Geri Allen Trio, Dark Prince

 

I thought of this performance this morning and decided to post it again.   I really miss Geri Allen, maybe the finest pianist of her generation. 

the real legislative power is vested in this country not in Congress or the State legislatures, but in the courts, principally in the Supreme Court of the United States - We Are Repeating History Because We Have Been Kept From Learning From It

The most formidable obstacle, however, to the success of a labor party in this country is the fact that a mere legislative success would be insufficient to carry its program into execution. As shown in my articles on the “Political Situation in the United States and the Socialist Party,” the real legislative power is vested in this country not in Congress or the State legislatures, but in the courts, principally in the Supreme Court of the United States. In consequence, a success such as was achieved by the British Labor Party, that is the placing upon the statute books those of its proposals which it wants to become law, even if achieved through some miraculous combination of circumstances by an American Labor Party, would be barren of any real results. In fact it would leave the working class just where it was when it started out to organize the labor party, for the Supreme Court would undoubtedly declare each and every important measure which the labor party would succeed in forcing upon the statute books as “unconstitutional.” Indeed, it has already declared most of them, and not only the most radical of them either, “unconstitutional” in advance.

Louis Boudin: Prospects of a Labor Party in the U.S.  1910

IT WAS HARDLY only in regard to "radical" labor law that the United States Supreme Court has nullified the most vital of of legislation, as I noted yesterday that supposed giant of the American judiciary,   the author of the Marbury usurpation of the legislative power to that Court,  John Marshall had no problem overturning even the Constitutionally warranted power of the Congress to ban the importation of slaves into the United States.    The eminent historian and scholar of the law and American history,  Paul Finkelman summed up his documentation of the practice of 'justices" in regard to their playing fast and loose with the law and the Constitution said in regard to Marshall: 

On the bench Marshall always supported slavery, even when statutes and precedent were on the side of freedom. He also adjusted his jurisprudence when slavery cases were before him. For example, in embargo cases Marshall was famous for his flexible approach to admiralty, and declined to apply “technical niceties” of common law procedure to maritime cases. But in cases involving the illegal African slave trade, Marshall rigidly applied technical niceties, protecting slave traders from suffering for their illegal and immoral commerce. Similarly, Marshall used natural law arguments to defend property rights, to protect the inviolability of contracts, and to condemn bankruptcy laws. But, in The Antelope, Marshall emphatically rejected the legitimacy of using natural law to liberate Africans illegal[y] brought to the United States in violation of American law.

This jurisprudence reflected Marshall’s investment in slaves that was probably unmatched by any other member of the Supreme Court. It dovetailed with his lifetime commitment to slavery and his virulent hostility to the very presence of free blacks in the United States.

Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court

In the Oxford Academic abstract of the article it notes:

In Supreme Injustice, the prolific Paul Finkelman takes on the three most important Supreme Court justices of the antebellum era: John Marshall, Joseph Story, and Roger B. Taney. When questions regarding slavery came before them, all three justices “invariably voted against liberty and in favor of slavery” .

Most notable in regard to the false reputation of the Supreme Court in regard to its integrity or the soundess of its judicial proclamations,  THE TOTAL ABSURDITY OF DEPENDING ON THE COURT FOR THE PROTECTION OF OUR LIVES, OUR RIGHTS AND OUR FREEDOMS, it has to be noticed that of those three Story was "officially" anti-slavery, though he certainly found nothing in the law or the document that, after Marbury, the Court usurped the defining of, the Constitution which made him a reliable defender of even Free Black People who could provide evidence that they should not be kidnapped into slavery for the profit of the criminals who did that,  he was the author of the infamous Prigg decision which, if Dred Scott had not been issued, would stand as the most infamous slavery protecting ruling in Supreme Court history. 

And those were the years when the Court was somewhat reluctant to press their claimed authority to outright nullify duly adopted and even long standing federal law.   After Dred Scott it became routine for the Court to use that Supreme Court created power in case after case, whether it was against legally free Black People, in regard to their rights, in regard to their voting rights, in regard to them having what is, AFTER ALL THE ENTIRE REASON FOR WE THE PEOPLE TO HAVE A VOTE, IS TO BE REPRESENTED IN THE LEGISLATIVE AND EXECUTIVE BRANCHES OF THE GOVERNMENT WHICH THE ROBERTS COURT HAS ANNULLED. 

They repeatedly lied about provisions in the Constitution to favor employers over those they employed, worked to death, stole from, abused and oppressed.   That was the point which Boudin addressed in his open-eyed and realistic view of the futility of a "Labor Party" gaining office or even all of the elected offices of the United States because any law they passed was bound to be overturned by the Supreme Court which, as can be seen in reviewing the histories of those two eminent Chief "justices" and the associate "justice" who was reputed to be among he greatest legal scholars of his generation,  they can always come up with some legal language to justify laws or, in fact, the Constitution meaning whatever they want it to mean.  

The history of the United States can very accurately be read as a history of members of oppressed groups, whether minority groups, Black People and Native American People being the quintessential and eternal examples of that,  or Women or, even more a majority of the population, workers, or despised groups, OR JUST MEMBERS OF THE OPPOSING PARTY TO THAT WHICH ANY GIVEN "justice" BELONGS TO, ESPECIALLY WHEN THEIR PARTY IS IN THE MAJORITY ON THE COURT, having to struggle against the Constitution and, especially that far more real and consequential "constitution" the one which is a product of Supreme Court say-so, the one which actually can do everything from deprive People of their lesser rights, to keeping them from voting, having representation in the government or, IN FACT KILLING THEM.   

Abolition, Womens' Rights, other great and lesser civil rights struggles, the struggles of workers to their rights and even the right to not get killed on the job,  the right to their earned wages, the rights of all of us to such things as health care, all of them struggles which cost enormous work, emotional distress, blood and lives which finally resulted in federal or state laws - and not all of those struggles succeeded - THOUGH ANY OF THEM WHICH DID HAVE BEEN SUBJECTED TO SUPREME COURT NULLIFICATION. 

All of that is generally knocked back or knocked down by the Supreme Court which has been a reactionary force in favor of those who have against those who don't have.   Their clients have been those generally favored by the legal profession, those with the deepest pockets or those who they are allied with.   THAT HAS BEEN THE CASE OF THE SUPREME COURT IN REALITY INSTEAD OF THE NINA TOTENBERG,* TYPICAL "COURT REPORTER" STYLE OF PIOUS BULLSHIT THAT HAS BEEN FAR MORE OF A NARCOTIC THAN MARXISTS FALSELY BELIEVED RELIGION TO BE.   America's "civic religion" to use a putrid phrase beloved of the corrupt associate "justice" Sandra Day O'Connor,  is far stronger than the Gospel of Jesus, the Law of Moses or, certainly, any other Biblical prophesy in the oppression of Americans, the large majority of whom are included in that list above.   The founders fetish,  the asserted inerrancy of the framers, the asserted mystic wisdom of the Constitution and worst of all, the piety of that corrupt priesthood in black robes, the Supreme Court.   They are certainly as powerful if not actually more powerful than the Assembly of Experts in Iran,  they have exercised the same power to appoint a president and to crown one as a de-facto king within the past quarter of a century.   

American history in regard to the struggle to establish egalitarian democracy is a struggle against the established order, the wealthy, the established power,  the anti-democratic corruption baked into the Constitution in the form of the Senate and the Electoral College and the general struggle against our indigenous fascism, White Supremacy and its allied ideological schemers, but more than any of those it has been a struggle against the Marbury empowered Supreme Court. 

Without annulling the Marbury power the most popularly supported law adopted by even a unanimous  Congress and enthusiastically signed into law by a President with enormous approval of the Voters, even, as I pointed out was the case with the Voting Rights Act, a law passed and approved by more than one Congress and president will fall to the whim of a majority of the sitting members of the Supreme Court - and it should never be forgotten that the present court was a product of court packing by Republicans in concert with a billionaire financed court-packing campaign of decades in line with a blueprint for oligarchs and racists to dominate our county through the court drawn up more than a half a century ago by the putrid Louis Powell. 

In that response to criticism by the representative of Victor Berger, which I cited the other day,  Louis Boudin noted exactly that point and what it will really take in American politics AS THEY REALLY ARE INSTEAD OF IN THEORY to wrest the stolen power which enables them to thwart any progress toward egalitarian democracy.

What Mr. Ghent calls my “attack on Representative Berger,” was a criticism of Comrade [Victor] Berger for what I believe to be a serious tactical blunder, in dealing with the power of the judiciary to annul federal legislation on the alleged ground of “unconstitutionality” as if it were a power actually given to the judiciary by the Constitution, instead of treating it as sheer usurpation. I made the point that by conceding that this right was granted by the Constitution to the judiciary we have at one stroke irretrievably given up our case against the courts. Our complaint is then against the Constitution: which, in my opinion, makes a big difference from a practical point of view.

Mr. Ghent says:

“So far as the practical issue is concerned, the curtailment of the powers of the judiciary is just about as feasible as the amendment of the Constitution.”

In this he is clearly mistaken. The powers of the judiciary can be curtailed whenever a majority of the people seriously want it. Provided, of course, they know that this power is not given by the Constitution. But the Constitution cannot be amended except by the consent of three-fourths of all the States, which is a practical impossibility to obtain, has never been obtained, and never will be by ordinary peace means. But that is not all. From the point of view of agitation and propaganda there is quite a difference, and a very practical one, between an agitation against the Constitution, on the theory that the founders of this Republic and the framers of that document were either knaves or fools, and one against the present judges, or usurping a power never granted to them by the Constitution. I have no objection to knocking the Constitution. But that knocking is, from a practical point of view, on quite a different footing from an agitation against the usurpations of the judiciary. And it is because Comrade Berger’s Constitutional amendment makes the Constitution “the main point” on this question, and desires to “focus attention” upon it, instead of on the judiciary, that I criticised it.

Of course, were the power in question really given to the judiciary by the Constitution, we could not help it, we would then be compelled to fight it out on the field now chosen by Comrade Berger. But it wasn’t. Mr. Ghent says, however, that that is merely my opinion: “that the consensus of views and opinions printed about the time of the Constitutional Convention tend to support” a contrary opinion; and that it is “like the States Rights question which kept two generations of Americans in turmoil.”

Mr. Ghent is in error on some of these points at least. To begin with, it is not merely my opinion. It is the opinion of every unbiased student of the subject.

Mr. Ghent is also in error on the question of “consensus of views,” etc. I naturally cannot go here into the evidence of the subject. (I have presented some of it in The Call before). I will therefore merely re-state here my conclusions as I stated them in an article on the subject published in the current issue of the Political Science Quarterly. I there said:

“There undoubtedly were some men in the convention who favored the investing of the federal judiciary with general revisory powers over legislation; but all attempts to make the judiciary part of the legislative power of the Federal Government failed signally and had to be abandoned by their sponsors. The provisions of the Constitution as they now stand contain no reference whatever to any such powers, either expressly or by implication. And there is ample historical proof that — whatever the points of some — from the complete silence of the document, as to possible future development — the great majority of the framers never suspected that a general power of the judiciary to control legislation could be interpreted into the Constitution. They evidently assumed that such an extraordinary power could not be exercised unless expressly granted. And it is equally certain that had the convention given to the courts that power, either expressly or by necessary implication, apparent to the ordinary mind, the Constitution would have been overwhelmingly rejected by the people. A careful examination of all the evidence on the subject now extant leads to the conclusion that the Constitution was adopted by the Philadelphia Convention and ratified by the people of the States without any belief, without even a suspicion on the part of the great majority of those voting for it, whether in or out of the Constitutional Convention, that it contained any such implication.”

It should be remember in this connection that the Quarterly is not only a magazine of high standing in the scientific world, but is extremely conservative, and would not print any attack on our judiciary from a militant Socialist, unless it could be backed up by uncontrovertible proof. This subject of the judiciary is an extremely ticklish one with the intellectuals of our ruling class. Most of our magazines therefore absolutely refuse to publish any “opinion” such as mine. They will publish anything you like, including proposed amendments, etc., but not the “opinion” that the Constitution does not give the judiciary any such power as is here discussed. And the more evidence one gives in support of such an “opinion,” the worse. And even our purely scientific publications fight shy of the subject, and when they do print such “opinions,” they will only publish them if they are so worded that absolutely nothing of any historical value can be presented against them by any reactionary. It is therefore clear that had there been any such “consensus of views” as Ghent speaks of, my “opinion” would never have found expression on the pages of the Political Science Quarterly.

That last paragraph is where I left off on Tuesday.  

What was being debated then is, during the Roberts Court tyranny, as relevant to our lives and politics as it was then because all of that was papered over and suppressed.  The Court keeps playing the same role of thwarting equality and, so genuine democracy,  the rights of Women of Workers, of all of us to a clean environment free of the domination of robber barons and old-money oligarchs.  

It's time we noted the real engine of history in the United States, the train pulled backwards by the Supreme Court and the corruptions both actually in the Constitution, those which developed, especially under Supreme Court law making and Supreme Court nullification and amending of the thing as it really is and not as the words merely printed on paper. 

Of those the easiest to overturn is the Supreme Court Marbury power grab, it appears nowhere in the Constitution, it is, as it always was,  an invention of members of the Court, one which has a history of them exercising powers the Constitution never gave them and which, in fact, it explicitly delegates to the Congress and, in a way that the Congress can overcome by a super-majority, the presidency. 

If we don't, anyone who survives will face the same Supreme Court knocking down of reforms forever.  

*  And Nina Totenberg is one of the better ones.  

There is another; and in its binding force upon the American people this other Constitution is quite as important as the written document.

IN GOING THROUGH the article Government By Judiciary by Louis Boudin,  I left off with this paragraph:

The courts occupy a position of importance in our government such as they occupy in no other government, because, instead of dealing only with the rights of one man face to face with his fellow-men, as is the case in other governments, they here pass upon the fundamental governmental rights of the people as exercised through their legislative and executive officers.

Which makes the very important point that the powers given to the Court in the Constitution was quite strong, already but the power that the Court GAVE ITSELF in the Marbury ruling and in rulings that came after that, expanded the Court's power out of any proportion to that of any other such court in any other country.  I have read many legal scholars and others who have said the same thing, that in no other country and certainly no other deputed democracy does a Supreme Court take and wield such power as the one in the United States been allowed to wield.   That power is so out of proportion that it has only been denied by one sitting President I'm aware of,  Lincoln in his conduct of the Civil War and in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.   It is widely acknowledged that, among other wartime acts by Lincoln's government that Chief "justice" Roger Taney was planning on striking down the Emancipation Proclamation from the bench, he died before he got to hear a legal challenge to it.    

I think that's unfortunate because I have every certainty there is that if if the Court had handed down that decision, WHICH IT ALMOST CERTAINLY WOULD HAVE, Lincoln would have told the Court to go blow air as he fought the war.   Though I think such a ruling could have resulted in the traitorous states to have won the war, such is the real danger of the Supreme Court as it really is.

If you think that's overwrought,  they have gradually overturned the Voting Rights Act which is every bit as important as the Emancipation Proclamation was and Democratic Presidents and Congresses have rolled over like a whipped dog giving up as the Rehnquist Court started that overturning and the Roberts Court have given the great-great-great grandchildren of the Confederate traitors the apartheid that previous Supreme Courts and conservative administrations and congresses have acquiesced to for lifetimes of Black People in many of and often the majority of states.   

White Supremacy, America's indigenous form of fascism is as dangerous and powerful as that which went by the name in other places.  And the Supreme Court except for a decade or two, has been dominated by those who favored it.  The Roberts Court is as racist in that regard as any other, including that most depraved of those in its rotten history as Clarence Thomas.  It has surpassed the Rehnquist Court in that regard. 

The article continues:

And it is the same position that is expressed in a very forcible and striking manner in an editorial article on " The Flexibility of the Law," which appeared recently in The Outlook.   The editor of the The Outlook said:

In our judgment the real Constitution of the United States, the Constitution under which we are living, the Constitution to which the decisions of all our subordinate courts must conform, the Constitution to which all legislative acts, whether State or National, are subject, is not the written Constitution which was formed in 1787. It is that written Constitution plus the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States interpreting and applying it, and the habit of the Nation which has grown up under it. 

The Outlook has been criticised for talking about the written Constitution as though there were any other.  There is another; and in its binding force And it is the same position that is expressed in a very forcible and striking manner in an editorial article on " The Flexibility of the Law," which appeared recently in The Outlook.  

The editor of the The Outlook said:

In our judgment the real Constitution of the United States, the Constitution under which we are living, the Constitution to which the decisions of all our subordinate courts must conform, the Constitution to which all legislative acts, whether State or National, are subject, is not the written Constitution which was formed in 1787. It is that written Constitution plus the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States interpreting and applying it, and the habit of the Nation which has grown up under it.  The Outlook has been criticised for talking about the written Constitution as though there were any other.  There is another; and in its binding force upon the American people this other Constitution is quite as important as the written document.

The Supreme Court of the United States decided by a majority of one that an income tax was constitutional. Then one judge changed his mind and the Supreme Court decided that an income tax was unconstitutional. It is now unquestioned, or at least unquestionable, that an income tax cannot constitutionally be levied by Congress upon the people of the United States. 

What makes such a tax unconstitutional is the Supreme Court's decision interpreting the written Constitution. What made the Supreme Court's decision, interpreting the written Constitution, is the decision of the one judge who changed his mind.

But this is by no means admitted by the other side. Indeed, it is emphatically denied, at least as far as the conclusions are concerned.

I will disagree with the editor of The Outlook, the "other Constitution" the one that exists on the basis of what the Court rules IS ENTIRELY MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE WORDS ON PAPER.   The long string of rulings twisting, annulling, lying about and changing the words of the 14th Amendment, other amendments,  parts of the so-called Bill of Rights, the long list of rulings abolishing duly enacted and at times long-standing laws adopted by Congress and signed into law by Presidents, IN FACT, AS IN THE CASE OF THE VOTING RIGHTS AND CIVIL RIGHTS ACTS, RETAINED AND STRENGTHENED AS LAWS BY MORE THAN ONE CONGRESS AND PRESIDENT, and as tellingly, long retained decisions of the Supreme Court, itself,  the written word of the Constitution is whatever the current Court majority says it is,  the document, itself and even in relation to the legislative history of the adoption of it and its amendments is a dirty wash rag used to white wash the filth that the Supreme Court makes the real law of the land.  

And there is the ruling of Bush v Gore in which five Republicans on the Court handed the presidency to their preferred candidate and, worse than that,  Trump v USA in which they made Republican presidents absolute monarchs which the law would not stop,  though they seem to have a bit of buyers remorse, they have not done much of any effectiveness to roll that back SO IMPORTANT IS THEIR FASCIST IDEOLOGY OF A UNITARY EXECUTIVE TO THEM.  No doubt in their Supreme judicial arrogance, they believe they could reign in one that attacked their offices or their preferences.   And no doubt they would succeed more with the traditional kind of Democratic president than they would a modern Republican one.   Democrats should elect non-lawyers with enough audacity to not have any illusions about the law as it really is or the dangers of the Supreme Court to democracy.  And I think it will take a strong NON-LAWYER who will not appoint anyone as Attorney General and other legal offices less clear sighted in regard to legal reality than they are.  Lawyers are trained to not see and not understand and not admit how things really are.  And those are the ones who retain some scruple against lying, themselves.   Supreme Court corruption has corrupted the very culture of the law and lawyers. 

The first such act that devalued the written Constitution is almost certainly the Marbury decision which, as I noted, written by a man who was not in on the framing of the Constitution,  Marshall, nullified laws written by actual framers of the Constitution such as Marshall's predecessor as Chief Justice and, earlier, a member of Congress, Oliver Ellsworth, and numerous other framers from the Constitutional Convention who passed the Court organization act including the provision that Marbury nullified.   And the Court that gave itself that power was, in fact, criticized for it by no less than Thomas Jefferson who predicted evil such as we are living with right now would come of it. 

The example given,  the flip-flop on the constitutionality of an income tax was mild compared to the long standing laws and rulings that the Roberts Court has flipped on,  which I hope will turn into the ultimate flop as it forces reform on that corrupt court and, as important as limiting the terms and expanding the Robert's McConnell, Federalist-fascist majority on the Court into minority status will be the Congressional nullification of the Marbury power grab which appears nowhere in the Constitution.  As Jefferson said in another letter:

The second question, whether the judges are invested with exclusive authority to decide on the constitutionality of a law, has been heretofore a subject of consideration with me in the exercise of official duties. Certainly there is not a word in the constitution which has given that power to them more than to the executive or legislative branches. 

That was certainly the case and it is is certain that that power was a consequence of the Supreme Court creating that matter out of thin air because the Congress didn't create it and the president didn't sign any such law into existence as provided for in the Constitution.   That members of congresses, especially those trained in the lore and traditions of the law and presidents may have stupidly believed that such a power originated in the Constitution of 1787 (which would certainly seem to have been a surprise to the framers whose Congressionally passed law was overturned in Marbury) or who were gulled by lore and tradition into accepting it doesn't do a thing to make it any more a duly adopted law of the United States under the written Constitution.  

They will publish anything you like, including proposed amendments, etc., but not the “opinion” that the Constitution does not give the judiciary any such power as is here discussed. And the more evidence one gives in support of such an “opinion,” the worse

I AM TORN between the intellectual honesty of attributing the arguments I'm going to make about destroying the powers of the Supreme Court as those have been usurped originally by the Marshall Court in 1803, the Marbury decision which is the source of most if not all of the most significant Supreme Court originated corruption of democracy in the United States,  and merely presenting the arguments without citation of the man who made those arguments in their most exigent of historical contexts and with voluminous citations by the likes of Abraham Lincoln who had argued much of the case against that in responding to the first truly significant and rightly abhorred use of that power in the Dred Scott decision.  

The reason is that in his younger days Louis Boudin had been something of a Marxist theoretician, though, from the evidence I can see of his career, he steadily became less impressed with Marxism the more he saw it in practice after the Russian Revolution and the immediate suppression and crimes of the budding Soviet system.   

I think he likely found that as American and other Marxist parties and their scribblers and thinkers went on, he became ever less impressed with that as, in fact, I've found I have the more of that same record has become available to read in extensive completeness online.   Of course, given the use of such a history by America's fascists, the white supremacists, the Republican (now overtly Republican-fascist) Party and oligarchy favoring individuals and groups, I expect that his Marxist identity will be used against his scholarship (which is of a quality you seldom find, these days) his reasoning (also, too) and his citations will be shoved aside by those who favor the tyranny of the Supreme Court which has been thwarting equality since the time of Marshall and democracy, as well, and the rights of minority groups, Women, workers, LGBTQ+, and even voters right to cast a vote and have the representation which was the point of the "majoritarian government" which the Constitution was explicitly claimed to set up to start with. *  

The Roberts Court, the only real current competition the Taney Court has for the title of "Most Evil"  through what it has imposed on the Country - the previous and somewhat less competition that the Rehnquist Court got runner-up for by, among other things, deciding the 2000 election in favor of the loser - have made newly topical the issues that Boudin raised in his original 1911 article and in his magisterial two-volume work of the same name (alas, though published more than ninety-five years ago, it is not under public domain).  How relevant that is can be seen in the opening paragraphs of his earlier article.  

GOVERNMENT BY JUDICIARY

THE most momentous question before the people of this country today is undoubtedly the question of the limits of the power of the judiciary to annul legislation for alleged unconstitutionality. When Mr. Roosevelt opened his campaign for the so-called " new nationalism," he was forced to make what was called by his opponents " an attack upon the judiciary." The general election that followed was largely fought, at least in the eastern part of the country, on the issue thus made; and the fight against the new nationalism has since been largely a fight for the preservation of the powers of the judiciary as they exist today.

The fact that Mr. Roosevelt denied the allegation,  claiming to have made no " attack " upon the judiciary, does not change the situation. It is of course true that Mr. Roosevelt did not  attack the judiciary as an institution: he merely criticised some of the decisions of one of our courts. 

But that court is the highest court in the land. And criticism of courts must be admitted to stand on an entirely different footing from criticism of other public functionaries, notably from that directed against legislative assemblies. 

Legislators-and, within certain circumscribed limits, executives-are vested with discretion to act as the public interest may, in their opinion, from time to time require. Criticism of their public acts does not necessarily involve anything more than the expression of a different opinion as to what is best calculated to promote the public good under certain circumstances. 

It is different with judges. They are not supposed to be vested with any discretion to act as they see fit in the interest of the public welfare. They are supposed to find the law written down in former decisions or in statutes, in the making of which they have no share, and to apply the law which they find to the facts of the cases presented to them, irrespective of their opinion of its wisdom or unwisdom. 

Ordinarily, therefore, criticism of the judgments of a court implies  a reflection upon either the legal knowledge or the integrity of its members.

Call me skeptical, but I doubt the "museum"  "AI" Teddy Roosevelt with whom Trump "conversed" and seems to have  believed in Trump's ignorance and senility to be the man, himself, was programmed to go after the Supreme Court as the real one did.  Such is how the Republican-fascist telling of history is, as much when it's a conservative white man who's been dead for more than a century as it is for Black and other minority figures who died within recent memory. 

I will have a lot more to say about this last sentence, especially in regard to the mania the present court has for overturning decisions made by previous Supreme Court majorities, even unanimous decisions aren't immune from their overturning.   Even in cases where a candidate declared themselves to hold a decision was "decided law" as they lied through their teeth to get confirmation, they have had no hesitation to overturn such decisions - so much for "legal knowledge" of Supreme Court "justices" when it comes to their knowledge of the law and even the Constitution which they claim to hold the last word on.  

There is no question as to the integrity of a large number of the members of the Supreme Court, at least when it comes to noting their complete lack of integrity.  That's a certainly made claim of the Roberts Court and certainly in previous courts.   The rare landmark rulings in which the Courts have not favored the wealthy, the powerful, the white-male, the employer, the oppressor are notable BECAUSE THEY ARE SURPRISING.   Their typical product isn't surprising in that regard    

I would, again, as I always will, remind you that the original hero of those who worship the Court, that the major holder and profiting from slavers, John Marshall never found a single time in favor of either an enslaved Person or, indeed, I believe I'm correct,  a free Black Person who could be enslaved even as he and many other members of that court directly profited from the slavery that they routinely enhanced and protected.  That was true even in the case of a man who illegally imported slaves into the United States in the period AFTER THE CONGRESS HAD BANNED THAT IMPORTATION AS THE ORIGINAL CONSTITUTION EXPLICITLY GAVE THEM THE POWER TO DO AFTER TWENTY YEARS UNDER THAT DOCUMENT.   

Far from the amber-filtered reverence and pious, soft-spoken, fawning presentation of the Supreme Court in flawless, academic English, an honest presentation of that court would show it has been the most corrupt branch of the government even as it has presented its corruption in the most anodyne of legal language bullshitese aiming to confuse and soothe the public as to the true nature of what they're getting up to to favor slave-holders, the de facto slave-power in the period of American apartheid after de jure emancipation, to favor wage-slavers of the working class,  Women, voter of the other party (a specialty of Courts starting with the period when the Federalists faced that first and tragically partial revolution as the slave holding Jefferson (and Madison) took office - the very origin of the Marbury decision and on to this year when the Roberts New Taney majority legalized racial gerrymandering in the guise of partisan gerrymandering against Democrats.   

The only guarantee of anything like integrity that comes with the holder of any public office is an effective possibility or likelihood of getting fired by the voters (not that that is any firm  guarantee) but in the case of the Supreme Court that inhibition of corruption is removed by the Constitution and the fact that the bar to impeachment is so high it has never been reached at that level of "justices" or the president.  The farther away from the possibility of effective firing by the voters, the more certain the corruption of the office and the Supreme Court has proven, over and over again throughout its history that that guarantee of corruption is most confirmed by the reality of what that court has become. 

Our courts are, however, in a different position-or, at least, it is claimed that they are in a different position-with respect to their power to declare legislation void for alleged unconstitutionality. It is claimed by those who criticise certain of the decisions of our courts on that subject that in dealing with constitutional questions our courts exercise legislative powers under the form of judicial decrees, and that the canons of criticism which usually apply to acts of legislatures are therefore applicable to our courts with respect to such decisions. It is this that Mr. Roosevelt implied, when he said, in his Denver speech:**

The courts occupy a position of importance in our government such as they occupy in no other government, because, instead of dealing only with the rights of one man face to face with his fellow-men, as is the case in other governments, they here pass upon the fundamental governmental rights of the people as exercised through their legislative and executive officers.

I may go through Louis Boudin's century old article at least as far as I get.  I admit that  Trump and the Republican-fascists' war in Iran,  Israel's genocides and expansion, American politics, law, the goddamned Court, the drought, the heat wave, the pervasive evil have got me down.  

I've found one of the ways to get through depression is to mount a project and I can't think of one more timely than to revive the knowledge of the objections of some of our most respectable persons,  Lincoln, foremost, to the most corrupt branch of the government and its usurpations of power on behalf of the like of  Trumpian fascism.  

The power that the Court gave itself in 1803 to nullify duly enacted laws - in that case provisions of the Court Act, which was written by a legislator, Oliver Ellsworth, who, unlike his successor as Chief Justice, John Marshall had been a member of the Constitutional Convention - he is believed to have authored the 3rd article dealing with the judiciary and the Supreme Court - and a host of other framers of the Constitution who adopted it as federal law including Madison - was not again exercised by the Supreme Court until the rightly infamous Taney Court used it to nullify key provisions of the Missouri Compromise which had stood as federal law for more than thirty years - and which had restricted the spread of slavery and which the Taney Court used to, in effect, nullify free state bans on slavery within their jurisdictions.  I can't think of any significant use of it by a Supreme Court which was not evil.  I've been compiling a list and intend that to become part of this series.  As the fact that the rate at which those Marbury cases seems to be accelerating, not becoming in any way rarer as the Roberts Court tyrannizes us and through its empowering of Trumpian fascism in the executive and legislative branches.  

*Louis Boudin, in his response to criticism by a socialist in regard to his 1911 article made this point:

It should be remember in this connection that the Quarterly is not only a magazine of high standing in the scientific world, but is extremely conservative, and would not print any attack on our judiciary from a militant Socialist, unless it could be backed up by uncontrovertible proof. This subject of the judiciary is an extremely ticklish one with the intellectuals of our ruling class. Most of our magazines therefore absolutely refuse to publish any “opinion” such as mine. They will publish anything you like, including proposed amendments, etc., but not the “opinion” that the Constitution does not give the judiciary any such power as is here discussed. And the more evidence one gives in support of such an “opinion,” the worse. And even our purely scientific publications fight shy of the subject, and when they do print such “opinions,” they will only publish them if they are so worded that absolutely nothing of any historical value can be presented against them by any reactionary. It is therefore clear that had there been any such “consensus of views” as Ghent speaks of, my “opinion” would never have found expression on the pages of the Political Science Quarterly.

The matter cannot even be considered fairly debatable among historians. It is true that our reactionaries try to instil a contrary belief to the ignorant. But that is not debate, that is intentional misrepresentation, except when it proceeds from the ignorant. There are many things that are being “debated” by some people in the pulpit and in the press, but that does not mean that they are “debatable” to us. Mr. Justice Lurton, of the United States Supreme Court, has recently attempted to uphold the opinion now advocated by Mr. Ghent (I sincerely hope that Comrade [Viktor] Berger disagrees with his secretary on this proposition). I disposed of him in the article published in the Political Science Quarterly mentioned above. But I was not debating with Mr. Justice Lurton: it was too much like taking candy from a baby.

I will note that I have written respectfully of Viktor Berger who did what almost no other person to the left of Theodore Roosevelt who wasn't a Democrat ever managed to do, win an election and hold public office, honorably.   I haven't researched any dispute between him and Louis Boudin, though it's exactly the kind of thing I'd have found worth pursuing through the now easily available and extensive record of the American left as was published in the period before the iron curtain of copyright as has been absurdly extended to cover those older than even my grandparents even now fell on it.  Maybe I'll do what I once did and invent an "institution" for me to get access past that intellectual Berlin Wall.  

**  I've found a number of transcripts of speeches given by TR before and right after this article was written,  many of which slammed the Court almost as strongly as I'm perhaps infamous for.   I have not found one of that particular speech, yet. 

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows

has dropped out of the contention to get the nomination for Senate in Maine.  The story in the Portland Press Herald says that Troy Jackson,  former logger, former Maine Senate president is believed to be the front-runner among those still seeking the nomination. 

They were the first and third of my choices on the ranked choice ballot for Governor, my second choice, Hannah Pingree got the nomination,  so I'd have been happy with either of them as Senator.  

Both of them had something that Graham Planter did not have, both of them have run for office before and so were vetted in ways that Platner was not,  both of them have records of service in public office that he didn't have.   The same for Hannah Pingree. 

I am an ABC Democratic voter,  anybody but Collins.   I'm hoping and praying that a decisive majority of Maine voters are fed up with her patented ersatz "concern" which always results in her only doing the right thing when it doesn't make a difference for the preferred right-wing Republican result.   It might happen.   Collins doesn't care about voters in Maine enough to meet with them,  she hasn't had a town hall in two decades.   I'm not sure she's even bothered since that became an issue in her re-election.  No more than her original lie that she wouldn't seek more than two-terms in the Senate during the "term limit" fad among Republicans.   That promise - and she was far from the only one who promised term limits back in the 90s - turned out to be worth as much as Trump's promises.  

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Gordon Pengilly - Bailey's Way - Ghost Lake

 Ghost Lake 

Ghost Lake: On a fishing trip, Tanis finds a Teddy bear floating on the lake; the only clue to a child’s disappearance.

Shameless Apology For A Desperately Needed Neologism

HERE'S THE BETTER URBAN DICTIONARY definition:: 

 trumptarded 

Describing something so idiotically stupid that it could only have been done by the mediocre reality TV star and five-time bankruptcy champion currently wasting oxygen in the White House.

Taking a dangerous malaria medication in order to prevent coronavirus is seriously trumptarded. What in the f**k's wrong with you?

Looking it up to make sure the word had been invented before - I assumed it had, it's such an obvious one - Wicktionary's description on the google list says:

Noun Trumptard (plural Trumptards) (US politics, slang, derogatory, offensive, vulgar) A supporter of Donald Trump; a Trumpist.

Derogatory, offensive, vulgar,  yeah, just what's needed in this situation.   

Though it is certainly most descriptive of Trump himself, his spawn, his inner circle as well as those they've roped in through him being a really mediocre reality TV star who's legend is based on "his" book, which he probably never read and which was written by a hired ghost writer.   You know, the kind of person who blames Canada for the smoky overcast because he figures they don't rake the forest floors like he might have seen done on the edge of a golf course or, maybe, in Central Park.   

He is the stupidest, by a million miles, idiot to have ever been president of the United States.  My comparison of him to the mad Caligula was inapt because Caligula was nuts but he wasn't also epically stupid as Trump is.  It is all the more telling how bad our system REALLY IS that we have had him in office for going on six hears in combination and we haven't gotten rid of him yet.   The United States Constitution,  judiciary, congress, media, etc. is Trumptarded.  

If There Is One Thing That Is Clear From The Period of Bush v Gore Till Today

IT IS THAT YOU CAN'T FUCKING TRUST THE GODDAMNED COURTS TO PROTECT AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.    

Hell, they won't even protect the lives of the American People with anything like any reliability.  

This has been a response.

Nightmares In The Daytime - Thoughts On Trump's Insane Election Ratfucking Speech

LISTENING TO CLIPS from Trump's election stealing  "speech" from last night,  my first thought was the mad Caligula going to war against Poseidon and having his troops collect his plunder in the form of seashells, after which he demanded the Roman Senate praise him for his victory.   As  I recall an arch or some other monument was constructed.* 

Our Senate is not much better than the Roman Senate in the most corrupt parts of the descent of Rome into the imperial system after its plenty corrupt to get on with republic failed.   It should never be forgotten, that even with the history of the thing fully known to them, the framers of the U.S. Constitution used the Roman republic as a model for what they were imposing on the new country.   They clearly were trying, to an extent, to repeat what had failed more than 18 centuries before expecting that it would prove incorruptible, this time.   That is with all of their slave-owner, crooked lawyer-financier and inequality enabling features added.   The Constitution of the United States is held up as fundamentalists hold up the Bible, only it is far more dangerous to us because it is given actual power which the Bible has never held on this continent.  We are never to admit that the Constitution is the source of most of the corruption that we suffer under, or that and the Supreme Court "interpretation" of it which has only added more dangerous features to what they wrote down. 

Hearing the calls for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove our own corrupt, mad and far more dangerously powerful Roberts Court crowned emperor only proves that our system, our Constitution, now corrupted into the beginning of Republican-fascism is ludicrously unable to protect us.   

That amendment, framed when it was plausibly argued** that something like honor and caution would govern the actions of a Vice President and the members of a president's cabinet,  is a dead letter.  The provision in it for Congress to appoint others to remove a dangerous president from office have never been taken up and, without some better scheme for doing that,  we are left with the sense of responsibility and honor and morals that a J.D. Vance, a Todd Blanche, a Pete Hegseth, a Marco Rubio, a Robert Kennedy, a Brooke Rollins, Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessent, Doug Burgum, Sean Duffy, Linda McMahon, Chris Wright, Doug Collins, Scott Turner,  Keith Sonderling,  and Markwayne Mullins have.   If you could find enough morals, sense of responsibility, honesty, wisdom or even enough of the least of those attributes, intelligence among the entire group just named to make one decent public official,  I doubt entirely.   None of them could count on even a J.D. Vance to keep them on, he and his owner, Thiel would want their own gang of thieves in place and they might want smarter ones. 

Such is who our fate is put in the hands of,  by the absurdity of the Constitution and the Republican-fascist majority in the U.S. Senate who the thing relies on to shield us from the corruption and stupidity of a Trump. 

Nothing that happens in November, no reform legislation, not even the desperately needed reform of the totally corrupt Supreme Court will be enough to save us in the long run without some serious and drastic reform of the U.S. Constitution - including taking the Marbury power from the Court once and for all.   It was the Supreme Court that got us into this with their lie and billionaire and millionaire favoring rulings.   It was lawyers among those in the presidency and Congress who couldn't imagine doing what needed to be done after the BIPARTISAN emergency clean elections legislation passed after the democracy endangering crimes of Watergate were exposed - remove the power to nullify such legislation from the Supreme Court.   I have long held that even among democrats the lawyers among them would be the weakest link in securing legitimate government through egalitarian democracy and protecting it from those who were its most dangerous enemies,  the rich, the racist, the profiteers and the for-show-patriots.   And they will ride such nonsense as removal of a Trump through the Constitutional fictions of impeachment and the 25th Amendment into an imperial corruption that will make the Roman one look penny-ante. 

I think the most insightful sentence uttered about the law under the U.S. Constitution was said by one of the most corrupt and corrupting of the robber barons,  J.P. Morgan when he is said to have said,  "I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do what I want to do, which is pretty much an accurate description of what a very large percentage of lawyers in the US are trained to do and which any rump of honest practitioners in the law have been unable or, more likely, unwilling to transcend. 

Trump is, beyond measure, the stupidest person to have ever held the American presidency,  and considering the likes of Franklin Pierce,  Andrew Johnson, Calvin Coolidge,  George W. Bush, and others are his competition for that, that is saying a lot.   But he is a corrupt idiot who was tutored by the infamously corrupt and extremely powerful lawyer-liar-crook Roy Cohn.   He apparently learned everything he needed about the law and lawyer tactics that he would need to rob, steal, cheat, swindle, wear down to climb to the top rank of criminals in United States history from that one corrupt lawyer.  I would be surprised if he hadn't, actually learned less from his putrid father, the KKK-Nazi loving Fred Trump.    And it should never be forgotten that Cohn prospered for decades,  half a century as a corrupt, crooked and loathsome lawyer, not in some eutrophic swamp like Louisiana or Alabama but in the capital of American sophistication and media scrutiny,  New York City.    The one and only time that the members of the bar really did anything to hold him to account was when he was finally on his deathbed dying of AIDS even as he was pretending he was straight and getting celebrity TV journalists to cover for him,  one of the most famous of those having pretended to be his girlfriend, briefly.   And the judges and "justices" were in on that and so many other examples of corruption, both in the career of Cohn and in the CV of Donald Trump. 

Putting a Band Aid on the gutted American democracy is what I expect will happen, it will not work, the Supreme Court will make sure of that.   Especially if the Congress passes effective laws.   The Constitution is the cause of all of it,  the faulty ideas it consists of, the intentional anti-equality corruptions baked into it, the added corruptions that its structure did nothing to overturn or prevent.  Without that, with the practice and scheming of corrupt lawyers and others - look at the authors of Project 2025 - will only get another chance to try again.  

As an aside, election rigging is also baked into the Constitution in order to prevent real representative democracy.   The original 3/5ths provision which, after emancipation turned into the even more corrupt 5/5ths under Jim Crow (and which the John Crow Supreme Court has revived) was stealing the power to vote from Black People while giving those who enslaved them and maintained post-bellum apartheid against them the voting power they were given through counting them in the census.   Trump's legislation which his speech pushed is a Republican election rigging law.  As have been the Roberts Court's rulings that allows states to deny Black People,  Latinos, Native Americans and, as the Court explicitly green-lighted DEMOCRATS the representation that their numbers give them a right to.   

I will leave that point which could be elaborated on by saying that the structure of the Senate has de-facto election rigging in it by giving low-population states far, far more electoral power than those in even the largest states.   Vote rigging in reality is baked into the Constitution from the start.  Those in the largest states have been played for chumps from the start of the thing and never so much so as today. 

One of the stupidest things in our Constitution is that the 1st Amendment is so flawed that even with the witness to the Holocaust, slavery, America's genocide of the original American People, etc.  WE ARE TO NEVER LEARN FROM AND PREVENT SUCH ATROCITIES.  The ideologies those are based in are to ALWAYS HAVE ANOTHER CHANCE TO SUCCEED AND MURDER MILLIONS IF NOT MORE, FOREVER.    We are to never, ever learn even the hardest lessons of history, not even during the lifetimes of those who experienced and witnessed those terrible lessons.  It has given rise to the insane post-WWII ideology of "free speech absolutism" which went from such champions of Molly Ivins and myriads of other leftist and liberal democratic journalists, lawyers, academics, etc.  There is nothing so telling as to the insane folly of that ideology that it is now the favorite ideology of the Trumpists, the Murdochian fascist-porn industry titans, and fascists and Nazis and, lest anyone not realize they are the most powerful of all of these, Americas indigenous fascists, the white supremacists.   ONLY ONCE THEY HAVE POWER THEY WILL USE EVERY ORGAN OF POWER THEY HOLD TO SUPPRESS, WHAT, THE FREEDOM OF THEIR OPPONENTS TO OPPOSE THEM.   Look at what the "civil libertarian lawyer" led Brit Labour government has done in that regard, as an example.  

Until we make lying not only wrong again, but a meaningful liability to those who lie for fascism,  America's democracy is as dead as the Roman Republic was.  And I mean as it was in 1787, not just in 40 AD.  

* UPDATE:  I was going on memory, it was a massive lighthouse not an arch,  which erosion on the coastline destroyed.  I think any Democratic candidate who promises to destroy Trump's monuments to himself will probably gain votes for that promise.   It is insane that a criminally corrupt and insane president can do what Trump has been allowed to do in that regard but it only proves how insanely corrupt our Constitution, as it really is, allows things to get.  WITH THE SUPREME COURT AND LOWER COURTS ALLOWING IT. 

** It is entirely relevant that those who wrote and adopted the 25th Amendment were the generation who experienced and fought WWII against fascism and Nazism.   Their children (my age cohort), grandchildren and great grand children have proven to have forgotten or never learned what their experience taught them.  We can't rely on that happening again, not short of a democratic recovery from as bad or worse here than happened in Europe, Asia and elsewhere then.  We can learn from that history or we can fall for libertarian insouciance such as "free speech-press absolutism" is made of. 

I Need A Day Off

From the news, not from writing.  I'm going to shut down my computer and not go on it again till Friday morning.   And I'm not going to listen to the radio either.   Not even if I hear from a relative that they've proclaimed the second coming of Mitch. 

Till then. . . 

In case someone wondered what I mean by going through that small book as a quick self-directed course here's what I do.

Type it out, making comments and taking notes along the way,

- put the book on a clip board with clips or clothes pins, or in a holder  (mine's a cookbook holder my sister-in-law bought but my brother decided to get rid of ) to hold it up flat and prop that up where I can see it as I read and type.

- Then, starting at the start of the text,  I read a paragraph twice, then type it out, then read through what I've typed out to correct and check it.  For those writers with a more complex writing style or a book that does, you might find it faster to read it more than twice before typing it out.  David Bentley Hart's writing is an example of that kind of thing, his paragraphs are very long so I don't try to do more than about a page a day with him. 

- then type any questions or thoughts on that paragraph.

Then move to the next one.  

I go by what they claim monks in a scriptorum were able to do and never try to do more than two pages in a day.   Again, more complex text might need to be taken at a slower rate.    I started out writing it out but my hand's can't take that anymore and even with my practice of only writing things out in block capitals, I can read it but no one else is ever going to want to. 

And also never try to have more than two books going at a time, the temptation is to think you can do more than you can.   It's better to go through fewer books better than more books where you're just skimming.    You don't have to finish by the end of the semester, you're not paying anyone or getting paid.  You don't even have to do tests though writing out ideas like in a theme paper might be useful. 

If you have suggestions of how to do it better,  please, tell me.  I'd love to have more efficient ways to do it. 

Schools are increasingly credentialing rackets, not places of education.   Your education is, ultimately, in your own hands. Really, it always has been.  For older books in the public domain, the internet has been a positive boon, especially since many town libraries have more or less given up.  And this way you can take any course you want, whether or not its offered, whether or not it's approved.   

Tom Paxton - Molly Bloom

 

I haven't listed to this song in about a half a century, I'd guess,  but it has been going through my head all week so I figured I'd share the ear worm.

At least it's a funny song with pretty clever words.   Good use of kazoos too. 

Now, where's my copy of Ulysses?  

I Can't Do Better Than Mehdi Hassan Did In Refuting Today's Version Of Holocaust Denial

 

I wish I could ask this question to Michael Sean Winters and, really all those denying what the world has seen because the murderers bragged about their killing online. 

Neo-Nazi Says What?

IN RESPONSE TO MY POSTS ABOUT THE ICESTAPO MURDER of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, brings up a case of a shooting NOT BY A POLICE AGENCY to "what about" the murder by his fellow white supremacist, neo-fascists and neo-Nazi Republican-fascist goons saying that I say its OK because the alleged shooter (I know nothing about the case so I am taking the ne-naz's word for that or arguments sake) because I, what?  DIDN'T SAY A WORD ABOUT IT BECAUSE IT'S JUST ONE OF A JILLION SHOOTINGS THAT HAPPEN IN THE UNITED STATES BECAUSE OF HIS SIDE'S ARMING THE MURDERERS,  PRIVATE AND ICESTAPO.  

You really are that stupid, aren't you, ne-naz.  

Auto-Correct Strikes Again or "good news for the poor . . . that is also a form of bad news for the rich"

Of course I know that the prophecy made over the infant Jesus at the Temple was made by Simeon, not "Simon" as apparently whatever intelligence might be claimed for auto-correct doesn't know. 

I have yet to find out how to turn of auto-correct in the program I type texts into.  That's laziness on my part, not a lack of intelligence.  At least to the extent that laziness isn't a product of stupidity.  

- - - - 

Since I have the time I'll type out the next paragraph from Luke Timothy Johnson's book from the one I typed out this morning.   If I'd been intelligent that early in the morning I'd have remembered it was even more focused on my them.

As a prophet, Jesus announces "good news for the poor" (6:20) that is also a form of bad news for the rich (6:24).  The categories of rich and poor stand, on one side, for all those who are powerful within society, who "sit on thrones" (Lk 1:52) social and religious privilege, and on the other side, all those who are weak and powerless, who are marginalized within society. 

Jesus Was Absolutely In Line With The Goals Of Socialism And Not Those Of The Framers Of The Constitution - Hate Mail

THERE IS NO DOUBTING that the economics of Jesus are extremely radical and anti-capitalist.  That is there is no honestly doubting it.  For a start he goes the Mosaic ban on usury one step better and tells People that if they have money they are to give it away to those they don't expect to pay it back.   Since I've only got a little time to deal with this, I'll concentrate on Luke this morning.   Here's what he says in Luke 6:34-35.

34 If you lend money only to someone you think will pay you back, will God be pleased with you for that? Even sinners lend to sinners because they think they will get it all back.

35  But love your enemies and be good to them. Lend without expecting to be paid back.  Then you will get a great reward, and you will be the true children of God in heaven. He is good even to people who are unthankful and cruel. 36 Have pity on others, just as your Father has pity on you.

Capitalism would be impossible, as would, by the way, banking and insurance and other industries based on the lending of money with interest if the U.S. law were "based in the bible"  only it's when that claim would NOT be in line with the Gospel of Jesus that those who love to tell that lie are in favor of their version of scripture being claimed that way.   And as I said, Jesus' are an intensification of the Law of Moses. 

In Luke Timothy Johnson's surprisingly useful book  The New Testament: A Very Short Introduction  (which I'm going through as a self-designed short course) he condenses a lot of the evidence to support my title in some very short paragraphs.  

Jesus appears as a prophet-Messiah at the start of his ministry.  Luke moves a story about Jesus visiting his home town from its original place in Mark 6:1-6) and makes it a formal inaugural moment in Jesus' ministry (Lk 4:16-29).  Himself full of the Holy Spirit (3:22, 4:1, 14) Jesus reads in his hometown synagogue the words of Isaiah (61:1-2, 58:6), and declares them to be fulfilled in him (4:21).  The Spirit of the Lord is upon him, and he is the anointed one, who has been sent out to bring good news to the poor, liberty to captives, sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed (Lk 4:14-19).  The rejection of his townspeople foreshadow the opposition this prophetic messiah will experience 4:28-30).  He will be a sign of contradiction, as Simeon declared of him when he was an infant, "for the fall and rise of many in Israel." (2:34). 

I will begin by noting that the Common English Version translation of the sentence of Simeon translates what most versions put a different way as a "warning."   I think that's a useful way to put it if you understand that any significant warning will meet with opposition argument and contradiction.  I think we professed Christians would do well to take his words as warnings, he was a prophet and more. 

The program of the Republican Party in the United States could not be more in opposition to the words of Jesus,  "good news for the poor," all the Republicans have is hatred of the poor and destitute, lying about them and advocating they live and die in abject misery.  Capitalism's attitude towards them, ESPECIALLY IN THE ENGLISH SPEAKING COUNTRIES, was best put by Charles Dickens in his most known but also most superficially read book:

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.
“Both very busy, sir.”
“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”
“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”
“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.
“You wish to be anonymous?”
“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides—excuse me—I don’t know that.”
“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.
“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

I will forego the temptation to point to the Malthusian reference to that, the fact that it is exactly what the New Poor Law made the law of Britain and the fact that Charles Darwin's natural selection is an intensification of Malthus which ALWAYS leads to death through eugenics.   Though it's one of my major themes here. 

The policy of American conservatives,  Republicans, capitalism is the policy of Scrooge before his unlikely and miraculous conversion.   And that's only their policy towards Poor Whites, their policy toward People of Color is that of the KKK, as the ICESTAPO murders this week alone prove.  Those were in line with the New Taney Court's Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo decision in which the "color blind"  John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett et al gave the police the power to target People, even those who they had no warrent for as the one in Biddeford, Maine yesterday ON THE BASIS OF THEIR COLOR.  

As an aside, Susan Collins, the patented "moderate Republican" said that she didn't make a mistake in voting to confirm its author, the sex criminal and, clearly, racist Brett Kavanaugh, which should be an issue in the coming election.   She supports the legal decision that is the basis of the police murder in her constituency yesterday.   And she's a "moderate Republican." 

I could go through the entire New Testament and over and over again compare the words of Jesus to the policies, whether explicit or on a de facto basis of Republicans, conservatives and capitalism.   I will note that any and all forms of secular socialism fall short of the radical economics of Jesus but I don't have much time this morning,  I've got to get some work done before the global warming heat sets in.   Yet another thing brought to us as a "good" of Republicans and capitalists and a lot of the communists, these days, are full fledged capitalists.   Though they're somewhat less inclined to be slaves to the extraction industries than those conservatives under "classical economics" and capitalism.  Capitalism is pretty much a guarantee of not only corrupt government but stupid and irrationally selfish government, as well. 

I would welcome any Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, practitioners of Vodun or any of the other religions to lay out their own scripture or prophecy or tradition that supports the same points.   I think any legitimate religion will have the same content.  I will say that may Muslims have far more extensively made the scriptural ban on usury part of their civil law than those in the West have from the start of early modernism when Calvin, especially, put that aside in favor of capitalism. 

In secular governance in a pluralistic egalitarian democracy,  we need a generally religious socialism if not something more radical that needs a new name. 

Here's' the latest thing I've seen about the ICESTAPO murder in Maine today, from the Portland Press Herald,  by Isabell Oss and Abby Driscoll

Cecelia Humiston woke up Monday morning to commotion outside her Chapel Street apartment in Biddeford.

The 22-year-old walked out and saw what appeared to be a person on the ground on Pool Street, then heard yelling from other neighbors and cries from a family in distress — two women and a young child.

“She couldn’t have been older than three,” said Humiston, who has a 2-year-old son. “She was still in her Bluey pajamas.”

Just minutes after a man was shot and killed, reportedly by federal immigration officials, Humiston saw who she believes was the victim’s daughter. She said the older of the two women yelled to law enforcement, “You took her dad, you took her dad!”

The Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! Maine identified the victim as a 26-year-old Columbian man. His name has not been released, but the organizations said he had been issued a Social Security number and was authorized to work in the U.S.

Humiston said she did not know the family, but her father told her he’d seen them around town several times over the last few years.

From her window, Humiston could see law enforcement asking the family to stay on the scene and if they had spoken to investigators yet. A member of the family told an officer she “didn’t care,” and wanted to leave, Humiston said.

Humiston described the law enforcement officials as “rude,” and said they barricaded the family’s car from leaving. Another yelled at the little girl, who she said was trying to smell flowers.

Several neighbors said they have seen ICE activity in the city since February. Some recall agents patrolling bus stops and stopping people on the street, but Humiston was shocked to learn about Monday’s incident.

“This is Biddeford, things like this never happen here,” she said.

Naw, I don't feel in the least bit ashamed of saying it - Rain Delay Hate Mail

I HAVE AN UNSHAKABLE FAITH that Lindsey Graham is in hell, what most of you would know Catholics call purgatory.   Where Trump will go.  Which one will spend more time there, that I don't know. 

There's an old joke about Unitarian Universalists,  that the Universalists believe God was too good to damn anyone to hell for eternity and the Unitarians firmly believe that THEY are too good for God to damn THEM to eternity.   I'm with the universalists.  

I'm a Catholic universalist,  I think there's a hell where all the evil we have done and been gets burned out of us but that it's not eternal.   I wouldn't want to go there but I'm sure someone does. 

Charlie Kirk is there getting his racism and slander against TransPeople burned out of him, his promotion of gun murder, too.   And for the same reasons that Lindsey is there. 

Aren't you glad you demanded an answer?  

I Don't Know How Much Coverage It's Getting

but there has been another ICESTAPO murder, this one in Biddeford, Maine.  That's not far from where I life.   There haven't been many details in the media, and those will, I'm sure, come from witnesses and not the Trump regime.   

I haven't read anything from our governor, Janet Mills.   I hope she's as good on this as she was on standing up to Trump up till now.  Not that she'll have much more success with that than governors in other places where ICE and the other federal fascist police entities have murdered People.

Did these assholes get all their training from watching cop shows on TV and video games?   I'll bet our local cops probably got more training than to do stuff like that. 

This is the Trump regime at war with the American People. 

Before Going Out To Weed

 I'll repost what I said at RMJ's

I think it's pretty funny that a lot of the conspiracy theorists find it unreasonable that a 71-year-old man who is known to have eaten pretty much every meal from a restaurant (when a TV was stolen from his kitchen he didn't know it for weeks because he never went in there) and who is known to have drunk heavily - believe me, he was an alcoholic and not a recent one - could have died as a result of hardening of the arteries.

I was just talking to one of my younger relatives a couple of weeks back about how when I was a kid it was far from unusual for men in their 30s and 40s to die of heart attacks. Off hand, thinking of it right now, I could name you at least four or five of those who died in my town at the time. It's not because diets have generally gotten better, drugs for treating the effects of a meat centered diet mixed with other health endangering habits have gotten better.

Still, since the Republicans live by spreading rumors and lies, I've got no problem with what they do being turned against them, except it does nothing to defeat the deadly error that there is such a thing as a "right to lie."

Todays Article Slamming Democrats

BY MICHAEL SEAN WINTERS embodies what I really like about his journalism and what I really dislike about it.   I will pass by the typical and rather superficial comments about Graham Platner,  I have yet to read someone who isn't a long time observer of Maine politics who really gets that.  He is somewhat more at home when talking about New York. 

Like most American journalists, for him Democrats, except for the farthest right of them (see below), can only do wrong.  

Here for example is a paragraph I think is both rather unaware and unfair as it is, in part,  insightful.

The problem with the democratic socialists is not their economics. It is their indifference to the way liberal democracy works.  If they called themselves "social Democrats" they would not be such an easy target. Or, better, if they called themselves "FDR Democrats" they would put their opponents on the back foot. And there is not a single item on their agenda that requires one label over the others.  One suspects that they like the fact that "democratic socialist" sounds more radical.  In a democracy, however, one has to persuade, and this group of progressives prefers to hector. They speak as if their ideas are self-evident.

I would like to have Winters give us a paragraph or two just what is "the way liberal democracy works."  Because as the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, etc. show, it's either not working very well or it isn't working at all.   The turmoil in the United States that gave us things like the phenomenon of the Obama voter becoming the Trump voter and, I will go on to say, so many of those very same people turning from MAGA to FAFO regrets over their support for Trump is exactly that LIBERAL DEMOCRACY NOT WORKING AS ADVERTISED, IN ANY WAY. 

Liberal democracy with its maximum emphasis on "freedom" especially under the name of "liberty" as became a slogan in both the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century has proven to be entirely compatible with inequality, ECONOMIC INEQUALITY most of all, but also the rankest of racial, gender, ethnic, class inequality in terms of political participation and legal rights.   AND ALL OF THOSE AREAS OF INEQUALITY UNDER LIBERAL DEMOCRACY ARE INTERTWINED.   In the Post WWII years, when, through Democrats enhancing the power of organized labor and such massive economic and social leveling under things like the GI Bill and increased support of higher education - the tuition at Land Grant Universities in those years should certainly count as welfare as much as payment to poor families - the white working and middle class flourished as never before.   That was even as Black Americans and other People of Color were far, far less included in that until the passage of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts in the mid-1960s.   

Once that happened and with the economic consequences of things like spending for the War in Vietnam and increasing transfer of wealth from the working class TO THE RICH and poor and middle class whites felt the pinch, they were either talked into or fell back on those long, long ingrained habits under liberal democracy to kick down and kiss up.  

Michael Sean Winters' liberal democratic habits of thought are one thing that leads his desire for the consequences of egalitarian liberty with the very "freedoms" such as the freedom of the media to lie us into fascism, the freedom of those with money to buy government, the freedom of them to set up guess pools and programming on such as PBS in the past and in online "influencers" like the late Charlie Kirk to propagandize using such notions as "freedom" and, most potently destructive of equality, "free speech." to lie us into Trumpism.  

His notion that Democratic Socialists, who I have certainly been critical of in several ways, would be any more acceptable in 2026 by calling themselves "Social Democrats" or even "FDR Democrats" is naive in the extreme.    If calling themselves either of the two would in any way benefit their chances of getting elected or putting their economic equality agenda into law then that would have happened back when Democrats ran on the memory of FDR and called their agenda "social justice."   So corrupted has the memory of history become, under the liberal democratic definition of "free-press, media, speech" that those wouldn't work any better than "Democratic Socialism."  

He is, though, correct in the fact that so many lefties, especially those with college credentials, seem to be blissfully unaware of,  that in order to govern, make laws and put them into effect,  you do need to win a majority of the votes, though, as I noted yesterday, under our "liberal democracy" with its rigging to ensure that the right and ignorant and influenced by billionaire money actually win, the Electoral College and, especially under Supreme Court usurpation, can short circuit that.    Liberal democracy, American style, is even more corrupt than it is in many of the newer liberal democracies.  Ours is intentionally and explicitly rigged to ensure inequality will always be a major force in American politics.

Almost the entire news media, almost as much of academia and the conventional wisdom of the plutocracy will lie to you about that, never so much as in the month of July 4th and never so much as in a year that ends in a 76 or a 26.  

The most self-evident clause in the Declaration of Independence was rendered moot almost as soon as the leaders of the Revolution, slave owners and their allies, every one,  got actual power.  That was already clear when they got around to the parts about enumeration of population in the slave states and how they would be assessed for taxation at the commencement of the revolution. 

Before giving his article a bit of praise I have to address this obscene passage:

Nowhere is the progressives' morally obtuse self-certainty more obvious, and more troubling, than in the ease with which they accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. Everyone is free to criticize any decision of the Israeli, or any other, government. . . 

THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO MORAL OR RATIONAL ARGUMENT THAT WHAT ISRAEL HAS DONE IN GAZA IS NOT A GENOCIDE.  If you want to give that decision to the 'experts' there are numerous ISRAELI scholars of genocide who have said that what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza is a genocide.   The Nazis did their best to cover up their genocide as they were committing it.  As I recently linked to a piece by a Holocaust scholar noted, there is a rare instance of a soldier writing to his wife in Vienna about what he and his unit were doing in Eastern Europe,  and it is one of the rare instances of something like that.  The genocide by Israel in Gaza has been videotaped and commented on by the genocidalists as they were gleefully committing it TO THE WORLD ON THE INTERNET.  If Winters wants to argue about the definition of "genocide" to defend what the IDF an the widely supported Israeli government is doing as some lesser act, then he is in need of some serious moral reflection.   Maybe he should seriously contemplate a picture of a child shot in the head by the IDF like the baby who was shot while they were breast feeding.  

. . . Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel delivered a master class in how you criticize an ally in his speech in Tel Aviv last week. When a person only criticizes Israel, and ignores Hamas' responsibility not just for the pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, but for repeatedly placing Gaza's civilian population in harm's way and refusing to turn over hostages which would have brought the war to a speedy conclusion, why is that? Avila Chevalier attended a pro-Palestinian rally the day after the Oct. 7 attack. There is a word for looking at a complex problem and only blaming the Jews involved: antisemitism.

Dear Jesus, don't tell me that MSW is going to endorse Emanuel for president.   

There have been myriads of those who condemned the actions of Hamas on October 7th who are fully able to see that the scores and scores of thousands of civilians killed and outright murdered and millions removed from Gaza in what MEMBERS OF THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT AND ZIONISTS INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF ISRAEL ADMIT IS AN ATTEMPT TO DESTROY GAZA AND DEPOPULATE IT, LEBANSRAUM 2026, IN A WORD IS THE VERY DEFINITION OF GENOCIDE .  

What is Israel but a program of putting Jews "in harms way?"   One of the great criticisms of the Zionist project was that it would concentrate Jews in a way that killing them would make it far easier.   And it was seen from before the establishment of the state that it would exist in a perpetual state of war because of how it was built on land stolen from Palestinians, Muslims, Christians and others.   Dorothy Thompson went from an ardent supporter of Zionism - unlike Hannah Arendt, she supported the overtly exclusionary (and racist) Zionist Biltmore Conference - only for her to realize when she saw what was happening for herself to see the Israel project as a deeply dangerous trap for both Jews and Palestinians.   I think Winters would do himself a favor by looking closely at the evolution of Dorothy Thompson's position on the establishment of a "Jewish state" that has turned into an explicitly apartheid state which has steadily expanded its land by terrorizing, attacking and killing Palestinians and those in surrounding states, especially Lebanon.   Thompson was consistent in her opposition to that kind of thing, whether in Europe by Hitler or, eventually, in the middle east by Israel.  

I would love to hear what he would have to say about this recent quote:

 "What is Jewish supremacy? Eighty years after the Holocaust, it's Mein Kampf in reverse. The superior race is us." 

And this one:

"The Israeli government is encouraging Jewish pogromists to dispossess Arabs of their land through abuse, including shooting at them,"

That was said by former Israeli Defense Minister, Moshe Ya'alon .

I could go on with what is wrong with what Winters said,  here is something that demonstrates why he is pretty good in his real area of expertise, recent and past Catholic history and culture.

. . . The record of democratic socialism in postwar Europe is something Americans would do well to emulate. At its heart, it stands for the proposition that the common good needs to play a larger role in setting national priorities, that the hyper-individualism, and most especially the deregulation of capital, that characterized the Reagan-Thatcher revolution was a mistake. John Judis has penned an excellent analysis of the development of democratic socialism in recent years vis-à-vis the Democratic Party.

This is not merely my opinion. That noted leftie pol Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2006 book co-written with Marcello Pera, Without Roots, famously said: "In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness."

Maybe he could get the recent Catholic converts like J.D. Vance to refute the second most adored recent Pope of the trad-caths to good effect.   I have pointed out that, having to deal with both the far more radical than socialist economics of the Mosaic Law or its intensification under the Gospel of Jesus and the earliest church, even the recent reactionary Popes,  Benedict and JPII have sounded like economic radicals in their writings and speeches.   

I would, though, caution that European democratic socialism has rested on a reform of the liberal democratic order* and, so, it has not prevented the devolution of its retained inegalitarian features into neo-fascism and even neo-Nazism.   Which gets us to something we do really agree on,  I agree with MSW that the word "socialist" makes it a political liability if not a non-starter.   The Nazis along with the Marxists, the putrid Fabians and a myriad of other pseudo-socialism have made the word poison in far too many cases.   For the good that came from post-war European democratic socialism, it was certainly not an end of history any more than liberal democracy - you can safely read that "rampant capitalism" - has been. 

NOTE:  I have come to distrust any political or legal or, really, intellectual framing that pretends it can extend the methods of science as used in the more exact physical sciences into the realms of society, economics, and, most dangerous of all, perhaps, civil law.   Liberal democracy is, inherently, that kind of a pretense of extending scientific method way beyond where it can legitimately, honestly or safely be applied.  That danger intensifies with that most dangerous of all such attempts becoming part of the mix, the theory of natural selection.   For the Catholic journalist Michael Sean Winters, he might want to consider the consequences for the Gospel of Jesus under the intellectual framing of "natural selection" which Darwin, himself, said was identical to Spencer's "survival of the fittest." 

The Law, the Gospel, the Epistles, and their equivalent in other religious traditions are  the only secure foundation of egalitarian democracy and you can't find that with the scientific method.  "Liberal democracy" shuns that truth.