Intro Music
ANDY
It’s Andy’s Podcaster Podcasting Podcast.
SFX -snoring
TIME CHECK
Three a.m.
SFX -Dream backing music
ANDY
Hot waffle breakfast.
TRUMP
Hydroxychloroquine
ANDY
Idiot
SFX - Dream backing music
MARTIN LUTHER KING
I have a dream. I have a dream.
TV NEWS ANCHOR
Tonight video has surfaced of an African American man being chased down and killed, his family says he was just out jogging…
ANDY
NO…
HILARY CLINTON
They are often the kinds of kids that are called super-predators, no conscience, no empathy…
ANDY
NO!
MARTIN LUTHER KING
I have a Dream
BIDEN
Everything the President says and done encourages White Supremacists, and I’m not sure there is much of a distinction, as a matter of fact it may be even worse, in fact he may be out there in fact trying to curry favor with White Supremacists and any group that is an anathema to everything we believe in…
TRUMP
But you also had people that were very fine people…
JEN
ANDY… ANDY!… Wake up, you’re having a bad dream…
ANDY
Oh… that was… really bad… my heart is racing…
JEN
Um. Do you want to talk about it?
SFX - lamp, glass
ANDY
Ummm… Let’s see.. Is Donald Trump the President?
JEN
Yes…
ANDY
And did he really give Rush Limburgh the Medal of Freedom and say that actual Nazi’s were very fine people?
Jen
Yes… that happened…
ANDY
GOD… and are the Corporate Democrats running Biden against him? The man who wrote the ’86 drug bill targeting black drug users over white, which he then followed up with the ’88 Drug Bill doubling jail time for drug offenses, which he then followed up with the ’94 Crime Bill labeling black kids as super predators… which essential makes him the very face and front of systematic black incarceration his entire career?
JEN
Well… Yes.
ANDY
Wow… And can white guys storm Government Buildings with AR-15s and face no repercussions but black guys are getting shot now for jogging…
JEN
… Yes…
ANDY
So it wasn’t just a bad dream… What do you call it then, when its not a nightmare?
JEN
Oh… love… it’s 3 am… I don’t know right now. Life? … We should try and get back to sleep.
ANDY
So it wasn’t a bad dream. More like - A bad WAKE. Yes it is a kind of a wake… a vigil held beside the body of something dead…
JEN
What are you doing.
ANDY
I don’t think I can get back to sleep now. I’ll go downstairs and work on the Pod…
JEN
OK love. Try and get some sleep.
ANDY
I will.
Music - Rise of the Black Centipede - Mario Rom’s Interzone
ANDY
It’s… Review… Time…. MMMMWAHAHAHAHAHA!
ANDY
It’s True Crime Time… one of the biggest and most popular podcast genres… Today I’m looking at three shows which all cover various aspects of crime and justice in these United States. I’m a British American, an immigrant by fate and choice, I’ve always felt at home here, more space to stretch out… and I prefer the Star Spangled Banner to God Save the Queen - which - lets be honest, is a dreary servile piece of propaganda for a corrupt vampiric monarchy who should have lost 95% of their stolen land and money after either of the World Wars - but anyway, one of the things I like about the star spangled banner - is that the bit they always sing, the first verse - ends in a question. I like that there is a dialogue at play, renewed in a way, every time it is sung, even if it’s subconscious. The question, as you know, is - does the Star Spangled Banner still fly over the land of the free and the home of the brave? Come on, regardless of your take on Jingoistic Patriotism, it’s a good question. I think it does invite thought and analysis even if most people are not thinking when they hear it or maybe just chomping on hotdogs and thinking about baseball or how the amazing is the most expensive army the world has ever seen can be used to save us from Iraqi children but can’t protect us from Donald Trump… but it’s still a good question, because it’s in there at least. So it’s way better than most anthems. except maybe the Danish one that describes a king mashing in a Swedish brain in a battle with a broadsword. So yeah, I’m happy to be a Citizen rather than a subject. And a citizen with a question. And maybe Colin Kapernek and other respectful kneelers are answering every time it is asked, as is their right. And so we get to the crux of it. ‘Does the Star Spangled Banner still fly over the home of the brave and the land of the free’, What do you think? Does it to you? I would say perhaps not for all of us equally, perhaps its more a case of all of us are equal but some are more equal than others. And I would site as evidence for my take, the three superb Podcasts I’m reviewing today.
First up is Serial Season Three. This was out in 2018, and is very much the direct follow up to Serial season one, the Adnam Syeed investigation and we are back with Sarah Koenig and her journey into the Criminal Justice system in America. The break out show - Serial of course zeroed in on one case but here she takes on the task of understanding the whole justice system by embedding in the Central Courthouse in Cleveland and talking to everyone over many months about what goes on at every stage. She sits down with Police and judges and District Attorneys and prison guards and defense lawyers and of course defendants. We hear stories of a system under strain, people trying to do good, but becoming trapped in insane kaffka-esque routines that resemble strange and deadly pantomimes. And yes IT IS very DAMNING TESTIMONY and yes it is compulsive listening. There are several stories followed through the season, the opening case takes you step by step through the process of getting arrested and being processed and arraigned and how a woman who was assaulted in a bar somehow ends up facing charges herself and gets loaded up with fines and court fees that she probably won’t even be able to climb out from under. You’re kind of outraged by this one but it really is just the beginning, and after this it get worse and there are a couple of cases in which police brutality occurs, and as always she frames the issues with impeccable research, like this…
SARAH KOENIG
“A study published in 2016 found that reports of police brutality not only contribute to a, quote, ‘spirit of legal cynicism’, they also cause people to not call the cops when they need them. They make entire cities less safe. The researchers looked at 911 calls before and after a infamous case in Milwaukee the 2004 beating of a guy named Frank Jude, they found that for a year afterwards there were 22,000 fewer 911 calls in Milwaukee and that residents in Black neighborhoods especially were far less likely to report crime and at the same time that people were reporting fewer crimes, murders in Milwaukee rose by 32%.”
ANDY
One of the most memorable bits of the show is this utterly chilling conversation that she conducts with the former president of the Police Union Steve Loomis that I think will stay with me forever…
STEVE LOOMIS
We really don’t care about civilian complaints, not that we don’t care that we get don’t get them. But we don’t.
ANDY
So they get into it about Tamir Rice the 12 year old child who was shot and killed by a the Cleveland police, by a rookie cop while he was playing with an air rifle near his house. You probably remember the case it was from 2012, the video footage is horrible. The cop car drives up really fast and without any warning or attempt to engage, disarm or discover that the gun is a toy they jump out of the car and shoot him down. Tamir Rice. This twelve year old boy… This is America, kids are encouraged to play with toy guns. It’s even a ritual for many families at Christmas is watching the comedy film A Christmas Story in which a young kid dreams of getting the ultimate gift from Santa - ‘A Red Ryder Air Rifle’ but you know what, that’s not something a Black Kids can really take part in, that slice of the American Dream, we white families get to laugh and watch ‘A Christmas Story’… but Black Families seeing the movie will have to follow it up with another episode of The Talk with their kids - establishing all the ways that they could get killed by the Police, a police who are supposed to protect and serve us all equally but in fact seem to dispense justice on a sliding scale of the amount of Melanin you have in your skin… So, Steve Loomis in this chilling interview, slanders Tamir’s family, Blames the 12 year old for his own death, and argues there was no other way it could have gone down but he’s lying, we know Tamir shouldn’t have been executed by the police that day. Because the police manage to use non lethal force all the time, apprehending guys like Dylan Root, Nicolas Cruz, or handling the gang of white guys who just stormed the Michigan State Capitol with AR-15s real guns and not toys and moving, threatening with bad intent… You got to hear this whole interview… and Koenig ends up asking pressing him for a solution, a way forward to stop these trigger happy police killings of Black People… and this is what he says…
SARAH KOENIG
When you’re saying why are we fixating on these deaths, because people are saying enough is enough is enough is enough… they’re saying one is too many…
STEVE LOOMIS
I’ll tell you how we fix that… we don’t go. When somebody calls us and tells us that someone is at a rec centre, we don’t go. That’s the only way to fix that…
SARAH KOENIG
I don’t buy that… I think that Steve really believes what he is saying here, that police are never to blame for harming someone in the line of duty. If you end up dead or hurt its always because of something you did or didn’t do. It follows than, that the only ones who need to reform, are the citizens. In the name of Cleveland’s fifteen hundred police officers, Steve Loomis is folding his arms. Inside his petulance is also a threat, you don’t like how we do business, fine, we’ll stop arresting people. See how you like your city then. It’s the same stance some police officers have taken in Chicago, Minneapolis and New York and Baltimore. A Cop-out.
ANDY
It’s just unbelievable. Basically, if we don’t allow the police to kill people they will go on strike. How noble. How honorable. You have a Police Union President - a man elected by the police to speak for them coming out with this shit. It’s a disgrace. It reminds me another moment from another podcast I reviewed on Episode 7 - Io Tillet Wright’s The Ballad of Billy Balls - where they spoke with Ron Kuby the Civil Rights lawyer who as it happens, is from Cleveland, and here is what he said:
RON KUBY
The system embodies structural violence. And the most direct form of structural violence is the police. And so, how many, Billy Balls, are you willing to allow to be killed to make sure you are safe. And the answer that most people give is, just do whatever you need to do. Judges, jurors, citizens, courts, are always willing to say, ‘well, it’s too bad but that’s what happens’. People want to be kept safe and part of that is not second guessing every single thing the cops do.
AUSTIN MITCHELL
How do you reconcile that balance between keeping the public safe and a system that embodies structural violence?
RON KUBY
I don’t reconcile it. It’s irreconcilable.
ANDY
Yeah - so it’s on all of us - the structural violence is cooked into the system and it’s on all of us… I’m not quite so sure though, that it’s quite so bleak and irreconcilable… we can deescalate as a society, we can enact common sense gun laws, this will protect our police and everyone. We can make sure that black people receive the same level of service and respect from the police that Dylan Roof, Nicolas Cruz and White gun totting terrorists get when they invade and take over state capitals or occupy government land, like Cliven Bundy. I don’t think that’s irreconcilable exactly. Back to Serial… This is an essential listen if you want to understand what is happening, how we are managing to incarcerate more people than any other country on the planet, how we are actually failing everyone in a broken system. Sarah Koenig and her team calmly pull back the curtain and it is brilliant investigative work. You have to hear it and it culminates in this brilliant summation of all we have discovered…
SARAH KOENIG
“The best kept secret in the justice center. is in the lobby, it’s tucked between two pillars, near the elevators. It looks like a wheel you might see at a raffle or a bingo game. But it functions as a suggestion box. You can send kites to the staff. The administrative judge will get them. He’s got the key. After hanging around this building for a year I have many suggestions, just off the top of my head… I’d say, go minimalist, don’t pile six charges onto a single crime when one charge will do. Don’t over-charge to force a guilty plea, don’t lock anyone up unless they are demonstrably violent. Admit that police officers lie under oath. Get out of the punishment business and turn towards the urgent problem of fairness. Keep obsessive track of who exactly is being charged with what crime, how their sentence shakes out and what their life looks like in 3 years, 5 years. Take note of the color of their skin and how much money they have. Don’t shove what you learn in a drawer and forget about it. Don’t be insensible tempted as Charles Dickens wrote ‘into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course’. Cops, prosecutors, judges, lawyers, call out your colleagues who degrade your profession. Pay assigned attorneys and public defenders at least twice as much as you’re paying them now. Judges, stop choosing those assigned attorneys. Citizens, mix up the bench, stop electing judges county wide. And overall, slow down, doubt yourselves. And I know how corny this sounds but imagine that every person in the elevator car is part of your own family and reflect on the far reaching pain of prosecution. Also, don’t tape anyone’s mouth shut in court, that happened. And consider getting rid of the Grand Jury. I could cram that wheel to bursting but if I’m only allowed on suggestion, let’s all accept that something has gone wrong, let’s make that our premise. Many times on our reporting in Cleveland, when I’d ask about problem or reforms, someone would throw out, ‘Well, let’s remember, we have the best system in the world,’ County Prosecutor Michael O’Mally said it to me. ‘I just think people need to realize, we have the best criminal justice system in the world’. The people who operate the system, know about the warts and they concede we can always improve. But generally, they are not chomping for a overhaul, an extreme make-over that the data is screaming at us to undertake. We’ve all heard the stats - that we in the United States imprison a vastly higher percentage of our population than the rest of the world. We are number one. The numbers are well documented, wildly out of whack and unprecedented in our history. Also well documented, inequity. Every joint in the skeleton of our criminal justice system is greased by racial discrimination. Compared to white people who have committed the same crime and have similar criminal histories, black people and other people of color are arrested more often, charged more harshly, given higher bails, are offered worse plea deals, are handed longer prison sentences and their probation is more often revoked. These numbers aren’t floating above us in the sky, they’re alive, all over the country. We looked at studies from NYC and Alabama and Wisconsin and Iowa’s sixth district and Hampton Virginia and Harris County Texas. It’s everywhere, in all our court houses. Reporters often hear that we only report the bad stories, that we exaggerate and sensationalize. Especially when it comes to law enforcement and wonky prosecutions. But we didn’t go to Cleveland and sift through hundreds of cases looking for the most egregious injustices we could find. We didn’t have to. The ordinary ones told us everything we needed to know.”
ANDY
Serial Season 3 - gets 5 stars 2 thumbs up, a police siren, and a bit of The Lie by Sir Walter Raleigh.
TOM O’BRIEN
Say to the court it glows and shines like rotten wood, Say to the church it shows what’s good and does no good, if church and court reply, then give them both the lie…
ANDY
Next up is Motive from WBEZ Chicago, which if you don’t know is a fabulous and greatly storied radio station, its the originator and home to many great shows such as This American Life, comedy game show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and stuff like my old favorite Word Jazz from Ken Nordine, which is a big inspiration of mine. I’ll put links to a favorite episode from these shows in the transcript. So Motive is a crime investigation series, with two seasons, the first one is hosted and put together by journalist Frank Maine of the Chicago Sun Times and its based around his reporting of the extraordinary life story of TJ Jimenez. Frank Maine has a sort of grizzled detective type delivery and comes he across as a the sort of hard case working journalist that might have slipped from the pages of some incredible noir crime novel, and this impression is definitely helped by the sound design which features a Tom Waits / Marc Ribot guitar riff which is very reminiscent of the song, ‘Down In the Hole’ - which was used very effectively on the Hit TV Show The Wire. The TJ story is a really wild ride. He’s this young kid who falls into gang life in Chicago, with the Simon City Royals and at the age 14 gets arrested and charged with a murder of another gang member. He’s a true soldier, a scary gang fanatic if you will, a boy whose absolute commitment to the gang life brought him to the attention of the Chicago Police who made the judgement that everyone would be better off if he was behind bars. Which, obviously, is not how it’s supposed to work. It’s one of those weird tragic things whereby you probably know the Chicago PD were probably right in some ways in the position they are in, every instinct in many of there law enforcement bones twitching as they see him strut down the street, with a head full of Gangsta Rap because that is where we are, we engineer poverty in these communities and pay the police to protect us from it, and then we have fake outrage when they shatter our white sensitive illusion that the police are out to protect and serve everyone equally not on a sliding scale of how much melanin you have in your skin or how much money and inherited wealth and privilege your family has managed to accumulate over the years. Look, if the police was to protect and serve equally someone would have been charged with poisoning Flint’s water and the Chicago Police would be kicking in the door of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange every day for money laundering and insider trading. But it doesn’t happen. So, the police, very much emboldened by Biden and the Clinton Super predator crime bill they identify TJ is a crime spree waiting to happen and lock him up for a murder he didn’t commit on the dubious testimony from quote ‘eye-witnesses’. That’s the set up. And we learn about the gang culture in Chicago and prison culture and we meet TJ’s family and then we get to the remarkable turn in fortune that sees TJ released after 16 years in jail with help from an Innocence Project. He gets out has his record expunged and then wins a civil suit against Chicago PD for 25 million dollars. It’s a fairy tale, a weird turn of fortune. So what does he do? he could do anything, go anywhere, be whatever he wants. But and this is the kicker, he’s out but he’s head is still inside, in jail, utterly institutionalized and I don’t want to spoil it but yes, he does end up back inside following outrageous gang bullshit, building his own little gangland mercenary army and inventing a new identity for himself as ‘Batman’ on the North Side driving around in a fleet of luxury cars blowing through the money pretending to be some kind of Scarface type criminal mastermind but in reality he's just a stir crazy kid - literally stir crazy street punk who can’t break out of the role he was born into, fully embraced and then baked and frozen in like Han Solo in Carbonite.
SFX - music, Simon City Royals gang anthem, feat batman of the north side.
ANDY
It’s mad. It’s one of those weird stories that will keep you thinking for a long time. The second season of Motive features an entirely different story from reporters Candice Mittel Kahn and Alexandra Salomon and it covers the struggle for a large group of women, foreign exchange students on study abroad programs from American Universities to find each other and actually be believed when coming forward with sexual assault allegations against a mass rapist who hid in plain sight for a couple of decades. The struggle for women to be believed about sexual assault is a core subject of this season and it deals with it in a very compelling way, with multiple testimonies artfully arranged around an open and active pursuit for justice in the Spanish Supreme Court. It really cuts to the core about how the Patriarchy, our social system, effectively lives under the skin of us all so that our first instinct when hearing from women is to minimize their experience and deny their victimhood. Here’s a clip…
SFX - clip from motive season two
CANDICE KAHN
Kaethe Hoffer runs the Chicago Alliance against sexual exploitation
KAETHE HOFFER
Who wants to be called a liar? If you have reason to be believe that you will be treated like a liar - who would do that? Especially if you’re already enduring the consequences of a trauma, you can’t go back in time and undo. There’s an 11% arrest rate for reported rapes, 89 out of every 100 rapes reported to the police result in not a damn thing happening to him…
ANDY
The women sharing their experiences and overcoming the shocking indifference towards sexual assault in our culture deserve to be heard, and deserve justice. Their testimony is brave and moving and vital and we as men need to do better in all our male peer groups to ensure everyone understand what consent is and destroy attitudes of indifference to the suffering of women. Another thing from the show I found particularly enlightening was how they identified the way Right Wing Fascist Movements, in this case as regards the Wolf Pack case in Spain but it’s the same over here, are successfully recruiting young men to their causes by reframing the #METOO movement as a massive offensive against all men, a sort of nuclear option in some kind of Terminal Gender War in which the slightest attempt to address male violence on women is to be met with a massive Neanderthal counter backlash with phrases like ‘Feminazi’ tossed out at any woman who will not instantly submit to male dominance in all it subtle and not so subtle forms. So let’s see, Motive gets 5 stars and… a deer hunter for season one and a sketch about consent for season two.
SFX - the Deer hunter Russian roulette scene, tracey ullman show sketch about police indifference to sexual assault reporting.
ANDY
Finally, we have White Lies from NPR - now this show has been in the news as it was nominated for a Pulitzer prize. It’s a fascinating cold case story from the Civil Rights era, focusing on the events surrounding Selma and the murder James Reeb. Reeb was a Unitarian minister from Boston who answered Martin Luther Kings call for help in the aftermath of the murder of civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by state trooper James Fowler and the Bloody Sunday clashes in which racist gangs of police and white supremacist militias attacked a peaceful march with billy clubs and tear gas. James Reeb, was a man of conscience and conviction - how we are in need of more of his like today - and he was murdered by a gang of racists who were themselves answering the call of George Wallace the Alabama Governor and a pervasive White Supremacist legislature to physically fight and deny black equality movements at every level. The show wonderfully takes us back to the 60s with archival tape and interviews and they try to solve the murder case in a direct sense but they also broaden the context of the crime to understand it in a holistic sociological way. So we can see directly how the white people of Selma wrapped themselves in a hideous shroud of White Lies to deny the truth and keep the flame of race hatred burning through… well through to today. Because this show is incredibly pertinent to our current time. The journalists who put this together, native Alabamans - Andrew Grace and Chip Brantley, really labored hard over this show with love and care and intelligence and it really shines through. There are a number of moments that will make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. There is a hunt for lost tape and lost witnesses. And there is the startling revelation of an insane conspiracy theory that James Reeb was killed by the Civil Rights Movement on the way to the hospital. This Conspiracy narrative was key in leading to the acquittal of three men initially charged with the murder and it’s terrifying to see how lies, emboldened by State Actors and politicians can capture the hearts and minds of people to perpetuate hatred and the oppression of black americans. Of course it echoes and reverberates loudly through to today, I’m a White man in a white neighborhood and I am surrounded by White Lies just as pernicious as the ones that led the folk in Selma to hold their silence about the murder of James Reeb and embrace a conspiracy theory to protect themselves from real self examination. The White Lies are everywhere, from Trumps Birther movement, to Neo-liberal white dog walkers in Central Park faking existential fear on phone calls to the cops, to the idea that people marching under Swasticas to defend an icon of Slavery are ‘Very Fine People’, that Rush Limbugh deserves the Medal of Freedom, that kneeling to protest Police Brutality is somehow disrespectful and unforgivable but watching over and over as police murder black people is normal. That saying Black Lives Matter should be responded to with a media megaphone that ALL LIVES MATTER or as our Maryland Governor would have it - Only Blue Lives Matter. We have a police officer in our family who told me to my face after becoming annoyed at the Black Live Matter sign in our front yard that he thinks the Black Lives Matter movement is the actual equal and equivalent of The Ku Klux Klan. Incredible. How utterly ignorant and dismissive of over a century of terror and lynchings. It was literally Jaw Dropping. A very difficult discussion, to say the least. But this is where we’re at, this has happened, Rush Limbaugh and Fox news has turned Black Lives Matter into a hate organization in the minds of most white Americans. The White Lies are everywhere, not just in Alabama. White Lies - absolving white sins, over and over and over. And there is outrage at calls from women like Amy Cooper, or Dr. Jennifer Shulte who called the cops of Black BBQers in Oakland, there is moments of outrage, but it passes all too quickly In the latter case BBQBecky was a joke for a week on SNL and the talk shows, a joke dismissed by White Culture but these women are but the modern equivalent of Carolyn Bryant Donham the lying white woman who got Emmet Till lynched in 1955. Yes, in these two cases, they didn’t get the lynching they were looking for but only because the Black people involved calmly held their shit together and recorded them with their phones. Recordings of frightened phone calls to police are often used by judges in criminal cases in sentencing instruction to juries. White Lies - you need to listen to this show, and honestly it’s not all bleak, there is some hope in it too, voices of wisdom and healing do prevail. But as they say in one quote that has really stuck with me - we need to expose the White Lies especially amongst those who pursue ‘the agenda of the Klan with the soft harmless demure of the Rotary Club’. Download this one now. Five Stars, two thumbs up, all the marbles and some very fine people.
SFX - all the marbles, fascist groups marching in charlottesville screaming ‘white power’ ahead of the murder of Heather Heyer.
SFX - radio static - Phil Ochs - ‘Love Me I’m a Liberal’ - radio static - delta night news segment.
NEWS ANCHOR
On Delta Tonight… for years the monument to Emmett Till has been target practice for white fraternities from Ole Miss, but not any longer as the new monument is now bullet proof… but is it axe proof, acid proof or able to survive the impact of a dump truck… join us at ten to find out.
SFX - dump truck - radio static - preacher screecher - radio static - top of the pops…
SARAH KOENIG
‘Every joint in our criminal justice system is greased by racial discrimination.’
MALCOM X
There are many whites trying to solve the problem, but you never see them going under the label of liberal, that white person who calls himself a liberal is the most dangerous thing in the entire western hemisphere. He’s the most deceitful, he’s like a fox, and a fox is always more dangerous in the forest than the wolf, you can see the wolf coming, you can see what he's up to to but the fox will fool you, but even though you see his teeth he’s smiling, you take him as a friend.
SARAH KOENIG
‘Every joint in our criminal justice system is greased by racial discrimination.’
MARTIN LUTHER KING
And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? ... It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met.
MALCOLM X
With skillful manipulating of the press, they’re able to make the victim look like the criminal and the criminal look like the victim.
COLIN KAEPERNIK
There are a lot of things going on that are unjust, people aren't being held accountable for, and that’s something that needs to change, this country stands for freedom, liberty, justice for all and it’s not happening for all right now…
MUPPETS
Oh say does that star spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the … Elmo, Elmo want to be part of this because it sounded really fun, really patriotic…
SFX - Music - Everything is Permitted - Mario Rom’s Interzone
ANDY
So that’s a wrap. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show. Please spread the word. Tell one person. Pick your favorite episode and have them give it a listen… Please leave me a review apple podcasts - And if you you want to help out, buy me a coffee by clicking the link in the show notes and on the webpage…. The Muppet sounding voices on the Star Spangled Banner there done by the super talented CARTOONMAN, there’s a link to his Youtube page in the Transcript…. The Jazz is from Mario Rom’s Interzone. I don’t know who’s providing your jazz but I think you switch to these cats. More lighthearted Podcasts will be reviewed over the next few episodes I promise. Let me know if you’ve found any that you’ve been enjoying and I’ll give them a listen and share them on the show. Until next time… BBBBBBBye.