Lennie Tristano Quintet - Subconscious-Lee (1949-1950)

 

Lee Konitz (alto sax), Lennie Tristano (piano), Billy Bauer (guitar), Arnold Fishkin (bass), Shelly Manne (drums)

 

Subconscious-Lee as played by The Lee Konitz Quartet (2013)

 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Maeve Binchy - Golden Oldie My Arse

 

Golden Oldie My Arse 

 

Friggin' RTÉ has changed its website so the things I used to be able to post so easily and neatly I can't even get to play on my own computer.  I've got to go through friggin' Itunes now!
   
There's a long introduction before things start, the play starts at about 3:30. If I had longer I'd find the credits and post them like I used to.  Why they changed their website when it worked so well . . . I think a lot of that happens so IT staff can make believe they're doing something so they'll keep their jobs.

one gets the feeling they might have seen it differently . . .

CONTINUING THE dissection of the ACLU's Stephen Rohde's critique of the ACLU's Bert Neuborne's inadequate critique of the consequences of the Supreme Court's First Amendment rulings.

That Neuborne may be the first to focus on the order and placement of the terms of the First Amendment is of less importance than that he fails to make the case why there is anything lyrical, musical, or poetic in that order, placement, and structure, or more importantly, that any of this has or will make any difference in how the First Amendment should be interpreted or applied. Neuborne repeatedly argues that it is “tragic” that the Supreme Court has “utterly ignored Madison’s music,” but he does not cite a single decision that would have been decided differently based on the specific order or placement in which the rights in the First Amendment are listed. He does argue that in certain cases the Supreme Court should rely more on the First Amendment instead of the 14th Amendment, but not because of the order and placement in which the rights are listed.

Oh give me a friggin' break. The biggest problem with the language of the friggin' First Amendment is that it is poetically vague and could be used to blow a big enough hole in democracy to kill it. If you think that's not true, well, for People of Color in the United States that has been the status quo for the large majority of years in which The Bill of Rights has been in place and, in fact, many of the years in which the 14th Amendment and other Civil War Amendments have been in place, the Roberts Court killing the Voting Rights Act ending the brief period in which that was not the case.  

The First Amendment interpreted to allow privileges to lie to the media being an integral part in the  attacks on and throttling of equal rights, equal justice under law. In that the granting of privileges to corporations, including the artificial entity "the press" and to the millionaires and billionaires who own it is as integral a part of it as the dispossessing of those without money, power or otherwise privileged, making their money "speech" effectively gives them a monopoly on "speech" leveraged to swamp the "speech" of those without money. None of these things happens unrelated to the others, some nobody can shout the truth at the top of their lungs and will be swamped by someone telling lies backed by billionaire "speech-money" on TV or the radio or the internet. Look at how the competent medical experts in the Covid epidemic have been thwarted by a dangerously large number of suckers buying into the Republican-fascist lies against the truth of medical science if you want a real life example of what the Supreme Court-ACLU conception of The First Amendment produces.

It is the crisis that this kind of First Amendment use has brought us to outside of the courtrooms and white-collar world of lawyers and judges and "justices" which even someone as invested in that fantasy land as the ACLU's Bert Neuborne has noticed is dangerous. I believe that even some of the ACLU's lawyers who deal with the real consequences of Republican-fascist ascendancy as enabled by the media lying with impunity know it is their own ideological position that has led to that fascist ascendancy and the Court's attack on Voting Rights and equal rights as well as its privileging the filthy rich and their financial interests - something the court has far more reliably done in its history than issue bombshell rulings like Brown v. Board - which has not been the enormous success that it should have been, in no small part due to its "free press" rulings.

Indeed, the book is reduced to little more than imaginative throat-clearing, which never matures into a useful theory of jurisprudence. Would it make any difference if the clauses protecting Free Speech and Free Press were listed before rather than after the Establishment or Free Exercise clauses or after rather than before the Petition clause? Would any specific doctrine of First Amendment law more robustly advance the goals of our democracy if the Court took into consideration the particular order in which the rights are listed in the First Amendment? Neuborne leaves these questions largely unexamined.

It was, obviously, a stupid tactic to try to fix things through the language of The First Amendment on Neuborne's try.  The language of it is the source of the problems, it is inspecific and makes no distinction between the right to tell the truth and there being no right to lie.  I probably would have told him the problem with that would be that the fascists on the court would do to his argument exactly what his ACLU comrade does, quibble about such stuff so as to empower the worst of us at the expense of the most vulnerable.  Doing linguistic gymnastics with "the language of" the Constitution is probably more useful to those who want to do evil with it than those who want to use it for good, especially those who aren't so interested in the truth and honesty as a majority of Supreme Court "justices" could justifiably be suspected of being.   I doubt they're any more honest a class than the members of Congress who are something none of the "justices" are, answerable to the further judgement of the voters.

 

The problem is the poetry of the thing, it is not specific enough in distinguishing between speech which is legitimately protected and that which is not legitimately protected.  Lies, libels, slanders, racist slurs, sexist stereotyping, and a wide range of other anti-truth, anti-egalitarian, pro-inequality speech is as allowed in its poetry as the truth, the advocacy of equality, the truth that all People are created equal.

The "even handedness" that gives lies the same protected status as the truth enables it far more than it does the truth because lies can be constructed in any way that the one lying figures it will work best for them, taking advantage of our weaknesses, our evil inclinations, our inegalitarian predispositions and, most of all OUR FINANCIAL SELFISHNESS.  It was that financial selfishness that almost led to there being no Bill of Rights as the aristocrats, especially the slave owners among them, had every reason to have the Constitution be silent on such matters. Why, if those were protected someone might, eventually, ask if "All men are created equal," if there is to be "egual justice under law" that certainly wasn't working out for those held in slavery, in wage slavery, deprived of the vote which the founding document required for any government, including its courts, to have any legitimacy. Someone might ask Madison and Jefferson and the others how they could justify keeping slaves in slavery, certainly deprived of free speech and every other freedom enumerated in the Bill of Rights. Something that the Supreme Court has had no problem with for the entire lives of all of the Founders, in fact using the language of the Constitution and the record of those Founders to declare Black People non-persons in so far as that document was concerned, the current court trying to set things back to the period when later courts maintained Jim Crow as slavery-lite.  

To be sure, Neuborne levels trenchant criticism against Supreme Court decisions regarding a wide range of issues (including in particular campaign finance reform and voting rights), but he never explains how these specific cases would have been decided differently had the Court considered the order and placement in which the rights in the First Amendment are listed. Neuborne is a lively and engaging writer, but his book promises more than just another critical survey of Supreme Court decisions, and he does not deliver on that promise.

If that were all, it would be disappointing. But it’s worse. In the midst of paying lip service to the “music” and “poetry” of the First Amendment, Neuborne executes a disturbing “bait and switch” by turning his book into an argument in favor of less First Amendment protection and more government regulation of free speech.

In the pantheon of landmark First Amendment decisions,[It's more like a pandaemonium] few are as important as New York Times v. Sullivan (and its progeny), in which the US Supreme Court in 1964 decided that in defamation cases brought by government officials (and later public figures) the First Amendment requires that a plaintiff not only prove that the defendant published a false statement, but also that the defendant was motivated by “actual malice,” i.e., the defendant actually knew the statement was false or published it in reckless disregard of the truth.

Speaking for a unanimous Court, Justice William Brennan wrote that

we consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.

According to Kenneth A. Paulson, president and CEO of the First Amendment Center at the Newseum in Washington, DC, and dean of the College of Mass Communication at Middle Tennessee State University, Sullivan “changed American journalism. It set the stage for the boom in investigative reporting in the decades to follow and truly invigorated the watchdog role of the press.” As Anna Stolley Persky wrote in the ABA Journal, “Columbia University law professor David Pozen, who specializes in constitutional and national security issues, says that Sullivan and other cases from that era are ‘seen as valorizing an aggressive form of journalism and promoting the idea that courts are the institutional safeguards of that kind of journalism.’”

I will start by noting that Kenneth A. Paulson, William Brennan and Stephen Rohde seem to favor the press being "aggressive," uninhibited, robust, and wide-open," "vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp," BUT NOTICE THEY DO NOT SEEM TO VALUE THEM BEING CAREFUL TO TELL THE TRUTH.  In fact, the line of cases that Rohde holds up as wonderful GIVE PERMISSION TO AN "AGRESSIVE . . . SHARP" MEDIA TO LIE AND PUTS THE OBLIGATION TO HOLD THEM TO TELLING THE TRUTH TO THOSE THEY LIE ABOUT!

That is what these idiot lawyers and "justices" think will produce good and aid The People in being able to govern the country through their voting for representatives who are as free to lie, even freer if they lie in their official capacity, and these meatheads figure that is going to end up well.  Well, the history of the country since the Sullivan Decision and the freest press in the history of the world has not produced anything good, it has produced a country in which a dangerously large number of suckers for media carried lies got us Trump and the Republican-fascists in governorships, in control of legislatures, etc.  

That is what William Brennan sitting on the insanely and ahistorically held to be  sacrosanct Supreme Court figured allowing the media to lie with effective impunity would not lead to.  If he thought it would lead to what it has led to even as he wrote the decision,  that would definitively discredit him in the eyes of any any decent, wide-awake lover of equality and democracy.  Any rational person would hold him to be a short sighted fool, not someone whose ersatz wisdom should be held up as supportive of a point.  Anyone who knew the first thing about who has held power for the majority of the history of the United States would know it is not We The People, as a unified body of equals but those who have money and the least morals, slave owners, white supremacists, segregationists - who had the power to keep Black People and others in a perpetual state of subjugation even as they are certainly as much a part of We The People as the upper-class, lily-white members of the Supreme Court up till Lyndon Johnson integrated it after the decision was made.
 
Things may have been bad before when unamplified voices, ink on paper were what spread racism, sexism, hatred of minorities, anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic, immoral lies, with the coming of electronic and mass communications, concentrated and owned by millionaires and billionaires, things have become far worse.  When means of manipulating the actions and attention of millions of people as is done regularly on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, when those algorithms can be manipulated by a concerted effort as idiotically lauded by the fans of the amusing "Santorum" campaign (as if that wouldn't be harnessed by Santorum's side who had the money to really do it right) things have far surpassed the imaginations of a William Brennan and the other idiots on the Warren Court who couldn't imagine where this was going back in 1964 but no one today has that excuse, we have seen the more than half a century of where America has gone under the period of lies privileged by the First Amendment.

The idea that there is a right to lie is so obviously wrong and malignant that it must have taken a monumental act of willful stupidity and ignorance to create one.  The idea that it is the responsibility of those lied about BY THE PROFESSIONAL MEDIA WHO SHOULD HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO CHECK THE TRUTH OF WHAT THEY PUBLISH was as obviously stupid. The Supreme Court or a lower court could have found against the New York Times for irresponsibly carrying false information and awarded court costs to the victim of those lies without serous damage to the corporation. 

Instead the "bombshell" addicted Warren Court decided to do what has produced the rule of lies and the full and not unlikely success of the destruction of equality and democracy in the United States. The ACLU has been one of the most aggressive enablers of the liars, the manipulators, the friend of the powerful, Republican money backed white supremacists, the fascists, the Nazis who may have in the early post-WWII years  seemed like a less than dangerous fringe at one time but who are certainly not that now.  Of course, to Black People, People of Color, those groups and their followers were never as little a danger as they were to affluent, white-collar lawyers and judges and "justices," they killed People of Color, they whipped up people who killed them. No doubt such people have the dubious virtues listed by the fans of lies above, "aggressive," uninhibited, robust, and wide-open," "vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp," . . . One gets the feeling that if it were members of the Supreme Court, lower court judges, the lawyer class who were the primary targets of their "aggressive, uninhibited, robust, wide-open. . . " speech and so actions, those guys might have seen it differently.   Most of the members of the media, too.  

Note:  I should have included what the "free press" under the regime of absolutism has done to the rights and lives of Women but these things get to be long and I promise to get back to that soon.  Especially the pro-pornographer rulings.

Lee Konitz and Bill Evans In Paris 1965 - Bet you couldn't anticipate every note like you would if I'd posted Rubber Soul for the 27,394th time

 

Lee Konitz: alto sax, 

Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen: double bass; 

Alan Dawson: drums, 

Bill Evans: piano

Lee Konitz et all - Geneva's Move

 

The Tristano School of Bebop was one of the three mainstreams of the Cool Jazz movement in the late forties and early fifties. (The other ones were West Coast Jazz and the group around Miles Davis and Gil Evans including other former bop musicians like the MJQ.) The "Tristano School"was a group of musicians led by pianist Lennie Tristano and including Lee Konitz (as), Warne Marsh (ts), Billy Bauer (g), Sal Mosca (p) and Arnold Fishkin (b). This group existed from 1946, when Tristano moved to New York. In this session we see and hear Lee Konitz (as), Warne Marsch (ts), but in this clip is pianist Billy Taylor. Mundell Lowe on guitar and Ed Thigpen on drums. An instrument I have never seen in the jazz context is the mellophone, here being played by Don Elliot.

I got a yen to hear a mellophone all of a sudden.  Not something that's ever happened before.  Maybe it was all that talk about being kew-el I wanted people to hear what that really sounded like.  Lee Konitz was one of those we lost to Covid-19 last year.

Hate Mail

IT IS FUNNY considering I'm totally uninterested in being kew-el and groovy and popular which one of us writes endlessly about the crap hits of the 1960s and 70s and which one of us rarely posts anything but fairly recent music.   I looked at his pop-music blog in response to his most recent comment (which I didn't post) and was amused to see how stuck in his own post-adolescence he is.  It would be sad if it wasn't so funny. 

His good buddies from Eschaton don't seem to go there much, if the comments are anything to go by.  Either that or they're all using pseudo-pseudonyms because they don't want their regular pseudonyms associated with it.   Though they might all just be his own sockpuppets, he does tend to lose track of them there have been so many. 

* When I was in college my creepy College Republican next door neighbor invited me to go out to a bar with him a few times.  I kept refusing which led him to say, "All work and no play makes Anthony a dull boy."  To which I said, "I don't care if I'm boring."   I had corrected him when he called me "Tony," before then.   

Update:  Actually, I don't prefer "Anthony" I prefer "Ant'nee,"  as I grew up hearing it.

All Of This Corruption Is A Direct Result Of The Supreme Court's First Amendment Decisions Dataing Back To the Sullivan Decision, The Buckley v Valeo decision

 that built on the Sullivan Decision, Citizens United, etc.   Most of not all of those decisions were supported by the ACLU, prominent "civil rights" attorneys, etc. on the basis of The First Amendment.

That is why Joe Biden's agenda is being blocked by Democrats who are in the habit of corruption that the Supreme Court guaranteed with govern us with their "Free speech-press" decisions since the Warren Court.

The Tireless Little Meter Maids Of Orthography Are On The Case Again

NO, I INTENDED IT WHEN I TYPED "LAWSTERS" 

We need a word for the typical gangster lawyer who state bars, the courts, the federal courts and the Supreme Court allow to empower gangsters, those who are merely crooks to those who get people killed to those who are destroying egalitarian democracy on behalf of government of, by and for the oligarchs, the plutocrats, the fascists and other gangsters. 

We need that word badly.  Just thought I'd throw in an adverb, they don't like adverbs, either.

Before Going On With The Stephen Rohde Roasting Of Bert Neuborne I'm Asked What I'm Getting At So Here It Is

IF THE FIRST AMENDMENT PROTECTS those in the media who lie about people like Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Democratic politicians, etc. then the people who assert that that would be correct in asserting that there is a "right" to lie that is superior to the right of people to not be the target of false witness.  People have a right to lie and the "founders" though, actually, it was the members of the First Congress who wrote and voted on the thing and got it into the Constitution, intended that people telling lies had that right.

In order for self-government through elected officials to be any good at all requires people to know the truth.  If they  are told and believe lies and their votes are cast on the basis of those lies then the government that is elected on the basis of those lies will not likely produce good government.   Included in that right to lie, I guess, is included the right of politicians to lie themselves into power and to lie about what they do and to have the self-interested media lie about what they're doing and the effects of those lies being bought will perpetuate that into perpetuity.  

How is that any better than what happens in a dictatorship that stages phony elections in its effect?  

One thing that is bound to come from a dysfunctional "democracy" of that kind will be the active suppression of the truth or, minus that, the flooding of the truth with lies that lessen the good effect of the truth or its complete impotence to produce any good.  The lies told by Republican-fascists, the Murdoch and worse media are an experiment in that freedom to lie, one for which, in the Covid pandemic, the death toll is rapidly climbing toward the body count of a million.  It is far from the only high-death-toll result of the freedom to lie, though those are mostly done through foreign military intervention as the lies that got us into the Iraq debacles of the Bush presidencies, there are also body counts here, such as those who died as a result of the racist lies that maintained both slavery and its extension into Jim Crow and the related genocidal violence against other People of Color and the not dissimilar violence against women which has victims every day and is such an accustomed part of our life that it is as unremarkable as "honor killings" that get into our news when those happen in Muslim countries.  

I fully expect one of the results of the regime of lies being granted the privilege of being considered a right will be the destruction of the ability to have the truth, to have that truth be known and the good effects of that truth in real life being made real.

WE HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW THE TRUTH WHICH THE PERMISSION TO LIE DESTROYS, THAT RIGHT IS THE CONSTANT LOSS TO ALL OF US IN THE LIBERTARIAN, "FIRST AMENDMENT" ACLU-SUPREME COURT REGIME OF "FREE SPEECH-PRESS" SINCE 1964 WHEN THE SULLIVAN DECISION WAS ISSUED.  The constant drift ever towards Republican-fascism and back into Jim Crow has happened exactly lock step as the results of that decision have been enacted, starting with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 if not the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964, the first Republican to use the "Southern Strategy" of attracting and the attempted harnessing of white racism to put Republicans in power.  Any claims of it producing a "robust media" is only evidence that a robust media freed to lie will produce degenerate decadence which is the opposite of a robust egalitarian-democratic government based on The People knowing the truth and the truth making them free.  I remember the 1968 campaign, Nixon may have hated the media but they're the ones who put him in office and kept him there.  Even as it was clear he had set a presidential record as the most then corrupt president, the media pulled harder for him in 1972 against one of the most decent men to have ever gotten a party nomination, George McGovern.

I refuse to accept any of that regime of free-lying as legitimate or necessary or, in the idiotic libertarian traditional ACLU formulation a good and wonderful manifestation of robust "free speech".   Anyone who presents it as good and necessary is an accomplice to the murder of egalitarian democracy in the United States, they are doing here what the Putin gang did in Russia, what Mussolini did in Italy, what the Nazis did in Germany and literally every gangster thug anti-egalitarian democratic regime does everywhere.  

The Warren Court requiring politicians lied about to prove the mental state of the liars did, in fact, create a right to lie about politicians for liars who were protected by the near impossibility of a lied about politician to prove the required mental state of those who lied about them.  That they used a case by a white racist who sued over inaccurate information posted by those working against white supremacy in the South to make their bombshell ruling is ironic and instructive as to the dangers of court-made law.   They greatly privileged liars and, if their intent was to extend egalitarian democracy they proved they were incredibly stupid because it would empower the worst liars with the worst motives on behalf of some of the people who would be the victims of those lies so freed from restraint.  That it was a court of well-off, white males who didn't understand that it was, in fact Black People, who would be among those most damaged by that "freedom".  That it is white supremacists, including the heirs of the KKK and America's indigenous form of fascism, the Trump cult from whom and in whose behalf "freedom of speech" is being most loudly asserted today, as egalitarian democracy is holding on by its fingernails as those fascists destroy the right to vote and other rights proves my case.   Not that I expect the lawyers for liars, the "justices" of the Roberts Court to be much troubled by that, the ACLU still holding up the torch on their behalf even as they will destroy democracy.

Whine Tasting Party - Part 1 - Why I Am Not A Fan Of The First Amendment Or The Bill Of Rights

SINCE IT IS ALMOST AS RELIABLE an event as the sunrise in the morning,  I had known that my criticism of The First Amendment and its interpretation by courts and, especially, as promoted by the ACLU and other "civil liberties" hacks I had long ago copied and saved a record in a brawl caused when a former National Legal Director of the ACLU, seeing how that "free press-speech" stuff was working out in real life, producing an ever worsening Republican-fascist hegemony that endangered so many of the civil liberties and rights and lives of Black People, People of Color, LGBTQ people*, Women, etc. was having second thoughts permitting the mass media to lie with impunity . . . would produce whining.  

I will note that my criticism of The First Amendment long preceded that of Bert Neuborne (dating from my first hearing about the Skokie case) and, in fact, I was mocking the "minor 18th century poetry" of the First Amendment for more than a decade before finding out what I was mocking as dangerously utilitarian for the Republican-fascists was being praised by even the revisionist Neuborne.  I was using that phrase before I knew there was an internet.  I'm going to go through the critique of another ACLU fixture, Stephen Rohde, not to defend Neuborne but to point out some of the idiotic consequences of ACLU style rhetoric and phrasing which has gone from the mouths of lawyers arguing on behalf of the "free press" (I assume for pay) into the mouths of Republican-fascists and fascists and neo-Nazis who are the ones you're most likely to hear those phrases from, these days.  

The present day court is using The First Amendment as one of their most potent tools for corrupting our politics with billionaire money, the use of Murdoch style media lies, lies by wannabees in hate-talk-lie-talk media and online and by thousands of others including alleged and actual figures of religion.  The First Amendment as written and even more so as interpreted has certainly corrupted perhaps a majority of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, some of its most prominent members using the "freedom of religion" bit of it to do all kinds of things from discriminating against people to getting people killed in the name of "worship." 

As you can see, it's a big topic but I decided to start here:
 

Is the First Amendment Poetic?

April 8, 2015   •   By Stephen Rohde

IN THE NAME OF CELEBRATING what he sees as the music and poetry of the First Amendment, and with impeccable credentials — as former national legal director of the ACLU, founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice, and a professor of civil liberties at NYU Law School — Burt Neuborne unexpectedly sounds a sour note by urging courts to significantly cut back on constitutional protection for freedom of expression and to trust the government when it comes to regulating free speech.

Neuborne begins well, imagining that when James Madison crafted the First Amendment in 1789 at the First Congress, as part of what would become the Bill of Rights, he wrote a “textual blueprint for a robust democracy.” Neuborne explains that the thesis of this book, dear reader, is that a careful study of the order, placement, meaning, and structure of the forty-five words in Madison’s First Amendment will trigger a responsive poetic chord in you that will enable us to recapture the music of democracy in our most important political text.

Neuborne continues:

Madison deploys the foundational concepts in his First Amendment on a disciplined inside-to-outside axis, beginning in the two religious clauses with freedom of thought, progressing through three ascending levels of individual interaction with the community — free expression of an idea by an individual, mass dissemination of the idea by a free press, and collective action in support of the idea by the people — and culminating in the petition clause with the introduction of the idea into the formal process of democratic lawmaking. In short, a chronological description of the arc of a democratic idea — from conception to codification.

It’s intriguing to wonder if Madison himself had this progression in mind. But Neuborne declares that this “is not a work of history.” He readily disclaims having any special expertise about Madison’s interior life or his subjective purpose, and does not “claim that Madison himself was wholly responsible for his music.” Curiously, what we do know (as Neuborne himself acknowledges) is that Madison would have preferred to integrate throughout the Constitution the provisions that other drafters eventually organized into a separate Bill of Rights. This established historical fact seriously undermines Neuborne’s premise that Madison rigorously composed the chronological order, placement, and structure of the First Amendment.

Neuborne excuses himself from citing anything in Madison’s writings or speeches or in the writings or speeches of any of his contemporaries or in the work of any historian or legal scholar to support the notion that Madison (or anyone else) placed any significance on the particular order in which the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment are listed.

I will begin my commentary in the sprit of contemporary First Amendment Juris Prudence by asking Who the fuck cares what James Madison, dead for about a hundred eighty years, a vicious slave owner - ALL SLAVE OWNERS HOLDING PEOPLE AS PROPERTY BY VIOLENCE AND THE THREAT OF BODILY HARM AND DEATH AND, WORST OF ALL, THE DISSOLUTION OF THEIR FAMILIES - and a very reluctant "father" of the so-called Bill of Rights to start with, thought about it?  I would love to have details of how Madison kept his People-property in shackles for the entire period in which his "Bill of Rights" was the law of the land. His own double-speaking, two-step around the issue would make you wonder why anyone would imagine his own thinking on anything was at all consistent or reliably discerned.  Which James Madison would you use to make any kind of an assertion about anything he wrote or said or mistakenly had attributed to him for the purposes of the fucking Supreme Court making unlegislated, non-executive confirmed law on the topic?   About the only thing that is clear is that he (as well as the idiotically romanticized Dolly) was primarily motivated BY HIS OWN PERSONAL FINANCIAL INTERESTS, his selfishness in profiting off of keeping and selling slaves, including those both had promised their freedom. 

I will note how much time Rhode takes up with this quibble about whether or not Neuborne correctly identified as "poetry" or credited the language of the First Amendment as it stands today to James Madison is a common tactic of dishonest discourse, go for the merely unimportant and insubstantial as a means of attacking the more serious points in something.  I'm happy to take up the tactic to point out what's wrong with both of them to show what is wrong with it.

It is sheer insanity to believe that a document, the Constitution, whose own authors, if we can reliably can rely on anything about them, would disclaim had the character of divinely inspired infallible Scripture, (which in the very preface says can be overturned as it fails to protect our lives and our freedoms, as, in fact, it doesn't) should allow those long dead corpses and their far from fixed thought to rule our life instead of our own thinking on the history and hard experience of the regime of law they set into place.  

If we need to keep going back to the 1800 or a few years earlier to set the limits on our law and lives now, you wonder why we should have gone to the bother of struggling against slavery, for universal suffrage, for rights of workers, for equality of any kind - all of which the language of the Constitution is used by the Supreme Court and other courts to set back to the status quo ante even now.

Not a single Black Person, other Person of Color or Woman had a hand in the writing, the adoption or or, until much later, the interpretation of The First Amendment. It is not sacred Scripture, it is not handed down by God, it is not in accord with The Law, The Gospel or the Prophets, none of them would have identified a right to lie, as current courts and the ACLU maintain there is.

If is clear that Madison and his fellow founders intended that their violent, vicious holding of Black People in slavery continue as an active and life-long part of their law making regime, we had to fight a terrible Civil War to merely legally end the support of that system, though the Supreme Court and lesser courts reestablished de facto, unofficial though not much less terrible inequality and, in fact, slavery on the theoretically freed Black People in much of the country, even as the Rehnquist and Roberts court are in the active process - along with the unshackled, privileged to lie media, of reestablishing that after the great Civil Rights Movement got an earlier court to reverse that on an all too temporary basis.  Using the Constitution of Madison et al as their tool to reimpose Jim Crow jr. 

If you think Madison's thought from his least favorable to slavery period, perhaps the 1780s, till his death in 1836 grew and changed for the better, it didn't.  That link above shows that:

In 1829, Madison participated in a Virginia constitutional convention convened to decide if non-property-holding citizens should be able to vote—and took the opportunity to argue that African Americans, both enslaved and free, should be part of the count for Virginia’s House of Delegates. He took to the floor to argue that “it is due to…our character as a people, that they should be considered, as much as possible, in the light of human beings, and not as mere property.”[17] And yet, when facing financial strain in the 1830s, Madison did not accede to these principles, instead selling several of his slaves to make financial ends meet—a decision he described as “yield[ing] to the necessity.”[18]

Madison’s conflicting views on the institution of slavery manifested in highly contradictory ways throughout his life—from his relationship with Sawney and his emancipation of Billey, to his failure to follow through on his Revolutionary principles or his own moral beliefs. Historians continue to grapple with these paradoxes. Michael Signer recently argued that “Madison applied a different political philosophy to matters concerning the state to those concerning his own house… At the national level … he believed slavery presented an existential threat to a country premised on freedom. At Montpelier, with slaves he felt he treated well, he saw no such conflict.”[19] Similarly, Jack Rakove has claimed that “Madison’s reluctance to challenge slavery outright or in public can thus be explained—if not justified—as a concession to political reality.”[20]

Yet by the end of his life, Madison was no longer even convinced that emancipation was superior to slavery. In 1836, he ended a letter to the Editor of the Farmers’ Register with this unexpected conclusion:

    It is most obvious, they [slaves] themselves are infinitely worsted by the exchange from slavery to liberty—if, indeed, their condition deserves that name.[21]

Ultimately, Madison’s personal dependence on slavery led him to question his own, once enlightened, definition of liberty itself.

These lawyers, Neuborne and Rhode, both on behalf of and having a history of working for one of the premier groups attacking the establishment of religion by the government taking this religious view of The First Amendment and The Constitution is more than merely ironic, it is rank hypocrisy.  The idolatrous worship of The Constitution and, especially, The Bill of Rights, has ripened into something like an American Imperial pagan cult.

One of the most annoying phrases used by lawyers, by judges by "justices" declaims that "the law" must be "even handed" in its application, though that pose is notably able to obviously impose even the most severe injustices on the losers.  We have "justices" on the Supreme Court who can even claim that court filing schedules are sufficient to allow the state to kill an unjustly sentenced man (goddamned Sandra Day O'Conner joining other Republican fascists in that one, as I remember) and imposing the loser of the election of their own political party, keep The People from voting and their votes to count.  The Court is not and never has been anything like a reliable dispenser of justice, in most of its history it has been notable for its privileging the privileged, starting with the Supreme Court "justices" who were slave owners and who made many self-benefitting pro-slavery rulings.  They are not an institution that is friendly to equality or democracy except on rare occasion and on some of those their "wisdom" has been about as wise as their "justice" tends to be just. 

No, no legitimate government can ever take an "even-handed" approach to the truth, to false-witness against individuals and, even more so, racial, ethnic, religious, gender groups, no legitimate government could use "The First Amendment" to privilege and enable those who lie for profit, those who pay them to lie for them in the mass media and on social-disease media.  No legitimate government can attack the rights of The People to vote and have their votes counted and determinative of the government that will govern them.  Yet the Constitution and, especially, The First Amendment has been used to do all of those and far worse by the courts and beyond.  To pretend these are not only serious problems but the very things that are bringing us to fascism by "civil libertarians" has led to me thinking the very conception of "liberty" is, indeed, problematic but for the opposite outcome that Madison came to. 

That is the sludgy world of ACLU style discourse on these issues. That is the language of these guys whose ideals are unreliable benefits in the lives of those who they claim to benefit.   I have to say that, especially as a witness to the hearings the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees conducted into Trump's trying to get the Ukrainian government to lie to throw the election to him instead of President Biden last year, seeing how it was the diplomats and military officers who stood up bravely as the lawyers of the "justice" department, the FBI, etc. failed to and covered their professional asses, I don't have a very high opinion of the legal  profession, these days.   Madison wasn't a lawyer, you wonder how these professional lawsters think he's so reliable on the topic of the law as that.  I wonder which other non-lawyers they'd give that status to.

Pretentious, Toi

SINCE THE TERM WAS MISUSED HERE, the term "a cappella" is misused for a solo vocal performance unaccompanied by instruments.  It is a very specific term in that the "cappella" was the Sistine Chapel and, more specifically, the Sistine Chapel Choir during the height of modal polyphonic composition for choruses without instrumental doubling or accompaniment and, especially, as that was imagined by later musicians and commentators on music.  This online definition of it is pretty good for being pretty short so I'll post it.

A term referring to choral music without instrumental accompaniment. During the Renaissance the performances of the Sistine choir in Rome were considered exemplary; and since the use of instruments was forbidden by its statutes, the term came to be used for any performance in a manner similar to those in the Sistine Chapel. The Sistine tradition of unaccompanied voices stems from the monophonic, purely vocal style of plainchant. Although musical historians of the 19th century believed that all music before 1600 was a cappella, they ignored the vast amount of evidence, especially that of paintings, to the contrary. Even in liturgical performance the older procedure was to double vocal lines with instruments of disparate tone colors, thus enhancing the individuality of the parts and accenting the music's polyphonic character. The a cappella practice is related to polyphony in what is called the "Palestrina style," a term referring not only to works of G. Palestrina but also to imitations of his style, e.g., the stile antico of the baroque era. Though the concertato style with instruments became widespread during the 17th and 18th centuries, the Sistine Choir continued its a cappella tradition, thus furnishing a performance model for the revival of liturgical polyphony in the 19th century (see caecilian movement).

The assertion that someone singing a song without accompaniment, especially doing it well enough to hold the attention of someone who doesn't understand the words (without having a line-by-line translation of those in front of him) is doing something "pretentious" is ridiculous.  What's pretentious is using a very specific term badly so as to fancy up your stupid scribbling so as to make your fellow ignoramuses think you're erudite.  That's what so much popular music scribblage is.  

As Aaron Copland said, when a literary man writes two words about music one of them will be wrong, it was probably more likely to be an adjective that was the clunker.   But, then, he said it before the serious inflation of pretentiousness among mid-brow college-credentialed scribblers who dabbled in music.  And even more so the talking heads on TV and radio and, now, online.  Though I will acknowledge the ability of those idiots to change the actual definition of the word as their damage expands and becomes common place among those who learned the word from them, I think it's important to point out how that happened and who was responsible for it. 

 Update:  Zute Dunje is an old Bosnian folksong, it's apparently been sung and recorded by a very large number of people, you can hear them on Youtube, Spotify, etc.  He didn't write the song though I'd imagine most of the people who have sung it sang it without any instrumental accompaniment.   Stupy thinks the singer wrote it.   I forgot he dislikes people from Eastern Europe to go with his disdain of the Roma People. 

Božo Vrećo - Žute dunje

 

I don't think I know of a real artist who breaks more rules, smashing some in disturbing ways, than Bozo Vreco.  I never knew about BV before last night and am fascinated.  I wish there were better online translations of the words to the songs, the ones I've seen look like google translate was relied on.  What a singer!    Western pop that goes for transgression and violations of rules are tame compared to this and so is their music.

Another Busy Tuesday and Tolt Ya So and Giving Credit To Canada As Credit Is Due

IT'S GOING TO BE another one of my busy Tuesdays.  As luck has it RMJ has written a fine commentary on the sermon by Walter Brueggemann, Romans 12 and Matthew 25: 31-46 that is worth reading and thinking about.

I hope to write something later today or Tomorrow.  

In the meantime, I notice that Mary Trump has said "we dodged a bullet" which reminds me of the time I considered what if we dodged a previous bullet, so here that is.

WHAT IF WE DODGE THE BULLET?

What if they lose? What if the congress investigates the crimes of the Bush regime and those are stopped? What if things go back to normal? After what we've seen the past forty years, if things can go back to normal it won't be a blessed relief, it will be a disaster. Our recent history proves that we have fatal problems in the foundation of the American government.

Our elections have to be fixed, not just returned to c. 1964. We have to secure the vote, from before it is cast to counting to reporting the results to their fulfillment. No elections official, secretary of state, or judge can ever be allowed to prevent another legal ballot being cast or counted or made to count. The sleazy behavior we've seen from every level from elections clerk to Supreme Court and the Executive wouldn't be tolerated in a real democracy. A democracy needs it to be an impeachable crime for a Supreme Court Justice to say that a Citizen of the United States does not have a right to vote. That is a fundamental contradiction of the role of the court in a democracy. Anyone who believes that has no place on our court or in our government.

The media, and today that means the electronic media, have to have their self-interested biases exposed and it's pollution scrubbed out of our politics. They have to be forced to perform the public service they promised, including standards of fairness. Broadcast stations must provide real news, including local news, which has to be unbiased and fair. And as a comment here yesterday said, without diverse ownership of the media, they won't serve the entire public.

The cable "news" channels have betrayed the public's trust even more flagrantly than broadcast, spreading lies effective enough to start the most idiotic and dangerous war of our history. We will pay the cost of their lies for decades, in blood as well as money.

They also aided the Bush putsch of 2000 and the earlier scheme to remove a genuinely elected President on trumped up charges and lies. Pretending that a rogue cable industry isn't a danger to freedom has to stop. Anyone who defends them on their crimes against democracy is a dupe or a profiteer. Put them under the same public service requirements as broadcast media. Media passes itself off as the voice of the people, then let them show it by putting the public before their investors and owners.

Recent history proves that self-government can't depend on leaving it to chance. Laissez faire democracy dies and the death is never a natural one. It lets the powerful and wealthy swamp the People's voice almost all of the time. In the same comments mentioned above, it was pointed out that the Supreme Court rulings making corporations artificial people made that all the more true.

Our government is always presented as having three branches, those are where almost all of the pitiful efforts at reform are concentrated. And that hasn't worked, we have the most dishonest government of our lifetimes. Putting patches on the process to make it a level field is unrealistic to the level of willful blindness. Powerful interests have power. They will always win when they have equal access to the process and own the media. The handful of examples where individuals or small groups win over the big guy make for sentimental TV movies, using them as proof that the system works is calculated dishonesty.

If the People are neglected then it all goes wrong. They won't even show up to vote. That step isn't a naive social studies lesson that you stop thinking about after the test in fourth grade. You don't go on to the higher study of civics and leave it behind. There is nothing higher in a democracy that the People, there is no act of government more important than their Vote. Abraham Lincoln, one of the real founders of the country we live in today, gave the formula for it. You know it by heart. He didn't mention the congress, the executive or the high church of the judiciary. He said that the enormous sacrifice of the American People in the Civil War was so that government of the People, by the People, and for the People shall not perish from the earth.

Any aftermath of the Bush II disaster that doesn't include changes to these laws will be just the beginning of the next time. Not securing the Vote, the will of the People; and forcing their own chosen responsibilities on the media, the only guarantee of an informed and realistic Vote, is a welcome mat for the next would-be dictator. Any liberal, leftist, Democrat, independent, even "moderate" Republican who lets two years go by without enacting real electoral and media reform had better beware. It's just a matter of waiting before the same coalition of corporate interests, bigots, oligarchs and haters tries again. They might be as slow and stealthy as they were this time, buying up media, using it to spread lies that "more speech" can't drown out, but they'll make a come back.

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

Here is a recent article about how and why Canada uses paper ballots for voting and counts them, by hand in an open, transparent process.  

We should hire Elections Canada to run our elections,  though that would mean they'd be open, clean and above board and that doesn't suit anyone with the power to clean things up.  Least of all our "justice" system.   The American system is a fraud, a joke and an invitation to rigging as it was immediately after the Constitution was put in place and, in fact, before and as it was being adopted. 

Ašik osta na te oči, Bozo Vreco & Edin Karamazov, Arrangement by Dusan Bogdanovic

Bozo Vreco, Voice 

Edin Karamazov, Lute. 

Music by Petar Konjovic; Text by Osman Djikic. Arrangement by Dusan Bogdanovic, 2021. Published by https://www.singidunumusic.com/scores/

Ašik osta' na te oči Ašik osta’ na te oči, na te dvije tamne noći. "Oj, kaduno, kono moja, ne ishodi na pendžere. Ne ishodi, ne prkosi, nemoj, da te šejtan nosi!” "Jes’, tako mi Ramazana, biće bruke jednog dana, u dvor ću ti uskočiti, sto ću čuda načiniti, dok odaju nadjem tvoju, i u njojzi, kono, tebe, ljubav moju. Izgrist’ ću ti usne rujne, i obraze tvoje bujne, ispiću ti oka oba, bićeš moja, sve do groba!" by Osman Djikic 

Translated to English: I fell in love with your eyes I fell in love with your eyes, on those two dark nights. “Ah, my lady, don’t stand at your window, don’t stand there, don’t tease me, don’t play with the devil!” “I swear by Ramadan, I’ll make a scandal one day, I’ll sneak to your place, I’ll perform hundred wonders, till I find your room, and you in it, my love. I’ll bite your sweet lips, and your crimson cheeks, I’ll kiss your both eyes, and then you’ll be mine till I die!”

This is one of the most wonderful settings of a song I've heard in a long time.  Spectacular,  the use of the lute by a modern composer, the way the accompaniment matches and expands the voice without stepping in the way.  AND THAT VOICE AND HOW IT'S USED!

I'd never heard of any Bozo Vreco, a real artist who I wish I'd found out about earlier in the day because I'm liable to stay awake looking for more work and thinking about . . . well, here's what it says in this one article.

Sevdah, Bosnia’s traditional music which sings of loss, sadness, and heartache, has been experiencing a resurgence in popularity since the civil war of the 1990s. With figures such as Amira Medunjanin and Damir Imamović taking sevdah to the world stage, the genre has moved out of bars and kafanas and earned the status of a high art form. Recently, a new face of sevdah has been rapidly gaining popularity all over the Balkans – the band Halka, and their dazzling frontman Božo Vrećo. Dubbed a ‘new European musical phenomenon’ by one Slovenian newspaper, Halka has been touring the region to amazing success, sold out performances, and glowing reviews. Most of the media attention is focused on Vrećo and his beautiful tenor, suited perfectly to sevdah’s long, drawn out melismas. Vrećo put out his own solo album last year, which features 17 acapella versions of sevdalinke, including two that he penned himself.

And then there’s Vrećo’s daringly queer aesthetic. He often appears in dark eye makeup and winged eyeliner, sometimes beardless and boyish in a tailored suit, sometimes glamorous in a backless gown and curled locks, sometimes in a black, dervish-like kaftan and topknot. His garments swirl around him as he dances to his band’s enchanting music. His personal interviews and posts on social media reveal a similar aesthetic – he appears bearded, with coquettish black curls and flowing black robes, or posts photographs of his hair in curlers, bearded and smiling. The New York Times recently branded Vreco a ‘cross-dresser’ – not only an outdated and transphobic term, but inaccurate, given that Vreco does not dress ‘as a woman’ but as himself. He sings, unusually, sevdalinke which are written for the voices of both men and women, from the perspectives of both genders. All in all,  Vrećo is breaking boundaries when it comes to the genre.

At first this seems somewhat puzzling. An undeniably beautiful, talented singer who plays with gender not only onstage but offstage as well, who is discernibly queer, who sings not pop but traditional, serious sevdah music – is incredibly popular all over Bosnia?

 

On What Other Political Blog Are You Going To Get A Review Of A Squash?

BEING EVER ON THE lookout for thrills in my gardening, I'm always trying new and novel (to me, at least) varieties.  This year I tried a couple of new squashes I'd long wanted to try but didn't get round to.  I just harvested and ate the first of the many Galeux d'Eysine squashes (or pumpkins) and can report it has a texture and flavor somewhere between a butternut squash and a watermelon.  The Fedco  catalog quotes Barbara Damrosch as describing it:

This heirloom, hailing from the Bordeaux region of France, was listed by Vilmorin in 1883 as Warted Sugar Marrow. It resurfaced at the Pumpkin Fair in Tranzault, France, in 1996. Shaped like rounded slightly flattened pumpkins, the 15-lb fruits have salmon-peach skins covered with large warts.

Sugar marrow might be a good name for it, it's a bit sweeter than I like and  a lot more moist than I usually care for in squash, cooking it cut into small pieces in a  microwave is what I'd recommend.  I was remembering how, true to the dreadful practices retained from 19th century New England cooking how people boiled squash while thinking if you tried that with this variety it would dissolve into mush.

It also has very large seeds which I intend to eat when they're dried out but haven't tried those yet.

The reason I wanted to grow it was that it - apart from the description of its eating qualities - is so unusual looking.  The photo, taken from the Fedco-seeds catalog online is a good representation of what they look like.  Perhaps the warts on the skin are one of the reasons they're considered not to be good keepers.   

Will I grow it next year?  I'm not sure.  I think I have a couple of seeds left from the packet so I might though I think I'll try a smaller one that has a better reputation as a keeper for next year, preferably one with a drier, nuttier texture instead of a near watermelon one. 

"there is enough for all of us to be working at"

Continuing on with Brueggemann's sermon on Exodus:

But what these two midwives did was to imagine that the world could be lived outside of the reality of Pharaoh.  

And I believe there is a straight line from the Book of Exodus to Romans 12 which is the epistle reading for today which is why I insisted against our rector that we needed to read it today, he was trying to save us time. 

But Roman's 12 which you didn't have printed in front of you, you can look it up, Paul writes the Christians at the Church in Rome about how to obey Jesus. 

And the thesis sentence is "Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed according to God's spirit."

And I propose for these months while we read the book of Exodus we may be reflecting on how we conform and how we are being transformed by the power of God.  It's easy to be conformed.  If you are like me you can be conformed without having to think about it, you just go with the flow. But to be transformed means to be intentional and thoughtful and disciplined about being in the world differently.  

So then Paul gives a catalog of some of the ways that we may be transformed.  First he says if you are conformed you will be miserly and selfish and greedy, wanting to get more. 

But if you are transformed, says he, you are invited to generous generosity, even generosity to people who do not deserve it, generosity in terms of charitable acts, generosity in terms of public policy, about education, about housing, about healthcare.  

Second, he says that if you are conformed you will want to build fences to keep everybody out that is not exactly like us because all strangers are threats.  But if you are transformed, says Paul, show hospitality to the stranger.  And so the Jesus movement is all about reaching out to the strangers and welcoming people who do not belong to our tribe or our national group or our race or our gender.

And third, Paul says if you are conformed you will keep score and take vengeance you will respond to every insult, every slight, every offense, to make sure you get even and get payback. But Paul ends this great chapter in Romans 12 by saying that the People of Jesus never take vengeance because vengeance belongs to God and so what you should do is give your enemy food and thereby heap coals of fire on his head.

So Romans 12 is a catalog that includes these three aspects of transformation, there is enough for all of us to be working at.  And if you do that, what becomes clear is it doesn't have anything to do with being liberal or being conservative, it has to do with conformity to Pharaoh, which liberals and conservatives can do, it has to do with generosity, hospitality, not taking vengeance, which transforms people, liberals and conservatives can do.

So I imagine Shifra and Puah and all sorts of women who practice civil disobedience are still at work in the world.  And every time one of us commits an act of transformation Shifra and Puah dance again. 

Amen.

I would imagine most of those who read me will see the part of the catalog of things to be worked on that I've yet to get to includes taking vengeance on people who attack me, so I should let you know I see that too and get it out of the way.   

I think it's also rather apparent that the conformity that Paul says is the opposite of following Jesus (and, as Brueggemann points out, The Law of Moses) is pretty much the public policy of political conservatives in a more radical way than it is contained in the public policy of "liberals."  I remember back in the Reagan years the terrorist-right winger, enthusiastic wager of war against the peasants of Central America, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who had been a Democrat but who became a neo-conservative, said she was opposed to the stingy, miserly Republican policy against poor people in the United States.  If that seems strange to you, it was pretty much in accord with the JFK and, to an extent, LBJ's policy.   That generosity seems to have not counted as much as their anti-communism, for them, in the end, which, it seems to me, would have been better waged if America had become an example of an egalitarian commonwealth at home and exported that egalitarian, economic justice within the area of our strongest influence.   I think that economic egalitarianism would be a far easier sell than inegalitarian "democracy" which the elite policy makers have stupidly and disastrously attempted to spread by external military force, most conspicuously in recent times in Afghanistan and Iraq.   

So it is clear from our public policy that "liberals" as that word was wrecked in the 18th century "enlightenment," transformed from a word based in the liberal provision of the material and mental and, so, spiritual requirements for a decent, peaceful life to the poor among us to one meaning that the markets were unregulated so the rich and smart could become richer and smarter by any means they chose to.  If "liberal" had kept to its original meaning, based on the reading of The Mosaic Law by SOME Protestants, Walter Brueggemann's statements about "liberals and conservatives" in this sermon would not be nearly as justifiable as they are.  

Just before typing out the somewhat informal transcript of the sermon, I followed a link to an LA Times story about the conservatives in rural California being disappointed with the results of the recall election that only ended up being an expensive attempt by Republicans to use the absurdly easy referendum-recall process in California to have what they hoped was a very low turnout election where the minority in California (Republicans) could rig things through the law to prevail where they can't with a larger percentage of the voters there, these days.  In the description of the,seemingly, largely white-affluent, I would guess college-credentialed Californians intereviewed for the story, it struck me that the descriptions of those people and what they did sounded like the media stereotype of "liberals" drinking chai at what sounded like a high-end coffee shop, having white-collar jobs that one would expect might pay a lot, some involved in what is considered "the arts" (though I wouldn't make that mistake, not these days).  

I think that the thing I took from this sermon,  Walter Brueggemann's distinction between the liberal-conservative political spectrum on one side and "Exodus politics" on the other is an especially useful and so important distinction to make.  I suspect some of the Mormons, Southern Baptists, white Catholics, members of other "conservative" churches, who vote consistently for Democrats who want policies that are more in line with "Exodus politics" do so on that basis - though the fact that Donald Trump was obviously a throwback to the most degenerate of Roman Imperial, Pharaonic gangsterism may have convinced a percentage of them to vote against him.   I have pointed out here before that even some of the worst of recent Popes have, nonetheless, issued Papal policies and statements that are to the left of Bernie Sanders in terms of economic justice, something that he pointed out, himself, when he was running for president.  

Politically I have made the distinction between the entire range of political identity that is opposed to egalitarian-democracy as "gangster politics," everything from Putin and the Kim regime, the various gangster run economies who do without much in the way of ideological clap-trap, up to and including the most seemingly benign of Constitutional monarchies and republics can be included in the category of gangster-run governments.  Clearly, as three House Democrats blocked allowing the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from negotiating prices with drug companies, there is enough of that kind of gangsterism to go around.  I will, though, point out that it is the Supreme Court using the First Amendment to keep our own government thoroughly corrupted with bribery and pay-outs in a way that is flagrantly corrupt.  The Supreme Court is the source of that corruption today, after the elected branches tried to get past that by keeping money out of elections.  They did so by an extension of the absurdity of "liberal" "justices" making things like strip-tease dancing "speech" on behalf of the sex industry* as referenced in something critical of a media "liberal" I wrote here over the weekend.

I do think it's a distinction, between "Exodus politics" and the politics of inequality, anti-democracy and gangsterism, which, indeed, has infected both "conservatism" and "liberalism" so thoroughly that those distinctions are frequently meaningless.  Which is the reason I went through the exercise of attempting to transcribe the sermon.  

*  I'm trying to remember if whether or not local and state governments could require strippers to wear pasties really became a court case and an ACLU style cause celebre back in the day, having previously found it hard to believe the extent to which "liberalism" hitched its wagon to the porn industry (all about turning women and others into objects for the use of privileged males)  and its, even then, enormous money hoard.  And that we really thought that, like keeping public property free of manger scenes, was at all important.   It might take Covid-19 and global warming to slap "the left" awake, though the ones making money in the media will certainly be the last to wake up.