Reporting Unlimited

10/25/2024

https://www.mortreport.org/reports/none-so-blind2

BAYEUX, France — This gem of a medieval Normandy town, nearly flattened by allied bombers in 1944 to stop a power-obsessed madman from swallowing Britain and moving on, puts looming American elections into sharp, stark focus. Today, Bayeux encapsulates a hoary adage now fraught with urgent meaning...

10/08/2024

https://www.mortreport.org/reports/so-what

PARIS — Polls say about 25 million eligible voters remain undecided as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump run neck and neck. A handful of states will determine the winner, in some by margins in the low thousands. The House and Senate are both tossups. Wherever you are in the world, if you aren't terri...

09/26/2024

https://www.mortreport.org/reports/shaggy-dogs

FREJUS, France — Sen. JD Vance keeps on slandering legal Haitian immigrants who his constituents welcomed to fill crucial jobs. Truth from outraged townsfolk, local officials and the Republican governor of Ohio fails to dim his headline-grabbing lunacy. "If I have to create stories so that the

09/12/2024

https://www.mortreport.org/reports/never-again2

VEYRIER, Switzerland — In a leafy glade straddling the French border, among headstones chiseled with the Star of David, it aches to see a world sleepwalk toward what may be another great war with the same intolerance and apathy that sparked the last one. Reality bites hard in haunting silence at t...

08/30/2024

https://www.mortreport.org/reports/boorish-boor

AMPUS, France — Hulking boar called sangliers and assorted rodents dominated high-country Provençal fauna when I came here in the 1980s. The pigs trampled rock terraces and uprooted plants. Rats infested homes and barns. They were no big deal. Olive groves, amber waves of grain and vineyards thri

08/30/2024

The inimitable Frank Bruni: "...Trump, Kennedy, Gabbard: It’s the dinner party from Hell. Or maybe the Donner party, given Trump’s frequent mooning over Hannibal Lecter."
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08/16/2024

O-Rings...

A few friends have asked for my take on the Olympics... A Mort Report In the works after I ask around. I've been happily hiding out 900 kliks to the south.

In brief, I'm thrilled they went well for the sake of all those brave souls who found what I expected the Games to be -- a wild-ass party free of contretemps and ugly surprises -- and for all those competitors who worked so hard to prepare for competition.

As it turned out, it seems, so many Parisians got the hell outa there that those who watched events and were able to sort out credentials/tickets and whatnot report a very good time.

I loved the Serbs showing that basketball is exportable, and that killer US-France game. (Reminded me of World Cup finals when all of the color-conscious rightwing buttheads suddenly realize that although white guys can jump (or kick), but...

Roger Cohen of the NYT, to no surprise, did a sh*t-hot analysis on how the whole thing reflected a new and different Paris/France, which blows all to hell that old châtaigne: plus ça change... It ain't la même chose, for better or worse.

However, I'm no fan of the Sun-Queen mayor of Paris, whose conclusion seems to be the old city so many of us have loved for so long (bitching aside) ought to be a full-time playground for able-bodied tourists and timeoff-ers, leaving its multiple millions of a workaday residents to seethe polluting traffic snarls or to hike long distance while Paris pretends to be a much smaller Amsterdam, without canals, trams -- or the Dutch.

And the Seine. CNN did not cover itself with glory when Melissa Bell took a brief dip in the river that the mayor to prove it was safe for swimming. It is cleaner now than in recent years. But it is the main drag through a big city with industry and heavy diesel boat traffic upstream.

Having spent half my life watching what floats by on calm early mornings -- sharp detritus, bloated dead pigs and whatnot... Much worse are all the chemicals and toxic waste that get dumped into the upriver Seine and its multiple tributaries... Human waste that spills into the river in Paris after rains is organic, and it floats downstream pretty quickly. However...

Wait, did I say brief?

08/16/2024

08/13/2024

https://www.mortreport.org/reports/truth-twisting

08/09/2024

No American voter should be allowed within 10 miles of a voting booth without first watching this: Lawrence O'Donnell's commentary on the state of U.S. TV "coverage" of Trump. Note, particularly, the contrast in his report between the lapdog poodles questioning Trump under strictly muzzled circumstances and the same watchdogs -- suddenly Rottweilers -- hounding Joe Biden.

Donald Trump rambled and lied for over an hour without any follow up questions or fact-checking. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell says that while he hopes Vice President Harris answers questions from reporters, after the press conference that Donald Trump turned into a “charade,” Vice President Ha...

08/03/2024

https://action.lincolnproject.us/listen_ad?utm_campaign=080224_listen&utm_medium=email&utm_source=lincolnproject

Check out The Lincoln Project's latest video: Listen

07/24/2024

https://www.mortreport.org/reports/grapes-not-wrath

WILD OLIVES, France — Finally, a gleam of hope tinged with euphoria cut through despair down my rutted road in deepest Provence. America soon might have a leader who speaks plainly and carries a big law book. Its porcine ex-president, intent on an Orwellian Animal Farm where self-anointed pigs rul...