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Sunday, December 17, 2023

Fundamentalism and the Supreme Court.

 

Catholic fundamentalist Samuel Alito is not a fan of Thomas Jefferson.  Thomas Jefferson was arguably a deist or a theist, or maybe even a Unitarian.  His statute for religious freedom in Virginia was a template for the separation of church and state, later expressed in the Constitution. His views about keeping the preachers away from government are well known.  He was an enslaver, and a father of enslaved children, but his ideas about religion have been soundly reaffirmed in our republic—until now.  The separation of church and state has allowed different religions to thrive in all the states of the Union.  

 

And now, the Supreme Court of the United States has anointed itself as a priestly guardian of public morality and even worse, the reproductive freedom of women, to the point of reckless endangerment.

 

Everyone my age has heard stories about “fallen women,” back-alley abortions, and ruined lives.  We have heard stories of women dying in illicit, filthy, abortion clinics unstaffed by medical personnel, and seen Hollywood movies of the era depicting melodramatic, but true, tragic denouements to unwanted pregnancies resulting from rapes, incest, and medical emergencies.

 

Donald Trump, a man who never got a majority vote from the American people, appointed not two, but three extremist justices, creating a judicial Frankenstein, a renegade Supreme Court; justices rushed through by Mitch McConnell, who would not even meet with Merrick Garland to offer a balance to the court, lost by Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death.

 

Let me digress for one paragraph: Mitch McConnell, could have, but refused, to whip votes or vote himself for Trump’s well-deserved impeachment conviction, followed up his vote with a sanctimonious speech about Trump’s possibly being held accountable by the courts…well you know how that has worked out.

 

But let’s get back to the Supremes.  

 

Five robed Catholic religious fanatics have pilfered women of their constitutional right to reproductive freedom, forged over 50 years ago by Roe v. Wade.  Justice Alito, an ideologue par excellence, conducted Machiavellian palace intrigue to rush through his obfuscating opinion as revealed in a recently published article by Adam Liptak and Jodi Kantor of the New York Times.  This, including the arguable leaking of the opinion early to cement the votes of his colleagues who might have been wavering over this ill-thought monumental injustice.

 

Women are now fleeing from unfree states to free states, like the 1850s when slavecatchers roamed across state lines to capture runaway slaves. Ok. No slave catchers today.  Only regressive state legislatures and salivating Attorneys General like Ken Paxton of Texas threatening to sue or imprison women who travel from their home states to seek health care.  Physicians fear making health care decisions for their patients. They might go to prison for 99 years or lose their license.   Forget that a woman whose fetus has a fatal anomaly or that the woman could possibly die. 

 

There was a time when burning people at the stake for apostacy was de riguer.  Now prosecuting them for protecting their lives or their sanity is the fashion in Texas and some other states that have become bastions of religious fundamentalism.

 

The problem of course, is that the law is not purely a religious undertaking.  It is a mélange of both.  If it were not, we would be living in a theocracy, like Iran.   

 

What the anti-abortion crowd truly believes is that life begins at conception.  And it cannot be truly argued otherwise.   But since Roe v. Wade, it has been judicial practice that prior to viability, that the social implications of abortion far outweigh the religious proscriptions.  So, yes, there is a profound difference between truly held beliefs and what has evolved in modern legal thought.  Therein lies the dilemma.  The incurable malady.   Religion or socially desirable mores. Moderation or extremism.   70% of the American public are in favor of moderation.

 

What Justice Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett lied about, that they were committed to stare decisis, or long settled law during confirmation hearings, undermines not only their credibility, but their place in history, like the infamous Justice Roger Taney, when he authored the Dredd Scott decision, denying human rights to a Black man.  Even worse, also on the wrong side of history, Alito deserves a special place in judicial infamy for his unmitigated ability to alter modern legal thought into some contorted, thinly veiled religious rationalization actually citing 16th century law.  A fall back to the good old days.  Those days were not so good, after all, despite what Samuel Alito thinks.  And no, he is no Jeffersonian.  Not even close.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday, October 19, 2023

Religion and Real Estate

Religion and Real Estate.

 

 

The guilt of cruising the Aegean as an American and as a Jew while fellow Jews are undergoing the most gruesome assault since the Holocaust makes me wonder why people pray to God. They thank God for good things and call it “providence,” and dismiss the bad, as though some beneficent entity is controlling their lives. 

 

Islam arose around 624 AD, after the much older Jewish monotheism arose in the levant some 3-4,000 years ago, depending upon which source you believe. Early Jewish religion had elements of polytheism, worshipped goddesses and a cult of mother goddesses, according to historian/anthropologist Raphael Patai. In the 300,000 or so years since homo sapiens emerged in Africa, organized religion has only existed for about 4,000 years, a flash of light in terms of the 4.5 billion years in the history of Earth.  

 

Before organized religion, primitives danced around fires and assumed direct relations with the spirits. Shamans then arrogated for themselves the sole ability to communicate with the spirits and therefore control over the populace.  “Only I can communicate with God.”  Sound familiar?  You had to go through them to be safe. Some grievance politicians do the same. Get the picture?

 

Scientists have predicted that in another 250 million years the sun will incinerate our planet.  Meanwhile we are doing a pretty good job of doing it ourselves.  We had better hope Elon Musk’s plans for moving humanity to other worlds works out.

 

So, let’s share a little perspective on the Arab-Jewish/Israeli wars.

 

People have circulated maps showing Palestine as it was before the time of Christ; true believers rely on that map to justify claims on the land. They say Palestinians did not exist at that time and therefore, Jews have a superior claim.  There were Canaanites, Israelites, Assyrians, Egyptians and of course, wars over the land among clashing empires and tribes.

 

The troubles began with the rise of monotheism, which automatically dismissed other faiths, all of which are constructs anyway.  Ours is the only way to God, they say.  Death to the others.  Let’s take their land.

 

Israel is supposed to be a homeland for Jews.  Well, it has been a very inhospitable homeland ever since partition.   When the Ottoman empire collapsed at the end of World War I, the Versailles treaty created the conditions for what followed—another war, even worse than the first one.  And the carving up of the British and French colonies and mandates at the end of World War II perpetuated the conditions for what is happening today, by promising the same land to two different tribes.  

 

Are the territorial disputes tied to religion or are the religions tied to the disputes? Or is it a distinction without a difference? Or is it simply about real estate?  Pretty complicated stuff.

 

New surveys say that approximately 26% of Americans do not believe in a supernatural being that can change the course of history or respond to the pleas of a suffering humanity. Evangelicals are among the strongest supporters of Israel, because in the end of days, Christ will return or some such other theory.  And the theory involves the Holy Land being in possession of the Jews.  It all sounds, excuse the term, Medieval.  One wonders if a professed Atheist can ever be elected to political office in America.  

 

No one denies the soothing aspects of a religious undertaking, and I suppose that is reason enough to feel some comfort that after one dies, they will go to some either defined or undefined place, heaven or hell, purgatory, or some other destination conceived by priests, or those others who need to provide an explanation for the inexplicable.  But religion should not justify demands for real estate and competing claims for land over which bloody wars have existed for millennia.

 

There are only three countries in the Middle East that have been around for centuries:  Persia, which has devolved into a fanatical, theocratic Iran, Egypt, which is a military dictatorship, and Turkey, a putative democracy, the remnant of the Ottoman Empire and the selection of the wrong allies during 

World War I.  The rest are political creations arising from colonial enterprises, and a Jewish tribe with the greatest present date moral claim on a small part of the land (because of the Holocaust.) Israel is so small compared to its Arab neighbors.

 

Why can’t they just leave her alone?

 

Unfortunately, in historical terms, the comparatively new remnants of the colonial empires’ 

division of the land in the most awful, blood-soaked 20th century, the situating of Israel between the former empires of Persia and Egypt and the bloody competition for a relatively small strip of land is arguably the result of tribal imperatives which have no end in sight, fueled in great part by religious imperatives.

 

 

Monday, August 14, 2023

Pardon Trump? Never!


 

Aaron Burr, the vice-president of the United States was tried for treason for aiding the British during the American Revolution.  Acquitted in 1807, Burr spent the rest of his life trying in vain to rebuild his reputation. His personal reputation destroyed, he spent the rest of his life vainly trying to rehabilitate himself by writing a self-serving memoir and wandering the US and Europe.  He died in obscurity in 1836 on Statin Island, of all places.

 

Richard Nixon, pardoned by Gerald Ford, skulked off to California, and appeared in television interviews attempting to recalibrate his reputation and legacy.  His crimes in office consisted of dirty tricks and covering up a third-rate burglary of the Democratic National Committee.  Nixon had a famous enemies list and sabotaged an early attempt to end the Viet Nam war in order to advance his election prospects in 1972.   But Nixon never tried to effectuate a coup d’etat.  Gerald Ford lost the next presidential election because the electorate was not amused by his decision to pardon Nixon’s criminality.  Ford announced, “Our long national nightmare is over.”

 

Au contraire. It was just beginning; that pardon set a dangerous precedent.  A precedent that if one is in the highest position of trust, the chief magistrate of this great country, you are not subject to accountability.  Your self-serving hubris will and should prevail.  The law be damned. Justice be damned.  Tell the peasants “l’etat c’est moi.”

 

Some have argued that Donald Trump should be pardoned for his criminal activities to avoid a national trauma that would be provoked by a trial and even a conviction.  They argue that a trial and conviction will increase polarization, fueling the ilk of Sean Hannity.  Propaganda has been fed to the public for years now, by billionaire media moguls, interested only in  their unparalleled profits, exacerbated by the continuing Trump circus.  And yes, CNN and MSNBC have enjoyed the ratings also on their evening Trump bashes.  Being in a media silo is a stupefying hypnotic mushroom induced religious experience.

 

Arguing that a Trump trial will increase polarity is fear itself.  It is an acquiescence that our justice system is hopeless.  That accountability for the prominent is untenable.  That the wicked should go unpunished for their misdeeds.  That some future president can come along and do whatever they want to impugn the law and escape accountability. This is unacceptable in a country with a constitution and the rule of law.   Acknowledging misdeeds in one part of an argument and then saying there should be impunity for those deeds is cognitively dissonant and intellectually dishonest, a fear ridden Dickensian, existentialist, despair ridden determinism.  It is depressing beyond the wildest imagination.

 

I prefer the Churchillian outlook, “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing—after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”   

 

We have gone so far down the rabbit hole--a mishandled pandemic, the minority election of a man exacerbating our national malaise of disunion, 5 years of distraction from the real problems facing the nation, and now those who wish out of fright not to punish those who would subvert our democracy.

 

Our country has been through, to name a few traumas (and this list is by no means exhaustive,)  a civil war killing 700,000 Americans, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the failure of reconstruction, the Jim Crow south, two horrific world wars, a disastrous war in Southeast Asia, a civil rights revolution, desegregation, a white population that still fears its loss of tribal status, the assassination of a young and promising president and his brother, race riots in Los Angeles, racial profiling, and a party that has now become anti-democratic.  

 

We can certainly tolerate the trial of Donald Trump. On TV. In living color.  On every channel. Unvarnished. Unedited. Unexpurgated.  No sound bites.  On the internet live stream. Show them how American justice works.  I have tried many cases in front of many juries.  Let’s do it. Let’s see the evidence.  

 

Television for all those who think there is no justice for the privileged and for those who question the justice system. For all those low information, Fox watching naifs who are sending in $25-35 of their hard-earned money to a scoundrel ostensibly to make America great, but instead who is using 23% of the money to pay his lawyers ($23M and counting). 

 

Many of the little people who smashed into the capitol have been convicted and sentenced, testifying that they did it for “their president.”  What about their leader?  

 

Let’s send the message for the generations to come that a president is not a king, just as George Washington showed us when they offered him a kingdom.

 

No pardon for Donald Trump.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Donald Trump in two years……


 

Trump: “Well, boys, it sure is great making America great here in this fine minimum-security prison. The orange jump-suit matches my complexion. Happy to be sharing a cell with you great Americans.”

 

Proud Boy: “Yes, sir, Mr. President. You will always be our president and making America great again.  It’s an honor to share a cell with you, too.”

 

Trump: “If you had been more careful, we could have been in the White House now, instead of the Big House. I told you to march peacefully.  When I said fight like hell and stay strong, I did not want you to really hang Mike Pence.  That was not good optics. After all he was loyal all the way, except when I told him to overturn the election.  I told you to stand back and stay strong.  That did not mean break down the doors and kill policemen.

 

Proud Boy: “Yes, Mr. President, maybe we should not have stormed the Capitol. And that hangman’s noose and gallows was not a good idea either.   And we never got a hold of Nancy Pelosi.  We would have surely hanged her. But I did get to put my feet up on her desk and take a video, so the deep state FBI could ID me.”

 

Trump:  I forgive you even though this is all your fault.   But that’s ok boys, we will get there in the next election.  I am making arrangements to have the Constitution amended allow past presidents to pardon themselves. And Justice Alito even said he can interpret the law to allow me to pardon myself without an amendment. This trip to prison was all rigged.  The jury was rigged, the Biden Justice department was rigged, just as this last attempt to get the GOP nomination was rigged against me.  And I thought I would get away with it all until Garland finally appointed that mad dog Jack Smith, a war crimes prosecutor, a real inspector Jovert, to get me.  I thought Garland was such a wimp he would wait until after the election to appoint Smith. Biden must have put a boot up his ass.  Those RINOs in the party gave the nomination to Asa Hutchinson, that Casper Milquetoast.  How is he going to make America great?  He even told people that I was unfit to be president.  What kind of Republican is that?  The least thing they could have done would have been to give the nomination to Ron DeSantis.  At least he was mean enough and cruel enough to send those migrants to Martha’s Vineyard.  He even used taxpayer dollars to do it!   He is trying to be just like me, but he’s just a poor imitation, like Hunt’s Ketchup instead of Heinz.  And by the way, that’s what they are giving us here at the mess hall.  They don’t even have a MacDonald’s here.”

 

 

Proud Boy: “Yes sir, Mr. President.  You know as leader of the Proud Boys, I had your image tattooed on my back, just like Roger Stone had a tattoo of Nixon on his back.  And I got the orange color just right.  They had to use red number 4 to correct the skin tone.  I sure am proud sharing a cell nearby you.   I am really grateful that you pulled some strings to keep me out of that supermax prison, even though I clubbed some of those capitol police storm troopers.”

 

Trump: “Well anyway, I succeeded in getting Liz Cheney out of congress.   Who needs goody two shoes there to inspire the people?  It’s bad for business.  Never mind though, I have an enemies list even longer than Nixon.  And I have studied Putin’s methods of dealing with political opponents.  I mean I would not order any poisonings or arrange for anyone to fall out of a window, but there are other things I can do like blackmail.  I watched how Frank Underwood did it.  Very inspiring, I’ll tell you.  Believe me.”

 

Proud boy: “Mr. President, can I play golf at one of your courses after I get out of this hole?”

 

Trump: “Sure, I will give you the felon’s rate.  But be careful going to the bathroom, I still have some classified documents semi-hidden there.  I would not want Lavrov to see them.  I only share them with club members and good-looking women, since Melania does not even come to visit.

 

Wednesday, July 12, 2023

A Court of Division and a Look through the Glass, Darkly.


 

The Supreme Court of United States favors the perpetuation of minoritarian rule and law, unrelated to the evolution of the American polity.  This court has directly or indirectly advanced the notion that a multi-cultural democracy is not on their agenda.  That notion hides behind a veil of corruption and hubris.  The dignity of the highest court in the land is ghosting us.

 

Behind the façade of granite columns and the “Equal Justice under Law,” is a divide between the essentially gerrymandered court, appointed by a president elected by a minority of the popular vote and confirmed by a Senate that does not equally represent Americans. 

 

This Supreme Court’s current agenda is insidiously hacking away at 70 years of racial progress.  An agenda that gutted the civil rights act, and an agenda that tosses affirmative action in a ditch.  An agenda that cruelly disenfranchises minority voters behind a cloak of intellectually dishonest hypocrisy.

 

Since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 dismissed racial segregation in the south, a litany of cases has followed its courageous lead. “Impeach Chief Justice Warren” signs abounded on every highway in the south.  I saw them.  Whites were busy reinforcing their tribal “superiority.”  Tribes may have been good when we were fighting wooly mammoths, but are they still?  New manifestations of old tribes have been egged on by Fox News, decrying every night about fear of immigrants, fear of others, all in the name of corporate profit biting away at the heels of our democracy.   The first amendment gone wild.  Where have you gone Walter Cronkite?  

 

And yes, the north was racist also, effectuating segregation geographically.  That, too was a remnant of disastrous reconstruction, presided over by Andrew Johnson who ascended to the presidency when Lincoln died.   Johnson, a virulent racist, did all he could to return black America to the same position it was antebellum.  Draft riots in New York City consisted of white mobs who did not want to fight to free “n*****s.” Segregated neighborhoods still exist.

 

The court imposing a time limit on the attempt to achieve racial justice while it is still a work in progress is heartbreaking because it assaults and batters the aspiration of a new generation of the American underclass, struggling to rise up.  It struggles to grasp a part of the American dream, now fading further into the horizon, like someone crawling through the arid sand toward an illusory, shimmering oasis.  But the court says the strugglers are now equal.  Are they?  Do they still have further to go?   Justice Alito, his cruelty and bitterness unmasked, thinks so.  Alito, after all, relies on 16th century opinions that use witchcraft as a rationale.  Discrimination is dead, says he and Chief Justice Roberts.  It’s discriminatory to favor an African American.  Asians might suffer.  Tuba players, athletes and legacies, too.  

 

Equally divisive is the Alito authored Dobbs decision, creating a maze of State laws, especially for women with limited resources, trying to travel to states that provide health care involving reproductive choice. Abortion is never an easy choice; those who make it are often in dire need of help, psychological, emotional and medical, Justice Alito’s callous ideology aside.

 

Even sadder, is the reality that the court truly represents a significant number of Americans, fearing the reality of a majority-minority nation, threatening their supremacy, their tribe.  

 

A house divided against itself cannot stand, said Lincoln.

 

Are we to suffer the same fate as many other nations that could not reconcile their tribal differences, unable conquer their fear of others and the need for obedience to norms and to fellowship, of, if not loving, at least respecting countrymen of different creeds, opinion, and race?  

 

Doctor King thought the arc of history bends toward justice.  Would he feel the same way today? What would Abraham Lincoln say?  Lincoln understood moral ambiguity.  After all, before the war started, he said if he could save the Union half slave and half free, he would do so.  But the war changed him, and although he was always morally opposed to slavery, at one time he considered a plan to send blacks back to Africa.  He knew the first obligation of a politician is to get elected. The great emancipator understood moral ambiguity in himself and in his countrymen.  He also said that without public sentiment there is nothing.

 

Looking at a hate and grievance monger like Ron DeSantis in the most charitable light, one might say he is just trying to get elected.   But at what cost?  Do we see in Trump and DeSantis the dark reflection of ourselves?

 

Sunday, June 25, 2023

Foundation and Union

I have been trying to figure out why our country is so riven.   It is not as though we have not been riven before, as in the 1930s when racism and anti-Semitism bloomed like an Onion at the Outback Steakhouse.   Middle American nativism, reflected in the ravings of Father Coughlin, the Ku Klux Klan, the American Bund and even Charles Lindbergh, aviation hero.  

 

Philip Roth writes convincingly of this in his novel of alternative history. “The Plot Against America,” where a sycophantic Rabbi becomes the dupe of Charles A. Lindbergh, who wins election to the Presidency against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the election of 1940.

 

In that novel, which is, in fact, based upon the true historical zeitgeist of America in 1940, Lindbergh and his anti-Semitic Secretary of the Interior, Henry Ford, send Jewish boys to families in the south and Midwest to be “Americanized.”  The novel became a television mini-series, with the conservative Rabbi, Lionel Bengelsdorf, convincingly being played by John Turturro, and shown to be a foolish dupe of Lindbergh. Rabbi Bengelsdorf is promised a position of authority and power in the Lindbergh administration to convince Jews to vote for him.

 

Anyway, it all turns out pretty sour for Bengelsdorf when he learns that Lindbergh, after the election, no longer regards him of any use. While Lindbergh does not fit the role of confidence man, he did deceive Bengelsdorf to act in his behalf by betraying his own people.  Lindbergh was, after all, a Nazi sympathizer, with no particular affection for Jews, whom he wrongfully thought had too much “influence” over President Roosevelt.

 

Roosevelt, meanwhile, had all he could do to keep political peace at home and to thoughtfully bend the United States into a fight for democracy and to save England from defeat in 1940 by the Nazi tyranny.  It was not easy, as James MacGregor Burns writes in his brilliant biopic “Roosevelt the Soldier of Freedom.”  America in 1940 was a hotbed of anti-Semitism as well as deep racial injustice and isolationism. People fleeing war ravaged Europe could not get visas to enter the United States.   African Americans were being lynched every day and the “America First” movement was coordinating rallies in Madison Square Garden with the Nazi-American Bund to keep America from fighting a war for “the Jews.”

 

Fast forward 80 years. Immigration policy remains a fiery cauldron of discrimination, xenophobia, racism, and fear.  Fear of those different.  Fear of those who do not look like us.  The nameless fear of fear itself, as invoked in FDR’s first inaugural address (1933).

 

the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance

 

This speech, given at the depth of the Great Depression, where soup kitchens lined Pennsylvania Avenue, the dust bowl caused famine in the Midwest, where unemployment was 25%, where an army of veterans descended on Washington to protest and were dispersed by the Army, shows how leaders that care about their flock act.  

 

They calm fears, they create unity, they lead the blind to quench their thirst. They do not steal classified documents, they do not enrich themselves at the public expense, they do not lie about election results, stoking fear and discord.  They do not slither like snakes, away from public accountability and double down on their wickedness.  They do not consolidate power based upon prejudice and fear. And they do not corrupt and pass fleas upon all those that lie down with them.

 

This nation was built on many different foundations.  A living Constitution, but one that must move with the times, the labor of slaves and immigrants, the dispossession of native Americans, of land stolen from Mexicans, of imperial hubris, of racial injustice, but also of decency, and the respect of our norms and institutions.  The rule of law.

 

Occasionally we take a detour, we forget our past and partially re-live it.  But in the end, we must believe that it will all turn out right.  It took revolution, civil war, civil rights movements, protests, civil disobedience; but we must finally recognize what unites us as a people.  The sticky glue that holds us together. This struggle has existed since the foundation of the union, and it will continue to exist as we labor toward a more perfect union. Not disunion.  But union.

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday, May 25, 2023

Napoleon without the Bonaparte

Among the enigmatic politicians of the current crop, Ron DeSantis begs the question whether he really believes some of the things he says. If he is a hypocrite that is bad.  If not, that is arguably worse.   Not content with simply pandering to his aspirational MAGA base, he is pitching his divisive agenda to the American public.  He looms, supposedly with the benefit of a Harvard diploma, like some ostensibly Trumpian avatar, minus the drama. But Trump fans like the drama, the excitement, the apprentice rancor.   Rumor has it that DeSantis dislike index compares favorably (or unfavorably) with Ted Cruz, another darling of the extreme right. Apparently when DeSantis was at Harvard no one spoke to him, recognizing him as the martinet he was, thus rivaling Cruz’s reputation as stated by early (not the later version) Lindsey Graham, “that if someone shot Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, no one would care.” DeSantis is a Cruz fellow traveler.  

 

DeSantis became governor of Florida in 2015, squeaking by Andrew Gillam, later implicated in a drug scandal from which he was recently acquitted, after spiraling downward in a vortex of shame and guilt.  No one really knows whether he would have succeeded as governor, but he certainly failed in handling his loss. So much for picking yourself up when you are down.  Well, we escaped Gillam’s dysfunctional persona, receiving an authoritarian wannabe instead.  The important question, however, is why we are faced with such glum choices?

 

Politics is a shaky game, drawing, arguably, on those who do not have the ability to gain prominence in private life; H.L. Mencken’s aphorism aside—"no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”  

 

Loyally in the corner of DeSantis ( of course, only if Trump is not the MAGA nominee), Marco Rubio is evidence of that maxim, bashing the verdict of the New York jury finding his putative friend, Donald J Trump liable for defamation. As if either of them were capable of friendship to anyone. 

 

Attorneys can be disciplined for generically denigrating the justice system.   Attorneys should state that while they disagree with a verdict, they should not bash the system of justice after a disappointment. This is an ethical violation.  The truth is, however, that Rubio failed in his attempt to gain a large salaried position anywhere, so he changed his mind and went back to Washington, courtesy of the Florida electorate.  Being a mediocre lawyer apparently is no impediment in Florida to being a mediocre senator.  

 

And let’s not forget DeSantis potential loyalist Rick Scott, that other jewel of the Senate whose company was fined billions for Medicare fraud, and who, as chairman, lost the GOP a bunch of seats in the last election. 

 

Within this rogue’s gallery of panderers, DeSantis paradigmatically excels, attempting to woo Trump followers to his culture wars, conducting his own policies of grievance with a sycophantic, spineless legislature passing a six-week abortion ban, making it harder to sue extortionate insurance companies and businesses, eliminating licenses and training for concealed carrying of guns and virtually assuring us another shoot out, almost anywhere in our state. Florida already has suffered its fair share of tragedy.  Perhaps a gun fight at the magic kingdom, home of the subversive mouse who refuses to harken to the demands of DeSantis’ cultural imperatives, including homophobia and nixing anti-gender affirming care.  There are always Nobel prize-winning authors’ books to ban. There are always “thoughts and prayers,” I guess, to address the gun issue, and don’t forget, we haven’t the foggiest notion where the governor is going now that his travel itinerary has been sequestered.

 

There’s transparency for ya.

 

Already, DeSantis has done his best to destroy the academic freedom at highly respected New College, appointing right-wing Republican president of the University of Florida, the Governor assuming the role of education curriculum czar so students can be stripped of their secular and misguided liberal “woke” tendencies.  The methodology for this is banning subversive history books like the Diary of Anne Frank and Tony Morrison’s “Beloved.” Apparently, real history is verboten in MAGA world.

 

Good luck encouraging hormonal college students at State Universities in abstaining from sex, forbidding abortion after six weeks, putting a state prison next to Disney World, banning books, removing the tenure of “woke” professors, denying black history, politicizing the education system, expecting a plethora of guns to not result in more deaths, inserting religious fundamentalism in the schools, and stoking the cultural divisions of Floridians.   We have seen Donald Trump, we have known Donald Trump, and Governor DeSantis, you are no Donald Trump.  But you are no Napoleon either.

 

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

“A Black Man who hates his own People.”


 

Bud Harris,  World War II bomber pilot and highly decorated war hero, and a personal hero of mine, coined this phrase to me during the Anita Hill scandal at Thomas’s confirmation hearings in 1991.  Bud has passed but his words  and prescience linger on.

 

A misunderstanding of one’s own identity is the cornerstone of being out of synchronization with one’s peers.  I think I know who I am, and if I do not, I wish someone would tell me that I do not.

 

Someone should tell Clarence Thomas who he is.  

 

He is of humble origins but has forgotten them.  He has aspired to the American dream, climbing the heights of jurisprudence at least on a superficial level.  Yale Law School. Appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by a war hero President, George H.W. Bush.  Never mind.

 

Some of his dubious accomplishments are:   stopping the Florida recount in 2000, deciding that the second amendment permitted individuals, not only well-regulated militias; to carry guns (2008) (CDC figures show that gun violence affects blacks twice as much as whites); allowing dark money to corrupt campaign finance (2010), diminishing anti-discrimination features of the Voting Rights act of 1965; breaking down the wall of separation of state and religion (2014).  His latest notable accomplishment is issuing the lone dissent in turning over Trump’s purloined classified documents and asking his colleagues if he had to disclose special favors, gifts, accommodations and private jet travel from his billionaire friends. Since these colleagues said “no,” he did not.  Why would a Supreme Court justice need ethical advice?  Really?  

 

And of course, the fact that his wife and he never discussed any of the above for their 35 years of marriage, not even her wack-a-doodle efforts to aid the Capitol insurrectionists.  Only morons think that husbands and wives discuss anything at all.  And let’s not forget his consistent opposition to women’s reproductive rights as well as joining in with his Taliban oriented colleagues in striking down Roe v. Wade.  This is the pendulum swung like a guillotine.

 

The consequences of these ideological bête noirs have plunged our country deeper into the mud.  Virtually unlimited access to all kinds of firearms, mass shootings with weapons of war-- legally purchased, the states fighting over some states criminalizing health care providers in other states where abortion is legal, possible prosecution of women travelling from their home state to obtain an abortion, and states acting like this was the 1850s by pursuing individuals into other states to enforce their retrogressions.  Like the fugitive slave act.  Like the Dred Scott decision.  And now Massachusetts declaring war on Texas over contraception pills.

 

And here in Florida, our DeSantis rubber stamp legislature now wishes to cap abortion at six weeks when women may not even know they are pregnant.  Thank you, Justice Thomas.

 

Does Clarence Thomas know who he is?  Well, forgive the pun, but the jury has come back after deliberating since he was appointed in 1991.  In 32 years, Thomas has done his fair share in turning the founding fathers in their constitutional graves, and has done more to damage the principles of the republic than anyone since John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, both of whom had the honesty to announce their treachery by leaving the Union.

 

Thomas should announce his decency by resigning from the Supreme Court.    Congress should announce its decency by calling corruption hearings to investigate the justices who have sanctimoniously and hypocritically said nothing about Thomas, by filing articles of impeachment or seeking his resignation, as they did when they were a fair and deliberative body when they asked Abe Fortas to do so for far less financial indiscretions and by accepting a $15,000 fee for lecturing at American University.  Fortas stepped down.  So should Thomas.

 

Wednesday, March 29, 2023

REPLACE THE SECOND AMENDMENT


 

More dead children, just now in Nashville, continuing shattered families, shooting in the streets, massacrers in elementary schools, twenty state legislatures now passing laws allowing open carry of guns, including the Florida House now passing permitless carry? WTF. I have a carry permit.  I had to be fingerprinted and pass an elementary course to be sure I knew how to handle a gun.  Just like driving a car.  

 

The second amendment currently reads:

 

A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”   This is a collective right.

 

A proposed second amendment should read:

 

“Citizens shall have the right to bear arms in the common defense of the United States, or as members of an authorized military organization or, as subject to regulation, designated by the several states or by the United States.  Congress shall have the authority to enforce said rights and privileges by the appropriate legislation.”  

 

This is still a collective right, but much clearer. The courts will not have to continue a Kabuki dance regulating sales of guns because of a constitutional straight jacket imposed upon them by the original second amendment, written in 1787 and as interpreted by Antonin Scalia, also born in 1787.

 

This new 21st century version will still allow people to bear arms and will give the states continued concurrent authority to regulate sale and carry.  It’s not as strong as it should be, but it will clarify the constitutionality of the states and Federal government being able to regulate guns and do away with Antonin Scala’s disastrous ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller. This decision created a constitutional Frankenstein.

 

Heller, by one vote, turned a previously meaningful constitutional amendment on its head, by stating the right was individual, not collective.

 

Heller egregiously said It had nothing to do with militias, intended by the framers to protect the states, recently former independent colonies, against the tyranny of the crown or of the central government; it had to do with individual rights to carry guns, not a well-regulated militia.  John Paul Stevens was correct in his dissent.  It was all about militias.

 

Since then, the courts, legislatures and politicians have used the misguided decision written by a conservative ideologue to intellectually masturbate over the meaning of the comma in the second amendment.  Enough already.  Children, students and worshippers, cry out for help from their blood-soaked graves and their families, traumatized forever, ask “why?” to their deaf-eared lawmakers.

 

 

Law abiding citizens owning guns will still be able to keep them for self-defense.  I own a gun.  I enjoy going to the range from time to time.  And several times, late at night, when someone knocked on my door and would not identify themselves, I felt secure that I had an effective defense if, heaven forbid, necessary.

 

But the current Second Amendment prevents meaningful gun legislation.   My new version still gives states power to regulate gun sales.  It should be less subject to challenges that have filled volumes of law books. 

 

Other democracies have meaningful gun laws.  We no longer live in the wild west. People must be educated to understand that their rights are not being sacrificed to a totalitarian state.  That is not what the framers intended.   The preamble to the constitution says “…to provide for the common defense…”.  That was what they meant when they talked about militias. Since Antonin Scalia’s majority 5-4 decision in Heller v. D.C. stating that there is an individual right to possess guns, rather than a collective right, there has been a Mount Everest of gun litigation often financed by the gun lobby, to ensure that everyone, including lunatics who want a gun, can get one. 

 

This revised amendment would help clarify and lessen the mountain of litigation challenging the constitutionality of the second amendment, still allow gun ownership, but also allow meaningful gun regulation by the states and by Congress.  King George III is not coming to get us.

 

Never mind lip service paid by legislators receiving large campaign donations from the NRA or its distraction of a “mental health issue.” Or providing “thoughts and prayers,” to those poor family members who have seen their children and loved ones slaughtered in a bullet-riddled storm of blood-spattered classrooms, college campuses, places of worship and rock concerts.   And pay no heed to highly salaried NRA Gucci-loafered consultants who sail the Aegean Sea on private yachts fleecing their membership for donations to finance their cynical voyages.

 

Sunday, January 1, 2023

Why the West is allowing Ukrainians to bleed and die.


 

 

During his “wilderness years,” Churchill understood Adolf Hitler’s ambitions, presciently shouting to a deaf world the dangers ahead.  The Rhineland.  Sudetenland. Czechoslovakia gobbled up while appeasers twiddled. England and France could have sent Hitler packing.  Instead, they gave him three more years to arm.  It was too late. Fifty million died. 

 

Stalin, double-crossed by his former Poland-dividing German friend, decided too late that he had to fight.  Millions of Soviets soldiers and civilians died because of his dithering.  FDR had to contend with America Firsters and could have entered the war sooner; he had third term political considerations in in 1940; but he knew he had to fight, too. Eventually

 

We relive the mistakes of history at our own peril, like Wiley Cayote chasing the Road Runner.   Putin invaded a sovereign country.   Stop him, Germans.  Stop him, Frenchmen.  Stop him, NATO.  Stop him, America.  Ukrainian children are freezing and starving.  People are losing their lives to a Russian bloodthirsty pyromaniac, a Hannibal Lecter.

 

Here’s the rub: using time as his weapon, like Hitler, Putin is conscripting, propagandizing, and  gradually conscripting massive manpower—constructing his war machine, gaslighting his people, building support, slowly, craftily, cunningly, odiously. Russians believe his lies about Ukraine as a Nazi haven, a virtual pizza parlor filled with basement dwelling pedophiles, or in this case, jackbooted storm troopers. Despite President Zelensky’s Churchillian appearance before congress, we must move swiftly, because time is on Putin’s side.  A war of attrition is not on Ukraine’s side. Even with US Ordinance, rockets, drones, artillery.   Western fear is Putin’s ally.  Time is Putin’s ally.

 

Wars start slowly but inevitably spiral out of control; aid the west provides the Ukrainians resembles aid the US gave to England in 1940, followed by exponential materiel increase from the great American “arsenal of democracy.” It was not enough. Not in 1940 and not enough in 2022; it will not be enough in 2023, 2024, 2025 as this war drags on.  Too many Russians, too much manpower.  Too much time.

 

Victory requires a credible threat of NATO mobilization—an army ready to do battle.  And an ultimatum.   But that will not happen, I fear.

 

Billions of dollars for weapons in a proxy war with Ukrainians fighting Russians has been impactful. Americans can watch Netflix war movies while Ukrainians bleed.  They can watch Tom Hanks storm the beach at Normandy.  Much less dangerous.    Let’s just ship some more rockets to Ukraine instead.  Yellowstone is on. Even so, it was heartening to see the bipartisan support for Ukraine in the Congress.

 

Military planners in the Pentagon and in Western European capitals should be preparing for a wider war. It would be malfeasant for them not to do.   We just don’t realize it yet.  NATO is obliged to tell Putin to get out of Ukraine or face an allied army to evict him.   Putin must be given an ultimatum to get out or face military force.   Germans and French, British and American, Canadian and Australian.   Putin understands naked power. The west must mobilize.  He does not understand anything else.  Lenin said, “push forward the bayonet.  If you find soft flesh, push.  If you find steel, retreat.”   Putin learned Lenin in school; Lenin is in his DNA.  He learned it in the KGB. He learned it in Mother Russia.  He wants it all.  He is Czar Nicholas, Comrade Stalin, Comrade Lenin all rolled into a painting in the Hermitage, his hometown museum, where he went as a schoolboy, where his parents took him, where he learned of the greatness of Russia.  Where the Czar had palaces.

 

Russians never had democratic traditions.   Ask Nicholas II and his family, brutally executed by Bolsheviks.   Ask the millions starved by Stalin in the Ukraine during his communized agriculture plan.  Ask the people sent to the Gulag, or the Hungarians who dared to revolt against the Soviet hammer and sickle.  Ask the subjugated Poles carved up by Stalin and Hitler.  Ask all of the subjugated and terrorized people who suffered behind the iron curtain. Ask Alexi Navalny, a political prisoner, poisoned once, and now jailed in a Russian gulag.

 

A delusional revanchist KGB agent in the Kremlin tries to raise the Soviet corpse by terrorizing a sovereign nation.   A nation which had its own history before Lenin and his desciples created a dark Bolshevik empire.

 

NATO, led by Germany and France and then the United States, face the eventual inevitability of mobilizing an army to kick Putin out of Ukraine and Crimea.  The alternative is too grim to contemplate.   Trench warfare.  Stalemate.  Ukrainians under siege.  Massive Russian armies. Possibly being defeated.  World economic disruption.  Continued war crimes. A war of attrition, cold and misery.  I hope I am wrong about this.

 

Western ambitions about this outrageous war ending through negotiation are delusional.   If Putin sees that we are serious about the sovereignty of nations, he must face a serious military threat-- mobilization of NATO forces.  Only then he will likely back down.  Until then brave Ukrainians will bleed, freeze and die bearing the brunt of our fear.