And Chris Hayes quickly points out that that choice is, as well, about to be badly made in the Republican-fascist Senate, putting a thug on the court who wants to take healthcare away from millions as the pandemic retakes the country. Amy Coney Barrett is that amoral thug, the Court is already ruled by them.
Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congresswoman Katie Porter do a great job of quickly going over a small part of the most outrageous part of the small part of Donald Trump's crookedness that we now know and they are right about him being only a now public figure in the florid corruption and graft and what should be criminal gift our system is for the billionaires and millionaires and even the incompetent failed ones among them.
And they are right about the need for Democrats to change things to end the corruption but without addressing how the Supreme Court has weaponized money to prevent democratic change in the United States, through the Buckley v. Valeo ruling, making money "speech" that can't be restricted in elections, and in the even worse rulings coming after that which give corporations such "speech rights" including, lest anyone forget, foreign money, any attempt to fix things will be swamped in the media, the cabloids, hate-talk-radio, etc. and Democrats will lose on their attempt to clean up things.
We got here through the Supreme Court WITH THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF "CIVIL LIBERTIES" GROUPS LIKE THE ACLU rigging the words of the Constitution to produce the massive corruption. They did so using the attempt of both Democrats and, unlikely as it seems now, Republicans to clean up our elections as excuses to rig things for the billionaires and millionaires, starting in 1976 with a ruling named for one of the most famous names in Republican-fascism, "Buckley". I remember years and years ago one of the things that changed my thinking from the ACLU slogans to where I am today was hearing James Buckley's more famous brother slamming the concept of equality as an infringement on his and his ilk's liberty. It was shortly after I heard him say that that the ACLU represented the Nazis in the Skokie case, winning the rights for Nazis, in the late 1970s to rally to terrorize Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois. I remember hearing one of the ACLU crowd pooh-poohing the danger of "it happening here" which even then struck me as insane given our history of domestic fascism, Jim Crow, the KKK, etc. You know, the same people whose children and grand-children are showing up to incite violence in Portland and elsewhere. Funny, I don't think the ACLU lawyers who write those briefs are putting their own asses on the lines to oppose them as they go from the words encouraging the susceptible into doing what they want to do to doing them. I have to admit I rather despise the ACLU and that style of lawyer.
Without getting the role of money out of our politics that even Republicans in the immediate post-Watergate period knew was dangerous, without getting rid of not only those rulings but the ideological smokescreen that covers up the advantage of corruption that comes with that kind of "free speech" absolutism and the Supreme Court created abomination of "corporate person-hood" even the great Warren and Porter can try to change things with all their might and the billionaire gangsters money will swamp them through the Supreme Court probably with the ACLU writing amicus briefs to help the billionaires on the basis of their "civil liberties".
Democrats who have to run for office know the kind of high financed lie campaigns they will face if they really try to change things. Trying to get the kind of money that Nixon weaponized in politics out of it was prevented by the Supreme Court, and that's when its members were mostly just too stupid to understand what would come with the corruption they unsuspectingly sowed. The ones on the court now know it and they favor it and its extension and perpetuation as a means of destroying democracy and its future existence.
Trump and his posse testing positive for Covid-19 brings up just another of the terrible features of our Constitution, what would happen if one of the only people who will win the presidential election dies just before the vote, what if it is the person who the large majority of voters wants to be president instead of the only one left standing? Trump or anyone else could have given his fellow septuagenarian, Joe Biden Covid. Hope Hicks could have given it to Amy Coney Barrett who could have given it to who knows who who would have given it to who knows who. Who knows who around the White House might have given it to Hicks?
Our 18th century Constitution has a lot of ways that it can be a disaster, many of them rather obvious and, due to the difficulty of quickly changing it built into the thing, hard to impossible to fix.
The whole thing needs to be removed from the pillar it is placed on and the spells of protection around criticizing it removed because it really is a rather awful thing to have kept. That cult of the Constitution, the cult of the "founders" including the latest bullshit in that "Hamilton" is one of the greatest dangers in American culture because, as I've pointed out, ALL OF THE PROGRESS WE CAN BE PROUD OF, the abolition movement, the Women's' suffrage movement, the workers' rights movement, the many movements that have demanded the equality that was promised by the Declaration of Independence, all of the progress to provide a decent life in a sustainable environment, ALL OF THAT WAS A STRUGGLE AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION THAT THE FOUNDERS WROTE. And, as I've pointed out, as long as those original corruptions and even the features put there like the impossibility of addressing the kind of disaster we could face if Trump is the last candidate alive on Voting Day, as long as those remain beyond criticism and CHANGE we should expect the disasters that we face to happen. And, lest it slip our minds THE FASCISTS TRUMP AND MCCONNEL HAVE PUT IN THE FEDERAL JUDICIARY CAN USE THE WORDING OF THE CONSTITUTION AGAINST ANY AND ALL OF THAT PROGRESS AS LONG AS THOSE WORDS ARE THERE.
I read somewhere that countries that copied the American presidential system instead of a parliamentary system of government are far more likely to quickly devolve into dictatorship. Though as we can see from Britain, when any system lets scum like Murdoch turn its media into a super amplified lie machine, even that doesn't protect democracy our system with its obscene easily rigged Electoral College, its winner-takes-all, fixed term presidency with a range of powers and a legal system under his control is even more of a patsy of that kind of effort.
There is a lot that we have seen destroyed in the Trump era, there is a lot that has been destroyed by his predecessor Republican-gangster presidents, the Bush-Cheny years, in particular. Anyone who piously mouths the habitual platitudes of civic faith without admitting that those are an enormous danger is the enabler of that danger. I figure someone has to point this stuff out.
We should have a clear means of voters rejecting a Trump as they do for voting for a Biden, without that we are one man in his seventies traveling and campaigning during a pandemic away from catastrophe.
I should have included the execrable piece of crap, The Hill, with PBS and NPR and C-Span in that list of media entities slammed here the other day. This was pretty accurate in assessing its role, such as it is, in public life. I'd go on but that will get me into talking about one of The Hill's media figures, Krystal Ball, and I don't think what I really think of her would be edifying to hear, though it might be satisfying to say.
On a slightly different topic. Listening to some, not all of but some of the always gone to October Undecideds, they sound like this kind of media narrative is what fills their minds with mush. The gal who was as upset with Biden telling "The President" to shut-up and seemed to think that saying that as Trump weaponized incivility and butting in was as bad as telling a violent. racist, misogynist, antisemitic criminal gang to "stand-by" when invited to condemn them has to be about the stupidest of them. Other October Undecided are pretty stupid but that was the stupidest excuse for not making up their minds I've heard from them. I wouldn't be surprised if they go out of their way to find phony ones to push a pro-Republican or at least Republican-friendly narrative to fill air. I'm sure there were a hell of a lot more of even the October Undies who listening to the debate thought "finally, someone says it to him" when Biden told Trump to shut-up.
Update: I don't know if it's New Blogger or something I'm doing or what that keeps reproducing paragraphs and breaking lines. But I'll try to finally break the habit of using a borrowed computer to do these posts and go back to my decision of using only the simplest text editor I can find to write them.
Now, let's see if this edited the way I wanted it to this time.
A new month and another chance to make some real progress in this study of The Prophetic Imagination. Distracted by the politics of the week, I missed how important this next passage is for us right now as Trump and his party of neo-royalist thugs tries to rig his own eternal rule over us, even against the will of the voters. The temptation to break into it and point out what must be obvious to anyone who is watching what is happening to us, right now but I won't.
In considering the Solomonic achievement I have been speaking of the fate of the royal consciousness as "numbness" even though I have not used that word. The Solomonic establishment embodies a loss of passion, which is the inability to care of suffer. One has only to compare the grief, anguish and joy of David (2 Samuel 1:19-27, 3:33-34, 12:15-we, 18:33, 19:4, 23:13-17) with the one-dimensional narrative of Solomon to realize something decisive has happened from the father to the son. Here the discussion of numbness concerns apathy, a-pathy, a-pathos, the absence of pathos, whereas in the reflective statement of Ecclesiastes the same experience is expressed as vanity:
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
then they flow again.
All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done';
and there is nothing new under the sun. (Eccles. 1:7-9)
In the language of R. D., Laing, people must simply practice the proper behavior because thy are no longer able to experience their own experience. Clearly the regime is interested not in what people experience but in their behavior, which can be managed.
More specifically, the royal consciousness is committed to numbness about death. It is unthinkable for the king to imagine or experience the end of his favorite historical arrangements, for they have become fully identified with his own person. Indeed they are his person, as much as he is or has a person. And therefore his historical arrangements must be invested with a quality of durability if not eternity. Kings need to assign the notion of "forever" to every historical accident over which they preside. Thus it is not thinkable among us that our public institutions should collapse and we must engage in deception and self-deception about our alienations. So we must practice the royal game with our marriages and all serious relations, with our bodies, our age and our health, our nerve and our commitments.
I went on my occasional though somewhat regular look around the lefty media and saw lots of the same lassitude among some of them, especially those who are more out of the world of show-biz than journalism - Sam Seder's comments after the "debate" in particular disgusted me. I will use him as an example of how the secular "left" is really not disinvested in the royal consciousness that the Republican-fascists are steeped in. On the left, that secular, hipster oriented left, nothing is ever good enough, not even the best available to be had, which reminds me of how close he has also claimed to be to the circles that spawned Gavin McInnes who, a failure in his great ambition to be a comedian, turned to a fascist variant of what some others have, such as those I've written about extensively, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Bill Maher.
There's a reason that that kind of stuff is often considered "cool" which is what the "anti-political-correctness" stuff was marketed as being, edgy, "controversial" "transgressive" but cool, which traffics in the same kind of "free speech" cult that values that more than the lives of victims of hate speech and the hate-acts that it promotes.
I am hoping to step up the pace of posting on this in October.
If we are lucky enough to have a President Biden on January 22, 2021, I hope that is the day that a deportation process for Gavin McInnis and associated alien fascists and Neo-Nazis such as Sebastian Gorka starts.
They and other undesireables should be gotten out of the country and banned from coming here or being active here. Get that scumbag from the underside of the Toronto area and wherever Gorka was spawned out of the United States and keep them out.
It was good that Nancy Pelosi prepared the country for the horrific possibility under our anti-democratic Constitution that the choice of the president would be made by the House of Representatives, the only part of the federal government that is even theoretically ruled by the will of the majority of voters.
That provision of the Constitution, part of the baroque anti-democratic atrocity of the Electoral College - what to do in the event of the failure of the Electoral College to choose a president - that each state no matter what size would have one vote, the majority of each state delegation having, no doubt, the majority of its members deciding how their entire state would go. That means even if a state had an overwhelming vote for a Democrat for president but had one more Republican in its house delegation, no doubt in most cases it being the product of a typically gerrymandered House districting scheme, they could disenfranchise all of the Democratic voters in their state to choose Trump, this year, no doubt ending any more of the pretense that our system is the democracy we have all be lied into believing we had.
Not being satisfied with fucking The People with the abomination of the Electoral College, when that didn't work they made a system that was even worse to fix that.
There is no reason for a nation that falsely believes it has a democratic Constitution to put up with this 18th century slave-owner-amoral businessman anti-democratic corruption to continue. If those provisions were brought to a popular vote for renewal, a straight up or down, popular vote on whether or not to retain the Electoral College and the disgusting provision for the House to choose a president when that fails, it would certainly be rejected in favor of the direct popular vote for president and vice president.
Our Constitution is a play-thing of corrupt lawyers, manipulators, and with a list of decisions out of the the Berger, Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, bilionaires and millionaires, at first domestic and now, with full warning of what they were opening us up to, billioniare gangster dictators of other countries. It is their tool, the tool of the corrupt "justices" on the Court, all of them rigging things for their Republican-fascist party, some of them adherents to the explicit fascist theory of the unitary executive, which, as well, rests like a basilisk egg on the language of the "founders".
We have to basically change it to get rid of the booby traps preventing democracy that were consciously put there to protect slavery and corrupt business interests at the start. The fascists are getting better and better at manipulating it, the combination of a string of disastrous democracy killing Supreme Court interpretations of its language mixed with, first the use of computers that the (minimally repentant?) Republican thug Richard Viguerie pioneered and which the internet, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. have nuclearized against the rule of an accurately informed People of good will in favor of autocracy and the most obscenely vulgar of dictators. '
Democracy in the only form in which it is better than gangster government, egalitarian democracy, was promised in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution was written to renege on that promise the extent to which the aristocrats and slaveowners who wrote the thing dared to cheat The People of it. It has been a constant struggle by Black People, Women, members of ethnic, national and religious minorities, the Native People of the lands stolen, and more recently the disabled and LGBTQ people against the system that that Constitution set up to get what was promised in the Declaration and which the Constitution certainly did not produce. Now we are in a period when Republican-fascists on the Court are, again, rolling back progress bought with blood, sacrifice, lives devoted to justice making incremental progress against the Constitution using the words of the Constitution as a weapon against democracy. Those decisions have, with the full knowledge of those "justices" as they were warned that they were opening us up to the billionaires, domestic as well as foreign, to have democracy cheated from a gullible margin of the population and so stolen from the rest of us. It is time to take those words so used against egalitarian democracy away from future judges and whatever "justices" might be given that title without scare quotes and with a capital letter. There might be as many as three of those later ones on the court, for now, some courts haven't had a single one.
If we don't get rid of the Electoral College and its baggage of such anti-democratic abominations as may well happen in December and January, they will succeed in the future as this corrupt court lays the ground for that. If we don't take those words from them they will weaponize them against democracy even more effectively with the help of billionaires, here and even among the enemies of American democracy and The People it would serve if it were a real democracy.
Note: I have no idea why this post keeps changing form, duplicating paragraphs, breaking lines, etc. after I fix those. It's a new one on me.
Back when I still had a TV, I'd stopped watching PBS news programming because it was more consistent a vehicle of the Republican "moderate" bullshit than some of the commercial networks, though I didn't much watch those either. I'd stopped trusting "non-commercial" media, PBS, NPR, C-Span pretty much entirely. So I didn't listen to their coverage of the "debate" last night until reading hints for what that was like at RMJ's and other places online. I went back and listened to the post-"debate" coverage, Judy Woodruff, Yamiche Alcindor, Lisa Desjardins, Amy Walter, Gary Abernathy, Cynthia Tucker, all tisk-tisked the candidates in a safe, useless,"both sides" "analysis" of what happened as Trump called out a violent hate group to "stand by" as the Republicans prepare to use a more extreme form of voter intimidation, of the kind that William Rehnquist used to engage in to prevent the votes of People of Color, when he was a genteel Republican thug instead of a "justice".
By the time the
PBS News Hour Senior National Correspondent Amnar Narwaz unsurprisingly
announced that their panel of six, count 'em six whole evenly divided
undecided but "leaning" voters had been horrified in exactly the same
way by the incivility "on both sides" that the entire useless PBS
exercise had been, anyone who had a working mind would have turned it
off like I turned off PBS back when it was McNeil-Lehrer doing the same
Republican thug enabling act.
I hope one of the things done in
the next congress is the total defunding of PBS and NPR. If there is
one thing I've learned since those innocent days back when we all longed
for a BBC style public broadcasting system in the United States, a
real, independent news reporting organization that upheld standards of
journalism free from the ideological and financial interests of the
corporations and their owners, is that you can't trust anything like
that to not become what it was allegedly created to be different from.
The BBC has been as much of a disappointment in that as PBS and NPR
have been here, they have consistently used the same kinds of tactics to
shore up support for Boris Johnson, their criminal clown even as he has
been a total disaster of the Trumpian kind.
They are useless, they should not be funded, they should be defunded by the chumps who still donate to them. en I still had a TV, I'd stopped watching PBS news programming because it was more consistent a vehicle of the Republican "moderate" bullshit than some of the commercial networks, though I didn't much watch those either. I'd stopped trusting "non-commercial" media, PBS, NPR, C-Span pretty much entirely. So I didn't listen to their coverage of the "debate" last night until reading hints for what that was like at RMJ's and other places. I went back and listened to the post-"debate" coverage, Judy Woodruff, Yamiche Alcindor, Lisa Desjardins, Amy Walter, Gary Abernathy, Cynthia Tucker, all tisk-tisked the candidates in a safe, useless,"both sides" "analysis" of what happened as Trump called out a violent hate group to "stand by" as the Republicans prepare to use a more extreme form of voter intimdation, of the kind that William Rehnquist used to engage in to intimdate voters of color with, when he was a genteel Republican thug instead of a "justice". By the time the PBS News Hour Senior National Correspondent Amnar Narwaz unsurprisingly announced that their panel of six, count 'em six whole evenly divided undecided but "leaning" voters had been horrified in exactly the same way by the incivility "on both sides" that the entire useless PBS exercise had been, anyone who had a working mind would have turned it off like I turned off PBS back when it was McNeil-Lehrer doing the same Republican thug enabling act.
That dream is just one of many of the mostly white, secular liberal liberalism of the 1960-70s has died because it had no moral purpose, "evening the playing field" style amoral, "disinterested" stuff that immediately gives in to the side that lies and ramps up racism, etc. immediately gives them the upper hand. That was so obvious in the Woodruff et al's reaction to what they'd just heard as Trump, given the chance by a FOX figure to reject American-fascism, "white supremacy" called on the violent fascists to "stand by" and could just tisk-tisk the unpleasant-makingness of it all.
They are useless, they should not be funded, they should be defunded by the chumps who still donate to them. I'd rather that whole fraud of "evenhanded" "objectivity" was dumped. It doesn't exist. Journalism that doesn't consistently choose to promote morality out of some insipid "secularism" inevitably ends up serving which ever thugs and gangsters have the more money or can say the meanest things about them. They are as cowardly as the PBS gang was last night.
Last night Donald Trump called on a violent, Neo-fascist, white-supremacist cult to stand by and, as can be read in their immediate Twitter response, they took that as a call to get ready to commit violence as he seems to be losing the election.
Get that in the front of your minds, the TV entertainment division - Electoral College - Republican-fascist provided president of the United States on live, national television, when given the opportunity to condemn white supremacy, the delicate term for Neo-Nazis and fascists in the United States, he chose, instead, to send them a barely coded message to get their guns and whatever ready to keep him in power.
Anyone who thinks that what I've written here the last couple of days is extreme or that I wasn't serious about breaking up the country if we can't get rid of the remnants of slavery empowerment in our Constitution, the Electoral College, the anti-democratically constituted Senate, the appalling means we get a Supreme Court through the anti-democratically selected president and the even more anti-democratically comprised Senate for lifetime appointments, not to mention the easily rigged rules adopted within the Senate and the powers that appear nowhere in the Constitution but the Supreme Court has given itself, if we can't change most or all of those that those areas in the country that are constantly at the mercy of the sometimes bare majority of Republican-fascists in other states that we get out of it and write egalitarian democratic, not billionaire-milliionare gangster enabling and privileging constitutions for our new nations conceived in equal rights and rational governance, anyone who thinks I wasn't serious about that is not serious, at all.
It's already a lot later than we think, if Biden or Harris is president in two years I can guarantee you that the fascists will be resurgent, maybe not even in the majority of the country but in carefully selected parts of it so they can try to rig the Electoral College and flip the senate back to a party, one of the "moderates" of which said that if Hillary Clinton became president he would guarantee that she never got a Supreme Court appointment and who had to suppress the government record of Brett Kavanaugh to put him on there WITH THE VOTE OF "MODERATE" REPUBLICANS who lied through their teeth to cover their asses, Susan Collins I'm talking about you.
It is time for those who favor what the opening of the Declaration of Independence promised to resort to the same threats that the slave-owning "founders" and their equally corrupt allies in northern commercial interest used to get the anti-democratic, slavery protecting sections of the Constitution that we are still saddled with AND WHICH GAVE US BOTH A BUSH II AND NOW A TRUMP AND THE SUPREME COURTS THAT REGULARLY RIG THINGS AGAINST DEMOCRACY AND FOR THE BILLIONAIRE-MILLIONAIRES, TODAY'S EQUIVALENT OF THE SLAVE-POWER THAT THE ABOLITIONISTS STRUGGLED AGAINST. They even promote the same racism that the supporters of slavery did, NONE OF THAT WENT AWAY WITH THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION, THE VICTORY OF THE UNION IN THE CIVIL WAR OR THE VOTING RIGHTS AND CIVIL RIGHTS ACTS THAT WERE PASSED TO END THE JIM CROW THAT WAS SUCCESSFULLY REINSTALLED LESS THAN A GENERATION AFTER THE CIVIL WAR. It was reinstalled and is being revived by the Rehnquist-Roberts Court through those parts of the Constitution that were put there by the slave owners and the corrupt commercial interests in the north that made those compromises with them.
I hope that the three states on the Pacific Coast and the North Eastern states, and others elsewhere start to seriously consider what life under the domination of Republican-fascism is for the future because under this Constitution this is bound to happen again and again and again with the full and total aid of the mass media and those electronic social diseases such as Facebook and Twitter which will not remove even violent fascists from their money-making machines to spew their hate talk and encourage each other to violence, spreading the violent calls of a Donald Trump who they helped install to start with.
This is dead serious. As serious as those dead in the Bush II-Cheney invasion of Iraq, as serious as those dead from being denied healthcare before the ACA was adopted and as the Supreme Court is removing it, as dead as those Trump got killed by his criminal incompetence and total lack of interest in the lives of people over money. It's as serious as the governor of South Dakota and the huge numbers who became infected from the motorcycle rally she encouraged against warning.
Of course I'm serious about states unwilling to remain under the thumb of the Dakotas and Wyoming, the tyranny of the anti-democratically comprised Senate and, by the way that figures into the Electoral College vote, the power to prevent Democrats naming members to the Supreme Court, etc, should leave and form new countries which adopt really egalitarian and so truly democratic constitutions.
What isn't serious is that after Bush II imposed on us twenty years ago by the Rehnquist Court and the crooked Jeb Bush government in Florida (with cousin Ellis on FOX setting it off) and then Trump being imposed on us sixteen years later by the Electoral College as he, as well, lost the election that we should remain part of a system rigged from the start to subject us to the will of an anti-democratic and not infrequently crooked minority of the vote.
I would, of course, pity the egalitarian democrats, the people of good will who remain as an unempowered and disenfranchised minority in their states, people who can vote in every single presidential election and never once have their vote counted because the Electoral College throws it out, those who may have voted for Democrats but who, as we all do, have our votes diminished by the fact that the anti-democratic voters in the Dakotas and Wyoming have enormously more representation in the federal government than even their relatively few Democratic representatives, as we can see, over and over again, the system is rigged to give the anti-democratic Senate power to thwart the democratically constituted House and is corruptly entrusted with more powers than the only really democratically chosen part of the federal government.
The claim in the original Constitution that they were "forming a more perfect union" is a lie, what they were forming was a corrupt bargain which has repeatedly thwarted real democracy, favored the wealthy and powerful, just as that original corrupt deal between the slavers and the northern money men intended. What was originally set up under that corrupt compromise to protect and perpetuate the financial interests of the slave owners is turned by Republican-fascists to protecting the billionaires and millionaires and neo-Confederate thugs over the rest of us, they are dismantling every reform, hard one AGAINST THAT ORIGINAL CONSTITUTION over the past two hundred and more years.
No, what is stupid is tolerating the perpetuation of the corrupt bargain over future generations, over our own generations, allowing the same anti-democratic corruption - now with modern technology and the power it gives those with power and the money to buy it - to continue in the form it is being brought back to.
Without getting rid of the Electoral College, the anti-democratically constituted and empowered form of the Senate, without getting rid of the stupidly written parts of the Constitution, including changing, especially, the first two amendments in the "Bill of Rights" and those in relation to the powers of the president which they have gamed to lie us into first Bush II and now Trump, what is absurd is continuing to be a part of that till the crack of doom. Which, by the way, Republican rule is hastening, not putting off. Some of them obviously want it, some of them pretending to be "christians".
Once again, John Oliver's show puts it together in a short form that is easy to see with very welcomed additional content.
I think one of the things that is missing from the struggle to reform the system, getting rid of the Electoral College, making the Senate stop empowering the right-wing minority against the will of the majority, reforming the Supreme Court with term limits and an expanded number of "justices" (and some of those seats should be required to go to those with enough math and science so at least some of them can understand the issues that come before them) . . . one of the things that is missing is an even more radical position and that's for states with majorities unwilling to continue under the oppression of the minority of right-wing voters to talk secession.
The original blackmail of the slave-power, concentrated in the southern states, the original and effective means of imposing the Electoral College, the anti-democratic Senate, the thing that as they were unable to prevent the election of Abraham Lincoln they actually did, pitching us into a terrible civil war. As (spoiler alert) John Oliver said, riffing off the vulgarian scumbag Mitch McConnell, you have to fight "mule piss with mule piss."
If the Dakotas, Wyoming, other states with tiny populations who should never have been allowed in the country as single states, entirely over-represented in the Senate and, so, in the Electoral College, block democratic reform of the Constitution, if even the states who have large populations and wretchedly anti-democratic politics do, there is no reason those of us who live on the Pacific coast, in the North East should tolerate rule by the kind of Republicans chosen by the Electoral College, by a Congress swayed by the absurd granting of enormously more power to voters in low population states and the Republican-fascist dominated Supreme and federal courts.
There is every reason not to sentence our children, our grandchildren in perpetuity to the 18th century atrocity wrought when the slave-owners and crooked aristocrats of the northern states made their original corrupt bargain, thwarting democracy, something that the selection of Bush II by the corrupt Rehnquist Court on the basis of the Electoral College and, within two decades Trump make entirely relevant today.
If the right-wing states with more representation than their numbers merit block the abolition of the Electoral College and these other reforms, it's time for the majority of us to pull out of that original corrupt deal altogether.
It's clearly not working for us even in the often awful way that it kind of did sometimes in the past. And that's not counting what the Republican-fascist dominated Supreme Court will do to us for as long as they can rig it.
That should increasingly be the position of people in the North East, on the Pacific Coast, of others in other states who favor democracy who have been continually deprived of the rational, egalitarian democracy they want. And, lest it be forgotten, many of them live in states which tend to give more to the Federal government than they get back. One of the things those low population states have done with their advantage in anti-democratic power since the start is to rob the other states.
I'm sure there are states among them that would welcome being able to have the most degenerate politics - though I think even the Republican voters there would soon miss the moderating effect that the states they love to hate have on things now. But that's definitely not working for those of us in regions of the country that have been under their thumb for long enough. A real threat to blow it up is needed. I think it's time we started talking about that option. I don't want my nieces and nephews to continue under the rule of the gangsters who govern under our current corrupt system. I don't want them to be ruled by the fiat of the fascist dominated Court who steal elections for Republican-fascists.
Update: The linking of the Senate, AND SO THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE, with its unequal advantage given to states with small populations - SUCH AS MAINE WHICH I LIVE IN - is intrinsically linked to the accommodation to the slave-owners among the "founders" Madison and many of the other deified gangsters explicit in their bargaining as to what their motives were. That has been known since the 1840s since the publication of Madison's papers as the abolitionists already knew. In this quotation from Senator Charles Sumner given in Wendell Phillips landmark book, The Constitution A Pro-Slavery Compact, he laid it out as part of that corrupt bargain that still works in much the same way the original slave-owners and corrupt northern business interests intended, to thwart the danger that rule of, by and for The People was to their privilege.
There was a compromise between the small and large States, by which equality was secured to all the States in the Senate. There was another compromise finally carried under threats from the south, on the motion of a New England member, by which the slave states were allowed representatives according to the whole number of free persons, and the "three fifths of all other persons,' thus securing political power on account of their slaves, in consideration that direct taxes should be apportioned in the same way. Direct taxes have been imposed only four brief intervals. The political power has been constant, and at this moment, sends twenty-one members to the other House.
There is a third compromise which cannot be mentioned without shame. It is the hateful bargain by which Congress was restrained until 1801 from the prohibition of the foreign slave trade, thus securing down to that period, toleration for crime. This was pertinaciously pressed by the South even to the extent of an absolute restraint on Congress. . . the effrontery of the slave masters was matched by the sordidness of the Eastern members [from the the Northern states] who yielded again. Luther Martin, the eminent member of the Convention, in his contemporary address to the Legislature of Maryland, has describe the compromise "I found," he says, "that the Eastern members, notwithstanding their aversion to slavery, were very willing to indulge the Southern States at least with a temporary liberty to prosecute the slave trade,provided the Southern States would in turn gratify them by laying no restriction on navigation acts." The bargain was struck, and at this price the Southern States gained the detestable indulgence. At a subsequent day, by solemn legislative act, adjudged this compromise to be felonious and wicked.
Such are the three chief original compromises of the Constitution and the essential condition of the union.
Read that and listen to the part of John Oliver's piece that points out under the apportionment of power in the Senate, TODAY, Black citizens are represented at about three-fifths and Latino citizens at about one half in the Senate AND THEREFORE ARE ONLY PROPORTIONALLY REPRESENTED IN THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE.
Brad Parscale's meltdown with guns is proof of one thing, the Republican-fascist policy that has saturated the country with guns is dangerous to them. One of the biggest dangers of having the Roberts Court rulings doing that is from an increase in suicide by gun, which is something they were warned about even as they made that the Court ordered law of the land.
Another thing it proves, in the libel of Democrats by the Trump press operation is that these people are shameless and weaponize media carried lies without the slightest regard for the truth or morality or even shame.
I suspect a third thing that it will prove is that the media will carry the Trump crime mob's water for them, over and over and over again as they did for previous Republicans, Bush II, Bush I, Reagan, I would say even Nixon until they couldn't ignore his crimes, crimes which, with the Trump crime spree are probably puzzling to younger people, so used to Republican criminality as we've become.
Parscale's incident looks more like a cry for help to me than a suicide attempt - I've seen one of those up-close and this isn't what one looks like. Macho guys can't just come out and say it, they act it out. Like all such inarticulate cries, when a gun is involved, that turns it into something other than what it is. I think it's very possible that he is as much a victim of some code of manhood that prevents admitting you're sinking as anything. The more typical means of self-destruction in that is alcohol, often with violence. I'm seeing it in someone I am close to right now. One of the first things his brother did was talk him into selling him his guns so just such an incident or worse wouldn't happen. If he doesn't get the help to get out of the death cult he is a paid member of, chances are it will consume him. Maybe he should look at what James and, especially, Sarah Brady did with their experience of gun violence and work for laws that inhibit the free flow of guns - which even as greatly weakened by our idiot thug dominated Supreme Court is reported to have led to "reductions in the firearm suicide rate for persons aged 55 years or
older" but, probably due in no small part to how the Court gutted it,
"not with reductions in homicide rates or overall suicide
rates."
If Parscale wants to save his soul, he should do that instead of becoming a tool for the side that got him in the trouble he's in. No doubt Amy Coney Barrett, Trump's Notre Dame Law gal on the court would vote to enhance suicide the way the Court did under Rehnquist in 1997. And she'd call it consistent with Catholicism, think about that as you hear them try to game her religion to shore up Republican "Catholic votes" in a way not unsimilar to the way they're already using Parscale's emotional crisis. I think it's time for Notre Dame to dump its pretense of being any more than an elite monstrosity of the same kind that the Ivys are. The last straw for me was when they provided William Barr with the platform they gave him to lie his fat head off.
Mavor Moore, Nero Wolfe
Don Francks, Archie Goodwin
With: Cec Linder, Frank Perry, Alfie Scott
Special Guest Stars: Dixie Settle, Terry Tweed, Michael Christy
Music by: Don Gillis
I don't think this is one I've posted before from this too short and excellent series of adaptations, the ones that are from the novels I've read remain close to them. As I've mentioned before, the entire series probably cost less than any one of the excellent series that starred the great Maury Chakin and Timothy Hutton with a company of very, very fine actors. I'd love to have heard even more of them with either company.
Sorry about not posting a radio play last night, I just didn't feel up to it. I'm getting more depressed over the election and the head long pitch into the abyss the world is taking. I'll post something later today. I'd feel less despairing if it would start raining, all over the place where rain is needed and stop raining where they don't need any more.
Yesterday was the feast day of the North American Martyrs, who include St. Charles Garnier who was called "rainmaker" by the inhabitants around Lake Ontario because his arrival coincided with the end of a devastating drought. I wonder if it was as bad as the one this year. We've had fog the last two mornings, that's something that hasn't happened here in a while. It's not enough. I head a loud bang about ten o'clock last night and at first was afraid some idiot was setting off fireworks which would certainly lead to a wildfire. Needless to say, I didn't sleep well, waiting for what didn't come, this time. The damned Republicans legalized them during the LePage regime, it will be hard getting that back into the box. Maybe it will take an enormously expensive fire to do it. Loss of wildlife won't move our politics as amoral and degraded as those are.
Walter Brueggemann is a wonder in another way, he keeps writing books, well-well into his 80s, he's got at least two this year, one about the Covid pandemic Virus As A Summons To Faith and another with the intreguing title - especially for an anti-materialist such as myself - Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements For Moral Action In The Real World. I assume by "materiality" he doesn't mean the ideological position of materialism which cannot, no matter how you twist it, produce any elements of any morality, though I'd have to read the book to find out.
And I wouldn't be surprised if he hadn't written more books this year. Unlike other famously or infamously fecund authors, generally of pop-science, science-fiction, crime-fiction, I have yet to read so much as a paragraph of anything he has written which is not fully worth reading. That would be because he is founded, securely, in the very real as he pointed out the Prophets were, as, in fact, he has pointed out the entirety of the Jewish scriptures are. Listening to the interview above motivated by the publication of Materiality As Resistance, I've thought about how a century ago the secure 19th century materialism of so many scientists and philosophers was beginning to dissolve from assumptions about the materiality of atoms and, as they were theorized, subatomic particles to what either Eddington or Bertrand Russell called "points on a dial" or, rather, vague shadows cast by statistical analysis.
That crisis for the common and even scientific understanding of physics, of matter, of the material universe has been put off the farther down the line from the place in science where the exigencies and vicissitudes of the discoveries of physics can be tabled for future business, that future to be put off indefinitely, perhaps longer than the human species has. I don't feel much of an inclination to ignore those questions, the probabilities of random chance producing this or that result and the enormous powers of ten to one needed to express their impressive improbabilities isn't something I think is worth ignoring, especially in attacking the ideological materialism of the atheists, the anti-monotheistic campaigners who so stupidly bandy about the numbers (real, speculated and entirely made up) to claim those support their case when they far more easily support the opposite.
The consideration of the improbabilities of the theorized "first organism" from which all life after was descended, of its assembly, the incredibly improbable happenstance of all of it just having happened inside an effective and working containing membrane, of its commencing metabolism and the regulation of life, its entirely improbable first and totally successful act of reproduction, all point to it being vanishingly unlikely that it could have happened without it being an act of willful creation. I think a rigorous examination of the problems involved, unless you are impeded by a refusal to consider the possibility that it was an act of conscious creation, will lead most rational people to conclude that it is improbable that it could have just happened by any known physical phenomena within the remarkably limited time-frame that modern physics gives it to have happened. The popular atheist belief that it must have happened more than once in our only known universe makes the improbabilities expand with each time it happened, as far as I can see, the improbabilities of it happening once multiplied by two or three or a jillion times with each subsequent improbable event - either that or the entire edifice of physics which yields both that gargantuan improbability and the atheist-materialist arrogance is just plain wrong to start with. The improbabilities are the creation of our physics, perhaps best considered a demonstration of them and not an entity of pure mathematical reasoning that stands independent of the variables provided.
I was thinking about the loose talk about "random chance mutation" and wondered the extent to which the rates of even temporary viability or immediate death those produce in the organisms built on the basis of those mutations is confidently known. I wonder how that figures into the success of those first acts of reproduction in the Early Earth with whatever producers of molecular mutation that they were subject to and the probabilities of the success of the line of life on Earth. I wonder what rate of fatal mutation they were subject to while having no confidence that what we know about DNA and RNA tells us about that. I wonder how much the very success both of the original form of life and its gradual mutations producing successful lines of mutant life would be expressed in terms of the probability of mutations producing viable organisms with the capacity of successful reproduction and continuation, how many wildly successful lines of life could be matched with the improbabilities calculated on the basis of fatal mutations arising in that random-chance scenario.
I don't know the answer to that and I wouldn't be confident that a non-ideological calculation of that could be made - to start with, we have absolutely no evidence of the mechanism it would operate under in "earliest life" and that evidence will almost certainly never be had. Which has certainly never impeded the ideological claims of scientists and mathematicians and philosophers of science, or which rarely has.
That's what I've been thinking about as the world burns and egalitarian democracy gives way to vulgar materialist gangsterism.
* Which I believe are probably a product of a long period of evolution, I doubt either of them are relevant to the biology of those first organisms. If DNA or RNA were present and working in that first organism, which would have had to have been present on the pre-biotic Earth to get into it, it would have to enormously increase the improbability of that first organism evolving and I think would lead even more rational people to believe it could have never happened without divine intent. If they evolved within that first organism, the improbability of it happening before that first act of reproduction would only more point to it as being a product of intelligent design, the logical speculation, not the ideological industry that goes by the same name.
