Category: reason

Did Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, suggest that his boss might try to unilaterally (and illegally) reschedule this fall’s presidential election? That’s the way The New York Times portrayed Kushner’s comments, but it is not a fair interpretation.

The Times reports that Kushner “refused on Tuesday to rule out postponing the presidential election in November, a comment that fed directly into Democratic concerns that President Trump might use the coronavirus crisis to delay or delegitimize the contest and one that contradicted Mr. Trump himself.” The headline: “Kushner, Law Aside, Doesn’t Rule Out Delaying 2020 Election.” The subtitle: “The opinion of a White House staff member has no bearing on when the election is held, but his comment played into the concerns of President Trump’s detractors.”

Here is the relevant exchange from Kushner’s interview with Time magazine White House correspondent Brian Bennett:

Bennett: Is there any scenario, including a second outbreak in the fall, where the elections move past November 3rd?

Kushner: That’s too far in the future to tell. Nothing that I’m aware of now, but again, our focus right now is just on getting the country—

Bennett: Will [unintelligible] commit that the elections will happen on November 3rd?

Kushner (laughing): It’s not my decision to make, so I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other. But right now, that’s the plan, and again, hopefully, by the time we get to September, October, November, we’ve done enough work with testing and with all the different things we’re trying to do to prevent a future outbreak of the magnitude that would make us shut down again. I really believe that once America opens up, it will be very hard for America to ever lock down again.

Note that it was Bennett, not Kushner, who suggested the election might be delayed, and it was Bennett who suggested that the president has the power to do that. Why else ask a representative of the White House to “commit that the elections will happen on November 3rd”?

Far from agreeing with Bennett’s premise, Kushner said, “It’s not my decision to make, so I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other.” The Times story omits the first part of that sentence, making it seem like Kushner was asserting a power he was actually disclaiming. Maybe Kushner meant that the timing of the election is Trump’s decision, but there is no evidence to support that interpretation, other than the suspicion that the president is eager to assert dictatorial powers for his own political benefit in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some things Trump has said—in particular, his dubious assertion of “total” authority over the imposition and lifting of state lockdowns—have reinforced that view. But in practice, he has not actually tried to override state and local responses to the epidemic. To the contrary, many of his critics on the left have argued that the Trump administration should have asserted more authority in this area.

In any case, Trump has explicitly rejected the idea that the epidemic might force a delay of the presidential election. “Are you taking steps to ensure that the general election will happen even if this pandemic has reemerged or hasn’t gone away?” a reporter asked the president during a press briefing last month. Trump’s reply: “The general election will happen on November 3rd.”

In this context, it is rather puzzling that Times reporters Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman thought it was necessary to remind us that “the opinion of a White House staff member has no bearing on when the election is held,” since “even the president himself does not have the authority to unilaterally postpone Election Day, which by law takes place the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.” Their explanation for that civics lesson is a model of anti-Trump hostility masquerading as reporting:

Mr. Kushner’s comment raised alarms both because of the expansive power Mr. Trump has conferred on members of his family who serve in his administration and because it played into the worst anxieties of Mr. Trump’s detractors—that the president would begin to question the validity of the election if he feared he was going to lose.

The presumptive Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., gave voice to those concerns at a virtual fund-raiser last month. “Mark my words, I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow—come up with some rationale why it can’t be held,” he said.

For the president’s most vociferous opponents, pretty much anything he or his underlings say “raise[s] alarms.” When those alarms are false, as this one seems to be, the job of serious reporters is not to amplify them but to present the relevant facts.

In the 10th paragraph of the story, we get this response from Kushner:

On Tuesday night, Mr. Kushner sought to clarify his earlier interview. “I have not been involved in, nor am I aware of, any discussions about trying to change the date of the presidential election,” he said. A White House official said Mr. Kushner was fully aware that the date was set by federal law.

In other words, the whole premise of the Times story, which was based on Kushner’s purported “hedge about the date of the election” (as Karni and Haberman put it), seems to be fundamentally faulty.

Last month, Haberman, who covers the White House for the Times, co-wrote an opinion piece disguised as a news story that portrayed Trump as vain, petty, irresponsible, and self-obsessed. While I think that description, which was based on a content analysis of Trump’s comments during COVID-19 briefings, is pretty accurate, the president’s supporters probably would disagree. That sort of blatant bias, along with the subtler but still obvious bias epitomized by the Kushner story, shows that the president is right to view many of the reporters who cover him as political opponents.

That reality does not mean all of Trump’s frequently unhinged complaints about the press are valid. There is a crucial distinction between reporting facts that make the president uncomfortable and manufacturing facts to fit a preconceived view of him. Does the Times understand the difference?

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From Judge C.J. Williams’ decision yesterday in NuStar Farms, LLC v. Lizza (N.D. Iowa):

On January 16, 2020, plaintiffs filed a complaint in this Court alleging a single count of defamation. Paragraph 14 of the complaint alleges that the article “makes the following false and defamatory statements about Plaintiffs” and then lists 16 bullet points constituting the statements plaintiffs allege are false and defamatory (“the statements”):

• “So why did [Devin Nunes’] parents and brother cover their tracks after quietly moving the farm to Iowa? Are they hiding something politically explosive? On the ground in Iowa, Esquire searched for the truth—and discovered a lot of paranoia and hypocrisy”. [Other bullet points included later in this post. -EV]

… Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(e), “[a] party may move for a more definite statement of a pleading to which a responsive pleading is allowed but which is  so vague or ambiguous that the party cannot reasonably prepare a response.” “A motion under Rule 12(e) is designed to strike at unintelligibility in a pleading rather than want of detail.” …

Defendants argue that plaintiffs’ complaint fails to identify “what aspect(s) of each statement is supposedly false and defamatory, and … what Plaintiffs allege the truth of the matter to be.” Plaintiffs contend that it is enough for the complaint to simply allege that the statements are false, and defendants can seek the factual details they want through discovery. As a preliminary matter, the Court finds that plaintiffs must allege facts that, if proven, would show the statements to be false. It is not enough for plaintiffs to list a number of statements and generally declare them to be false without alleging facts which, if proven, would show them to be false.

To determine if plaintiffs’ complaint has met the minimal pleading requirement such that defendants can answer the complaint and defend against the claim, the Court must carefully examine the allegedly false statements in the article. [Long and detailed discussion omitted.—ed.] …

The tedious and laborious exercise of dissecting each of the sixteen bullet points illustrates the deficiency of plaintiffs’ complaint. The complaint is not at all clear as to which facts asserted in these bullet points plaintiffs allege are actually false. Knowing which assertions plaintiffs allege are false is necessary for defendants to be able to answer the complaint and assert a defense. As the Court pointed out as it addressed each bullet point, some of the alleged facts may be defended as opinions or conclusions, others may be defended as not concerning plaintiffs, and still others may be defended as being true. Without knowing which of the facts plaintiffs allege are actually false, defendants are left not knowing how to answer the complaint.

The exercise also shows that the complaint fails to allege facts which, if proven, would show that any of the alleged facts are false. In short, the Court finds this is one of the rare instances when a more definite statement is required under Rule 12(e). Although defendants have urged the Court to dismiss the complaint outright under Rule 12(b)(6), to do so here would require the Court to guess as to what exactly plaintiffs are claiming are the false statements. Even if the Court granted such a motion at this stage, it would be a dismissal without prejudice allowing plaintiffs leave to file an amended complaint to allege facts that would state a claim. Without knowing precisely what plaintiffs are claiming, the Court cannot say that plaintiffs are incapable of alleging facts which, if proven, would state a defamation claim against defendants.

The Court fully understands that in determining whether a publication is defamatory, the Court must view the publication as a whole. The Court also understands that plaintiffs are proceeding at least in part on a theory of implied defamation by juxtaposition.  Yet, for defendants to be able to answer the complaint, or for this Court   to analyze whether the complaint is subject to dismissal under Rule 12(b)(6) because it fails to state a claim, it is first necessary that the complaint itself be intelligible.

The complaint needs to state whether it is alleging specific facts are false, and if so, which ones and why. If plaintiffs’ entire theory of recovery is that the article as a whole is defamatory by implication, then the complaint needs to allege which facts or omissions are juxtaposed with other facts or omissions so as to lead to a false assertion of fact, and allege facts which, if proven, would show the implied assertion of fact to be false….

Here are Nunes’ other bullet points:

• “Devin; his brother, Anthony III; and his parents, Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, sold their California farmland in 2006. Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, who has also been the treasurer of every one of Devin’s campaigns since 2001, used their cash from the sale to buy a dairy eighteen hundred miles away in Sibley, a small town in northwest Iowa where they—as well as Anthony III, Devin’s only sibling, and his wife, Lori—have lived since 2007 [W]hat is strange is that the family has apparently tried to conceal the move from the public—for more than a decade”.
• “Why would the Nuneses, Steve King, and an obscure dairy publication all conspire to hide the fact that the congressman’s family sold its farm and moved to Iowa?”
• “As he walked to his truck, [Tony] looked back and warned me: ‘If I see you again, I’m gonna get upset.’ Apparently Sibley’s First Amendment training hadn’t filtered down to all its residents”.
• “Other dairy farmers in the area helped me understand why the Nunes family might be so secretive about the farm: Midwestern diaries tend to run on undocumented labor”.
• “In the heart of Steve King’s district … the economy is powered by workers that King and Trump have threatened to deport. I checked Anthony Nunes ‘s campaign donor history. The only federal candidate he has ever donated to, besides his son, is King ($250 in 2012). He also gives to the local Republican party of Osceola County, which, records show, transfers money into King’s congressional campaigns”.
• “The absurdity of this situation – funding and voting for politicians whose core promise is to implement immigration policies that would destroy their livelihoods – has led some of the Republican-supporting dairymen to rethink their political priorities”.
• “‘They are immigrants and Devin is a strong supporter of Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump wants to shut down all of the immigration, and here is his family benefiting from immigrant labor’, documented or not”.
• “I had a particularly sensitive interview that afternoon with a source who I knew would be taking a risk by talking to me about immigration and labor at NuStar. When I arrived, we talked for a few minutes before the source’s cell phone suddenly The conversation seemed strained. “Sí, aquí está,” the source said. I learned that on the other end of the phone was a man named Flavio, who worked at NuStar. Somehow Flavio knew exactly where I was and whom I was talking to. He warned my source to end the conversation. Not only was I being followed, but I was also being watched, and my sources were being contacted by NuStar”.
• “I left and drove to the local grocery store, where I parked in the open, hoping to draw out whoever was tailing I suddenly noticed a man in jeans, a work shirt, and a baseball cap pulled down low. He was talking on his cell phone and walking suspiciously. Was he watching me? I held up a camera to take pictures and he darted away. I followed. His car was parked haphazardly on the side of the road half a block away. He got in and took off while I followed. It was a dark Chevrolet Colorado pickup truck—with California license plates …. The guy in the pickup truck with California plates was, of course, … Anthony Jr”.
• Devin Nunes “and his parents seemed to have concealed basic facts about the family’s move to Iowa. It was suspicious”.
• “There was no doubt about why I was being According to two sources with firsthand knowledge, NuStar did indeed rely, at least in part, on undocumented labor. One source, who was deeply connected in the local Hispanic community, had personally sent undocumented workers to Anthony Nunes Jr.’s farm for jobs … asserting that the farm was aware of their status”.
• “I laid out the facts I had uncovered in Sibley, including the intimidation of sources …, and asked him for ‘I’d tell that story,’ he said. He paused and added, ‘We’re a sanctuary church, if you need a place to stay. You’re safe here!'”
• “I learned that Anthony Jr. was seemingly starting to panic. The next day, the 2009 Dairy Star article about NuStar, the one that made me think the Nuneses were hiding something and that had led me to Sibley in the first place, was removed from the Dairy Star’s website”.
• “Is it possible the Nuneses have nothing to be seriously concerned about? Of course, but I never got the chance to ask because Anthony … did not respond to numerous requests for interviews”.
• “The relationship between the Iowa dairy farmers and their undocumented employees is indeed fraught”.

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When the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) examined the nation’s long-term fiscal state last year, it offered this dour assessment: Federal debt levels were on track to reach their highest levels since shortly after World War II. On the current trajectory, “growing budget deficits would boost federal debt drastically over the next 30 years,” pushing debt to levels that were “the highest in the nation’s history by far.” Interest payments were set to spike, tripling over the next several decades, and exceeding the total amount of all discretionary spending. Over time, debt service would essentially become its own massive federal program.

Even under favorable scenarios, in which productivity growth remained steady and interest rates remained low, debt levels would continue to rise and rise. “The prospect of such high and rising debt poses substantial risks for the nation and presents policymakers with significant challenges.” Among the risks and challenges: “High debt might cause policymakers to feel restrained from implementing deficit-financed fiscal policy to respond to unforeseen events.” Here is my thinking face emoji.

What the nonpartisan congressional budget analysts were saying, in their own carefully antiseptic language, was that even if things went pretty well for the economy, the continued growth of federal debt was going to be a big problem. A crisis was brewing, perhaps not immediately, but in the long term.

You may have noticed: Things have not gone well.

As COVID-19 spreads, the American economy is in the midst of the largest freefall in at least a generation, perhaps the most devastating since the Great Depression. Joblessness is at record highs, and financial analysts are predicting that the economy will end up shrinking by as much as 40 percent during the second quarter this year. A sharp drop in health care spending, as people delay elective surgeries and other non-emergency care, has alone managed to trim several points from the gross domestic product. No one has any clear sense of how or when this will end. 

As the economy has tanked, Congress has responded with a series of aid packages totaling nearly $3 trillion, all of which have been deficit-financed. This year’s budget deficit is expected to come in somewhere around $4 trillion, nearly the size of last year’s entire federal budget. In April, the U.S. posted its highest monthly budget deficit ever, at $737.9 billion. In 2016, the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency, the annual deficit was $585 billion. In a single 30 day period, the U.S. government ran a bigger budget deficit than any one year outside of the Great Recession and its aftermath. 

And this year isn’t over: Yesterday, Democrats unveiled a new $3 trillion relief package, offering billions in bailout funds to state budgets and the post office, along with another round of stimulus checks for most households. Progressives complained the bill wasn’t large enough. 

The bill isn’t expected to pass, however, at least not in its current form. And the reason why is something the CBO warned about: High debt levels appear to be causing policy makers “to feel restrained from implementing deficit-financed fiscal policy to respond to unforeseen events.” Republicans in both Congress and the White House are balking at the price tag, in part because it would come on top of a debt and deficit outlook that was already worrisome. 

I have criticized the major fiscal stimulus bills under both the Bush and Obama administrations. But there is at least a case to be made that this crisis, which is different in both scale and kind from previous economic upheavals, is one that actually justifies some amount of emergency deficit spending, if not the particular bills that Congress has passed: When governments are forcing businesses to close in response to an unforeseeable exogenous event, as well as forcing individuals to stay home from work, some form of recompense is probably justified. It is notable that the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, one of the organizations most single-mindedly focused on national debt reduction, has backed deficit spending in this instance. 

Yet the relief effort is running up against legislative skepticism—a political constraint imposed by the high debt and deficits that were already locked in before the crisis began. 

I don’t mean to endorse the House Democrats’ bill, which is at least in part an effort to use the current crisis to push the party’s pre-crisis priorities. And there are plenty of legitimate criticisms of the relief legislation that has already been passed; the contradictory design and dysfunctional implementation of the previous relief bills should give anyone wishing for trillions more real pause. 

Congress needs to keep emergency relief simple and direct. Get universal monthly cash payments to the people. Don’t put a good idea into a bad bill with a dozen convoluted ideas that are counterproductive and costly. Get money to the people and let them decide what to do with it.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) May 7, 2020

There’s blame to go around for the fiscal mess: Republicans shoulder much of the responsibility for the preexisting conditions of the nation’s fiscal health, although Democrats have certainly contributed plenty over the years as well. But partisan blame is, at the moment, somewhat beside the point. 

It is certainly possible that additional deficit-financed relief legislation will pass in the coming months. But the current challenge is real: Decades of rising debt and deficits, even under thriving economic scenarios where persistently high deficit levels are unjustified, have left lawmakers across the aisle less willing or able to respond, exactly as budget-watchers have predicted. The debt is not just a drag on the economy. It’s a burden on crisis response, a limitation on the government’s ability to take action in a time of need. 

For years, the risks associated with long-term fiscal imbalances have mostly been seen as potential threats down the road rather than real, immediate challenges. But those risks have now materialized dramatically as short-term challenges. The long-term problems are exacerbating our near-term crisis. 

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The post about the Kentucky AG suing the Kentucky Governor post is a good reminder that the separation of powers operates very differently in many states than in the federal government. At the federal level, the executive power is vested in the President (though there are some disputes at the edges about independent agencies); but many states have independently elected executive officers—Governors, Attorneys General, Secretaries of State, and many more—that run different parts of the executive.

Beyond that, some state high courts have held that it’s unconstitutional for state legislatures to create evidence codes or codes of civil procedure, since that’s a part of the judicial power; that’s not the federal view. Many states provide that the governing bodies of various powerful agencies will be appointed in part by the legislature; at the federal level, that’s not allowed (except as to essentially advisory bodies).

Of course, other features of state government structure are also often different from the federal. Many states elect judges, many states allow the citizen initiative, referendum, and recall. Nebraska has a unicameral legislature. Different states have very different rules as to the governor’s veto and pardon powers; and the list could go on.

There are doubtless some commonalities: No state has a parliamentary system, where the executive is elected by the legislature, though I think there’s nothing in the federal Constitution precluding that. (Many local governments, I believe, have something like that sort of model, with the city council appointing a city manager.) State and federal governments arise, after all, from the same constitutional culture, and the federal constitutional rules are an influential part of that culture.

And there is probably an irreducible constitutional minimum: I suspect that judges have to have at least some level of independence from legislative or executive officials (plus of course each state is supposed to have a republican form of government, so monarchies are out, and no state can have a House of Lords because no state can grant titles of nobility). Also, while states have considerable latitude in deciding voter qualifications in some respects, that’s limited in other respects (both expressly, as to race, color, condition of previous servitude, sex, and age above 18, and via the Equal Protection Clause, as to various other matters).

But “the doctrine of separation of powers embodied in the Federal Constitution is not mandatory on the States,”and there is a broad tradition of substantial state variation from that federal structure.

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In 1955, Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” became the first song from the wild new music known as rock ‘n’ roll to hit number one on the Billboard pop chart. Though Haley and his band presented impeccably respectable and Caucasian personas, it was well known that the genre they were playing had been pioneered by black musicians. And so the meteoric popularity of rock ‘n’ roll was met with puritanical and racist reactions by many parents, teachers, newspaper columnists, politicians, and other good citizens of the day. Several American cities banned the music for its “degenerate,” “uncivilized,” and “jungle” characteristics. But the thirst for the music overwhelmed the censors, as legions of young fans flocked to each new rock ‘n’ roll act that came onto the scene. Knowing that much of the music was being played in juke joints and night clubs across the South, music industry talent scouts were under pressure to find black performers who could present an “authentic” black sound but also “cross over” and appeal to young white audiences.

In the summer of 1955, Robert “Bumps” Blackwell, the chief talent scout for the black-owned independent label Specialty Records, found a potential black crossover star: a 22-year-old singer, songwriter, and piano player from Macon, Georgia, named Richard Penniman, who as “Little Richard” had made a name for himself in New Orleans for, among other things, his six-inch pompadour, wailing falsetto voice, extravagantly feminine gestures, sexually suggestive on-stage antics, and “off-color” lyrics. In September, Blackwell signed Penniman to a recording contract and brought him to the J&M Recording Studio in New Orleans for a session that both men hoped would make the next mainstream rock ‘n’ roll star. But the session fell flat, with Penniman failing to capture the energy he had recorded on a demo tape that had earned him the contract with Specialty. The two men decided to take a break and have a drink at the nearby Dew Drop Inn.

Penniman was a regular performer at the Dew Drop. When he and Blackwell walked in the door, Penniman jumped onto the stage and behind the piano, where he pounded out a rollicking, hard-driving tune that formed the foundation of his stage act. The song was called “Tutti Frutti” and its lyrics were a celebration of a particular kind of sex: “Tutti frutti, good booty, if it don’t fit, don’t force it, you can grease it, take it easy, tutti frutti, good booty.” Blackwell had never heard anything like it. “‘I said, ‘Wow! That’s what I want from you, Richard. That’s a hit!'” Blackwell, of course, was right. Rewritten so that all the lines referencing anal sex were replaced with repetitions of “aw rooty,” a slang expression meaning “all right,” “Tutti Frutti” shot to the top of the charts by October.

Little Richard Penniman soon became one of the most popular and influential rock ‘n’ roll performers in the world. He placed more than 15 singles on the charts in less than three years, including “Lucille” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly.” During the height of segregation in the South, Little Richard’s public performances were known for the extraordinary degree of racial integration among the audiences, even in Jim Crow cities. It is quite possible that a typical Little Richard concert saw more mixing of black and white people than any other public space in America at the time. Nearly every major white rock ‘n’ roll star of the period covered his songs, including Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and Elvis Presley, who recorded no fewer than four of Little Richard’s songs on the two albums that made Presley a star in 1956. Paul McCartney and George Harrison both idolized Little Richard in their youth, and McCartney adopted some of his falsetto style in several of the Beatles’ biggest hits. Mick Jagger called him “the originator and my first idol.” David Bowie declared that when he first listened to “Tutti Frutti” he felt like he had “heard God.”

Among rock ‘n’ roll cognoscenti, Little Richard is unanimously considered to be one of the principal founders of the genre and one of the most important figures in making the music a mass, trans-racial, and trans-class phenomenon. Few Americans have brought more freedom and pleasure to American culture than the man who got his break at the Dew Drop Inn. What is generally ignored is that before he was Little Richard, Richard Penniman was best known as Princess Lavonne, a drag queen who regularly performed at the Dew Drop, the pre-eminent black gay club in 1950s New Orleans. In fact, Richard Penniman had been performing in drag since his early teens, when he dropped out of high school, joined Dr. Hudson’s Medicine Show, and took on the stage persona of Princess Lavonne. Through the early 1950s, Penniman appeared in drag for various vaudeville and “chitlin’ circuit” acts around the country, learning the tricks of his trade from the female impersonators who performed alongside him. When he turned exclusively to rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-1950s as Little Richard, he stopped wearing the drag queen’s skirts and gowns but he held on to her sequins, her makeup, her pompadour, her towering self-confidence, her mischievous sense of humor, and her way with words. “This is Little Richard, king of the blues,” he announced to audiences in Southern black nightclubs—adding with a sly smile, “and the queen, too!”

It was a time not just of Jim Crow but of a nationwide homophobic panic that forced many gay men and lesbians from their jobs and sent thousands to prisons and mental asylums. Yet drag shows had reached unprecedented popularity in black neighborhoods. Harlem, Chicago’s South Side, and Detroit’s Black Bottom each featured several clubs that hosted regular drag shows.

In New Orleans in the 1940s and early 1950s, at least four nightclubs featured black female impersonators as performers; drag queens were known to regularly stroll the streets of the city’s black district. There were also smaller drag cabarets that toured the South and black neighborhoods in northern cities as parts of rhythm & blues revues. Black drag performers—which often included male impersonators known as “drag kings”—elevated ostentation and self-aggrandizement to a supreme virtue. They crashed through the boundary bourgeois culture had established between appropriate and excessive display, elevating their own bodies as high as their imaginations could take them. Flamboyance and the celebration of the self were the order of the day. Simply using the titles “queen” and “king” shows their sense of entitlement: a declaration that even though they were black, gay, and poor, nothing was too good for them.

This was the world that Little Richard’s art helped create and from which it emerged, and it was the essence of rock’s subversive, liberating, and individualist power. The song “Lucille” was written in honor of a female impersonator in Penniman’s hometown who had gone by the name “Queen Sonya.” And while many square Americans wrote off “Good Golly Miss Molly” as a nonsensical ditty about teenage romance, much of its power came from the use of the gay slang term “molly,” which since the 18th century had meant “male prostitute.” The historian Marybeth Hamilton has written that the rock ‘n’ roll icon formerly known as Princess Lavonne “made the drag queen’s sly ironies part of every white teenager’s soundtrack.”

Little Richard helped make the United States a little more black, a little more queer, and a little more free. All hail the king and queen of rock.

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