Before I get to the subject in the title of this blog posting, I want to remind those of you who haven’t already heard this from me on Mastodon or LinkedIn today:
American citizens, It is absolutely critical for you to call your senators today: tell them to filibuster the continuing resolution unless it includes written commitments to spend the money appropriated by Congress, prevent DOGE from rampaging through the government, and undo the unauthorized budget cuts that DOGE has already implemented.
Your senators need to hear today that you support a government shutdown if that’s what it takes to stop DOGE.
The budget process is almost the only lever of power that Democrats can use right now to influence the direction of the Trump administration. They need to use it, and you need to tell them that you expect them to. This is a inflection-point moment, folks. Do not put it off.
https://5calls.org/ can help.
NOTE: You need to call today. Sending email is not enough. Senators take calls much more seriously than emails.
If you’re a man it’s even more important to call; far fewer men call electeds than woman, so when they get a big flood of calls from men they know people are serious. (Yes, this sucks, but it is what it is, and we need to use it to our advantage here.)
DON’T WAIT, CALL TODAY, IT’S CRITICALLY IMPORTANT.
For the background on why it essential for you to make these calls today, please read what Josh Marshall has to say.
Now, let’s move on to the ostensible topic of this blog posting, which is frankly much less important than what I wrote above.
Last week, a couple journalists who work for TV Tokyo did a video interview of me. We met at the Boston Public Library central branch, and they interviewed me in one of the small conference rooms available to be reserved in the Kirstein Center on the lower level. Kudos to BPL for making these rooms available, but boo, BPL! for not having private study rooms available at most branch libraries, unlike most of the other public libraries in the surrounding communities.
I spoke to them for around an hour and a half, and gave them another half hour after that to shoot B-roll on the streets around the library, and after all that, the segment they ended up using the footage for wasn’t even a minute long. D’oh. Perhaps they will use more of the footage in another segment later. 🤷
The segment aired last Friday night in Tokyo on the live (though obviously my segment was not live) “World Business Satellite” news program. I have a video clip of the segment, but I can’t post it here because it’s behind a paywall on the TV Tokyo site and I don’t want to walk all over their copyright. However, I am able to share it privately with friends and family, so if you’re curious to see it, hit me up and I’ll share it with you. Just keep in mind that it’s in Japanese. 😉
