Bring Out Your Dead: The Podcast

Susan Zakin

Entertaining political commentary (and context) from Susan Zakin and JP Sottile, aka, The Newsvandal. With occasional guests. journaloftheplagueyears.substack.com

Episodes

  1. 5d ago

    What’s Congress Got to Do With It?

    Is it safe to relax and ignore politics for a while? Sure. But first let’s be clear — as Obama says — about the importance of what the country is facing over the next two years. Here’s the pressing question: Will Democrats embrace the kind of wholesale reform that’s needed to address decades of escalating corruption? There are a number of measures being discussed, some reasonable-sounding but, upon examination, not quite adequate, others that can truly clean up the system. We help you tell the difference. Then there is the deeper question: What does the Blue Tsunami mean? Is the resounding Democratic victory simply a matter of the financial squeeze Americans are feeling or something deeper? Are Americans returning to our shared values? Susan argues that the American Dream is tied to immigration, the promise of opportunity and the belief in equality that has defined the American experiment since the beginning. It’s way past time for the Democrats to come up with a vision for immigration. Migration is only going to intensify over the next years as a result of climate change. There are ways to do it right, modern and compassionate ways to regulate immigration and help immigrants assimilate. We’ve been ignoring those and letting Republicans scapegoat innocent people. It’s time to redefine the issue. Finally, our Tiger Beat speculation about cute (and not-so-cute but worthy) presidential candidates in 2028. Yes, it’s early, but a girl can dream. On a more profound level, many of us feel that we are coming out of a surreal, decade-long hijacking of our lives. How do we find perspective? Watch for a more personal analysis tomorrow: Two Cheers for Democracy. And if you’re a videophobe, a cleaned-up transcript of our conversation is below. Journal of the Plague Years relies on your subscriptions. Paid subscribers are crucial. Joe: Hi, I’m JP Sottile of Newsvandal, and this is Bring Out Your Deadcast. Susan: And I’m Susan Zakin, editor of Journal of the Plague Years, and Joe is teaching me how to do television. I’m a very poor student. So we’re, you know, we’re all sort of letting our thoughts settle after and our emotions settle after this, after the tsunami, the blue tsunami. With this incredible sense of relief, people are starting to look ahead. Today we’re going to talk about the Democrats in Congress and whether they can rise to the occasion. And of course, we’re all doing the Tiger Beat, like, you know, crush on the cute guys. Who is it going to be? Is it going to be in 2028. Is it Ossoff? Well, it’s just fun. Okay, no spoilers. Let’s talk about Congress. This is so crucial. Why don’t you start? You sent me an interesting article from The Atlantic about Chuck Schumer. Joe: Yeah, you know, there’s the usual haranguing about Chuck Schumer. I personally think he needs to get better speech writers. I mean, he had an analogy on election night about how the American people broke down the red brick wall. And then he said, and then there was a pile of bricks. Susan: Didn’t it make you think of the Wizard of Oz? The yellow brick road? Joe: Yeah, it wasn’t good. It made me think of a doddering Jewish mother telling me to eat my food. I mean, it’s just he’s so doddering. Susan: That’s me, the doddering Jewish mother. Joe: You’re anything but doddering. Yeah, no, it wasn’t good. Susan: I really have always had a problem with trashing Chuck Schumer. Chuck Schumer’s job, and you certainly know this as well as I do if not better, it’s counting votes. And he knows how to count votes. That’s his job, not to be a rock star, although that would be nice. Joe: And when we say counting votes, we’re saying not just counting votes to make sure that when you take a bill to the floor, it’s going to pass. Pelosi, when they say she was a great vote counter, it was because she never brought a bill to the floor immediately. She knew it was going to pass if it was going to get up there. How many times did [Mike] Johnson say, well, we don’t know. And it was a cliffhanger. And they didn’t. At the last minute they’re cutting deals on the floor of the Senate and extending voting times. Never happened with Pelosi. Susan: Schumer has had some misses. Janet Mills in Maine. Bad call. But he used his long relationships for some major wins. He leaned on Roy Cooper to run in North Carolina, and Cooper was a slam dunk because of his history in the state. I was just reading that he met with Sherrod Brown and his wife, Connie Schultz, who’s a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, three times to get Brown to come out of retirement and run again. And I love what he said to Brown, which is that you’re not going to enjoy your retirement very much if the Republicans are in charge of Congress and the Senate. Joe: Right. Susan: And as it was reported, that’s what sold it. So he’s hardly incompetent. I think the bigger question is, can the mainstream Democrats, can Schumer, can Hakeem Jeffries, commit to making the kind of thoroughgoing reform that’s needed? Joe: That’s going to require finding a way to capture the energy of the young people who are now coming into Congress for the first time. There are a number of young, a lot of seats got flipped. So that means there are a lot of freshmen and fresh, I guess it would be fresh persons now, a lot of congressional freshmen coming in. They’re going to have a lot of energy and they have a lot on their agenda, too. I know. How long did it take me to say data centers? Susan: No, not the data centers! Joe: There are 44 anti-data center initiatives around the country that passed. There are two that are pending, and 18 of them were in Ohio. So Ohio was ground zero for the data center fight, which is one of the things that Sherrod Brown actually was running on, control of data centers. This is there’s energy. So they’ve got to capture the energy while also making compromises, because they are going to be at 55, maybe 50, maybe 56. But let’s just say 55 if they pick up Mississippi. They do not have the 60 vote threshold. Susan: Explain the 60 vote threshold for people. Joe: Yeah, to get cloture. Once you get a bill out of committee and then it gets to the floor, basically they debate about the debating rules and when they decide on the debating rules, then they decide on whether to close debate. To get closure, which is called cloture, you have to get to 60 votes. That will stop a filibuster. Just to clarify on the filibuster rules. One person can basically filibuster and say, I’m holding out my vote, so you’re not going to get a final vote. Susan: Trump would love to get rid of the filibuster before January so the Republicans can push through legislation. But I think the larger question, there are some reforms that I think the Democrats agree on. At least in theory. Overturning, Citizens United, no stock trading. But what David Sirota said in this Guardian article, which I linked to in the piece that I’m publishing on Saturday, which is tomorrow, after this podcast is up, is that public financing for campaigns is absolutely crucial. The rest is tinkering. New York City has this, by the way, and it’s a big reason Mamdani won. There really has to be a vision for the kind of reform that’s needed to deal with money in politics because it is a huge hydra-headed problem that makes it impossible for the system to work properly. Joe: It was underscored an exclamation point at the end because of Elon Musk’s nearly 500 million donated to Republicans like Ken Paxton. So that huge chunk of money, which I think is part of it, fed into the tech backlash, which is underpinning this because Donald Trump is intimately tied to tech. Everybody connects him with that dinner that he had at the White House with all the tech guys. Joe: Money in politics has been around as an issue for, do you remember McCain-Feingold? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipartisan_Campaign_Reform_Act Susan: I do, in part because McCain was so ashamed after he got caught meeting with the bank folks in Phoenix. He really had a conscience and he did… Get full access to Journal of the Plague Years at journaloftheplagueyears.substack.com/subscribe

    What’s Congress Got to Do With It?

  2. Nov 1

    Welcome to Crazytown

    It used to be that campaign managers didn’t talk about their clients. It used to be that Democrats might have indulged in their time-honored practice of circular firing squads but didn’t actually endorse Republicans. Welcome to 2026. After several days of minor-league Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens, who lost the Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed, has now endorsed Republican Mike Rogers, citing Israel, and who knows what else. Pique? Her hardcore Zionist fiancé? The smart money says it’s too late to make a difference. But that didn’t stop Stevens from grandstanding at an event on Sunday, making a pitch to the black voters who could be the key to the Michigan race. At the same time, South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, aka The Kingmaker, appeared on the stump with El-Sayed. Because, kids, Clyburn knows how to be a Democrat. And a politician. Within hours, Stevens’ staff started resigning. Joe and Susan break down the likely effects on the Michigan race, the cultural shift away from loyalty in politics generally (or at least the appearance thereof), plus an election roundup, including the data center vote, a likely eddy in Florida while the blue wave surges through most of the country, and what comes after the midterms - it might just be a bigger, uglier war in Iran. Don’t exhale yet. Journal of the Plague Years needs your loyalty! We are working hard to bring you breaking news with context. Your paid subscriptions make our work feasible. Transcript for the Luddites among us: Hi, everybody. I’m here with Joe Sottile, and we are fixated on the breaking insane news today, maybe not completely unexpected, but sort of wacky, that Haley Stevens, who lost to Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic primary, in Michigan is now hugging Mike Rogers and endorsing him just as her, okay, can I just say it, just extremely unattractive fiance has done. Her fiance is Jewish and is into it. And that’s his pretext for endorsing Rogers. The whole thing of someone’s fiance making news by endorsing someone Is a little bizarre. So Joe is going to talk about this. I just want to frame this news by saying, in my view, and this is my personal view, I feel that this is beyond doubt the most interesting race of the midterms. And to me... It is really a test of the country’s morality because the incredible Islamophobia that has been directed at Abdul El-Sayed. For me, it’s a make-or-break moment for how I feel about this country. If this works, if that strategy on the Republicans’ part I will never feel the same about this country. And so the ugliness of the last days of this campaign are really striking. Joe, you did me a favor and you kept kind of notes on all the Islamophobic things that have been done. Right down to J.D. Vance just saying he has weird friends. Some of his friends are weird. I mean, an optimist would say this exposes the extent to which they have nothing to run on, the extent to which they’re stretching on this Islamophobic thing. I have a sense that it may not work. It may work on specific issues, but I think broadly it’s not going to work. In Michigan, I watched the event with Mike Rogers. And of course, Haley Stevens had to say, I’m out here, you know, practicing my faith in front of my church. Had to drop that in before she said, went on an ad hoc soliloquy on how the Arab community in Michigan is one of the jewels of the state and tried to blunt what she was doing. Susan: Not lose them entirely for whatever she’s going to run for next, if she’s even able to run for anything. Joe: Well, is that the calculus? We will concede you the Arab community and we will try to bleed off support from the black community. It may just be a pure numbers game. Susan: It’s all about the black community, isn’t it? Because Clyburn came, Jim Clyburn, who is, you know, the kingmaker, he came to appear with Abdul El-Sayed because he is a rock solid Democrat, whatever else you might want to say about him. And he is, of course, in my view, the reason that Joe Biden got elected. Joe: Yeah. Susan: Gavin Newsom has been cultivating him like crazy. So Stevens, who is strong in the black community, was clearly trying to counter this appearance by Jim Clyburn. You know what really strikes me about some of these midterm elections is the incredible disloyalty That I’m seeing. And it started with Graham Platner. Just hold on for a minute, because Graham Platner’s campaign manager turned on him. And I heard a lot of, I was doing some reporting in Maine, and this campaign manager is not well thought of there. Now in Alaska, Mary Peltola, the main source of the New York Times story on the ersatz, Dan Sullivan allegedly tapped to split the Republican vote, a story which I find, I can’t help it, I find it amusing. Like the movie Being There. He looks like a nice guy. Joe: Chauncey Gardner. Susan: Yeah, Chauncey Gardner. Yeah, the fake Dan Sullivan. But you know she’s still going to win. I’m comfortable predicting that. You know what she said about her campaign manager, who was the main source of the New York Times story? And I’m not saying that the Times should not have run this story, but Peltola said if she could fire that campaign manager again, she would. Joe: Right, right. You know, we are in that kind of TMZ culture, right? So if there’s any kind of transgression or something, some kind of grudge that somebody in your staff has with you, or they see an opportunity, there may be an opportunity to get a payment from a tabloid for your story, whatever. Or it may be just an opportunity to extend your own brand because you want to go off and do your own thing. Susan: Or get some traction being a lobbyist for corporate interests. I think what happened with Platner’s former campaign manager. Or, you know, the other side and try to, you know, build a sort of second incarnation of your career. Joe: It did seem a little bit more interesting, actually, when there was some honor among thieves, right? And it meant that you were dealing with just the candidate. You weren’t dealing with all of the other agendas of these other people who want to pursue their own celebrity. So I personally see it as an outgrowth. The American dream of a white picket fence and a house and two cars and two and a half dogs or however that thing goes, the two kids, has been replaced by celebrity. I think celebrity has replaced the traditional American dream. And anybody can become an influencer and a celebrity. And all you have to do is have no shame. Susan: Well, I’m not sure if those campaign managers... Exactly are going to become celebrities. It used to be that if you leaked or if you got caught leaking or if you talked s**t about your candidate, you would never work again in that field. Joe: But that was before Newsmax and Fox News will bring you on and turn you into a conservative superstar. The case in point for this is Bill Maher. Most of us can’t stand him anymore. Susan: I used to think he was funny. Don’t hate me for saying that. But now he’s one of these people who thinks he’s much smarter than he really is. Joe: Well, I’ve actually charted the moment that he changed. He was invited to give a commencement address at Berkeley. Then there was a revolt by the student body against him and he was canceled. And then I think he was restored in the end. But he got I remember him getting so angry about that. And that’s when he got attached to this Gen Z and the woke Gen Zs and millennials. What that did also in the process, I think, is started to cleave him from his traditional audience. So he’s been in search of a new audience in the center, and he’s doing it by appealing to, he had Kid Rock on. He and Kid Rock spent much of the show talking about how Bill Maher did or did not get drunk at Trump’s house at another dinner. He is trafficking in the cachet that you get on the Republican media side for transgressing against your own side. Susan: Oh, this is really interesting. So let’s circle back to the midterms here. So you could say Haley Stevens is doing t… Get full access to Journal of the Plague Years at journaloftheplagueyears.substack.com/subscribe

    Welcome to Crazytown

  3. Oct 24

    Will the Money Bomb Bomb?

    Our podcast, Bringing Out the Dead, elicited a rousing reception from at least one reader, Jeanette Berkovitz. Here is what she wrote: Oh, no! Not you, too...I don’t want people yapping at me. I loved you for allowing me to read in silence your stellar prose. Nooooooooooo I assured her that I hated video, too, especially because, unlike Katie Couric, I don’t have someone to do my hair and make up. I assured Jeannette that I am still writing (see my screed on the truly unbelievable ad run by Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy against Democrat Amy Acton) as well as publishing incisive journalists like Lucian Truscott and Marc Cooper, along with essayists Brian Cullman and Lori Jakiela. I also assured her that the Bringing Out the Dead podcast will only last until the election. Well, probably. My partner, Joe Sottile, is getting stoked. Let’s see what happens. Herewith: Joe “JP” Sottile, aka The NewsVandal, and I break down this week’s election news. Joe’s knowledge of history gives this podcast the depth and context we try to bring you in all of the Journal’s coverage. We hope that you will subscribe to the Journal, and if you’re a free subscriber, please consider a paid subscription. The workload is getting heavier, along with the news. For the Luddites among us (you know who you are) here’s a transcript: Hey, Joe. Hi. How are you doing, Susan? I’m okay. How are you? You know, muddling through. We’re getting to the end game here. We’re closing in on the final, the big day. We’re going to go live, I think, on that day, aren’t we? Yeah, and we’ll inflict ourselves on our... My readers, your readers, and our viewers for a few hours until the outlines become clear. I think, you know, we’ve been talking over the week and I think what we’ve seen is this is, one reporter called it the money bomb. I mean, this is the can’t buy me love, moneyball election. Yesterday, Elon Musk put even more money into the midterms. He’s up to, let me just make sure I get this right. He’s up to Joe: 450 or 442. I’ve seen both. Susan: 442. He put another 76 million. Joe Yeah. Susan: And, you know, somebody on X might argue that the Democratic billionaires are putting money in, but there’s no comparison. Joe No. Well, look, it comes back to the Southern strategy. The question is, if you are demonizing your opponents and spending a lot of money to do it, will it move voters? And we’ve talked about this off of the podcast. Trump has actually mentioned the Willie Horton ad at least three or four times now at rallies. The Willie Horton ad being sort of the ultimate example of Of the Southern strategy working where you demonize your opponent and you get big electoral returns. Susan Can you just rehash the Willie Horton? Joe: So the Willie Horton ad, famous ad, Dukakis came out of the Democratic Convention, I think it was in July, with a 17-point lead on Herbert Walker Bush. It was looking dire. Iran-Contra was really dogging Bush, among other things. And Lee Atwater rolled out this ad with Willie Horton, an African-American adjudicated murderer who absconded from a furlough program in Massachusetts and proceeded to commit armed robbery, kidnapping and rape. Atwater’s ad blamed Dukakis, who was the governor of Massachusetts. And also in that election, they ran a lot of ads saying Dukakis was against the Pledge of Allegiance. And by the way, that was also the election where they rolled out Kitty Dukakis’ alcoholism. They rolled out everything they could. And it worked by the time... By the time you get to the election, Dukakis was soundly beaten. Susan: And I think Atwater later, after he had brain cancer, didn’t he have an attack of conscience? Yeah, well, the attack of conscience? Joe: That happened pretty early on because after the victory, he was appointed to the Board of Trustees of Howard University, which went over like the Hindenburg, as you would imagine. He ended up having to resign. By the way, Lee Atwater, an accomplished blues guitarist, one of his best friends was B.B. King. And they used to jam together. And I think he did not, for some reason, it did not dawn on him that the Willie Horton ad was one of the most racist Southern strategy style ads ever. Susan: I just want, you know, as you tell me this, what’s striking me is the Kitty Dukakis alcoholism. I remember also that being weaponized, and it’s bringing to mind something that we all thought about. And we’re wandering a little bit here off the money trail but obviously we are all thinking about this moral depravity of the Vivek Ramaswany about Amy Acton. This ad where they unearthed Amy Acton’s mentally unhinged mother who Amy Acton had, this is for the Ohio gubernatorial race, Amy Acton had not seen since she was 12 when she was taken away from this woman whose husband, Amy’s stepfather, a grand jury found, indicted him for sexually assaulting her. And I think her brother as well. Vivek Ramaswamy ran an ad with the mother saying that Amy Acton is a liar. Oh, my God, come on. And then J.D. Vance, this is just to catch people up, called Acton a whiner. Trump, of course, endorsed Ramaswamy and said, it’s, you know, double down, dude, and just keep going. Joe: Yeah, he said, I wish I had an ad like that I could run. He sort of ad envy he was sort of playing with. Susan: So I think that, I think that, I mean, it’s interesting to trace it back to Willie Horton, where we’re, we’re absolutely just stepping on women and doing it in a personal way. Not weaponizing them on issues. As well as, you know, all the stupid jingoism and flag waving. So, I mean, you know, did that set the tone for the contest to see how low you can go? I just want to say that it backfired. And as I put in my story on Substack, I had no interest in this race before or very little. After the ad I sent $10 to Amy Acton. Full disclosure, I’m a journalist, I’m not supposed to do anything in elections. But this is visceral. Not just for me. J.B. Pritzker’s wife sent $500,000 to Acton. And I think her smaller dollar donations are also rising. And now there’s a decision desk, HQ, which is non-partisan…they’re very good…. Joe: They’re very good. Susan: They give her a 61% chance now. So, you know, this brings us back to the squishy subject of polls. You know, how much can we trust the polls on this purported blue wave? Right. Especially with what someone called, I love this, as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, the money bomb of Republican cash. So this is the question. When the Willie Horton ad came out, I found it depressing because it worked. This is one of the things about negative advertising. The thing that sucks about it the most is that it seems to work. It does work, yeah. So the question is, is it not going to work this time, right? Because the Amy Acton ad did not work, right? Right. So far, it looks like it’s been blowback. Is the money going to prove decisive? That’s the question. Right. Joe: So in Texas and in Florida, particularly the Texas race where Elon Musk is pouring a lot of that money, there are the ads that say James Talarico is going to come to your house, take your child, remove the child’s g******s or change the g******s and then re-deliver the child back to you. Because that’s basically what the ads are saying. Susan: Yeah, Elon Musk is echoing them. Joe: Right. So in a sense, there’s kind of a test of the American voter happening here. Is it going to work? I also think there’s another part of this money bomb thing. You know, we don’t have three major networks that everybody is watching all the time. Television is not the central network, the dissemination device that money can then amplify a message through. Everything is so fractured. And by the way, millennials and Gen Z’s are so, they’re such digital natives and they’re so skeptical of everything they see. Is this going to move anybody but Gen X and boomers? [The money] So this money issue is we’re going to have a better sense of it when it’s done. And it could be that it’s th… Get full access to Journal of the Plague Years at journaloftheplagueyears.substack.com/subscribe

    Will the Money Bomb Bomb?

  4. Oct 16

    Are We Too Sanguine About The Midterms?

    Why not do a podcast? Everyone else does. Besides, we’ve got J.P. Sottile, a veteran Washington, D.C. TV producer who’s also a mad news junkie (see The Rundown and NewsVandal). Unlike the rest of the Journal contributors, he actually knows something about video. Quick bio: Sottile - his first name is Joe - got a master’s degree studying fascism. Who knew it would be so useful? Then he squandered his education covering politics, economics, and national security, working for PBS NewsHour, C-Span, and a couple of think tanks. Most of you know me, Susan Zakin. I’m the Boomer (late-stage, please! Jones, really) to Joe’s GenX. While he is the master of detail and just a little OCD, I’m always trying to see the big picture. We disagree on music, except maybe Dave Alvin. Here are some of the questions we’ll be looking at, in no particular order: * What happens if Democrats take over both the House and Senate? Will Americans’ day-to-day lives actually change over the next two years? * Does money in politics matter as much as it used to? (Lookin’ at you, Elon Musk, and your $355 million for Republicans in the midterms.) * Is corruption the message that will finally give the Democratic Party a way to convince voters they’re not a bunch of elitist a******s? All this and more, plus blow-by-blow coverage on election night. Susan and Joe Get full access to Journal of the Plague Years at journaloftheplagueyears.substack.com/subscribe

    Are We Too Sanguine About The Midterms?
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Entertaining political commentary (and context) from Susan Zakin and JP Sottile, aka, The Newsvandal. With occasional guests. journaloftheplagueyears.substack.com

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