Democrat Politics

Congressional Cowards is a weekly series highlighting the worst Donald Trump defenders on Capitol Hill, who refuse to criticize him—no matter how disgraceful or lawless his actions.

Multiple GOP lawmakers this week accused California Democrats of corruptly trying to redraw their state’s congressional districts, even though the Golden State is moving to redraw its maps only to counter the naked power grab Republicans pulled off in Texas with their mid-decade gerrymander.

House Speaker Mike Johnson—who supported the Texas redraw that could boot as many as five Democratic House members—said California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s planned redraw is “a slap in the face to Californians who overwhelmingly support the California Citizens Redistricting Commission.”

“Gavin Newsom should spend less time trampling his state’s laws for a blatant power grab, and more time working to change the disastrous, far-left policies that are destroying California,” Johnson wrote.

Funny, you could say basically the same thing about Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, who was more focused on rigging the midterms for Republicans and his dear leader, President Donald Trump, than helping his state recover from devastating flooding that killed dozens of people.

Other House Republican leaders also slammed California’s redraw while ignoring Texas’.

Texas state Sen. Juan Hinojosa, right, looks at a protester dressed as death standing outside of the House Chamber where Democratic Texas state Rep. Nicole Collier refuses to leave due to a required law enforcement escort on Aug. 19.

“The NRCC is prepared to fight this illegal power grab in the courts and at the ballot box to stop Newsom in his tracks,” National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson said in a statement, accusing Newsom of “disenfranchising voters to prop up his Presidential ambitions.”

But when he was asked earlier in August about Texas’ gerrymander, Hudson demurred.

“Well, it’s up to the states. I mean, I have nothing to do with it. I found out about it when you all wrote about it,” Hudson told reporters, adding later that he was “not “concerned” about California’s redraw. 

“Some of the states, they can do what they want to do,” Hudson said—before it was clear just how serious California was about countering Texas’ power grab.

Other Republicans cooked up their own criteria to claim that Democrats gerrymander more often than Republicans do, when the opposite is true.

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who comes from the state that fired the first shot in this latest redistricting war, also slammed California without taking a look in the mirror.

“Newsom & Obama are lying and they are hypocrites,” Cruz wrote in a post on X. “The most egregious gerrymanders in the country are virtually ALL Democrat.”

Cruz then made up a metric he thought would prove his point, asking Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to “Examine states with six or more congressional seats. Compile a list of the five most egregious gerrymanders, defined as the biggest delta between the percentage of the congressional delegation a party wins & the percentage that party wins statewide.”

“Which party is it?” Cruz asked Grok.

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, shown in 2022.

But Grok’s response showed that Republican-run states also have gerrymanders that are “egregious” based on Cruz’s metric, including Tennessee and Wisconsin. Not to mention, Cruz limiting the list to states with six or more districts leaves out a number of Republican-run states that heavily gerrymander their seats, including Oklahoma, Arkansas, Utah, and Iowa, among others.

Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley, whose House seat would be nuked if California voters allow the state to redraw its congressional map, also made the rounds on cable news shows to whine.

“When elections are fair, Republicans win. That’s why we should end gerrymandering and establish Voter ID nationwide. And it’s why Newsom is trying to permanently rig our elections by making himself Gerrymanderer-in-Chief,” Kiley said.

Of course, Democrats would love to end gerrymandering nationwide. It’s why it was in the first bill House Democrats introduced in 2019 after they took back control of the House in the 2018 midterms. Not a single Republican voted for the bill, and the GOP controlled Senate never brought it up for a vote.

Republican Rep. Ken Calvert, who would also be drawn out of his House seat in the California plan, also complained about California’s redistricting effort without complaining about what Texas did first.

“There is zero transparency as Sacramento Democrats scheme to eliminate the power of the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission,” Calvert moaned.

At the end of the day, Republicans are merely getting a taste of their own medicine in the redistricting wars. And it looks like they don’t like it.

A cartoon by Tim Campbell.

Related | Trump commands Smithsonian to pipe down on ‘how bad Slavery was’

The trend, connected to a cryptocurrency group’s moneymaking scheme, is yet another example of online misogyny escalating to real-world violence against women.

By Mariel Padilla for The 19th

For weeks, WNBA fans and players kept an eye out for green dildos flying toward the court, a phenomenon that started July 29 during a game between the Golden State Valkyries and the Atlanta Dream and occurred during at least six more games around the country. Players, coaches and fans expressed shock and frustration.  

Online, an entirely different group of people were following the games. Instead of focusing on the athletes, the cryptocurrency enthusiasts were posting derogatory comments about the WNBA and scanning the stands, awaiting the emergence of the green sex toy, based on a meme coin they launched the day before. They quickly claimed credit for some of the incidents, which were designed to create publicity for the meme coin and drive up its value. The meme coin’s value jumped 300 percent in its first week and traded over $1.3 million in a single day.

“We didn’t do this because we dislike women’s sports or, like, some of the narratives that are trending right now are ridiculous,” the spokesperson for the group told USA Today under the condition of anonymity. “Creating disruption at games is like, it happens in every single sport, right?”

Related | How algorithms, alpha males and tradwives are winning the war for kids’ minds

For these women athletes, it wasn’t a harmless disruption. It was a safety concern and deeply disrespectful. Humiliation, often lewd, has long been used to make women feel uncomfortable or diminish their athletic accomplishments. The WNBA has grown significantly in the last two seasons with record attendance, television viewership and financial investment. As they negotiate for higher salaries, players are fighting to be respected.

“Everyone’s trying to make sure the W is not a joke, and it’s taken seriously and then that happens,” Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever said during an August 5 podcast interview, referring to the first dildo being thrown. “I’m like, how are we ever going to get taken seriously?”

Sophie Cunningham takes a shot on August 17.

The 19th spoke with experts about the popularity of meme coins, how online jokes can lead to violence and what can be done about it.

What are meme coins?

A meme coin is a type of cryptocurrency based on Internet memes or viral trends. Because they are not tied to any specific technology or practical application, they are known for their extreme price volatility.

Molly White, a researcher, engineer and prominent writer who focuses on the cryptocurrency industry, said a lot of times meme coins come down to what cryptocurrency groups find funny.

“It’s often misogynistic and racist,” White said. “I think it’s part and parcel with a lot of the behavior that we see in the crypto sector, broadly speaking. A lot of the jokes and meme coins are fundamentally incredibly bigoted. The more shocking it is, the funnier people in these spaces tend to find it.”

White, a longtime critic of the crypto sector, said the financial terminology that is used in describing crypto can be misleading for the inexperienced and that many people lose a lot of money because they think they are investing and have protections similar to if they were investing in the stock market.

“It’s really not investing; the speculation that happens around meme coin is sort of more like gambling,” White said. “And not only that, it’s almost like gambling at a rigged casino. If you go to Vegas, and you’re in one of the legitimate casinos there, there are some requirements there. You can’t weight the dice, and they have to publish the odds at the tables so you know how lucky you have to be to win. That’s really not the case with a lot of crypto trading, which happens on marketplaces that have very shady backgrounds and do a poor job of controlling market manipulation.”

After President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission released a memo that neither “meme coin purchasers nor holders are protected by the federal securities laws.” Trump has openly embraced crypto since taking back the White House, and his family has generated around $4.5 billion in crypto wealth since January.

Related | Everyone in Trump world wants a cut of the family’s crypto grift

“We are really in a Wild West situation when it comes to meme coins because there is no oversight at this point in time,” White said.

Because meme coins rely on virality and face thousands of competitors every day, creators have been known to use extreme and sometimes illegal stunts to get attention and news coverage. People have set themselves on fire, shot guns out of windows and threatened to hurt themselves and their own families.

How does an online joke turn into a dangerous trend?

Pasha Dashtgard, director of research at the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University, said “the weaponization of humor” is a common strategy used by extremists to recruit people to their movement.

“This is how it works: Your entry into this space is as a joke, through memes and humor, with the idea that it gives you plausible deniability,” Dashtgard said. “Rather than being held to some academic or professional standard, you can write yourself off as ‘I’m just joking around, so if you’re offended, don’t follow up with me. Don’t hold me accountable.’”

But for the people who are being radicalized, Dashtgard said they understand — sometimes subconsciously — that this isn’t really a joke.

“It is a persuasive tactic. It is meant to be resonant — like a dog whistle of sorts,” Dashtgard said.

As the manosphere — a network of online influencers promoting male supremacy and far-right ideologies — has grown and become more mainstream, young men are being radicalized into male supremacy at higher rates. And a small contingent of those men are “taking their online behavior into the offline world,” Dashtgard said.

“This isn’t serious, until it is serious — and then it’s like disrupting a professional  basketball game in order to embarrass and humiliate these women who are working,” Dashtgard said, adding that it’s not a coincidence that the majority of WNBA athletes are Black women, who often face disproportionate hate.

Related | Why men are a problem for Democrats—and what we can do about it

As a researcher of extremism, Dashtgard said there are levels of radicalization before violence. For example, someone who is posting vitriol on 4chan is one level. Doxxing and harassing women reporters online would be a higher level. And if you are attending a nationally televised event like a WNBA game to throw a sex toy, that is an even higher level of investment in and endorsement of male supremacist ideology.

“So the next step is more violence: intimate partner violence, domestic violence, violence against random women on the street,” Dashtgard said. “If this [WNBA trend] becomes a phenomenon that a bunch of young people take up as funny, that then imperils women. It makes it less safe to be a woman in public — which is, in a sense, the broader aim.”

How concerned should WNBA fans be about attending future games?

Fans shouldn’t be too concerned.

White said it is challenging to sustain the value of a meme coin. There are thousands of new ones that emerge everyday, and even the more successful ones typically get headlines for only a couple of weeks before the joke gets old and attention and value drop. There are a few exceptions, such as the $TRUMP meme coin that the president announced days before his second inauguration. Shortly after launch, the coin’s value on paper soared to more than $10 billion.

It’s hard to predict which way things will go with any given meme coin.

Related | Trump’s crypto dinner was just as corrupt as you thought it would be

“Either the whole thing dies out with the early buyers making a lot of money, but the majority of people losing money,” White said. “Or the creators of the token are incentivized to up the ante and do something more dramatic and attention-getting.”

As it stands, the WNBA announced that anyone who intentionally throws an object onto the court would be immediately ejected and face a minimum one-year ban, in addition to being subject to arrest and prosecution by local authorities. Two people have been arrested so far.

What can be done to minimize violence and combat online misogyny and hate?

White warned that giving dangerous trends attention is oftentimes exactly what feeds their longevity. However, she said, when it becomes increasingly shocking and dangerous, the solution isn’t ignoring it and hoping it goes away. At some point, people need to discuss what’s happening.

“Rather than starving it of attention, I think it is a phenomenon that needs to be grappled with by broader society,” White said. “There’s going to be attention paid to it, whether it’s big media outlets or social media, and so giving it an accurate accounting is ultimately important.”

White said there should be consequences for bad behavior. Ideally, she said, there would be discouragement from external parties. Meme coin platforms — where the coins are bought, sold and launched — would monitor their platforms more. Organizations, like the WNBA, would eject people and prosecute criminal activity. And the federal government would tighten up regulations for meme coins.

Dashtgard said his focus is on engaging with susceptible young people before they are radicalized.

In partnership with the Southern Poverty Law Center, Dashtgard said PERIL released a guide last year called “Not Just a Joke.” The goal is to arm authority figures, like parents and educators, with the knowledge to reach young men without condemning or humiliating them. Dashtgard compared this method to a vaccine: You inoculate people against propaganda by giving them a small dose and explaining what persuasive mechanisms are being used to change their beliefs.

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“But the vaccine doesn’t work if you are already sick,” Dashtgard said. “If you are already bringing a dildo to a WNBA game, you are too far down the rabbit hole for a simple redirection.”

Then, Dashtgard said, the situation is more similar to rehabilitating alcohol or drug addicts.

“What can be done for a guy like that?” Dashtgard said. “Honestly, not much. He has to want to come out of this. Maybe it’s his wife, a girlfriend, a friend, a family member, a cousin, a brother, a best friend, somebody in his life has to help him recognize the harm that he’s doing. And he has to want to change.”

Well, thank god justice has prevailed, and President Donald Trump and his family will not be forced to pay the $500 million penalty in the New York state civil fraud case over their years-long habit of providing inflated property valuations to banks and insurers. Sure, the New York state appellate court that threw out the penalty made sure to say that Trump and his companies did indeed engage in fraud—but decided they don’t have to pay, because the penalty was an excessive fine that violated the Eighth Amendment. 

No, really. 

Trump is making the rounds and bragging about it, and why wouldn’t he? It’s quite the gift to a president who is basically stripping the nation to the studs and selling it off to crypto grifters to be told that any effort to punish his behavior is simply too much. But according to the court majority, the president and his sons juicing their valuations to deceive banks into giving them more money is “not the cataclysmic harm that can justify a nearly half billion-dollar award to the State.”

There is something so grim about seeing the court provide Trump with the protection of the law while he’s busy dismantling democracy. The tender solicitude for the pocketbook of Donald Trump, who has added over $3 billion to his personal fortune just since taking office in January, is nauseating, particularly when you contrast it with how gleeful Trump has been about forcing “settlements” that require universities to give the administration millions of dollars to access federal money they were already entitled to.

So, while a fine of roughly one-sixth of the amount Trump made in the past seven months is cruel and excessive, these extortions are, apparently, not. 

Not excessive: $221 million from Columbia University

The Trump administration squeezed Columbia University, accusing it of allowing antisemitism, for months until it coughed up nine figures so that federal grants would be restored. There’s no real justification for that figure—it’s just the amount the administration settled on as the amount it would accept in order to restore funding. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is busy bragging about how its $21 million portion of that is “the largest EEOC employment discrimination resolution publicly announced in nearly 20 years; the agency’s largest ever for victims of antisemitism; the most significant religious discrimination EEOC settlement for workers of any faith; and is part of a historic multi-agency settlement achieved by the Trump Administration”

Related | Columbia caves to Trump, setting dangerous precedent for higher ed

Sure, we don’t know exactly how many employees were victims of antisemitic discrimination and sure, the administration is fully in charge of how that $21 million gets allocated to those employees, but let’s just pretend that it’s a totally real number rather than just a way to step on Columbia and “woke” higher education institutions. 

Not excessive: Demanding $1 billion from UCLA

Yep, that’s the demand from the administration. The University of California-Los Angeles should give it $1 billion to get … $584 million in funding restored. With that threat hanging over its head, UCLA has entirely paused faculty hiring for next year. 

To be fair, it’s correct that this isn’t excessive—it’s extortion.  

Not excessive: An ever-increasing amount from Harvard University

The administration is furious that Harvard will not bend. Part of how you know that the proposed “fine” Harvard is expected to pay is intended to be punitive is that it’s an entirely arbitrary amount that Trump keeps juicing because he’s mad. A recent New York Times report revealed that Trump wants Harvard to pay $500 million because he wants it to be double what Columbia had to pay. 

That report also shows just how much Trump wants to punish Harvard for fighting back: “Every time they fight, they lose another $250 million. Harvard has to understand, the last thing I want to do is hurt them. They’re hurting themselves. They’re fighting.”

Yeah, this isn’t just excessive. It’s abusive. 

Not excessive: Taking Harvard’s intellectual property

In the war with the Ivy League school, the Trump administration has also threatened to take away patents Harvard holds that stem from federal grants. Under the Bayh-Dole Act, schools can receive patents for inventions stemming from federally funded research, but the government can step in and take ownership of those patents if certain conditions are violated.

According to the administration, Harvard failed to timely disclose inventions, didn’t use enough U.S.-based manufacturing, and didn’t maximize public benefits. Did the administration detail which patents, exactly, are at issue? Nope. Instead, Harvard is supposed to tell the administration about all of its patents and then maybe, maybe the administration will tell them more. 

How would this help address the alleged raging antisemitism that plagues Harvard? It wouldn’t! What it would do is allow the administration to have another point of leverage, another way to wreak harm so that Harvard will give up that same half-billion-dollar amount that was far, far too excessive for Trump to pay. 

Not excessive: $50 million to settle … nothing?

Where Donald Trump thinks that Donald Trump would have been irrevocably harmed by coughing up a fraction of his wealth, Donald Trump also thinks that forcing Brown University to pay $50 million in order to unlock millions in grants the administration illegally withheld is just dandy.

With Brown, the administration didn’t even bother to come up with a reason that it was withholding $500 million in already-allocated grants and contracts, nor did it say that Brown violated any law. Without that funding, Brown had to take out a $300 million loan in April and a $500 million loan in July. The administration knew full well that the loss of half a billion dollars in funding was catastrophic and used that to bring Brown to heel. Too bad Brown didn’t have the New York state appellate court looking out for it, like they looked out for poor Donnie. 

 Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 275 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.

I’ve written quite a few stories about the blues and blues artists over the years, both male and female, and examined multiple sub-genres that fit into the “blues” classification. But I’ve overlooked a blues performance style that has had a major impact on other genres of Black music over the years, and those who perform it. 

I’m talking about blues shouters. I happened to be compiling my weekend birthdays and departures segment (which you will find in the comments section below) and one of the artists in the group this weekend was Wynonie Harris, born Aug. 24, 1915, and who joined the ancestors on June 14, 1969, at the age of 53. His is a name you may or may not be familiar with, however history will remember him as a “blues shouter.”

Songwriter Dan Reifsnyder makes an introduction to shoutin’ on Soundfly:

If you’ve ever been to a lively church (I live in the South, they’re a dime a dozen around here) you’ll find that music is often the centerpiece of the experience. Music helps convey that communal sense of joy and ecstasy of being saved by the religious deities. And that was no less true hundreds of years ago, when most slaves were no doubt too poor to obtain decent instruments. Parishioners would use their whole bodies as instruments, and their voices “like trumpets.” Clapping, stomping, and dancing, their voices would rise above the rhythm, baring their souls to their God.

This was also before the microphone was invented.

In the days prior to amplified sound, auditory projection was a sheer necessity. The gospel singer soloist needed to be heard above the choir, above the din of the congregation, and above the stomping and shouting. This technique was even passed on to some of the great gospel singers of the 20th century — Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin and many others — whose voices could soar above the music with exceptional power.

[…]

Blues shouting is similar to that of those gospel singers trying to be heard over a choir or congregation. Blues frontmen had to use the full strength of their voices to be heard over the band, often a loud and wailing brass ensemble, and wild audiences; almost like underground nightlife opera singers.

More than just a simple curiosity however, blues shouting has been seen by some as a kind of bridge between blues and jazz, and that which directly led to the eventual creation of rock ‘n’ roll. In fact, Big Joe Turner — arguably one of the most prominent of blues shouters, alongside cohorts Jimmy Rushing, Walter Brown, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Wynonie Harris, and H-Bomb Ferguson — has been said to have directly helped create rock ‘n’ roll.

The All About Blues webpages also dive in with some “Blues Shouter” history:

The term ‘Blues Shouter’ means something more than the sum of the two individual words. It is true that most Blues Shouters belt out their songs at constant full volume, with very little regard for vocal dynamics. But to really qualify for the title, a performer also has to project a fervour and energy into their delivery that gets the audience on their feet and creates a certain electricity in the air. It is not that these people are incapable of singing quietly, it’s more that they can’t help themselves once they get going, lost in the moment, at the centre of the cyclone, given over to the power of the music.

[…]

In 1929, pianist Bill ‘Count’ Basie and singer Jimmy Rushing had joined Bennie Molen’s band in Kansas City, and when Bennie passed away a few years later, the Count took over, with ‘Mr. Five-by-Five’ out front. Jimmy’s voice was so loud he barely needed a microphone, and his extrovert stage presence generated huge excitement on the crowd. Their ‘Kansas City Stomp’ style is a direct fore-runner of ‘Jump-Blues’ which is itself in direct line of descent to ‘Rock’n’Roll’. Jay McShann was also leading a swing band out of Kansas City and in 1938, Big Joe Turner took the Kansas sound to Carnegie Hall for the ‘Spirituals to Swing‘ concert. In the years before WWII, many of the great ‘big bands’ led by Benny Goodman, Tiny Bradshaw, Chick Webb, and Lucky Millinder, had ‘shouters’ out front. Artie Shaw and the incomparable ‘Duke’ Ellington always remained rather more melodic, but even the Duke hired Big Joe for his touring ‘Jump For Joy Revue’.

Here’s their example—Jimmy Rushing with Count Basie: 

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And here is more about “Mister Five-by-Five” Jimmy Rushing, possibly the loudest Blues Shouter of all:

‘Mister Five-by-Five’ was probably the loudest Blues Shouter of them all. Fronting the Count Basie Orchestra, Jimmy Rushing was still capable of injecting great emotional force into his performances at a volume that barely needed a microphone! His careful phrasing brought the Blues into the repertoire of swing bands as Count Basie’s front-man; his up-tempo Jump-Blues was popular in the post-WWII era; he continued as a solo artist from 1950; and he appeared in films and at Festivals all over the world in the 60s. Jimmy got the ‘Five by Five’ tag from a 1942 song by Ella Mae Morse, and that big voice came from a very solid foundation.

The most well-known of the shouters was Big Joe Turner. Jim White at Blues Roadhouse writes:

The shouters were big-voiced, full-throated singers who just stood in front of the microphone and sang. They didn’t dance, or play guitar behind their back. They didn’t need to. The power and passion of their vocals said all they had to say. Their voices were their instruments, and they were masters of those instruments.

Turner is one of my favorites. He was born in Kansas City in 1911, the city where he later became a singing bartender, later a big band singer, and even later put his pipes to work and helped create rock ‘n’ roll.

“Rock and roll would have never happened without him,” songwriter Doc Pomus said in Rolling Stone, after Turner’s death in 1985. 

Here’s Big Joe Turner singing “Jump For Joy”:

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Warren Huart writes for Produce Like a Pro on Turner and the impact of “Shake Rattle and Roll”:

Joe Turner was born in Kansas City on May 18, 1911. Starting his career as a bartender at the age of 14, he earned a reputation as the “singing bartender” – a blues shouter who didn’t need a microphone. Turner’s bold stylings caught the attention of bandleaders like Bennie Moten, Andy Kirk and Count Basie, who all brought Turner on tour at different moments in his career.

In 1938, Turner, alongside the incredible piano talents of Pete Johnson, brought his blues singing to the famed Carnegie Hall concert “From Spirituals to Swing.” That same year, the pair wrote and recorded “Roll ‘em Pete” which has been credited as one of the most important tracks contributing to the development of rock ‘n roll, and was later inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. With both Turner and Stone working in the Kansas City scene in the heyday of the incredible dance bands that came out of that region, the two musicians’ careers certainly crossed paths. And their lives in New York City also intersected through Abramson and National Records.

But in 1954, they came together to create another foundational track of rock ‘n roll. Stone recalled: “In January or February, 1954, Herb Abramson said to me, ‘We got Joe Turner comin’ in to record and we need an uptempo blues for a change.’ I threw a bunch of phonetic phrases together – ‘shake, rattle, and roll,’ ‘flip, flop, and fly’ – and I came up with thirty or forty verses. Then I picked over them.”

“Shake Rattle and Roll” is a classic 12-bar blues song; set up in a verse-chorus form.  The chorus shares the title lyrics, repeating the phrase “shake rattle and roll” with Turner’s iconic vocal shouting.  It has a laid back, but up-tempo groove, which gives it that “dance-ability” that Abramson was looking for.

Here it is live:

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Before I go much farther, I want to make it clear that though most of the shouter lists only seem to mention men, I want to include the other side of the aisle, starting with Big Mama Thornton. Blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter Joe Bonamassa writes:

Big Mama Thornton aka Powerhouse blues vocalist Willie Mae Thornton was born in a rural town outside of Montgomery, Alabama. She started singing in church and taught herself how to play harmonica and the drums, later touring throughout the south before moving to Houston to start her recording career.

Her robust voice and confident stage presence earned her the nickname “Big Mama”. In 1952, she scored her the highlight of her career with a 12-bar blues song titled “Hound Dog”. The hit topped the R&B Chart for seven weeks.

Although Big Mama was the first to record the song, Elvis Presley also struck a monster hit with his version. She was also the first to sing “Ball and Chain”, later made famous by Janis Joplin. So, yeah Elvis just have a seat and Big Mama will show you how it’s really done.

In case you missed it I celebrated her right here. You can hear the power of her shout in “Bumble Bee,” which was written by Memphis Minnie.

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A 1986 New York Times obituary, written by Jon Pareles references another female shouter, Sippie Wallace:

Sippie Wallace, a major blues singer and songwriter of the 1920s, died Saturday at Sinai Hospital in Detroit. She was 88 years old.

Mrs. Wallace, known as the ”Texas Nightingale,” was one of the leading blues shouters of the 1920s – a contemporary of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey – and she wrote such earthy, self-assertive blues songs as ”Women Be Wise” and ”Mighty Tight Woman,” songs that were embraced by feminists in the 1970s. She abandoned blues for gospel in the 1930s, but returned to secular music in the 1960s. During the 1970s, her songs were rediscovered by the singer Bonnie Raitt, who helped revive Mrs. Wallace’s performing career.

Here’s Wallace singing “Suitcase Blues”:

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Another sista who could shout ‘em down was Koko Taylor, who was born Cora Taylor Harris in 1928 in Memphis, Tennessee:

Accurately dubbed “the Queen of Chicago blues” (and sometimes just the blues in general), Koko Taylor helped keep the tradition of big-voiced, brassy female blues belters alive, recasting the spirits of early legends like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Big Mama Thornton, and Memphis Minnie for the modern age. Taylor’s rough, raw vocals were perfect for the swaggering new electrified era of the blues, and her big hit “Wang Dang Doodle” served notice that male dominance in the blues wasn’t as exclusive as it seemed.

Taylor was a 2004 NEA National Heritage Fellow.      

Here’s “Wang Dang Doodle” live with Little Walter:

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Barbria DeAnne posted this short bio of Tayor:

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Switching back to the brothers, H-Bomb Ferguson was a shouter for sure, as well as a pianist and songwriter who was born in 1929 in Charleston, South Carolina.

How to define the inimitable persona of H-Bomb Ferguson? Someone said: “If you could combine the vocal style of blues shouter Joe Turner, the unbridled showmanship of Little Richard and the head gear of a well-aged Rick James, the end result would be something like H-Bomb Ferguson.” H-Bomb is the last performing of the original U.S. blues shouters. He recorded extensively in the 1950s for such labels as Derby, Atlas, Savoy, Prestige, Specialty and Federal. He then retired in the 1970s. One day he got an idea to perform in wigs and began a comeback. It included bringing the house down on the Chicago Blues Festival in 1992. Things have looked up ever since.

[…]

Unique as the name was, H-Bomb was pushed to imitate the blues shouter style of Wynonie Harris. They were often paired in billing, with on stage antics of H-Bomb mimicking Wynonie. Though they were closely associated, they were not close, and H-Bomb lobbied to be able to create his own style. About his early recordings, H-Bomb says : “They were going for a big band sound. I always loved the sax. Bass, piano, and four horns were used. And I played with some of the best! Guitar played a minor part. I wasn’t playing piano in most of these recordings. At the time, they said my voice came out much better if I stood at the mike and didn’t play the piano.” H-Bomb made the circuit of regional clubs, singing and telling jokes in vaudeville tradition. He worked with Ruth Brown, Clarence “”Gatemouth” Brown, Willis “Gatortail” Jackson and Bullmoose Jackson, and did comedy with Redd Foxx. 

Here’s his hit, “Good Lovin”:

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A documentary, “The Life and Times of H- Bomb Ferguson” was released in 2006.

Last, but not least on my list (I’m running out of space, but will cover more in the comments section below) is Wynonie Harris:

Black music has known a vast number of larger than life characters. Few came larger than Wynonie Harris, the loud-talking, fast-living, womanising, hard-drinking and witty son of a gun. But he was a true original and arguably the greatest of the blues shouters. From 1948 until 1952 he was one of the biggest selling recording artists in the jukebox dominated rhythm and blues market.

Wynonie Harris was born in Omaha, Nebraska, to an unwed 15-year old mother and an American Indian father that he saw only once in his life. Despite accounts that Harris spent two years as a pre-med student at Creighton University, he was actually a high-school dropout who broke into showbiz as a dancer and a club emcee. He sang in Omaha nightclubs and was a bit of a local celebrity, but it wasn’t until he moved to Los Angeles in 1940 that his musical career began to gain some momentum.

[…]

Though the quality of his recordings was undiminished, Harris’s star dimmed significantly with the advent of rock and roll. He helped to create the new music, but, try as he might, Wynonie could not sustain a career in rock & roll. At 40, he was just too old to be a rock and roll star. Teenage audiences saw him as a dirty old man singing dirty old songs about sex and alcohol. But as late as October ’54, Harris still had the arrogance to claim “I’m the highest-paid blues singer in the business. I’m a $1,500 a week man. I started the present vogue of rocking blues tunes.” (Interview with Tan magazine).

After one Atco single in 1956, he briefly returned to King in 1957. In the 1960s he recorded for Roulette and Chess, with no success. He was a sick man by then, but he kept on drinking and carrying on. His last known appearance was at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem in 1967, where he stunned the audience with his power- packed performance. On June 14, 1969, Wynonie Harris died of esophageal cancer at the USC Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was only 53

One of my Harris favorites is “Grandma Plays the Numbers”:

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YouTube Video

Hope you were shouted out of your seats today. Join me in the comments below and post some of your favorites. 

A cartoon by Clay Jones.

Related | Let’s check in on where Trump is deporting people this month

Most rational human beings who know anything about American history believe that the practice of slavery was one of the United States’ original sins, and that it was allowed for too long. Untold millions suffered due to the enslavement of human beings across generations in a way that still has very real lingering effects.

Which makes slavery the most bewildering topic for Republicans to want to explore the upside of.

President Donald Trump made clear on Tuesday that he doesn’t like all this negative talk about slavery, and complained that the Smithsonian museums are too “woke.” 

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” Trump bleated on Truth Social.

White House senior associate Lindsey Halligan appeared on Fox News to underscore Trump’s message.

“What I saw when I was going through the museums personally was an overemphasis on slavery,” said the white woman. “And I think there should be more of an overemphasis on how far we’ve come since slavery.”

Related | Trump commands Smithsonian to pipe down on ‘how bad Slavery was’

In an Aug. 13 appearance on CNN, pro-MAGA celebrity trainer Jillian Michaels argued that museums like the Smithsonian give too much weight to the role of pro-white racism when discussing slavery.

“You cannot tie imperialism and racism and slavery to just one race, which is pretty much what every single exhibit does,” Michaels said.

Slavery in America was practiced for over 200 years. It involved the subjugation of Black people forced into labor for the benefit of white people. Slaves built the foundations of America’s economic supremacy and were not paid a dime for it, and many lost their lives in the process. These are not facts up for dispute or quibbling around the edges. It happened, it was well-documented, and everyone who sets foot in the country is surrounded by the aftermath of this debilitating, inhuman practice.

The MAGA drive to whitewash slavery didn’t appear out of nowhere. Trump is a racist who has pursued a racist agenda. His administration has sought to roll back or purge civil rights-era gains. Under his orders, the U.S. government is in the middle of a push to absolve and even honor the pro-slavery Confederacy. And the right wing has long sought to deemphasize slavery’s severity and downplay its ripple effect.

For instance, Republican-run states like Florida and Texas have pushed school curricula attempting to educate children on the purported upside of slavery. The Florida version of this was materials that raved over how “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” In Texas, the thought process was that children shouldn’t learn about the use of Black slaves to build notable structures, like Thomas Jefferson’s famed Monticello estate.

Conservative politics has for decades been focused on pushing white voters with racist sympathies to vote red. This has led the GOP to emphasize that group’s grievances, including praise for the Confederacy and made-up issues like “white genocide.” Arguing that slavery wasn’t all bad or at a minimum arguing that there was something positive about keeping millions of Black people as property fits within that morally bankrupt paradigm.

Conservative leaders and Republican voters have made it clear for a long time that they prefer fairy tale narratives about America’s past over the truth—because that truth could expose the legacy of white supremacy.

Of course this is not reality. Slavery was a massive mark on America and it was followed up by policies like Jim Crow and redlining, along with many of the ideas at the center of modern Republican politics. It is not a coincidence that after America twice elected a Black man named Barack Obama as president, that this generated backlash with many white voters and led to the ascendancy of a racist like Trump.

No matter how the right tries to rewrite reality for schoolchildren or manipulate museum exhibits, the facts will never change. Slavery was wrong, it was an integral part of the foundation of America, and everyone who lives in this country has to deal with its dark legacy every day of their lives.

A cartoon by Clay Bennett.

Related | Texas GOP saddles Democrats with armed minders and permissions slips

By Stephanie Armour for KFF Health News

Dining under palm trees on a patio at Mar-a-Lago in December, President-elect Donald Trump reassured chief executives at pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly and Pfizer that anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wouldn’t be a radical choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services.    

“I think he’s going to be much less radical than you would think,” Trump said later that month during a news conference at his Palm Beach, Florida, resort.

Eight months have passed, and Kennedy is intensifying his attacks on the vaccine system.

High on his list of targets: a federal vaccine compensation program that settles injury claims. His strategy could bankrupt or diminish the fund, some legal scholars and public health leaders say, saddling pharmaceutical companies with liability risks and costs that would compel them to stop making vaccines altogether.

“It’s a radical agenda,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. “He’s using a bunch of different mechanisms and there really are no guardrails. People are going to catch on but it’s not going to be enough to stop the waves of deaths, and deaths of children.”

Related | Things are going great under RFK Jr.—why do you ask?

Kennedy has said changes to the U.S. vaccine system are needed because, he asserts without evidence, immunizations are linked to autism, neurotoxicity, allergies, and death. He is a leader of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, an informal campaign that eschews traditional medicine and espouses “medical freedom.” Many adherents oppose vaccines and believe they are unsafe despite scientific evidence to the contrary.

Kennedy has acknowledged he wants to reform the vaccine fund, known as the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, writing July 28 on the social platform X that “the VICP is broken, and I intend to fix it.” HHS is working with the Department of Justice to revamp the program, which shields drugmakers from most liability over injuries.

HHS didn’t respond to a request to speak with Kennedy, but agency officials said he isn’t opposed to immunizations.

“Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine — he is pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability,” HHS spokesperson Vianca Rodriguez Feliciano said in an email.

Yet behind the scenes, Kennedy has been laying the groundwork to restrict the availability of widely used immunizations, according to people familiar with internal discussions who asked not to be identified because they’re not authorized to speak on the topic.

A Multipronged Strategy

The strategy began taking shape in the spring. The first step: Raise unfounded questions about the safety of vaccines. At a Cabinet meeting in April, Kennedy told Trump that HHS was undertaking a massive study that would identify the cause of rising autism diagnoses by September.

Kennedy tasked David Geier, a researcher who’s repeated the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism, to oversee the work, according to media reports.

Kennedy then doubled down by questioning the use of aluminum, which is added to many vaccines to help boost the immune response. He linked it to allergies at a July meeting of governors, even though a recent study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found no connection. He’s widely expected to ask a federal vaccine advisory committee to conduct a review.

The autism research and concerns about aluminum were early salvos in the push to go after the compensation fund, according to two of the people.

That fund provides money to people for injuries from vaccines and has paid out more than $5 billion since it was established in 1988, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration.

Related | RFK Jr. cut grants for autism research while vowing to find a cause

Before filing a lawsuit in court, injured individuals bring their claims to the program’s nonjury vaccine court, which reviews evidence. The fund provides compensation from a small excise tax on vaccines.

Compensation is determined in part by a table maintained by HRSA and overseen by the HHS secretary. It lists each vaccine and associated injuries and encompasses routine vaccinations recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that are subject to the excise tax. The injuries include anaphylaxis and encephalitis. People who experience such injuries within a certain time after getting a specific vaccine can get money.

Kennedy wants to get autism or allergies added to that document, according to two people familiar with internal discussions and concerns raised publicly by some vaccine developers and former regulators. He could accomplish the goal if HHS-led research blames vaccines for autism, for example, or if a federal vaccine advisory panel recommends against aluminum in vaccines, according to some legal scholars.

“Given the rate of autism, if a lot of cases are brought, that could bankrupt the program,” said Dorit Reiss, a professor at University of California Law San Francisco.

If that were to happen, pharmaceutical companies could stop producing the immunizations, which don’t tend to be very profitable, rather than get entangled in drawn-out, expensive lawsuits from claimants who can’t get money because the federal vaccine injury fund has run dry, some legal experts and vaccine developers said.

“The compensation fund, if it’s gone, would impact decisions to proceed or not to proceed,” said David Dodd, president and CEO of GeoVax Labs, a biotechnology company developing vaccines and immunotherapies.

A federal vaccine advisory panel could also recommend against aluminum in shots, forcing drugmakers to make costly reformulations or exit the market.

Related | Chronically ill? In Kennedy’s view, it might be your own fault

Kennedy has placed people around him to execute the strategy. He’s pushed to get vaccine skeptics in decision-making positions at the CDC, which recommends vaccines, and the Food and Drug Administration, which approves them.

He also tapped leaders in the anti-vaccine movement to vet candidates for him.

The outcome has been regulatory and policy decisions that have winnowed vaccine access and development.

HHS this month said it was halting $500 million in grants and contracts for the development of mRNA vaccines, including an improved, more durable covid mRNA vaccine.

The federal government stopped recommending covid shots for healthy pregnant women and children, bypassing input from a vaccine advisory committee that traditionally would have weighed in.

And Kennedy reconstituted that committee with his own handpicked members, including vaccine skeptics, and removed the American Medical Association, American Nurses Association, and other industry groups that served as committee liaisons. The modified panel recommended against flu vaccines containing a preservative erroneously linked to autism.

The White House Calls

Kennedy’s determination to keep vaccine skeptics in oversight positions played out in a deal he recently made with Trump and his staff, according to two people familiar with the situation. The arrangement came together on a Sunday night in July when Kennedy got a call from the White House.

The subject was Vinay Prasad, a top vaccine regulator at the FDA. He had recently touched off a wave of industry criticism for playing a role in the agency’s decision to ask biotech company Sarepta Therapeutics to halt shipments of a gene therapy over safety concerns.

Vinay Prasad

Social media posts and conservative commentators whipped up a furor. Laura Loomer, a far-right provocateur, said July 21 on X that Prasad should be fired and called him “a self-proclaimed progressive liberal and Bernie Sanders fanboy,” referring to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Congressional lawmakers began peppering the White House with questions.

The furor reached Trump, who wanted Prasad out, according to the people. But Kennedy was concerned about losing Prasad. He felt he needed a critic of immunizations overseeing vaccines at the agency.

So Kennedy struck a deal. Prasad would be asked to resign as head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which regulates vaccine products and biologics such as gene therapies. And the center would be divided into two operations, with Kennedy empowered to select the person overseeing vaccines.

Some public health leaders publicly shared details of the arrangement and raised concerns about its potential impact. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in an Aug. 1 interview on CNBC that he thought it “would be very destructive to the agency.”

After leaving the agency in July, Prasad is now returning, though it is unclear if his role has changed.

Recently, Kennedy was sued by Ray Flores, senior outside counsel for Children’s Health Defense. An anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy, Children’s Health Defense is funding the suit, which claims Kennedy failed to launch a task force to study vaccine safety that it says is required to report findings to Congress. But Kennedy and his allies view the lawsuit as friendly, according to one person familiar with the matter, because it is seeking an outcome that he wants.

HHS on Aug. 14 announced it was reviving a federal panel, disbanded in 1998, to provide oversight of pediatric vaccines.

Kennedy’s work against vaccines has triggered unfriendly lawsuits too, including one brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other public health groups. His recent decision to halt funds for mRNA vaccine development yielded a swell of social media criticism.

“This is reckless. This is dangerous. This will cost lives. We must fight back,” Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) said Aug. 5 on X.

“I’ve tried to be objective & non-alarmist in response to current HHS actions – but quite frankly this move is going to cost lives,” Jerome Adams, who was U.S. surgeon general during the previous Trump administration, said Aug. 5 on the same platform.

Kennedy and his backers remain undeterred. In a counterpunch, his supporters are launching an unprecedented public relations campaign to promote the HHS secretary, spurring speculation that he may be mulling a 2028 presidential run.

The nonprofit MAHA Action held a call in July to energize Kennedy supporters and initiated a six-figure ad campaign extolling Kennedy and Trump administration health initiatives.

“Make no mistake, this is a revolution that will change the face of public health policy,” Tony Lyons, president of MAHA Action, said in a statement. “Americans are demanding radical transparency and gold standard science.

Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back.

Of course a 90-year-old agency is unconstitutional, you rubes

It’s nice of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to give a helping hand to the ongoing destruction of a functioning administrative state and the complete collapse of protections for workers. 

And it’s tough to think of a better way to do it than ruling that the structure of a 90-year-old congressionally created agency that forms the backbone of labor relations in America was probably just a ghost all along.

Yes, according to the worst federal appellate court, the structure of the National Labor Relations Board is likely unconstitutional.

A win for Elon Musk.

The court agreed with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which had argued that the NLRB impermissibly limited the president’s ability to remove board members and the administrative law judges who handle labor cases. 

The NLRB has been in the crosshairs of corporations like Amazon and SpaceX, which hate labor oversight and want it gone. 

Lucky for them—though not for the rest of us—their interests dovetail with President Donald Trump’s goal of eliminating all restrictions on his power. And since the Supreme Court already let him illegally remove one of the appointed NLRB members months ago, the fix was pretty much in. 

9th Circuit makes sure a week doesn’t go by without letting the administration kick more people out

On Wednesday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals swept aside a lower court ruling that was barring Trump from stripping Temporary Protected Status from over 60,000 people from Nepal, Nicaragua, and Honduras. 

Congress created the program to allow undocumented immigrants to legally stay in the United States if the Department of Homeland Security determines that conditions in their home country are too dangerous to return to. 

Trump and Vice President JD Vance spent the 2024 campaign whipping racists into a frenzy 

over Haitians with TPS status and, once they took office, set about stripping the status from everyone their racist little hobgoblin minds could think of. 

Related | Vance knew Haitian immigrants weren’t eating pets—and lied anyway

Of course, there has been no court ruling affirming that the administration can do this. 

Instead, there are court rulings that they cannot, but since the Supreme Court allowed Trump to strip protected status from nearly 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants while litigation continues, the administration is just going to keep throwing more people out. 

The administration’s argument here was the usual: It is extremely harmed if it can’t do what it wants when it wants, and the courts can’t even review their decision to remove TPS status. Sure seems like the greater harm would be to the people who are being deported en masse. 

Farewell again, Ten Commandments—but also likely not for long

Two weeks ago, it was Arkansas getting slapped down for its unconstitutional law mandating the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. This week, it was Texas. 

A granite Ten Commandments monument stands on the ground of the Texas Capitol.

U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, with the patience of a saint, wrote a 55-page decision to try to painstakingly explain basic civics to the state of Texas, which has already appealed. 

The Texas law would have required the display of the King James Version of the Ten Commandments in schools, and was basically identical to a Louisiana law the 5th Circuit struck down earlier this year. 

The whole point of these cases is to get something to a theocratic Supreme Court in the hopes the right-wing majority will sign off on jamming conservative evangelical Protestantism into public schools, but at least for now, we have Biery’s objectively funny decision to bring us joy:  

Even though the Ten Commandments would not be affirmatively taught, the captive audience of students likely would have questions, which teachers would feel compelled to answer. That is what they do. Teenage boys, being the curious hormonally driven creatures they are, might ask: “Mrs. Walker, I know about lying and I love my parents, but how do I do adultery?” Truly an awkward moment for overworked and underpaid educators, who already have to deal with sex education issues, … and a classic example of the law of unintended consequences in legislative edicts.

Yeah, unfortunately it’s legal for military attorneys to do civilian prosecutions

As the Trump administration continues its efforts to subdue the residents of the nation’s capital, there’s news that 20 members of the Judge Advocate General Corps, known as JAG, from the Department of Defense have been tapped to work as special assistant United States attorneys—aka federal prosecutors—and will prosecute civilian crimes. 

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro

This seems bad, and it probably is, but unlike so many other things the administration is doing, this one is actually legal.  During the first Reagan administration, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded this was unlawful, but then Congress passed a law authorizing it. 

Presumably, this is also in part because Jeanine Pirro, Fox News host turned United States attorney for the District of Columbia, just whined about how her office was understaffed. 

It is, indeed, thanks to the massive purge of prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases. There’s an additional benefit to using JAG attorneys as your temp agency: unlike civilians, they can’t just quit. 

This is likely the first time we’ve seen “Calvinball” in a Supreme Court opinion, but it won’t be the last

In an absolute mess of a decision, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the administration can cancel $783 million in National Institute of Health grants. 

Per the 5-4 conservative majority, the states and private plaintiffs being arbitrarily stripped of millions in public health do have recourse: They can go to the Court of Federal Claims, which is the court you go to for contractual disputes with the government. 

Of course, this isn’t a contractual dispute. These are grants that have already been issued and approved. 

Per a different 5-4 majority, however, the underlying reason the administration gave for the terminations—that they represented forbidden wokeness, basically—was likely unlawful. That weird result is because Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the majority in saying that the reason for the grant terminations is unlawful, but also joined the majority in saying they can go ahead and do it anyway. Got it. 

“Calvinball” shows up in Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s blistering dissent: “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”

Exactly that.