Hate Mail - I Will Never Apologize For Saying What I Did BECAUSE IT IS THE TRUTH

Barack Obama making Rahm Emanuel his Chief of Staff was probably his first and one of his biggest mistakes, if it wasn't a mistake it would force me to revise my opinion of Obama as a person and a politician much lower than it already is.    

 

You don't have to take my word for why Rahm Emanuel should never, ever be appointed to anything by a Democratic President, ever again, Mark Konkol gave a partial list.

 

. . .  Biden would be better off without Rahm's political baggage.

And Rahm's got a lot.

It's no secret Emanuel was co-architect of the "three strikes" crime bill that led to the mass incarceration of African Americans — which Biden has called a "mistake" he regrets backing as a U.S. senator. In 1996, Emanuel advised former President Bill Clinton to "claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens." He was the architect of the North American Free Trade Agreement that sent American jobs across borders, and so-called welfare reform that only made extreme poverty worse.

But, let's face it, that's old news on a long list of reasons there should be a ban on appointing Emanuel to any job that gives him a say in public policy.

It's the state in which Emanuel left Chicago that is the most troubling part of his legacy, and a harbinger for the damage he can do when entrusted with power. His administration treated Chicago as if it were two cities — one for the rich and powerful, another for the poor and forgotten.

Chicagoans remember how often Emanuel bragged of attracting an always increasing number of tourists from around the world, while turning a blind eye to the exodus of Black families fleeing neighborhoods neglected by City Hall.

As mayor, Emanuel closed the most public schools in American history and shut down half of the city's mental health centers, most of them in poor and minority neighborhoods.

Emanuel catered to the rich and famous. His administration squandered millions of dollars in federal funding pushing Elon Musk's high-speed train tunnel to O'Hare International Airport that died before the digging started. He funneled billions of taxpayer dollars skimmed from public schools and the park district to developers building the rich part of town.

And Emanuel would have given away a corner of Chicago's precious lakefront land — and millions more taxpayer money — for "Star Wars" creator George Lucas' private museum, if a righteous lawsuit didn't stop him.

During Emanuel's tenure, he hit homeowners with the biggest property tax increase in our city's history, raised fines and fees that hurt poor folks the most, and made the city's bad deals with money-grubbing parking meter and red-light camera companies worse.

And let's not overlook Emanuel's lacking judgment on who was best to lead Chicago's efforts on everything from improving schools and reforming the police department to managing public housing.

His hand-picked public schools chief, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, went to federal prison for pocketing.

The guy Emanuel promised would restore trust in the Chicago Police Department, former Superintendent Eddie Johnson, only made matters worse. He got fired for lying to Mayor Lightfoot about the night cops found him passed out behind the wheel after a boozy night of kissy-face with an officer — who wasn't his wife and who recently filed a lawsuit accusing him of years of sexual assault.

Emanuel's choice to lead the Chicago Housing Authority board, John Hooker, has since been implicated (but not charged) in a bribery scheme in which, according to a federal deferred-prosecution agreement, ComEd dolled out jobs and money to win legislative favors from Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.

Emanuel's pick to run the Chicago Board of Education, Frank Clark — ComEd's chief executive when the feds say the bribery scheme began — was named in a federal subpoena served on Madigan. And the FBI is currently investigating a dirty $1 billion custodial contract approved when Clark was board of education boss.

If Biden is being honest about his plans to be an American president who brings people together, the post-Rahm state of Chicago should be all the proof the president-elect needs to know that Emanuel isn't the guy for any job.

Rahm left our city more starkly divided by class and race than he found it.

Besides, America deserves better leaders than a failed mayor whose top City Hall lawyer brokered a deal with a poor mother — $5 million to keep secret a video showing a Chicago cop fire every bullet in his gun, 16 shots, until her Black teenage son was dead — that saved his re-election bid.

Take it from a city that knows.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."

For once I'll give the guy's credits at the end of his piece, I trust local reporters a lot more than I trust national ones, when they've earned that trust.  Rahm Emanuel is one of the few alleged Democrats who I suspect loves to shaft the poor and powerless, to destroy the environment, to do the bidding of the rich and powerful as much as any Republican scumbag.  He never was really a Democrat of any kind I'd want to be in the same party with.  I don't know why Obama named him or why other Democrats gave him positions of power within the House leadership, perhaps they figured they needed a tough-guy thug on their side.  But there are tough guys who are evil creeps and those who aren't, Rahm Emanuel is the evil sort.

 

One of the things Lawrence O'Donnell said in praising Biden's choice of Ron Klain for his Chief of Staff is that one thing he knew was that neither Joe Biden nor Ron Klain ever left a tough negotiating meeting in which things got heated with people hating them.  I hope that is a sign that Biden's long time in office has given him the political skills that Obama clearly didn't get from his brief time in politics before he became President, skills that make him realize he doesn't need a Rahm Emanuel and that having one would cost him more than it would ever gain him.  If Obama had passed a really great Affordable Care Act, based on him practicing more skilled politics, it would have been universally popular and the Supreme Court would never have dared try to sabotage it.  He probably would never have lost the Congress two years in if he had delivered the far, far more effective and worker friendly economic recovery bills that were proposed.  Rahm Emanuel's scumbaggery is largely to blame for the immediate failure of Obama to deliver what he had promised the Voters who voted for him, audacity.  What was audacious was Emanuel's influencing Obama to be a fraction of the president he had promised to be. 

Alito said in a speech webcast to the legal society’s national lawyers convention, which was virtual this year because of the pandemic.

In case you're wondering what kind of crap in a tailored suit sits on the Supreme Court of the United States,  Samuel Alito told the Federalist Fascist society, which is meeting for a convention remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic, . . . Alito told them BY WEBECAST that the kinds of restrictions for public safety which . . . It's just so disgusting I'll risk a cease and desist to post the whole thing.  

“We have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive and prolonged as those experienced for most of 2020,” Alito said in a speech webcast to the legal society’s national lawyers convention, which was virtual this year because of the pandemic.

He added: “The covid crisis has served as sort of a constitutional stress test.”

Alito said he was not criticizing officials for their policy decisions — “I’m a judge, not a policymaker” — and said before launching into the speech that he hoped his remarks would not be “twisted or misunderstood.”

Alito, one of the court’s most conservative members, said it would be hard to imagine before the pandemic that speeches and concerts would be off-limits and that churches would be empty on Easter and synagogues vacant on sacred holidays. The Supreme Court itself has been closed to the public since March, and the justices hold their meetings and hear oral arguments via teleconference.

And while he said he wasn’t being critical, he said the restrictions on public gatherings and worship services highlighted “trends that were already present before the virus struck,” which he identified as a “dominance of lawmaking by executive fiat” rather than by legislators.
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Alito was in the minority this summer when the court in emergency orders upheld local officials who limited the size of in-person worship services in California and Nevada. He was particularly aggrieved that the governor in Nevada limited church attendance while allowing casinos to reopen at 50 percent capacity and called for visitors to return to the state. The 51st person in line for a church service was out of luck, Alito said: “Forget about worship, and head for the slot machine or maybe a Cirque du Soleil show.”

Alito’s blunt words are likely to reignite questions about how far Supreme Court justices should go in speeches. The court has a 6-to-3 majority with President Trump’s three nominees, but Alito sounded as if conservatives were outnumbered on the court and in society.

He worried about religious liberty becoming a second-class right — although religious conservatives won all three of their cases at the court last year — and that the Second Amendment was not respected. He repeated his criticism of the court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that granted same-sex couples the right to marry. He told those watching that he predicted at the time that those who continued to hold to the notion that marriage is only between a man and a woman would be seen as bigots. “That is just what is coming to pass,” he said.

----------------

I hope Sheldon Whitehouse gets through a law that requires the Supreme Court to FINALLY reveal the finances and other integrity issues of its members because I'm betting several of them might be in such deep conflict of interest that they might get forced off of it.  I strongly suspect Alito is one of those. 

Yes For An Answer

It would seem that Barack Obama's book is coming out, I've read an excerpt and heard some of it read in his very good narration. Obama is probably the most effective voice to read his own words, not all writers are. He's a good writer and I believe he wrote the book. 

In one excerpt he raises the question if his administration was weakened because he was too cautious, to which his answer is a safe "I don't know". 

 

Well, one of the things about choosing to not answer a question is to allow others to answer the question for you so I will say, YES. Barack Obama's campaign promised his supporters boldness and audacity and a readiness to decisively take power on behalf of Democrats and democrats and those who wanted a decisive, brave leader and instead we got someone who wouldn't take on even the likes of the quisling Joe Lieberman, the phonies like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and to boldly give the American People things that were terribly needed.

A far bolder and more effective workers' benefitting recovery program, for one. Him putting the likes of Larry Summers and Tim Geither in charge of such things, him gutting it in a futile attempt to get Snowe and Collins to vote for it so he could get the phony, insincere, cabloid-Face The Nation-C-Span Washington Journal desideratum of "bipartisanship" slogan on it was a major and harmful self-weakening move. And so timid was Obama that, when those two phony "moderates" didn't vote for the hobbled program he still hankered after having Republicans like him. What he needed was to make them fear him.  I will never forgive Barack Obama for valuing the never to be had support of Republicans more than keeping faith with those who gave him the greatest opportunity of a Democratic President since 1964 which he squandered, not least for what he clearly had no reason to expect he would have.

And then there is him allowing the quisling Lieberman and other conservative Democrats prevent a far more effective healthcare bill which would certainly have been far more popular and far easier to understand than Obamacare. That started with the putrid Rahm Emanuel giving Big Pharma what they wanted at the start.

HERE'S A DESPERATE PLEA TO JOE BIDEN NEVER LET RAHM EMANUEL ANYWHERE NEAR YOUR ADMINISTRATION, HE IS A DUPLICITOUS PIECE OF SLIME.

I could go on and on and on as to how what started out promising such boldness voluntarily weakened itself through Obama's emotional need for the love of Republicans who used his race to rally the racists whose ownership of the Republican Party came to the forefront in the putrid Trump and the vile McConnell who clearly turned Obama into a half-president as soon as he took control of the Senate. I think that the Republican Party, in its entirety used Obama's race as the basis of its rally. NO REPUBLICAN WHO REMAINS IN THAT PARTY IN 2020 CAN BE ALLOWED TO ESCAPE THE RACISM WHICH THEY HAVE KNOWINGLY BENEFITED FROM AND WHICH THEY HAVE NEVER REALLY OPPOSED. The Republican Party that was made by Nixon and Goldwater, benefiting from the backlash to the great Civil Rights movement and its progress is the only Republican Party that is there now. Obama pretending that the fraudulent Snowe and Collins were not part of that was one of the more stunning things proving that even the smartest among us can be chumps of our own wishful thinking and our own timidity. No matter which Republicans may have been nice to him in the Senate, those who he worked with and schemed with to rise to the leadership of the Harvard Law Review or in the Illinois Senate, they were using him as much as he was using them.

Barack Obama is a good example of what I mentioned yesterday, the go-along-to-get-along that will go along with evil to rise in the legal profession. He was a trained lawyer, he flourished in that milieu. I have known a number of lawyers who found they couldn't stand that about their profession, a number of them went into other lines of work after trying to practice law. It was one of the biggest shocks to me to find that someone as intelligent as Obama didn't see that that was never going to work for him with the Republicans once they could make the use of his race that they would. I am virtually certain that they will use Kamala Harris's race in the same way and her gender as they used Hillary Clinton's to defeat her. Republicans can't be trusted, certainly none of those who chose to stay Republicans under Trump.

So, Mr. President, Barack Obama, I've answered that question for you. Considering the record of your presidency and how it was used by your opponents, some of them, such as your "friend" Lieberman, not officially Republicans - look at the role he is playing to try to keep the Senate in the hands of Republicans, him and his scumbag son. I am curious to see how you deal specifically with him and the two phony "moderates" of Maine but I'm really more interested in how Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to be putting things together and whether or not they have learned from your mistakes.

I told my brother the day of the election that I hoped one thing it did was definitively turn the page from the Bill Clinton years. Hoping that John Podesta never had anything to do with any official Democratic campaign or the DNC (Stacy Abrahms should be put in charge of that thing.) I hope it also definitively puts at least the period to yours as well. You should stop paling around with the billionaires, the superstars and take the example of the greatest ex-president in American history, Jimmy Carter, a man who has grown out of office and who has fully earned the esteem he is held in.

On General McCaffrey's List Of Where A Trump Coup Could Happen And (please let it be true) On His Faith That The Military Would Never Participate In One

The list of government entities that the Trump regime might reasonably depend on to conduct a coup against demorcracy given by General Barry McCaffrey is one I can believe,  The Attorney General (the Department of "Justice"), Homeland Security and Federal law enforcement, all of which were either emptied out of ethical people or in which those without ethics acted to bring Trump to power (James Comey) or quickly became strongholds of corruption.  

I'll never stop mentioning how many of the even anti-Trump figures in those, many an MSNBC featured ex-DoJ, ex-FBI lawyer were quickly proven wrong when they assured us their former colleagues who they worked with were totally dependable, not only them but others who assured us of the sterling character of the likes of Rod Rosenstein and that we should put our complete faith in the integrity and tenacity of Robert Mueller to do a full investigation (which he certainly did not), who stood by while his longtime friend William Barr mischaracterized to the American People and whose refusal to answer questions before the House committees of jurisdiction should always be how he is remembered.  

The incoming Biden administration needs to go after those agencies that did the worst things, "Homeland Security" "ICE" the Department of "Justice" the FBI because it is clear that they are going to remain a problem for the country and they have been full of corruption.  Frankly, I've come to distrust the judgement of lawyers with long careers in the Federal Government just as much as I have the Supreme Court.  The willful credulity of anyone who could have expressed admiration of a piece of slime like Rod Rosenstein discredits their judgement in anything.  I think lawyers and judges and "justices" are far too comfortable with overlooking the evils done by others in their profession, especially if they have had professional and personal relationships with them.   When I read that the very dubious judge of morality,  James Comey expressed private reservations about Rosenstein, saying that he'd look out for himself and his career, I had to wonder about all of the lawyers and buddies of Rosenstein and their judgement on all issues.   I mean, he's the man who promoted they rip infants away from their parents as a means of pleasing Trump and Sessions and, no doubt Steve Miller and Steve Bannon.  That is not something that would have come from nowhere, that would have had to be a part of who he was all along.

The legal profession and supposed law enforcement had better be forced to live up to the ridiculous fiction-based reputation they enjoy - the American People being total suckers for cop-shows that we are.  Once the full record of these things is released at the start of the new year I would like to see all of the figures in all of those and other departments of the government brought before the House committees of jurisdiction and, if there is a Georgia miracle, the Senate and held to answer for themselves.  Including Rosenstein and Mueller.  

And while we're at it,  I'd like to know how many other generals like the degenerate liar Anthony Tata are or recently have been maintained in the military.  There are way too many scumbags like him there for a democracy to safely maintain.

Oooh, and on the third anniversary of my first post slaming "Hamilton"

Guess that now that Charles Pierce has said what I got slammed for saying three years earlier that it's OK to say that the Broadway smash hit "Hamilton" is a lie from pretty much start to finish.  Only Ishmael Reed and a number of Black scholars said it before I got to it. 

In the paper, titled “‘As Odious and Immoral a Thing’: Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden History as an Enslaver,” Jessie Serfilippi, a historical interpreter at the mansion, examines letters, account books and other documents. Her conclusion — about Hamilton, and what she suggests is wishful thinking on the part of many of his modern-day admirers — is blunt. “Not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally,” she writes. “It is vital,” she adds, “that the myth of Hamilton as ‘the Abolitionist Founding Father’ end.”

Annette Gordon-Reed and Joanne Freeman, both respected scholars of the founding era—Gordon-Reed won a Pulitzer for her work on Thomas Jefferson and the Hemings family, and Freeman is the editor of the Hamilton papers for the Library of America—are quoted as supporting Serfilippi's work as yet another step in the country's overdue reckoning with how thoroughly saturated by the slave economy the first years of the republic were. In fact, as long as we're talking Broadway musicals, the showstopper "Molasses to Rum" from 1776, in which Edward Rutledge of South Carolina arraigns his northern colleagues for their "high-pocrisy" on the subject, may be closer to the truth of things than the more recent sensation was.

    Travis Bowman, the senior curator for the New York State Bureau of Historic Sites, who supervised the internal review of Ms. Serfilippi’s paper, said the relative lack of research on enslaved people in Hamilton’s household partly reflects the overall paucity of scholarship on Northern slavery. And the complexities of gradual abolition (New York’s gradual abolition law of 1799 phased slavery out over decades) makes tracking enslaved people, and clearly determining their status, particularly difficult. “It’s a very odd period,” Mr. Bowman said. “Many people were granting half-freedom. If enslaved people walked away, they didn’t go after them.”

Which proves a number of things, one is that you cannot trust a NYT Bestseller biography such as the one Lin Manuel Miranda pretty much entirely based is big lie on to be anything like good history or biography.  Another is that even the college-credentialed will buy bogus history if you put it in a costume and put it on stage or, even worse, on the screen.  Worse still if you do it with music and dancing and being an extended and far less rigorously researched Constitution Rock show.  

Another is that the NYT is hardly in the business of rigorous fact checking in much of what it promotes.   As Ishamael Reed pointed out, it was one of the foremost forces pushing that piece of garbage into the show biz stratosphere.  Lastly, I was right, the dolts who trolled me over it were wrong.  You'd have thought that they, college credentialed, all of them, would have noticed the citations and quotations, but, no, that doesn't count for anything.

And if you think this is me saying "tolt ya so" twice in two days,  about that you'd be right.   Now, who's going to break the news to Rosie O'Donnell? 

Never, ever, EVER rely on show biz to give you biography or history.  The percentage that gets it right is nugatory.

Maurice Ravel - Le Tombeau de Couperin

 

Vlado Perlmutter, piano

Every movement of this popular suite is written in memory of men killed in World War I, all of them friends of Ravel.  I remember when I first heard that I couldn't square it with the general sound of the music, it's certainly memories of his friends alive in the first case but remembered after their deaths, knowing the end they had.  Later, when I studied the movements myself and saw the dedications I couldn't play them as if they were lighthearted or light.  They weren't people I knew in life.

The great but largely forgotten pianist Vlado Permuter studied all of Ravel's music with him so he certainly knew how they were supposed to go.  I post this in memory of all of them.

Sorry About Any Confusion

As early readers of my first post this morning may have guessed, I'm having my recurring eye problem and relied too much on automatic spell check, resulting in several sentences saying the opposite of what was clearly intended.   Sorry for that.  I can't find my fresnel lens,  cleaning is the enemy of efficiency when it's someone as unaccustomed to tidiness as I am.  I may find other corrections as I look back later in the day. 

Sanders For Secretary of Labor With One Reservation

I started looking at the lefty mags and podcasts and YouTubes to see the inevitable slamming of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and see that In These Times says Bernie Sanders is lobbying to be made Secretary of Labor.  If Biden can be assured that he would be replaced by a Democrat from Vermont I say let him give him the job,  if the Senate won't confirm him to it, Biden should do what Trump did and arrange that he have it on a permanent temporary basis in fact.  It would give us a chance to see if the great claim of the Democratic Socialists is true, that the voters would prefer their policies on labor if only they knew it (and why didn't that work with healthcare any better than it did?) it would perhaps rightly give the socialist and socialist curious an important reward for not ratfucking the party this time and it would give Bernie Sanders something to do in his, no doubt, last public position.  I don't see any sign that Sanders is at all debilitated by his age, I doubt that he'd fall asleep in public like Wilber Ross does and he wouldn't drool like Trump does.   

I have every confidence that Bernie Sanders would not try to break any laws to pursue economic justice, I think he might even do a great job.  I have been very critical of Sanders when he was acting as a pseudo-Democratic carpetbagger and, especially, his cult but I do have some respect for him.

One thing is clear, though, Biden should not remove any Democrats from the Senate where they might be missed and, as we found when Massachusetts put the Republican Ken doll in Ted Kennedy's seat,  even in the most reliably Democratic state it's not an entirely sure thing that a Democrat will replace them.  It is one of the dumbest things that Obama and Bill Clinton did, to weaken the Democratic caucuses in the legislative branch.  If he chooses to not appoint Sanders for that reason he should make that clear to the public.  And if Sanders is really devoted to the issues he has championed, he should accept that as a valid reason for not making the appointment.   Though, as I say above, giving it to him on a de facto basis if the Senate won't confirm is something I have no problem with.  Given what we've seen in Republican-fascist controlled Senates and the often less than rigorous confirmation process even under Democrats, I'm not much bothered if a Democrat bypasses that disgusting body. 

Hate Mail - Loving The Founders You Would Have Liked Them To Be Instead Of How They Were And The Necessity Of Knocking Them Off Their Plinths

IT should be a lot less surprising than it is that the party that consciously and purposely took in the white racists who hated the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts turn out to be a party that relies on voter suppression and, now, totally rejecting the will of the majority as expressed by their votes in order to maintain their power.

When Lyndon Johnson predicted that "the South" would be lost to Democrats for a generation he was explicitly acknowledging that those who would go over to the Republicans would do so BECAUSE THE RIGHT OF BLACK PEOPLE TO VOTE WOULD NO LONGER BE SUPPRESSED, the suppression of the vote was an integral part of their means of retaining total control as their dominant presence in the anti-democratically constituted Senate was another of their means of ruling against the will of the majority of Americans.

That non-racist conservatives, even some racists who, nevertheless stopped short of disenfranchisement made common cause with the racist segregationists, means that EVERY REPUBLICAN WHO HAS STAYED IN THE PARTY IS A PARTY TO THAT CORRUPT CALCULATION.   I have no doubt that Mitch McConnell is an old line hater of Black People, that Jeff Sessions certainly was, that many of those from the former Confederacy and some in the North are.  If Lindsay Graham isn't he's certainly not at all uncomfortable with them, neither is Susan Collins whose power base in the Second District is, I will assure you, the home of racists as vicious as any who live in Alabama or Kentucky.   The Republicans on the Supreme Court who gutted the Voting Rights Act on the pretense that we've overcome racism is, clearly, within that category, the psychopathic self-hating Clarence Thomas someone I'll leave to those who claim to understand psychological pathology. 

That the Republicans-fascists of 2020 observe no bounds in their desire to suppress the votes of those who won't vote for their corruption and those who, on the basis of their ethnicity,  most of all because they are African Americans, and, once the votes are cast to suppress the counting of votes in the way the Rehnquist Court did in 2000 should come as no surprise, the modern Republican Party is a party of the minority, the privileged, the white and racist, the last thing an entitled, enriched minority wants is majority rule.  As I will never stop pointing out, neither did the founders, just about every which one either held people in slavery for their economic benefit or who benefited, admittedly, from the violent holding of slaves, their forced labor, the degradation of their lives and their families.  Not a single one of the founders does not belong in that category, not even the racist John Adams.  The thing was a corrupt bargain is still there and empowered by law,  corruption which was never repealed and amended out of the thing, the Electoral College, the anti-democratically constituted Senate - who the founders gave the power to confirm judges and justices and other important appointments and matters, just in case a person believing in equality and democratic rule ever became president.  

As to the legitimacy of the 1787 Constitution as ratified by the several states, the 20th century historian Charles Beard in his indispensable An Economic Interpretation Of The Constitution Of The United States shows quite well that the ratification process was rigged by the financial and elites even in terms of the eligible, white, male, propertied citizenry who would have had any kind of a say in it, in no case did more than about five percent of those participate in the extremely difficult to attend process, even most of them were excluded by plan from it.  I may go into that in the future.  But an earlier section of the book in which he describes the various "founding fathers" and their participation in the scheme to draft the Constitution we are supposed to revere is full of contrasts that show the majority of them, even those who are (wrongly) exempted from the stain of slavery were in on the most corrupt aspects of it.

 Benjamin Franklin, who at the time of the Convention was so advanced in years as to be of little real weight in the formation of the Constitution, seems to have entertained a more hopeful view of democracy than any other member of that famous group. He favored a single-chambered legislature, opposed an absolute veto the executive, and resisted the attempt to place property qualifications on the
suffrage.  He signed the Constitution when it was finished,but he was accounted by his contemporaries among the doubters and was put forward by the opponents of ratification in Pennsylvania as a candidate for the state convention, but was defeated. 

Elbridge Gerry, of Massachusetts, participated extensively in the debates of the Convention, but his general view of government was doubtless stated in his speech on May 31, when he expressed himself as not liking the election of members of the lower house by popular vote. He said on this point : "The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots. In Massts. it has been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute. One principal evil arises from the want of due provision for those employed in the administration of Governnt. It would seem to be a maxim of democracy to starve the public servants. He mentioned the popular clamour in Massts. for the. reduction of salaries and the attack made on that of the Govr. though secured by the spirit of the Constitution itself. He had, he said, been too republican heretofore: he was still, however, republican, but had been taught by experience the danger of the devilling spirit.” 

It should be noted that elsewhere in the book Beard goes into Gerry's care in making sure the new Constitution and the system it set up was in accord with his massive land speculations in the West, turning public lands into his lands for his own profit.  

It should also be noted that one of the favorite means of today's Republican-fascists of maintaining the power of the minority over the majority,  the Gerrymandering of districts,was named for this scumbag among the founders.  For anyone who doubts the evils of the founders are still alive, still permitted by the document they wrote to protect their own economic interests, to thwart democracy and, certainly, to prevent anything like equality from happening.  He was Madison's Vice-President, chosen by Madison so as not to present a difficulty to him being succeeded by James Monroe.  A deep dive into the politics of the Founders generation with political power under the Constitution they wrote is an interesting one, you will need a nose plug, their behavior in detailed history instead of in truncated hagiographic grade-school "history" may cure many of their dangerous romanticism concerning them and their motives.  They were no better than our politicians today, though many Democrats and even the odd Republican rise above the general level of them.  We've certainly got something they lacked, experience with what they wrought.  Even Alito talked up learning from experience yesterday.  If Trump had won the election I doubt he'd have said it.

Tolt Ya So

 

 

Seems I said some of this a while ago.

No One Makes It More Fun Than Olbermann - Trump's Latest Scam

 

Against Regionalism As Made Worse By The Friggin' Founders And Their Dirty Electoral College Scheme

I've been looking at the percentages to find how many people in the most benighted states voted for Biden over fascism, as far as I can tell the worst of those is West Virginia where 29.6% of the vote went to Biden and 68.7 went for fascism.  It's surprising how even some of the relatively worst states, as could be predicted, had far higher percentages of their Voters going for Biden over fascism than you'd guess from the maps and the coverage.

One of the worst things about American political systems are that they are winner-take-all, the Electoral College exacerbates not only that by disappearing many voters entirely, effectively nullifying their votes, but it also promotes regional hatred and division, especially as seen in the disgusting "red-blue" maps that are a ubiquitous lie about both the devotion to democracy in "blue" states and the love of fascism in "red" states.   The fact is in states having among the highest percentages of those who voted for democracy, Biden, there are dangerously high levels of voting for the worst and most blatantly criminal would-be fascist dictator in our history.   Massachusetts had 32.6% supporting fascism, California, 33.4%, Oregon a startling 40.6%.  Maine, a state which can go back to its place of shame had 44.2% vote for the fascist thug. Little, lily white Vermont has the distinction of having "only" 30.8% who voted for fascism this time. 

I don't know the extent to which people still have a strong sense of identity with the state they live in,  Maine has always had something of a skeptical attitude towards that, probably a remnant of the inferiority complex our ancestors had when it was, first, a colony of Massachusetts and later colonized by "people from away" who loved to find us natives quaintly stupid and amusing.   But I'm sure that the Electoral College does nothing to broaden our imaginations about ourselves as it reinforces negative stereotypes about those in other places.  

It was one of the oddest things about my youth that the first time I ever heard anyone express the idea that "Southerners are stupid" wasn't from some New England Yankee but from a college student from Indiana who came to New England for college.  I'd never heard anyone accuse an entire region of the country of stupidity during my entire upbringing until I went to college.  I remember how shocked I was to hear someone who aspired to be taken as educated expressing such an illiberal opinion. Then I was exposed to more of the type from other places, not a few of them from other parts of the North East and I'm sure that other people in other places in the country could report analogous experiences expressing other regional stereotypes.  

I have noted before that, contrary to stereotype, that several New England states have had chief executives and important state positions filled by those "from away," Maine has had a governor and a senator who came here from Virginia (Angus King) and a really great leader of our State legislature from South Carolina (Libby Mitchell).  Other states have had important offices filled by those from elsewhere. I'd love to have a list of those in other states who have the same that could be said about them, the more the better, the more we break down the divisions, the better.

Time To Play The Hardest Of Hard Ball And Aim For Their Heads

Don't be surprised if it turns out that Trump and McConnell and Republican-fascists are going to win much of the time even as they lost the presidency, even as a majority of Americans don't want their rule over them because they are able to lie and dupe the susceptible and they do so with the full power of the free press and free speech in the moderny form of that in which lies are as good as the truth if they get you what you want.  Trump is trying to overturn the will of a 5 million majority of Voters with the most baseless of lies, either by reinstalling himself in the presidency as the Bush v Gore 5 put Bush II in or through doing as much damage to President Biden as he did to the legacy of Barack Obama.  McConnell will not hesitate to nullify the election, a one-man majority in that anti-democratic abomination, the Senate.  And he and his fellow Republican-fascists and the media they rely on will do it through lying and hypocrisy, which is a post-facto lie made such by act. 

The lie that there is a right to lie is the lie that was successfully sold to a majority of college-credentialed, perhaps smart lefties even as it does not get them what they want as it gets their ideological opponents what they want over and over and over again.  As I have pointed out the "civil liberties" industry, largely associated with the left in previous decades played a major part in the selling of that meta-lie. 

It never fails to astound me how the American secular left can watch day after day, year after year, decade after decade how lies enable the billionaire-millionaire gangsters yet if someone suggests that lies should not be able to be spread freely in the mass media that they fall on the First Amendment fainting couch.  Those in the self-interested media no less than those in the lawyering-liaring professions and among scholars, such as those are.  It's astonishing how evidence proof, how experience-proof the modern mindset is, especially among those with college credentials and tenured faculty positions. 

In pondering that bizarre fact, in trying to discern something like a theory of why lies should have a "right" to be told and spread in the mass media, I have come up with several ideas as to how that stupidest of all articles of faith on the secular left took hold and swamped egalitarian democracy WITH THE HELP OF THE ALLEGED CHAMPIONS OF EGALITARIANDEMOCRACY.

I look at the early champions of it and see on one hand the secular-atheist left associated with Marxism and, to a lesser extent anarchism (anarchism is incapable of being more than a lesser sort of such stupidity) and it used to puzzle me until I realized that the Marxists are not that much different in result from the fascists, there has never been a lasting attempt at a Marxist democracy, Marxism uniformly persisted as red fascism, an oppressive, evil regime which created a gangster ruling class interspersed with Stalinist style terror states in which even the gangster ruling class was managed through murders, violence and terror, not really different from Nazism though with a somewhat different style and emphasis on who got killed.  

It is no wonder that the American Marxist left, realizing from the time of Victor Berger that there was no prospect of Marxism gaining power through the vote would either take his road of producing public good - and being derided as a "sewer socialist" who improved the lives of people in Milwaukee as the "real" Marxist produced nothing - or they would take the more typical communist road of trying to lie their way to power.   Which is where I think a lot of the lefty free speech absolutism got a good deal of its encouragement.  

The other was based in the thinking of the likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes whose free speech writing, one finds, if they look hard and critically at his thinking, was in general service to his elitist cynicism, his disdain for The People and democracy, and his enormous enthusiasm for Darwinist amorality, a struggle in which nothing but power mattered, something as quaint as the truth over opportunistic lies.  Of course he didn't put it in those terms in his legal writing, they teach you how to lie in law school, that was true of Harvard then as it is now as so many of Trump's hired liars learned how to do it there. 

Nothing good comes from lying except in the most rare and artificial of instances.  It is, of course, a good thing to lie to the Nazis about where the Jews are hiding, it's good to lie to anyone if the lie stands a good chance of preventing of righting against evil.  If the lies hadn't enabled the Nazis rise to power, there would not have been any reason to tell the lie.  It is interesting to me that it is the force of evil that presents the conundrum in which lies can not only be permissible but are good.  The regime that forces that is the opposite of good. 

That truth makes the morality of telling such lies fraught with difficulty and requires that the person be honest about the rare conditions in which such a lie is good instead of self-serving.   It is one of the things I'm sure the legal liars, those in journalism and academia are schooled in doing, convincing themselves that their lies are those kinds of lies when they are nothing like that or that they are innocuous.  I've become more aware of how either outright lying or cutting the corners of the truth are within academia, just like in most areas of life.

But it is when the lies are spread by the mass media, radio and television, network, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube that they are not only endangering democracy they are a clear and present and likely fatal danger to American democracy. 

I see that ever more clearly, ever more demonstrated in our horrific reality as well as an honest appraisal of our history and am ever less confident that we will overcome the truncated view of that as given in the second-rate 18th century poetry of the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution.  

I was reminded of just how badly written and what an invitation to dishonesty that was while watching the phony hallelujah peddler Paula White recently ranting out a curse in King Jamesian rhetoric  in which she called out spirits to keep Trump in power.  As if any but the most evil spirits would do that.    Any First Amendment that insists that such fraudulent religion is not a con job to be treated as one is a First Amendment that was badly written and stupidly promulgated.   The parts dealing with speech and press are similarly inadequate as the Second Amendment is dangerous in an even more deadly way.   The stupidity of it tacitly asserts that a. we are not to trust the most obvious of truths right in front of us, b. that we are to never learn anything about even the greatest dangers that have been allowed to come to pass under that evil enabling assertion of "rights" and "freedom" by the enemies of the rights and freedoms of pretty much anyone else. 

We have come to the point where the opponents of equality, of democracy, of decency have brought their use of the Constitution to such perfection to serve their ends that we cannot safely keep things as they are.  We can either have the United States Constitution as it is written and certainly just about impossible to amend or we can have a decent life in an egalitarian democracy in a sustainable environment.  We can't have both.  If the Senate stays in Republican hands and if they successfully, in concert with the Supreme Court and the mass media thwart the aspirations for egalitarian democracy and the survival of the biosphere, the United States is finished or it is an ever increasingly terrible terror state.  The Roberts and Rehnquist courts did their best to arm the fascists with automatic weapons.  Think about that as Trump calls his thugs out with their guns the the Supreme Court under Republican-fascist majorities have armed them with using the words of the friggin' Founders.

We either change things to prevent FOX, Sinclair, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc from endangering equality, election of a real representatives on the basis of accurate information, the right we all have to moral treatment by our fellow humans, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD EVEN ENDANGERING THE PUBLIC SAFETY FROM ARMED GOONS AND LOONS or those parts of the country who are no longer willing to tolerate the rule by the minority who elect the most Senators and who pack the Supreme Court and lower courts with goons and loons should leave and form our own egalitarian democracies.  I think the only means of preventing an eventual break up of the thing as it is now will be the abolition of the electoral college, the democratization of the Senate and the reigning in of the non-democratically constituted Supreme Court and, frankly,  as long as the country is at the mercy of the most benighted of small states with people of greatly enhanced power under the Constitution, I don't see much prospect of that happening.  I may miss my dear cousins in Florida, my relatives and friends in other parts of the country but not as much as I miss living in even the intolerable approximation of democracy we had beginning with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts.   We're on the verge of that being totally obliterated by the Court and the McConnell-Trump regime of "justice".