Vice President Richard Nixon, right, “debates” with John F. Kennedy in a TV studio following the 2nd Presidential Debate (Oct. 8, 1960).  A month and a day later, Nixon declined to call for a recount of the election results.

 
In Pennsylvania, Stein shifts
from state to federal courts

TRICKY DICK AS STATESMAN

Bubba and the Oval Office BJ
 
By Alan Z. Forman

In the aftermath of the 1960 presidential election, when voting irregularities in Illinois and Texas threatened to overturn John Kennedy’s razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon, the losing Republican candidate reluctantly accepted the “will of the people” and refused to call for a recount.

“It’d tear the country to pieces,” the then-incumbent Vice President instructed his chief speechwriter and adviser, Bryce Harlow, who was pushing hard for a recount, and brushed aside all pleas to challenge the result.

“[We] can’t do that,” Nixon insisted.

Contesting the election by calling for a recount would place the legitimacy of Kennedy’s upcoming administration in question, Nixon said, and would be, among other things, “devastating to America’s foreign relations,” adding that, “What if I demanded a recount and it turned out that despite the voter fraud, Kennedy had still won?

“Charges of ‘sore loser’ would follow me through history and remove any possibility of a further political career.”

It may have been the future Watergate President’s finest hour; certainly it was Nixon at his most statesmanlike. No matter that his own dirty tricks in the 1960 campaign might well have come to light had he demanded a recount.

The likelihood that Nixon was as responsible for election irregularities that year is proved by the scandal that ultimately sunk his own presidency more than a decade later, when a team of inept burglars working in his behalf broke into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington D.C. three days before the final presidential primary that spring.

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Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, left, is the Libertarian Party’s nominee for vice president.  His running mate is ex-New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson.

 
When both nominees stink so bad,
what’s a reasonable voter to do?

A WAY TO VOTE FOR PRESIDENT
SO YOU CAN SLEEP AT NIGHT

Stealing the nomination and the party
 
By Alan Z. Forman
 
So what does a responsible voter do in a presidential election when the standard bearers of both parties are below standard?

When neither is likable? And when both of them are flagrant, unabashed liars and cheats?

When one is a fascist and the other a crook?

And when the third-party alternatives are deficient also?  The Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson, for example, is unable to name a single world leader! and has never heard of the City of Aleppo.

It’s a choice most of us wish we didn’t have to make:  Between Scylla and Charybdis, a rock and a hard place; between a liar and a bigot, an untrustworthy woman and a less than trustworthy man.

So does one sit-out the election and not vote? Or do you suck it up, hold your nose, and pull the lever for whichever Republican or Democrat you believe is the “lesser of two evils”? the one that stinks the least, that’s only somewhat repugnant… and then despair at what is happening in 21st Century America?

Or do you vote for a third-party nominee or independent who hasn’t got a snowball’s chance of winning? Or maybe write-in the name of some other individual who isn’t actually on the ballot? — and hasn’t got a snowball’s chance of winning either?

In effect, a so-called “wasted vote.”

At latest count there are six third-party candidates to choose from, plus 19 independents, all virtually unknown to the voting public. And if you vote for any one of them, most people will probably say you’re wasting your vote.

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Journalist/author Bjarne Rostaing reviews a recent film with political implications
starring the venerable Helen Mirren, one of a select group of performers
to achieve the so-called ‘Triple Crown of Acting’ 
 

      “Eye in the Sky” is a 2015 British thriller starring Helen Mirren.

 
A sexy bitch on wheels
 
By Bjarne Rostaing
 
By now everyone knows who Helen Mirren is. She’s won all the awards, she’s convincing as a cop or a queen, and she’s always been hot.

Her exotic roots — Russian nobility and Romani gypsy on one side, solid English working class on the other — produced a reliably excellent presence with great range that sticks to the emotional ribs.

Over time Mirren has achieved an eminence that allows her great freedom, and she pretty much owns “Eye in the Sky,” a thriller driven by several potent and omnipresent realities: armed drones, establishment decision-makers stepping on themselves, and the 21st Century power woman.

That’s Mirren as Col. Katherine Powell, driven by the death of a colleague murdered by a terrorist group.

Her counterpoint is a room full of those decision-makers, including at least one lawyer and cabinet minister. They debate and dither while Mirren manipulates and the camera darts around the globe, Nairobi to Nevada to Pearl Harbor to London.

Under director Gavin Hood it becomes a frenzied dystopian arrhythmic mental chase. Everyone is focused on what’s happening inside a suicide-bomber house as Mirren grinds forward and the hesitant senior deciders weigh the political risk in that big rich room full of power.

It’s a simple decision and it needs to be quick. It has been an observe/capture mission.

Under extreme time pressure and imminent danger of multiple same-day suicide bombings, does it become a strike-and-kill? The “eye in the sky” is an armed drone ready to strike, and collateral damage becomes a critical issue, embodied in a child who will be injured or die in a strike.

Like the film’s tempo, this is cranked up to overkill, but it opens space for Somali actor Barkhad Abdi (of “Captain Phillips”), whose humane bearing and sensibility reveal the limitations of the robotic acting that the film’s tempo forces on the other actors.

Abdi takes time to be subtle, and his interlude with the child is a relief, humanizing the film and easing the pressure with his slower stronger personal rhythm. Where Mirren becomes her mission, he does not, but relates to the other actors in his sequences more naturally.

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Newspaper advertisement for New York City’s mid- town Piccadilly Hotel — back in the day (c.1950s).

  A Voice of Baltimore Feature, an excerpt from

      First-time novelist Margo Christie’s
       second work — Memory Motel —
                a novel in progress
      set in mid-20th Century Charm City
 
                             By Margo Christie
 
I stayed in New York that Easter weekend after all, though not in the loft above my aunt’s club like I wanted.

After returning to the loft to find her husband dead, Aunt Gen checked us into the Piccadilly Hotel. She ordered club sandwiches delivered to the room, then returned to the loft to report Uncle Gus’s death without taking a single bite of hers.

Never again did we speak of Paris. Dreamy as I’d gotten dropping a coin into a Times Square fortune-telling machine to see if my trip abroad would come true, it no longer mattered after she took her leave and I perched on the windowsill, gazing 12 stories down at the bright lights and ceaseless flow of Broadway.

“Paris has nothing on this City That Never Sleeps,” I thought. I was born in New York. With Uncle Gus gone, I might just return, live with Auntie and be her helper and companion. I felt horrible thinking this — so willing was I to jump into a dead man’s shoes — but I’d never seen Broadway from such a thrilling vantage point before.

I was in bed but awake, thinking of what I might say to convince Daddy and Mom to let me stay, when Aunt Gen returned, stepped out of her shoes and crawled, fully clothed, into the twin bed opposite mine.

In the morning, over toast and coffee in the café off the hotel lobby, she said, “I’m sorry you didn’t get to see the club, but I couldn’t rise to the occasion of showing off anything. I hope the hotel didn’t disappoint you.”

I shrugged, unable to admit that it thrilled me last night and thrilled me still. I could’ve lingered in that café for hours, watching tourists gawk at the sheer height of the hotel, feeling apart from them by virtue of a birth certificate.

“I’m off from school this week, Aunt Gen. Maybe I could stay with you, help you take care of things.”

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Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died this year.

A GRESHAM’S LAW OF POLITICS
 
By Bjarne Rostaing
 
The dust has cleared, we have a damaged Supreme Court, and the canonization of Celebrity Justice Antonin “Nino” Scalia is official. His greatness is accepted by all sectors of the political spectrum and the media, which would probably have amused him.

He might joke about how many friends he acquired by dying. His death put talking heads and politicians of all types under a spell, and they scrupulously avoided even the suggestion of any reservations, fearful of the man even in death and mindful of his powerful living allies.

His host at the time of his death was the brilliant but fatally compromised John Poindexter of Iran-Contra fame, pardoned by his partner in that crime, Bush 41.

But yes, Nino was a decent law-abiding and friendly man who meant no harm. No one seems to have disliked him much.

Good men may do great harm though, and do it with a sense of virtue that distracts criticism and seems to lend righteous substance to their actions.

Scalia did this:  Toppling the voting rights act (2013) opened the way to disenfranchise the poor, a serious attack on something taken for granted for many decades.

Conflating the rights of men with those of corporations (Citizens United) was a profound incursion on common sense, going against a long tradition of keeping unlimited money out of politics, and we’re seeing the results as billionaires like Adelson and the Kochs pour money into politics in hopes of buying the presidency.

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