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This is the fight of our lives. The fight to build an America that works for everyone, not just the wealthy and the well-connected. It won’t be easy. But united by our values, we can make big, structural change. We can raise our voices together until this fight is won.

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"Then lift up your voices and put down your phones"

Time for a change ...

FEBRUARY 04, 2018 10:28pm PT by Kimberly Nordyke - Hollywood Reporter

Jimmy Fallon took on President Donald Trump on Sunday night in his post-Super Bowl episode of NBC's The Tonight Show.

Fallon, who has been criticized for not being as political in his show as some of his late-night peers, did an impersonation of Bob Dylan during his show, which was taped at Minneapolis' Orpheum Theatre, which was once owned by Dylan, a native of the state.

Playing the guitar and harmonica, Fallon sang Dylan's 1964 song "The Times They Are a-Changin' " and tweaked the lyrics to criticize Trump and his frequent accusations of "fake news" and comments about NFL players who choose to take a knee during the national anthem.

Come gather ‘round people wherever you roam
And admit that our country don’t feel like our home
And that silence speaks louder than those who condone
If a tweet to you is worth favin’
Then lift up your voices and put down your phones
For the times they are a-changin’

Come women and men who hashtag #MeToo
And believe me when I say that we believe you
For weak is the man who calls truth “fake news”
Time’s up, our silence we’re breaking
Mel Brooks plays the hero Mel Gibson the fool
Well, the times they are a-changin’

Come athletes with platforms throughout the land
Who by taking a knee are taking a stand
And before you shout out that they should be banned
Listen to what they are saying
Perhaps they’d stand up if you reached out your hand
Well, the times they are a-changin’

Come journalists, writers who report the facts
And brandish your pen to fend off his attacks
Look past what he says and look at how he acts
The Fire and Fury is raging
For his words can hurt, but your words can fight back
New York Times, they aren’t a-failin’

Come leaders who bully like Internet trolls
We’ll curse you with four-letter words “love” and “hope”
For we will go high even when you go low
The order is re-arranging
For you have the power, but we have the vote
The times they are a-changin’

Uncle Sam Ervin

The Ervin Hearings

by Rick Perlstein, Encyclopedia Britannica
By the time the Ervin hearings began on May 17, a new tenor for American political life had been set: eye-popping revelations of nearly undreamed-of venality at the heart of American power, followed by increasingly threadbare Oval Office protestations of innocence. It would not let up for the next 15 months. The daily televised hearings were quite possibly comparable in drama, import, and historic depth to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919–20. Presided over by four Democrats led by Chairman Ervin—who became a folk hero (and to some a folk villain)—and three Republicans led by Vice Chairman Howard Baker of Tennessee, the hearings were at first covered gavel-to-gavel on all three commercial television networks—a business sacrifice that spoke to the remarkable civic high-mindedness with which the country approached the Watergate inquiry. Soon the networks began showing the hearings on a rotating basis. Some Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) stations, however, continued to broadcast the hearings live daily, other PBS stations reran telecasts of the hearings at night, while still others did both.

Trading volume shot down on the New York Stock Exchange. Housewives threatened not to do a stitch of housework for as long as the hearings lasted. College students gathered around TV sets in corridors between, and sometimes during, classes; high schools set up TVs in the cafeteria for all-day civics lessons. “Never have I enjoyed watching television more than in the last two weeks,” one Washington Post letter writer testified, “with the spectacle of high human drama interwoven with the finest possible example of the democratic process at work unfolding before my eyes for hours on end, with no rehearsal, no canned laughter, very little commentary (none needed!), and, best of all, almost no commercial interruption!”

The feeling was not universal. Sticklers, including independent prosecutor Archibald Cox, decried the unfairness of what he characterized as trying the principals in the media. Game-show and soap-opera fans complained about the preemption of their favourite programs. Most significantly for the later ideological direction of the country, though hardly noticed by elites at the time, large portions of Americans derided the entire business as a political witch hunt (and would continue to so view it into the 21st century). Still, some 35 million or so Americans watched the Ervin hearings at one time or another.

What did they see? Methodical portraiture of a White House riddled with unprecedented and extra-constitutional paranoia and corruption from the beginning, painted by a bipartisan panel backed by the awesomely thorough staff work of some of the best young legal minds in Washington (among them Hillary Rodham Clinton, who worked for the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment hearings). In the spring of 1969, national security adviser Henry Kissinger had wiretapped his staffers. In 1970 the White House set up an illegal money-laundering operation to fund its favoured Senate candidates. In 1971, after the disillusioned military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, the White House seemed to institutionalize what some have characterized as a culture of illegality. One young staffer named Tom Charles Huston had earlier recommended a plan, approved and then withdrawn by the president, that called for dramatically expanded illegal domestic spying activities by the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies. His specific plan was rejected, but a very similar operation—which Americans came to know as the “Plumbers,” so called because its original purpose was to ferret out leaks—was soon at work carrying out some of the same tasks.

It was revealed that, as the 1972 campaign season rolled around, roving cells of saboteurs devised ways to weaken individual Democratic presidential campaigns while making it look like the campaigns were actually sabotaging each other. A parallel fascination of the hearings was the questioning of young Nixon aides who left senators incredulous with their explanations that “ends-justifies-the-means” morality had become semiofficial White House policy. Another continuing thread was the examination of illegal sources of the money that funded the various clandestine operations. The drama was further intensified by ongoing investigation of the White House’s attempts at stifling the panel’s investigation even as it was still under way. The malfeasances multiplied every week—dredged up not merely by the Ervin committee but by journalists, the Watergate grand jury, Watergate special prosecutor Cox, and any number of related inquiries, including the trial in Los Angeles of Ellsberg (“Watergate West”), which had ended just before the Ervin hearings began.

The operative constitutional question tying the complexity together was framed with special eloquence by Vice Chairman Baker: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” Nothing, Nixon continuously maintained. That contention was thrown melodramatically into doubt by Dean on June 25, 1973, in a nearly seven-hour statement to the Ervin committee, watched by a huge portion of the American television audience, followed by five days of intense cross-examination. Dean’s account established the president as the prime mover behind the scandal and cover-up. However, these revelations were greeted with skepticism by many. It appeared that the entire extraordinary business would devolve into a stalemate, the president’s word against one of his aides—until, on July 16, Alexander P. Butterfield, formerly of the White House staff, disclosed that all conversations in the president’s offices had secretly been recorded on tape.

Both Cox and the Ervin committee promptly subpoenaed the tapes of several key conversations. Nixon refused to provide them on the grounds of executive privilege and national security. When Judge Sirica ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes and that order was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals in October, Nixon offered instead to provide written summaries of the tapes in question in return for an agreement that no further presidential documents would be sought. Cox rejected the proposal, and on October 20 the president ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire the special prosecutor. In an event that became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” both Richardson and William D. Ruckelshaus, the deputy attorney general, resigned rather than carry out the order, and Cox was finally dismissed by a compliant solicitor general, Robert Bork. It was another extraordinary historical moment. Many responsible American officials literally feared a White House coup d’état.

A storm of public protest pressured Nixon into finally agreeing on October 23 to release the nine tapes asked for by Sirica, but, of the nine tapes specified in Sirica’s order, only seven were actually delivered, and one of the seven contained a gap of 18 and a half minutes that, according to a later report by a panel of experts, could not have been made accidentally. The combined weight of all the allegations that had been made during the course of the investigation of the scandal led to the initiation of a formal impeachment inquiry by the House Judiciary Committee in May 1974. On May 20 Judge Sirica ordered Nixon to turn over additional tapes to Cox’s successor as special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski. On July 24 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon must provide the recordings. Between July 27 and 30 the House Judiciary Committee passed three articles of impeachment. On August 5 the president supplied transcripts of three tapes that clearly implicated him in the cover-up. With these revelations, Nixon’s last support in Congress evaporated. He announced his resignation on August 8, stating that he no longer had “a strong enough political base” with which to govern. Nixon left office at noon the following day, August 9.

Pardon And Aftermath On September 8, 1974, the new president, Gerald Ford, chose to grant Nixon a full and unconditional pardon for any crimes he may have committed while president. Ford had become vice president in December 1973, after Nixon’s previous vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, resigned amid accusations of financial improprieties and pled no contest to a single, negotiated criminal charge. By the time of the pardon, enough Americans had become convinced that Nixon (named by the Watergate grand jury as an “un-indicted co-conspirator”) was guilty of crimes and that Ford had pardoned him as quid pro quo for becoming president that the approval rating of the otherwise popular new president collapsed overnight.

This loss of faith in the new chief executive spoke to the extraordinary cynicism that marked the national mood 27 months into a scandal in which a clutch of Nixon’s closest aides eventually went to jail. For the rest of the decade both popular and political culture were suffused with paranoia and disillusionment. Ronald Reagan’s ascent to the presidency in 1980 had very much to do with his rhetorical ability to break the cloud of gloom that Watergate, along with the U.S. failure in the Vietnam War, had cast upon the country. Even in the early 21st century the legacy of Watergate continued to haunt American politics. Watergate was so synonymous with scandal that it became common practice for the press to tack on a -gate to the scandal du jour, from “Tailhook-Gate” to “Troopergate.” The former president and then, after his death, his family spent a great deal of money on a legal campaign to prevent the entirety of his tapes from being released. That effort failed, and the entire taped record of the Nixon White House eventually became available to the public. Scholars continue to mine the tapes for insights, including the discovery that Nixon ordered the firebombing of the Washington, D.C., think tank the Brookings Institution (never carried out) in an attempt to remove records suggesting that he had conspired to sabotage the 1968 Paris peace talks so that his Democratic opponent in that year’s presidential election, Vice Pres. Hubert Humphrey, could not run on a record of having helped end the Vietnam War.

The Times They Are A-Changin' (Witmark Demo - 1963) by Bob Dylan

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

Songwriters: Bob Dylan
The Times They Are A-Changin' (Witmark Demo - 1963) lyrics © Audiam, Inc