"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
Written by Gordon Pengilly, Bailey's Way stars Esther Purves Smith as Tanis Bailey, a young rookie constable on the the Calgary Police Service determined to make Detective just as soon as she can.
David LeReaney as Sergeant Mann Grant Linneberg as Detective Donaldson
A repost of this series that Gordon Pengilly wrote for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio series The Mystery Project. I like Gordon Pengilly's work, though it's not available anymore his Listening In The Dark is one of the best radio plays I posted here years back. I used to listen to these with far less fidelity fading in and out on the shortwave back in the 1990s. Good times. The transfer isn't perfect but it's a lot clearer than I heard back then.
I've been watching the movies made by the famous husband-wife team that gave us the mid-20th century fiberglass furniture and other design.
This one is mostly just fun, as with some of their others the music is by the Hollywood composer Elmer Bernstein, conducted by him. I like it a lot better than the music he wrote for feature films.
I DO LIKE a number of those members of Congress who are freaking out over the polling on Joe Biden's chances of winning against the two-time loser of the popular vote, criminally convicted, multiply successfully sued and prosecuted Donald Trump. But I agree with AOC that these otherwise serious Democrats aren't presenting us with any real viable alternative to Joe Biden or Kamala Harris being the Democratic nominee. Basing any such a call for the most successful Democratic President in a half a century to step aside on polling has a history of such conclusions to consider, something I don't think those expressing such faith in "data" have really understood. The polls that showed that Alf Landon would beat FDR or Dewey would Truman were as based on data as the polls being pushed by the anti-Biden media now. If there's one thing we know about polling today, it shares a lot of the same problems with polling done back then. Here's some relevant history of that from the conclusion that Truman's chances of winning were hopeless, from the the department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Oxford School of Emory University
In the 1948 presidential election, Thomas Dewey, then governor of New York, ran against the incumbent, Harry S. Truman. Three major polls (Gallup included) predicted Dewey would win. He did not. The Gallup poll came closest with 49.5% Dewey, 44.5% Truman, 5.5% other, and 0.5% undecided.
There were several problems:
First, they stopped polling too soon, and Truman was notably successful at energizing people in the last days before the election. The prediction came two weeks in advance of the election with 15% announcing undecided. It was assumed that the 15% undecided would split in the same proportions as those who had decided, leaving only 0.5% truly undecided. (The 0.5% undecided was Gallup's error factor.)
Second, the telephone polls tended to favor Dewey because in 1948 telephones were generally limited to more well-to-do households, and Truman was less popular among elite voters.
Third, one of the methods used sent interviewers into an area and told them to interview a certain number of people who met some given demographic criteria. For example, a pollster might be told to choose and interview 10 men, 11 women, 8 african americans, 2 asians, and 11 caucasians, etc... where the numbers chosen for each demographic is representative of the overall population.
Unfortunately for the pollsters, just because a sample is representative of the population demographically, doesn't mean that it will be representative with regard to the issue at hand.
Even worse, as long as the pollsters matched the quotas for their demographics, they were free to choose whom they like -- which can lead to substantial bias in the sample when pollsters avoid certain people that for some reason are hard to approach.
One of the things thatanalysis leaves out is the problem of people who choose not to talk to pollsters, ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO USE A PHONE TO REACH PEOPLE. It's an absolute fact of polling in 2024 that only a small fraction of those called will willingly subject themselves to answering the questions asked. I stopped talking to pollsters because I became convinced that virtually ALL POLLS ARE PUSH-POLLS DONE TO ACHIEVE RESULTS THAT THE PERSON PAYING FOR THE POLLS WANT. I don't trust any of them, especially when they won't say who is paying for the poll. Virtually every poll done today, when so many must be as sick and tired of polls as I am, has an unrepresentative sample of the population WHICH IS THEIR ONLY SOURCE OF DATA, that "data" that so many People with little to no actual critical knowledge of statistical analysis think means the same things as certain fact. I have no idea who is going to win the election in November AND NEITHER DOES ANYONE ELSE, NO MATTER HOW DEVOTED TO "DATA" THEY LIKE TO BELIEVE THEMSELVES TO BEING.
I do know that no election has ever been won by throwing out the person who even the polls show has the best chance OF ANY NAMED ALTERNATIVE candidate to beat the worst person to have ever gotten the presidency BY LOSING THE POPULAR VOTE. I certainly don't think that those who aren't willing to go on the record or those who have a track record of making wrong predictions are helping to defeat Trump by trying to reset the match this late in the game. That has a record of proven disaster, despite what idiotic Hollywood bull shit magical thinking would have such idiots believe. I think frequently consulted "Democratic pundits" as seen on TV and read in the NYT are as fully able to cut their babblage to the preferences of those who put them on the screen or in cheap ink on cheap paper.
THERE IS A KIND of Republican-fascist convert to Catholicism who sees it as nothing but a vehicle to power by tapping into the billioniare-millioniare supported "trad-catholic" cult. J. D. Vance is only one of a number of such opportunists, the serially divorced, serially adulterous Newt Gingrich is another that right-wing priests and bishops have allowed in to a religion in which the Catholic right wing bishops and priests have barring once divorced-remarried Catholics from the sacraments, though not if they are well connected Republican-fascists. I have long been suspicious of recent Catholic converts among affluent white men and women, from the beginning of JPII's papacy, in fact. I have long been suspicious of those who became priests and bishops under him and Benedict XVI, though not all of those. I am entirely skeptical of those who went from the expensive, elite kind of Catholic preps into the Ivy League class of university, especially those who go to their law schools, especially those who are Republican-fascists, now. There is simply no possibility of someone of informed good will to remain in that party or to join it, today. It is an act exactly equivalent to remaining in an overtly fascist party in 2024.
When he was running for the Senate, two years ago, Michael Sean Winters did an expose on J. D. Vance and the right-wing Catholic nut cases he has adopted as giving him his official views on so many things. I can't do better than Winters does so here's some of what he said then:
Vance sees Catholicism in a similar fashion. The Catholic Church of his imaginings is part of a "post-liberal" America, and so it was unsurprising Vance took time off the campaign trail to speak at a conference of conservative, post-liberal nationalists at Franciscan University at Steubenville, Ohio. The event included people like Harvard law professor and Christian integralist Adrian Vermeule, former New York Post opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari, and Rachel Bovard, senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute.
"If the last 30 years has taught us anything, it's that the left's fascist orgy is not somehow going to abate," Bovard told the group. "No one knows what lunacy is coming next, but we all know what's eventually coming: normalized pederasty, forced euthanasia, postnatal abortion, persecuting dissident faiths, disqualifying religious traditionalists and political conservatives from banking, property rights and public benefits."
Who talks like that? These are Vance's intellectual running buddies.
Also unsurprising is the fact that one of the guests when Vance was received into the Catholic faith* was Benedict Option author Rod Dreher, the Methodist-turned-Catholic-turned-Orthodox writer who recently separated from his wife, left his children so he could move to Hungary and be near his hero, Viktor Orban.
Vance's fraudulence is discerned in the fact that while he celebrates Catholicism as a vehicle for his sociocultural vision, he departs from the teaching of the church on a host of issues, from immigration to labor rights to climate change.
To hear him invoke his religion, you would never think that religion assures us that the meek are blessed and the rich will be sent away empty. The ancien régime of his heart is the imagined moral landscape of the 1950s, when moms mostly stayed at home, gays stayed in the closet, and the business of America was business.
Maurras, of course, was a monarchist, which is not a viable option in 21st-century America. Still, does anyone doubt that Trump would accept a crown if it were offered to him?
We know Vance would not demur. At a campaign event, he stood by sheepishly as Trump robbed him of his dignity, saying the Senate candidate was "kissing my ass" to get his endorsement. The former president compared Vance to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in this regard. Vance, in true courtier fashion, said not a word. That was painful to watch.
The writer couldn't have known then that the Supreme Court on July 1st of this year, a ruling issued by right-wing Catholics, Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Coney-Barrett, made what Winters believed was not a viable option in America just two years ago into what will become a fait accomplis if Trump or Vance becomes president next year. I strongly suspect if Biden or Harris is president, the same "justices" will immediately start back tracking on their coronation plans.
The right-wing "trad-catholic" cult might seem marginal or funny or unimportant to those who don't watch it and keep track of it but the fact that Republican-fascists have packed the Court with either its true believers or those who like Vance will play it to and use the cult to get power for themselves. I doubt J. D. Vance believes in anything except money and power, as apparently Putin's media in Russia is crowing, he's more like Trump than Trump is and he's approximately half his age.
This is no Chick Publications - Southern Baptist fever dream c. 1960 that suspected that a Catholic president would rule the country according to orders issued by Vatican City. This is more like what will happen when someone cynically uses the trad-catholic propaganda network based in Napa California in line with what billionaire tech bros like Musk and Thiel want. As Winters points out, "trad-cathoicism" has no use for Catholicism as Christianity which takes what Jesus and the writers of the New Testament say seriously. "Trad-Catholicism" is no more Christian than the hallelujah peddlers and millionaire TV hucksters who preach hatred of the poor, the dispossessed, the widow and orphan and stranger living among us so as to benefit from one of our indigenous forms of fascism, white supremacy in order to practice the other, the extraction of wealth from those lower on the economic scale so as to concentrate wealth and power in ever fewer hands.
This is what Democrats should be shouting from every available venue instead of trying to dump the most successful Democratic president since LBJ, who could outdo him if he had Johnson's advantage of a really Democratic Congress instead of one hampered by Manchin and Sinema. What he has accomplished with what he was given by circumstances and the voters has been a graduate level course in why deep political experience in DC is essential for a Democratic President's success.
But instead of me wanting to fight with Democrats, I'm more interested in exposing Trump, Vance and the stinking Republican-fascist party who are trying to put their ilk in power on a permanent basis, including the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court.
I WILL VOTE for whichever Democrat has the nomination, I fully expect that to be President Biden and I'm entirely OK with that. He has had a phenomenal three and a half years under extremely difficult circumstances. I will vote a full-Democratic ticket, again. Luckily I am from the First District of Maine so I don't have to hold my nose to vote for Jared Golden in the Second District. I'd vote for him if I had to though I wouldn't be OK with it and I don't trust him to not cross the aisle after the election. Though if Democrats retain the House I expect he won't.
The choice is you have a democracy next year or you don't for the rest of your life. Franklin's famous answer to what kind of government the Constitutional Convention had given us, "A republic, if you can keep it," should be among the things that all Democrats go forward with because we have never been so close to losing that due to Republican-fascists, especially those on the Supreme Court and lower courts.
I'm not tired of Joe Biden, though I'm getting tired of all of those who are floating the idea that he should quit at this late stage. Where were they a year ago when that might have been possible? If selling Biden is hard for them, selling them the possibility of democracy as soon as next January when the only alternative is Republican-fascism should be far easier to sell.
Apparently it's another of its forced updates that have caused millions of computers to crash. That's why I quit Windows for Linux almost five years ago, it's not perfect and there are all kinds of changes I had to make to use it but I haven't regretted the decision in the past. One of the best things about Linux is that it's free and even some of the less widely used distros have enthusiastic user communities. Updates aren't forced on you with them.
that the father of Trump's would-be assassin was on a Republican-fascist party database of gun nuts who they knew could be counted on to support Republican-fascist candidates. You know, the guy who asked to borrow daddy's big gun to go do some target shooting. The database is used to rile-up gun nuts for political support, especially in Pennsylvania.
But the media is spinning this as "both-sides." We don't need a new candidate, we need a new media.
IF PRESIDENT BIDEN is supposed to take the blame for everything OTHER FRIGGIN' PEOPLE say at secondary campaign events he didn't even attend when are your fellow Republican-fascists going to be forced to answer for what people they invited to speak NOT TO MENTION THEMSELVES say on their behalf. Trump's boys and their spouses have said worse many, many times.
Trump has been inviting violence from his supporters since he told them to beat up protesters and lied that he'd pay for his thugs' legal defense. He's been advocating it since well before that. He appointed his fellow fascists to the Supreme Court where they have prevented any effective gun violence prevention because our effective indigenous Murder Inc. is a major supporter of Republican-fascism.
I'm not going to get into yet another endless round of going down every rat hole you want me to because it's pointless to do it with Republicans because they aren't interested in truth or equality or even effective and efficient policy, they are all about power and violence.
The immunity decision of the Republican-fascist Roberts Court will require ruthless violence to make it the effective law of the land and from Coney Barrett to the one step down to Gorsuch, Alito and Thomas, they're all in on that violence as long as they're protected from it.
Your party is a fascist party and that is guaranteed to come only through violence.
I think it's hilarious that MAGA world is about to have a VP nominee who wears mascara while having a beard. Of course it's got a leader who's wearing even more makeup than J.D. does. I don't think the anti-divorce, women should say in abusive marriages guy is going to do anything to quell Roevember.
the reaction of President Biden to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and Donald Trump's other Republican-fascists in Congress and elsewhere, in the news media to the attempted assassination of Nancy Pelosi in the attack in which her husband was almost murdered.
That's everything you need to know about the difference between the candidates and the two parties and the whore house that the media is.
candidates running for president of the United States in 2024.
One made a strong, impassioned statement against gun violence just this week.
One spouted threats of political violence and encourages his followers to be violent.
One has criticized the Supreme Court for decisions permitting unrestricted, unregistered guns to terrorize the country.
One has favored and appointed Supreme Court "justices" to the Supreme Court who enable gun violence by their rulings.
One champions the peaceful practice of politics and the peaceful transfer of political power.
One advocates political violence and tried to violently prevent the transfer of political power. And he has repeatedly treatened violence against his opponents and promised to use it if he become president, again.
One has said he would not use the shield against prosecution the Republican-fascist Supreme Court invented two weeks ago.
One, on whose behalf that grant of criminal impunity was invented, certainly will use it if he can.
There are two real political parties about which you can say the same things, we all know which is which. But we all know who will take the blame when the things they vigorously oppose and have opposed happened last evening.
ALL OF THAT IS ON THE RECORD AND HAS BEEN ON THE RECORD FOR WELL OVER NINE YEARS AT THIS POINT.
We know who the Republican favoring "free press" will side with in covering the attempt to kill Trump and it isn't Joe Biden. They will side with the advocate of guns and gun violence, the advocate of political violence just as they have for the past three years and as they increasingly have this year. The media is by their conduct all in on political violence when used to further Republican-fascism, forget the lying hypocrisies from them, their words are as cheap as Trump's advocacy of hate and violence.
We can be pretty certain Trump never figured the violence he advocates could come back on him, that he could depend on the bubble of protection he gets at public expense. Just as he has always been able to depend on the protection that affluence gave him all his life. Maybe if he and his hypocritical supporters like the totally hypocritical wind bag J.D. Vance had read that Bible they wave around they'd have read the passages about living and dying by violence, sowing the wind and reaping the whirl wind. It's 100% certain that nearly 100% of the news media and their owners never read it or took it seriously as a moral law of reality.
The biggest question is if Trump will learn anything from probably his first serious near brush with death. I wouldn't bet on that any more than the news media learning anything or asshole Republican freshmen senators from Ohio or Republican-fascist House members. Apparently they don't realize that unstable people can target Republican-fascists, even rich, straight, white guys like himself, as well as the more often targeted Democrats and poor People of Color and the children who are killed in such large numbers due to Republican-fascist politics and Supreme Courts.
I don't like most of the so-called golden-age radio drama but I have admire Charles Laughton's acting, he's my favorite actor from the period. Lots of people like the old style stuff so I'll try to post a little more of it in the future.
THE ABSURD, NOW, DISGUSTING DEFERENCE and pseudo-religious reverence that the Supreme Court has traditionally been given in the United States is belied by the history of that court. From the period when it was upholding and expanding slavery, through the period up to and including the Taney Court and when it was upholding American apartheid, white supremacy after the abolition of de jure slavery, "justices" who had a direct or family interest in slavery and the Jim Crow system and who certainly had a social caste interest in them continuing ruled in support of their own, financial interest. It is ironic that one of the cynical Bush I appointees was a rare Black man who was prepared to promote its revival as he racked up a record of overt corruption graft and grift to match the financial corruption of even the most highly regarded of the slave-owners on the court before the Civil War. Only the cynicism that put Clarence Thomas on the court has marked appointments to that court throughout its history. Their support of wage slavery, corporate abuse and even murder (Gorsuch on truckers being forced to choose their job or freezing to death, for example), financial corruption and overturning any effort to reform government to make it do the will of most Americans is the actual majority history of that court.
The Roberts Court taking that corruption to new depths in its recent rulings such as the one that legalized bribe taking by government officials (such as Thomas and Alito and certainly others are guilty of), taking the right of the destitute to have a place to lay their heads, destroying the voting rights act and on behalf of Republican-fascist states to suppress votes and rig congressional districts, and turning the most corrupt, vulgar and stupid man to have ever gotten the presidency into a monarch worse than George III was permitted to be under British law are merely part of the worst of that Court's history, perhaps its current lowest point. I doubt even Roger Taney and his corrupt colleagues would have legalized corruption and made the likes of Buchanan immune from prosecution for crimes related to the core functions of the presidency. John Roberts' name along with those who concurred with those rulings should go down as the most corrupt "justices" in our history for the old fashioned reason that they earned it. They should be treated with the same regard that Matt Gaetz, Lauren Bobbert, and Marjorie Taylor Green are treated because, despite their Ivy League credentials and their absurd black robes and the putrid legal temple they work in, they are trash. There is no more obvious instance of sworn public officials violating their oaths of office than those who overturned, not only legitimately adopted and enacted laws but parts of the Constitution, the structure of the government set up under it and even the rejection of a despot with royal powers that was the absolute substance of the Declaration of Independence. And they did it while lying through their teeth in legaleese.
In the aftermath I've been curious to hear lawyers on different sides and how many of them can't face the reality of what was done. Those who like Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent have grimly faced the real meaning of the immunity decision in its full potential to allow presidents to commit even murder and get away with it, a power argued for by Trump's lawyer that the Court majority certainly didn't reject in their decision. They would certainly have rejected that as too far on that basis unless they intended for a president of their liking having that power. A power which it is impossible to believe any of those who wrote and ratified the Constitution would have approved, even tacitly. The royal power they had rejected stopped somewhat short of that. But not the well-manicured, affluent, Ivy League lawyers on the Roberts Court. Roberts' public routine of judicial aloofness is as phony as Alito's "christianity."
I've read things like what is described here from law professors at elite universities, one of Coney Barrett's colleagues at that shameful institution, Notre Dame's law school,
University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller said the decision makes it harder to prosecute presidents but does not give them a pass.
“It definitely gives more protection to the president, but I think there are pitfalls for future administrations if they were to rely too heavily upon it,” Muller said.
The lines between official and unofficial acts can be blurry, as they are in Trump’s case, Muller said. The decision leaves open the possibility that Smith’s charges against Trump over the election can continue, and it provides some protections to President Biden if he loses to Trump this fall, Muller said.
“It prevents President Trump from prosecuting former president Biden, if that’s the case, on a great many things,” he said. “So there is a way in which it will de-escalate rhetoric about a president or a candidate threatening to prosecute a former president for official acts.”
He called the hypothetical example of an assassination plot absurd. To start, others would likely be loath to carry it out because they would fear they could be prosecuted, he said.
Much more has to play out in the Trump case in the lower courts, and the case could easily return to the Supreme Court, he said. In short, the precise details of when presidents enjoy immunity remain unclear.
Keeping it from playing out in the lower courts is exactly what the decision does, you'd have to be a pretty stupid law professor to not see that, though apparently many are so stupid as to think we'd believe they are that stupid.
I'm going to point out here that this idiot Muller seems to not have watched TV on January 6, 2021 when Trumps insurrectionists were hunting down Nancy Pelosi, TRUMP'S OWN VICE PRESIDENT!, and other members of Congress to murder them on his order. They forget Trump's demand that metal detectors be inactivated because his insurrectionists weren't going to use any guns they brought with them on him. AND THAT WAS AT A TIME BEFORE THE ROBERTS COURT HAD GIVEN TRUMP IMPERIAL POWERS OF IMPUNITY. Anyone who thinks a Trump couldn't get members of the military who were AOK with murdering officials of civilians is too stupid to bus tables at a fast food joint. Especially given that he has already promised pardons to those who do his bidding. Many of those involved in the insurrection had held jobs in the military and on police forces, they'd sworn to uphold and defend the country against just such as Donald Trump wanted to be. I've listened to even some anti-Trumpists take that belief that there are limits as foolish comfort, forgetting, as apparently law professor Muller does, that presidents are stupidly given the absolute power of pardon in the Constitution. Trump, himself has said he'd pardon anyone who committed violence on his behalf, and he has pardoned many of his henchmen, as, in fact, Bush I did with the collusion of such of them as Bill Barr. And they forget that it's the Roberts Court and its like in, no doubt, future Republican-fascist packed courts that will be deciding any challenge to any criminality on the part of a Republican-fascist president and the legitimacy of any pardons granted. I heard Harry Litmann point out that even the hoped-for evidentiary hearing the Court ordered the trial court judge to conduct will be ratfucked by its ban on the use of evidence of intent. I can imagine they included that as an excuse for them to quash any attempt to introduce TO THE PUBLIC evidence that might hurt Trump's chance that his worst criminality will be hidden from voters. The depths of vileness in that decision are only, now becoming evident. I have no doubt that future Republican-fascist courts enjoying the same ability to do so, will drive things even lower.
I would bet that three years ago no one would have believed a Supreme Court, even the worst in our history would have done things that the Roberts Court has done for the past several years and certainly plans on doing in the next term. Anyone who would bet on them not going farther than they have is an idiot.
The Supreme Court will, as I'm already hearing some predict it will, extend similar emanations of immunity to themselves, I can't believe them legalizing bribery and financial corruption for government officials was done without regard to the financial scandals the Court has been confronted with this year. If there is one thing we know from the history of that court, from "justices" like the legendary John Marshall, they are fully capable of rendering decisions that benefit their worst financial motivations. He repeatedly ruled to support slave-holders and even slave-importing pirates after the importation of slaves was made a capital crime by the Congress. The depths of corruption tied to the financial interests of the "justices" cannot be excluded from the actual history of that court as it is understood by those indoctrinated into the often corrupt secular theology of legal scholarship.
The Supreme Court has so abused, not only its legitimate powers but such powers as it gave itself in Marbury v. Madison too badly and too dangerously to allow that to continue. If, by a miracle, we get a strongly Democratic Congress and president, they must legally overturn the usurped power-grab of the Court, put binding, effective and removing ethics requirements on the Court - Clarence Thomas and likely Alito should be investigated criminally for what we already know and imprisoned if they are convicted. Unless there is a Democratic super-majority in the Senate to impeach them - which I doubt we'll see in our or any ones' lifetimes - we should face the fact that impeachment and conviction of Supreme Court members and presidents is a constitutional mythological entity which will never happen. The stupidity of an anti-democratic Senate guarantees that. Impeachment and removal from office as a guarantee of safety from an imperial president or an imperial court is a dangerous myth. If it were not, it would have worked by now.
But there is nothing saying that a member of the Court who is convicted of a crime could not be given a twenty-year term without possibility of parole, their office not being any impediment to their imprisonment. And that should include their colluding spouses, such as Ginny Thomas and any others who made common cause with Trump's insurrection. I would include in the corruption that would be banned the extremely lucrative career of Roberts' wife in head hunting for law firms that either do or potentially could do business before the Court.
Those taking such an appointment to such powerful positions should be held to a far higher ethical standard than those for those without such power. They and their families should understand that is one of the conditions of them accepting such an office. The talk about that, about a spouse being able to have a career despite its high potential of creating a conflict of interest is wrong. When it comes to a spouse having a position of great power such as an official in the federal government, the potential for corruption should always outweigh the seeming fairness of their spouse being able to take whatever job they want to. There is no right for someone to hold a public office, there is no right to be married to someone who holds such a position. Their private decisions cannot be considered to be more important than the Peoples' need for honest government and an honest legal system. If their spouse doesn't like that restriction on them making money or indulging in a hobby of extreme anti-democratic agitation, that's the nominees problem and they should probably keep the job they already had. Frankly, I don't think there has ever been an irreplaceable member of the Supreme Court, one whose seat might not have been better filled by someone else. We've had less than a handful of presidents who may have been irreplaceable,*
From what I understand the model of that would be Vice President Harris's husband whose legal career in corporate law was put on hiatus for her term in office even though it was extremely unlikely that her duties in office would ever be in conflict with it. There isn't any right for a Supreme Court "justice" to be a multi-millionaire, thinking of such a thing as a "right" proves how stupid our "rights" language is, now. We'd be better off if they had to all get by on a working-class salary, them and their spouses. If she wanted a job she could have found one that had no conflict with his job but they're allowed to do that even when the conflict is so obvious. I'd like to see them overturn the Constitutional ban on reducing Supreme Court salaries but I doubt we'll see that till after a restoration of intended democratic rule after a catastrophe. I think the majority on the court would be overpaid at minimum wage.
There's a point past which a mere appearance of corruption turns into a pattern in which it is entirely more than a mere appearance and the set way of doing business. The Supreme Court passed that stage of mere appearance during the Marshall Court. As an appointed, not elected branch of the government, giving them the kind of deference they have enjoyed was always stupid and a violation of the spirit of representative democracy. They have proven what should always have been suspected, that, unless prevented from outside, an appointed judiciary was bound to become corrupt. The low regard that the "political" branches are held in even though they had to pass the test of voter approval at regular intervals is misplaced, though through such corruption as Supreme Courts have enabled and supported, elections in the United States are often the duped stupidly putting their exploiters in office. But such fallible men - and it's all been men so far - are the ones who choose who to put on the Court. There is now a long standing pattern of Republicans elevating some of the worst for some time now. Certainly in this century only two of those, Stevens and Souter have demonstrated an unwillingness to be corrupt on a partisan basis, the rest of Republican appointees, in cases such as Bush v Gore and those legalizing political corruption, vote suppression and rigging, and making Donald Trump immune from criminal prosecution are among the worst in the history of that court. The Roberts Court should be the last straw in the continuation of that disgusting history. The ordure in that Court has made drastic changes in it a necessity if equality before the law and democracy, itself, is going to survive. Nothing can be allowed to stay the same, from their self-imposed impunity from ethics laws to the amber-tinted, awed piety style of Court reporting, all of that is part of their criminality and treason against democratic government. The history of corruption on that court should be opened up and fully exposed, even going back to Marshall who was about as evil as a slave-holder could be expected to be.
* Washington who made himself so by relinquishing power to his successor, Lincoln who fought the Civil War and ended legal slavery, FDR who saved the country from the Republican depression and foreign fascists, the very same forces we are facing now. LBJ who forced the adoption of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts using his enormous knowledge as a member of the Senate to do that. I think if President Biden has a second term with a Democratic Congress, he may join that short list because we are in danger in ways that the others never faced. The Roberts Court can be counted on to prevent that if they can get away with it. They would welcome a Republican-fascist despot because they would serve the same purposes with pleasure and to their own profit.
** Souter warned twelve years ago about someone like Trump getting power in the United States due to the profound ignorance of civic processes among Americans. Given that warning you'd have hoped he would have done more to prevent that than he apparently has. I haven't noticed him doing much of anything to counter Trump or the Roberts Court making what kept him awake at night the horrific reality we live with 24 hours a day.
I would agree with what he said though I would say that at least as important, probably more so than mere ignorance is something he touched on as a "feeling of responsibility" is the deficit of any sense of morality which is an even more important foundation for democracy. I think the fact is we have to start positively instill in all Americans of all ages in the moral bases of equality and, so democracy. And I mean in school children no less than those who are already supposedly adults. And, far from Souter's charmingly naive concept of instilling that through high school civics classes, the only effective means of doing that is a requirement based in the mass media, the entertainment media being entirely more effective in doing that OR INSTILLING ITS OPPOSITE TENDENCY TOWARDS FASCIST STRONG-MAN RULE than the pseudo-journalistic parts of it.
HAVING RECENTLY gotten into an argument with a young friend in her 20s about the increasing necessity of voting for President Biden again, it got to the point where she asked me if I was familiar with Noam Chomsky. I could tell her I probably first read him about thirty or forty years before she was born. I added that I'd written him a letter once and he'd answered it. After Violetta Chamorro won the presidency of Nicaragua, ending the Sandinista government, I asked Chomsky how he could repeatedly see such things happen and not fall into despair. He answered saying that he had no right to fall into despair which, considering how much my opinion of Chomsky has taken a hit since then, I go back to repeatedly as being one of the soundest things someone on the secular left has ever said to me.
Did I know who Noam Chomsy is!
I also asked her if she had any idea of who Chomsky intended to vote for in November, something I don't know. If he doesn't vote for Biden he'll be voting for Trump no matter who he marks the ballot for or doesn't mark it for. Those are the only two alternatives under our dangerous presidential system as opposed to a prime ministerial system in which you could vote for the Democrats' congressional representatives and end up with a Democratic prime minister. Our system, when copied by later developing countries is associated with falling into dictatorial rule than the prime ministerial system, though it has plenty of problems, too. But ours is far more dangerous for putting everything into one person who could die or be assassinated or otherwise not win on election day. As we have learned, especially with the collusion of the Rehnquist Court in 2000 and the upcoming Roberts Court efforts to put Trump back in office, those dangers have increased with the ruthlessness of the Republican-fascist Supreme Court.
Anyway, reading this article about the 2024 Sandinista government's oppression, the then leader of the 1980's Sandinista government and present-day dictator, Daniel Ortega and his wife-Vice President Rosario Murillo, are well on the way to copying much of what the previous dictators of the country did. They are eliminating any institution or group or individuals who could mount an opposition to their dictatorship. As an admirer of the then figure in the democratic Sandinista government, the late Ernesto Cardenal and an opponent of the Ortega dictatorship as it left behind their supposed ideals, the current Ortega dictatorship's violent actions against the Catholic Church resonate with irony and a sense of deja vu. Even more ironically, the Trump regime, in an executive order, targeted Murillo. The Trump order called on Nicaragua to "restore democracy." Ha!
I will probably use this ironic situation in the future as an example of how Marxism an anti-democratic ideology, no matter how circumstances force "moderate" Marxists such as constituted the original Sandinista party, to accept some of the norms of liberal democracy. The ease with which Marxists can convince themselves and gull others into going past those as easily as the Nazis convinced the German establishment to in the early 1930s is a lesson in how dangerous that ideology is. Our own secular-civic mock-religion is quite dangerous enough on that count as we are just beginning to discover and, for People of Color, woke Women, woke anyone, really, that is no new discovery.
Things are a lot more complex than I thought they were in the 1980s as I opposed the Reagan-Bush I terror campaign to reimpose fascist dictatorship in Nicaragua, though it was possible to believe, then, that the Sandinistas of that time might actually develop into a real egalitarian democracy. I still think of the election of Violetta Chamorro as a tragic capitulation of the Nicaraguan People to Reagan-Bush era terrorism though I doubt the government under Ortega would have ended up as I hoped it would. Back then I thought democracy was possible under an ideologically materialistic regime but I don't believe that any more. I still admire the Catholic left which I can say my mother supported, even in the face of John Paul II's and the then Cardinal Ratzinger's opposition. I don't respect Marxism at all, any more. I was never a Marxist, myself, never having been a materialist and realizing as soon as I looked into it that it was based on some pretty naive pseudo-scientific scientism. But I thought it was possible for them to do better than the fascists and oligarachs. I don't think anything but a radically egalitarian and moral democratic government is reliable. Not in Nicaragua and not in the United States. Catholic social teaching is hardly 100% reliable, it is a human conception so it couldn't be, but it's miles ahead of both liberal democracy and any strength of Marxism. I'd have trusted Cardenal with power, he'd have carried it through though he'd probably have been murdered by Reagan's terrorists. As I pointed out recently the liberal democracies have a lot of sins to answer for even from before Trump.
can go to hell. Too little, too late and it won't change a damned thing in their content going on. Mara Gay as well as A. G. Sulzberger want to protect the Trump tax giveaway to the rich. It's not only what they've done to Biden, what they did to Hillary Clinton is what started this nightmare.
Colbert can go soak his head, too. You can't trust a comedian or a show biz liberal, in the end. What they really care about is the next laugh no matter what the consequences are.
