I will probably have more to say, actually, about the midterms in a few days, especially in light of recent tragic events. I'm recovering from a bad bout of stomach flu as I write this to you. I would probably still be in bed for the sake of my recovery. But I've decided to get out of bed for at least a little while to write this.
These days, my legal work includes a great deal of time spent with firms that review documents produced for litigation. On one such project recently, in a conversation with a colleague on a project, the subject turned to politics (a lot of this work is done in D.C., so that's probably not surprising. We started talking about why young people generally don't vote, and, on the basis of current reporting, are probably not going to vote in next week's midterm elections. He advanced the theory, advanced many other places in the MSM and social media, that young people don't vote because they don't see themselves as gaining or losing anything by not doing so.
Then he surprised me by including himself as one of those young people.
I say "surprised" because I assumed that someone who had been through both undergraduate and law schools, passed more than one bar exam, and worked on a regular basis in what is arguably the political center not just of the nation, but the world, would understand the power of voting. I would not necessarily expect that person to have an appreciation of all of the sacrifices that have been made for the sake of the right to vote, although I would hope that he (or she) would do so. But I would think they would know that voting affects a broad range of issues that ultimately do affect young people--the economy they graduate into, the ability to pay for tuition, and the assurance of health care coverage, for example.
Apparently, however, it's not enough for this cohort to make political appeals based on issues that affect everyone. Somehow, they're expecting to get something specifically, uniquely targeted at them, regardless of its impact on anyone else. And, even worse, they seem to think that, by not voting, the right political appeal will just come along looking for them. To put it another way, they don't think like citizens, putting the interests of the country first. Rather, they think like consumers, regarding themselves as a market that will, sooner or later, be "served" by a politician wise enough to do so.
But that's not how politics works today, if it has ever worked that way at all. On the Republican side of the nation's partisan divide, the pursuit of power at the expense of every other consideration is its only motivating force. The GOP pursues power largely for the sake of holding onto it, so that it can protect itself, as well as its principal funders, the investor class.
If you are not a significant member of that class (and 99% percent of us are not), well, the Republicans are still interested in you. But not as a market to be served. Rather, as a market to serve them.
I shared with my colleague a quote that I am fond of sharing in these circumstances: "You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you." I made the mistake of attributing it to Brecht; judging from the Internet, its provenance seems a bit uncertain. Regardless of the source, however, it has always been true, and remains true. Even in a world where it may be hard to find politicians perfectly or mostly aligned with you, it is nevertheless absolutely essential, especially in this political climate, to practice what can be referred to as "defensive voting." At the very least, do what you can to protect not only yourself, but any other people or causes you care about, from the potential of greater harm to your interests should the results go to a candidate less aligned with those interests than someone else might be. Perhaps this explains it somewhat better than I'm doing here; it's worth a look, in any case.
In any case, my colleague was not particularly impressed with the quote. I hope and pray that you will feel differently.
And vote next month like your freedom depends on it. Because it does.
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
Saturday, October 20, 2018
What I Learned From An Understaffed Hotel
As I mentioned last week, my wife and I recently returned from Louisville, Kentucky, where she attended an embroidery conference and I went sightseeing. And, as I mentioned, we had a good time. But one negative aspect of it has stayed with me, as it has a bearing on what is arguably the major issue of our current political debate, especially headed into the midterms.
We stayed in--well,, I won't mention the name, but it was a major hotel designed and built to serve the needs of convention-goers. The city's convention center is a very short walk away from the hotel, in fact, as are a number of major tourist attractions. The room was very spacious, clean and comfortable. But there was one major problem, one that surprised both of us given our experience with conferences and conference hotels.
Everything was understaffed. On our first full day in Louisville, we had dinner at one of the hotel's restaurants, and ended up waiting over an hour for our meal. We both noticed that the wait staff seemed badly outnumbered relative to the number of tables in the restaurant. When our food finally arrived, we complained to our waitress, who told us that there were only two cooks in the kitchen. Two cooks, and perhaps four or five servers, for a restaurant that had over 60 tables (a rough estimate on my part). On the plus side, she did give each of us a free dessert, without a lot of negotiation on our part. This tended to make both of us think that our complaint about the wait for our meals wasn't an unusual one here. On our way out, we noticed a crowd of about 20 people waiting to be seated, with no host or hostess to seat them but plenty of available tables. I tried to shout to them that they may want to go elsewhere, but I doubt that any of them heard me. Needless to say, after that, we took all of our meals outside of the hotel.
Then there was housekeeping. Or, rather, there wasn't, unless we made a complaint to the front desk to have our room cleaned and made up, and our bathroom supplies replaced. Again, given our experience with the restaurant, we suspected the problem was not with the diligence of the housekeeping staff, but with the level of staffing that the hotel was maintaining. And my wife discovered, from talking to some of her fellow conference attendees, that this was indeed a hotel-wide problem.
I realize that, in the broader scheme of life's potential problems, these are relatively petty complaints. They didn't detract from the fact that the overall experience was a wonderful break from other responsibilities that my wife and I both badly needed. But I found myself looking at the understaffing of the hotel from a business management standpoint, and I found myself wondering: why would a major convention hotel, one whose management should be well aware of the staffing levels needed to keep its business running smoothly, allow itself to be so poorly staffed while still marketing itself as a full-service hotel for conference business?
Not deliberately, of course. But what circumstance beyond its control could put the hotel, and perhaps others, in a circumstance that threatens its short-term effectiveness and its long-term existence?
Well, when you've traveled as much as I have, and you notice how many hotels rely on immigrants to staff their businesses, especially on the food service and housekeeping side, it becomes pretty clear what's really going on here, in the Age of T****.
It's not that there aren't people who are available, willing, and often very experienced to fill these vacant positions, thereby energizing the economies of cities all over the country and creating more jobs for everyone, native-born or otherwise. It's that we have a "President" who has turned his back and the nation's back on the centrality of immigration to the very essence of the history and greatness of the United States. All of those potential housekeepers, cooks, servers, and porters are just grist for the deportation mill, and for T****'s manipulation of the immigration issue for personal political gain. Sadly ironic, given how much of his alleged economic gain has come from the use--and abuse--of immigrant labor.
But what about all of those "economically distressed" T**** voters? The ones who supposedly have a better work ethic than all of those POC willing to risk their lives for the sake of making their lives better, and keeping America great? Why aren't they making themselves available to take these jobs, which are clearly there for the taking? What do they have to say about their seeming unwillingness to cross city and state lines to do so, a far less riskier process than crossing national borders to do so?
In a word: {crickets}
That's all you really need to know about both immigration and the state of the economy, currently pumped up by debt but shortchanged by the subtraction of labor from people who will take any job, and any risk associated with that job. That's how much we as a people, at the moment, are willing to throw away the American Dream for the sake of perpetuating the continuance of the American Nightmare: racism, the original sin of America's founding and the thread that runs through every major crisis in our nation's existence.
Does it really make any sense? Is it even what a decent people would expect of themselves? Have we struggled and sacrificed as a nation for nearly three centuries to die a death inflicted by caving in to our worst impulses?
T**** has no interest in anything except exploiting our worst impulses for short-term political gain. Immigration, on the other hand, has been an enduring part of our nation's growth, and a part that we have neglected fixing for decades. If I have to chose between T****, and the people who really want to exemplify the American work ethic, the people who should be filling the jobs at the convention hotels across the country--well, I've made my choice.
And I'm making it again on November 6.
I hope and pray you will join me.
We stayed in--well,, I won't mention the name, but it was a major hotel designed and built to serve the needs of convention-goers. The city's convention center is a very short walk away from the hotel, in fact, as are a number of major tourist attractions. The room was very spacious, clean and comfortable. But there was one major problem, one that surprised both of us given our experience with conferences and conference hotels.
Everything was understaffed. On our first full day in Louisville, we had dinner at one of the hotel's restaurants, and ended up waiting over an hour for our meal. We both noticed that the wait staff seemed badly outnumbered relative to the number of tables in the restaurant. When our food finally arrived, we complained to our waitress, who told us that there were only two cooks in the kitchen. Two cooks, and perhaps four or five servers, for a restaurant that had over 60 tables (a rough estimate on my part). On the plus side, she did give each of us a free dessert, without a lot of negotiation on our part. This tended to make both of us think that our complaint about the wait for our meals wasn't an unusual one here. On our way out, we noticed a crowd of about 20 people waiting to be seated, with no host or hostess to seat them but plenty of available tables. I tried to shout to them that they may want to go elsewhere, but I doubt that any of them heard me. Needless to say, after that, we took all of our meals outside of the hotel.
Then there was housekeeping. Or, rather, there wasn't, unless we made a complaint to the front desk to have our room cleaned and made up, and our bathroom supplies replaced. Again, given our experience with the restaurant, we suspected the problem was not with the diligence of the housekeeping staff, but with the level of staffing that the hotel was maintaining. And my wife discovered, from talking to some of her fellow conference attendees, that this was indeed a hotel-wide problem.
I realize that, in the broader scheme of life's potential problems, these are relatively petty complaints. They didn't detract from the fact that the overall experience was a wonderful break from other responsibilities that my wife and I both badly needed. But I found myself looking at the understaffing of the hotel from a business management standpoint, and I found myself wondering: why would a major convention hotel, one whose management should be well aware of the staffing levels needed to keep its business running smoothly, allow itself to be so poorly staffed while still marketing itself as a full-service hotel for conference business?
Not deliberately, of course. But what circumstance beyond its control could put the hotel, and perhaps others, in a circumstance that threatens its short-term effectiveness and its long-term existence?
Well, when you've traveled as much as I have, and you notice how many hotels rely on immigrants to staff their businesses, especially on the food service and housekeeping side, it becomes pretty clear what's really going on here, in the Age of T****.
It's not that there aren't people who are available, willing, and often very experienced to fill these vacant positions, thereby energizing the economies of cities all over the country and creating more jobs for everyone, native-born or otherwise. It's that we have a "President" who has turned his back and the nation's back on the centrality of immigration to the very essence of the history and greatness of the United States. All of those potential housekeepers, cooks, servers, and porters are just grist for the deportation mill, and for T****'s manipulation of the immigration issue for personal political gain. Sadly ironic, given how much of his alleged economic gain has come from the use--and abuse--of immigrant labor.
But what about all of those "economically distressed" T**** voters? The ones who supposedly have a better work ethic than all of those POC willing to risk their lives for the sake of making their lives better, and keeping America great? Why aren't they making themselves available to take these jobs, which are clearly there for the taking? What do they have to say about their seeming unwillingness to cross city and state lines to do so, a far less riskier process than crossing national borders to do so?
In a word: {crickets}
That's all you really need to know about both immigration and the state of the economy, currently pumped up by debt but shortchanged by the subtraction of labor from people who will take any job, and any risk associated with that job. That's how much we as a people, at the moment, are willing to throw away the American Dream for the sake of perpetuating the continuance of the American Nightmare: racism, the original sin of America's founding and the thread that runs through every major crisis in our nation's existence.
Does it really make any sense? Is it even what a decent people would expect of themselves? Have we struggled and sacrificed as a nation for nearly three centuries to die a death inflicted by caving in to our worst impulses?
T**** has no interest in anything except exploiting our worst impulses for short-term political gain. Immigration, on the other hand, has been an enduring part of our nation's growth, and a part that we have neglected fixing for decades. If I have to chose between T****, and the people who really want to exemplify the American work ethic, the people who should be filling the jobs at the convention hotels across the country--well, I've made my choice.
And I'm making it again on November 6.
I hope and pray you will join me.
Sunday, October 14, 2018
The Kavanaugh Aftermath
I spent last weekend with my wife in, of all places, Louisville, Kentucky--in other words, in Mitch McCONnell's home state. Louisville is a relative island of blue in a sea of Bluegrass red, so I can't say I picked up anything from the locals about the nature of their support for the Senate majority leader. However, and despite the fact that we had a good time on our trip, McCONnell and his fellow caucus members still managed to put a damper on our mood, as well as that of millions of Americans (and women in particular). They did this, of course, by ramming through a vote to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, by a margin of 50-48--the lowest number of votes for a Supreme Court nominee in the nation's history.
McCONnell and his Senate cronies, of course, don't give a damn about making this kind of history. Nor do they care about the sham FBI investigation of Kavanaugh requested by the aptly-named Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona. This, of course, would be the investigation that was arbitrarily limited in scope by T**** (or T$$$$, if you will; works just as well), to make sure that nothing was discovered, and in which any number of witnesses who volunteered to cooperate were without exception ignored. The investigation, in other words, that accomplished nothing except formalizing the politicization of the FBI that began almost the moment that T$$$$ took office.
Nor did McCONnell and his cronies care about the systematic trashing that they, and their media allies, did not only of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the principal accuser against Kavanaugh, but other women who came forward to share their knowledge of Kavanaugh's abusive behavior. All of these women were systematically slandered or libeled, and, with the exception of the sham FBI investigation previously mentioned, none of their accusations were investigated in any way, or treated with the seriousness that they deserved in connection with the potential (now actual) lifetime appointment of Kavanaugh to the highest court in the land.
If anything, the Republican caucus members and their fellow-travelers on Fox News and the Internet felt obliged to show blatant, over-the-top disrespect for the accusers in a way that not only demeaned them individually, but also demeaned them as women as well (and thereby demean all women). Typical of this sort of verbal assault was the suggestion by Senator Lindsey Graham that Dr. Ford was little more than the lowest form of prostitute, looking for attention from Kavanaugh. To put that slanderous accusation in a little political perspective, it was not long ago that Graham, along with his late colleague John McCain, was regarded as one of the more moderate Republican members of the Senate. If that is still true of Graham, then the rest of us can only conclude that the World's Greatest Deliberative Body has been led completely off the deep end.
Anyone watching the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings from the very beginning, however, and doing so with any degree of objectivity and intelligence, would have been able to see almost immediately that he was almost certainly a perjurer, and temperamentally unsuited for any judicial post at all, let alone an Associate Justiceship on the Supreme Court. I'll put aside the question of how he couldn't remember whether he recently talked to a law firm or not, yet somehow had detailed calendars from over three decades ago covering his prep-school personal life. I'll even put aside the question of his personal finances, even though that question did and still does have a bearing on his character, especially his ability to be blackmailed.
Instead, I'll point out something that, in all of the controversy over the sexual abuse allegations, somehow got overlooked. And that is the fact that there exists evidence that Kavanaugh perjured his way into his previous position on the D.C. federal circuit court. You don't have to believe me; you can find out more about it here.
Now, you may recall that a Republican Congress once upon a time impeached and put on trial in the Senate a popular Democratic President on the grounds that he had committed perjury while defending himself in a civil lawsuit--a lawsuit in which he was accused on engaging in the sort of conduct that Kavanaugh was accused of engaging in with Dr. Ford. This was allegedly done not because of the salacious details of the alleged conduct leading to the suit, but because the President's alleged perjury showed contempt for the rule of law, which every president swears to uphold.
Needless to say, every candidate for a federal judiciary post testifies under oath and, if a candidate lies while doing so, is subject to the penalties of perjury. If Kavanaugh did commit perjury, it not only disqualified him from service on the Supreme Court, but also makes him a candidate for impeachment either from his former circuit court position, or his new one. Unsurprisingly, neither the Senate Republicans nor the politically-tethered FBI delved into the question of Kavanaugh's possible perjury too deeply--or, indeed, at all. Thus, a new entry can be made in the catalogue entitled "It's OK If You're A Republican." Especially OK, of course, if the opportunity to politically pack the Supreme Court for a generation is at hand.
Aside from the question of Kavanaugh's fidelity to the truth, however, there is also the matter of his temperament. Judges are supposed to be fair and, in order to be fair, are expected to keep their feeling on the proverbial even keel, thereby preventing them from being swayed in their judgments by anything other than the application of the law to the facts of a given case. Likewise, in order to be fair, they are supposed to deal with individuals who come before them in a way that does not show partiality to one cause or another.
If it seems overly obvious to make those points, it is only so I can demonstrate the abundant lack of temperament that Kavanaugh demonstrated over the entire course of his confirmation hearings. Early in the process, at the end of one day's session, he was approached by the parent of a school shooting victim, one who was concerned about Kavanaugh's Second Amendment views. Kavanaugh could have politely greeting him, shown a modest amount of respect for the man's loss, and otherwise excused himself without tipping his hand on how he might rule in a case that raised the issue of school gun violence. Doing so would not have betrayed any degree of prejudice regarding the relative rights of gun advocates versus students.
Instead, Kavanaugh retreated from the man with the demeanor of a frightened rat who was looking to avoid being poisoned. Again, you need not take my word for it; you can look for yourself. Personally, I was convinced right then and there that he was not someone who belonged on any bench. Why should the law of the land be shaped by someone who is clearly afraid of the people to whom it might be applied?
As if that wasn't enough, there was his diatribe defense against Dr. Ford's allegations, for which he appeared to have been coached into doing an amateur imitation of Trump. Whether he was following a specific line of strategy or not, he made an absolute embarrassment of himself. No sane person could come before a judge who acted like this and expected justice, or even fairness. The clincher in the whole mess of words was his reference to his previous work for Kenneth Starr against Bill and Hillary Clinton, suggesting that the accusations against him were only some form of political retaliation for that work. That reference, far from serving as an effective line of defense, only served to poison his own reputation by exposing him as a political hack, one who was only being considered for the Supreme Court to serve a partisan agenda. It also served to illustrate, for the umpteenth time, the Ahab-like obsession that conservatives have with a Democrat who, during his time in the White House, gave them much of what they wanted in a desperate attempt to avoid impeachment--and then ended up being impeached anyway.
Despite the many doubts raised against Kavanaugh, despite the fact that there were undoubtedly other conservative candidates for the Court with far less baggage dragging behind them, McCONnell rallied his colleagues and rammed the nomination through a badly divided Congress. Because, of course, that's what McCONnell does. Nothing he does has anything to do with serving the interests of the nation, its people, the Constitution, or the Senate itself. All of these long-term interests, in the majority leader's world, are routinely sacrificed in favor of the short-term political victory. And that is especially so when doing so may well have the effect of tipping the outcome in midterm elections that now are less than a month away. You can understand McCONnell's inability under the circumstances to refrain from gloating in the aftermath of the Kavanaugh vote--even though at least one conservative has counselled against doing so.
So, without further ado, here is my five-point plan for wiping the smug grin off of McCONnell's oyster-face.
First, impeaching hearings much be launched, not only against Kavanaugh, but also his partner on the High Court in sexual shenanigans, Clarence Thomas. As I said earlier, there is certainly evidence that Kavanaugh has committed perjury; there was also the likelihood that Thomas did the same thing, and was allowed, in less enlightened times, to get away with it. If anything is clear in all of this, it should be the fact that we no longer live in less enlightened times, and Thomas, for the sake of the Court's reputation and for the sake of justice in this country, should not get the benefit of being barely confirmed (52-48, the previous record-holder for a close confirmation vote) to the Court simply because a less enlightened Congress made that possible.
Second, take a page out of Franklin D. Roosevelt's book, and pack the Court. There's never been anything constitutionally sacred about nine seats: the Court could have one, a thousand, or any number that Congress and the President see fit for it to have. Add two seats. Hell, add four, or six.
Politically, it would be a very heavy lift but, like FDR's attempt, it might send a message to the Court that its jurisprudence can't survive if it is not sensitive to the will of all the people. And it would certainly send a message to the Republicans that there are consequences to playing politics with the judiciary. Having already blazed that trail, they are in no position to try to club the Democrats over the head with that argument.
Third, and either of these would be a heavy political lift as well, either pass a statute limited the jurisdiction of the Court or, better yet, do so by constitutional amendment. Such an amendment could also impose term limits on the Justices, thereby lessening the pressure and the high-stakes politics that now surround lifetime appointments. It could also provide a mechanism for overturning Supreme Court decisions, such as by votes in the state legislatures.
Fourth, investigate the living daylights out of McCONnell. There is every reason to believe, going back to his willingness to block a Russian investigation before the 2016 election, that he is every bit as complicit as T**** is with allowing Vladimir Putin to try to turn the United States in a proxy state to do his bidding. Just as we need to know everything we can find out about T****, we need to do likewise with McCONnell.
Fifth, and the most fundamental point I can make here, is that none of these ideas are going to go anywhere in the current configuration of political power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. We need, American needs, our future needs a Democratic Congress in Washington by next January, so that all of this can begin, and include the impeachment of T****, without question the most impeachment-worthy President this country has ever had the misfortune to have.
You know what you have to do.
DO IT!
McCONnell and his Senate cronies, of course, don't give a damn about making this kind of history. Nor do they care about the sham FBI investigation of Kavanaugh requested by the aptly-named Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona. This, of course, would be the investigation that was arbitrarily limited in scope by T**** (or T$$$$, if you will; works just as well), to make sure that nothing was discovered, and in which any number of witnesses who volunteered to cooperate were without exception ignored. The investigation, in other words, that accomplished nothing except formalizing the politicization of the FBI that began almost the moment that T$$$$ took office.
Nor did McCONnell and his cronies care about the systematic trashing that they, and their media allies, did not only of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the principal accuser against Kavanaugh, but other women who came forward to share their knowledge of Kavanaugh's abusive behavior. All of these women were systematically slandered or libeled, and, with the exception of the sham FBI investigation previously mentioned, none of their accusations were investigated in any way, or treated with the seriousness that they deserved in connection with the potential (now actual) lifetime appointment of Kavanaugh to the highest court in the land.
If anything, the Republican caucus members and their fellow-travelers on Fox News and the Internet felt obliged to show blatant, over-the-top disrespect for the accusers in a way that not only demeaned them individually, but also demeaned them as women as well (and thereby demean all women). Typical of this sort of verbal assault was the suggestion by Senator Lindsey Graham that Dr. Ford was little more than the lowest form of prostitute, looking for attention from Kavanaugh. To put that slanderous accusation in a little political perspective, it was not long ago that Graham, along with his late colleague John McCain, was regarded as one of the more moderate Republican members of the Senate. If that is still true of Graham, then the rest of us can only conclude that the World's Greatest Deliberative Body has been led completely off the deep end.
Anyone watching the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings from the very beginning, however, and doing so with any degree of objectivity and intelligence, would have been able to see almost immediately that he was almost certainly a perjurer, and temperamentally unsuited for any judicial post at all, let alone an Associate Justiceship on the Supreme Court. I'll put aside the question of how he couldn't remember whether he recently talked to a law firm or not, yet somehow had detailed calendars from over three decades ago covering his prep-school personal life. I'll even put aside the question of his personal finances, even though that question did and still does have a bearing on his character, especially his ability to be blackmailed.
Instead, I'll point out something that, in all of the controversy over the sexual abuse allegations, somehow got overlooked. And that is the fact that there exists evidence that Kavanaugh perjured his way into his previous position on the D.C. federal circuit court. You don't have to believe me; you can find out more about it here.
Now, you may recall that a Republican Congress once upon a time impeached and put on trial in the Senate a popular Democratic President on the grounds that he had committed perjury while defending himself in a civil lawsuit--a lawsuit in which he was accused on engaging in the sort of conduct that Kavanaugh was accused of engaging in with Dr. Ford. This was allegedly done not because of the salacious details of the alleged conduct leading to the suit, but because the President's alleged perjury showed contempt for the rule of law, which every president swears to uphold.
Needless to say, every candidate for a federal judiciary post testifies under oath and, if a candidate lies while doing so, is subject to the penalties of perjury. If Kavanaugh did commit perjury, it not only disqualified him from service on the Supreme Court, but also makes him a candidate for impeachment either from his former circuit court position, or his new one. Unsurprisingly, neither the Senate Republicans nor the politically-tethered FBI delved into the question of Kavanaugh's possible perjury too deeply--or, indeed, at all. Thus, a new entry can be made in the catalogue entitled "It's OK If You're A Republican." Especially OK, of course, if the opportunity to politically pack the Supreme Court for a generation is at hand.
Aside from the question of Kavanaugh's fidelity to the truth, however, there is also the matter of his temperament. Judges are supposed to be fair and, in order to be fair, are expected to keep their feeling on the proverbial even keel, thereby preventing them from being swayed in their judgments by anything other than the application of the law to the facts of a given case. Likewise, in order to be fair, they are supposed to deal with individuals who come before them in a way that does not show partiality to one cause or another.
If it seems overly obvious to make those points, it is only so I can demonstrate the abundant lack of temperament that Kavanaugh demonstrated over the entire course of his confirmation hearings. Early in the process, at the end of one day's session, he was approached by the parent of a school shooting victim, one who was concerned about Kavanaugh's Second Amendment views. Kavanaugh could have politely greeting him, shown a modest amount of respect for the man's loss, and otherwise excused himself without tipping his hand on how he might rule in a case that raised the issue of school gun violence. Doing so would not have betrayed any degree of prejudice regarding the relative rights of gun advocates versus students.
Instead, Kavanaugh retreated from the man with the demeanor of a frightened rat who was looking to avoid being poisoned. Again, you need not take my word for it; you can look for yourself. Personally, I was convinced right then and there that he was not someone who belonged on any bench. Why should the law of the land be shaped by someone who is clearly afraid of the people to whom it might be applied?
As if that wasn't enough, there was his diatribe defense against Dr. Ford's allegations, for which he appeared to have been coached into doing an amateur imitation of Trump. Whether he was following a specific line of strategy or not, he made an absolute embarrassment of himself. No sane person could come before a judge who acted like this and expected justice, or even fairness. The clincher in the whole mess of words was his reference to his previous work for Kenneth Starr against Bill and Hillary Clinton, suggesting that the accusations against him were only some form of political retaliation for that work. That reference, far from serving as an effective line of defense, only served to poison his own reputation by exposing him as a political hack, one who was only being considered for the Supreme Court to serve a partisan agenda. It also served to illustrate, for the umpteenth time, the Ahab-like obsession that conservatives have with a Democrat who, during his time in the White House, gave them much of what they wanted in a desperate attempt to avoid impeachment--and then ended up being impeached anyway.
Despite the many doubts raised against Kavanaugh, despite the fact that there were undoubtedly other conservative candidates for the Court with far less baggage dragging behind them, McCONnell rallied his colleagues and rammed the nomination through a badly divided Congress. Because, of course, that's what McCONnell does. Nothing he does has anything to do with serving the interests of the nation, its people, the Constitution, or the Senate itself. All of these long-term interests, in the majority leader's world, are routinely sacrificed in favor of the short-term political victory. And that is especially so when doing so may well have the effect of tipping the outcome in midterm elections that now are less than a month away. You can understand McCONnell's inability under the circumstances to refrain from gloating in the aftermath of the Kavanaugh vote--even though at least one conservative has counselled against doing so.
So, without further ado, here is my five-point plan for wiping the smug grin off of McCONnell's oyster-face.
First, impeaching hearings much be launched, not only against Kavanaugh, but also his partner on the High Court in sexual shenanigans, Clarence Thomas. As I said earlier, there is certainly evidence that Kavanaugh has committed perjury; there was also the likelihood that Thomas did the same thing, and was allowed, in less enlightened times, to get away with it. If anything is clear in all of this, it should be the fact that we no longer live in less enlightened times, and Thomas, for the sake of the Court's reputation and for the sake of justice in this country, should not get the benefit of being barely confirmed (52-48, the previous record-holder for a close confirmation vote) to the Court simply because a less enlightened Congress made that possible.
Second, take a page out of Franklin D. Roosevelt's book, and pack the Court. There's never been anything constitutionally sacred about nine seats: the Court could have one, a thousand, or any number that Congress and the President see fit for it to have. Add two seats. Hell, add four, or six.
Politically, it would be a very heavy lift but, like FDR's attempt, it might send a message to the Court that its jurisprudence can't survive if it is not sensitive to the will of all the people. And it would certainly send a message to the Republicans that there are consequences to playing politics with the judiciary. Having already blazed that trail, they are in no position to try to club the Democrats over the head with that argument.
Third, and either of these would be a heavy political lift as well, either pass a statute limited the jurisdiction of the Court or, better yet, do so by constitutional amendment. Such an amendment could also impose term limits on the Justices, thereby lessening the pressure and the high-stakes politics that now surround lifetime appointments. It could also provide a mechanism for overturning Supreme Court decisions, such as by votes in the state legislatures.
Fourth, investigate the living daylights out of McCONnell. There is every reason to believe, going back to his willingness to block a Russian investigation before the 2016 election, that he is every bit as complicit as T**** is with allowing Vladimir Putin to try to turn the United States in a proxy state to do his bidding. Just as we need to know everything we can find out about T****, we need to do likewise with McCONnell.
Fifth, and the most fundamental point I can make here, is that none of these ideas are going to go anywhere in the current configuration of political power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. We need, American needs, our future needs a Democratic Congress in Washington by next January, so that all of this can begin, and include the impeachment of T****, without question the most impeachment-worthy President this country has ever had the misfortune to have.
You know what you have to do.
DO IT!
Saturday, September 29, 2018
A Few Words About A Subject That's All Wright
Well, if you've paid attention to television or social media over the past week, you know that our country is in a badly divided place right now. I've commented on that over and over again, in different ways, from different reference points when it comes to specific stories and issues. And G-d knows there's plenty of material for me to work with, if I wanted to do that today.
But, frankly, I'm not feelin' it. Right now, I'm so sick of the negativity that seems to hang over everyone's lives that I'm desperate to talk about something positive. Almost anything, in fact.
And, since it's not only the end of the month, but also the end of the baseball season, there's a very convenient way to do that.
I'm going to talk about David Wright.
If you're not a baseball fan, or a New Yorker, you probably don't know who Wright is. For most of the past 15 years, he has been the New York Mets' regular third baseman, on a team that, prior to his arrival, was notorious for not having a regular third baseman.
Wright grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, the home of the minor-league (AAA) Norfolk Tides. At the time, the Tides were the top minor-league affiliate of the Mets, the last stop before the big leagues. As a consequence, Wright grew up a Mets fan, even though they were not the closest major-league franchise to his home. A gifted athlete, Wright was ultimately drafted by the Mets, and got to play before his hometown family and friends on his way to the major leagues.
When he was called up from Norfolk in the summer of 2004, Wright made an instant impression in a town where making any kind of impression at all is, to put it mildly, a challenge. Not only for his all-around ability in playing third base, both offensively and defensively, but also for the way he conducted himself as a person, whether with fans, fellow players, the media, and anyone else my failing memory has left off of that list.
No tabloid scandals. No stiffing fans asking for an autograph. Always accessible to the press, and always willing to cooperate with their demands (of which, in New York, there are a lot). No bragging about being indispensable, even though, in just a few short years with the team, he pretty much made him so.
Perhaps, in our badly divided state as a nation, it is most poignantly summed up by this simple fact: a white man from the South, Wright's best friend on the team was (and still is) Jose Reyes, from Villa Gonzalez in the Dominican Republic. A shortstop, Reyes played next to Wright for their best years, and formed a friendship that will always link them in the minds and hearts of Mets fans.
Wright, of course, is only human, so I'm sure that, somewhere inside of him, he has faults. But nothing that damaged the allegiances of his family, his friends, his fellow-players, and most of all his fans. That's an incredible accomplishment.
Unfortunately, fate, or whatever prime mover you believe in, through a spanner into the works of what should have been a Hall of Fame career. It did so in the form of spinal stenosis, a medical diagnosis that Wright received a few years ago.
I'm not a medical professional, so I'm going to refer you to this. Basically, spinal stenosis is a narrowing of the space occupied in the spine by the spinal cord. This puts intense pressure on the cord producing equally intense pain. There is limited treatment for it in the form of surgery, but that treatment is palliative in nature rather than curative. Living a normal life with spinal stenosis is difficult at best; maintaining a career as a major-league player is impossible. Just ask Don Mattingly, the former New York Yankees first baseman, whose career ended prematurely as a consequence of spinal stenosis.
As is Wright's, now. Today will be his last game as an active player Fittingly, it will be in front of Mets fans at home, with family members present, and with Reyes next to him at shortstop. He will have five innings, and two at-bats, and call it a career. There will be a ceremony honoring him at the end of the game, and a presser, and, in the days to come, perhaps other related events as well. But, from a games-and-stats standpoint, today will be it.
It's difficult for me as a fan to avoid feeling not only a sense of loss, but also a sense of injustice, about this far-too-soon termination of the baseball career of the best player to wear only a Mets uniform. Had he been blessed with more health and more time, there is little doubt that he would have had the numbers to make an easy and early entrance into Cooperstown. He might have had a chance to win a World Series, rather than just play in one. None of that is meant to be. And many, many people in that position would be tempted to ignore their good fortune in favor of cursing their ultimate fate.
I'm happy to say, however, that David Wright is not one of those people.
For the past two years, Wright has been on the disabled list, working as hard as possible to get back to the point at which he could play. The expectations from everyone but Wright were anything but high. Including those of people who cared about him the most. And including the medical professionals who consulted with Wright and the Mets.
Wright didn't care. He had to let his body tell him when it was time to call it a baseball day. He worked for a very long time to get that answer. He worked past the point at which most people would have called it a pleasure to give up. And, in the end, his body gave him the answer he didn't want to receive. But he heeded it. And, with the cooperation of everyone in the Mets' organization, he is being given a last opportunity again to do the one thing he wanted to do: to play.
I'll end this by letting him have the last say. It tells you why, whether or not you're a baseball fan, you should appreciate what makes him special, and why you should pray for more people like him.
But, frankly, I'm not feelin' it. Right now, I'm so sick of the negativity that seems to hang over everyone's lives that I'm desperate to talk about something positive. Almost anything, in fact.
And, since it's not only the end of the month, but also the end of the baseball season, there's a very convenient way to do that.
I'm going to talk about David Wright.
If you're not a baseball fan, or a New Yorker, you probably don't know who Wright is. For most of the past 15 years, he has been the New York Mets' regular third baseman, on a team that, prior to his arrival, was notorious for not having a regular third baseman.
Wright grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, the home of the minor-league (AAA) Norfolk Tides. At the time, the Tides were the top minor-league affiliate of the Mets, the last stop before the big leagues. As a consequence, Wright grew up a Mets fan, even though they were not the closest major-league franchise to his home. A gifted athlete, Wright was ultimately drafted by the Mets, and got to play before his hometown family and friends on his way to the major leagues.
When he was called up from Norfolk in the summer of 2004, Wright made an instant impression in a town where making any kind of impression at all is, to put it mildly, a challenge. Not only for his all-around ability in playing third base, both offensively and defensively, but also for the way he conducted himself as a person, whether with fans, fellow players, the media, and anyone else my failing memory has left off of that list.
No tabloid scandals. No stiffing fans asking for an autograph. Always accessible to the press, and always willing to cooperate with their demands (of which, in New York, there are a lot). No bragging about being indispensable, even though, in just a few short years with the team, he pretty much made him so.
Perhaps, in our badly divided state as a nation, it is most poignantly summed up by this simple fact: a white man from the South, Wright's best friend on the team was (and still is) Jose Reyes, from Villa Gonzalez in the Dominican Republic. A shortstop, Reyes played next to Wright for their best years, and formed a friendship that will always link them in the minds and hearts of Mets fans.
Wright, of course, is only human, so I'm sure that, somewhere inside of him, he has faults. But nothing that damaged the allegiances of his family, his friends, his fellow-players, and most of all his fans. That's an incredible accomplishment.
Unfortunately, fate, or whatever prime mover you believe in, through a spanner into the works of what should have been a Hall of Fame career. It did so in the form of spinal stenosis, a medical diagnosis that Wright received a few years ago.
I'm not a medical professional, so I'm going to refer you to this. Basically, spinal stenosis is a narrowing of the space occupied in the spine by the spinal cord. This puts intense pressure on the cord producing equally intense pain. There is limited treatment for it in the form of surgery, but that treatment is palliative in nature rather than curative. Living a normal life with spinal stenosis is difficult at best; maintaining a career as a major-league player is impossible. Just ask Don Mattingly, the former New York Yankees first baseman, whose career ended prematurely as a consequence of spinal stenosis.
As is Wright's, now. Today will be his last game as an active player Fittingly, it will be in front of Mets fans at home, with family members present, and with Reyes next to him at shortstop. He will have five innings, and two at-bats, and call it a career. There will be a ceremony honoring him at the end of the game, and a presser, and, in the days to come, perhaps other related events as well. But, from a games-and-stats standpoint, today will be it.
It's difficult for me as a fan to avoid feeling not only a sense of loss, but also a sense of injustice, about this far-too-soon termination of the baseball career of the best player to wear only a Mets uniform. Had he been blessed with more health and more time, there is little doubt that he would have had the numbers to make an easy and early entrance into Cooperstown. He might have had a chance to win a World Series, rather than just play in one. None of that is meant to be. And many, many people in that position would be tempted to ignore their good fortune in favor of cursing their ultimate fate.
I'm happy to say, however, that David Wright is not one of those people.
For the past two years, Wright has been on the disabled list, working as hard as possible to get back to the point at which he could play. The expectations from everyone but Wright were anything but high. Including those of people who cared about him the most. And including the medical professionals who consulted with Wright and the Mets.
Wright didn't care. He had to let his body tell him when it was time to call it a baseball day. He worked for a very long time to get that answer. He worked past the point at which most people would have called it a pleasure to give up. And, in the end, his body gave him the answer he didn't want to receive. But he heeded it. And, with the cooperation of everyone in the Mets' organization, he is being given a last opportunity again to do the one thing he wanted to do: to play.
I'll end this by letting him have the last say. It tells you why, whether or not you're a baseball fan, you should appreciate what makes him special, and why you should pray for more people like him.
When it’s all said and done, I want to be able to say I got the most out of my potential. I don’t want to look back, however many years from now, and say, ‘I wonder if I would have worked a little harder. I wonder if I would have done this or done that, how things would have turned out.’ I want to, when it’s all said and done, be able to put my head on my pillow and say, ‘I did everything I could do — good or bad.’
Saturday, September 22, 2018
Overcoming My Kavanaugh-Related Despair
I have a personal confession to make.
I sat down tonight to update my blog, with no shortage of topics about which to write. My mind started to sort though them. I reviewed my Diigo library of news articles I saved toward that end. The nightmare that is the confirmation process of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court has been unfolding at breakneck speed over the past month. Discussing that process, and what it has revealed about our country at this point in history, is easily worth a month's worth of blog posts all by itself.
And then I came face-to-face with it. Despair. The same sense of hopelessness that I felt in the days immediately after the election two years ago.
It puzzled me for a while. There are a number of reasons to not let despair wrap itself around me. After all, the midterms are less than a month-and-a-half away, and things look very promising for the Democrats. They will probably take back the House, they may take back the Senate (although that's a bit iffier), and they will undoubtedly make significant gains in state office-holders. There is, of course, the current inexplicable madness here in Maryland, where Larry Hogan, routinely saved from his worst mistakes by a Democratic supermajority in the General Assembly, has a 22-point (that is not a typo) lead over Ben Jealous in the gubernatorial race.
But even that is not the principle source of my despair. Hogan's lead is principally the product of local print and broadcast media that are scared of looking too liberal, and a voting base too tuned in to its own short-term pleasures to really dig into the issues, the positions of the candidates, and the potential consequences that four years of either man may bring. I'm fairly confident that, if we end up with four more years of Hogan, his perception of a mandate will end up leading to mistakes that not even a legislature can easily fix, and that will remind voters that Maryland has done well as a blue state for decades for a reason--namely, being a blue state.
So, why is this blue voter/blogger feeling so blue?
I think it comes, as much as anything, from what the Kavanaugh confirmation process has revealed about the extent to which one of our two major political parties (guess which one) given a choice between democratic (small d) processes and conservative outcomes, chooses conservative outcomes every time. In other words, it has absolutely no faith in its ability to openly, freely persuade voters that its ideas are worth adopting. Its only faith, in fact, is not even in the ideas to which it gives lip service in its campaigns, is in maintaining institutional control of the levers of power.
I began to think about this very recently, after I read a Twitter post by Bruce Bartlett going back to the fiasco of Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the seat on the Supreme Court now held by Neil Gorsuch. That Gorsuch is on the Court instead of Garland was, of course, the by-product of a campaign overseen by Mitch McCONnell over the course of 2016, one in which McCONnell invented the "Biden rule" that Presidents could not make nominations to the Court during an election year, when the voters (contrary to the Constitution) should be allowed to "weigh in" on the process.
At any rate, Bartlett's point was as simple as it was completely accurate. Then as now, McCONnell was the Senate majority leader, and had the votes to simply give Garland, out of respect for the Constitution and the traditions of the Senate, a normal confirmation process strung out over the better part of the year, terminating in a vote where he would find a way to whip his entire caucus into rejecting the nomination. At that point, he could easily say that it was too late to consider someone else, and that would be that. McCONnell, in other words, controlled the process in any event; it would have been easy for him to manipulate it in a way that preserved the illusion of tradition and fairness without being too-cute-by-half about it.
So, why didn't he do it this way?
I think that there is only one possible answer. Mitch McCONnell knew that preserving even the illusion of the process was not enough to intimidate opposition from the Democrats. To do that, he had to deliberately sabotage democracy itself. He had to game the system to such an extent that the Democrats would have to either go outside of it to advance their goals, or be aided by some sort of deux ex machina set of circumstances. He was prepared to deal with the former by questioning the patriotism of the opposition, and the latter by the fact that his party's funders have the financial resources to muscle the Republicans' way though anything.
The Kavanaugh nightmare has revealed not only his preparation, but that of his caucus and his contributors, for dealing with both possibilities. The restrictions on access to Kavanaugh's records, as well as on the questions that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee could ask him, led to Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey's decision to disclose some of the documents that Republicans were hiding. Booker's decision, as he acknowledged, put him at risk for expulsion from the Senate, and Republicans wasted no time in floating that possibility out to the press.
But then, there was the discovery that Kavanaugh might well be another Clarence Thomas, a man with a history of sexual abuse that he and his supporters were working to cover up. Even then, it appeared that the Republicans were prepared to counter this news; within hours of it surfacing, the Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee, Charles Grassley, produced a letter signed by no fewer than 65 women attesting to Kavanaugh's character. The existence of this letter, combined with Kavanaugh's denials of the allegations against him, raise the possibility that Kavanaugh is willing to commit perjury to reach the Supreme Court, and that Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were willing to suborn it to help him do so. (This wasn't the first time that Kavanaugh had been exposed as a perjurer in the process, moreover.)
Then, however, things began to spin a little out of control into deux ex machina territory.
Kavanaugh's accuser, originally anonymous, came forward to say that she would be willing to testify before the committee. Corroboration of her story slowly began to emerge. And one of Kavanaugh's supporters worked with a public relations firm to float and promote a ridiculous story that the accuser might have confused Kavanaugh with someone else who arguably looked like him.
One might be tempted to think that Senate Republicans would decide to call it a day on Kavanaugh's nomination and move on to the task of getting re-elected in a few weeks. But remember what I said about McCONnell: he believes the system has been so gamed in favor of his party that he can do anything. And with that in mind, consider the following recent quote from the majority leader.
Mitch McCONnell sees his job as protecting Mitch McCONnell First, foremost, and last. The same is true of nearly every Republican in Congress. And it is especially true of the Republican who has the misfortune to occupy the White House.
And that is the source of my despair. That, and the knowledge that enough of my fellow countrymen and women support these Republicans to the point at which I am beginning to believe that civil unrest, and perhaps even civil war, might be the only door that leads out of our current national misery.
But, if history teaches us anything, there is always a door.
And, even if I do not live to see it, or walk through it, I'll do everything I can to help others find it and use it. As long as I can breathe, and type, that's my promise.
I sat down tonight to update my blog, with no shortage of topics about which to write. My mind started to sort though them. I reviewed my Diigo library of news articles I saved toward that end. The nightmare that is the confirmation process of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court has been unfolding at breakneck speed over the past month. Discussing that process, and what it has revealed about our country at this point in history, is easily worth a month's worth of blog posts all by itself.
And then I came face-to-face with it. Despair. The same sense of hopelessness that I felt in the days immediately after the election two years ago.
It puzzled me for a while. There are a number of reasons to not let despair wrap itself around me. After all, the midterms are less than a month-and-a-half away, and things look very promising for the Democrats. They will probably take back the House, they may take back the Senate (although that's a bit iffier), and they will undoubtedly make significant gains in state office-holders. There is, of course, the current inexplicable madness here in Maryland, where Larry Hogan, routinely saved from his worst mistakes by a Democratic supermajority in the General Assembly, has a 22-point (that is not a typo) lead over Ben Jealous in the gubernatorial race.
But even that is not the principle source of my despair. Hogan's lead is principally the product of local print and broadcast media that are scared of looking too liberal, and a voting base too tuned in to its own short-term pleasures to really dig into the issues, the positions of the candidates, and the potential consequences that four years of either man may bring. I'm fairly confident that, if we end up with four more years of Hogan, his perception of a mandate will end up leading to mistakes that not even a legislature can easily fix, and that will remind voters that Maryland has done well as a blue state for decades for a reason--namely, being a blue state.
So, why is this blue voter/blogger feeling so blue?
I think it comes, as much as anything, from what the Kavanaugh confirmation process has revealed about the extent to which one of our two major political parties (guess which one) given a choice between democratic (small d) processes and conservative outcomes, chooses conservative outcomes every time. In other words, it has absolutely no faith in its ability to openly, freely persuade voters that its ideas are worth adopting. Its only faith, in fact, is not even in the ideas to which it gives lip service in its campaigns, is in maintaining institutional control of the levers of power.
I began to think about this very recently, after I read a Twitter post by Bruce Bartlett going back to the fiasco of Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the seat on the Supreme Court now held by Neil Gorsuch. That Gorsuch is on the Court instead of Garland was, of course, the by-product of a campaign overseen by Mitch McCONnell over the course of 2016, one in which McCONnell invented the "Biden rule" that Presidents could not make nominations to the Court during an election year, when the voters (contrary to the Constitution) should be allowed to "weigh in" on the process.
At any rate, Bartlett's point was as simple as it was completely accurate. Then as now, McCONnell was the Senate majority leader, and had the votes to simply give Garland, out of respect for the Constitution and the traditions of the Senate, a normal confirmation process strung out over the better part of the year, terminating in a vote where he would find a way to whip his entire caucus into rejecting the nomination. At that point, he could easily say that it was too late to consider someone else, and that would be that. McCONnell, in other words, controlled the process in any event; it would have been easy for him to manipulate it in a way that preserved the illusion of tradition and fairness without being too-cute-by-half about it.
So, why didn't he do it this way?
I think that there is only one possible answer. Mitch McCONnell knew that preserving even the illusion of the process was not enough to intimidate opposition from the Democrats. To do that, he had to deliberately sabotage democracy itself. He had to game the system to such an extent that the Democrats would have to either go outside of it to advance their goals, or be aided by some sort of deux ex machina set of circumstances. He was prepared to deal with the former by questioning the patriotism of the opposition, and the latter by the fact that his party's funders have the financial resources to muscle the Republicans' way though anything.
The Kavanaugh nightmare has revealed not only his preparation, but that of his caucus and his contributors, for dealing with both possibilities. The restrictions on access to Kavanaugh's records, as well as on the questions that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee could ask him, led to Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey's decision to disclose some of the documents that Republicans were hiding. Booker's decision, as he acknowledged, put him at risk for expulsion from the Senate, and Republicans wasted no time in floating that possibility out to the press.
But then, there was the discovery that Kavanaugh might well be another Clarence Thomas, a man with a history of sexual abuse that he and his supporters were working to cover up. Even then, it appeared that the Republicans were prepared to counter this news; within hours of it surfacing, the Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee, Charles Grassley, produced a letter signed by no fewer than 65 women attesting to Kavanaugh's character. The existence of this letter, combined with Kavanaugh's denials of the allegations against him, raise the possibility that Kavanaugh is willing to commit perjury to reach the Supreme Court, and that Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were willing to suborn it to help him do so. (This wasn't the first time that Kavanaugh had been exposed as a perjurer in the process, moreover.)
Then, however, things began to spin a little out of control into deux ex machina territory.
Kavanaugh's accuser, originally anonymous, came forward to say that she would be willing to testify before the committee. Corroboration of her story slowly began to emerge. And one of Kavanaugh's supporters worked with a public relations firm to float and promote a ridiculous story that the accuser might have confused Kavanaugh with someone else who arguably looked like him.
One might be tempted to think that Senate Republicans would decide to call it a day on Kavanaugh's nomination and move on to the task of getting re-elected in a few weeks. But remember what I said about McCONnell: he believes the system has been so gamed in favor of his party that he can do anything. And with that in mind, consider the following recent quote from the majority leader.
I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether "gonna plow right through it and do our job" is how one would characterize one's response to a situation in which sexual abuse has emerged as a major factor. I think it's enough to say that the quote reveals what he believes his "job" to be. Not to defend the Constitution. Not to submit his politics to an open political process. Not to respect his opponents and their rights to participate in that process. No, not even to respect the concerns and injuries of a citizen who has come forward to tell her painful story and look past her own pain to protect the country from giving a monster a lifetime chance to re-shape the laws of our country.You’re all following the current Supreme Court fight, and you will watch it unfold in the course of the next week. President Trump has nominated a stunningly successful individual. You’ve watched the fight, you’ve watched the tactics, but here’s what I want to tell you: In the very near future, judge Kavanaugh will be on the United States Supreme Court. So my friends, keep the faith, don’t get rattled by all of this ― we’re gonna plow right through it and do our job.
Mitch McCONnell sees his job as protecting Mitch McCONnell First, foremost, and last. The same is true of nearly every Republican in Congress. And it is especially true of the Republican who has the misfortune to occupy the White House.
And that is the source of my despair. That, and the knowledge that enough of my fellow countrymen and women support these Republicans to the point at which I am beginning to believe that civil unrest, and perhaps even civil war, might be the only door that leads out of our current national misery.
But, if history teaches us anything, there is always a door.
And, even if I do not live to see it, or walk through it, I'll do everything I can to help others find it and use it. As long as I can breathe, and type, that's my promise.
Sunday, September 16, 2018
Larry Hogan: A Kinder, Gentler Version Of T****
I am a native of Baltimore, and have lived in Maryland most of my life. Politically, I have watched it evolve from middle-of-the-role Republicanism, when it gave its electoral votes to Richard Nixon three times, to middle-of-the-road Democratic politics in the wake of Nixon's self-immolation by way of Watergate, as well as the self-immolation of his Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, a former Maryland governor whose corrupt past caught up with him in time to give us Gerald Ford as his replacement (and later Nixon's).
Middle-of-the-road, in fact, is more or less the normal state of politics here in the Old Line (or Free) State. That status, as well as the two nicknames, reflect Maryland's geographic position among the original 13 colonies and the issue that divided them as well as the rest of the expanding nation, even to today: race.
Its northern border, part of the Mason-Dixon line (named for the two surveyors who created it to resolve a border dispute among four states) is now political shorthand for the divide within the nation over this issue. Maryland, in fact, was a state with slaves and slaveholders, kept in the Union at gunpoint by Lincoln in a battle that gave the state its official song, "Maryland My Maryland" (its original anti-Union lyrics long since politically corrected by our General Assembly). The zoning of Baltimore, the state's largest city, was designed to enforce the legal segregation of the races its white residents wanted. That zoning still strangles the development of the city. And yet, the proximity of Baltimore to other large, Northeastern cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston brought a degree of liberal thinking and cosmopolitan social life to Maryland.
What has popularly become know as Maryland's "middle temperament" comes out of the close proximity within a geographically small state between liberal Baltimore and the more conservative counties surrounding it. Early in the state's history, the need to function socially and economically led its politically divided residents to work hard at avoiding conflicts and finding ways to cooperate peacefully. This pattern persisted well into the 20th century, which is why Maryland produced moderate governors of both parties such as Theodore McKeldin, a Republican, and William Donald Schaefer, a Democrat.
However, and with all due respect to the late Speaker of the House of Representatives "Tip" O'Neill, all politics in the United States are no longer local. Almost every aspect of our life has been nationalized to varying degrees, as the functions of national government have expanded into formally localized functions such as schools, and the operation of the economy has been restructured to favor large, nation-wide enterprises over local ones. As this has happened, Americans no longer discuss politics face-to-face. They discuss it media portal to media portal, through an endless barrage of cameras and Web sites that thrive on conflict, or at least the appearance of it.
And so, in the 21st century, Maryland politics has begun to reflect these trends. In this century, the state elected governors with more of a taste for combat rather than consensus: the sharp-elbowed Robert Ehrlich and the morally earnest Martin O'Malley, who, in very different ways, wore out their welcome in a state whose middle temperament had little stomach for being pushed in one direction or another.
Enter Larry Hogan, stage right. Very far right, in fact, but with some knowledge of how to conceal it. A political legacy, whose father (also a Republican) voted in Congress for the impeachment of Nixon. A supposedly self-made small-businessperson who is, in fact, worth millions of dollars by way of a commodity that practically sells itself with the right connections: real estate. A man with a slightly goofy, grinning public persona perfect for that cliched politician complement, a "guy you could imagine having a beer with." A man who would seem to be a perfect fit for a state with a middle temperament.
And a man who, to an electorate weary of conflict and accustomed to making choices based on style points, seems to be a kind of hero. How else to explain, in a supposedly "blue" state, his 16-point lead over his Democratic opponent for re-election?
But, in fact, Hogan is the political equivalent of the guy sitting all the way at the end of the bar, complaining that the beer is watered and the pretzels are stale, and demanding to pay less and get away without leaving a tip. A man to whom much has been given financially, who still doesn't feel that he's been given enough. A man who expects to be seen as a hero for being sick, but who doesn't see the irony in being saved by government-back health insurance not available to every citizen under his charge. A man who, in Oscar Wilde's words, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. But also a man who knows, perhaps by way of his real estate experience, how to wrap up nothing and sell it as something. And so, he has positioned his likeability in such a way that it conceals the ineptitude and inherent racism of many of his policy choices.
How else to explain his decision to throw away a billion dollars in federal transportation money by cancelling the Baltimore Red Line project, which could have been the backbone of a real, city-wide commuter rail system and thereby cut through the legacy of the city's racist zoning practices? As a former state procurement officer, I personally know that Ehrlich, for whom Hogan worked as appointments secretary, believed in capturing every dollar Maryland could get from Washington. He would never have thrown away that money.
And the repercussions of this decision affect the whole state, since it makes getting additional federal moneys for transportation projects less likely. This is not just something we can ill afford; in fact, we can't afford it at all, given the current status of our infrastructure and commuting needs. All in the name of protecting the racial status quo. Cancelling the Red Line was not a decision that eliminated a fiscal "boondoggle"; it was a tightening of the white noose around the city's African-American residents. Take a look.
For that matter, how else to explain his bragging about cancelling O'Malley's so-called "tax on the rain," which in fact was a tax to fund the management of rain run-off from from the kind of rampant suburban development that helped Hogan make his fortune? He didn't eliminate the "rain tax" to help consumers; he did it because he felt it was picking his pockets, as well as the pockets of his like-minded cronies. Now, to protect the stapled-together, overpriced townhouses multiplying their way through Howard County, his Republican cronies in that county want to "save" historic Ellicott City by tearing it down, one block at a time.
This is their response, and Hogan's response, to the floods that have twice submerged the historic district and led to deaths on their watch, NOT to better regulate the development that led to the floods and the deaths in the first place. After all, it's not as if historic preservation is an economic generator that could, in fact, raise revenues and help pay for some of that regulation ... oh, wait!
Larry Hogan. Putting development over people's lives. Putting racism over ending poverty. Basically, a Maryland version of D****** T****. A man with a smile on his face and a shiv in his pocket for anyone who will stop him from lining it. Not a man with a middle temperament. And not deserving of a second term as governor.
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
John McCain: Loyal To America, Betrayed By The GOP
It is a sad commentary on the current state of not only American politics but also American civility that the death of a prominent U.S. Senator (and decorated veteran) is a cause for partisan fighting. Nevertheless, as the death of John McCain has illustrated, that's where we are.
In the past, flying the American flag at the White House at half-staff would have been a given, a fact worthy of no more in the news than a brief acknowledgement. Instead, under T****, it became a source of headlines over a period of several days. First, the flag was flown at half-staff for a day, along with a T**** tweet that expressed family condolences but nothing else. The next day, the flag was back to full staff, at which point a media firestorm erupted that ultimately brought veterans groups into the fray. This apparently let T**** to conclude something that would have been obvious from the beginning not only to any experienced politician but to any human being with an iota of common sense: spitting on the memory of a war hero makes other war heroes, the kind that vote regularly, deeply unhappy. Ultimately, T**** reversed course, lowered the flag again, and followed up with a tweet on McCain closer to the one he should have originally sent.
And, not to put too fine a point on it, but for the record: all of this from a man who objects to NFL players of color using the National Anthem as a background for making a point about a public issue.
I think we can say that this is the juncture at which the T**** hypocrisy has gone from epic to galactic.
When it comes to John McCain, of course, there are two, albeit interrelated sides to his story: his military service, which deserves to be exalted, and his political career, which can be said to be something of a mixed bag. To get some idea of the extend to which the latter is true, take a look at this, and then take a look at this. The latter is worth noting especially in the context of his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign, at which point he had moved away from the center and more toward the politically-correct extreme-right ideology that defines the modern Republican Party. Nevertheless, he still tried to conduct his campaign on the assumption that all of us are citizens of the same democracy, worthy of respect for that reason alone, and that elections were the arena for sorting out our differences on how to govern the country, not for promoting gossip and slander about each other. This moment has been circulated a great deal over the past several days, but it's worth sharing any number of times, in part because it makes my point about his conduct in 2008.
McCain received a great deal of criticism from within his own party for his defense of Barack Obama, and some of that criticism suggested that he lost that election in part because he was not tougher on Obama personally. To a degree, this line of "thinking" is meant to explain the subsequent rise of the Tea Party, the "birther" movement, and T****'s presidency.
The problem with it, however, is that it is both unfair to McCain, and unfair to reality.
John McCain didn't lose the presidency because he failed to launch a success ad hominem campaign against Obama. He didn't even lose because, to borrow a phrase, he selected a running mate with the apparent I.Q. of a dead flashlight battery (although G-d knows she didn't help). He lost because he was the candidate of a political party bereft of new ideas, and hopelessly wedded to ideas whose history carries the overwhelming stench of failure.
Until the September Wall Street crash, the polls and pundit consensus was that, in spite of public antipathy for the Iraq war, the election was McCain's to lose. I am neither a pollster or a paid media pundit, but I can tell you that, based on having followed elections (up to that point) for 40 years, I thought that the election was McCain's to lose. I saw Obama as (compared to Hillary, whom I had supported in the primaries) too liberal and too inexperienced to successfully compete against McCain. Obviously, I was wrong, and I'm delighted that this was the case. But it was the crash that gave Obama the opening he needed to get his message across to enough voters that he could win.
And the crash was the inevitable love-child of two failed policies joined at the hip: tax cuts paid for with Federal Reserve debt, and two wars paid for the same way. The history of Vietnam and the Reagan years should have taught Republicans to know better. But the Republican Party is no longer a political party because it no longer incubates ideas. It is a cult of fanatics who think that history will inevitability award their unwillingness to learn, when in fact history teaches exactly the opposite: those who cannot adapt do not survive.
John McCain did not let the Republican Party down, anymore than he let his country down in Vietnam. The GOP let McCain down. As well as his country, its supporters, and itself. This leaves we the people, we the living, to continue to do what he expected us to do in 2008: sort through our differences without losing faith in each other or in ourselves. And, above all, without weaponizing the flag that is designed to bring us together.
As for the senator, fair winds and following seas to the far horizon, and peace and grace to his family and friends.
In the past, flying the American flag at the White House at half-staff would have been a given, a fact worthy of no more in the news than a brief acknowledgement. Instead, under T****, it became a source of headlines over a period of several days. First, the flag was flown at half-staff for a day, along with a T**** tweet that expressed family condolences but nothing else. The next day, the flag was back to full staff, at which point a media firestorm erupted that ultimately brought veterans groups into the fray. This apparently let T**** to conclude something that would have been obvious from the beginning not only to any experienced politician but to any human being with an iota of common sense: spitting on the memory of a war hero makes other war heroes, the kind that vote regularly, deeply unhappy. Ultimately, T**** reversed course, lowered the flag again, and followed up with a tweet on McCain closer to the one he should have originally sent.
And, not to put too fine a point on it, but for the record: all of this from a man who objects to NFL players of color using the National Anthem as a background for making a point about a public issue.
I think we can say that this is the juncture at which the T**** hypocrisy has gone from epic to galactic.
When it comes to John McCain, of course, there are two, albeit interrelated sides to his story: his military service, which deserves to be exalted, and his political career, which can be said to be something of a mixed bag. To get some idea of the extend to which the latter is true, take a look at this, and then take a look at this. The latter is worth noting especially in the context of his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign, at which point he had moved away from the center and more toward the politically-correct extreme-right ideology that defines the modern Republican Party. Nevertheless, he still tried to conduct his campaign on the assumption that all of us are citizens of the same democracy, worthy of respect for that reason alone, and that elections were the arena for sorting out our differences on how to govern the country, not for promoting gossip and slander about each other. This moment has been circulated a great deal over the past several days, but it's worth sharing any number of times, in part because it makes my point about his conduct in 2008.
McCain received a great deal of criticism from within his own party for his defense of Barack Obama, and some of that criticism suggested that he lost that election in part because he was not tougher on Obama personally. To a degree, this line of "thinking" is meant to explain the subsequent rise of the Tea Party, the "birther" movement, and T****'s presidency.
The problem with it, however, is that it is both unfair to McCain, and unfair to reality.
John McCain didn't lose the presidency because he failed to launch a success ad hominem campaign against Obama. He didn't even lose because, to borrow a phrase, he selected a running mate with the apparent I.Q. of a dead flashlight battery (although G-d knows she didn't help). He lost because he was the candidate of a political party bereft of new ideas, and hopelessly wedded to ideas whose history carries the overwhelming stench of failure.
Until the September Wall Street crash, the polls and pundit consensus was that, in spite of public antipathy for the Iraq war, the election was McCain's to lose. I am neither a pollster or a paid media pundit, but I can tell you that, based on having followed elections (up to that point) for 40 years, I thought that the election was McCain's to lose. I saw Obama as (compared to Hillary, whom I had supported in the primaries) too liberal and too inexperienced to successfully compete against McCain. Obviously, I was wrong, and I'm delighted that this was the case. But it was the crash that gave Obama the opening he needed to get his message across to enough voters that he could win.
And the crash was the inevitable love-child of two failed policies joined at the hip: tax cuts paid for with Federal Reserve debt, and two wars paid for the same way. The history of Vietnam and the Reagan years should have taught Republicans to know better. But the Republican Party is no longer a political party because it no longer incubates ideas. It is a cult of fanatics who think that history will inevitability award their unwillingness to learn, when in fact history teaches exactly the opposite: those who cannot adapt do not survive.
John McCain did not let the Republican Party down, anymore than he let his country down in Vietnam. The GOP let McCain down. As well as his country, its supporters, and itself. This leaves we the people, we the living, to continue to do what he expected us to do in 2008: sort through our differences without losing faith in each other or in ourselves. And, above all, without weaponizing the flag that is designed to bring us together.
As for the senator, fair winds and following seas to the far horizon, and peace and grace to his family and friends.
Saturday, August 18, 2018
How "Never" Are The President's GOP Critics?
Since our current president began, nearly three years ago, to become a major force within the Republican Party, and subsequently became the current occupant of the White House, there has been a small cadre of commentators, party officials, and campaign consultants who have publicly identified themselves as "Never-[his last name]." Since TRH has taken the position that it will not give the current present the publicity oxygen he doesn't deserve by using his last name, we'll just refer to these people, in today's post and otherwise going forward, as "Nevers."
At any rate, if (like me) you spend a significant about of time on Twitter, you know who most of these people are. They are not, however, a uniform movement of thought, apart from their antipathy toward Trump. Some of them, for example, are people with a high degree of institutional loyalty toward the Republican Party, or toward institutional conservatism (e.g., think tanks and foundations), who feel that the current president's sordid and criminal lifestyle has tarnished the ability of those institutions to advance their traditional beliefs. They don't object to the Administration's policies as much as they object to the personal conduct of its leader and his subordinates (to say nothing of his children). A few of them are people who have issue-specific objections (e.g., immigration), and a very few are people who feel that the conservatism of American politics has veered in directions that are ultimately too extreme to be fairly called conservatism.
I follow a number of these people on Twitter, principally to maintain a sense of what's going on, intellectually and otherwise, on the other side of our ideological divide. I find myself "liking" much of it, re-tweeting some of it, occasionally responding to it (sometimes with support, sometimes with criticism). Initially, and perhaps naively, I did this in the hope that doing so would lead to a dialogue of a more expansive nature, one that might be in some small way the beginning of a larger effort to bridge that divide and perhaps move all of us toward real solutions for Americans that most, if not all of us, could support.
What was I thinking?
Much of my attempts at dialogue were with Tom Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and a staunch Reaganite who, in spite of his political beliefs, voted for Hillary Clinton and encouraged others to do so. This led a number of Clinton supporters to attempt to engage him in a dialogue with on a broader array of issues, with varying degrees of success (mine, alas, were not particularly successful). To his credit, he objected to Mitch McConnell's political shell game with Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. But the conduct of the current Administration has not either moved him from supporting the Republican Party or a broad array of conservative principles generally.
In fact, the support he has gotten from liberal Tweeters has not even moved him more generally to a more positive view of liberals as individuals. Take a look at the following tweet from him, and you'll see what I mean. He stills seems to hew to the literal party line that liberals are just congenital squabblers, incapable of uniting with anyone outside of their "tribe" for the sake of supporting a larger goal. And, with perhaps a handful of exceptions, the tweets of other "Nevers" are not much different in this regard.
Which has led me to wonder, in response, how much the "Nevers" are truly to be trusted with respect to the sincerity of their objections to the current President.
Are those objections so strong that they are willing to give up the various fruits of the poisonous tree? Would they be willing, for example, to give up the Republican Congress' middle-of-the-night tax cuts for the haves at the expense of the have-nots? Would they join Dr. Nichols in repudiating the process that wrongly denied Garland the opportunity for a hearing on his nomination? Would they, for that matter, repudiate the handshake deal between the current president and Anthony Kennedy to replace Kennedy on the Court with one of his former clerks? Would they support the concealment of that clerk's previous records, to prevent whatever apparent political dynamite that lies therein from seeing the light of day?
Quite frankly, it is the history of the modern Republican Party--and, for that matter, the modern conservative movement--that should inspire more questions about the sincerity of the Nevers than any such questions that could be directed at liberals. Every time they want to talk about 1960 and the Chicago graveyards, we should remind them about 1968 and the sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks Or 1972 and a certain hotel break-in (and a certain subsequent cover-up). Or 1980 and the delay of the release of the Iranian hostages. Or 2000, and Florida. Or two frigging years ago, and an election that in all probability was won by Vladimir Putin.
In fact, here's a challenge to the Nevers. You want to come together with us in opposing the current president and his systemic attempts to profit from the systems he is supposed to be administering for the benefit of us all? Then let's start with the application of the so-called "Biden rule." Let's let the American people "weigh in" on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and see what that yields. It would be one small but real way to make up for your participation in the disaster that gave us Justice Son-of-Anne-Gorsuch.
And, going on from there, let's stop President What's-His-Name from taking the dominant human rights issue of our time--the international refugee crisis and its subsequent impact on our immigration process--and pass the bipartisan 2013 immigration bill on which John Boehner sat in a doomed attempt to keep his Speakership of the House of Representatives. A bill supported by 68 Senators, enough to ratify a treaty (and when was the last time that happened?).
And one last thing, relative to the refugee crisis and its root cause: let's come together and figure out a way that all of us can agree on and support to stop the only planet we currently have to live on from burning to a crisp.
Well, there it is. A path out of our current hell, and a means by which the Nevers can demonstrate their good faith, and we can demonstrate ours.
Your move, Nevers.
At any rate, if (like me) you spend a significant about of time on Twitter, you know who most of these people are. They are not, however, a uniform movement of thought, apart from their antipathy toward Trump. Some of them, for example, are people with a high degree of institutional loyalty toward the Republican Party, or toward institutional conservatism (e.g., think tanks and foundations), who feel that the current president's sordid and criminal lifestyle has tarnished the ability of those institutions to advance their traditional beliefs. They don't object to the Administration's policies as much as they object to the personal conduct of its leader and his subordinates (to say nothing of his children). A few of them are people who have issue-specific objections (e.g., immigration), and a very few are people who feel that the conservatism of American politics has veered in directions that are ultimately too extreme to be fairly called conservatism.
I follow a number of these people on Twitter, principally to maintain a sense of what's going on, intellectually and otherwise, on the other side of our ideological divide. I find myself "liking" much of it, re-tweeting some of it, occasionally responding to it (sometimes with support, sometimes with criticism). Initially, and perhaps naively, I did this in the hope that doing so would lead to a dialogue of a more expansive nature, one that might be in some small way the beginning of a larger effort to bridge that divide and perhaps move all of us toward real solutions for Americans that most, if not all of us, could support.
What was I thinking?
Much of my attempts at dialogue were with Tom Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and a staunch Reaganite who, in spite of his political beliefs, voted for Hillary Clinton and encouraged others to do so. This led a number of Clinton supporters to attempt to engage him in a dialogue with on a broader array of issues, with varying degrees of success (mine, alas, were not particularly successful). To his credit, he objected to Mitch McConnell's political shell game with Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. But the conduct of the current Administration has not either moved him from supporting the Republican Party or a broad array of conservative principles generally.
In fact, the support he has gotten from liberal Tweeters has not even moved him more generally to a more positive view of liberals as individuals. Take a look at the following tweet from him, and you'll see what I mean. He stills seems to hew to the literal party line that liberals are just congenital squabblers, incapable of uniting with anyone outside of their "tribe" for the sake of supporting a larger goal. And, with perhaps a handful of exceptions, the tweets of other "Nevers" are not much different in this regard.
Which has led me to wonder, in response, how much the "Nevers" are truly to be trusted with respect to the sincerity of their objections to the current President.
Are those objections so strong that they are willing to give up the various fruits of the poisonous tree? Would they be willing, for example, to give up the Republican Congress' middle-of-the-night tax cuts for the haves at the expense of the have-nots? Would they join Dr. Nichols in repudiating the process that wrongly denied Garland the opportunity for a hearing on his nomination? Would they, for that matter, repudiate the handshake deal between the current president and Anthony Kennedy to replace Kennedy on the Court with one of his former clerks? Would they support the concealment of that clerk's previous records, to prevent whatever apparent political dynamite that lies therein from seeing the light of day?
Quite frankly, it is the history of the modern Republican Party--and, for that matter, the modern conservative movement--that should inspire more questions about the sincerity of the Nevers than any such questions that could be directed at liberals. Every time they want to talk about 1960 and the Chicago graveyards, we should remind them about 1968 and the sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks Or 1972 and a certain hotel break-in (and a certain subsequent cover-up). Or 1980 and the delay of the release of the Iranian hostages. Or 2000, and Florida. Or two frigging years ago, and an election that in all probability was won by Vladimir Putin.
In fact, here's a challenge to the Nevers. You want to come together with us in opposing the current president and his systemic attempts to profit from the systems he is supposed to be administering for the benefit of us all? Then let's start with the application of the so-called "Biden rule." Let's let the American people "weigh in" on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and see what that yields. It would be one small but real way to make up for your participation in the disaster that gave us Justice Son-of-Anne-Gorsuch.
And, going on from there, let's stop President What's-His-Name from taking the dominant human rights issue of our time--the international refugee crisis and its subsequent impact on our immigration process--and pass the bipartisan 2013 immigration bill on which John Boehner sat in a doomed attempt to keep his Speakership of the House of Representatives. A bill supported by 68 Senators, enough to ratify a treaty (and when was the last time that happened?).
And one last thing, relative to the refugee crisis and its root cause: let's come together and figure out a way that all of us can agree on and support to stop the only planet we currently have to live on from burning to a crisp.
Well, there it is. A path out of our current hell, and a means by which the Nevers can demonstrate their good faith, and we can demonstrate ours.
Your move, Nevers.
Saturday, August 11, 2018
Death Of An Empire, British-Style
Supposedly, according to Benjamin Franklin, death and taxes are the only certainties in life. Here's one more you can add to that list: empires crumble. If you've read any history, or were taught it by anyone competent, you know that history is about the rise and fall of empires that seemingly had everything they needed to exist indefinitely. That kind of security is an illusion, in part because successful empires, like successful people, become complacent. Humans have a natural tendency, even need, to gravitate internally to a sense that their lives are relatively stable. They view their successes as permanent monuments because they feel a need to be in control of their lives.
And successful empires, composed of successful people, function much the same way. Their leaders view their prosperity, their institutions and their cultures as things that will endure long after they are gone, because doing so relieves them of the need to do any further hard thinking about their futures. They can enjoy the fruits of their labors, more often than not the fruits of others' labors, secure in the fantasy that things will never change.
Except that, of course, they do. Humans change, from generation to generation, and from location to location. Which raises the need for empires to adapt to the changes. Some make a half-hearted effort to do so, while some pretend that they don't need to do so at all. The former fall apart slowly, due to the half-hearted nature of their efforts. The latter fall apart much more quickly, because they make no efforts at all.
I would argue, especially on the strength of recent events, that the British Empire is an example of the former.
In its imperial conduct, Great Britain's history is hardly a tale of unalloyed wisdom. On the one hand, at its absolute peak in the previous century, its physical, political, economic and cultural reach literally circled the entire globe, an accomplishment never seen before or equalled since. "The sun," it was said, "never sets on the Union Jack." On the other hand, its treatment of its colonial subjects was often far less civilized than its self-image would otherwise suggest. In at least some cases, that treatment led to serious reversals for the British, including the losses of colonial possessions covering all of North America and the entire Indian subcontinent.
Still, the British Empire, in one form or another, has lasted for literally centuries, and, in the process, done much to spread the enactment of democratic principles all over the world. Even in the loss of nearly all of its colonies, it has managed to preserve aspects of its culture, as well as extensive economic relationships, with many of its former global subjects. At the same time, it embarked on a new phase of its existence, as part of an economically integrated Europe. All of this demonstrates an ability to adapt that does much to explain the Empire's longevity.
But that ability may be coming, alas, to an end. And the root cause of that ending may be found in the inability of its two major political parties to adapt to a changing world.
On the one hand, the Conservative Party, like its Republican counterpart here in the U.S., is now dominated by the likes of Nigel Farage, a man who can't stand the idea of living or working next to people who don't "look or sound" like him. As a consequence, he led the successful fight to extract Britain from the European Union, which was supposed to open up a whole new world of economic opportunity for the British, freed of the alleged tyranny of European rules and regulations--and especially freed of European travel rules that increased the number of immigrants to Britain.
Only now, the whole thing doesn't look like such a good idea. Britain has effectively entered an economic world in which nothing is certain, in which it will have to fend for itself on trade issues in a world where nations now function on a much more independent basis where trade is concerned. As a result, British citizens have resorted to stockpiling food and other basic necessities. As for Farage, the man who started it all, there might be reason to think that, suddenly, when confronted with evidence that his great cause was not so great after all, he might even agree with that assessment of it.
On the other hand, you have the Labour Party, which ought to be in a position politically to exploit the failure of the Conservatives to leave Europe without consequences. Ought to be, but isn't. Labour, like its Democratic counterpart in the U.S., has a seemingly unlimited capacity for shooting itself in the foot . And, when that tendency is combined with the institutional anti-Semitism of much of the British intellectual classes, you end up with a party identified with hatred, and not with progress.
Two great political parties. Two great institutions of a historically great nation. Both now dominated and stained by the consequences of their bigotry, including the loss of the ability to adapt to a world that is changing, and will continue to change, whether either party likes it or not.
Unless one or both of them learn to change themselves, and to adapt, the sun may yet set on the Union Jack for good.
And successful empires, composed of successful people, function much the same way. Their leaders view their prosperity, their institutions and their cultures as things that will endure long after they are gone, because doing so relieves them of the need to do any further hard thinking about their futures. They can enjoy the fruits of their labors, more often than not the fruits of others' labors, secure in the fantasy that things will never change.
Except that, of course, they do. Humans change, from generation to generation, and from location to location. Which raises the need for empires to adapt to the changes. Some make a half-hearted effort to do so, while some pretend that they don't need to do so at all. The former fall apart slowly, due to the half-hearted nature of their efforts. The latter fall apart much more quickly, because they make no efforts at all.
I would argue, especially on the strength of recent events, that the British Empire is an example of the former.
In its imperial conduct, Great Britain's history is hardly a tale of unalloyed wisdom. On the one hand, at its absolute peak in the previous century, its physical, political, economic and cultural reach literally circled the entire globe, an accomplishment never seen before or equalled since. "The sun," it was said, "never sets on the Union Jack." On the other hand, its treatment of its colonial subjects was often far less civilized than its self-image would otherwise suggest. In at least some cases, that treatment led to serious reversals for the British, including the losses of colonial possessions covering all of North America and the entire Indian subcontinent.
Still, the British Empire, in one form or another, has lasted for literally centuries, and, in the process, done much to spread the enactment of democratic principles all over the world. Even in the loss of nearly all of its colonies, it has managed to preserve aspects of its culture, as well as extensive economic relationships, with many of its former global subjects. At the same time, it embarked on a new phase of its existence, as part of an economically integrated Europe. All of this demonstrates an ability to adapt that does much to explain the Empire's longevity.
But that ability may be coming, alas, to an end. And the root cause of that ending may be found in the inability of its two major political parties to adapt to a changing world.
On the one hand, the Conservative Party, like its Republican counterpart here in the U.S., is now dominated by the likes of Nigel Farage, a man who can't stand the idea of living or working next to people who don't
Only now, the whole thing doesn't look like such a good idea. Britain has effectively entered an economic world in which nothing is certain, in which it will have to fend for itself on trade issues in a world where nations now function on a much more independent basis where trade is concerned. As a result, British citizens have resorted to stockpiling food and other basic necessities. As for Farage, the man who started it all, there might be reason to think that, suddenly, when confronted with evidence that his great cause was not so great after all, he might even agree with that assessment of it.
On the other hand, you have the Labour Party, which ought to be in a position politically to exploit the failure of the Conservatives to leave Europe without consequences. Ought to be, but isn't. Labour, like its Democratic counterpart in the U.S., has a seemingly unlimited capacity for shooting itself in the foot . And, when that tendency is combined with the institutional anti-Semitism of much of the British intellectual classes, you end up with a party identified with hatred, and not with progress.
Two great political parties. Two great institutions of a historically great nation. Both now dominated and stained by the consequences of their bigotry, including the loss of the ability to adapt to a world that is changing, and will continue to change, whether either party likes it or not.
Unless one or both of them learn to change themselves, and to adapt, the sun may yet set on the Union Jack for good.
The Casualties Of Our Current President
First, and of least importance here, an announcement of a change in policy. Namely, mine. This is the last time TRH will use the name of Donald Trump in discussing the issues of the day, even as it relates to him. Henceforce, I will only refer to him here as "the current President."
Why?
For the simple reason that, past and present, he has always lived for self-promotion. That's why is name is always the most prominent feature of every building he has ever built. Of every product or service he has attempted to promote. Of just about every aspect of his public life that you--or rather, he--can name. It's all he really cares about. Not his family, his "projects," or even his Presidency. Everything with him is all about getting and seeing his name out there. And that is a process in which I will no longer participate. If promotion is truly the air that he breathes, then I am willing to do my part to suffocate his Presidency. His Presidency, mind you, and not him personally. I have no wish to turn him into a martyr. (So, any FBI agents looking at this, shoo. Nothing to see here.)
Now, on to a discussion of his casualties.
My current work as an attorney takes me back and forth between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. on a routine basis. Because of the limited nature of public transportation in Maryland, which has a lot to do with racial issues*, I'm forced to do a large portion of that by car, rather that by taking advantage of the forms of public transit that other large metropolitan areas can take for granted. I don't like having to do that, because the resulting four-hour commute daily is exhausting, even using the Washington Metro for part of it. But I do it.
It does, however, give me the opportunity to see how people drive on a regular basis. And I can tell you that how people drive has changed a lot over the past two years. It's gotten much, much worse.
Not a day goes by that I don't see an accident, and frequently more than one, along my route. Many of them appear to be little more than fender-benders, fortunately. But I can tell you that their number has increased dramatically. And sometimes, they are much more than fender-benders. Not long ago, I saw two instances of cars that had caught fire--one on my trip to D.C., and one on the way back. I have no idea if anyone was hurt in either instance, or how badly they may have been hurt. But the possibilities in that regard are as tragic as they are obvious.
Frankly, I view this increase in stressed-out driving as a consequence of living under the current President. It's difficult to know what else it can be related to successfully. Even if his policies aren't always directly affecting people, his behavior and conduct generally have left many people wondering, from day to day, whether or now the United States is truly a safe, stable place in which to live. Whether he's selling (or giving away) our domestic resources to Republican donors or foreign businesses, or helping Vladimir Putin turn the nation into a new Soviet republic, more and more people are beginning to wonder about their future. As in, whether or not they will have one.
Stressed-out driving is bad enough but, when even one life is lost, it's a tragedy with ripple effects that are not always easy to measure. Sometimes, they can even radiate around the world.
Here is one recent, especially tragic example.
Amy Meselson, an immigration attorney who devoted her life to saving refugees, and who did in fact help save many of them, committed suicide last week at the relatively young age of 46. You can read about her life and her work here. Whatever your feelings about immigrants and immigration may be, especially refugees, it cannot be doubted that she saved many lives to an extent that will have long-lasting benefits for the refugees and everyone whose paths they cross. Nor can it be doubted that her loss is a savage and tragic loss for all of us, especially for immigration attorneys and advocates such as my wife (and me, for that matter).
Ms. Meselson suffered from depression, and it will no doubt be tempting for some--especially immigation-haters--to blame her death on herself. But that is why it is important to read the entire obituary, and not become mesmerized for political reasons by that one fact. She worked for a long time on behalf of the world's most vulnerable people, accomplishing more than most people do in a longer lifetime. Consider the following paragraph:
We don't need more Laura Ingrahams; we need more Amy Meselsons. We can't afford the loss of even a single one. The loss of her life is a casualty that can and should be laid at the feet, publicly, of the current Administration and its selfish, racist pursuit of the interests of rich white men. Along with the stressed-out motorists I see every day.
And when you read a piece like this, that chronicles the current President's dereliction of duty to the people of the entire nation, whether they voted for him or not, whether they have white, black, red, yellow or brown skin, you should know that you are looking at the tragedy of an Amy Meselson or a stressed-out motorist times thousands. Give our current President enough of a chance, and it can easily become millions.
The casualties of this President are real. They mount on a daily basis. How many of them will have to mount before the current crisis ends?
Well, as always, that depends on you.
*A subject I will be discussing more extensively in future blog posts, especially as the current gubernatorial campaign here in Maryland heats up this fall.
Why?
For the simple reason that, past and present, he has always lived for self-promotion. That's why is name is always the most prominent feature of every building he has ever built. Of every product or service he has attempted to promote. Of just about every aspect of his public life that you--or rather, he--can name. It's all he really cares about. Not his family, his "projects," or even his Presidency. Everything with him is all about getting and seeing his name out there. And that is a process in which I will no longer participate. If promotion is truly the air that he breathes, then I am willing to do my part to suffocate his Presidency. His Presidency, mind you, and not him personally. I have no wish to turn him into a martyr. (So, any FBI agents looking at this, shoo. Nothing to see here.)
Now, on to a discussion of his casualties.
My current work as an attorney takes me back and forth between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. on a routine basis. Because of the limited nature of public transportation in Maryland, which has a lot to do with racial issues*, I'm forced to do a large portion of that by car, rather that by taking advantage of the forms of public transit that other large metropolitan areas can take for granted. I don't like having to do that, because the resulting four-hour commute daily is exhausting, even using the Washington Metro for part of it. But I do it.
It does, however, give me the opportunity to see how people drive on a regular basis. And I can tell you that how people drive has changed a lot over the past two years. It's gotten much, much worse.
Not a day goes by that I don't see an accident, and frequently more than one, along my route. Many of them appear to be little more than fender-benders, fortunately. But I can tell you that their number has increased dramatically. And sometimes, they are much more than fender-benders. Not long ago, I saw two instances of cars that had caught fire--one on my trip to D.C., and one on the way back. I have no idea if anyone was hurt in either instance, or how badly they may have been hurt. But the possibilities in that regard are as tragic as they are obvious.
Frankly, I view this increase in stressed-out driving as a consequence of living under the current President. It's difficult to know what else it can be related to successfully. Even if his policies aren't always directly affecting people, his behavior and conduct generally have left many people wondering, from day to day, whether or now the United States is truly a safe, stable place in which to live. Whether he's selling (or giving away) our domestic resources to Republican donors or foreign businesses, or helping Vladimir Putin turn the nation into a new Soviet republic, more and more people are beginning to wonder about their future. As in, whether or not they will have one.
Stressed-out driving is bad enough but, when even one life is lost, it's a tragedy with ripple effects that are not always easy to measure. Sometimes, they can even radiate around the world.
Here is one recent, especially tragic example.
Amy Meselson, an immigration attorney who devoted her life to saving refugees, and who did in fact help save many of them, committed suicide last week at the relatively young age of 46. You can read about her life and her work here. Whatever your feelings about immigrants and immigration may be, especially refugees, it cannot be doubted that she saved many lives to an extent that will have long-lasting benefits for the refugees and everyone whose paths they cross. Nor can it be doubted that her loss is a savage and tragic loss for all of us, especially for immigration attorneys and advocates such as my wife (and me, for that matter).
Ms. Meselson suffered from depression, and it will no doubt be tempting for some--especially immigation-haters--to blame her death on herself. But that is why it is important to read the entire obituary, and not become mesmerized for political reasons by that one fact. She worked for a long time on behalf of the world's most vulnerable people, accomplishing more than most people do in a longer lifetime. Consider the following paragraph:
Ms. Meselson had dedicated her career to defending hundreds of vulnerable immigrants from deportation and helping them navigate the gaps between the child welfare and national security bureaucracies. She recruited volunteers from corporate law firms to represent foster children in immigration cases, and she successfully lobbied for a special juvenile section in immigration court.That's not the life of a person defined by depression. But I believe that the end of her life came about at the intersection of her illness and the current "policy" on immigration in the U.S. (if one can dignify it by an increasingly abused word). And let's be clear, as Laura Ingraham made clear this past week on the Fox Network: that policy can be reduced down to the phrase "Get rid of 'em all." It's no longer just about the undocumented anymore; it's about those who, in Ms. Ingraham's words, make our country no longer "look" like it used to.
We don't need more Laura Ingrahams; we need more Amy Meselsons. We can't afford the loss of even a single one. The loss of her life is a casualty that can and should be laid at the feet, publicly, of the current Administration and its selfish, racist pursuit of the interests of rich white men. Along with the stressed-out motorists I see every day.
And when you read a piece like this, that chronicles the current President's dereliction of duty to the people of the entire nation, whether they voted for him or not, whether they have white, black, red, yellow or brown skin, you should know that you are looking at the tragedy of an Amy Meselson or a stressed-out motorist times thousands. Give our current President enough of a chance, and it can easily become millions.
The casualties of this President are real. They mount on a daily basis. How many of them will have to mount before the current crisis ends?
Well, as always, that depends on you.
*A subject I will be discussing more extensively in future blog posts, especially as the current gubernatorial campaign here in Maryland heats up this fall.
Monday, July 30, 2018
And, Finally, For July ... Please, Joe, JUST GO AWAY!
Shame on Joe Lieberman for attacking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the unexpected victor over fourth-ranked U.S. House Democrat Joe Crowley in the primary election for Crowley's seat, as being "too lefty" for the Democrats and their November chances.
I have to admit that I do not have an unalloyed brief for Ocasio-Cortez. She's obviously a tremendous new talent, and knows how to touch on a lot of bread-and-butter issues in a way that Democrats used to do routinely, and seemingly have long since forgotten how to do. At the same time, she's a political rookie, and political rookies make political rookie mistakes, whether its about explaining how you will pay for your promises (as she did the other night in an interview with Trevor Noah), or in denouncing the Israeli shooting of Palestinian protesters at the opening of the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, doing the latter in an artless way that left her open to charges of anti-Semitism from those who live to make such charges to score cheap political points.
On cue, regarding the latter mishap, enter Joe Lieberman, stage right, carrying a dagger. He immediately pounced and demanded that all true Democrats do the "centrist" thing and vote for Crowley, still on the fall ballot on a third-party ticket. According to Joe, only by blatantly stabbing the party's nominee in the back can we all truly enable the party to "reach across the aisle and get things done." Republican things, to be sure, but things nevertheless.
You know, like the Iraq war, which Joe supported.
Or John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, which Joe supported to the extent of reaching across the aisle all the way to the GOP convention.
Or like his 2000 running mate on the Democratic ticket, Al Gore, who he stabbed in the back by publicly declaring that the Florida recount effort should be ended, even while the Gore campaign was still pursuing a recount.
In many respects, Joe is every bit as much of a narcissist as Donald Trump: so in love with his public image that he can't quite see the feet of clay upon which it rests. I met him at a fundraiser for his 2004 Presidential campaign (it's a long story, and I won't go into it here), and was decidedly unimpressed. He seem less like a person and more like a fribble.
A fribble who will not go aways. Please go, Joe. You've damaged democracy enough for the sake of your self-righteousness. It can't take any more of you, and neither can we.
I have to admit that I do not have an unalloyed brief for Ocasio-Cortez. She's obviously a tremendous new talent, and knows how to touch on a lot of bread-and-butter issues in a way that Democrats used to do routinely, and seemingly have long since forgotten how to do. At the same time, she's a political rookie, and political rookies make political rookie mistakes, whether its about explaining how you will pay for your promises (as she did the other night in an interview with Trevor Noah), or in denouncing the Israeli shooting of Palestinian protesters at the opening of the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, doing the latter in an artless way that left her open to charges of anti-Semitism from those who live to make such charges to score cheap political points.
On cue, regarding the latter mishap, enter Joe Lieberman, stage right, carrying a dagger. He immediately pounced and demanded that all true Democrats do the "centrist" thing and vote for Crowley, still on the fall ballot on a third-party ticket. According to Joe, only by blatantly stabbing the party's nominee in the back can we all truly enable the party to "reach across the aisle and get things done." Republican things, to be sure, but things nevertheless.
You know, like the Iraq war, which Joe supported.
Or John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, which Joe supported to the extent of reaching across the aisle all the way to the GOP convention.
Or like his 2000 running mate on the Democratic ticket, Al Gore, who he stabbed in the back by publicly declaring that the Florida recount effort should be ended, even while the Gore campaign was still pursuing a recount.
In many respects, Joe is every bit as much of a narcissist as Donald Trump: so in love with his public image that he can't quite see the feet of clay upon which it rests. I met him at a fundraiser for his 2004 Presidential campaign (it's a long story, and I won't go into it here), and was decidedly unimpressed. He seem less like a person and more like a fribble.
A fribble who will not go aways. Please go, Joe. You've damaged democracy enough for the sake of your self-righteousness. It can't take any more of you, and neither can we.
Lord & Taylor, Debt Forgiveness, And Cash Repatriation.
I was saddened to learn about the soon-to-be closing of Lord & Taylor, in part because it was one of my mother's favorite New York department stores, and in part because it joins a long list of other now-departed Fifth Avenue retailers (Bonwit Teller and B. Altman, to name but two) that represented what was left of a more stylish, and much more personalized form of retailing that began in the 19th century, endured for much of the 20th century, and now seems to be definitively winding down to a close in the 21st. For us, the storied names of these shopping palaces are little more than nameplates. But, once upon a time, there were actual people behind the nameplates, people whose tastes and marketing skills, along with a highly competitive marketplace, gave those nameplates the value that at least some of them have managed to retain long after their namesakes have vanished from our midst.
It's easy to blame the disappearance of Lord & Taylor (actually, downsizing the number of outlets) on the prevalence of shopping via the Internet, which gives shoppers an unlimited amount of range and convenience. And there's no question that Internet shopping traffic has had a major adverse impact generally on traditional bricks-and-mortar retail outlets. For me, as for others, it would be somewhat hypocritical to complain about this too much. I lament the vanishing of traditional book stores, but I also buy books on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. In many respects, the Internet is the proverbial better idea, and shopping is a major aspect of our lives that reflects that fact.
But it's not hypocritical to note that, in the pursuit of convenience, we've lost an important part of our social lives as well. Stores like Lord & Taylor used to be not just places to shop, but to spend time with family members and close friends. Most of these stores had restaurants, which became places to extend the social aspect of shopping. These days, you're lucky to find as much as a McDonald's in a Walmart (and "lucky" may depend on how you feel about fast food).
In any case, convenience plays a large role in the disappearance of the Lord & Taylor-type stores. Physical elegance and social contact mean less to modern shoppers than they once did; getting goods quickly, and as cheaply as possible, are what matter most. But there is another factor as well: debt. During the 1980s, when economic expansion was fueled not by tax cuts, as is commonly believed, but by massive amounts of public and private borrowing, the ownership of many former "carriage-trade" stores such as Lord & Taylor was consolidated through mergers that were funded by massive loans These loans, unfortunately for everyone, proved to be so large that they stores themselves could not generate enough revenues to service the debt and generate profits for the new owners.
This fact, combined with a reduction in the variety of merchandise available in each of the stores, slowly led to the closing of many of the individual stores, which by this point had become little more than nameplates. Once upon a time, you could reasonably guess where an item had been bought just by looking at it. But, as time passed, that was less and less true. Macy's no longer needed to tell Gimbel's anything; they were both selling the same merchandise--and, as a result, only one of them has survived to this day.
The problem of debt strangling our economy is by no means limited to retail. In addition to its other problems (climate change and the spread of autocracy), the world economy is forced to chow down on servicing a level of debt that now stands at $247 trillion. A level of debt that has its roots in the go-go '80s--when, economically (to borrow a Stephen Sondheim lyric from "Follies) everything was possible and nothing made sense (then or now). There is clearly no way out of this financial trap except debt forgiveness. What is needed now is an international conference to work out the terms of this, on a global basis. Perhaps that can actually happen, once everyone faces up to the need for it--and it may take a cataclysmic event for everyone to do so.
But what if we could do it? And what if it could be combined with incentives to repatriate currencies that have fled their home countries, seeking tax shelters oversees? (U.S. dollars, we're looking at you here.)
Maybe some of that forgiveness, combined with a little cash, could save what's left of the carriage-trade model, before it vanishes altogether. Maybe some of that cash could help to not only provide the Lord & Taylors of the world with much-needed capital, but also with new, aspiring merchants to find ways to combine Internet-age convenience with old-school social experience. Maybe, if we can liberate money from the tyranny of debt service, and get it to start moving at the same speed as the people who make, save, invest, and spend it, we really can bake a large enough economic pie for everyone.
Admittedly, this is just a dream. But maybe necessity will make it a reality. I hope it happens before we say goodbye to another Lord & Taylor.
It's easy to blame the disappearance of Lord & Taylor (actually, downsizing the number of outlets) on the prevalence of shopping via the Internet, which gives shoppers an unlimited amount of range and convenience. And there's no question that Internet shopping traffic has had a major adverse impact generally on traditional bricks-and-mortar retail outlets. For me, as for others, it would be somewhat hypocritical to complain about this too much. I lament the vanishing of traditional book stores, but I also buy books on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. In many respects, the Internet is the proverbial better idea, and shopping is a major aspect of our lives that reflects that fact.
But it's not hypocritical to note that, in the pursuit of convenience, we've lost an important part of our social lives as well. Stores like Lord & Taylor used to be not just places to shop, but to spend time with family members and close friends. Most of these stores had restaurants, which became places to extend the social aspect of shopping. These days, you're lucky to find as much as a McDonald's in a Walmart (and "lucky" may depend on how you feel about fast food).
In any case, convenience plays a large role in the disappearance of the Lord & Taylor-type stores. Physical elegance and social contact mean less to modern shoppers than they once did; getting goods quickly, and as cheaply as possible, are what matter most. But there is another factor as well: debt. During the 1980s, when economic expansion was fueled not by tax cuts, as is commonly believed, but by massive amounts of public and private borrowing, the ownership of many former "carriage-trade" stores such as Lord & Taylor was consolidated through mergers that were funded by massive loans These loans, unfortunately for everyone, proved to be so large that they stores themselves could not generate enough revenues to service the debt and generate profits for the new owners.
This fact, combined with a reduction in the variety of merchandise available in each of the stores, slowly led to the closing of many of the individual stores, which by this point had become little more than nameplates. Once upon a time, you could reasonably guess where an item had been bought just by looking at it. But, as time passed, that was less and less true. Macy's no longer needed to tell Gimbel's anything; they were both selling the same merchandise--and, as a result, only one of them has survived to this day.
The problem of debt strangling our economy is by no means limited to retail. In addition to its other problems (climate change and the spread of autocracy), the world economy is forced to chow down on servicing a level of debt that now stands at $247 trillion. A level of debt that has its roots in the go-go '80s--when, economically (to borrow a Stephen Sondheim lyric from "Follies) everything was possible and nothing made sense (then or now). There is clearly no way out of this financial trap except debt forgiveness. What is needed now is an international conference to work out the terms of this, on a global basis. Perhaps that can actually happen, once everyone faces up to the need for it--and it may take a cataclysmic event for everyone to do so.
But what if we could do it? And what if it could be combined with incentives to repatriate currencies that have fled their home countries, seeking tax shelters oversees? (U.S. dollars, we're looking at you here.)
Maybe some of that forgiveness, combined with a little cash, could save what's left of the carriage-trade model, before it vanishes altogether. Maybe some of that cash could help to not only provide the Lord & Taylors of the world with much-needed capital, but also with new, aspiring merchants to find ways to combine Internet-age convenience with old-school social experience. Maybe, if we can liberate money from the tyranny of debt service, and get it to start moving at the same speed as the people who make, save, invest, and spend it, we really can bake a large enough economic pie for everyone.
Admittedly, this is just a dream. But maybe necessity will make it a reality. I hope it happens before we say goodbye to another Lord & Taylor.
America? Russia? Can You Tell Which Is Which?
And now, sadly, on to what is only the second-most important story of our time.
During the Cold War, and for a long time after its unofficial end in 1989, Americans could take pride not only in its "hard power," as defined by its military strength, but also in the "soft power" of its ideals, and its willingness to pursue making this ideals a reality. It's fairly safe to say that much of the social progress that has been made in this country, especially in the area of civil rights, came about as a consequence of that willingness, at least in part. How, after all, could we lecture the rest of the world about freedom and equality if we as a people ourselves were neither truly free or equal?
Unfortunately, that question is now a haunting one. Because, under the current occupant of the Oval Office, much of that social progress is not only beginning to unravel, but is seemingly being thrown into reverse. In truth, much of this reversal has been going in slow motion for quite a long time, beginning with the Reagan era. But those of us on the progressive side of the fence has always maintained the faith that democratic processes, and a commitment by all political sides to abide by them, would be enough to eventually set this country headed in the right direction.
In fact, the end of the Cold War itself seemed to validate that point of view. So did the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency, after a period of manufactured warfare and bankrupt economics. American ideals, during the Bush years, had been put to the ultimate test, and had proved to be enough to vanquish a serious attempt to thwart them.
But, as it turned out, the ultimate test was yet to come.
In 2016, the nation elected, and swore into office, a man whose victory had come about despite credible reasons to believe that a major foreign power, Russia (the functional successor to the Soviet Union) made massive, direct attempts to intervene in the outcome of the election and manipulate that outcome for its own benefit. And, although a few fingers were lifted against this horror in the form of demonstrations and legal challenges, the weight of public opinion leaned in the direction of those who believed that "our system" was strong enough to survive any attempt to thwart it.
For myself, however, and for many others, my weight shifted in the other direction.
I have long believed that the modern conservative movement, as launched in the post-World-War-II era, understands words like "freedom" and "democracy" in a very narrow sense. Specifically, the freedom to be a conservative, and to insist that democracy only be allow to promote conservative points of view. I have seen the truth of this in its willingness to promote right-wing dictatorships over legitimate democratic movements that were deemed to be "too leftist," in its insistence on "balanced" coverage from supposedly "liberal" media (while allowing the conservative counterparts to be as "unbalanced" as possible), and in its willing to promote an authoritarian perspective on faith under the twin guises of "tradition" and "religious freedom."
The tipping point, however, occurred for me even before Election Night 2016, courtesy of Mitch McCONnell, the Republican leader of the Senate. (I'll use his name, since a little manipulation allows me to tweak it in order to properly reflect his character, but will deny him the respect of pretending he leads a "majority.") Fresh from his successful denial of Merrick Garland the proper respect that a Supreme Court nominee deserves, in the hope that a Republican successor to Obama would get to fill a Court vacancy, McCONnell refused to cooperate with Obama's pre-election plan to share with the public what was then known about Russian plans to sabotage the election. He baldly stated his intention to denounce any such attempt as "partisan" in nature.
Sadly, Obama folded, as he did with the Garland nomination. That's on him, and I have no reservations about calling him out for it. In fact, Obama's penchant for folding in the face of Republican opposition, even when that opposition may have been little more than bluffing, is mirrored in a sad tendency by Democrats generally to put too much faith in the good intentions of the other side. That history, to some extent is recapped here. We have been constantly affronted with Republican disrespect for democracy, and then constantly been told, in the immortal words of Antonin Scalia, to "get over it." And, by doing so, we have enabled the present moment (myself included) to a far greater degree than any of is probably care to admit.
But make no mistake: McCONnell put Obama in that position with regard to the intelligence about the election. It was McCONnell who, faced once again with a choice between country and political chess, chose chess. Because that is what not only McCONnell, and the party that will follow him anywhere, do. They are not interested in building a better America, only in the acquisition of power, by any means. And let's be as clear as possible: they have not been stopped for a minute by the fact that the current President has a long history of association with Russia that makes plausible the possibility that he is not truly an American President, but a Russian asset.
How much plausibility should you give to that thought? Or, for that matter, to the idea that conservatives would chose conservatism over democracy? Take the words of a leading conservative, David Frum, who served in the Bush Administration: “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” Again, his words, not mine.
Or, don't take his words at all. Take a look at what is going on around us.
The banning of a reporter from the White House press pool, and the Presidential denunciation of reporters as "bad people."
The use of employer's rights to restrict freedom of speech for their employees, forcing people to choose between their beliefs and their ability to survive.
The restriction of the rights of the poor to public benefits, for no other reason than to assert who's "in charge.
The caging of human beings who are guilt of nothing more than the desire to flee unsafe countries, in conditions that cannot even be called decent.
The willingness of the current Administration to go to war not for the defense of the nation, but to use warfare as a public relations tool to pump up support for said Administration (here we go, "wagging the dog" again).
And finally, at least for now, the unwillingness of the current Congress to spend any money, or otherwise take any precautions whatsoever, to ensure that our elections are free from foreign--specifically, Russian--interference.
Is it any wonder that Putin wanted the current occupant of the Oval Office to be that occupant? He's getting exactly what he wants: a clone of his own country, one nominally led by a man who is easily susceptible to flattery. As has been pointed out recently, that's the hold that Putin, or anyone, can have over our "President," the only one that's really necessary. Flattery. Infinite amounts of it. That's how you hold on to a world-class narcissist. You don't need "pee tapes." You don't need "Playboy tapes." You don't need any tapes at all. You just need to keep petting him on the head and say "Good boychik. Good boychik. Now go do what I want."
And is it any wonder that Republican members of Congress spent the past Fourth of July not here, but in Russia, doing who-knows-what? It's enough to remind one of the chilling last lines of George Orwell's "Animal Farm," in which an idealistic rebellion by farm animals against a drunken farmer degenerates into an autocracy led by pigs, who increasing act like the animals former master. At the book's end, the pigs host and toast their human neighbors, while the rest of the farm animals look on in horror:
This is why it's essential to vote, and to get others to vote, this coming November. But, no matter what happens in this election (and a fair outcome is by no means certain, under these circumstances), it is not enough to vote. We must, sadly, fight the people we have long regarded as our fellow countrymen (and women) on whichever battlefield is necessary.
For they are no longer our fellows. They are the enemy. And, for the sake of true democracy, no quarter can be given.
During the Cold War, and for a long time after its unofficial end in 1989, Americans could take pride not only in its "hard power," as defined by its military strength, but also in the "soft power" of its ideals, and its willingness to pursue making this ideals a reality. It's fairly safe to say that much of the social progress that has been made in this country, especially in the area of civil rights, came about as a consequence of that willingness, at least in part. How, after all, could we lecture the rest of the world about freedom and equality if we as a people ourselves were neither truly free or equal?
Unfortunately, that question is now a haunting one. Because, under the current occupant of the Oval Office, much of that social progress is not only beginning to unravel, but is seemingly being thrown into reverse. In truth, much of this reversal has been going in slow motion for quite a long time, beginning with the Reagan era. But those of us on the progressive side of the fence has always maintained the faith that democratic processes, and a commitment by all political sides to abide by them, would be enough to eventually set this country headed in the right direction.
In fact, the end of the Cold War itself seemed to validate that point of view. So did the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency, after a period of manufactured warfare and bankrupt economics. American ideals, during the Bush years, had been put to the ultimate test, and had proved to be enough to vanquish a serious attempt to thwart them.
But, as it turned out, the ultimate test was yet to come.
In 2016, the nation elected, and swore into office, a man whose victory had come about despite credible reasons to believe that a major foreign power, Russia (the functional successor to the Soviet Union) made massive, direct attempts to intervene in the outcome of the election and manipulate that outcome for its own benefit. And, although a few fingers were lifted against this horror in the form of demonstrations and legal challenges, the weight of public opinion leaned in the direction of those who believed that "our system" was strong enough to survive any attempt to thwart it.
For myself, however, and for many others, my weight shifted in the other direction.
I have long believed that the modern conservative movement, as launched in the post-World-War-II era, understands words like "freedom" and "democracy" in a very narrow sense. Specifically, the freedom to be a conservative, and to insist that democracy only be allow to promote conservative points of view. I have seen the truth of this in its willingness to promote right-wing dictatorships over legitimate democratic movements that were deemed to be "too leftist," in its insistence on "balanced" coverage from supposedly "liberal" media (while allowing the conservative counterparts to be as "unbalanced" as possible), and in its willing to promote an authoritarian perspective on faith under the twin guises of "tradition" and "religious freedom."
The tipping point, however, occurred for me even before Election Night 2016, courtesy of Mitch McCONnell, the Republican leader of the Senate. (I'll use his name, since a little manipulation allows me to tweak it in order to properly reflect his character, but will deny him the respect of pretending he leads a "majority.") Fresh from his successful denial of Merrick Garland the proper respect that a Supreme Court nominee deserves, in the hope that a Republican successor to Obama would get to fill a Court vacancy, McCONnell refused to cooperate with Obama's pre-election plan to share with the public what was then known about Russian plans to sabotage the election. He baldly stated his intention to denounce any such attempt as "partisan" in nature.
Sadly, Obama folded, as he did with the Garland nomination. That's on him, and I have no reservations about calling him out for it. In fact, Obama's penchant for folding in the face of Republican opposition, even when that opposition may have been little more than bluffing, is mirrored in a sad tendency by Democrats generally to put too much faith in the good intentions of the other side. That history, to some extent is recapped here. We have been constantly affronted with Republican disrespect for democracy, and then constantly been told, in the immortal words of Antonin Scalia, to "get over it." And, by doing so, we have enabled the present moment (myself included) to a far greater degree than any of is probably care to admit.
But make no mistake: McCONnell put Obama in that position with regard to the intelligence about the election. It was McCONnell who, faced once again with a choice between country and political chess, chose chess. Because that is what not only McCONnell, and the party that will follow him anywhere, do. They are not interested in building a better America, only in the acquisition of power, by any means. And let's be as clear as possible: they have not been stopped for a minute by the fact that the current President has a long history of association with Russia that makes plausible the possibility that he is not truly an American President, but a Russian asset.
How much plausibility should you give to that thought? Or, for that matter, to the idea that conservatives would chose conservatism over democracy? Take the words of a leading conservative, David Frum, who served in the Bush Administration: “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” Again, his words, not mine.
Or, don't take his words at all. Take a look at what is going on around us.
The banning of a reporter from the White House press pool, and the Presidential denunciation of reporters as "bad people."
The use of employer's rights to restrict freedom of speech for their employees, forcing people to choose between their beliefs and their ability to survive.
The restriction of the rights of the poor to public benefits, for no other reason than to assert who's "in charge.
The caging of human beings who are guilt of nothing more than the desire to flee unsafe countries, in conditions that cannot even be called decent.
The willingness of the current Administration to go to war not for the defense of the nation, but to use warfare as a public relations tool to pump up support for said Administration (here we go, "wagging the dog" again).
And finally, at least for now, the unwillingness of the current Congress to spend any money, or otherwise take any precautions whatsoever, to ensure that our elections are free from foreign--specifically, Russian--interference.
Is it any wonder that Putin wanted the current occupant of the Oval Office to be that occupant? He's getting exactly what he wants: a clone of his own country, one nominally led by a man who is easily susceptible to flattery. As has been pointed out recently, that's the hold that Putin, or anyone, can have over our "President," the only one that's really necessary. Flattery. Infinite amounts of it. That's how you hold on to a world-class narcissist. You don't need "pee tapes." You don't need "Playboy tapes." You don't need any tapes at all. You just need to keep petting him on the head and say "Good boychik. Good boychik. Now go do what I want."
And is it any wonder that Republican members of Congress spent the past Fourth of July not here, but in Russia, doing who-knows-what? It's enough to remind one of the chilling last lines of George Orwell's "Animal Farm," in which an idealistic rebellion by farm animals against a drunken farmer degenerates into an autocracy led by pigs, who increasing act like the animals former master. At the book's end, the pigs host and toast their human neighbors, while the rest of the farm animals look on in horror:
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.One wonders if a glimpse of that July 4th meeting would have produced a similar response to the viewer.
This is why it's essential to vote, and to get others to vote, this coming November. But, no matter what happens in this election (and a fair outcome is by no means certain, under these circumstances), it is not enough to vote. We must, sadly, fight the people we have long regarded as our fellow countrymen (and women) on whichever battlefield is necessary.
For they are no longer our fellows. They are the enemy. And, for the sake of true democracy, no quarter can be given.
In Not-So-Fake News, We're Either Burning Up Or Drowning
It may be hard to believe that having a potential traitor in the Oval Office is only the second-most important story right now in the world. And I'll get to that story, in due course. But, sadly, that is absolutely the case. Because the nature of the person in the Oval Office may not matter so much when there's a planet at stake.
Yes, I know, I write about this a great deal. But, since we don't have anyplace other than Earth on which to live at the moment, it might be worthwhile to stop from time to time, look around us, and see what's happening.
And it ain't pretty.
Resource depletion at a record rate, and increasing exponentially from year to year.
Coastal regions slowly sinking into the ocean, and likely never to return.
And if you don't live on the coast? No consolation there at all, folks. Chances are that, like Great Britain, you're burning up. Literally.
Go ahead and call me a creeping socialist for pointing out these articles to you. Two of them come from the New York Post, nobody's idea of a creeping-socialist newspaper. Yes, the third one comes from the New York Times, and you can flog the Times as much as you want. But when both papers are basically telling the same story about the world around us, I think that it has a lot more to do with the reality they're both seeing, and that their respective ideologies can't let them ignore.
Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no climate deniers anywhere the effects of climate change--there, I've said it--can be seen or felt. And, increasingly, those effects have no boundaries.
And just as those effects are crossing geographic lines, the response to them--the only response based on the facts, that is--is doing the same thing with political lines. Great Britain, of course, has (barely) a government led by the Conservative Party, a party whose members generally see eye-to-eye with their counterparts in the U.S., the Republicans. Here, from the Times article, is a single-sentence summation of that government's current take on climate: "The British government announced Thursday that adapting to a warming climate was now a matter of 'life and death.'” (Emphasis added, as if it needed to be.)
On the other hand, perhaps it does.
Because while this country was making some--some--real progress on this issue during the Obama administration, Obama's successor (who loves hearing his name, so I won't use it) has been going full-speed in the other direction, discouraging the development of renewable sources of energy, and wedding the country to resources that cannot be reproduced or duplicated, only replaced.
In so doing, he is preying on the fears of two groups: the owners of fossil-fuel industries, who fear that they will not be able to profitably adapt to an age of solar, wind, and geothermal power, and the employees of those industries (especially coal miners), who fear the loss of familiar jobs and doubt their own ability to adapt to employment in a world of renewables.
It should seem obvious that there are ways by which government at all levels could provide incentives in various forms to enable both investors and workers to successfully and painlessly make the transition from the extraction world of energy to the renewable one. Obama, of course, translated a number of these ideas into public policy when he was President. Hillary Clinton, the person who should be sitting in the Oval Office right now, was ready and willing to do the same and more.
But the current President does not actually care about solving problems. He only cares about political issues at all to the extent that they can be manipulated to promote his personal interests, both in his businesses and in his ability to reach a second term in office. And he always takes the divide-and-conquer approach to that manipulation. Thus, problems are never actually solved. They continue to fester, so that they can remain available for future misuse.
In short, he illustrates the difference between holding an office, and serving the people who have "elected" him to it. (I'll have more to say about the "election" part of the equation in a subsequent post.)
So, even though public opinion in the U.S. is--admittedly, very slowly--moving in the direction of accepting the reality and the danger of climate change, the reality and danger are growing at a faster rate than is the acceptance of its existence.
What can you do? Rather, what should you do, for everyone's sake?
Stop pretending the problem isn't real, if that's where you are. And stop pretending there is nothing we can do about the problem, if that's where you are. There are many things we can do to not only solve the problem but also, in the process, achieve a level of economic growth that could benefit more than just a handful of investors. I have said it before, and will continue saying it until either I or the temperature drops: it's possible to have an environment without an economy, but not an economy without an environment.
And, once you have stopped all of that pretending, one more thing remains: find out which candidates support policies that address the need to adapt to and overcome the effects of climate change, and only vote for those candidates.
It's our only planet. It's up to us to save it.
Get started doing that right now. Before we burn--or sink--together.
Yes, I know, I write about this a great deal. But, since we don't have anyplace other than Earth on which to live at the moment, it might be worthwhile to stop from time to time, look around us, and see what's happening.
And it ain't pretty.
Resource depletion at a record rate, and increasing exponentially from year to year.
Coastal regions slowly sinking into the ocean, and likely never to return.
And if you don't live on the coast? No consolation there at all, folks. Chances are that, like Great Britain, you're burning up. Literally.
Go ahead and call me a creeping socialist for pointing out these articles to you. Two of them come from the New York Post, nobody's idea of a creeping-socialist newspaper. Yes, the third one comes from the New York Times, and you can flog the Times as much as you want. But when both papers are basically telling the same story about the world around us, I think that it has a lot more to do with the reality they're both seeing, and that their respective ideologies can't let them ignore.
Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no climate deniers anywhere the effects of climate change--there, I've said it--can be seen or felt. And, increasingly, those effects have no boundaries.
And just as those effects are crossing geographic lines, the response to them--the only response based on the facts, that is--is doing the same thing with political lines. Great Britain, of course, has (barely) a government led by the Conservative Party, a party whose members generally see eye-to-eye with their counterparts in the U.S., the Republicans. Here, from the Times article, is a single-sentence summation of that government's current take on climate: "The British government announced Thursday that adapting to a warming climate was now a matter of 'life and death.'” (Emphasis added, as if it needed to be.)
On the other hand, perhaps it does.
Because while this country was making some--some--real progress on this issue during the Obama administration, Obama's successor (who loves hearing his name, so I won't use it) has been going full-speed in the other direction, discouraging the development of renewable sources of energy, and wedding the country to resources that cannot be reproduced or duplicated, only replaced.
In so doing, he is preying on the fears of two groups: the owners of fossil-fuel industries, who fear that they will not be able to profitably adapt to an age of solar, wind, and geothermal power, and the employees of those industries (especially coal miners), who fear the loss of familiar jobs and doubt their own ability to adapt to employment in a world of renewables.
It should seem obvious that there are ways by which government at all levels could provide incentives in various forms to enable both investors and workers to successfully and painlessly make the transition from the extraction world of energy to the renewable one. Obama, of course, translated a number of these ideas into public policy when he was President. Hillary Clinton, the person who should be sitting in the Oval Office right now, was ready and willing to do the same and more.
But the current President does not actually care about solving problems. He only cares about political issues at all to the extent that they can be manipulated to promote his personal interests, both in his businesses and in his ability to reach a second term in office. And he always takes the divide-and-conquer approach to that manipulation. Thus, problems are never actually solved. They continue to fester, so that they can remain available for future misuse.
In short, he illustrates the difference between holding an office, and serving the people who have "elected" him to it. (I'll have more to say about the "election" part of the equation in a subsequent post.)
So, even though public opinion in the U.S. is--admittedly, very slowly--moving in the direction of accepting the reality and the danger of climate change, the reality and danger are growing at a faster rate than is the acceptance of its existence.
What can you do? Rather, what should you do, for everyone's sake?
Stop pretending the problem isn't real, if that's where you are. And stop pretending there is nothing we can do about the problem, if that's where you are. There are many things we can do to not only solve the problem but also, in the process, achieve a level of economic growth that could benefit more than just a handful of investors. I have said it before, and will continue saying it until either I or the temperature drops: it's possible to have an environment without an economy, but not an economy without an environment.
And, once you have stopped all of that pretending, one more thing remains: find out which candidates support policies that address the need to adapt to and overcome the effects of climate change, and only vote for those candidates.
It's our only planet. It's up to us to save it.
Get started doing that right now. Before we burn--or sink--together.
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