older family member taught you to do?

My paternal grandmother taught me canasta, and my paternal grandfather taught me gin rummy. My father’s cousin Ruth described my father at her home, feverishly trying to figure out my name and initials shortly after I was born.

4. Back in the day, what name brands would we have found in your family’s kitchen?

Joy dish detergent, Kellogg’s/Nabisco/General Mills cereals (I LOVED cereal), Fro-Joy ice cream (a truly inferior product), Pyrex bowls, General Electric (refrigerator, maybe?) Our stove/oven was ancient, and I have no idea what brand it was. Maybe my sisters recall.

5. As a child, did you collect anything (rocks, shells, stickers, etc.)?

Stamps, baseball cards, LPs. coins. I was really put out when some kid, the child of my parents’ friends, purloined some of my half-dollars.

Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.