FOCUS | Read It and Weep, Moscow Mitch: 100 MW of Solar to Be Bought by Kentucky Coal-Country Utilities for Toyota
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51519"><span class="small">Juan Cole, Informed Comment</span></a>
Friday, 24 January 2020 12:08
Cole writes: "The East Kentucky utilities Kentucky Utilities and Louisville Gas & Electric have applied for permission from state regulators to buy electricity from a 100-megawatt solar facility."
Urban solar farm. (photo: iStock)
Read It and Weep, Moscow Mitch: 100 MW of Solar to Be Bought by Kentucky Coal-Country Utilities for Toyota
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
24 January 20
he East Kentucky utilities Kentucky Utilities and Louisville Gas & Electric have applied for permission from state regulators to buy electricity from a 100-megawatt solar facility. The utilities, which ordinarily purvey power from dirty coal (80% of their generation), were pressured by Toyota and Dow, who in turn are trying to please their consumers and investors. The power of US public opinion, which has shifted dramatically in favor of renewables, is thus on display even in Moscow Mitch McConnell’s home state.
You wouldn’t be surprised to hear about advances of solar in Hawaii, but Kentucky?
The lowest bid that came in for the new solar plant (to be online in only two years) “compares favorably” to coal and natural gas, according to the utilities. You betcha. The cheapest power coal can deliver is at least 5 cents a kilowatt hour even if you don’t count the damage it does to health and the environment, which would put its real cost up around 80 cents a kilowatt hour.
Recent Los Angeles and New Mexico utility-scale solar bids have been as low at 2 cents a kilowatt hour and even slightly lower. That is, it is now crazy to continue to operate coal plants. That is why all the coal plants are rapidly closing. If you as a consumer could buy a megawatt hour of electricity for $15 from a solar farm, but some coal plant offered you the same thing for $50, which would you choose? Exactly. Only artificial subsidies or the fact of sunk costs keeps any coal plants open at all at this point.
Even North Carolina, which until recently was run by the GOP, has a big solar sector and is the number two solar power-producing state after California. Duke Energy isn’t going in this direction for its health. Solar is a money-maker.
In fact, in Qatar in the Gulf, an 800 megawatt tender for a new solar farm has gone for a record low of 1.6 cents a kilowatt hour. Recent auctions in Portugal and Dubai have also brought in bids less than 2 cents a kilowatt hour.
For the Toyota plant in Georgetown, Ky. to get its electricity from solar is extremely important to the environment. Toyota now plans to get half of its new car sales from electric vehicles by 2025. If it builds the car with solar electricity, it means that constructing the EV will have used much less carbon dioxide, and so its drivers will be completely green sooner in the car’s lifetime. If homeowners put up rooftop solar panels and power their EVs off them, that also greatly increases the car’s greenness.
Likewise, electric-powered steel plants powered by wind and solar that provide steel for the electric vehicles will also reduce the amount of carbon that goes into the auto’s construction. Yes, that is a thing– it is happening in Sedalia, Mo.
American consumer resistance to electric cars is based on three mistakes. One is a worry about pick-up and merging on the highway. Another is the idea that the car won’t have the range necessary to get you home. Yet another is that you might not be able to find a charging station.
In fact, electric cars have sports-car style pick-up. The Chevy Bolt can go 0 to 60 mph in 6.5 seconds, as can BMW’s i3. The new generation of electric cars, moreover, gets 200 – 250 miles on a charge, and most trips are five miles. In everyday life, you never run out of range, even if you commute to work 50 miles each way. And, I was surprised to find with my first EV that they are just appliances like a refrigerator or television. You put them in the garage and plug them into a wall socket. You can put in a home fast charger, but you don’t really need it if you charge at night. I combined my EV with rooftop solar panels, and since I don’t work 9-5, I often was able to charge straight from the sun. My summer electricity bill with the solar panels is typically $14 a month.
A ton of sleek new beautiful EV’s are coming out this fall, and I expect them rapidly to become mainstreamed. Some of them will be built in East Kentucky. With clean solar electricity.
An Impeachment Trial Without Witnesses Would Be Unconstitutional
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53068"><span class="small">Paul Savoy, The Atlantic</span></a>
Friday, 24 January 2020 09:33
Savoy writes: "On the opening day of the impeachment trial, the Senate, in a party-line vote of 53-47, approved an organizing resolution establishing the ground rules for the trial and rejecting efforts by Democrats to compel the testimony of witnesses and the production of documents not included by the House in its impeachment inquiry."
Chief Justice John Roberts arrives at the U.S. Capitol to preside over the impeachment trial. (photo: Sarah Silbiger/Reuters)
An Impeachment Trial Without Witnesses Would Be Unconstitutional
By Paul Savoy, The Atlantic
24 January 20
And a resulting acquittal verdict would present Americans with something far worse than a constitutional crisis.
n the opening day of the impeachment trial, the Senate, in a party-line vote of 53–47, approved an organizing resolution establishing the ground rules for the trial and rejecting efforts by Democrats to compel the testimony of witnesses and the production of documents not included by the House in its impeachment inquiry. However, the resolution allows Democrats to renew their motions to subpoena witnesses and documents after House managers and the president’s defense lawyers have completed their opening statements. The fateful battle over witnesses will thus begin in earnest next week.
In December, Donald Trump became only the third U.S. president to be impeached. If Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell succeeds in his intention to prevent any witnesses from testifying, Trump will become the first president to be acquitted by an unconstitutional impeachment process.
McConnell has created the mistaken impression that the Constitution does not provide any guidance about the impeachment process, and that the procedures for the trial—including motions to call witnesses—can be determined by a majority vote. Although the Senate has broad discretion to set the rules for the trial, Supreme Court Justice Byron White, in a concurring opinion in Nixon v. United States (1993), a case involving the impeachment of federal Judge Walter Nixon, found in the impeachment-trial clause of Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution a limitation on the method by which the Senate can conduct an impeachment proceeding. The text of the clause states, “The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments.” Justice White interpreted the word try to mean that the impeachment proceeding must be in the nature of a judicial trial, and concluded that “a procedure that could not be deemed a trial by reasonable judges” would be unconstitutional.
White found support for his conclusion in the Framers’ understanding of the impeachment process, particularly the arguments by Alexander Hamilton, the delegate to the Constitutional Constitution who devoted the most attention to the impeachment function of the Senate. Contrary to McConnell’s assertion that impeachment is actually a “political process” and that “there’s not anything judicial about it,” Hamilton described the Senate in “Federalist No. 65” as possessing a “judicial character as a court for the trial of impeachments,” and in “Federalist No. 66,” he repeatedly referred to the Senate as “a court of impeachments.”
There is a widespread assumption among Americans that it is perfectly legitimate for the trial to be conducted as a no-holds-barred partisan battle, with senators voting along party lines, rather than impartially deciding the merits of the case. This is contrary to the Framers’ intent. Hamilton regarded the upper chamber as “the most fit depositary” for the impeachment trial because it provided “the necessary impartiality between an individual accused, and the representatives of the People, his accusers.”
The choice of the Senate made sense for the Framers, who contemplated a republic without strong parties and a Senate whose members —elected by state legislatures until the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913—were expected to function in a less partisan, more deliberative, and wiser manner than their popularly elected counterparts in the House. The impeachment oath, which requires senators to “do impartial justice,” is not a quaint ritual to be performed with a wink and a nod, but a procedure required by the Constitution because the Framers intended the impeachment proceeding to be run much like a judicial trial.
Senators are thus constitutionally bound to follow what Justice White described as “a set of minimal procedures.” His opinion does not specify their exact contours, except to say that they must be the kinds of procedures a reasonable judge would regard as necessary components of a court trial. Because no reasonable judge would refuse to allow witnesses with personal knowledge of the facts to testify in an ordinary trial, it is the Constitution itself that establishes the right of House managers to call witnesses such as former National Security Adviser John Bolton and Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. Both men are thought to have firsthand knowledge of the president’s purpose in holding up congressionally approved military assistance to Ukraine after a phone call in which Trump asked the country’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
At least three moderate Republican senators—Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Susan Collins of Maine—have indicated their openness to hearing testimony from Bolton and other key witnesses, which leaves the 47 members of the Democratic caucus one vote short of the majority needed to compel testimony from the four current and former administration officials on their witness list. In addition to Bolton and Mulvaney, House managers want to call Robert Blair, a senior adviser to Mulvaney, and Michael Duffey, a top official in the White House Office of Management and Budget who, at the direction of the president, ordered the hold on the military assistance 90 minutes after the phone call. The nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office has ruled that even if the president withheld the aid for national-policy reasons, rather than for personal political gain, his action violated the Impoundment Control Act because the president cannot substitute his own policy priorities for those of Congress.
New documents provided on January 14 to the House Intelligence Committee by Lev Parnas, an indicted former associate of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, will increase pressure on Republican senators to allow additional testimony and evidence, including testimony from Parnas himself, because they demonstrate how much remains unknown. “There is news every day and that will likely be factored in,” Senator Murkowski said when asked about the documents, which include a letter signed by Giuliani stating that his communications with Zelensky were made with Trump’s “knowledge and consent.” Parnas also gave a rather sensational interview to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, in which he linked Trump to Giuliani’s efforts to pressure Zelensky to announce an investigation of the Bidens, saying the president “knew exactly what was going on.”
Even if McConnell, in the face of this new evidence, can prevent the defection of more than three Republican senators, a majority vote of the Senate cannot validate the unconstitutional exclusion of witnesses from an impeachment trial. If Republicans succeed in preventing House managers from calling witnesses with firsthand knowledge of relevant facts, an acquittal of the president will be unconstitutional. Given that a majority of the Supreme Court in Nixon ruled that a Senate impeachment trial is not subject to judicial review, the question remains, if the courts cannot overturn a Senate verdict, what are the legal consequences of an unconstitutional acquittal?
An answer is provided by a momentous opinion of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is responsible for providing the president with “controlling advice” on questions of law. The relevant OLC opinion is the same one that furnished the basis for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusion that he was prohibited from prosecuting Trump before he left office, even if there was overwhelming evidence that the president had committed serious crimes.
The OLC opinion, written in 2000 by then–Assistant Attorney General Randolph Moss, explains that the reason prohibiting the prosecution of a criminally culpable president does not violate the “important national interest in ensuring that no person—including the President—is above the law” is because “the constitutionally specified impeachment process ensures that the immunity would not place the president ‘above the law.’”
If the impeachment process conducted by the Senate is unconstitutional, the unavailability of either criminal prosecution or a legitimate impeachment trial as a means of presidential accountability, according to the OLC opinion’s own reasoning, would “subvert the important interest in maintaining ‘the rule of law.’”
An unconstitutional verdict of acquittal would present Americans with something far worse than a constitutional crisis. The nation will have blundered its way into creating an accidental autocracy governed by a president who, even if not reelected, would remain in office until January 20, 2021, beyond the reach of the rule of law.
“Wherever law ends, tyranny begins,” John Locke cautioned in his Two Treatises of Government. This is how autocracy comes to America: not with a declaration of martial law and tanks in the street, but by a roll-call vote in the Senate whipped by the leader of the Senate in violation of the Constitution.
If on the day the Senate returns its verdict, history records the failure to convict the president following a trial without witnesses, that will be the day the rule of law dies in America. The courts will remain open for business. Congress will be in session. Citizens will still be able to vote. And a free press will continue to launch withering attacks on President Trump. But the American people will no longer be living in a constitutional democracy.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51635"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog</span></a>
Thursday, 23 January 2020 14:01
Reich writes: "As the Senate debates Donald Trump's future, chief executives, financiers and politicians have assembled in Davos, Switzerland, for their annual self-congratulatory defense of global capitalism."
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)
Abuses of Power in Trumpworld and Davos
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
23 January 20
s the Senate debates Donald Trump’s future, chief executives, financiers and politicians have assembled in Davos, Switzerland, for their annual self-congratulatory defense of global capitalism.
The events are not unrelated. Trump is charged with abusing his power. Capitalism’s global elite is under assault for abusing its power as well: fueling inequality, fostering corruption and doing squat about climate change.
Chief executives of the largest global corporations are raking in more money and at a larger multiple of their workers’ pay than at any time in history. The world’s leading financiers are pocketing even more. The 26 richest people on Earth now own as much as the 3.8 billion who form the poorer half of the planet’s population.
Concentrated wealth on this scale invites corruption. Across the world, big money is buying off politicians to procure favors that further enlarge the wealth of those at the top, while siphoning off resources from everyone else.
Corruption makes it impossible to fight stagnant wages, climate change or any other problem facing the vast majority of the world’s population that would require some sacrifice by the rich.
Popular anger is boiling over against elites seen as irredeemably greedy, corrupt and indifferent to the plight of most people struggling to get by. The anger has fueled uprisings in Chile, Spain, Ecuador, Lebanon, Egypt and Bolivia; environmental protests in the UK, Germany, Austria, France and New Zealand; and xenophobic politics in the US, the UK, Brazil and Hungary.
Trump’s support comes largely from America’s working class whose wages haven’t risen in decades, whose jobs are less secure than ever and whose political voice has been drowned out by big money.
Although Trump has given corporations and Wall Street everything they’ve wanted and nothing has trickled down to his supporters, he has convinced those supporters he’s on their side by channeling their rage on to foreigners, immigrants, minorities and “deep state” bureaucrats.
It seems strangely appropriate, therefore, that the theme of this year’s Davos conclave was “stakeholder capitalism” – the idea that corporations have a responsibility to their workers, communities and the environment as well as to their shareholders.
Speeches there touted the “long-term” benefits of stakeholder capitalism to corporate bottom lines: happy workers are more productive. A growing middle class can buy more goods and services. Climate change is beginning to cost a bundle in terms of environmental calamities and insurance, so it must be stopped.
All true, but the assembled CEOs knew they’d get richer far quicker by boosting equity values in the short term by buying back their shares of stock, suppressing wages, fighting unions, resisting environmental regulations and buying off politicians for tax cuts and subsidies.
This has been their strategy for three decades, and it’s about to get worse. Three researchers – Daniel Greenwald at MIT’s Sloan School, Martin Lettau at Berkeley and Sydney Ludvigson at NYU – found that between 1952 and 1988, economic growth accounted for 92% of the rise in equity values. But since 1989 most of the increase has come from “reallocated rents to shareholders and away from labor compensation”. In other words, from workers.
What this means is that in order for the stock market to do as well in coming years, either economic growth has to accelerate markedly (won’t happen), or chief executives will have to siphon off even more of the gains from growth from workers and other stakeholders to their shareholders.
The latter will require even more downward pressure on wages, more payoffs to politicians for tax cuts and subsidies and further rollbacks of environmental regulations. All of which will worsen the prevailing discontent.
There was no mention at Davos of any of this, nor of the increasing political and economic power of these elites and the diminishing power of average workers and citizens around the world.
Nothing was achieved in the Swiss Alps because the growing global discontent has yet to affect the bottom lines of the corporations and financial institutions whose leaders are assembling to congratulate themselves on their wealth, influence and benevolence.
Trump, meanwhile, is likely to be acquitted by Senate Republicans who are so cowardly and unprincipled that they will ignore his flagrantly unconstitutional acts.
Trump spoke at Davos – an impeached president addressing world economic leaders while being tried in the Senate. He boasted about the stock market, bullied and lied, as usual.
One thing he did not say is that the whatever-it-takes abuses of economic and political power such as he and much of his audience are engaged in threaten to destroy capitalism, democracy and the planet.
Adam Schiff's Moment in the Trump Impeachment Trial
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53060"><span class="small">Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker</span></a>
Thursday, 23 January 2020 14:01
Glasser writes: "More substantively, Schiff offered a sweeping survey of the case that leaned hard into themes designed to resonate with national-security-minded Republicans."
The House managers Jason Crow, Jerrold Nadler, and Adam Schiff, who on Day 2 of the Senate impeachment trial offered a sweeping survey of the House's case against Trump. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT)
Adam Schiff's Moment in the Trump Impeachment Trial
By Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker
23 January 20
On Day 2 of the Senate impeachment proceedings, the House presents its case—and a senator has a cold glass of milk.
eaving the Senate chamber on Wednesday afternoon for a short break, the Washington Post reporter Paul Kane called over to his colleague Dana Milbank, a Post columnist. “Got milk! Got milk!” Kane said. “We got milk!” Tom Cotton, a Republican of Arkansas, was the first verified sighting of a senator actually drinking a glass of milk on the Senate floor during this once-in-a-generation impeachment trial of a President. Until the trial’s opening, the day before, the milk had been the stuff of congressional legend. It was rumored that senators, confined to sit silently in their seats for the entire weeks-long proceedings, deprived of electronics and food, could drink it on the floor, along with water—and only water—but no one seemed to be really sure that it was true.
Now, two afternoons and one very late-night session into the trial of Donald John Trump, it was confirmed. Soon, Richard Burr, a Republican of North Carolina, was also spotted downing a glass. The Wall Street Journalwrote a blog post about it. There were excited tweets. Cotton’s spokesperson confirmed that the white liquid was, in fact, milk. In truth, the whole Senate looked like it needed a restorative glass. Even late on Wednesday afternoon, the senators still seemed as though they were recovering from the trial’s marathon opening day, which was not technically an all-nighter but close to a Senate version of one.
As the House managers began to methodically lay out their case against President Trump, there was a general hangover quality to Wednesday’s proceedings—a hangover from the sharply partisan tone of the trial’s first day, which culminated in a 1 A.M. admonishment from the otherwise silent Chief Justice John Roberts, who rebuked both sides for “using language that is not conducive to civil discourse.” By the time the trial reconvened, eleven hours later, the Senate chaplain was opening the session with a prayer for “civility” and bromides about how “words have consequences.”
The partisan discord had been the predictable by-product of a partisan House impeachment followed by a partisan set of trial rules, which the Senate adopted, along a strictly party-line vote, as the trial’s first official business. After midnight, Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and one of the seven House managers prosecuting the trial, had given a strident and even angry speech. He accused Senate Republicans—every single one of them—of participating in a “coverup” by refusing to demand that Trump produce witnesses and documents that he has been withholding. His speech triggered an almost shouting response from Trump’s lawyers. Ignoring that, Republicans insisted that they were dismayed by the tone of Nadler’s late-night attack. “It was so insulting and outrageous,” John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, told reporters on Wednesday, before the trial started up again. “It was a shock to all of us.” It wasn’t just Cornyn. “I took it as very offensive. As one who is listening attentively and working hard to get to a fair process, I was offended,” Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, one of the few Republicans who is a potential swing vote, said.
The Democrats seemed to be listening, and the tone struck by Nadler and his House colleagues was notably different on Wednesday, when they began to lay out their case to the Senate. Under the Republican rules for the trial, they will have twenty-four hours in the span of three days to present that case, and then the Trump legal team will have three days to respond. When, soon after 1 P.M., Adam Schiff, the lead House manager, took the floor and began to outline the House’s indictment of Trump, he did not apologize exactly for Nadler’s heated words or for his own scathing characterization of the trial as an “ass-backwards” exercise. But he profusely thanked the senators for their late-night session and attentiveness, lavished praise on the Senate as a deliberative body, and launched into the kind of elevated peroration about the Founders that senators love. Later in the day, Nadler praised the senators for their “temperate listening” in the course of many long hours. “Truly, thank you,” he said. A couple hours later, his House colleague Hakeem Jeffries made sure that the point was made to the prickly senators. “I thank you once again for your indulgence and for your courtesy,” he said.
More substantively, Schiff offered a sweeping survey of the case that leaned hard into themes designed to resonate with national-security-minded Republicans. He reminded them that the allegations involve the President’s withholding of nearly four hundred million dollars in congressionally-appropriated security aid to Ukraine in order to induce Kyiv to launch politically motivated investigations that would help Trump. He spoke of the debunked Russian conspiracy theory “being promulgated by the President of the United States” and of the damage that the whole scandal has done to America’s international standing. He quoted the Republican icon Ronald Reagan and warned that Trump risked empowering autocrats around the world by undercutting American democracy at home. “Russia is not a threat—I don’t need to tell you—to Eastern Europe alone,” Schiff reminded the senators.
As he said it, I looked across the Senate chamber to Mitt Romney, the Utah Republican who just a few years ago had been the Party’s Presidential nominee and had warned that Russia was the greatest geopolitical foe facing the United States. Romney had lost that race, of course, and is now the junior senator from Utah and one of the few Republicans who might be considering voting to convict Trump. Schiff’s pitch seemed aimed almost directly at Romney. In all likelihood, though, there are few, if any, votes that are not accounted for, and few senators who can actually be persuaded by the many, many hours of evidence and argument that they will be forced to sit through in the next few days. “This is [as] predictable as the end of a Hallmark movie,” Representative Mark Meadows, a Republican of North Carolina and a designated Trump-spinner, told reporters during one of the trial’s breaks. His statement was cynical but also probably true.
Still, the House managers made a polished, impassioned stab at convincing their audience, dramatizing their case with an attention-grabbing presentation (designed to keep the senators awake, perhaps?) that included video clips from Trump himself; his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney; and many of the key witnesses from the House’s televised impeachment proceedings. It was a sort of greatest hits of the Trump-Ukraine scandal, a primer for senators—from Trump’s “do us a favor though” demand for investigations, in his July 25th phone call with Ukraine’s President, to Mulvaney’s famous “get over it” press conference, in which he appeared to confirm that Trump had held up the military aid as a quid pro quo for the investigations. To anyone who had followed the House impeachment proceedings, it wasn’t new, but it was frequently eloquent, appalling, and dramatic to hear the alarming facts of the case laid out all over again. As Schiff—a silver-tongued former prosecutor, whose talent for speechifying has been revealed to a national audience in the past few months—pointed out, this makes the impeachment case itself a perfect representative of the whole Trump era, when “so much of the last three years has been a combination of shock, and yet no surprise.”
Even if Schiff was not convincing any senators, the Democrats’ uninterrupted day of speaking on the Senate floor, unrebutted by any Republican, seemed to make the President predictably furious. Although he was travelling back from a short trip to Davos, Switzerland, to bask in the applause of the global financial élite, Trump easily surpassed his previous single-day record of frenetic social-media activity during his Presidency, sending out a stream of more than a hundred and thirty tweets and retweets—the vast majority of them complaints about his impeachment and the Senate trial. At one point, Trump passed along a tweet from Rand Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky, who claimed that “the more we hear from Adam Schiff, the more the GOP is getting unified against this partisan charade!” “True!” Trump tweeted. For a President who often has a problem with the facts, he might even have been right. But all it takes is four Republican senators to prove him wrong, four Republicans to vote for witnesses and breach the information blockade that has made Trump perhaps the most successful stonewaller in Presidential history. If he was so confident, why was he tweeting so much?
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53059"><span class="small">Anne Azzi Davenport and Jeffrey Brown, PBS</span></a>
Thursday, 23 January 2020 14:01
Excerpt: "PBS NewsHour co-founder Jim Lehrer, a giant in journalism known for his tenacity and dedication to simply delivering the news, died peacefully in his sleep at home on Thursday, at the age of 85."
Jim Lehrer. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/AP)
Remembering Jim Lehrer
By Anne Azzi Davenport and Jeffrey Brown, PBS
23 January 20
BS NewsHour co-founder Jim Lehrer, a giant in journalism known for his tenacity and dedication to simply delivering the news, died peacefully in his sleep at home on Thursday, at the age of 85.
For Jim, being a journalist was never a self-centered endeavor. He always told those who worked with him: “It’s not about us.”
Night after night, Jim led by example that being yourself — journalist, writer, family man, citizen — can be a high calling.
For 36 years, Jim began the nightly newscast with a simple phrase: “Good Evening, I’m Jim Lehrer.”
As an anchor of several iterations of the NewsHour, Jim reported the news with a clear sense of purpose and integrity– even as the world of media changed around him.
Jim and his journalism partner Robert MacNeil’s approach to reporting the news became known as the “MacNeil-Lehrer style of journalism.” Their approach helped lay the foundation for modern public media reporting.
The nine tenets that governed his philosophy included the assumption that “the viewer is as smart and caring and good a person as I am,” that “there is at least one other side or version to every story,” that separating “opinion and analysis from straight news stories” must be done clearly and carefully, and last but not least: “I am not in the entertainment business.”
Jim was born in 1934 in Wichita, Kansas, the son of Lois, a bank clerk, and Harry, a bus station manager.
He attended Victoria College in Texas and then studied journalism at the University of Missouri.
Having his father and brother before him enlist in the Marines, Jim served three years as an infantry officer in the late 1950s, including time in the Pacific. He saw no combat, but spoke often of how the experience shaped him.
“Seldom a day goes by, that I don’t know that I am doing something because of something I learned in the Marine Corps,” he said at a 2010 parade the Corps put on, in his honor.
In 1960, Jim married his lifelong partner and love, Kate Staples.
He also began his journalism career in earnest that year. He reported for both the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Times-Herald from 1959 to 1966, covering local politics. He became the Times-Herald’s city editor in 1968.
On Nov. 22, 1963, a rainy morning, Jim was asked by an editor to check on one aspect of President John F. Kennedy’s visit to Dallas: Would the president’s limousine have a plexiglass bubble top attached to shield him and the first lady from rain? In 2014, he told the NewsHour that he approached a secret service agent to ask that question, and that the agent then proceeded to direct the bubble’s removal from the car.
Jim was also at the Dallas police station when Harvey Lee Oswald, Kennedy’s assassin, was brought in for questioning.
“I wrote his name down. I still have the notebook. I’m one of those people who asked, hey, did you shoot the president?” Jim recalled.
MacNeil, who would go on to become Jim’s lifelong friend and partner in journalism, also covered the assassination for NBC News. They both described the experience of bearinging witness to such a significant historical event, and its long-lasting effects on them personally, during an appearance on the NewsHour.
“What I took away and have taken away — and it still overrides everything that I have done in journalism since — what the Kennedy assassination did for me was forever keep me aware of the fragility of everything, that, on any given moment, something could happen,” Jim said, “I mean, my God, if they could shoot the president–”
“And that president,” MacNeil added.
Jim said that because of that day, when he became city editor, he “had a rule that every phone that rang in that newsroom got answered, because you never knew who was on the other line.”
Lehrer’s television career was also launched in Dallas, at public station KERA. His move to the national stage with PBS came when he became a correspondent for what was then called the National Public Affairs Center for Television, or NPAT.
It was there he first joined MacNeil to cover another watershed moment — the Watergate hearings in 1973.
In addition to gavel-to-gavel coverage throughout the day, Jim presented a rebroadcast with analysis late into the night — some 250 hours in all. Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil’s broadcast helped guide viewers through hours of testimony, years before the concept of the 24-hour news cycle.
“The senators, as well as the rest of us who are interested, will have to make the ultimate choice between believing John Dean or Bob Haldeman. That’s the way it looks to me at 3:00 in the morning,” Jim reported at the time, while smiling. “Feel free to disagree.”
Some 70,000 letters poured in praising the team and its work.
“We began life in October 1975 as ‘The Robert MacNeil Report,’” Jim said, reminiscing on the 40th anniversary of the Watergate hearings. “And months later became ‘The MacNeil/Lehrer Report.’ In those days we dealt with one story for half an hour.”
In 1983, the program expanded to one hour of news and analysis and was renamed The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Twelve years later MacNeil retired, and the program became The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
Over the years, Jim interviewed numerous leading figures on the world stage, including Margaret Thatcher and Yasser Arafat in the 1980s, South Korean President Kim Daejung and Chinese leader Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, and Jordan’s King Abdullah and Afghan President Hamid Karzai in the 2000s.
Jim daily examined major turning points in the life of the nation and world. He pressed experts from the business world and military brass, as well as America’s top political figures.
During one of Jim’s most notable interviews, he pressed President Bill Clinton about accusations regarding his sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and the subsequent investigation into his conduct.
“The news of this day is that Kenneth Starr, independent counsel, is investigating allegations that you suborned perjury by encouraging a 24-year-old woman, former White House intern, to lie under oath in a civil deposition about her having had an affair with you,” Jim said in the interview with Clinton. “Mr. President, is that true?”
Clinton denied the allegation.
“That is not true. That is not true,” Clinton told Jim. “I did not ask anyone to tell anything other than the truth. There is no improper relationship and I intend to cooperate with this inquiry but that is not true.”
Jim was calm and careful in moments of crisis as demonstrated by his coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
“I’m Jim Lehrer. Terrorist used hijacked airliners to kill Americans on this, September 11, 2001,” Jim reported on national television. “Another day of infamy for the United States of America.”
“Jim’s intelligence is so laser-like, no matter what he’s applying it to, that’s how he treats any situation, no matter how we treat a certain news story or what a news story means,” MacNeil said this of his partner.
“I learned a lot from him about his very direct manner of interviewing,” MacNeil added. “And not being afraid to say you don’t understand or you don’t know. But also his extraordinary ability to listen. You know the hardest thing to do on TV is to listen.”
MacNeil described how Jim was able to moderate a discussion of several people and never drop important points.
“He’s brilliant at that. Nobody does it better than he does. Brilliant. I learned a lot about the fundamental meaning of fairness,” MacNeil said.
Perhaps nowhere was this seen better than on the largest stage of all, with upwards of 60 million viewers: as moderator of 12 presidential debates, more than any other person in U.S. history.
His first was in 1988, his last in 2012. In 1996 and 2000, he moderated all the presidential debates — the first person to do that.
For Americans, Jim would say, the debates are the one chance to take the measure of candidates side by side.
Jim’s wife, Kate, served as his main debate prep sounding-board.
“As soon as the process really gets underway it’s, I’m Alice in Wonderland going in the rabbit hole. Praying to come out on the other side,” Kate said in 2012 when discussing Jim’s book, “Tension City,” which was a reflection on his role in presidential debates.
Jim likened moderating the debates to “walking down the blade of a knife.”
“It’s not a lot of fun, but if you get to the other end it’s really exciting,” Jim said in 2012. “When a debate is over that I moderate, I want to be able, I want everybody to say, O.K., here you have seen and heard the candidates for president of the United States on the same stage at the same time talking about the same things. You can judge them. I mean, do you like this guy? Is he telling the truth? All that kind of stuff. And you see them right there together — it’s a huge test.”
But Jim’s life wasn’t all tension and worldly affairs.
One of his great passions was on display in his basement at home and his office at work: the intercity bus memorabilia Jim had collected over the years. It was a reminder of his father’s career and his own early Kansas childhood.
There was also Jim Lehrer the prolific writer. He was the author of some 20 novels, drawing on his life as a newsman, as well as his interest in history and politics. He also wrote plays and three memoirs.
One early novel, “Viva Max!”, was turned into a film starring Peter Ustinov and Jonathan Winters. The political satire featured a modern day Mexican general who crosses into the U.S.. to retake the Alamo.
“I write a little bit on my fiction everyday. It’s just what I do,” Jim once said.
Jim earned dozens of journalism awards and honorary degrees.
He was given the National Humanities Medal by Clinton, elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and with MacNeil, inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.
Although he insisted on not being the center of attention when reporting the news, at one important juncture in his life Jim did tell a deeply personal story: the major heart attack that almost killed him in 1983.
The documentary “My Heart, Your Heart” captured how the scare led him to a change in diet and lifestyle. Among other things, he would become a committed afternoon “napper” — there was no disturbing jim between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m.
One priority that never changed was his family. Jim and Kate — herself the author of three novels — had three daughters: Jamie, Lucy and Amanda. He also had six grandchildren.
Jim stepped down as full-time anchor of the NewsHour in 2011.
Late in his tenure, he closed a speech to PBS stations managers this way:
“We really are the fortunate ones in the current tumultuous world of journalism right now, because when we wake up in the morning, we only have to decide what the news is and how we are going to cover it. We never have to decide who we are and why we are there. That is the way it has been for these nearly 35 years and that’s the way it will be forever. And for the NewsHour there will always be a forever.”
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n the opening day of the impeachment trial, the Senate, in a party-line vote of 53–47, approved an 
s the Senate debates Donald Trump’s future, chief executives, financiers and politicians have assembled in Davos, Switzerland, for their annual self-congratulatory defense of global capitalism.
eaving the Senate chamber on Wednesday afternoon for a short break, the Washington Post reporter Paul Kane called over to his colleague Dana Milbank, a Post columnist. “Got milk! Got milk!” Kane said. “We got milk!” Tom Cotton, a Republican of Arkansas, was the first verified sighting of a senator actually drinking a glass of milk on the Senate floor during this once-in-a-generation impeachment trial of a President. Until the trial’s opening, the day before, the milk had been the stuff of congressional legend. It was rumored that senators, confined to sit silently in their seats for the entire weeks-long proceedings, deprived of electronics and food, could drink it on the floor, along with water—and only water—but no one seemed to be really sure that it was true.
BS NewsHour co-founder Jim Lehrer, a giant in journalism known for his tenacity and dedication to simply delivering the news, died peacefully in his sleep at home on Thursday, at the age of 85.
