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A Primer on TV & Film Adaptation for Writers (Where the Rules Change Often)
November 2, 2022 by Jeanne Veillette Bowerman 7 Comments

Today’s post is by Jeanne Veillette Bowerman < https://jeannevb.com/ >  (@jeannevb < https://twitter.com/jeannevb >) of Pipeline Artists < https://pipelineartists.com/ > . 

Hollywood is an odd place and ever-changing. If your literary agent or publisher wants to pitch your book to producers, managers or networks, they need to know the rules—or at least, the rules of the day.

But don’t get too stuck on them, because … you guessed it … they’ll change. Often.

Back in the day, an agent or publisher could pitch your book over the phone or mail a copy off for consideration. Now, the execs prefer a little more detail and insight before considering your story for an adaptation.

The million-dollar question: What does Hollywood want in a story?

Truth is, sometimes they don’t even know until they hear it. It’s a gut check of something that’s not only marketable, but also gives them tingles when they read the logline.

The elements of a great pitch package
Unless your rep has a personal relationship with a Hollywood executive, they’ll need a formal pitch package, which includes a logline, short synopsis, treatment, and possibly a pitch deck.

By no means is this list a rigid formula. As noted above, the rules change constantly, and each executive and company have different preferences. I know many who decide just on the logline alone.

Unlike the literary world, submission requirements are not always listed on the company’s site. One size definitely does not fit all, but if you have the following materials, your team will be ready for any question thrown at them.

Logline
This is the most important part of your pitch and the hardest to write. A compelling logline alone will make or break your chances. Oftentimes, an exec will read the two-to-three sentence logline and decide from there, regardless of the pitch package you’ve spent countless hours creating. I know. A lot of work for potentially no gain, so spend the time to create a standout logline.

Synopsis
A synopsis tests the concept’s strength, so don’t just use the blurb on the back of the book. Boil it down for them, without getting into the weeds. Keep it high level, showing complex characters, lots of potential for conflict, and a strong ending.

Treatments
These used to be more commonplace for both selling a feature screenplay or a book for adaptation. A treatment is just a lengthy synopsis of the book, usually 5 to 25 pages long, depending on the complexities of the story and the type of adaptation you’re pitching (feature film, TV series, limited series). Basically, it’s a well-written outline of the book. Even though they are not always needed, it’s helpful to have one in your back pocket.

The Book
The goal is always to get them to read the book, but don’t expect a high-level exec to read it. They won’t. They’ll pass it onto an assistant or someone in their coverage department to read and give them the bottom-line notes—pass or recommend.

Pitch Deck
Rather than craft a video to pitch an adaptation, it’s common to use a pitch deck (slideshow). Canva is a fantastic resource, full of free images and tools. The purpose of the pitch deck is simply to make it easier for the execs to get a feel for the tone of the book. These execs are visual people and pictures grab them. A slide deck can do the job of a video pitch for a lot less money, time, and aggravation.

Do you need the screenplay written in advance?
Yes and no.

Unless the author understands screenwriting, they shouldn’t write the script, especially when pitching a TV series. A pilot script (the screenplay for the very first episode) requires deep understanding of screenwriting, as you’re building the entire world, introducing characters, plus telling a compelling story in just 60 pages. That requires great understanding of the craft.

But … yes, you can write the script, even if it’s not great.

I know that seems counterintuitive, but developing a story costs a lot of money. If the execs have even a bad script for a great book, pre-approved by the author, the cost savings are astronomical. They already know what the author is willing to cut without a battle. Then, they simply hire a professional screenwriter to finish the job. In the ideal world, it’s not about control. It’s about a great story being told in a different medium that the author loves, too. If the author hates the adaptation, they’re less likely to promote it to their fan base—a fan base Hollywood is counting on to purchase movie tickets.

So, if you have a solid screenplay, it can greatly improve your odds of selling the rights. Plus, you then get at least a “Written by” credit, which means more money. That’s one of the reasons my company helps the novelist craft a solid script for submission to executives. (See the Book Pipeline Adaptation Contest.) Writers learning how to crossover into other mediums—whether it’s poetry, short stories, novels or scripts—only makes them more valuable as an artist. It never hurts to have as many tools in your toolbox as possible.

If your book isn’t a best seller or overflowing with glowing reviews, don’t panic. Of course it’s definitely worth mentioning if you have a robust amount of positive reviews. Strong book sales would definitely help, too. But if the producer doesn’t like the concept, they won’t care how many reviews or sales it has.

Parting advice
Like many industries, Hollywood is built on connections. You often hear, “It’s who you know.” While every author needs assistance connecting with a decision maker, be wary of any small press claiming they can help pitch the books they publish via a “sister” arm of their business. This possibly comes with a fee. Some of these operations require lots of book reviews, an angle to get the authors to encourage friends to buy and review the book that they themselves published and profit from. So take a deep research dive into anything that feels off to you. Trust your gut. There are a lot of scams out there.

Selling a story to Hollywood is much harder than getting a book published. After all, it costs millions of dollars to produce a TV show or feature film. But it only takes one “yes.” Do your research, surround yourself with a great team, find people who understand the industry and craft who have a track record and solid reputation, and you’ll dramatically increase your odds of success.

MY COMMENT

great post, question Ms/Mrs Bowerman, is Nollywood/the Various Woods in India/The European cinemas's have the same rules. Something tells me they don't, but do you know?
if any who read this is interested, I have a screenplay free to read online, please tell me what you think at my blog below
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-nyotenda

ARTICLE

https://www.janefriedman.com/a-primer-on-tv-film-adaptation-for-writers-where-the-rules-change-often/

Former Racial Justice Task Force chair explains ballot questions
By Deanna Garcia New York City
PUBLISHED 8:40 PM ET Oct. 27, 2022
With voters hitting the polls this weekend for early voting, New Yorkers will also have the chance to weigh in on four ballot proposals.

Three of the proposals are for city voters only. They explore how to create a statement of values for the government to form a racial equity office and define how the cost of living is calculated in the city.

The Racial Justice Task Force, formed under former Mayor Bill de Blasio in the wake of the 2020 protests after George Floyd’s murder, recommended these citywide questions.

Jennifer Jones Austin, former chair of the city’s Racial Justice Commission, joined Bobby Cuza on “Inside City Hall” Thursday to explain these proposals.

“We can’t policy our way out of racism, we can’t program our way out of racism,” she said. “But what we can do is look at the structures that have birthed it and perpetuate it and when we look at the laws, the New York City, the charter, is our Constitution.”
Article
https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/inside-city-hall/2022/10/28/former-racial-justice-task-force-chair-explains-ballot-questions
MY THOUGHTS

Trying to get equality financially between parties who started unevenly is the question. i ask, have any two peoples in one country repaired one being the oppressed with the other the oppressor to become equal kin? does anyone know?

Democrats block Latina Republican from joining Congressional Hispanic Caucus
Opinion by Brad Polumbo - Oct 27

Rep. Mayra Flores, a Texas Republican, made history after taking office as the first female member of Congress who was born in Mexico. You’d think that partisanship aside, the Latina Republican would be considered a win for diversity in Congress.

You’d be wrong. The Democrat-controlled Congressional Hispanic Caucus is reportedly blocking Flores after she requested to join it.

“Flores requested to join CHC in early October and was rejected shortly thereafter,” Townhall’s Julio Rosas reports. “Flores is not only first Mexican-born woman to serve in Congress, but she also represents a district along the U.S.-Mexico border that is overwhelmingly Latino. CHC used to have [Republican] members but they went on to create the Congressional Hispanic Conference as their own version of the CHC in the 2000s.”

At first glance, this doesn’t make much sense. Flores is indeed Hispanic, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is not supposed to be a partisan entity.

Per its website, the group exists to address “national and international issues” and “craft policies that impact the Hispanic community,” and “serve as a forum for the Hispanic Members of Congress to coalesce around a collective legislative agenda.” There’s nothing on its about page about only being open to progressives or members of a certain political party. Yet the group denied Flores membership in what’s clearly a partisan snub.

Flores isn’t having it.

“As the first Mexican-born American Congresswoman, I thought the Hispanic Caucus would be open in working together,” Flores remarked of the snub. “This denial once again proves a bias towards conservative Latinas that don’t fit their narrative or ideology.”

It’s hard to see any other explanation.

The situation is eerily reminiscent of similar snubs from ostensibly neutral (but Democrat-controlled) diversity caucuses. As Rosas notes, Rep. Byron Donalds, a black Florida Republican, was similarly denied admission to the Congressional Black Caucus.

“The Congressional Black Caucus has a stated commitment to ensuring Black Americans have the opportunity to achieve the American dream,” Donalds said after his snub. “As a newly elected Black Member of Congress, my political party should not exempt me from a seat at the table dedicated to achieving this goal.”

Whether you politically agree with Flores and Donalds, this is deeply wrong. These partisan acts of discrimination reveal the contempt many Democratic elites actually have for diversity. One is not any more or less black or Hispanic because of how one thinks or how one votes — and these decisions implicitly suggest otherwise.

That’s bigoted. There’s simply no other word for it.

If they have any integrity at all, these groups should open up their ranks and actually represent their respective minority communities, which are not partisan or ideological monoliths. If they’re not willing to do that, they should at least rename themselves and reorient their groups’ values to reflect their partisan nature. Anything less is an insult to the diverse Americans they claim to represent and, frankly, pretty racist.

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a co-founder of Based-Politics.com, a co-host of the Based Politics podcast, and a Washington Examiner contributor.

MY THOUGHTS

Polumbo's argument has a great flaw. The flaw is in all the parties of governance that exist in the USA, especially the largest two. I call the largest two parties of governance in the United States of America, the POAL <party of abraham lincoln, commonly called the republicans> side POAJ <party of andrew jackson , commonly called the democrats>
Both of those parties, like all the littler ones,  are on racial lines. The problem here is race isn't restricted to phenotype or gender or religion or age. Race/classification/order/ranking are based on any factor. Philosophical races are ... races.
Functionally while Unfortunately, the populace in the USA likes to not consider philosophical races... races? Why? the populace in the usa doesn't have a physical/financial/geographic/religious binder. The only binder the USA populace can have is philosophical.
The populace in the USA has majorities in various racial categories, mostly white, mostly christian, mostly hetero, mostly fiscally poor, but none of the majorities are large enough in modernity to say the USA is explicitly any specific category. It is mostly white but not all white. It is mostly of immigrants but humanity outside the usa is even more multiracial so immigration doesn't yield to cohesion in thinking. 
So all the USA populace has in modernity to bind itself is like mindedness in philosophy as the one racial element that can survive the ever growing multiracial composition.
But, philosophy can be more fracturing than any other racial category, as the war between the states proved in USA history. 
And, this is the problem  with the caucasus. The parties of governance each governing official is a part of is racists, based on philosophy on how to govern, sequentially, how can the caucasus be absent a similar racial reality.
The question going forward is, why not have a latino party of governance, why not have a negro party of governance?
A caucus is designed to represent a union across parties but what about making parties for those agendas? 

ARTICLE
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/democrats-block-latina-republican-from-joining-congressional-hispanic-caucus/ar-AA13r419?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=25415f3082f940ba832dcd62cbd3c117

“AND THERE WAS LIGHT: ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE AMERICAN STRUGGLE”
NOVEMBER 02, 2022 AT 6:30 PM

Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and historian Jon Meacham takes fresh look at Abraham Lincoln in a new book “And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle.” Meacham describes how a president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Tonight, Meacham opens up on the former president’s leadership and explains why he chose to dissect his legacy now.

TRanscript or Video 
https://www.thirteen.org/metrofocus/2022/11/abraham-lincoln-and-american-struggle-whqkwd/

MY THOUGHTS

Lincoln was challenged harder than any other president in terms of domestic issues. I argue, that his murder conveniently didn't allow him to shape his success. People forget Lincoln never got to be president in internal peace. and that is important cause the peace after the war between the states needed great management and didn't get it. 

Chaka Khan Reveals Why She Turned Down Steven Spielberg For 'The Color Purple'
The iconic singer shared who she could have played in the award-winning film.
Jazmin Tolliver
By 
Jazmin Tolliver
Nov 4, 2022, 09:10 PM EDT

Chaka Khan wasn’t too keen on the opportunity to star in “The Color Purple.”

The iconic singer, who appeared on “The Jennifer Hudson Show” Friday, said she turned down Steven Spielberg’s offer for a lead role in the beloved 1985 film.

“Funny you should ask that,” Khan said after Hudson asked her about projects she had declined during her long career. “Well, you know I turned down ‘The Color Purple,’ the movie.”

Hudson, who appeared shocked, replied, “What?”

Khan said Spielberg approached her about being in the movie when she was “20, 22 tops,” but nervousness and an aversion to studying kept her from jumping on the opportunity.

“I was like, trying to run [from] that because I was afraid,” the Grammy-winning singer said. ”I was like, ‘Oh God, a movie, oh my God.’”

“I like detested school and tests and studying, you know, I said, ‘Oh, that means I’d have to learn the script,’” Khan added.

The “Through the Fire” singer said that the Oscar-winning director asked her to play Celie, the role that Whoopi Goldberg ultimately portrayed in the critically acclaimed film.

After Khan revealed who Spielberg asked her to play, Hudson told her audience: “Imagine Chaka Khan as Celie, y’all?”

“Woulda been hot,” Khan replied.

“That would have been a whole other Color Purple,” Hudson quipped.

“The Color Purple”, which starred Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover and Goldberg, was produced by Spielberg and Quincy Jones.

Based on Alice Walker’s classic 1982 novel, the film centers on Black women from the rural South during the early part of the last century, trying to survive and thrive under cruel conditions.

The film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress for Goldberg and Best Supporting Actress for both Winfrey and Margaret Avery.

A new movie musical adaptation of “The Color Purple,” produced by Spielberg and directed by Blitz Bazawule, is currently in the works.

The upcoming musical is set to star Taraji P. Henson as Shug Avery, Fantasia Taylor as Celie, Colman Domingo as Mister, Danielle Brooks as Sofia, Halle Bailey as Nettie, Corey Hawkins as Harpo and singer H.E.R. as Speak.

MY THOUGHTS

well, I think she lied on herself. she said "“I was like, trying to run [from] that because I was afraid ....I like detested school and tests and studying, you know, I said, ‘Oh, that means I’d have to learn the script,’ ""  But Chaka your uncle is quincy jones and you have learned tons of songs, and how to sing them. no,she mischaracterized herself. She likes studying and tests in terms of music, not literature. Chaka khan knows how many songs now? learning the script is hard:) The truth is revealed in the blues brothers. Chaka khan played the head of james browns chorus. She played herself. James brown played the head of the church, himself. the only musicians in blues brothers that some can argue had to act was aretha franklin, but aretha franklin does like to cook and has a strong temperament. Chaka khan is comfortable playing herself. In modernity so many artists push being the multimedia agent and many fail at it. But in the role spielberg wanted for her in the color purple, chaka khan who is very independent minded or strongwilled, former black panther of self defense member, would have to play, small/weak/little/abused Celie who does turn around but I don't think chaka khan felt comfortable with celie. and in defense a better thespian in whoopie goldberg got it. As a comedian who did one person shows, whoopie goldberg had experience shifting in character on stage.  I want to end with , Speilberg wasn't wrong. The man danny glover played would choose a woman that look like chaka khan over whoopie goldberg. He is a wife beater, a black land owner in the usa when it wasn't... common:) <meaning whitey kill black landowners> so.. he want a trophy woman, and i apologize to any woman who may read this and feel insulted, but a trophy woman has physical requirements. Chaka khan in her 20s large or firm breast/buttocks/hourglass shape, natural hair, is what you want over whoopie goldberg if you are looking for a trophy wife. 

IN AMENDMENT

..Someone pointed out Chaka khan couldn't had been asked about the color purple in 1975 when she was 20 or 22 so... . I don't know anything about chaka khan's age. The color purple was published in 1982, so spielberg couldn't had asked anyone to be in the movie in 1981 or earlier. And I checked , the blues brothers was made in 1980. I wonder her experience on set

ARTICLE
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chaka-khan-the-color-purple_n_63659fdae4b08f849aab6d9b

Former presidents of Gabon and France, Omar Bongo (L) and Jacques Chirac (R)

Why ex-French colonies are joining the Commonwealth
Published
29 June

Gabon and Togo have moved to strengthen their diplomatic armoury in a bid to ease their reliance on France.

They have been admitted to what was originally founded as a club of former British colonies but has been steadily diversifying its composition. These two small francophone African nations are now the Commonwealth's 55th and 56th members.

Rwanda joined in 2009 and Mozambique came into the group in 1995. None of these states had particular past historical ties to the UK.

The fact that they have opted to join the Commonwealth suggests that they see the organisation as a useful network of diplomatic and cultural influence, and for exercising "soft power" on the world stage.

It also testifies to the importance of English as a language of business, science and international politics and the necessity of building a range of connections to support economic development and get diplomatic messages heard.

For Gabon and Togo, Rwanda offers an encouraging precedent: just 13 years after joining, it has now hosted the organisation's summit meeting, attended by heads of state and government from all over the world, though there were some notable absentees, including South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Youth appeal
Gabon and Togo's entry to the Commonwealth also comes at a time when the relationship between Africa and France has become so contentious.

A growing number of younger urban citizens demand an end to the CFA franc currency which is pegged to the euro under an arrangement guaranteed by the government in Paris. The French military presence in the Sahel is also controversial.

So joining the world's largest anglophone bloc is likely be popular among many young Togolese and Gabonese.

That helps to modernise the image of two regimes that were for many years perceived as particularly emblematic of the traditionally close relationships between leaders in Africa and in France - "la françafrique".

There was a time when such a development would have provoked angst among Paris policymakers fearing an erosion of influence south of the Sahara. But today's French governments take a much more relaxed view of such trends.

For the same arguments about diversifying contacts and building up new vehicles of international connection have also fuelled the steady expansion of the Commonwealth's francophone sister, the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF).

It actually claims 88 member states and governments - including Rwanda, whose former Foreign Minister Louis Mushikiwabo is its secretary general. Its regional offices for West and central Africa are in fact hosted by Togo and Gabon, and it too is growing.

In March Ghana's Foreign Minister Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey announced that her country, a former British colony which has been an associate member of the OIF since 2006, would complete the transition to full membership of the organisation.

Ghana, with strong democratic institutions and a dynamic economy, will be one of a growing number of countries that are full and active members of both the Commonwealth and the Francophonie - for solid diplomatic and practical reasons.

Most of its neighbours in West Africa are French-speaking and the government has been taking steps to equip its young people to make the most of this economic, cultural and political reality - for example, there are now 50 bilingual schools.

Nor should one forget the significant development of the small but still influential Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) - most of whose members are African.

Democracy tests
But all three groupings - the CPLP, the Francophonie and the Commonwealth - face the delicate challenge of how to promote good governance, democracy and human rights - an issue with which the African Union and some of the continent's regional blocs, notably the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), are also wrestling.

Both the Commonwealth and the OIF send experts to help member states improve their electoral systems, but when it comes to membership conditions they tend to opt for inclusion and gentle encouragement rather than the assertion of a strict line.

Togo was ruled by the notoriously brutal dictator President Gnassingbé Eyadéma from 1967 to 2005, and has since then been led by his son, Faure Gnassingbé.

Gabon's President, Ali Ben Bongo Ondimba, is the son of Omar Bongo, head of state from 1967 to 2009, who swam with the trend towards multi-party politics in the 1990s but took care to maintain the predominance of his ruling party and the role of his family in government. Before succeeding to the presidency, Ali Bongo was defence minister.

The Commonwealth's official press release announcing the admission of Togo and Gabon stated: "The eligibility criteria for Commonwealth membership, amongst other things, state that an applicant country should demonstrate commitment to democracy and democratic processes, including free and fair elections and representative legislatures."

Yet Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, although lauded for overseeing undoubted social and economic development progress, is accused by rights groups of being uncompromisingly authoritarian in the exercise of power. Critics say the opposition is cowed and marginalised.

Mr Kagame claims his government upholds human rights, and there is "nobody in Rwanda who is in prison that should not be there".

Gabon will face a key barometer of governance with next year's presidential elections. But for Togo, there is a fairly immediate test.

The very day of the Commonwealth announcement, the authorities banned a planned demonstration by the opposition Dynamique Monseigneur Kpodzro (DMK) movement to protest against the rising cost of living, and what it called bad governance and injustice.

The DMK has rescheduled the protest for 16 July. It will be interesting to see whether Togo's new status as a Commonwealth member prods the government into taking a more lenient line.

Paul Melly is a consulting fellow with the Africa Programme at Chatham House in London.

ARTICLE
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-61967842

Title: Magical Girl Cover 1 revamp
Artist: GDbee < https://gdbee.store/ > 
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Title: Carnivorous plant or vampire appreciation
Artist: GDbee < https://gdbee.store/ > 
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Various constitutional amendments prohibit denying voting rights to women, racial minorities and other groups. But the Constitution contains no explicit right to vote.Credit...Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times

Does the Constitution Guarantee a Right to Vote? The Answer May Surprise You.
For decades, the courts and Congress have taken the lead in expanding the legal right to vote, but the founders never explicitly included it.

By Michael Wines
Oct. 26, 2022
The Constitution makes reference to voting 15 times in the original document and another 22 in the amendments. But somewhat surprisingly, none of those mentions makes an explicit declaration that Americans have a right to vote — something many politicians and their supporters consider fundamental to democracy. Here’s a look at why that is, and what rights voters actually have.

What did the founding fathers believe about the right to vote?
If it seems odd that such a fundamental right was not enshrined in writing, the explanation is simple enough: The authors of the Constitution, many of them deeply suspicious of universal suffrage, could not agree on a single standard for the right to cast a ballot.

For all their talk about “We, the people,” most of the founding fathers wanted to limit voting rights to property owners like themselves, the Harvard law professor and historian Michael J. Klarman wrote in his 2016 book “The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution.”

Gouverneur Morris, a New Yorker who wrote the preamble to the Constitution, argued that “the ignorant and the dependent can be as little trusted with the public interest” as could children, Dr. Klarman wrote. James Madison warned that voting should be restricted to the wealthy, “the safest repositories of republican liberty,” because the poorer classes would be swayed by populist appeals. Benjamin Franklin, the most prominent dissenter, pointed out that it was the commoners who had fought for and won American independence and that the rich were hardly immune to corrupting influences.

In the end, the property requirement failed to make it into the Constitution in part because many states already had extended the franchise beyond landholders. Disenfranchising those voters, the constitutional convention delegates feared, could wreck what already seemed to be shaky prospects for approving the new Constitution.

Their compromise left decisions on voter qualifications to the states, but it placed the choice of United States senators and the president in the hands of state legislators, not voters. That changed in the early 19th century, as state legislatures increasingly delegated the choice of presidential electors to ordinary voters, and in 1913, after the 17th Amendment decreed the popular election of senators.

Does a right to vote exist today?
Various constitutional amendments prohibit denying voting rights to women, racial minorities, citizens over age 18 and people unable to pay election-related fees like poll taxes.

But the Constitution contains no explicit right to vote. Rather, the Supreme Court has recognized an implicit right to vote via the 14th Amendment, enacted in 1868 after the Civil War, which aimed to protect the civil rights of people who had been enslaved and guarantees “the equal protection of the laws.”

The court has recognized it in a handful of decisions dealing with the meaning of those amendments. “Undeniably the Constitution of the United States protects the right of all qualified citizens to vote, in state as well as in federal elections,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the historic 1964 ruling, Reynolds v. Sims, that cemented the concept that every vote has an equal value. But even a Supreme Court ruling falls short of the guarantees of rights such as freedom of speech and religion that are embedded in the Bill of Rights.

In practice, the Constitution leaves most decisions about the ballot to state and federal legislators, saying that the “times, places and manner” of elections are state matters unless Congress sets nationwide standards.

What most Americans see as an inalienable right to vote is actually the product of decades of court rulings and legislative decisions, most of them — but hardly all — slowly expanding a legal guarantee of the ability to cast a ballot. Congress could give everyone the right to vote by mail, but since it has not, mail balloting is subject to a jumble of state laws. The 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, gave women the right to vote, but by then, Wyoming had been letting women vote for 50 years, even when it was a territory, not a state.

What does the future hold?
For decades, courts and Congress have taken the lead in upholding a legal right to vote — in the Voting Rights Act of 1965; in the 1966 Supreme Court case, Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, which outlawed poll taxes; in federal legislation in 1993 that set ground rules for registering new voters and removing existing voters from the rolls.

In lawsuits seeking to enforce or protect existing election laws, the 14th Amendment’s implicit guarantee of voting rights has become a mainstay of plaintiffs’ arguments.

“As long as those precedents are respected, I think it’s fair to say there’s a constitutional protection of a basic right to vote,” Edward B. Foley, a leading scholar of election law at Ohio State University, said in an interview.

But the evolution of an increasingly conservative Supreme Court with a skeptical approach to voting rights and an emerging record of upending precedents means that the current interpretation of the right to vote is no longer a sure bet, he said.

The court is considering two major voting cases this term — one that could limit the Voting Rights Act’s power to remedy racial disparities in political districts, the other arguing that state courts have no authority to overturn legislative decisions on political redistricting and election laws — that could reverse once-solid precedents.

Indeed, what most voters would consider a foundational right — electing a president — exists nowhere in the Constitution, which says presidential electors may be appointed “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.”

Democrats in both the U.S. House and Senate filed legislation last year that would establish a statutory right to vote, but neither bill has received a hearing. And for years, voting-rights advocates have pressed for a new constitutional amendment affirming citizens’ right to cast a ballot. So far, it’s all been to no avail.

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/article/voting-rights-constitution.html

MY THOUGHTS

The problem is relates to Roe vs Wade, Roe vs Wade is a supreme court decision. the odd thing about Roe vs wade is how people treat it like a legislative act or an amendment to the constitution. it is a decision by the supreme court which the supreme court is totally free or legally allowed to change. 
Voting isn't guaranteed in the usa. But the issue here is how the usa came to be? 
PEople speak of democracy, rule of the people. But the people in the thirteen colonies did not gain the rule based on voting or elections, they gained it by arms, violence, murder, death.
PEople in the USA today speak as if the USA came about through some non violent merit. It came about through killing/death/murder/war, that is where the rule of the people always is. No matter what government style, the people rule through violence. It is the cheap readers of history who mistake  appeased populaces as symbols of the masses power to rule itself. 
It isn't. If the masses want a king/a council/a clan/elected officials, the masses make it happen. 

How Elon Musk Became a Geopolitical Chaos Agent
The world’s richest man has inserted himself in some of the world’s most combustible conflicts.

By Cade Metz, Adam Satariano and Chang Che
Cade Metz, Adam Satariano and Chang Che reported this story from San Francisco, London and Seoul.

Published Oct. 26, 2022
Updated Oct. 28, 2022

In the last four weeks, Elon Musk has offered a peace plan for Russia and Ukraine that outraged Ukrainian officials. He has posted a tweet about Iranian internet access that exposed government protesters to a phishing scheme. He has also suggested in a newspaper interview that China could be appeased if it were given partial control of Taiwan. An official in Taipei demanded that he retract his suggestion.

Mr. Musk has in recent months emerged as a new, chaotic actor on the stage of global politics. While plenty of billionaire executives like to tweet their two cents on world affairs, none can come close to Mr. Musk’s influence and ability to cause trouble. He has sometimes waded into situations even after he was advised not to, and has already left behind plenty of messes.

While the bulk of Mr. Musk’s wealth comes from his stake in his electric car company, Tesla, his influence stems largely from his rocket company, SpaceX, which runs the Starlink satellite network. Starlink can beam internet service to conflict zones and geopolitical hot spots, and it has become an essential tool of the Ukrainian army.

Mr. Musk’s influence will grow with the close of the deal to buy Twitter. He has called himself a free speech absolutist, and he is expected to take a light touch to moderating Twitter’s content.

His critics — and there are many — worry that it is difficult to separate Mr. Musk’s opinions from his business interests, especially when it comes to Tesla, which is increasingly dependent on China.

“Technology has become central to geopolitics,” said Karen Kornbluh, a director with the German Marshall Fund, a geopolitical think tank, and a former adviser to President Barack Obama. “It is fascinating and it is messy and there is Elon Musk in the middle of it.”

In some cases, Mr. Musk has been a boon. When he provided Starlink internet access in Ukraine earlier in the year and funded at least part of the hardware and service, he equipped both civilians and soldiers with a crucial means of communication during the ongoing conflict with Russia.

But the messages he has delivered have also caused problems. This month, in a Twitter post, he said he could not “indefinitely” fund Ukraine’s use of Starlink, before suddenly reversing course.

Late last month, Mr. Musk attended a private event in Aspen called The Weekend. Organized partly by the former Google chief executive and government adviser Eric Schmidt, the event brought together American business and political leaders, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, former Vice President Al Gore and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford.

At lunchtime, under a tent on a golf course, Mr. Musk took the stage for a sweeping conversation with the billionaire businessman David Rubenstein, according to two people who attended the event and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

At the end of the conversation, to the surprise of many in attendance, Mr. Musk proposed a peace plan for the war in Ukraine that would allow Russia to annex Ukrainian land, seeming to align himself with the Kremlin.

The idea outraged many at the event, according to attendees. The next day, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser to President Biden, gave a video talk at the event and a questioner raised the issue of Mr. Musk’s peace plan. Mr. Sullivan did not comment on Mr. Musk’s remarks at the event, according to a National Security Council spokesperson. Nonetheless, Mr. Musk revealed his plan 10 days later on Twitter. The Kremlin publicly supported the idea.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and his top aides fiercely rebuked Mr. Musk’s plan. But his shifting positions put them in a bind: Starlink terminals have become a crucial means of communication for the Ukrainian Army.

Mr. Musk did not respond to several requests for comment.

In mid-September, as the army advanced into southern territories previously occupied by Russia, it lost access to Starlink in some areas near the front lines, four people with knowledge of the matter said. Two of them said this was because Mr. Musk had “geofenced” the service so that it was available only in certain areas. It was not clear why the satellite system was not working, and others in Ukraine reported that it was working fine.

Mr. Musk has discussed the matter with both the Ukrainian government and the U.S. government in an effort to determine the locations where the army will have access to Starlink, according to the people. A National Security Council spokesperson said that the council, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and “officials across the U.S. government have spoken to Starlink and answered questions about U.S. policy like we do with all companies.”

This month, Mr. Musk delivered more uncertainty to Ukraine when he said he could not keep paying for Starlink service to the country, making it seem like he was shouldering the expense. In fact, the United States, Britain and Poland have paid SpaceX for at least part of the Starlink cost, according to a document outlining the expenditures reviewed by The New York Times.

“He has to decide whether Starlink is a commercial service that provides sometimes lifesaving technology to its customers or a service that is highly dependent on the geopolitical interests of its management and, thus, unreliable for customers who have concerns over national security,” said Dimitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a geopolitical think tank in Washington.

While he was in Aspen laying out his peace plan for the war in Ukraine, Mr. Musk also waded into unrest in Iran.

As protests spread across the country and the authorities responded by blocking internet access in some areas, he appeared to come to the rescue. “Activating Starlink,” he said in a Twitter message after the U.S. government lifted some sanctions that limited the ability of American tech companies to operate in Iran so that they could aid protesters.

Starlink offered the potential to bypass the government’s blockade of land-based internet connections that had taken Iranians in many cities offline.

But as many Iranians soon learned, Mr. Musk’s promise did not hold up. Left unsaid by Mr. Musk was any context on what was needed to get Starlink up and running, how long it would take and why Iranian government restrictions would make it nearly impossible to offer the service widely inside Iran.

While Starlink remained unavailable in Iran, hackers believed to have links to the government began a phishing campaign, sending messages inside social media channels with links claiming to provide access to Starlink, according to Amir Rashidi, a digital rights expert from Iran. Rather than providing access to Mr. Musk’s satellite system, the links were malware that gobbled up information from the users’ phones, said Mr. Rashidi, who analyzed at least five versions of the malware.

A small amount of Starlink internet access is now available in Iran with equipment smuggled across its border, Mr. Rashidi said. That is creating additional concerns that the authorities will be able to identify data transmitted because the satellite signals may be traceable to individuals on the ground.

Mr. Rashidi, who fled the country in 2009, commended Mr. Musk for trying to help but said his tactics were “very irresponsible.”

“It was just someone who wanted to jump up to say, ‘I’m doing something good,’ without understanding what the consequences would be,” he said.

Mr. Musk also recently stepped into perhaps the world’s most delicate geopolitical hot spot: Taiwan.

Tensions between China and Taiwan pose major risks to Mr. Musk’s business empire. Tesla operates a manufacturing facility in Shanghai that produces as much as 50 percent of the company’s new cars. The Beijing government tightly controls how Western companies operate in the country, and observers have long worried about how Tesla’s dependence on China could affect Mr. Musk’s political positions.

This month, Mr. Musk confirmed that he faced pressure from Beijing, when he told the Financial Times that the Chinese government had made it clear that it disapproved of his offering Starlink internet service in Ukraine. Beijing sought assurances, he said, that he would not offer the service in China.

Then he offered a way of easing the tensions: handing some control of Taiwan to China.

The comment, which breaks sharply with the policy of the United States and its allies, drew swift rebukes from Taiwanese politicians.

In a phone interview with The New York Times, Chao Tien-Lin, a member of the Democratic Progressive Party and the Taiwanese legislature’s foreign affairs and defense committee, called on Mr. Musk to retract his statement. “If he does not, I will sincerely advise not just Taiwan but all consumers in liberal democratic countries to boycott Tesla and its related products,” he said.

Some have pointed out that if a military conflict breaks out between the two sides, the Taiwanese, like the Ukrainians, may call on Mr. Musk to provide an emergency means of communication with satellite internet. But given Mr. Musk’s public stance on the situation and links to China, Starlink may not be a viable option.

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/26/technology/elon-musk-geopolitics-china-ukraine.html

MY THOUGHTS
IT goes back to the cake and eat it too. People want the USA to have technological dominance, but they also want individual fiscal possibility, but then they want all the rich to be champions of cohesion/peace/philanthropy. 
You can't have your cake and eat it too. no one can. And some people as the metoo era proved are beyond being cancelled.

Why I Keep Coming Back to Reconstruction

By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

I write frequently about the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, not to make predictions or analogies but to show how a previous generation of Americans grappled with their own set of questions about the scope and reach of our Constitution, our government and our democracy.

The scholarship on Reconstruction is vast and comprehensive. But my touchstone for thinking about the period continues to be W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Black Reconstruction,” published in 1935 after years of painstaking research that was often inhibited by segregation and the racism of Southern institutions of higher education.

I return to Du Bois, even as I read more recent work, because he offers a framework that is useful, I think, for analyzing the struggle for democracy in our own time.

The central conceit of Du Bois’s landmark study — whose full title is “Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880” — is that the period was a grand struggle between “two theories of the future of America,” rooted in the relationship of American labor to American democracy.

“What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States?” Du Bois asks. “Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color?” And if not, he continues, “How would property and privilege be protected?”

On one side in the conflict over these questions was “an autocracy determined at any price to amass wealth and power”; on the other was an “abolition-democracy based on freedom, intelligence and power for all men.”

The term “abolition-democracy” began with Du Bois and is worth further exploration.

Abolition-democracy, Du Bois writes, was the “liberal movement among both laborers and small capitalists” who saw “the danger of slavery to both capital and labor.” Its standard-bearers were abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and radical antislavery politicians like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, and in its eyes, “the only real object” of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery and “it was convinced that this could be thoroughly accomplished only if the emancipated Negroes became free citizens and voters.”

It was also clear to some within abolition-democracy that “freedom in order to be free required a minimum of capital in addition to political rights.” In this way, abolition-democracy was an anticipation of social democratic ideology, although few of its proponents, in Du Bois’s view, grasped the full significance of their analysis of the relationship between political freedom, civil rights and economic security.

Opposing abolition-democracy, in Du Bois’s telling, were the reactionaries of the former Confederate South who sought to “re-establish slavery by force.” The South, he writes, “opposed Negro education, opposed land and capital for Negroes, and violently and bitterly opposed any political power. It fought every conception inch by inch: no real emancipation, limited civil rights, no Negro schools, no votes for Negroes.”

Between these two sides lay Northern industry and capital. It wanted profits and it would join whichever force enabled it to expand its power and reach. Initially, this meant abolition-democracy, as Northern industry feared the return of a South that might threaten its political and economic dominance. It “swung inevitably toward democracy” rather than allow the “continuation of Southern oligarchy,” Du Bois writes.

It’s here that we see the contradiction inherent in the alliance between Northern industry and abolition-democracy. The machinery of democracy in the South “put such power in the hands of Southern labor that, with intelligent and unselfish leadership and a clarifying ideal, it could have rebuilt the economic foundations of Southern society, confiscated and redistributed wealth, and built a real democracy of industry for the masses of men.”

This — the extent to which democracy in the South threatened to undermine the imperatives of capital — was simply too much for Northern industry to bear. And so it turned against abolition-democracy, already faltering as it was in the face of Southern reaction. “Brute force was allowed to use its unchecked power,” Du Bois writes, “to destroy the possibility of democracy in the South, and thereby make the transition from democracy to plutocracy all the easier and more inevitable.”

In the end, “it was not race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.” What killed Reconstruction — beyond the ideological limitations of its champions and the vehemence of its opponents — was a “counterrevolution of property,” North and South.

Why is this still a useful framework for understanding the United States, close to a century after Du Bois conceived and developed this argument? As a concept, abolition-democracy captures something vital and important: Democratic life cannot flourish as long as it is bound by and shaped around hierarchies of status. The fight for political equality cannot be separated from the fight for equality more broadly.

In other words, the reason I keep coming back to “Black Reconstruction” is that Du Bois’s mode of analysis can help us (or, at least, me) look past so much of the ephemera of our politics to focus on what matters most: the roles of power, privilege and, most important, capital in shaping our political order and structuring our conflicts with one another.

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/25/opinion/reconstruction-civil-war-du-bois.html

MY THOUGHTS

The question is simple. If all humans are equal in a space then how do the poor not rip from the rich or how do the rich not enslave the poor? The USA has no answer. Never had one.  In Haiti or France or Russia the poor ripped from the rich. In the USA... the lower rich ripped from the upper rich, but the poor of the usa still had needs and from the war between the states to the gregorian year two thousand and twenty two, the poor have tried to merit to satisfaction while not taking from the rich. But, patience is a thing rarely stated when people talk of peace. and absent patience, the poor can't wait to take, the rich can't wait to enslave. 

Biden and Trump Share One Thing
Oct. 24, 2022

By Yuval Levin

Mr. Levin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a contributing Opinion writer.

Back in January, looking ahead to the midterm election year, President Biden said that he expected to be featured prominently by Democrats running for Congress. “I’m going to be out on the road a lot, making the case around the country, with my colleagues who are up for re-election,” he predicted.

It has not turned out that way. Instead, many Democratic candidates have practiced the delicate dance that politicians of both parties have had to master over the past two decades — keeping their distance from a president of their own party while not openly repudiating him.

The four presidents we have had so far in this century have been peculiarly unpopular. George W. Bush had a stretch of high approval after the Sept. 11 attacks but spent much of his second term underwater (often deeply). A chart of Barack Obama’s public approval looks faintly like a W — briefly rising above 50 percent around the two elections he won and at the very end of his term, but he otherwise spent much of his eight years in the 40s. Donald Trump is the only president during the seven decades that Gallup has been regularly tracking approval ratings who never once topped the 50 percent mark. Joe Biden floated above that mark early in his term but hasn’t seen it since.

It’s not just in terms of public support that recent presidents have been weak. This can be hard to grasp because we still live with the bromides of “the imperial presidency” — a term made famous by the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the 1970s to describe an office drunk with power and towering over American government. We implicitly think this is still the case.

But this persistent cliché keeps us from seeing the real contours of our strange constitutional moment. Joe Biden and Donald Trump may well be the two weakest presidents since before the progressive era.

They have been weak presidents of different sorts. Mr. Biden has largely declined to set priorities for his administration and has been so desperate not to divide his party that he has been nearly paralyzed. Think of any other modern president, including Mr. Trump, and you can probably list two or three issues he particularly cared about. Can you come up with such a list for Mr. Biden? Other than the withdrawal from Afghanistan, is there any major initiative his administration has pursued because it was singularly what the president wanted to do?

Even when he has overreached in his use of administrative power — as with the legally dubious forgiveness of student loans — Mr. Biden has often acted under pressure from party activists. On many important measures in Congress, Mr. Biden’s views do not appear to have been decisive, and he has not been essential to the negotiations that led to any of the bipartisan deals he has signed.

Mr. Trump exhibited another kind of weakness. During his presidency, he dominated most news cycles and sought to operate outside the formal framework of presidential power in ways that ultimately posed real threats to the constitutional system. But within that system, where our government actually governs, he was feckless and chaotic, and largely failed to exert meaningful control even over his subordinates. His most significant achievement was in the realm of presidential power that requires the least persistent follow-through: the appointment of judges, including three Supreme Court justices, where the president’s role ends almost as soon as it begins. In other arenas, he generally couldn’t steer any one course long enough to get very far.

Astonishingly blatant insubordination was routine in Mr. Trump’s White House, and it was matched by a bipartisan tendency in Congress to regard the president’s words as devoid of meaning and his actions as always open to reversal. No one took him seriously as an executive.

The administrative state — that tangle of agencies that compose the executive branch, some formally independent and others more answerable to the White House — remains a formidable force in this era. But its growth has not always strengthened our presidents. This is most obvious in Republican administrations, as the chief executive strains to wrangle career officials and independent regulators who often want to steer a course different from his. But those same agencies operate in Democratic administrations, and even if the course they steer better suits a left-leaning president, their autonomous strength can render him institutionally weaker.

The same might be said of presidential appointees. One measure of a president’s administrative prowess is whether his midlevel political appointees can readily imagine what the president would do if he were in their jobs and act accordingly. This has been fairly easy to do under most modern presidents. But under both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, many appointees could be forgiven for having no idea how the president would want them to make key decisions — Mr. Trump because he was so unpredictable, and Mr. Biden because he so rarely has set clear goals.

These distinct but related forms of presidential weakness gesture toward two key elements of the job. Alexander Hamilton argued that a strong chief executive exhibits energetic decision-making and “steady administration.” Both elements are necessary, and the absence of either, Hamilton suggested, “implies a feeble execution of the government.”

Those of us who would like to see Congress reassert itself might hope for a silver lining in such presidential feebleness. But the evidence of recent Congresses suggests those hopes are misguided. The past couple of years have seen the passage of some meaningful bipartisan measures — on public health, infrastructure, gun control, manufacturing and more. But they have often revealed the contemporary Congress’s own weaknesses — the gangs of senators have often worked around rather than through the committee system and regular order — more than they have remedied them.

This should not surprise us. The president and Congress don’t have the same job, and the weakness of one does not make the other stronger. On the contrary, it often distorts the work of the other and invites more weakness in return.

When that happens, partisanship rushes in to fill the void and soon makes for a vicious cycle: Congress and the presidency increasingly incline to the same sort of work — neither legislative nor executive but more like partisan performance art — and both grow more forgetful of their core responsibilities.

This is a particular problem for our presidents because, unlike Congress’s job, the president’s role is defined by obligations he must meet. As the political scientists Joseph Bessette and Gary Schmitt have argued, the presidency is better understood as a collection of duties than an arrangement of powers, and presidential strength is often a function of living up to those responsibilities.

It is by doing the chief executive’s core work — faithful, predictable execution of statutes; steady administrative rule-making that can last beyond the next election; cleareyed prioritization and prudential action within the law in response to pressing national challenges — that a president can wield and therefore fortify the strengths of the office. Playing chief pundit and willfully blurring the line between rhetoric and action is a recipe not for influence but for haplessness.

Until our chief executives grasp that the burdens of their office are its strengths, they will remain baffled by their own debility and unable to marshal the public to their side.

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/opinion/biden-trump-weak-presidents.html

MY THOUGHTS
I think of presidents in the USA in era's based on a president that defined the era. In my view we are in the Ronald Reagan presidents era. 
Ronald Reagan like all presidents after him has a few things in common. 
All are huge militarists, increasing military power in hundreds of percent in various forms.
All are domestic incapables, varying plans of domestic agenda that are bound to create more problems or fail in terms of leading to multiracial comradery and are not comprehensive enough for a multiracial populace that is differed not only in appearance/phenotype but differ in financial qualities/financial potencies/heritage concerning the usa and with a general negativity in inter racial relationships between themselves or in themselves.
All are media barons, they each were very successful in the presentation of potential greatness.
All are legislative obsolescences, each have dysfunctional legislative history <from woeful to nonexistent> before they became president. 

That explains why under the reagan presidencies the military has grown so vast.  The populace of the usa has displayed ever growing dysfunction between its races. The role of media has become more important than any legislative or governing quality. Legislative quality is so low.

Putin Is Onto Us
Oct. 25, 2022

By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist

As the Russian Army continues to falter in Ukraine, the world is worrying that Vladimir Putin could use a tactical nuclear weapon. Maybe — but for now, I think Putin is assembling a different weapon. It’s an oil and gas bomb that he’s fusing right before our eyes and with our inadvertent help — and he could easily detonate it this winter.

If he does, it could send prices of home heating oil and gasoline into the stratosphere. The political fallout, Putin surely hopes, will divide the Western alliance and prompt many countries — including ours, where both MAGA Republicans and progressives are expressing concerns about the spiraling cost of the Ukraine conflict — to seek a dirty deal with the man in the Kremlin, pronto.

In short: Putin is now fighting a ground war to break through Ukraine’s lines and a two-front energy war to break Ukraine’s will and that of its allies. He’s trying to smash Ukraine’s electricity system to ensure a long, cold winter there while putting himself in position (in ways that I’ll explain) to drive up energy costs for all of Ukraine’s allies. And because we — America and the West — do not have an energy strategy in place to dampen the impact of Putin’s energy bomb, this is a frightening prospect.

When it comes to energy, we want five things at once that are incompatible — and Putin is onto us:

1. We want to decarbonize our economy as fast as we can to mitigate the very real dangers of climate change.

2. We want the cheapest possible gasoline and heating oil prices so we can drive our cars as fast and as much as we want — and never have to put on a sweater indoors or do anything to conserve energy.

3. We want to tell the petrodictators in Iran, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to take a hike.

4. We want to be able to treat U.S. oil and gas companies as pariahs and dinosaurs that should pump us out of this current oil crisis and then go off in the woods and die and let solar and wind take over.

5. Oh, and we don’t want any new oil and gas pipelines or wind and solar transmission lines to spoil our backyards.

I understand why people want all five — now. I want all five! But they involve trade-offs, which too few of us want to acknowledge or debate. In an energy war like the one we’re in now, you need to be clear about your goals and priorities. As a country, and as a Western alliance, we have no ladder of priorities on energy, just competing aspirations and magical thinking that we can have it all.

If we persist in that, we are going to be in for a world of hurt if Putin drops the energy bomb that I think he’s assembling for Christmas. Here’s what I think is his strategy: It starts with getting the United States to draw down its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It is a huge stock of crude oil stored in giant caverns that we can draw on in an emergency to offset any cutoff in our domestic production or imports. Last Wednesday, President Biden announced the release of 15 million more barrels from the reserve in December, completing a plan he laid out earlier to release a total of 180 million barrels in an effort to keep gasoline prices at the pump as low as possible — in advance of the midterm elections. (He didn’t say the last part. He didn’t need to.)

According to a report in The Washington Post, the reserve contained “405.1 million barrels as of Oct. 14. That’s about 57 percent of its maximum authorized storage capacity of 714 million barrels.”

I sympathize with the president. People were really hurting from $5- and $6-a-gallon gasoline. But using the reserve — which was designed to cushion us in the face of a sudden shut-off in domestic or global production — to shave a dime or a quarter off a gallon of gasoline before elections is a dicey business, even if the president has a plan for refilling it in the coming months.

Putin wants America to use up as much of its Strategic Petroleum Reserve cushion now — just like the way the Germans gave up on nuclear energy and he got them addicted to Russia’s cheap natural gas. Then, when Russian gas was cut off because of the Ukraine war, German homes and factories had to frantically cut back and scramble for more expensive alternatives.

Next, Putin is watching the European Union gear up for a ban on seaborne imports of crude oil from Russia, starting Dec. 5. This embargo — along with Germany and Poland’s move to stop pipeline imports — should cover roughly 90 percent of the European Union’s current oil imports from Russia.

As a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., noted, “Crucially, the sanctions also ban E.U. companies from providing shipping insurance, brokering services or financing for oil exports from Russia to third countries.”

The U.S. Treasury and European Union believe that without that insurance, the number of customers for Russian oil will shrink dramatically, so they are telling the Russians that they can get the insurance for their oil tankers from the few Western insurance companies that dominate the industry only if they lower the price of their crude oil exports to a level set by the Europeans and the United States.

My sources in the oil industry tell me they seriously doubt this Western price fixing will work. Russia’s OPEC Plus partner Saudi Arabia is certainly not interested in seeing such a buyers’ price-fixing precedent set. Moreover, international oil trading is full of shady characters — does the name Marc Rich ring a bell? — who thrive on market distortions. Oil tankers carry transponders that track their locations. But tankers engaged in shady activities will turn their transponders off and reappear days after they’ve made a ship-to-ship transfer or will transfer their cargo into storage tanks somewhere in Asia for re-export, in effect laundering their Russian oil. Oil in just one very large tanker can be worth roughly $250 million, so the incentives are enormous.

Now add one more dodgy player to the mix: China. It has all kinds of long-term, fixed-price contracts to import liquefied natural gas from the Middle East at roughly $100 a barrel of oil equivalent. But because of President Xi Jinping’s crazy approach to containing Covid — in recent months some 300 million citizens have been under full or partial lockdown — China’s economy has slowed considerably, as has its gas consumption. As a result, an oil industry source tells me, China has been taking some of the L.N.G. sold to it on those fixed-price contracts for domestic use and reselling it to Europe and other gas-starved countries for $300 a barrel of oil equivalent.

Now that Xi has locked in his third term as general secretary of the Communist Party, many expect that he will ease up on his lockdowns. If China goes back to anything near its normal gas consumption and stops re-exporting its excess, the global gas market will become even more scarily tight.

Last, as I noted, Putin is trying to destroy Ukraine’s ability to generate electricity. Today more than one million Ukrainians are without power, and as one Ukrainian lawmaker tweeted last week, “Total darkness and cold are coming.”

So add all of this up and then suppose, come December, Putin announces he is halting all Russian oil and gas exports for 30 or 60 days to countries supporting Ukraine, rather than submit to the European Union’s fixing of his oil price. He could afford that for a short while. That would be Putin’s energy bomb and Christmas present to the West. In this tight market, oil could go to $200 a barrel, with a commensurate rise in the price of natural gas. We’re talking $10 to $12 a gallon at the pump in the United States.

The beauty for Putin of an energy bomb is that unlike setting off a nuclear bomb — which would unite the whole world against him — setting off an oil price bomb would divide the West from Ukraine.

Obviously, I am just guessing that this is what Putin is up to, and if the world goes into recession, it could take energy prices down with it. But we would be wise to have a real counterstrategy in place, especially because, while some in Europe have managed to stock up on natural gas for this winter, rebuilding those stocks for 2023 without Russian gas and with China returning to normal could be very costly.

If Biden wants America to be the arsenal of democracy to protect us and our democratic allies — and not leave us begging Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela or Iran to produce more oil and gas — we need a robust energy arsenal as much as a military one. Because we are in an energy war! Biden needs to make a major speech, making clear that for the foreseeable future, we need more of every kind of energy we have. American oil and gas investors need to know that as long as they produce in the cleanest way possible, invest in carbon capture and ensure that any new pipelines they build will be compatible with transporting hydrogen — probably the best clean fuel coming down the road in the next decade — they have a welcome place in America’s energy future, alongside the solar, wind, hydro and other clean energy producers that Biden has heroically boosted through his climate legislation.

I know. This is not ideal. This is not where I hoped we would be in 2022. But this is where we are, and anything else really is magical thinking — and the one person who will not be fooled by it is Vladimir Putin.

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/25/opinion/putin-energy-gas-prices.html

MY THOUGHTS

The problem with Biden is he became president on his not being Schrumptf. The problem is, not being like Scrumpft means , not having your own initiative, not doing things your way against others input, not caring about opinion, not focusing on your base. 
And that is a problem cause, the voting group to Biden want green energy regardless of the financial costs. They want to kill the domestic oil industry with no retort from said industry. They want countries that benefit from oil that are far more potent than the countries with faux elected officials to do as they are told when it comes to energy.
And Biden in trying to satisfy the usa populace aside his voting base can't approach the foreign lands as a bully, but can't cut them off. 
In the end, Biden wanted to be president... Kamala Harris wanted to be vice president
 

IN AMENDMENT

An unverified image

Danielle Deadwyler had trepidations about playing Emmett Till’s mother “because it’s a joyous endeavor, but it’s a painful one, too.”Credit...Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York Times

Danielle Deadwyler Is the Beating Heart of ‘Till’
After critically acclaimed turns in “Station Eleven” and “The Harder They Fall,” her latest role hit close to home. That’s why she was hesitant to take it on.

By Sarah Bahr
Oct. 24, 2022
Danielle Deadwyler’s eyes are an instrument that she can play with precise control.

In HBO Max’s postapocalyptic drama “Station Eleven,” they stare into your soul as Deadwyler’s graphic novelist character, Miranda, soaks in the world around her. In Netflix’s all-Black western “The Harder They Fall,” they’re the last thing a baddie sees before he’s killed by Deadwyler’s quippy gunslinger, Cuffee.

And in her latest film, Chinonye Chukwu’s “Till,” about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose gruesome murder in Mississippi in 1955 by white supremacists helped spark the civil rights movement, they often fill your entire screen, tortured and unblinking in shocked grief, eyelids fluttering in painful remembrance. Though the actress has been an outsize presence in smaller screen roles in recent years, “Till” is her first lead part in a feature film.

“I’d been reared in the history, but I didn’t know the intimacy of it,” Deadwyler, 40, said of Mamie and Emmett’s relationship in a recent interview on a rainy evening at the Park Lane Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “So this was a chance to show what it meant to be Mamie both in public and in private, and how she was intentional about and navigating those two identities.”

Deadwyler’s expressive eyes are only the beginning of her critically acclaimed performance as Emmett’s doting mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis praised Deadwyler’s range. “With fixed intensity and supple quicksilver emotional changes,” she wrote, “Deadwyler rises to the occasion as Mamie, delivering a quiet, centralizing performance that works contrapuntally with the story’s heaviness, its profundity and violence.”

DEADWYLER GREW UP with three siblings in southwest Atlanta, the daughter of a legal secretary and a railroad supervisor. Her mother, she said, was intent on giving the children a diverse cultural life.

“My mom was like, ‘You can’t go to U.G.A,’” she said, referring to the University of Georgia. “She had intentions for us to get out of a certain comfort zone.”

As a youngster, Deadwyler dabbled in theater and dance, taking her first dance class when she was just 4 after her mother saw her shimmying to “Soul Train,” and falling in love with theater in high school.

But she didn’t necessarily want to be an actor, she said, nor did she even fathom becoming one.

“It was just a part of my life since I was a kid,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the couch in a loose white button-up over black slacks and black crew socks. “It was lifeblood.”

She stayed close to home for college, majoring in history at Spelman while continuing to perform in plays. She earned a master’s degree in American studies from Columbia in New York, writing her thesis on sex-positive representations of women in hip-hop. (In 2017 she earned a second master’s degree, in creative writing at Ashland University in Ohio.)

When she was rejected for the women’s studies graduate program at Emory University in Atlanta — “I cried in the bathroom at the trust fund where I was interning,” she said — she turned to teaching at an elementary charter school for two years. But with her youthful looks and wiry frame, Deadwyler struggled to be taken seriously. “Quinta Brunson’s character on ‘Abbott Elementary’ looks young, but she has a teacherly presence,” Deadwyler said, clutching her knees to her chest. “I just looked young — I was fresh out of grad school. The kids were like, ‘What grade are you in?’”

But then came her big break: a role as the Lady in Yellow in “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” mounted by True Colors Theater in Atlanta in 2009.

Screen work soon followed, including the lead in the 2012 TV drama “A Cross to Bear,” playing a homeless, alcoholic mother. She also began booking small television roles: the antagonist LaQuita Maxwell on Tyler Perry’s prime-time soap opera “The Haves and the Have Nots,” a recurring role as Yoli on the Starz drama “P-Valley,” and memorable parts in FX’s “Atlanta” and HBO’s “Watchmen.”

The latter was the performance that came to mind when Patrick Somerville, creator of “Station Eleven,” was looking to cast his Miranda, the artist whose graphic novel drives the show’s narrative arc.

“Her eyes can do anything,” he said. “You can feel how substantial the person is inside her whether or not she’s talking.”

He put her through a lot of last-minute rewrites, but “she was never concerned with change,” he said. “She was always her own center. I was always impressed by her unbelievable confidence.”

HER BIGGEST LEAP to date, “Till,” is one she almost didn’t take.

Mamie Till-Mobley is best known for insisting on an open-casket viewing for her son’s corpse, to show the world what a mob of white men did to him, but the film focuses on her transformation from shellshocked parent to fervent activist. “My reps sent me the script, and I was like, ‘Do I want to do this?’” said Deadwyler, who is the single mother of a 12-year-old son, “because it’s a joyous endeavor, but it’s a painful one, too.”

In the end, the role of Mamie resonated in her bones.

For her audition, she submitted a self-tape that included the scene in which she knots a tie around Emmett’s neck — using her son, Ezra, as a stand-in — as he prepares to go down to Mississippi, telling him to “be small.” Then, in a video call with Chukwu, she re-enacted the moment when Mamie sees Emmett’s corpse for the first time. (“I warned my son, ‘Hey, man, you might hear some weird noises,’” she said.)

Chukwu, the director, said she knew immediately that she was watching something special.

“When I’m casting, I look at whether actors can communicate a story with their eyes,” she said. “Are they able to get underneath the words in a nonverbal way? Are they willing and able to dive into the work in a way that demands a vulnerability and focusedness? I saw all of that in her audition tape.”

Deadwyler’s wordless ability to act with her whole body informed how she shot the film, Chukwu said.

“I knew that I wanted the audience to see this Black woman’s humanity and that faces would be important,” she said. “But when I saw how much command and power Danielle had, I leaned into that even more.”

Mamie’s testimony scene in the courtroom, for instance — a seven-page powder keg of grief, frustration and rage — is shot in one long take. Chukwu said she originally planned on eight or nine other setups, but when Deadwyler received a standing ovation from the cast and crew on the first take — a close-up on her face — Chukwu decided: She didn’t need any more.

Deadwyler said the weight of Mamie’s suffering, her choice to fight battles for future generations even when she knows she cannot win in the present, settled into every part of her body on set. But the minute they wrapped for the day, a waiting car would take her home, Mahalia Jackson gospel songs on the stereo.

“It’s a sonic shift,” she said. “It’s the same thing with Mamie: There’s a private self and a public self.”

Yet there were lighthearted moments on set that reflected Deadwyler’s sense of humor. “At first I thought she was very serious, and that she’d get very annoyed with me, because I’m not,” said Whoopi Goldberg, who plays Mamie’s mother and served as a producer of the film. “But she is also very silly.”

Despite the film’s enthusiastic reception among both critics and audiences — it currently has a 99 percent fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes — it was a project that took more than two decades to reach the big screen, Goldberg said.

“People would say, ‘You know, nobody wants to see that story,’” she said. “You’d say, ‘No, people do want to see it.’ I guess it was the reckoning that happened that finally got people interested in telling these stories.” (“Till” is the second project focused on Mamie and Emmett’s story to be released this year, after the ABC mini-series “Women of the Movement.”)

“It has modern-day resonance,” Deadwyler said, adding that she has discussed the story with her son because “it would be neglectful for me to not talk to him about the possibilities.”

AFTER THE PUBLICITY TOUR for “Till,” Deadwyler plans to take a moment — just a moment — to soak it all in. She can also be seen starring alongside Zoe Saldaña in the new Netflix limited series “From Scratch,” based on Tembi Locke’s memoir about an American student who falls in love with an Italian chef. And she has a few film projects in the works, among them Kourosh Ahari’s sci-fi thriller “Parallel” and Netflix’s star-studded airport Christmas thriller “Carry On.”

“I want to collaborate with people,” she said. “And I’m looking forward to being approached for more projects, vs. doing 80, 100 auditions per year.”

In the meantime, after being told that her face can be seen in ads atop New York taxis, she marveled at her change in fortune, though she hadn’t seen one yet. “I would like to go quietly into the dark,” she said, laughing.

Deadwyler’s laugh is a curious thing, a sound you haven’t heard much onscreen: It’s a deep, rumbling, full-bodied “HA HA HA” that you can hear echoing down the hall long after the door closes. “Me, a serious person?” she says, eyes twinkling. “No.”

I ask what else people get wrong about her.

There’s that laugh again.

“Everything.”

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/movies/danielle-deadwyler-till.html

The director Chinonye Chukwu planned to focus on faces all along. But “when I saw how much command and power Danielle had, I leaned into that even more.”Credit...Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York Times

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She is just so sexy:)
 

Clara Schumann and Florence Price Get Their Due at Carnegie Hall
Two works by these composers have been marginalized in classical music, but they were never forgotten, as their histories show.

By Sarah Fritz and A. Kori Hill
Oct. 27, 2022
Two composers marginalized by history will take center stage at Carnegie Hall this week.

On Friday, the Philadelphia Orchestra will perform Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 and Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto, which is making its Carnegie debut with Beatrice Rana as the soloist 187 years after its premiere.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Philadelphia ensemble’s music director, called the concert, which sandwiches those two pieces between classics by Ravel, an example of varying artistic perspectives. “A work of art is a viewpoint from an artist,” he said in an interview. “And if you have only one part of society that always gets their viewpoint heard, we constantly hear one viewpoint. It’s so important to have different viewpoints.”

As a result of rediscoveries and shifting approaches to programming, works by Schumann and Price have migrated to classical music’s mainstream in recent years, with attention from major orchestras, especially Philadelphia, and recordings on prestige labels like Deutsche Grammophon. But they were never truly forgotten, as their histories show.

Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor

In 1835, the piano concerto by Schumann (then Clara Wieck, not yet married to the composer Robert Schumann) premiered at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, Germany, under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn. She was just 16, but already famous as a composer and virtuosic performer. The work earned ovations, and later, the Viennese demanded three performances in one season. But after Robert Schumann’s journal, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, among others, reviewed it as a “lady’s” composition, she shelved it.

The concerto’s second edition didn’t come about until 1970, according to Nancy B. Reich’s biography “Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman.” (The pianist Michael Ponti is believed to have made the first recording in 1971.) Decades of work by musicians and musicologists culminated in Schumann’s widely celebrated 200th birthday in 2019. But despite new recordings by Ragna Schirmer and Isata Kanneh-Mason, who recently debuted the concerto with the Baltimore Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, major orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, continue to ignore it.

Some artists have shrugged off the concerto, which Schumann completed when she was 15, as the work of a teenager. But it has had a long-ranging influence on some of the most beloved piano concertos that came after it.

“It was written at a pivotal point in the history of the genre,” Joe Davies wrote in “Clara Schumann Studies,” published by Cambridge University Press last year. “It invites a powerful reimagining of what the concerto can be and do. Stylistically and expressively, she put her own stamp on the genre.”

In an interview, Rana, who called the concerto “a genius work in many ways,” said: “I think that it’s very, very underestimated — the intellectual value of this concerto in the history of music.” Schumann’s nontraditional, through-composed form, seamless without breaks between movements, Reich has noted, bears the influence of Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto. Rana called it as revolutionary as concertos by Liszt and Robert Schumann, both of which it predates by over a decade.

The concerto’s powerful march opening, deceptively simple in its orchestral unison, contains the five-note motif that unites the themes across its three movements. In its transformative second movement Romanze, a tacit orchestra listens to the piano sing an exquisite love duet with a solo cello — an instrument that both Robert Schumann and Brahms featured in their concerto’s solo movements. Its final, longest movement displays the full breadth of Clara’s pianistic prowess and personality.

Alexander Stefaniak, the author of “Becoming Clara Schumann,” writes that Robert emulated her form and improvisatory style; Robert also inverted Clara’s piano entrance in his piano concerto (also in A minor). Based on that, you could consider her reach extending to Grieg’s and Rachmaninoff’s first concertos, which echo Robert Schumann’s. Brahms might even have been inspired by her third movement Polonaise in his First Concerto’s third-movement Hungarian dance.

“You can see she was a great virtuoso because what she writes is very challenging for the piano,” Rana said.

At Carnegie, Nézet-Séguin intentionally avoided the cliché of programming Schumann with her husband’s work. For him, she and Price stand on their own. As composers, they had “the self-confidence to believe in what they wanted to bring to the world,” he said. “They are works that have no equivalent.”

Price: Symphony No. 3 in C minor

Price’s Third Symphony is a work rooted in the traditions of symphonic Romanticism and classical Black composition, simultaneously adding to and expanding the expectations of orchestral technique. “A cross-section of Negro life and psychology” is how she described it in a letter to Sergei Koussevitsky, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director, in 1941. That was a year after the symphony’s premiere, with Valter Poole and the Michigan W.P.A. Symphony, which was positively received in the Detroit press and even earned a mention in Eleanor Roosevelt’s syndicated column, “My Day.”

Price’s music, Nézet-Séguin said, is “like a great wine that really ages very well.” He and the Philadelphia Orchestra released a Grammy Award-winning recording of her First and Third Symphonies last year. Since then, he added, “We keep exploring all the finesse and the detail and the language.”

Philadelphia’s recording of the Third is the most high-profile, though not the first. (That was by Apo Hsu and the Women’s Philharmonic, released in 2001.) The album comes after decades of artists championing Price’s work, including luminaries like Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price, as well as present-day virtuosos like Michelle Cann, Samantha Ege and Randall Goosby, whose live recording of the violin concertos with the Philadelphia Orchestra will be released on the Decca label next year.

Rae Linda Brown, in her book “The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price,” described the Third Symphony as a reflection of “a maturity of style and a new attitude toward Black musical materials.” Rather than applying African American music idioms through melody and harmony alone, Price incorporates conventions of form, texture, rhythm and timbre, an approach she also used in her Concerto in One Movement (1934), Violin Concerto No. 1 (1939) and Violin Concerto No. 2 (1952). Her percussion section calls for snare drum, cymbals, triangle, orchestral bells, castanets, wood blocks and sand blocks, to name a few; and she expands the brasses and woodwinds beyond the sets of twos from her earlier works. The first and final movements feature more contrapuntal motion and tonal ambiguity.

Nézet-Séguin said that during a rehearsal, a Philadelphia Orchestra member mentioned that Price probably played a lot of Bach, and that the third movement Juba-Allegro’s melody seemed to be a reference to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. That speaks to another core aspect of her style: her use of the African American musical procedure of signifyin(g), in which older works and forms are referred to and transformed in new, unexpected directions.

The juba dance movement of Price’s Third features asymmetrical phrasing, rhythmic complexity and interaction between sections. The cool trio section, with habanera rhythms and a muted trumpet, and her use of a modified jazz progression for the main theme, reflects a creative palette that crosses time, region and culture.

UNLIKE SCHUMANN’S CONCERTO, Price’s symphony is not making its Carnegie Hall debut. But it has been performed there only once before — by the Gateway Music Festival Orchestra this year. By contrast, according to the hall’s archives, the Ravel works on Friday’s program, “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and “Boléro,” have been performed there 48 and 114 times.

“We’ve had too much of the white European male for too long,” Nézet-Séguin said, adding that it was time to aim “for a certain kind of balance in terms of what we see on our concert stage.”

Nézet-Séguin is an established Price champion by now; he and the Philadelphians brought her works to five European cities this summer alone. And Rana can say the same about Schumann, having toured the concerto with Nézet-Séguin, and having prepared a recording to be released in February.

“The only way to give dignity to a piece is to listen to it,” Rana said. “It needs to be played. It needs to be heard.”

Sarah Fritz, a musicologist who is writing a book about Clara Schumann, teaches at the Westminster Conservatory of Music at Rider University.

A. Kori Hill is a musicologist, freelance writer and staff member of the nonprofit ArtsWave. She lives in Cincinnati.

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/arts/music/clara-schumann-florence-price-philadelphia-orchestra.html
 

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