tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32030813440289061012024-03-15T12:01:46.022-03:00A Yankee at LargeVeteran newsman/traveler/writer Dan Newland comments from a maverick's viewpoint on global affairs, people and places, and on political and social issues affecting North America, South America and the world.Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.comBlogger178125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-31246210712569798732024-03-09T20:47:00.004-03:002024-03-10T10:50:11.704-03:00THE ‘KING’S’ SPEECH<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">Three nights ago, I once
again watched </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">The King’s Speech</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">, with
brilliant and moving performances by Geoffrey Rush, as an Australian speech
therapist with an uncanny talent (but no credentials) for gifting speech to the
speechless, and Colin Firth, as the reticent, stammering Prince Albert of
Britain, who was to become King George VI, upon the abdication of his older
brother, David, who gave up his crown in exchange for the love of a
twice-divorced American commoner with a racy reputation—a love story that would
resonate throughout the English-speaking world as a popular fairytale for years
to come.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdVa79NSIIXsyFcBLs1LqMy_UbjuqmNWrCbbL6MgpFtpPpOH32uiSRQ6F6Nw5K2XMb5TdaItFH9mT40UqsKWtF6fv6gB3wH53vzRq9WA9elO4xp0dt7iYG-XLqN1hiJ3BMzfVsairlaqEpIAVH3RszckSAg5ijbOhvcdkBKANThmYi7OEKkGcnAKHElWIc/s804/the%20king's%20speech.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="454" data-original-width="804" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdVa79NSIIXsyFcBLs1LqMy_UbjuqmNWrCbbL6MgpFtpPpOH32uiSRQ6F6Nw5K2XMb5TdaItFH9mT40UqsKWtF6fv6gB3wH53vzRq9WA9elO4xp0dt7iYG-XLqN1hiJ3BMzfVsairlaqEpIAVH3RszckSAg5ijbOhvcdkBKANThmYi7OEKkGcnAKHElWIc/w400-h226/the%20king's%20speech.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Firth and Rush in "The King's Speech"</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The following night, I
watched, in its entirety, President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union
Address, and I couldn’t help but strike a parallel in my mind between the
award-winning film and the president’s stunning performance. Granted, Biden has
a half-century history in American politics and has learned to tackle public
speaking with vigor and aplomb. But like King George VI, Biden has struggled
all his life with a speech impediment, a stammer that has always taken great
concentration for him to overcome. Journalists and commentators who should have
done their research and, as such, should have known better, have far too often,
on hearing Biden’s sometimes halting and disjointed speech, echoed the
president’s bitterest opponents in misconstruing it as diminished mental
faculties, due entirely to the fact that he is, without a doubt, an old—but
not, for that, automatically elderly—man. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP6dw_BVN4hBV-wwyOra9no2sM0tXZ-AcNE0JHr5KU7hU1uCd1bCvn2etZJWl7fhN7sJJLkLfG0zSK4eCU4HactLSoICfFZtbmp1_8X1I4Z6PNihJDO9VBkcGtNIQBJBPdqzqksNHOoSZF7OjyrWM5_vTkcAxBICLjfSbNUmvZfkCuF8Q09T3iFAuv5ok1/s310/_02.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="163" data-original-width="310" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP6dw_BVN4hBV-wwyOra9no2sM0tXZ-AcNE0JHr5KU7hU1uCd1bCvn2etZJWl7fhN7sJJLkLfG0zSK4eCU4HactLSoICfFZtbmp1_8X1I4Z6PNihJDO9VBkcGtNIQBJBPdqzqksNHOoSZF7OjyrWM5_vTkcAxBICLjfSbNUmvZfkCuF8Q09T3iFAuv5ok1/w400-h210/_02.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I suppose the reason I naturally
struck the comparison between The King’s Speech and President Biden’s speech
was that, at least in my mind, there were unavoidable parallels. In order to be
a constitutional monarch at the service of his people, George VI (father of
Queen Elizabeth and grandfather of King Charles) had to overcome his crippling
stammer and attendant terror of public speaking to become an effective head of
state of the British Empire through some of the darkest years in its history.
As if that weren’t enough, he also had to clear the hurdle of his unpopularity
as the also-ran replacement for the former, if short-lived, heir to the throne,
his flamboyant and popular brother David (a.k.a. King Edward VIII).<o:p></o:p></span></p><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Biden’s situation is
similar. Not only does he follow four years of Donald Trump, which, for better
or for worse (worse), reshaped American politics and rendered the Republican
Party unrecognizable as the respectable Grand Old Party of yesteryear, but he
is also, as a former two-term vice president, “heir to the throne” of Barrack
Obama, the most rock-star-popular and dynamic president in living memory, and one
of the nation’s youngest and most consequential leaders. And, like George VI,
Biden continues to struggle with his life-long speech impediment and with the
prejudices of the ignorant and mal-intentioned, who seek to equate that
struggle, applying flawed Medieval logic, with unsoundness of mind. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Like George VI, but with
the comparative disadvantage of cable TV and a twenty-four-hour news cycle,
Biden is under constant observation, with supporters holding their breath that
he “doesn’t screw up”, and opponents gleefully awaiting the moment he does.
Meanwhile, his political rival, former President Donald Trump, who is only a
little more than three years Biden’s junior, screws up consistently. For
instance, confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, confusing the current
administration with the Obama administration—once even talking about running
against Obama when he meant (or perhaps didn’t) Biden—and failing to pick his
own second wife, Marla Maples, out of a photo line-up. Indeed, he even confused
Maples with his sexual assault victim, newspaper columnist E. Jean Carroll. And
those only form a small portion of his gaffs. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But as Trump himself once
said, he could “shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue” and wouldn’t lose any votes.
Over the years, if we’ve learned anything about MAGA Republicans, it is that
this is shockingly and sadly true. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBeOFVS2m_NbYWiKbV1FpmPsSZ_SNkmfNu0-b9W4OEdKmGvYWU3lT5IMLAOBVWwOPv0qCYcQfffiy2Ob7n_p7NYqTyy3fsydLfK6R6PvQkuGAT0pT3U0-9VZ09vzxkONqW9zWzqPb8pGOq551ahS_kPyzG1rh3ZqvE_clYZn0UUSGNzPnhDMLmdhJCTNgS/s1206/marjorie-taylor-greene-yelling.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="806" data-original-width="1206" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBeOFVS2m_NbYWiKbV1FpmPsSZ_SNkmfNu0-b9W4OEdKmGvYWU3lT5IMLAOBVWwOPv0qCYcQfffiy2Ob7n_p7NYqTyy3fsydLfK6R6PvQkuGAT0pT3U0-9VZ09vzxkONqW9zWzqPb8pGOq551ahS_kPyzG1rh3ZqvE_clYZn0UUSGNzPnhDMLmdhJCTNgS/w400-h268/marjorie-taylor-greene-yelling.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, vulgar and rude as ever.</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That said, anyone
listening to, and indeed watching, Biden’s State of the Union Address to
Congress on Thursday night heard and saw a rejuvenated and articulate Joe
Biden. The octogenarian president was vigorous, energized and upbeat, yet
critical and combative, as well as extending an invitation to politicians of
all colors to eschew hatred and division, and to negotiate and compromise on
major issues for the good of the country, and the world. He was ready for
hecklers in the MAGA camp, clearly knew in advance what each of his own
statements would elicit, and responded intelligently, often wittily, and with
admirable grace to what were clearly rude and vulgar interruptions—led, of
course, by the ever crass and inappropriate Georgia Representative Marjorie
Taylor Greene, whose behavior was so unacceptably boisterous that she was
threatened with removal by the Sergeant-At-Arms.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Biden was, in short, how
every critic on both sides of the aisle posit he <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">should</i> be—strong, sharp, edgy, in command, but still willing to
compromise, within ethical limits, to get what the nation’s people need from a
reluctant and, in part, completely renegade Legislature. If anyone attended
that historic event either fearing or hoping, depending on their political
bent, to hear a confused and bumbling “Sleepy Joe”, they were either pleasantly
surprised or bitterly disappointed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Michigan Representative
(D) Debbie Dingle, who was on the floor of the chamber for the speech, said it
was “very clear” that her Republicans colleagues were “uncomfortable”, both
with Biden’s strong showing, and with loud displays of impropriety from the
MAGA sector in their own ranks. That behavior only seemed to underscore Biden’s
pointed references to the undemocratic disorder and chaos sown by Trump and his
most ardent supporters. Clearly, Republicans had set a miserably low bar for
this State of the Union speech, believing their own electioneering hype in
thinking that the perception would be that of a confused, doddering old man, who
was obviously unfit to serve. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">They were about to be
disappointed. The president came out swinging from the very beginning, landing
a stunning blow to the jaw of the MAGA wing, by opening with a quote from President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, in 1941, told Congress: “I address you at a
moment unprecedented in the history of the Union.” <br />
Biden then embraced that idea as his own, saying that, back then: “Hitler was
on the march. War was raging in Europe. President Roosevelt’s
purpose was to wake up the Congress and alert the
American people that this was no ordinary moment. Freedom and democracy were
under assault in the world. <br />
“Tonight I come to the same chamber to address the nation. Now
it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of
the Union. And yes, my purpose tonight is to both wake
up this Congress, and alert the American people that
this is no ordinary moment either. Not since President
Lincoln and the Civil
War have freedom and democracy been under assault here
at home as they are today. What makes our moment rare is
that freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home
and overseas, at the very same time.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1l8q4-vxWE7DMUs2mrINffIAkaj48Suam7WdiczjlAHyHfVAgOJoWP-8hQAhMQcgLd3Zb2QzZH0Yo6esvb5ypQaG1P_JKbqtYEvDG5UL7IZayLZqEBsPq9o7Zy3OthwJsvXfB4efw6TbItm1Z81EqaL8SJpqy5kEhjH7q5FBFYzyjdZWy_Ugm80DVMSAQ/s195/Biden.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="195" height="345" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1l8q4-vxWE7DMUs2mrINffIAkaj48Suam7WdiczjlAHyHfVAgOJoWP-8hQAhMQcgLd3Zb2QzZH0Yo6esvb5ypQaG1P_JKbqtYEvDG5UL7IZayLZqEBsPq9o7Zy3OthwJsvXfB4efw6TbItm1Z81EqaL8SJpqy5kEhjH7q5FBFYzyjdZWy_Ugm80DVMSAQ/w400-h345/Biden.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">From that moment on, in strong and vibrant terms, he enumerated the
things that, against all odds, his administration had been able to accomplish,
and passed back to the GOP the bundle of failures that they have sought to lay
at his door. At the top of the list was the continued chaos on the US-Mexico
border, and in the immigration system as a whole. The president pointed out
that while he had managed to prompt a bipartisan solution to the crisis with
some of the most conservative members of Congress, the GOP leadership had bent
to Donald’s Trump’s personal will in not passing the immigration bill so as to keep from giving Biden a major policy win before the elections. To which far-right
Oklahoma Senate Republican James Lankford, mouthed the words “that’s true.”
Biden made it clear that, if there was no improvement on the immigration front,
the fault was entirely that of Trump-led Republicans, and that their reasons
for rejecting the bipartisan solution were strictly a matter of political electioneering.</span><br /><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEbZK_3zxH3kmxe3UNzcnLnn6qK79PExwB0I_lkEQ2QtCkWgfB-64aZMAcaSCup42xWiaZzQ5pOhy-89wm2sxWhtkUXQyBb8Th8h3_5AaVMIZk_RTeYktludKOMnsGN-XiDAuyxOqHiBPRxulUfSs_MQs7X5HMhMSFQg9YHmOLIdtaqwqI5KVtaQxogm9-/s558/James%20Lankford.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="452" data-original-width="558" height="324" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEbZK_3zxH3kmxe3UNzcnLnn6qK79PExwB0I_lkEQ2QtCkWgfB-64aZMAcaSCup42xWiaZzQ5pOhy-89wm2sxWhtkUXQyBb8Th8h3_5AaVMIZk_RTeYktludKOMnsGN-XiDAuyxOqHiBPRxulUfSs_MQs7X5HMhMSFQg9YHmOLIdtaqwqI5KVtaQxogm9-/w400-h324/James%20Lankford.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Lankford - "That's true"</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In point of fact, Biden
never mentioned Trump’s name in the nearly ninety-minute address, referring to
him only as “my predecessor”. But those references were to number a baker’s
dozen, always remaining within the initial context of the speech, positing that
Donald Trump is a clear and present threat to American democracy.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Nowhere was that clearer
than when he said: “Overseas, Putin of Russia is on the
march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe
and beyond. If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I
assure you, he will not. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“But Ukraine can stop
Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons it needs to
defend itself. That is all Ukraine is asking. They are not
asking for American soldiers. In fact, there are no American soldiers at
war in Ukraine. And I am determined to keep it that way. But
now assistance for Ukraine is being blocked by those who want us to walk
away from our leadership in the world. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“It wasn’t that long ago
when a Republican President, Ronald Reagan, thundered, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear
down this wall.’ Now, my predecessor, a former Republican President, tells
Putin, ‘Do whatever the hell you want.’ A former American President actually
said that, bowing down to a Russian leader. It’s outrageous. It’s dangerous. It’s unacceptable.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Biden went on to
underscore the obvious link between Trumpism and authoritarianism, saying: “History
is watching… My message to President Putin is simple. We will
not walk away. We will not bow down. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I</i> will not bow down. History is watching, just like
history watched three years ago on January Sixth, (when) insurrectionists stormed this
very Capitol and placed a dagger at the throat of American
democracy.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Biden continued to drive
this point home, saying that the insurrectionists, “had come to stop the
peaceful transfer of power and to overturn the will of the people.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Recalling the
anti-democratic infamy of the chaotic end to the Trump presidency, Biden
qualified the historic significance of that incident, saying: “January Sixth and
the lies about the 2020 election, and the plots to steal the
election, posed the gravest threat to our democracy since
the Civil War. But they failed. America stood strong and
democracy prevailed. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“But we must be honest,
the threat remains and democracy must be defended. My
predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of January Sixth. I
will not do that. This is a moment to speak the
truth and bury the lies. And here’s the simplest truth.
You can’t love your country only when you win. As I’ve done
ever since being elected to office, I ask you all, without regard to
party, to join together and defend our democracy!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The president went after
Trump and the MAGA Republicans on another burning domestic issue, saying that “history
is watching another assault on freedom.” He went on to say that American women’s
reproductive rights were under continuing attack following the overturning of
Rowe v Wade during the Trump presidency. To make that point, he introduced two
women in the audience, one who had had to escape the law in her own state to
terminate a pregnancy in which the fetus had a fatal condition and carrying it
to term would put her at medical risk and would threaten her ability to have
children in the future, and another woman who had also had to leave her state
after local laws declared embryos to be people, and the IVF facility where she
and her husband were seeking relief from infertility shut down. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Biden described both
cases—like thousands of others—as being the direct outcome of the overturning
of Roe v Wade, opining, in juxtaposition to the Supreme Court ruling, that Rowe
v Wade “got it right.” Taking more precise aim, he said: “Many of you in this
Chamber and my predecessor are promising to
pass a national ban on reproductive freedom. My
God, what freedoms will you take away next?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In assigning blame for
the diminishing of women’s rights, he laid primary responsibility at Trump’s
door, saying: “… My predecessor came to office determined to see Roe
v Wade overturned. He’s the reason it was overturned. In
fact, he brags about it. Look at the chaos that has
resulted.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">To the Supreme Court
Justices sitting in the front of the chamber, he quoted their Rowe v Wade
decision back to them, saying: “In its decision to overturn Roe v Wade the
Supreme Court majority wrote, ‘Women are not without electoral or
political power.’ No kidding! Clearly, those bragging about
overturning Roe v Wade have no clue about the power of
women in America. They found out, though, when reproductive freedom was
on the ballot and won in 2022…and they will find
out again, in 2024.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Meticulously throughout
the evening, the president laid out issues affecting the United States both at
home and abroad and underscored how MAGA Republicans are conspiring to stymie
any and all solutions, despite Democratic efforts to reach across the aisle and
achieve suitable compromises to enact improvements in the state of the union.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But the president also
listed his administration’s achievements—all too often given short shrift by
detractors and the media in general—despite this overwhelming opposition from
the far-right. He touted, among other things, a record fifteen million new
jobs in three years, unemployment at fifty-year lows, a record sixteen
million Americans starting small business ventures, historic job growth
and small business growth for Black, Hispanic, and Asian-Americans,
eight hundred thousand new domestic manufacturing jobs, more people having
affordable health insurance than ever before, the greatest reduction
of the racial wage gap in twenty years, and a drop in inflation from a soaring
nine percent to just three percent annually, and six hundred fifty billion
dollars in private sector investment in clean-energy production that promised
to add thousands of good-paying jobs to the workforce. He praised the
bipartisan infrastructure bill passed into law on his watch and promised “buy
American” policies would apply to both manufacturing and labor that formed part
of the resulting construction projects. And he proudly discussed his
administration’s part in taking on Big Pharma to bring down exorbitant drug
prices for Americans, specifically talking about the reduction of insulin
prices that had already been slashed for seniors from four hundred to just
thirty-five dollars a month, with future plans to do the same for the rest of
the country’s insulin users.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In short, it was,
perhaps, the most political State of the Union Address in history. It was
bitterly criticized as such by the MAGA opposition. But that factor also drew certain
expressions of disapproval among some of the generally friendly mainstream media.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I disagree. If there was ever
a time for a powerfully political State of the Union Address, instead of the
usual meaningless waffling that goes with trying to please everyone, it is now.
Biden is not wrong. US democracy is facing an existential crisis, the visible
authoritarian head of which is Donald Trump, who has hijacked the former GOP
and turned it into a cult of personality at his complete service. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Biden spent the first
part of his term staying aloof of the fray, while Justice independently took
charge of enumerating Trump’s transgressions and turning them into criminal
indictments. But as the wheels of justice turn with agonizing lethargy, and it
is clear now that insurrectionist and populist autocrat Donald Trump will once again
be on the November election ticket, there is no longer any room for Marquis of
Queensbury rules. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Democrats must strictly
maintain the constitutional rules of democracy at a governmental and legal level,
and see to it that they are obeyed by others, especially in the MAGA movement,
who would burn it all down and plunge the country into anarchy. But at an
electoral level, Biden and his party need to be ready to gird for battle and,
when necessary, to get down and punch it out, to paraphrase the late Johnny
Cash, in the blood and the snot and the beer. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The most indubitable
point that President Biden made in his address last Thursday was the first one:
US democracy is under mortal attack by authoritarians both at home and abroad (and
all too often in cahoots with each other). The stakes are intolerably high. What is in play, is
democracy’s very survival. And like it or not—in the absence of a strong third
party conservative candidate willing to torpedo the GOP’s chances for the sake
of the nation—re-electing Joe Biden is the only safeguard against democracy’s otherwise
certain demise.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-85571504222518035742024-03-04T11:37:00.002-03:002024-03-04T11:38:26.899-03:00RHETORICAL QUESTIONS<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Two-tier justice?<br />
I rest my case...</span><span style="line-height: 107%;">😁👍</span></span><span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br />
These are the questions California Democrat Eric Swalwell asked Hunter Biden during Biden's hearing. <br />
<br />
SWALWELL: Any time your father was in government, prior to the Presidency or
before, did he ever operate a hotel?<br />
<br />
BIDEN: No, he has never operated a hotel.</span></span></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibx-1AXuGy5uqHXufLOAYm_neBy6gF4xjM5ca1_RHMvktmrMXA4v4LPt_WhVSkqTFIqdDqTrgjvn64jHpkBaqrGc6G0NzFtSVEcd_89pvhRLPpFhgyV1lVMBQZk_SV-TtFJw2Sxc3msQxruo7KkbgCNsZwGxP6jwziMbDmaGA3BE31U7XjDEoyATducEIE/s569/Eric%20Swalwell.jpeg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="380" data-original-width="569" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibx-1AXuGy5uqHXufLOAYm_neBy6gF4xjM5ca1_RHMvktmrMXA4v4LPt_WhVSkqTFIqdDqTrgjvn64jHpkBaqrGc6G0NzFtSVEcd_89pvhRLPpFhgyV1lVMBQZk_SV-TtFJw2Sxc3msQxruo7KkbgCNsZwGxP6jwziMbDmaGA3BE31U7XjDEoyATducEIE/w400-h268/Eric%20Swalwell.jpeg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Rep. Eric Swalwell</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: large; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br />
SWALWELL: So he’s never operated a hotel where foreign nationals spent millions
at that hotel while he was in office?<br />
<br />
BIDEN: No, he has not.<br />
<br />
SWALWELL: Did your father ever employ in the Oval Office any direct family
member to also work in the Oval Office?<br />
<br />
BIDEN: My father has never employed any direct family members, to my knowledge.<br />
<br />
SWALWELL: While your father was President, did anyone in the family receive 41
trademarks from China?<br />
<br />
BIDEN: No.<br />
<br />
SWALWELL: As President and the leader of the party, has your father ever tried
to install as the chairperson of the party a daughter-in-law or anyone else in
the family?<br />
<br />
BIDEN: No. And I don’t think that anyone in my family would be crazy enough to
want to be the chairperson of the DNC.<br />
<br />
SWALWELL: Has your father ever in his time as an adult been fined $355 million
by any State that he worked in?<br />
<br />
BIDEN: No, he has not, thank God.<br />
<br />
SWALWELL: Anyone in your family ever strike a multibillion dollar deal with the
Saudi Government while your father was in office?<br />
<br />
BIDEN: No.<br />
<br />
SWALWELL: That’s all I’ve got.</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><br /><p></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-73536470616754145902024-01-13T18:34:00.006-03:002024-01-13T19:44:02.684-03:00POTATO POTAHTO, TOMATO TOMAHTO, IMMUNITY, IMPUNITY<p> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">Let’s
talk about “presidential immunity”. Does anyone else find that concept utterly
at odds with democracy and the rule of law, or am I the only one? I really
can’t believe that this is even being discussed, or that former President
Donald Trump’s lawyers would seek to employ it in his defense, as if it were in
any way valid and logical. Indeed, practically as his </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">only</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;"> defense.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuh6MgMMhUb9tlKRIo9BOLYN7hf7DUNqIcYIr7sZ5ZONfHvHKi8LGFYmWzYfY1PyY8bUz2RvnJEDR5xFWEdM2V_38rhXWjQB5egoBBw63-2S-smBvXYVTIVdecd_2v0oUE2Kw8gqmgas5iG-Oioiro9wavaafPJuKbbfxkv4m8aL38J7efnhNWhCfFjgKA/s386/Trump_Napoleon_EDIT.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="386" data-original-width="341" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuh6MgMMhUb9tlKRIo9BOLYN7hf7DUNqIcYIr7sZ5ZONfHvHKi8LGFYmWzYfY1PyY8bUz2RvnJEDR5xFWEdM2V_38rhXWjQB5egoBBw63-2S-smBvXYVTIVdecd_2v0oUE2Kw8gqmgas5iG-Oioiro9wavaafPJuKbbfxkv4m8aL38J7efnhNWhCfFjgKA/w354-h400/Trump_Napoleon_EDIT.jpg" width="354" /></a></span></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Basically,
what Trump’s attorneys—and Trump himself—are trying to say is that a president
(or at least Trump, since clearly, up to now, there seem to be entirely
different and lionizing rules for Trump than for anyone else in the United
States of America) can do whatever the hell he pleases in office, and then,
neither while in office nor afterward, can he be charged for it, no matter how
blatantly illegal or illegitimate his deeds might be. I ask myself, how can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anyone,</i> be they legal experts or common
folk, not see how un-American, un-democratic and untenable that concept is. It
is simply licensing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">carte blanc</i>
criminality and despotism in an office that is already, arguably, the most
powerful post on earth.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">This
is precisely what Americans (except Trump who is what might be termed a
“dictator groupie”) criticize dictators all over the world for—the idea that a
Vladimir Putin, a Kim Jong Un, a Xi Jinping can do whatever they want,
including abducting and/or killing their opponents, with complete impunity,
because they are despots, because they answer to no one, which is exactly what
Trump infamously admires and envies about them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Let’s
be clear about what we’re dealing with here. Beyond a plethora of other
criminal and civil indictments against Trump elsewhere, a federal grand jury has
agreed with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s criminal charges against Trump and has
indicted him. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Smith’s indictment,
filed in the District of Columbia, Trump is charged with conspiring to defraud
the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and
attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. All of these charges stem from
Trump’s January 6, 2021 attempt to illegally alter the outcome of the 2020
election in which he lost, and to lead an insurrection aimed at overthrowing
the election results (hence the government). In other words, if we’re not
beating around the bush, the first attempted coup d’état in US history.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Smith
has also brought a federal indictment in Florida against Trump for the
retention and mishandling of myriad classified documents, some with the highest
of top secret classifications. Items Trump considered his property, simply because
he had once been president. Clearly, they were actually property of the US
government and should have been under the care of the US intelligence
community, not stowed in boxes in Trump’s spare bathroom, or on the stage in
the activities room at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago seaside resort. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Now
here’s the thing, the evidence against Trump in the first three indictments is
so overwhelming, that his attorneys appear reluctant to seek a not-guilty
defense. Instead, they have introduced a bizarre defense strategy that
basically says that, in his former position as president, Trump’s power was
essentially absolute. Why? Because, they argue, the president of the United
States is “immune” from prosecution for any and all laws that he may violate
while he is in office. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Trump’s
lawyers have apparently chosen this tack because there is arguably no precedent
for it. That’s because just about everything to do with Trump’s presidency has
led the United States into new, impossibly murky, and uncharted waters. His
presidency is unique in US history because of his contempt for representative
democracy, his admiration for authoritarianism and his desire to do away with
every tradition that has maintained the Nation on the path set by its framers
for the past two and a half centuries. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Truth
be told, Donald Trump never saw the office of the presidency as what it was
meant to be, the elected office of the head of the executive branch of
government, over which there are supposed to be checks and balances provided by
the other two branches. He sought the office not to serve his country, but to
serve himself, and for the egotistical goal of becoming the most powerful man
on earth. Once he achieved that goal, his fevered delusions led him to believe
that it would be his forever. Losing an election by a wide margin wasn’t a
contingency he ever had in mind, surrounded, as he has always been, by fawning
sycophants, who were loath to tell him that he was delusional.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, we are seeing an attempt to
institutionalize Trump’s delusions as legal precedents. According to Trump’s
attorneys, the only way the former president can be tried for crimes he committed
in office is if he is first impeached and convicted by Congress. This flies in
the face of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s statement when Congress
failed to impeach Trump following the January Sixth Insurrection. McConnell
himself didn’t vote to convict Trump in impeachment proceedings, but in a
speech following the Senate vote, he said that Trump was “practically and
morally responsible” for the January 6, 2021, uprising. The veteran lawmaker
also made it clear that, while Congress had failed to provide a conviction for the
crimes committed by the former president, Trump could and should have charges
filed against him and be tried in a regular court of law. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Special
Prosecutor Jack Smith, meanwhile, has brought up the case of Richard Nixon, who
resigned as president in 1974 to avoid impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors
committed while he was in office. Following his resignation, he was swiftly issued
a blanket pardon for any crimes committed in office by his replacement, Gerald
Ford. Smith argues that, first, even though Nixon was neither impeached nor
convicted by Congress, he was indeed liable for his crimes in the federal
courts system. And second, if Nixon had had “presidential immunity,” says
Smith, there would have been no need for Ford to pardon him. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">In
Trump’s second impeachment trial, the idea that he was liable for his crimes
was made by his very own attorney, Bruce Castor, who was quoted as saying, “The
text of the Constitution…makes very clear that a former president is subject to
criminal sanction after his presidency for any illegal acts he commits.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">But
one of Trump’s current attorneys is presenting an argument that can only be
seen as an ardent call for authoritarian rule. Basically, that no matter what a
president does in office, he or she is immune from prosecution, except in as
much as Congress sees fit to call him or her out in impeachment proceedings.
Were that sort of argument to be accepted by the Supreme Court, for instance,
the rule of law would no longer apply to chief executives—which is the same as
saying the rule of law would no longer exist, because a basic tenet of the law
is that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">no one</i> is above it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">This
is the case, basically, because impeachments are not, in the least, impartial
legal procedures, as evidenced by the unprecedented two impeachment proceedings
that Trump underwent. They are political processes with political biases. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In both of Trump’s cases, but particularly in
the second, which was concerned with the January Sixth Insurrection, despite
the ample and undeniable evidence presented against him, Trump was acquitted.
Not because he wasn’t guilty of the misdeeds of which he was accused, but
rather, because he possessed a strong enough presence of votes in Congress to
provide him with a get out of jail free card.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">According
to Trump attorney, D. John Sauer, a president can do virtually anything that
crosses his mind. Sauer told US District Appeals Court Judge Florence Pan, in
arguments presented to her court, that unless a president were impeached and
convicted by Congress, the law didn’t apply to any actions he took. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Testing
Sauer’s theory, Judge Pan asked, in Sauer’s opinion, "Could a president
order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival?" <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Sauer
cagily responded, "That's an official act: an order to SEAL Team Six.” In
that case, Sauer said, the president could not be charged with a crime except
if Congress impeached and convicted him or her. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Judge
Pan insisted, "But if he weren't (impeached and convicted), there would be
no criminal prosecution, no criminal liability for that?" <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Sauer
reiterated that Congress would have to take action before any indictment of a
president or former president could take place. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">“So
your answer is no,” the judge said. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Could
the DC Court of Appeals ever rule in favor of such an argument? It seems
unlikely. Could the US Supreme Court, should it eventually decide to give
Trump’s defense a hearing? One is tempted to laugh and say, “Of course not.
Don’t be ridiculous” But considering the current composition of the Court, which
has a conservative majority, including three justices hand-picked by the former
Trump administration, can we be sure of that? Especially considering the
Court’s having overturned the fifty-year-old precedent set by Roe v Wade, its
upholding of state laws that clearly infringe on women’s reproductive rights,
and its de-authorization of the Environmental Protection Agency in having
sweeping control over business practices that negatively affect the
environment, among other controversial actions. Nor can one of the senior
justices on the Court, Clarence Thomas, be trusted not to support an
undemocratic ruling, as long as it protects the interests of his friends on the
far-right, including Trump.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The
argument for immunity is, then, an argument for impunity. It would provide the
president with pretty much absolute powers in detriment to the other two
branches of government. It would turn the president into a legally established
autocrat untouchable by the law, no matter how heinous his or her actions might
be. Unless Congress were willing to act—and today’s divisive climate is nothing
like that of 1974, when it was President Nixon’s own party that told him he
must resign or face impeachment and conviction—a president’s crimes, from
bribery, security breaches and treasonous relationships with foreign powers, to
torture, kidnapping, rape, human trafficking and murder, would be above
prosecution. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">If
a president has blanket immunity from prosecution for anything he or she does,
then, they cease to be presidents and become tyrants. Respect for the universal
nature of the rule of law is all that stands between democracy and tyranny.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-33351955313299271772023-08-28T23:03:00.022-03:002023-08-30T10:27:46.777-03:00REHASHING THE GOP VICE-PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE<p><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Talking heads have been
analyzing who won last week’s GOP debate hosted by Fox News. I, on the other
hand, had no problem at all picking a winner right away: It was the mastodon </span><i style="font-size: 14pt;">not </i><span style="font-size: 14pt;">in the room, Donald J. Trump (a.k.a.
Prisoner No. P01135809).</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It’s true. What was
billed as the first GOP Presidential Debate actually could have been called the
GOP <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vice</i>-Presidential Debate. And
even as such, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nobody</i> on that stage
came away a winner, with the possible exception of Nikki Haley, but only in
terms of the debate, and certainly not in the primaries. In one of the most
lackluster debates of its kind in history, what viewers mostly witnessed was a
lot of bickering and schoolyard banter, and an utter dearth of substance
regarding domestic and international policy. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Many commentators have
tried to squeeze some differentiating plus out of the squabbling mess, but the
best they’ve been able to do is claim former everything Nikki Haley stood her
ground. But how much merit is there, when you’ve been a governor and UN
ambassador, in coming out on top in a pillow fight with an absolutely inexperienced
nobody like Vivek Ramaswamy?</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVCeOdEXqPfZbPM1fjgUjyxfiUR7KPlfwo92ImmREQVaMmkDUkLNcW_gZS3pkHzu8OHh8qKlLuB-e36bEKRH2EvYCVr0rNt5GWC65p9ccOrXRwyVRF7hFnwaZsJxe7R8sZlfl6Hcu7hwM-WJ-SKFieJpF-bO7IFX7B0lICCJrbAJxH8mNeWjDYzptijgYN/s1286/CANDIDATES.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="726" data-original-width="1286" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVCeOdEXqPfZbPM1fjgUjyxfiUR7KPlfwo92ImmREQVaMmkDUkLNcW_gZS3pkHzu8OHh8qKlLuB-e36bEKRH2EvYCVr0rNt5GWC65p9ccOrXRwyVRF7hFnwaZsJxe7R8sZlfl6Hcu7hwM-WJ-SKFieJpF-bO7IFX7B0lICCJrbAJxH8mNeWjDYzptijgYN/w443-h276/CANDIDATES.jpg" width="443" /></span></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I would have to give
Haley points, however, for calling out her party (Trump’s party, actually, but
she, like the others, was borrowing it for the debate) on the utter hypocrisy
of their position on spending—which, could be summed up as, It’s okay when we
do it, but not when Democrats do it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">More specifically, Haley
said, “The truth is that Biden didn’t do this to us. Our Republicans did this
to us too. When they passed that 2.2 trillion-dollar COVID stimulus bill, they
left us with ninety million people on Medicaid, forty-two million people on
food stamps.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“They need to stop the borrowing.
They need to eliminate the earmarks that Republicans brought back in, and they
need to make sure they understand these are taxpayer dollars.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“And while they’re all
saying this, you have Ron DeSantis, you’ve got Tim Scott, you’ve got Mike Pence
— they all voted to raise the debt [limit]. And Donald Trump added eight
trillion to our debt. And our kids are never going to forgive us for this.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“And so, at the end of
the day, you look at the 2024 budget. Republicans asked for 7.4 billion dollars
in earmarks. Democrats asked for 2.8 billion. So, you tell me, who are the big
spenders?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This definitely places
Haley on the moral high ground in the debate outcome, but it’s unlikely it will
do much to endear her to her fellow party members—especially not the Washington
leadership. She also called on her experience as UN ambassador to go after Ramaswamy’s
simplistic view of Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine—to wit, that
the US should stay out of it. Haley accused Ramaswamy of wanting to “hand
Ukraine to Russia” and “let China eat Taiwan.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“You are choosing a murderer
over an ally of the US,” she said. “You have no foreign policy experience and
it shows.” That statement got her a round of loud applause.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Other analysts tried to
spin Ramaswamy’s performance as stellar. But if this were a boxing match and I
were covering it, I’d have to report that all he managed to do all night was
feint and cover, as he was tag-teamed by nearly all the other candidates. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Nor did the other
candidates shine in their attacks on him, which were unworthy and disrespectful
at best, and ad hominem and vaguely racist at worst. Two candidates who, in my opinion,
seriously damaged their own images in their rabid verbal assaults on Vivek were
former Vice-President Mike Pence and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">About all that Pence has
going for him is his “evangelical”-based governorship in Indiana, and the fact
that he served as vice-president of the United States, since he is a remarkably
unimpressive and indecisive politician. Throughout his entire four-year term as
VP, he limited his performance to being a yes-man for Donald Trump, never
showing any character of his own and failing to call out his boss’s bad behavior,
even when it crossed the line into uncharted and possibly felonious waters.
Pence’s one shining moment was when, in his role as Senate President, he for
once, and crucially, refused to give the president’s bad conduct a pass, and,
as it turned out, risked his life in defiance of Trump’s mob, by carrying
congressional certification of the presidential election Trump lost to
fruition. But afterward, even after it became clear that the former president’s
reckless behavior had put his life and those of other members of Congress in
mortal danger, Pence remained wishy-washy in his placement of blame where it
belonged until he had already launched his own campaign for the presidency.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But despite all that, all
has been forgiven for Pence in both the old-time Republican and moderate Democratic
camps, since he has been touted as “a hero of democracy” for, basically, doing
the job he was morally and legally obliged to do under the Constitution,
instead of joining his boss’s criminal conspiracy to virtually overthrow the
established order and remain in power as a de facto president. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It would have been wise
for Pence, who is one of the blandest politicians in history, to have basked in
his former VP status and remained above the fray in the debate, concentrating
on grass-roots conservative policy and on separating himself from Trump instead
of on engaging in head-butting and eye-gouging with the most inexperienced
candidate on the stage. He could have provided an example for others by
treating all candidates with equal respect, debating on substance rather than
personality. But that was clearly too much to ask of a man who appears never to
have had an original idea in his life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Pence, who has an
obviously naïve idea of today’s United States “conservatism”, still sees his
party as the party of Eisenhower and Reagan and allowed himself to be goaded by
Ramaswamy’s ironic tone when the young candidate sought to remind him that
today’s climate is no longer the one Pence recalled from the past. The US,
Ramaswamy pointed out, was in the grip of a national identity crisis. Pence
came back with his “Mr. Rogers” view of the country, saying, “We’re not looking
for a new national identity. The American people are the most faith-filled,
freedom-loving, idealistic, hard-working people the world has ever known.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Innocent though many of
us may find that church-bulletin, blue-sky view of a troubled nation, it is
indeed what sells among Pence’s natural conservative peers—white, Middle-American
people of fifty-plus grown weary of the drama, who would like nothing as much
as to return to “the good old postwar fifties.” Pence is unlikely to find
support among radical Trumpsters who consider him a traitor to their
personality cult, nor is he likely to attract young and up-and-coming
Republicans who think all “boomers” should go home to tend their flower gardens
and leave straightening out the mess the world is in to the people who are
going to have to live in it for decades to come. So it would have made sense
for him to stick to his good-ol’-days narrative, since he clearly has no idea
what contemporary “conservatives” are looking for, nor does he care. He
apparently thinks the young should listen to their elders and re-found a Reaganite
America under his leadership. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Vivek wasn’t buying it.
He said—in a disparaging reference to a Reagan era slogan—“It is not ‘morning
in America’. We live in a dark moment. And we have to confront the fact that
we’re in an internal sort of cold, cultural civil war.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Pence could have gained points by calmly and cogently
explaining how, in his view, what was wrong with conservatism today was
precisely that it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">wasn’t </i>the
conservatism of Reagan, but had instead taken a sharp turn toward right-wing extremism.
But he chose instead to dismiss the other candidate’s view on the sole grounds
of his youth, saying, “Now is not the time for on-the job training. We don’t
need to bring in a rookie.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">His belittling of Ramaswamy tended to indicate that he was dismissing
him because he saw him as a credible threat. That gave Ramaswamy more
importance than he merited. Pence had a chance to continue “schooling” the
thirty-eight-year-old candidate and gave it up to schoolyard banter, rendering
him, “just some guy” on the stage instead of the only one with somewhat presidential
credentials. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Chris Christie, for his part, also decided to surrender his
“experience advantage” by launching the same sort of ad hominem attack as Pence
did on Ramaswamy. The former New Jersey governor probably did a lot to boost
Vivek in the polls by seeking to dismiss him, saying, “I’ve had enough already
tonight of a guy who sounds like ChatGPT standing up here. And the last person
in one of these debates…who stood in the middle of the stage and said, ‘What’s
a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here?’ was Barack Obama. And I’m
afraid we’re dealing with the same type of amateur.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">By saying that instead of slamming Vivek on things he needed
to be slammed on—like his incredibly surreal assertions that climate change was
“a hoax”, that more people were dying because of anti-climate-change policies
than because of climate change, that racism was a thing of the past and that
white supremacists in America were as rare as unicorns—Christie employed the
peevish “young whippersnapper” defense, which lacked substance. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Had Christie left it there, at least, he would only have been
shooting himself in the foot with something smaller than a double-barreled twelve-gauge.
But the comparison to Obama and the “amateur” status of both him and Ramaswamy
was way over the top. Vivek is basically a nobody, no matter what he might end
up being in the future, while Obama, no matter what far-right Republicans and
their white-supremacist cousins might think of him, remains ranked by
presidential historians as one of the most popular presidents of the postwar era,
listing on a footing with such names as Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and
Ronald Reagan. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It made Christie look weak, defensive, clueless, and even
slightly racist. It is one thing for men of color like Obama and Ramaswamy to
refer to themselves as “skinny guys with funny last names,” but quite another
for a white guy to do it. Especially when it was a backhanded attack on a
highly popular and respected leader—the first non-white ever elected to the
presidency—for whom many people voted across party lines in both presidential terms
that he served. Moreover, it was tantamount to throwing a jab but leaving his
guard down for the hard uppercut Ramaswamy delivered when he responded, “Give
me a hug just like you did to Obama, and you’ll help elect me just like you did
to Obama.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In all fairness, both Christie and former Alabama Governor
Asa Hutchinson were addressing a hostile crowd. As the only two who are dead
set against Trump’s ever again being a GOP presidential candidate, they were
setting themselves up to get booed by the clearly overwhelming majority of
Trump apologists in the live audience. As two of the three lowest
candidates on the totem pole, they would clearly have done well to be prepared
to let their listeners judge them on policies, not their politics. Alas, they
didn’t. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The other fellow who barely made the stage, North Dakota
Governor and gazillionaire businessman Doug Burgum, ensured his continued
anonymity—to make the forty thousand donor tally he needed to join the debate,
he reportedly offered a twenty-dollar gift certificate to anybody who would
donate a dollar to his campaign—with his non-performance. In fairness to Burgum,
however, he really was not prepared for a political brawl. His whole campaign is
based on energy strategies to strengthen the US in the face of rising
aggression from China and Russia. He probably figured there would be some segue
that would permit him to expound on that, but there wasn’t, so he ended up
looking like he had nothing to say. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Nor4 did Tim Scott get a chance to tout the conservative
policy logic that separates him from Donald Trump—or, thus, a chance to move
the popularity needle further in his favor. But I blame Scott himself for that,
as I have from the outset, since he has refused to go after Trump in any
meaningful way, which makes him look weak and acquiescent. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Unfortunately, Scott is not alone in that regard. And that
was where the debate, across the board, demonstrated itself to be more
vice-presidential than presidential. Ramaswamy, for instance, may have gotten
noticed—more by being obnoxious than for any other reason—but in answer to one of
the questions asked, he said that Trump was “the best president of the
twenty-first century.” The natural follow-up question for the Fox moderators to
have asked should have been, “So, why the hell are you running against him?”
But they failed to ask it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I think I know the answer to the unasked query. At
thirty-eight, I figure Ramaswamy is running to get noticed, since he has no
political credentials. The main person he is trying to impress, I feel, is
Donald Trump, since there is essentially no difference between his running platform
and Trump’s. A successful businessman, he probably feels his profile will
appeal more to a man like Trump than a politician’s. So it would make sense
that he would hope to be Trump’s vice-presidential pick. Being VP to Trump,
should Trump get another four years—in the White House rather than in prison—could
give a man as young as Vivek the street cred he would need to run for president
in the future, or at least that might well be his calculation. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The big loser of the night was Ron DeSantis. Believing his
own campaign’s hype about how he was going to be receiving “all of the
incoming” in the debate, as holder of the distant second spot to Donald Trump,
he ended up seeming to be at a total loss for anything else to do, when,
surprisingly, all fire from the other candidates appeared to be focused on
Ramaswamy. The Florida governor, not at all his usual brash and boastful self,
spent a lot of time looking like a deer in headlights. The only time he really
came to life was when Fox News moderator Brett Baier put a Trump question to
him and he bristled, asking if the debate was going to be about Trump or the
future. Trump, he indicated, wasn’t relevant. Baier bristled right back and
indicated that with Trump’s voter intention rating running at least twenty
points higher than anyone else’s on the stage, he was clearly relevant, whether
DeSantis liked it or not. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Not only did DeSantis, to his discredit, hem and haw and
waffle when he was later asked if Mike Pence had done the right thing in
certifying the 2020 election on January 6<sup>th</sup> 2021, but he also proved
just how true Trump’s relevance was when all candidates were asked to raise
their hand if they would vote for Trump, assuming he was the candidate, even if
he had been convicted of a felony. The Florida governor looked left and looked
right to see what everybody else was doing and belatedly raised his hand (as
did Pence). It was a chance for him to definitively separate himself from
Trump, and he blew it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In total, six of the eight candidates on stage raised their
hands—in doing so, Nikki Haley undid all of her refreshing earlier
disqualifying criticism of Trump—thus demonstrating that Trump still owns the
GOP, since not even his rivals for the presidency will throw him under the bus
completely, even if he is a convicted felon. Chris Christie timidly raised a
finger (had it been the middle one it might have been taken as a no, but it wasn’t),
but later reneged, saying he wouldn’t vote for Trump. “Someone," said Christie, “has
to stop normalizing this conduct.” A response that was met with loud
booing from the audience. The only candidate who left no doubt about his
position was former Governor Hutchinson, who made no move to look at other
candidates to see what they were doing, or to raise his hand. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">With that single exception, it was a moment in the debate
that continued to put Trump above the law. Never did Trump’s controversial
statement in the 2016 campaign to the effect that he could “shoot somebody on
Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes” seem more apropos. In the end, then, Trump
won the debate hands down without being there and the other eight demoted
themselves, from the outset, to “also-ran” status, in their failure to cut the
umbilical cord to the Trump base and to start reaching out to the other
sixty-plus percent of Republican voters.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-45756688310805427962023-08-09T20:45:00.005-03:002023-08-13T13:34:23.789-03:00OH O-HI-O!!!<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;"><br />My home state of Ohio
topped the national news earlier this week in a litmus test for the GOP’s less
than prudent bet against women’s reproductive rights.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">But while abortion rights topped the agenda
of Ohio’s Issue One, which was soundly defeated in a special referendum on
Tuesday, it also piggybacked other themes that were aimed at expanding the
power of state and at restricting the influence that the people can exert on
their elected officials.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOmVFh2mKLq6iHAUL3FOFeGQechPet3w671KyaJjh-KkI1cw6opHWPJbZdcSlYqUew22m1e501KBbLMCjwPkR50FeAycVcDv3EcPNtOrISGbBaVTWeIHaM9R6QsZ2Lr9ZjPofCqpTkkDh0VMSB7-b2ro8b_T5jTSXo3BrgJaQ3TDzHV2C5OVow0H70nQa6/s251/Issue%20one.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="201" data-original-width="251" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOmVFh2mKLq6iHAUL3FOFeGQechPet3w671KyaJjh-KkI1cw6opHWPJbZdcSlYqUew22m1e501KBbLMCjwPkR50FeAycVcDv3EcPNtOrISGbBaVTWeIHaM9R6QsZ2Lr9ZjPofCqpTkkDh0VMSB7-b2ro8b_T5jTSXo3BrgJaQ3TDzHV2C5OVow0H70nQa6/w400-h320/Issue%20one.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Conservatives portrayed
the referendum as vital to “protecting the state constitution.” But, in fact,
it was an attempt to make it harder for common citizens to introduce
constitutional amendments. Since 1912, amendments have been passed in the state
by a simple majority (fifty percent plus one). Issue One was designed to raise
that bar to sixty percent. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It is worth noting that,
historically, less than a third of amendments to the Ohio constitution have
passed by a sixty percent majority or more. But that wasn’t the only way in
which Issue One would have restricted citizens’ political power. According to
the terms of the referendum, citizens who sought to petition for the proposal
of a constitutional amendment would have needed to collect at least five
percent of signatures from voters in the previous gubernatorial race, and
furthermore, that proportion of signatures would have had to come from all
eighty-eight Ohio counties. Currently, a constitutional amendment can be
elevated for consideration with the signatures of five percent of the voters in
just forty-four of the eighty-eight counties. <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">But Issue One also sought to affect voter rights in
an even more direct way, by proposing the elimination of current legislation
that permits any voter whose signature has been deemed questionable by the
office of the secretary of state to provide a signature-correction within a
ten-day period after his or her ballot has been challenged. In other words, had
the proposal passed, the secretary of state could have arbitrarily challenged
ballot signatures and thrown the votes out without the voters’ having any
recourse under the law. Considering the currently uncertain climate in which we
have seen Republican attempts to steal an election through fraud on a national
scale, this would have placed extraordinary authoritarian power in the hands of
the secretary of state and, indeed, the state itself. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Although the referendum may have appeared, at first
glance, to separate greater amendment restrictions from the abortion issue,
they were, in fact, inextricably linked. Last year, Ohio’s legislature enacted
one of the country’s most restrictive bans on abortion. Strong opposition to
it, however, has kept that legislation from taking effect, since the Ohio
Supreme Court agree to place it under judicial review. In the meantime, Ohio pro-choice
activists have mounted a campaign to draft an amendment that would protect
women’s reproductive rights. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Across the country, ever since the heavily
conservative US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, which had protected these
rights for fifty years—despite data demonstrating that a vast majority of
Americans across party lines are, to a greater or lesser degree, pro-choice and
were against the end of Roe-v Wade—grass-roots efforts to protect pro-choice
rights at a state level have been put together across the country. The result
has been six successful proposals to protect reproductive rights in as many
states since Roe v Wade was dismantled. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">This fact has thrown the Ohio GOP—which is clearly
playing to the radicalized base of Donald Trump, despite all indications that
the majority of voters oppose a flat ban on abortion—into panic mode. In spite
of conservative attempts to sell Issue One as “protecting the constitution”,
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose pulled no punches prior to the vote when
he said that the referendum was “one hundred percent about keeping a radical,
pro-abortion amendment out of our Constitution.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Considering, as mentioned previously, that
only about one in three amendments pass with a sixty percent majority, this
tended to indicate that Issue One was less about constitutional integrity than
about the GOP’s trying to appease the Trump evangelical base by keeping a
pro-choice amendment from finding its way into law.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">In the end, the inordinate stress that the Ohio GOP
is placing on stripping women of their right to choose, and virtually making their wombs wards of the state, under the scrutiny and control government, may well be a very risky bet. The rejection of
Issue One is clearly a strong indicator that this is true, especially in highly
populated areas of the state, which Republicans can’t help but covet in their
future election campaigns. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The numbers tell the story. Twice as many people
voted in the referendum as in Ohio’s last primary. Overall, the measure was
defeated by fifty-seven percent. In all major cities in the state, however,
Issue One was spectacularly rejected by margins of between sixty-one and
seventy-six percent. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Perhaps the Ohio GOP would be smart to stop tuning
their discourse to the Trump base, rethink making abortion a major plank in
their campaign and start concentrating on more practical issues. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><br /><p></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-37095726268703997792023-08-08T13:48:00.005-03:002023-08-08T13:48:34.730-03:00MOBSTER WARNING...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk1k5zQzSJubXWgjBaXmLy9SRTrPhiK2-k2_7xPblIF3ZpkCZ0eL_DEdjw3FWaI0_U01QoAT9eO3WjuXQxEAW2lpc_vJMu7kjfW6ZLH_W4vqkDyTmOXt0rF4iyz6TGj31mEyWRryLLKzgj7izf4Mz7qvvi5EgfhFgjbADJKdbBlYPTTi13cyDXA89CAHns/s431/Trump%20godfather.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="431" data-original-width="356" height="719" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk1k5zQzSJubXWgjBaXmLy9SRTrPhiK2-k2_7xPblIF3ZpkCZ0eL_DEdjw3FWaI0_U01QoAT9eO3WjuXQxEAW2lpc_vJMu7kjfW6ZLH_W4vqkDyTmOXt0rF4iyz6TGj31mEyWRryLLKzgj7izf4Mz7qvvi5EgfhFgjbADJKdbBlYPTTi13cyDXA89CAHns/w593-h719/Trump%20godfather.png" width="593" /></a></div><br />Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-52426842289810909762023-08-07T17:32:00.004-03:002023-08-07T17:39:36.231-03:00THE THIRD INDICTMENT OF DONALD TRUMP<p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">This past week, former US
President Donald J. Trump was arraigned pursuant to the third criminal
indictment brought against him in the past few months. This is, perhaps, the
most consequential of the three indictments, since it involves Trump’s refusal
to concede defeat in the 2020 election and his repeated attempts to subvert,
disregard, corrupt and overthrow the lawful democratic process by which he was
defeated as the incumbent candidate.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioPZTBYXIYAH934Al0iG85NlDFkLXRgwzyzs4I8QySc6dmcIDZMYl-1Zdt-AGhO0QGKoZoYk-pYhIG20c-XIrg9XmoyGxq9rzFoC5bRSvxY0eij7j0JZyvcKep4hpXc1MGEKeUPwosrZ2JO__TpfXJglfOU0by9t0al_9GC86nkW-vZyHC8uX-SEv2kd-s/s1206/Trump%20Indicted.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="681" data-original-width="1206" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioPZTBYXIYAH934Al0iG85NlDFkLXRgwzyzs4I8QySc6dmcIDZMYl-1Zdt-AGhO0QGKoZoYk-pYhIG20c-XIrg9XmoyGxq9rzFoC5bRSvxY0eij7j0JZyvcKep4hpXc1MGEKeUPwosrZ2JO__TpfXJglfOU0by9t0al_9GC86nkW-vZyHC8uX-SEv2kd-s/w400-h226/Trump%20Indicted.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I feel that there are two
ways of looking at this piece of news. One, that it is one of the saddest days
in modern American history—though surely no sadder than the events encompassed
by the indictment—and, two, that it is the most hopeful day in our most recent
history in which democracy and the rule of law have been (and continue to be)
under direct attack.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">The sorrow encompassed in
this turn of events is, basically, that it has come to this. It wasn’t a sudden
turning point. It is the end result of a monstrous social experiment that began
with Trump’s demagogic election campaign as of 2015 and ended with his refusal
to accept the results of what was arguably the most transparent and highly
scrutinized election in US history, when he ran for a second term in 2020 and
was beaten handily by current President Joe Biden.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That refusal came in the
form of his, first, insisting on specific recounts, and then exhausting all
legal recourse to try and prove election fraud, which ended with more than
sixty courts rejecting his campaign’s false claims, the Supreme Court refusing to
hear the case, and his own Attorney General William Barr admitting that, no
matter how hard they looked, they could find no widespread fraud. Clearly, no
matter how unjustified it might be, that is the legal right of any and all
candidates for public office. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And Trump
is certainly not the first, and very likely will not be the last candidate to
question an election outcome. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirT2XMQrI2whgrEI_2x0SSuFGYm2wA01G0U3dU_p9iEKniV1LnwBIQMQYa0Pdsn-PjMIyoReH4MuNoAfDaXuMvcgBMgtOi0tDm_iNHc8YRo9rOwVULdFq72QH9lDV---oOeINi3e8RTfKPTTB5E6Jz6_9glfk0XX3aLWPl5Zva8I8NC4JkySmxF-nh9Rx9/s1206/January%20sixth.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="806" data-original-width="1206" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirT2XMQrI2whgrEI_2x0SSuFGYm2wA01G0U3dU_p9iEKniV1LnwBIQMQYa0Pdsn-PjMIyoReH4MuNoAfDaXuMvcgBMgtOi0tDm_iNHc8YRo9rOwVULdFq72QH9lDV---oOeINi3e8RTfKPTTB5E6Jz6_9glfk0XX3aLWPl5Zva8I8NC4JkySmxF-nh9Rx9/w466-h296/January%20sixth.jpeg" width="466" /></a></div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But in the case of Donald
Trump, for the first time in US history, when legal action was exhausted, he
still refused to concede defeat. From that point on, he initiated—as borne out
in recordings of his own voice and words—an active attempt, with the collusion
of his campaign and several of his attorneys, to corrupt election officials, to
widely spread falsehoods and conspiracy theories which he and his cohorts knew
well to be spurious, and to install fake electors parallel to the authentic
Electoral College. And finally, when nothing else worked, Trump called on the
most fanatical and violent elements in his slavish base to turn out and defend
his seditious continuation in power by refusing to allow Congress to certify
the true election results. This incitement ended in the historic and now
infamous January Sixth 2021 attack on the Capitol, violating the sanctity of
one of the nation’s most basic institutions, and endangering the lives of
lawmakers including Trump’s own Vice President Mike Pence in his role as Senate
president. This spurred an hours-long insurrection in which at least five
people died as a direct or indirect result of the violence—this does not
include four Capitol Police officers who later took their own lives as a consequence
of the mental and physical trauma they suffered—and in which at least one
hundred fifty people were seriously injured (the vast majority police). The
attack also resulted in at least a million and a half dollars in damages to the
Capitol itself. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">While these facts are
well-known to the general public, they bear frequent reiteration, since again
and again, Trump sycophants in Congress and elsewhere have sought to minimize
the events of January Sixth, which, with the exception of the American Civil
War, was the most serious and violent attack on US democracy in the nation’s
history. These include high-profile Republican politicians who, in the immediate
aftermath of the insurrectionist violence, heaped scathing criticism and blame
on the former president, characterizing the riot as the grave upheaval that it
was, only to later recant in accordance with their own personal and party
convenience and proportionate to their cold-sweat cowardice in the anticipation
of retaliation from Trump and his radicalized base.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But hope springs eternal,
as Alexander Pope once wrote, and the upside of what is an otherwise sad day,
is that the rule of law, which Donald Trump has so sorely disrespected with the
necessary collusion of far too many right-wing politicians in Congress, and of
the GOP leadership in general, is apparently alive and well. None other of the
indictments against Trump so far is more significant of this fact than the one
leading to the former president’s formal arraignment last week for his part in attempts
to unlawfully overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and to
remain in office as a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">de facto</i>
president.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">While Trump and many of
his enablers continue to disrespect this process, in their persistence in
deluding the most blindly loyal and gullible of the former president’s
followers—even while, without a doubt, knowing that what they are telling those
Trump fanatics is patently false—both the Justice Department and, in
particular, Special Counsel Jack Smith have been nothing if not transparent and
meticulous in the pursuit and presentation of their case. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheUn5_hH5sSTSkZHg9_ktGtZvFKW7LHGsa7o0gli_3fhcxbgN5UJCf3Dt44NgX41l3tiJ1cZZ1yP7EJs-DS40dvU0SlMI8nikYHaBX7enIz9WLACP6arUJ8EzYeBgds-GvOZWpcLYEyafmenAGHeFLwHuQk6b5T-UAWRDCIyvxXOS71zi8AKpJLyb_Sxu6/s159/Special%20Counsel%20Jack%20Smith.jpeg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="159" data-original-width="137" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheUn5_hH5sSTSkZHg9_ktGtZvFKW7LHGsa7o0gli_3fhcxbgN5UJCf3Dt44NgX41l3tiJ1cZZ1yP7EJs-DS40dvU0SlMI8nikYHaBX7enIz9WLACP6arUJ8EzYeBgds-GvOZWpcLYEyafmenAGHeFLwHuQk6b5T-UAWRDCIyvxXOS71zi8AKpJLyb_Sxu6/w344-h400/Special%20Counsel%20Jack%20Smith.jpeg" width="344" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Special Counsel Jack Smith</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The indictment handed by
Smith to the Federal Court in Washington DC is a faithful reflection of the
legal efficacy and scrupulousness with which the prosecution is presenting the
case. Smith and his team have penned their charges in the clearest and simplest
terms possible. The Special Counsel has, additionally, invited the public at large
to read the indictment, knowing full well that the basis for criminal
proceedings against the former president will, through its reading, become
crystal clear to anyone but the most indoctrinated and disingenuous of Trump
supporters. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It is worthwhile noting
that Smith has prudently avoided, at least for the moment, prosecution of
Trump’s undeniable part in the January Sixth Insurrection itself. That might
well take shape as a separate indictment in the future. But for right now,
Smith is concentrating entirely on trying the former president for using his
powerful office to perpetrate election fraud and to coopt the civil rights of
voters who opposed his candidacy and won, as well as conspiring to spread
disinformation among his followers. As Princeton political history professor
Julian Zelizer pointed out this past week in an interview with CNN, it’s
important to note that “this isn’t a question of presidential power, but of
presidential <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">abuse</i> of power.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The fact that those
efforts to steal the election would indeed spark a violent insurrection, which Trump
unquestionably egged on, and that claimed lives and destroyed property, is an
issue that is being left for another day. It is a prosecutorial strategy that
appears wise, since the soundest of proof gathered pertains to efforts by the
former president and his lieutenants to falsify an election win, while his
responsibility for the insurrection itself will require a much more meticulous
case-building effort, despite the fact that many of the perpetrators already
convicted and sentenced have made it clear that they truly believed that they
were answering a call to battle by the former president.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As someone who, in my
work as a researcher, translator, ghostwriter and editor, has frequently been
called on to write up simplified executive summary versions of particularly
dense legal and political documents, I can tell you, without the least doubt,
that my services would have been required by no one reading this
forty-five-page list of charges. Smith has taken great pains to eschew legalese
and to present the case in layman’s terms and in the most starkly plain
sentences possible. It is, without a doubt, an impeccable piece of writing in
the common American vernacular.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Plain
English, in other words. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As part of their strategy
to plant overwhelming doubt in the minds of Trump’s supporters, his enablers
among the GOP leadership have sought to convince the public that the former
president can’t possibly get a fair trial in Washington DC. And yet, there
could be no more natural place for it to occur. The court is the same one that
has already successfully tried and either convicted or released a number of the
active participants in the January Sixth rioting. Furthermore, Washington is
the seat of the federal government of which Trump is the former head. And it is
the place where the bulk of the felonies described in the indictment were
allegedly perpetrated. Finally, as the nation’s capital, it would seem the
appropriate venue in which to try crimes perpetrated not only against Congress
but also against the people of the United States as a whole. If the former
president’s attorneys should ask for a change of venue—and it seems likely they
will—it is, then, highly unlikely that the court will grant the defense such a
request, nor should it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Donald Trump, like any
other citizen called before a court of law, is innocent until proven guilty.
This case will indeed demonstrate that fact, since no effort is being spared to
guarantee the civil and legal rights of the former president. Beyond the
courtroom—where nothing can be assumed or taken for granted—however, there is
not just what the prosecution can prove or what the defense can challenge under
the rule of law, but what we, as citizens, know to be facts and what we can see
with our own two eyes and hear with our own two ears. And federal court action will
be very different in securing justice than the two impeachment proceedings
brought against Trump during his presidency, where actions were quashed in
accordance with partisan considerations and rivalries rather than based on the
overwhelming evidence. It is the job of the prosecution, the jury and the judge
to try and decide the case based on hard facts, not on whether the decision
will alienate one party or another, or whether one party has more votes than
the other and can prevent the opposing force from prevailing. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Whether it can be proven
in court or not, however, is not the concern of those of us who objectively
know what we’ve seen and heard. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And what
we have seen and heard is this:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">A president who, for the first time in
history, took seditious actions that put his own personal and political
interests above American democracy and the rule of law.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">An incumbent president who, after failing
to prove his claims of election fraud in dozens of courts, decided to take the
law into his own hands, refusing to accept the authentic results, to concede to
his rival, or to voluntarily leave office.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">A president who hired a group of
unmitigatedly crooked and lunatic lawyers to spread a false narrative of a
stolen election, of adulterated results and of tampered-with voting machines,
none of which ever existed, as proven repeatedly in the courts and in numerous
recounts.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">An incumbent president who countenanced
the creation of fraudulent lists of fake state electors in an attempt to
overturn his clear and definitive loss in the Electoral College. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">A president who seriously contemplated the
unsound advice of a disgraced general and several other advisers that he could
declare martial law and rule by force—with only the honor and stability of the
armed forces chiefs preventing him from doing so. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">A president and his attorney’s calls to
election officials in at least two states seeking to get them to invent
election results that would make Trump the winner, even when he legally and
demonstrably wasn’t. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">A former president who has yet to concede
defeat, years after his loss, either because he is being feloniously disingenuous
or because he has lost touch with reality and believes his own narcissistic
fantasy in spite of abundant proof to the contrary. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">An incumbent president who, as one of his
final acts as chief executive, fueled a massive and violent demonstration of
his own making and then refused for hours on end to defuse the situation,
despite a virtual state of siege in Congress and serious threats to the lives
of police, of members of Congress and of his own vice president. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">A former president who continues to show
no remorse, and who, in fact doubles and triples down, blaming everyone but
himself for the serious legal jeopardy that he is facing, backed by palpable evidence
of more than seventy felony counts, the validity of which will be tested in
courts of law where he will have a chance to redeem himself, but is unlikely to
do so. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqP5LqtIZEcvPdsK4UHgdHbQzGskZxlzv_Smwo2NLsriDnFVPR9hz8AMp9gn9o5SvFUhawy7XGCqw8W7eMTaN3k7DvHCP-vyZ5gjHdUts7V6_JVPg_6crjIAiWfSQp37j0ym7jJx-XRv-f80-Xpqd1gikBfuBLYBGJoDNlYO2qpkQg-aDYGO2Nn4hTQ1mC/s225/Giuliani_Powell_Flynn.jpeg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" height="342" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqP5LqtIZEcvPdsK4UHgdHbQzGskZxlzv_Smwo2NLsriDnFVPR9hz8AMp9gn9o5SvFUhawy7XGCqw8W7eMTaN3k7DvHCP-vyZ5gjHdUts7V6_JVPg_6crjIAiWfSQp37j0ym7jJx-XRv-f80-Xpqd1gikBfuBLYBGJoDNlYO2qpkQg-aDYGO2Nn4hTQ1mC/w342-h342/Giuliani_Powell_Flynn.jpeg" width="342" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Sidney Powell, General Flynn, Rudy Giuliani,<br />the lunatic fringe...</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Allies of former
President Donald Trump have rushed to his defense since he was charged Tuesday
in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">They inaccurately
attacked the judge assigned to oversee the trial, baselessly speculated that
the timing of the accusations was intended to obscure misconduct by the Bidens
and misleadingly compared Trump’s conduct to that of Democratic politicians in
somewhat, but nor entirely, similar situations—I say “somewhat” because the
case of Trump is unprecedented in US history. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The most egregious of
these claims came, disgracefully, from the Speaker of the House, Kevin
McCarthy, who disingenuously, sought to compare Trump’s conduct to that of
other candidates who, in the past, have questioned the results of close
elections. He mentioned, in particular, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Hillary
Clinton—biasedly overlooking Republican Richard Nixon’s complaints about John
F. Kennedy’s narrow win. McCarthy indicated that Trump was being pilloried for
something that was his right—to question election results—while nobody was
mentioning the other three times where candidates did the same. The indication
being that it was a Democrat versus Republican thing. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj_aVQsoGpujeWpJztLTo4_zaCCyz8Mof-yk9ooNRh7HYUahiH6dSV4BC_zMg2t7FWOP1kMWrBf9LghSJbiS8YpfsANSopXtbeYByBiYlLry0tKkIS_TU2O95sqeM7EtCHJvRltUuBehaQg7yRMhbnm4yup5IHjhftUXbD0hDAGUeL_fv3niKai_O2mkmo/s249/images.jpeg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="249" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj_aVQsoGpujeWpJztLTo4_zaCCyz8Mof-yk9ooNRh7HYUahiH6dSV4BC_zMg2t7FWOP1kMWrBf9LghSJbiS8YpfsANSopXtbeYByBiYlLry0tKkIS_TU2O95sqeM7EtCHJvRltUuBehaQg7yRMhbnm4yup5IHjhftUXbD0hDAGUeL_fv3niKai_O2mkmo/w400-h270/images.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Clearly, that is not the
case. For one thing, 2020 was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a close
call. And it should be pointed out that in those other three cases, the results
were questioned, the challenges ruled invalid, and all three candidates
accepted the outcome, conceded defeat and fully supported the peaceful transfer
of power. Trump is the first president in history who hasn’t.<br /> <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">No one, least of all Jack
Smith or the federal court, is questioning Trump’s right to challenge the
election results <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">by all legal means</i>—which,
again, he has done and failed. Rather, what is being questioned and charged is,
first of all, the potentially felonious behavior of a former president who
sought to overturn an election by illegal means, and second, whether McCarthy
and his party are really willing to subvert US institutions and the rule of law
in order to defend the indefensible and render tribute to a cult of
personality. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-29603748872027288152023-08-04T17:05:00.004-03:002023-08-04T17:18:51.482-03:00HEADS UP TO KEVIN MCCARTHY...<h2 style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: x-large;">HOW HE ENDS UP TREATING <br /></span></b><b><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: x-large;">EVERYONE WHO COVERS HIM </span></b></h2><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: x-large;"><b><br /></b></span><b><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: x-large;"></span></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: x-large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMarbM0ZII--imx2M7Dr1QfsaxGE0557AwDk2SwpLn3F9ApgUA9PZGbqCNSKkZdeRAt5CnfROIcxQ-P_ukQNovypyFP0l_3nvQNmWWBR0eD9B7KdZKtgBreoptv1o76-Qmf_RDVC-UoacYFi4VVEDdfr5yQI6G8k5zpbuNIbkDbxImw3vGOCOmvrfCVnTa/s202/trump-umbrella.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="202" data-original-width="200" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMarbM0ZII--imx2M7Dr1QfsaxGE0557AwDk2SwpLn3F9ApgUA9PZGbqCNSKkZdeRAt5CnfROIcxQ-P_ukQNovypyFP0l_3nvQNmWWBR0eD9B7KdZKtgBreoptv1o76-Qmf_RDVC-UoacYFi4VVEDdfr5yQI6G8k5zpbuNIbkDbxImw3vGOCOmvrfCVnTa/w634-h640/trump-umbrella.gif" width="634" /></a></span></b></div><b><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: x-large;"><br /> </span></b><p></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-56024446429897288562023-06-28T17:29:00.002-03:002023-06-28T17:29:26.653-03:00DESANTIS…DESANTIS…IS THAT CHEROKEE?<p> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">And now, he wants to end
birth right citizenship!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In other words, if you're
born in the US to brown parents, you might not be a citizen after all. If he
has his way, it'll all depend on whether Uncle Ronnie says you are or not.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Has this clown ever even
READ the Constitution???<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Hey Ron, I know you're a
moron, but this is really simple: Let me spell it out for you. </span><span lang="ES-AR" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: ES-AR;">I_F <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Y_O_U <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A_R_E <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>B_O_R_N
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>O_N
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>U_S
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>S_O_I_L,
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Y_O_U
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A_R_E
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A_M_E_R_I_C_A_N!
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Otherwise. all of us
whose ancestors washed up on these shores from wherever they washed up from are
going to have to pack up and go back to wherever we came from and give the
continent back to its original owners, none of whom was called Desantis<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">—</span>the
Latin root of which, rather appropriately in this case, means
"blameworthy".</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHjbVqw_7wYC2oUhE1X65s9YaJ1bSzbS5kOkEjPcHWl34Tjwb1CbHobwJtatEB3-RohxpJL3WXh6LC1dC0LiKxPUIFuNbazKe8Atk4jzNt7_StR00btSUp2pBjXta8YLs57PScY2By4WBsk9j62KCARlINj20uu6Gva255kEm1QwCWWzwbAD3QNpRQhrXb/s528/Desantis%20%20flaming%20constitution.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="528" data-original-width="528" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHjbVqw_7wYC2oUhE1X65s9YaJ1bSzbS5kOkEjPcHWl34Tjwb1CbHobwJtatEB3-RohxpJL3WXh6LC1dC0LiKxPUIFuNbazKe8Atk4jzNt7_StR00btSUp2pBjXta8YLs57PScY2By4WBsk9j62KCARlINj20uu6Gva255kEm1QwCWWzwbAD3QNpRQhrXb/w640-h640/Desantis%20%20flaming%20constitution.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-91051936502991784452023-06-28T12:16:00.004-03:002023-06-28T12:19:54.072-03:00RUSSIAN EXPOSURE – SOME TAKE-AWAYS<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">For about a New York
minute, I found it quite satisfying to see the rats at the top of the
autocratic, oligarchic food chain in Russia turning on one another. Yevgeny
Prigozhin’s short-lived revolt against a sector of Vladimir Putin’s government (not
even the chief of one of the most ruthless mercenary forces ever assembled
could muster the guts to oppose Putin himself) was a little like the scene in </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">The Wizard of Oz </i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">when Dorothy’s dog Toto
knocks over the screen and the wizard is exposed for what he is, an ordinary
man with no real power at all except for his ability to make people believe that
he is all-powerful.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But once that small
pleasure had waned, there were other more practical aspects to consider, as a
result of the weekend of utter chaos that Prigozhin visited on Putin’s Russia.
The most immediate take-away is that both Putin and Prigozhin came out of this incident
much weaker than before.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivkEkPGxVYT1wZl6FxgtJNoC-skBc6aAsKtRJwXbqZOc-Lpl4zbbpoep5EFnW-8VwqgDPnDkHw3wQi8zhiA89Hwe6ITIICKlbV8znI6_cioCcwRku822CKVPsjxDaiBw7Bt9jvrH1kZjQK9Y3lATJniJPVsH0zfml0lFr7g4XJd5gbegJhME3mCntRbIEj/s259/Putin_Prigozhin.jpeg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="194" data-original-width="259" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivkEkPGxVYT1wZl6FxgtJNoC-skBc6aAsKtRJwXbqZOc-Lpl4zbbpoep5EFnW-8VwqgDPnDkHw3wQi8zhiA89Hwe6ITIICKlbV8znI6_cioCcwRku822CKVPsjxDaiBw7Bt9jvrH1kZjQK9Y3lATJniJPVsH0zfml0lFr7g4XJd5gbegJhME3mCntRbIEj/w400-h300/Putin_Prigozhin.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Putin and Prigozhin - end of the affair</b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Prigozhin basically ended
up having to give up his brutal, tinpot, mercenary army in order to save his
own skin when he miscalculated the level of discontent in the Russian Armed
Forces in general and among Putin’s closest military commanders in particular.
It’s not hard to guess that in his delusions of grandeur, he imagined marching
on Moscow and picking up large detachments of the Russian military on the way.
That didn’t happen. And despite the fact that he made it clear he was rebelling
against the defense ministry and not against the chief of state, Putin,
nevertheless, declared him a traitor and vowed that he and his men would be
punished to the full measure of the law (which is often whatever Putin says it
is). But that didn’t happen either.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Putin, for his part, was
caught on his back foot and got waylaid. He seems to have been unaware until
the last minute that the rebellion was coming. And yet, as someone who was once
an officer in the KBG and who has, over the past twenty years, garnered an
enormous measure of autocratic power over the Russian Federation, he should
have known. At least some of his generals knew ahead of time but evidently
didn’t share that knowledge with the boss. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It seemed clear, at
least, to many Russia insiders in the West that Prigozhin was hardly likely to
stand still for Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s move to bring the oligarch and
his private army, known as the Wagner Group, under the control of the Russian
state. Shoigu had earlier issued an order for all Russian mercenaries to join
the regular Army by the first of July, which would basically have rendered moot
Prigozhin’s until-then enormous power.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was Putin himself who
provided Prigozhin with the power he had come to wield. And ex-convict and
self-made man, Prigozhin had become Putin’s go-to guy whenever the president
didn’t want to get his own hands dirty. Prigozhin and the Wagner Group
repeatedly provided Putin with deniability in unofficial Russian military
actions in which crimes against humanity were consistently committed. Prigozhin
was also reportedly behind Russian interference in both the 2016 and 2018
elections in the US.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This is, of course, part
of the dictator playbook. When I was covering the bloody reign of a military
dictatorship in Argentina in the nineteen seventies and early eighties, paramilitary
hit squads, made up largely of retired police and military personnel, carried
out most of the torture, political abductions and assassinations in which tens
of thousands of people disappeared or were killed. The first junta head and
president, Jorge Rafael Videla, would consistently insist, in answer to
worldwide outrage, that when orders were given, he had no real control over how
they were carried out. A claim that was, of course, ludicrous, as have been all
of Putin’s own denials since he started using paramilitary mercenaries to invade
Ukrainian territory, clear back to the time when he first annexed Crimea in
early 2014. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Ever since it became
clear that practically any pyrrhic victory Putin could claim in Ukraine—where
his original claims that it would be a walk-over and that his troops would be
accepting the Ukrainians’ surrender in short order turned out to be a
miscalculated fantasy of epic proportions—has been largely thanks to Prigozhin
and his army of mercenary thugs, I started asking myself what the Russian
president was going to do when that pack of mad dogs turned on him. This past
weekend provided an at least partial answer. I say partial, because the
consequences of the rebellion have still not all been revealed. </span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQr99o8A3VgXg4jMZ404Q3LLbUueFEGNiCd9Z3iC-MYS-XLJZ7T8koTbmZkOAKgmo_b2r2CEZgbHrNBvTPfQd4N1YAXVXpFPkIiiWKW3i5i2JMmH8j151qPwW3ji4oou71x6DlYvQd49cPJFWuIGzJrZBQIB1olByYSpD6fSlReA_w_DHiz3WbneL5PK7X/s502/Shoigu.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="502" data-original-width="393" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQr99o8A3VgXg4jMZ404Q3LLbUueFEGNiCd9Z3iC-MYS-XLJZ7T8koTbmZkOAKgmo_b2r2CEZgbHrNBvTPfQd4N1YAXVXpFPkIiiWKW3i5i2JMmH8j151qPwW3ji4oou71x6DlYvQd49cPJFWuIGzJrZBQIB1olByYSpD6fSlReA_w_DHiz3WbneL5PK7X/w314-h400/Shoigu.jpg" width="314" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Defense Minister Shoigu</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">While Putin has tried to
keep up appearances, in his home-grown Ukraine War, in the face of withering
pushback from Ukraine’s Armed Forces and its stoic people in which the Russians
have suffered their worst losses since World War II—some forty thousand men
killed and another one hundred forty to one hundred sixty thousand
injured—Prigozhin’s drive toward Moscow demonstrated clearly that Putin has
nothing to spare in the way of military power. A mobilized detachment of the
men of the Wagner Group made it from Ukraine to within one hundred twenty-five
miles of the Russian capital and, according to Western reports, only
encountered armed resistance from the Russian Armed Forces at one point along
the way, where the Wagner Group quickly overpowered it. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More telling still, when a deal was struck,
the mercenaries were allowed to turn around and go back to where they had come
from, and Prigozhin was permitted to slip away into exile.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">What this also tended to
show was that while Putin’s military, by and large, didn’t turn against him,
neither did it make any great effort to defend him, which could be taken as a
wait-and-see attitude and/or previews of possible coming attractions. Or
perhaps it was just the Russian field military commanders demonstrating that
without them, Putin was powerless against overthrow. In the only images that
have come out of Prigozhin talking to military officers during his drive toward
Moscow, both he and the Russian officers seemed relaxed and
non-confrontational. Furthermore, despite all of Putin’s talk of holding the
Wagner Group and Prigozhin to account, in the end, he was forced to let
Prigozhin escape to exile and to strike a deal, telling the mercenaries that
all would be forgiven if they submitted to Russian military control. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He also was forced initially
to say that nothing would happen to Prigozhin. But then, nobody believes that,
and least of all, Prigozhin. While he agreed to Belarusian exile, he
immediately and wisely disappeared from view. From an undisclosed location he
would later issue a statement explaining that his idea was never to overthrow
Putin. All he was doing, he said, was protecting his men. Clearly, what he was
trying to protect was his own power, and without his private army, that power
has been considerably reduced. But it has not been wiped out, since, up to now,
Prigozhin has been a chief ally of Putin’s in the vast Russian mafia. He is a
kingpin, a guy who knows where the bodies are buried. And, without a doubt, he
and his Army have been crucial in Putin’s prosecution of his war of aggression against
Ukraine and in military action elsewhere.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Seeking to explain the
significance of the Russian Defense Ministry’s order for all of Prigozhin’s
battle-hardened frontline fighters to place themselves under Russia’s general
military command, former US Army in Europe commander, Lieutenant General Mark
Hertling, told a TV interviewer that it was rather as if members of Delta
Force, Navy SEALs or some other special forces unit were being told to place
themselves under the orders of a regular infantry command. But he hastened to
point out, however, that this was where the comparison ended, since the Wagner
Group wasn’t a highly trained, special forces unit, but rather, a mercenary
army made up of criminal thugs and convicts, led by a mafioso.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQjb3CH_15uVOk2SW7D75Rc_Etr56P41w8tdgmFzUVjEkn2lOYeHTLEflon8kg61aL98U9yOo6pP6NluuT-6HQrGwHyXEL9QEutDFJYwdlh1H2ZFyS3cYSCzjKRhVHUNhj51-iwA3nzThXRNPHwjsfavkAIbPeC2kSCXmTPIQJY3lh2tOYutpy5QNctmHH/s748/Prigozhin%20in%20uniform.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="748" data-original-width="682" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQjb3CH_15uVOk2SW7D75Rc_Etr56P41w8tdgmFzUVjEkn2lOYeHTLEflon8kg61aL98U9yOo6pP6NluuT-6HQrGwHyXEL9QEutDFJYwdlh1H2ZFyS3cYSCzjKRhVHUNhj51-iwA3nzThXRNPHwjsfavkAIbPeC2kSCXmTPIQJY3lh2tOYutpy5QNctmHH/w365-h400/Prigozhin%20in%20uniform.jpg" width="365" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Prigozhin dressed in battlefield gear</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Indeed, for all of his
posturing in elaborate military garb and armed to the teeth, Vevgeny Prigozhin
is as much a self-style military commander as he is a self-made oligarch.
Sometimes known as “Putin’s Chef”, because, under Putin, his food industry
interests have catered to the Kremlin, the sixty-two-year-old Prigozhin
originated from fairly humble beginnings at the height of Soviet rule in
Russia. His Jewish father died while he was still a boy and his mother
struggled to support Vevgeny and his ailing grandmother with her work at a
hospital in what was then Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). <o:p></o:p></span></p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Vevgeny’s mother
eventually remarried. His stepfather, who was also Jewish, was a cross-country
skiing instructor. Vevgeny, who was a teen by this time, took to the sport and
hoped to go pro. His stepfather managed to get him into a prestigious athletics
school to help him reach his goal, but Vevgeny’s plans didn’t work out in the
end. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Almost immediately,
Prigozhin turned to a life of crime. He was arrested for stealing at age
eighteen. The court went easy on him and gave him a two-year suspended
sentence. At twenty, he was arrested again for leading a criminal gang of
mostly juvenile delinquents, which burglarized high-end apartment buildings.
This time, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison for theft, fraud and
corruption of the minors whom he had involved in his crimes. He ended up
serving nine years of the sentence before being released in 1990.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">On his release he joined
his mother and stepfather in a small business selling hotdogs out of stand in
an open-air market in Leningrad. In an interview years later, Prigozhin would
say that their hotdog business was so thriving that his mother didn’t know what
to do with all the money that came rolling in. But Vevgeny did. He embraced the
entrepreneurial spirit of the times following the fall of the Soviet Union and
invested in a wide variety of interests. From grocery stores and restaurants to
marketing research, construction and foreign trade, Prigozhin’s empire expanded
exponentially. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But it was apparently his
foreign trade interests that eventually led to areas of interest to the Putin
regime—notably gold and diamond mining in Central Africa. These interests seem
to have provided him with the perfect segue into arms and mercenary
recruitment. For some time, Prigozhin denied having anything to do with the
Wagner Group—a shadowy paramilitary arm of the Putin regime that was involved
in guerrilla warfare activities in several parts of Africa and which eventually
showed up in Syria, where Putin was propping up the cruel dictatorship of
Bashar Al-Assad in his devastatingly bloody war to put down a nationwide
democratic uprising. But he eventually admitted to being the group’s founder,
and in Ukraine has become its high-profile commander. His untrained, unschooled
and non-strategic approach to war to date has been simple: to throw huge
numbers of men and ordnance at the enemy in hopes of eventually overcoming
their resistance. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">For this unsophisticated
and brutal strategy to work, Prigozhin requires either highly motivated or,
more often, otherwise hopeless men. That’s why much of his army in Ukraine has
been made up of convicted felons, desperados who joined him in order to get out
of prison. These are men who have had no problem following their commander’s
orders to lay non-military targets to waste and to murder civilians. And in
some of the heaviest fighting, Prigozhin himself admitted that he was losing an
average of a hundred men a day.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The US has leveled
numerous sanctions and criminal charges at Prigozhin in recent years. He is
also one of the Russian oligarchs under sanctions in the United Kingdom and in the
EU. Additionally, the FBI has offered a bounty of up to two-hundred-fifty
thousand dollars for information leading to Prigozhin’s arrest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjFcAJIVfQ5SOHtcYDlPr-h3q_kefvAR0p1iYZRU0UfZYde9ZMMK-J6SfUuRyVmsWSTyQDLQstnirwgn8tUAukXEqPTrmgmW0HI9wkhXAEGldz-Qkp8X-jEBFnKG6sHxHPjnGqz72F9natoSLDS5Jqj2j7762K4vllVxc7FwMVJUC4xX-aeVVQjaPamWYR/s1286/Prigozhin%20with%20Russian%20military%20officials%20on%20June%2024.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="726" data-original-width="1286" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjFcAJIVfQ5SOHtcYDlPr-h3q_kefvAR0p1iYZRU0UfZYde9ZMMK-J6SfUuRyVmsWSTyQDLQstnirwgn8tUAukXEqPTrmgmW0HI9wkhXAEGldz-Qkp8X-jEBFnKG6sHxHPjnGqz72F9natoSLDS5Jqj2j7762K4vllVxc7FwMVJUC4xX-aeVVQjaPamWYR/w400-h226/Prigozhin%20with%20Russian%20military%20officials%20on%20June%2024.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>A relaxed Prigozhin meets with Russian military leaders</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The uncertainty in Russia
hasn’t been allayed, by any means, as a result of the deal reached between the
Putin regime and the Wagner Group. Just the fact that Putin put together a
flamboyant display honoring the Russian Armed Forces within a couple of days of
the mercenaries’ revolt is as telling as it is unusual. Until Prigozhin went
rogue, no one was questioning the power of Vladimir Putin. Dictatorships,
however, function very much like the Mafia. The capo is the capo…until he
isn’t. His power isn’t based on love and loyalty, but on ruthlessness and fear.
Power in autocracies in strictly vertical, and a dictator’s continuation in
power is subject to the fear of those beneath him. They must feel that the
price of betrayal is so certain and so lethal that their only choice is blind loyalty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Given Putin’s track record, while it’s
unlikely anyone is beating down Prigozhin’s door to sell him a life insurance
policy, the fact that he and his band of thugs got away, at least for now, with
nipping at Putin’s heels will almost certainly be taken as a sign of fear and
weakness on Putin’s part. All the more so because, instead of downplaying the
incident’s importance, Putin has cast Prigozhin as a dangerous traitor and has
thanked and honored the Armed Forces for “saving the country from civil war,”
when, in fact, all indications are that the military did precious little in
that regard.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Calling the uprising an
attempt at civil war tends to show that a much more serious rebellion is a
possibility that might be keeping Putin up nights. An admirer of Czar Nicholas
and his empire, Putin can hardly help but recall that, in the end, the czar’s
failures in foreign wars and the poverty they engendered at home played into
the hands of the Bolsheviks so that a revolt by ragtag civilian militias ended
up being backed by large numbers of discontented professional soldiers. And
Czar Nicholas and his family ended up facing a firing squad.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-90527910643089605252023-06-11T20:15:00.005-03:002023-06-13T09:33:05.935-03:00ABOVE THE LAW?<p> <span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;">Former president Donald
Trump’s reckless comments to one of his typically self-aggrandizing rallies—it’s
never about the Nation he was supposed to have served but, rather, tried to
place at his own service, it’s always about him because, clearly, he thinks
he’s the most important being in the universe—make it crystal clear that he
believes himself to be above the law.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Yk_p8FJYzLGhwW0LRX130FhGF9dUGPPdRpaLhA_b-P7aKLXiFOXsrp4Q7JBLAuYp28kGjRn_tjR3CyMfJqtSBjan2CIjroheGxpXgpdEJDJHNxL0DT3PnIBtJWm3TwmqdBaxaAvzpwv7pp2BFwJqekcIzc3PUPFDzGk3c9nvqZXtscnZZff7_KHvdA/s280/Trump%20in%20GA.jpeg" style="clear: left; font-size: 18.6667px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="color: black;"><img border="0" data-original-height="180" data-original-width="280" height="257" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Yk_p8FJYzLGhwW0LRX130FhGF9dUGPPdRpaLhA_b-P7aKLXiFOXsrp4Q7JBLAuYp28kGjRn_tjR3CyMfJqtSBjan2CIjroheGxpXgpdEJDJHNxL0DT3PnIBtJWm3TwmqdBaxaAvzpwv7pp2BFwJqekcIzc3PUPFDzGk3c9nvqZXtscnZZff7_KHvdA/w400-h257/Trump%20in%20GA.jpeg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">Trump..."a hit job"</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">It was in Columbus, Georgia, before a rally throng of two thousand supporters that Trump made his first comments on the thirty-seven felony count indictment unsealed at the end of the week. As usual, he sought to make out something strictly about his misdeeds, criminal behavior, presidential misconduct and contempt for the law to be a national cause. The first thing he did was tell his most fervent and blindly loyal supporters that this wasn’t about him. It was about them.</span><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In a rabble-rousing
diatribe, Trump told members of his base, “In the end, they're not coming after
me. They're coming after <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you</i>, and I'm
just standing in their way.” He also called the case against him “a political
hit job,” and sought, in his typical ad hominem fashion to belittle his
accuser, calling Special Counsel Smith “a deranged lunatic”, “a psycho” and “a
Trump-hater.” He also made light of commonness of Jack Smith’s name, quipping, “What
was his name before he changed it?” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This has been Trump’s
message from the outset, when he first announced his candidacy for the
presidency in June of 2015. Since then he has conned his followers with the
message that anyone calling him out on his misdeeds is merely a hater who is
accusing him falsely, that it’s all a rigged system, and suggesting that he is “the
only one who can fix it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It is easy to fool
people who want desperately to believe that their own view that everything is
going to hell in a handcart is not just a perception, but a hard and fast fact.
It is not a hard sell when the victims of a con are willing ones, who want to
believe the con. In fact, that is precisely what con artists have always done—encouraged
their victims to believe what they would <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">like</i>
to believe in, as a means of getting the upper hand and taking advantage of their
naivety. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Trump, experienced grifter
that he has been throughout his long and infamous business career, is surely
not above lying to make his grift stick. Indeed, even in a profession like
politics where lying, deceit and subterfuge are practically synonymous with the
term “politician”, it would be hard to find a single political figure—and particularly
president—in the history of the United States who has lied as consistently
about practically everything as Donald J. Trump has. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This is not an unfair
or unwarranted charge, considering that fact-checkers in every serious medium
one can think of mutually and consistently caught Trump in blatant lies or
misleading statements to the public at least <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">thirty thousand times</i> over the course of his four-year presidency.
But again, conning a person or group of persons isn’t hard if they are more
than willing believers in the grift. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Trump is often touted
in even the liberal media as “a master of deception” or as a “spin genius”. But
the truth is that he’s not really a good liar at all, nor would his grifts work
on even the most mildly skeptical of marks. His lies are laced with holes and
wouldn’t hold water with a keen-minded ten-year-old. What makes his lies stick
is the willingness of his base to accept him as The Owner of the Truth.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So what’s his secret?
The secret of his success in pulling the wool over the eyes of a frighteningly
large segment of the American population is that he is always preaching to the
choir. In doing so, if he has had any stroke of genius at all, it lies in his
having convinced a certain rather large demographic in US society that he is “the
only one telling them the truth.” He has successfully and incredibly convinced
his followers that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">everybody</i> is lying
to them but him—the media, the government, the courts, even the US intelligence
community and the FBI. He has entranced them to the point that he has become
the arbiter of their “truth”. He is the judge of what is truth and what’s
false. He is the “outsider”, the avenging angel, the only leader who can make
right everything that is wrong in their lives. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But what happened
during the four years when he was president and nothing substantially changed
in the lives of those followers and when basically everything he had promised
them during his campaign was laid naked as a bald-faced lie? Grift Two is what
happened. He blamed the opposition, traitors in his own party and administration,
lying liberal journalists and, above all, “the deep state”. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Suddenly, his followers
were his defenders, his liberating army, his enforcers, ready and willing to
overthrow democracy—while convinced they were defending it from the “rigged
system”—by violent means. That’s how the insurrection of January Sixth 2021 happened. The date deserves capitalizing because it is a major event in our
history that will surely be studied in the future. How it is studied—whether as
the blackest day in US democracy, or as the day a glorious populist revolution
began—will depend on whether or not US democracy and our founding liberal
traditions survive the Trump Era. Especially when the hierarchy of the
Republican Party, few of whom have swallowed the Trump con, but instead have
become his shills in detriment to the Nation but in favor of their own
political expediencies, have become his accomplices in duping “the base”. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In this struggle
between—dare I say it? —good and evil (or at least between the rule of law and
abject lawlessness), the federal indictment of Donald Trump this past week is a
turning point, a line drawn in the sand, basically, an all-out last-ditch
effort to keep authoritarianism from taking root in the United States of
America. This will be the test of whether a felon, if convicted in a court of
law, of the serious crimes with which he is charged, is subject to the law,
even if he is a former president and a highly popular public figure.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It is worth pointing out
that the case doesn’t involve a lone felony count that could be open to
misinterpretation. Rather, the special counsel in charge, Jack Smith, has
carefully constructed a well-documented and meticulously vetted list of no
fewer than thirty-seven federal crimes directly linked to the former president.
If he can prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt in a federal court, Trump
could be facing the possibility of prison for the rest of his life. And
considering the seriousness of some of these crimes—especially gross violations
of the Espionage Act that might well have compromised not only US national
security, but also the security of our foreign allies—if Trump is proven guilty,
the punishment must fit the crime, if justice is to be served. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpPmK1Zr7JsMGQRsTFg3Lo_SUKZUKyIDkynCOUG1rG396E6Q5Oza-MuslBvPhUTdd8LexGbAEswNalFmEsLajTlr0I6nx0g13WJrYZ08zkV4GZ806Pv_WZ7KeDl86Lz8JZ1pJ_Z_sOe8WCQ5xhLak1EzGKg4SUXew4Pw7vazirFXDef9QoXZQFwuAz9g/s300/Jack%20Smith.jpeg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpPmK1Zr7JsMGQRsTFg3Lo_SUKZUKyIDkynCOUG1rG396E6Q5Oza-MuslBvPhUTdd8LexGbAEswNalFmEsLajTlr0I6nx0g13WJrYZ08zkV4GZ806Pv_WZ7KeDl86Lz8JZ1pJ_Z_sOe8WCQ5xhLak1EzGKg4SUXew4Pw7vazirFXDef9QoXZQFwuAz9g/w400-h224/Jack%20Smith.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Jack Smith - "the law applies to everyone."</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Smith is pushing for a
speedy initiation of legal action so as to avoid any appearance of an attempt
to disrupt the 2024 election process in which, thanks to the GOP’s self-serving
acquiescence, Trump promises to be a frontrunner. But Smith also vows to be thorough
in proving his charges beyond the shadow of a doubt, <o:p></o:p></span><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;">saying, </span><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;">“We
have one set of laws in this country and they apply to everyone.”</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In a perfect world,
there would be no way that Trump’s defense could complain that they are arguing
their case before a hostile court. The venue is in ruby-red Florida and the
judge, Aileen Cannon, is a 2020 Trump appointee to the federal bench, who has
been criticized in the past for going out of her way to favor Trump in earlier
court action involving the Mar-a-Lago documents case. Furthermore, jurors in
Florida apparently have a well-established history of siding with elected
officials against the prosecution. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In other words, in a
veritable litmus test for democracy, equality and the rule of law, if Smith
proves unquestionably the felony charges his investigation is bringing against
Trump and achieves a guilty verdict, Trump’s punishment must fit the crime. Any
other outcome would mean that in the United States, fame and authoritarian populist
power are above the law. And US democracy will have been permanently degraded
and undermined. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-19219737100880431762023-06-10T12:35:00.001-03:002023-06-10T12:35:18.062-03:00LIKE AN ITCH THAT NEEDS SCRATCHING<p><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I owe my deepest thanks to several hundred people
who, despite my lackadaisical approach to this political and social blog have
continued to check in on it from time to time every month, apparently to see
if, perhaps, I’ve quit messing around and gotten back to work. It’s humbling to
see that, even though I consistently disappoint, a handful of people—actually a
</span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">couple</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> of handfuls—per day are
dropping by, even when weeks or months pass without my uttering a syllable. I
figure they are either going back and checking out old entries they might have
missed, or, perhaps, they are simply keeping the faith by sticking their
proverbial head in the door, seeing the lights are still out, and quietly leaving.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQbbTYnw8hjKR6Z9KHcn2CUzml9zNRuBNFkGSPVVitkMT3NsLS-eL9r6Hm_Sy7TjedzPOe7laRX0UqFaw-_TAkZTh2gJ_1CKzMot74-bblWc78Xt8Qm2GdHEyVWIUTpOZqhEMTk2Z-hbDZAY0PW0LJchlZ-qoylEJ80O_zM7ai6RaAmpv2jJjmOKC1QQ/s233/ITCH.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="233" data-original-width="217" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQbbTYnw8hjKR6Z9KHcn2CUzml9zNRuBNFkGSPVVitkMT3NsLS-eL9r6Hm_Sy7TjedzPOe7laRX0UqFaw-_TAkZTh2gJ_1CKzMot74-bblWc78Xt8Qm2GdHEyVWIUTpOZqhEMTk2Z-hbDZAY0PW0LJchlZ-qoylEJ80O_zM7ai6RaAmpv2jJjmOKC1QQ/w373-h400/ITCH.jpeg" width="373" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Again, my humblest of apologies. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That said, whether they love or hate what I write (few
are indifferent) about the contemporary political and social scene, trying to
provide an independent viewpoint beyond partisan lines, they are consistent in
their apparent desire for me to keep covering these subjects because if not,
the hits this “other blog” of mine gets would dwindle to zero, and that simply
doesn’t happen. Ever.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Why? Because they are right to keep coming back in
that I never seem to be able to kick the news habit I acquired in twenty years
of professional journalism, when I was a much younger man. And like so many
other addicts, no matter how old I get, I eventually fall off the wagon and
start editorializing again. I seem unable to help it. It’s like an itch I can
never completely scratch, and never quite reach. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So, in the end, there’s nothing for it—no matter how
much I might want to bury my press card forever and devote myself entirely to
my “normal” literary efforts and to my <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Southern
Yankee</i> blog southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com—but to admit that I’ll always
be stimulated by current events. And worse still—and to the chagrin of many—I’ll
never be able to just shut-up and keep my opinions and observations to myself. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It’s an itch way more powerful than I am. So stay
tuned. As the Terminator might say, I’ll be back.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-48310049505953146242022-12-23T19:21:00.003-03:002022-12-23T19:22:36.812-03:00 (AD)DRESS CODE<p><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi04orxwKYwrKqg_11UUtFsBDXPpR136YJbSGua7GaCW_HrOvpDETKypfl_Hdkr342_xIdNBuFGC-8nhNXrOl2sgKSvaPtJLNJJLd_FfJHwN0H1-zSqIKNUP-w3RAPNZiTyVaRJIUv0YRE_iv_KIDv8UXT_T-76IeGomTZpN5twRi8TgkjdjCHO3frqfA/s1023/Zelensky.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="786" data-original-width="1023" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi04orxwKYwrKqg_11UUtFsBDXPpR136YJbSGua7GaCW_HrOvpDETKypfl_Hdkr342_xIdNBuFGC-8nhNXrOl2sgKSvaPtJLNJJLd_FfJHwN0H1-zSqIKNUP-w3RAPNZiTyVaRJIUv0YRE_iv_KIDv8UXT_T-76IeGomTZpN5twRi8TgkjdjCHO3frqfA/w400-h308/Zelensky.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I cannot believe how many jerks in Congress and
on TV were worried about how Zelensky was dressed when he appeared before
Congress.</span><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Really??? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That morning the guy
was on the front lines handing out medals to true heroes while all of these
sleazes were taking up wasted oxygen instead of worrying about how to support
Ukraine and help its brave people stop Putin in his tracks. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Zelensky is one of the
truest examples of a modern-day hero, a David who has taken on Goliath. My only
irate question is, who gives a flying fuck what he wore to Congress? As if
scores of senators and representatives haven't already violated and spat on any
pretended decorum, integrity and sanctity that that body ever might have
presumed.</span><o:p></o:p></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-44950699150912559862022-12-06T20:50:00.003-03:002022-12-06T20:53:40.737-03:00IF IT WALKS LIKE A DUCK AND TALKS LIKE A DUCK…<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">“A massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows
for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found
in the Constitution.”</span></i></p>
<p align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: right;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">—Former President Donald J. Trump—<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">He never should have gotten this far. Donald Trump never should have been
a candidate for president and certainly never should have been endorsed by the
Republican Party. Many of us said this from the outset—screamed it from the
rafters, in fact. Okay, so a lot of people refused to listen, refused to see
the warning signs, refused to face reality. We had to learn the hard way.<br /><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgubXoFch61F2TEshU4MB7xaXi9jUF9_kclOfXzc7syebIOgirfuuR9K2fUY-HxUAi2hp-Ny0c9SoDtYArdGphpAADiWJQlzhnBQR3NLCa27KepjqqxsMpq-LYhwtv5Mg8bmuD4KqfJxOE7A0XxEWWQ6zO0DAMcrAmuYG5CDPYBMubUGwnaUV1eVS2Mdg/s640/Trump_George%20Rex.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="363" data-original-width="640" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgubXoFch61F2TEshU4MB7xaXi9jUF9_kclOfXzc7syebIOgirfuuR9K2fUY-HxUAi2hp-Ny0c9SoDtYArdGphpAADiWJQlzhnBQR3NLCa27KepjqqxsMpq-LYhwtv5Mg8bmuD4KqfJxOE7A0XxEWWQ6zO0DAMcrAmuYG5CDPYBMubUGwnaUV1eVS2Mdg/w400-h228/Trump_George%20Rex.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But even after Trump
clearly demonstrated that he was not only as bad as, but actually even worse
than some of us had warned, even after he abused power for four years, usurped
the leadership of the GOP and bastardized its traditional party line to fit his
ambitions, even after he engaged in nepotism, pardoned his cronies of their
crimes and heaped praise on every ruthless dictator he met, after he tried his
level best to demonstrate unequivocally that he was an enemy of our allies, an
enemy of American traditions and ideals, an enemy of the Constitution and an
enemy of liberal democracy, even then, the majority of the GOP leadership
backed him to the hilt. And leading Republicans who were appalled and refused to
bend to Trump’s inexplicable power in the party were ousted from positions of leadership
and opposed for reelection in their own camp. In most cases they also received
threats against their lives and those of their families, in tactics usually circumscribed
to the world of gangsters and organized crime, when not to the world’s worst
dictatorships—Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, Mohammed bin Salman’s
Saudi Arabia, and Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, among others, where opposing the
authoritarian leader exposes rivals to mortal risk.</span><br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Then, this would-be authoritarian president of the United States did the
unthinkable and, for the first time in the history of the country, refused to
accept the results of a free and fair democratic election—the most transparent
election in American history—that he lost, went to more than sixty courts to
try and find a judge who would quash the election results, and when that flatly
failed, sought to elicit help from the Supreme Court, which he had heavily
weighted in his favor by appointing three far-right justices during his time in
office, but was rebuked once again. And when all else failed, he tried to
pressure election officials to alter the results of the elections in their
states by “finding” the necessary votes to overturn his loss—votes that clearly
weren’t there. Then, when any sane person would have just accepted clear defeat—in
his case, marked by a seven million popular vote margin and a definitive
majority for the other candidate in the Electoral College—he again made dubious
history by inciting an insurrection in which his most radicalized supporters violently
attacked and sought to take over Congress, in an assault that left one police
officer dead, one hundred forty-four injured, the Capitol in shambles and
lawmakers and Trump’s own vice president, whom he abandoned to the attackers,
having to run for their lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">And yet, the Trump-infected GOP—it’s hard to think of the party any other
way, since Donald Trump is like a virulent virus that has attacked and continues
to attack liberal democracy and all other core American values—refuses to
flatly reject Donald Trump or to question his party leadership. Like infected
cells in an infirm body, his vast majority of enablers in the party have been
killing off the remaining healthy cells—true conservative democratic Republicans
like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Anthony Gonzalez, Jaime Herrera Beutler, Peter
Meijer, Tom Rice and John Katko, all of whom were either primaried by
Trump-groomed candidates or decided not to run again. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Only two of the ten who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6<sup>th</sup>,
2020 insurrection have survived the authoritarian onslaught (namely, California
Republican David Valadao and Washington State Republican Dan Newhouse). Instead
of being praised for standing up for democracy and against Trump’s authoritarian
designs, the GOP leadership (in the person of House Minority Leader Kevin
McCarthy and his merry band of election deniers and insurrection justifiers) ousted
the likes of Cheney and Kinzinger for daring to sit on the House January Sixth
Committee, an investigative body that has been doing what all sides in Congress
should be devoted to doing: investigating the role of the former president in a
plot to overthrow the US government and install a dictatorship in 2020.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Even after the drama of the January Sixth Revolt and its attendant
aftermath, the GOP leadership has remained too cowed by Trump and his minority
base to call the former president out, and has once again permitted him to
register as the main Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential race—this,
despite the fact that all serious political opinion polls are showing the only
other apparent GOP candidate so far, Ron DeSantis, to be far ahead of Trump in
popularity. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIT_Cev-MENRH-2qkRAAKkjIQP3rGuQDAj7jSlTIwwIH_6slRqWg0wBg5k2dUodXHqJN1wXarjFT3JqLWPmwwW414UFCuC3TVrgir2jZUXLsirlYD1Rop0f75k8zq0nHdWFkI4fHYh_OeQrf1MS0Ryg8oforixgCZnzS_cFWJcprS4hd7Jfty_CxQNvw/s1010/TRUMP_MUSSOLINI.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="580" data-original-width="1010" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIT_Cev-MENRH-2qkRAAKkjIQP3rGuQDAj7jSlTIwwIH_6slRqWg0wBg5k2dUodXHqJN1wXarjFT3JqLWPmwwW414UFCuC3TVrgir2jZUXLsirlYD1Rop0f75k8zq0nHdWFkI4fHYh_OeQrf1MS0Ryg8oforixgCZnzS_cFWJcprS4hd7Jfty_CxQNvw/w465-h292/TRUMP_MUSSOLINI.jpg" width="465" /></span></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">Continuing to embrace Trump, as if in some sort of trance from which they
can’t seem to wake up, the GOP leadership suffered a veritable trouncing in the
recent midterm elections. Widely predicted to win a resounding victory in both chambers
of Congress in those elections, the party’s decision to support Trump-backed
election deniers and conspiracy theorists in major House and Senatorial races
cost them dearly as those candidates, by and large, suffered humiliating
defeats. In the end, the GOP shared that humiliation, far underperforming
pre-election expectations and once again losing the Senate to the Democrats and
only eking out a razor-thin majority in the House.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">It wasn’t, however, like it should have come as a surprise to the GOP
leadership—or to the less than oracular pundits who predicted a GOP shutout—since
the party had already made the same mistake twice before in elections in which
they took a beating because they misread just how sick and tired the majority
of Americans are of Trump and his narcissistic quest to be a king rather than a
president. What is more, opinion polls since the midterms seem to be clearly
demonstrating that disillusionment with Trump is only growing, with his
popularity plummeting following the vote. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The message is that it is clear to swing-voters, independents and
traditional conservatives that Trump’s politics are toxic and un-American. They
are no longer willing to put up with a supposedly conservative party that looks
more like a three-ring circus with a modern-day P.T. Barnum grifter as the
ringmaster. They want to see a new face in 2024 and for Trump to be a four-year
“wonder” who finally fades away.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The more unpopular he is becoming, nevertheless, the more Trump is
typically doubling down on his anti-democratic rhetoric, still vehemently
resisting conceding his 2020 election defeat, still spouting conspiracy
theories and claiming “massive election fraud” in the 2020 General Elections.
The Supreme Court that he thought he “owned” after naming three hand-picked justices
to it during his White House tenure has stubbornly rejected his every attempt
to use the Court as a tool to help him legitimize his false claims of a
fraudulent election. And the three justices that he appointed have, to their
credit, shown that they, unlike him, will continue to defend the US
Constitution and the rule of law, that they are, in other words, the exact
opposite of what he has just accused them of being: namely, an institution
that, in his words “has lost its honor, prestige, and standing, and has become
nothing more than a political body…” On the contrary, the Court remains a
bastion of justice that opposes the designs of a would-be despot—even if it’s
the same tyrant who named a third of the Court.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Trump’s meltdowns are growing more and more worthy of concern. They would
be of no concern at all, it should be pointed out, if it weren’t for the fact
that prominent Republican leaders continue to render him relevant on the
American political scene, instead of treating him like the raving madman that
he has become. In this latest phase of the Madness of King Donald, he is now
calling for the Constitution to be “terminated”. This is rhetoric that is, by
any standard in American life, qualifiable as “batshit crazy.” And yet, way too
many powerful Republicans are either going through a thousand sweaty contortions
to act like they’re not sure what he meant, or are ignoring the pronouncement
completely, with only a handful unequivocally criticizing him for saying it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">This begs the question, if the GOP has lost three elections because of
Trump, if they got trounced because of him and his conspiracy-theorist candidates
in the latest midterms, and if, with their own ears, they’re hearing him call
for the dissolution of the rule of law in the United States, is it still all
about the party’s being cold-sweat scared of “losing the Trump base”? Because
if that’s the case, don’t look now, guys, but that base is shrinking by the
minute, proportionate to the growth of Trump’s own legal liability—because,
slowly but surely, Justice is coming for him. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Instead of thinking of the Trump “base” as some magical key to success, the
GOP should be thinking of it as an ice cube, and if they continue to try and
hold onto it against all odds, they had better start thinking of 2024 as what is
very likely to be the sweltering summer of the party’s electoral discontent. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-22713909151578509642022-11-11T20:35:00.000-03:002022-11-11T20:35:08.584-03:00 VETERANS DAY<p><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Sergeant Whitie:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4JtGx1wZXxAFgFRZlMbADHyqcPkpuubmT5E7pVfh7w0H5E3sGDnnEFqLjG__XSxEE6KSS5_Gh7BppEANL6lDRZEdDIOcExFlLfVVDRCTbIxU-WRwvZVTzoWf-S3bktutSBRzpaUK58eZxbcpXRl1R2ULJdvvQaZ1G8YZIhejFujYJNvI5qqVxmFQUgw/s400/Sgt%20Whitie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="252" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4JtGx1wZXxAFgFRZlMbADHyqcPkpuubmT5E7pVfh7w0H5E3sGDnnEFqLjG__XSxEE6KSS5_Gh7BppEANL6lDRZEdDIOcExFlLfVVDRCTbIxU-WRwvZVTzoWf-S3bktutSBRzpaUK58eZxbcpXRl1R2ULJdvvQaZ1G8YZIhejFujYJNvI5qqVxmFQUgw/w253-h400/Sgt%20Whitie.jpg" width="253" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I know you didn't want
military honors, or the box of medals and commendations they sent us when you
passed on, Whitie. I know you didn't want the grave-marker with the little flag
they change on Decoration Day. I know you didn't like to remember the war or
the three and a half years you spent in combat. It wasn't that you didn't think
the sacrifice was warranted. On the contrary, it embarrassed you to be honored
for something you considered your inescapable duty.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But as one vet to
another and as one who sacrificed little but three fairly quiet years of my
life, I can't help but remember you today and the very real sacrifice you made
to rid the world of authoritarianism and a racist cult. I know it would sadden
you to see all of that alive and well and thriving in the country you loved.
Rest assured I'm fighting it the only way I know how, with my passion for
freedom and democracy, with experience gained, like you, elsewhere in the
world, and with my words, which have always been the most powerful arms I know.
<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thanks for all that,
Dad, and thanks for imbuing me with the values to know the meaning of liberty
and the value of not backing down in the face of tyranny.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-69797957230387110012022-11-10T13:43:00.002-03:002022-11-10T17:20:35.966-03:00THE BANNON FACTOR<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;">I was recently going over notes from a ghostwriting
project that I worked at for nearly a decade. I was chief researcher and editor
and thus responsible for formulating a lot of the political ideas that the
client prompted me to consider in his writing. I was struck by how on point we
had been as far back as 2013-2014 regarding the wave of authoritarian thought
that was taking shape all over the West, but nowhere as much as in the United
States, where a man who had never been taken seriously before, an almost
ridiculous jet set playboy with a lousy comb-over and a series of insane business
projects, many of which were crashing failures became suddenly relevant. He was
a guy who was taken in the best of cases as a joke and in the worst as a
swindler whom former partners sought to avoid in the future. But suddenly, he was
becoming, against all odds, the face of the American ultra-right and,
incredibly, a serious contender for US president.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLP28T0rk0xyEJLnqAGUC-BW4U2H1hoiyL8ev6S5QylKDClIrsDojDT09PP2oE8Rhmj1nprvGuxQlWxIO3u3buGHAJJMhJQZY46cmH2inQM1gKTjp4j3YziB4wQVncW3-6xWBvorACzH0OnJXe-VA6BASn_iAcCzLsM-8IWkRwuxvDeL3TO49foDNOUA/s1316/Trump-Bannon.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="987" data-original-width="1316" height="333" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLP28T0rk0xyEJLnqAGUC-BW4U2H1hoiyL8ev6S5QylKDClIrsDojDT09PP2oE8Rhmj1nprvGuxQlWxIO3u3buGHAJJMhJQZY46cmH2inQM1gKTjp4j3YziB4wQVncW3-6xWBvorACzH0OnJXe-VA6BASn_iAcCzLsM-8IWkRwuxvDeL3TO49foDNOUA/w444-h333/Trump-Bannon.jpg" width="444" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">What’s stunning to me now—although I called it on a
hunch back then—isn’t so much the nefarious influence that this man, Donald
Trump, has had on the entire spectrum of American politics in the last seven or
so years. It was easy enough to see that coming if he managed to gain access to
the White House. What was chilling, in retrospect, was just how influential his
former chief adviser, Steve Bannon, had been in ushering Trump from the
play-by-ear politics of his early campaign for the presidency into a truly
pernicious political philosophy similar to the classic ideologies of some of
the most prominent dictators in history. I couldn’t help thinking that, without
Bannon—and to a somewhat lesser extent, Stephen Miller—while Trump surely would
have been a capricious, directionless, reactionary and recalcitrant executive,
as he always had been in his role as CEO of the Trump Organization where his
main “product” was the Trump Brand, he probably wouldn’t have been nearly as
focused as he has been on destroying the US representative democratic system as
we, born right after World War II, had known it up to the present. He would, I
reasoned, simply have bumbled through a four-year term like a bull in a china
shop, alienating everyone, probably even including his own base and the GOP,
with his aimless brand of populism and duplicity until he was voted out of
office and faded from the scene.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But Bannon, a well-studied ideologue with a warrior
mentality at the service of anti-establishment chaos, got Trump’s ear early on
and convinced him that he was the man called by destiny to burn it all down. It
was no coincidence that I referred back then to Bannon as “the American
Rasputin”, because he was no less nefariously influential on Trump than Grigori
Rasputin had been on Czar Nicholas of Russia. This was obvious from the outset,
when what had passed for “policy” in the Trump campaign and early presidency,
and that had all of the orientation of a weathervane in a hurricane, suddenly
became laser focused on issues that were sure to appeal to the most extreme
elements of the Republican far right. And, indeed, even beyond the traditional
far right to other political currents too extreme to be embraced even under
“the big tent” of Republicanism.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The arrival of Bannon and his “war room” in the West
Wing of the White House was, then, clear as day, in its extremist influence that
had Trump at war with the world, but a political war imbued with almost
military strategy, designed to isolate enemies, incorporate erstwhile rivals
where convenient, and destroy those who refused to climb on board. This was all
pure Bannon, not because Trump wasn’t interested in conquering absolute power,
but because he’d had no idea how to go about it in American politics until
Bannon provided him with the tools. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Out of those project notes of mine, the information
that jumped out at me regarded Steve Bannon’s stated philosophy in the years
prior to the Trump era when the alt-right strategist was still searching for a
protégé—courting potential candidates like Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz
unsuccessfully before finding a perfect fit in Trump, someone aggressive yet
malleable because he had never had a salient intellectual notion of his own.
Trump’s brain was, Bannon reasoned, fertile soil for his revolutionary
politics, a blank slate on which he could write his manifesto. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The notes in question had to do with an article that
writer Ronald Radosh had researched for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Daily Beast</i> in 2013. It was that year when he was invited to a book-signing
event and cocktail that Bannon, then CEO of the Breitbart far-right ideological
site, was holding at his posh digs in Washington DC. Radosh struck up a
conversation with Bannon about a picture in which his daughter, Maureen, a West
Point-graduate Army officer, was sitting in Saddam Hussein’s former throne with an
assault rifle across her lap. Bannon, the doting father, couldn’t contain his
pride for her.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">One thing led to another and the chat became an
interview. In the course of it, Bannon suddenly said, apropos of nothing, “I’m
a Leninist.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Radosh wasn’t sure he’d heard Bannon right. He knew
the political strategist to be a far-right-wing, Christian white supremacist,
“populist” and “nationalist”. Or at least, that was the pitch that he was
currently hawking. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So Radosh said something like, “A Leninist?” And
when Bannon confirmed it, he asked him to explain what he meant by the term.
“Lenin wanted to destroy the state,” Radosh quoted Bannon as saying. “And
that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all
of today’s establishment.” Asked to expand on that thought Bannon, according to
Radosh, told the writer that he was applying Lenin’s strategy to Tea Party
populist goals. Radosh said that Bannon wasn’t shy about telling him that the
institutions that he was focusing on were the Republican and Democratic Parties
and the traditional conservative press.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Several years later, when Bannon was picked to be
Trump’s chief strategist, Radosh contacted him again and told him that he
planned to reused parts of that 2013 interview in a new profile he was creating
for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Daily Beast</i> and asked if the
strategist would like to add anything new. Bannon, knowing that those comments
weren’t going to fly in Republican far-right circles, claimed he didn’t recall
that conversation and said if Radosh used it, he would deny it ever took place.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In the wake of the Trump era, in which the GOP has
been usurped by the extreme right, and its moderates as well as true
conservatives have been marginalized, in which the two main parties are faced
off in a war in which Congress is shackled and stalled in a climate of non-negotiation,
and in which the unthinkable happened for the first time in history when the
extreme right tried to overthrow the established order and install an
autocratic regime after losing an election, and indeed in a current climate in
which an enormous cross-section of American politics no longer believes in the
integrity of the democratic election process, it’s not hard to see that
Bannon’s nihilist goals found an able enforcer in Donald Trump. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">While it may seem positive for democracy that, in
this week’s general election process, observers have pointed to Trump and his
camp as the big losers in the race, Trump still has a large and fanatical
following. And the fact that big-money campaign donors are reportedly ready to
write Trump off, fades in importance in view of the fact that he is still
capable, among his most loyal supporters, of raising millions of campaign
dollars through donations of five to twenty dollars each. It is worthwhile
recalling that neither Trump nor his most implacable base—often evangelicals
who view him as a messiah sent by God—are simply not bound by long-standing
American ideals and traditions. And it is also important to remember that if
there is one thing we’ve learned about Donald Trump, it is that he often
resurges even when the most sacred of pundits pronounce him finished. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Anyone who has ever had an ounce of true patriotism,
anyone who cares at all about the future of American representative democracy,
should be bearing that in mind for 2024, when the presidential election process
is once again center stage. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><o:p></o:p></p><br /><p></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-64083159866014157172022-10-30T11:58:00.004-03:002022-10-30T13:52:09.874-03:00THE TWEET THAT WASN’T<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt;">If you didn’t see the tweet
by Greg Kelly “wondering” if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t maybe stage the
home invasion and beating of her husband as an election publicity stunt, don’t
bother looking for it. A despicable coward for putting it up, he doubled down
on cowardice by removing it when a gazillion people called him out, but without
apologizing for putting it up in the first place.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC8XsrqIQhVlHam7wZQSQZXOPFa-fYfpFqXUvhD5jd9A2Pw8QfvdkY5gp9lLsiB_NqYYX4sruToA8_lI5sApiGmr6MWYlIyyFa-16XHOtqALq_WodXXTWmHq6ZrDHDEr2F2Z_fk4-3ph0qw9mUnyJSMRiHCbY8ASgF2NBCX5Mz-etjXPncqSmi5AxUOA/s1095/Kelly's%20tweet.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1095" data-original-width="705" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC8XsrqIQhVlHam7wZQSQZXOPFa-fYfpFqXUvhD5jd9A2Pw8QfvdkY5gp9lLsiB_NqYYX4sruToA8_lI5sApiGmr6MWYlIyyFa-16XHOtqALq_WodXXTWmHq6ZrDHDEr2F2Z_fk4-3ph0qw9mUnyJSMRiHCbY8ASgF2NBCX5Mz-etjXPncqSmi5AxUOA/w258-h400/Kelly's%20tweet.jpg" width="258" /></span></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Did the far-right cable “news” talking head think maybe nobody saw it? I mean, you
know, he’s only got like a half-million zealous far-right followers, so if he
sneezes, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gesundheit</i> echoes all
over the airwaves.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">If you don’t know who
Kelly is—if you’re not an assiduous consumer of Faux News or NewsMocks you may
not—he’s a so-called “conservative” (alt-right) propagandist posing as a
newsman on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Greg Kelly Reports</i> (sic).
He actually <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i> a newsman at one
time, but that was way back in 2003, when he was embedded with the US Army’s
Third Infantry Division, Second Brigade during the Iraq invasion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He received a minor shrapnel wound while on
that assignment—too late for a purple heart; he was already out of the Marine
Corps by then—but went on to become the first TV reporter to broadcast live
pictures of American troops reaching the presidential palace in Baghdad. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Credit where credit’s
due.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The son of former New
York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Greg was, prior to his reporting
days (and as I mentioned before), a Marine Corps Reserve officer, retiring with
the rank of lieutenant colonel. While on active duty as a Harrier Jump Jet
pilot from 1991 to 2000, he helped enforce a coalition no-fly zone over Iraq. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The reason I mention
this is because I find the tweet—which he threw like a stone at Speaker Pelosi
and her seriously injured octogenarian husband before quickly hiding his
hand—so much more vile, cowardly and inexcusable than if it had emanated from
some ignorant, QAnon-freak, insurrectionist lunatic. This is an educated guy
from a New York top-cop’s family and a former senior field grade officer in a premier
military institution, in which honor is one of the most sacred of its principles.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcmYKuQ6OrbRlcJwKLafSEk4oS2ygyD0f-Gqzz36CfVxPyC2v5QL4Oppvk-Bo9oLC-DrBxd_4VXbbLUjfnV_LydVqLFhlbDH13z09WjDk5oaw7TY_53UmRLbnXMhkS0ZS9XCttZ-niOPTDrj6Q2SGCx30SZuEKvxt1qVOo3n4Qjlavg8IVCXO9gTizSw/s502/GK%20Reports.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="502" data-original-width="502" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcmYKuQ6OrbRlcJwKLafSEk4oS2ygyD0f-Gqzz36CfVxPyC2v5QL4Oppvk-Bo9oLC-DrBxd_4VXbbLUjfnV_LydVqLFhlbDH13z09WjDk5oaw7TY_53UmRLbnXMhkS0ZS9XCttZ-niOPTDrj6Q2SGCx30SZuEKvxt1qVOo3n4Qjlavg8IVCXO9gTizSw/w400-h400/GK%20Reports.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">What the disappearing tweet in question actually
said was: “Just ‘wondering’ if Nancy Pelosi tried to STAGE her own mini January
6<sup>th</sup>. Complete with leaving the doors and windows OPEN for the ‘insurrectionists’
and that Depepe (sic) fellow. THAT or she can’t secure her home or office.”</span><br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Although Kelly rather
grandly calls his show <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Greg Kelly <u>Reports</u></i>,
if this sort of totally baseless speculation has anything to do with “reporting”,
I’ll eat my journalist’s hat. This doesn’t even rise to the level of gossip. It’s
merely a piece of ugly provocation to bolster rating among the many conspiracy
theorists whom his show courts. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This gratuitous Twitter
attack on the aging Speaker of the House, who showed extraordinary courage, cool-headedness
and leadership during the January 6, 2020 insurrectionist invasion of the US
Capitol (which Kelly denies), couldn’t have been released at a more vulnerable
time for both the Speaker and for the US, a scant few days before mid-term
elections. The fact that it was posted even as Speaker Pelosi’s eighty-two-year-old
husband Paul was undergoing surgery for serious head trauma inflicted with a
hammer by just the sort of conspiracy theorist, home-invader nut job that
Kelly’s inflammatory TV propaganda appeals to, is nothing short of heinous. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Worse still, Kelly
later doubled-down, writing: “Wait a second, 82-year-old Paul Pelosi they SAY
was attacked by a guy with a HAMMER, yet he’s expected to make a Full Recovery?
And why is NANCY requesting ‘privacy at this time’ – NO.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The fact that Kelly
couldn’t stand sitting in the hot seat and took the first tweet down is scant
redemption, especially since he made no apology—the honorable thing to do—for
putting it up in the first place. And, furthermore, those of us who saw it
before he hid it from view can’t unsee it. Neither decent, honorable people
from across the political spectrum who were appalled and sickened by it, nor
the radical extremist fringe among his followers who were no doubt inspired to ever-increasing
states of fevered paranoia and random violence as the American democratic
process unfolds during the midterms.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">As an authentic
journalist, as a veteran, as a politically independent American, I can’t find
words to express my most energetic condemnation of Greg Kelly and every
other propagandist currently pouring gasoline on the flames of division. Moreover,
I find it tragic that it isn’t an isolated incident, but a mere symptom of the
ever more divisive climate in which Americans are living today. Sadly, it is no
longer the American Dream that we are living. It is the American nightmare that
we grew up thinking never could happen in “the land of the free and the home of
the brave.”</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"> </span> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-19604699930153016022022-09-26T21:00:00.002-03:002022-09-27T09:39:16.705-03:00MAGA IS NOT CONSERVATIVE, LIZ IS<p> <span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;">Staunchly democratic
Republican Liz Cheney finally said it out loud. If Donald Trump is the 2024 GOP
nominee for president, she will abandon the party.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This news has been a
long time coming. Unlike some long-time iconic conservatives such as syndicated
columnist George Will, who not only abandoned the party when Trump became the
candidate in 2016, but also called on his conservative readers to vote for
Hillary Clinton because Trump was a danger to democracy, Cheney stuck it out
for Trump’s entire term. In fact, she voted for Trump’s policies more than
ninety percent of the time. But when Trump began undermining constitutional
order, Cheney, then the third highest-ranking Republican in the House of
Representatives, who had already been finding Trump’s loose and reluctant
adherence to the Constitution and to presidential traditions disturbing, voted,
along with nine other House Republicans, to impeach the then-president for
inciting a bloody insurrection against the United States Congress. <o:p></o:p></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifTIStPBWODOQ-6t-aFmbjFfxPaZ4_8yaKYcNudGOVDCXyygXxBwAcTZ-2W0kT0z7KKtfeawSMSlt_F7c9afnOBvOTM4g6hkVu7mJV7CEgNZtgOGV1ow8d910ypHiKRATC4-jCdKMMw2QxPSqamfirsUQNr75lmj4tmuTjGKmDtpJYxQkUuecHhXSixQ/s1608/liz-cheney.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1208" data-original-width="1608" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifTIStPBWODOQ-6t-aFmbjFfxPaZ4_8yaKYcNudGOVDCXyygXxBwAcTZ-2W0kT0z7KKtfeawSMSlt_F7c9afnOBvOTM4g6hkVu7mJV7CEgNZtgOGV1ow8d910ypHiKRATC4-jCdKMMw2QxPSqamfirsUQNr75lmj4tmuTjGKmDtpJYxQkUuecHhXSixQ/w400-h300/liz-cheney.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>The tenacious Liz Cheney, authentic conservative</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Since then, Cheney has
become the leading conservative voice against Donald Trump’s authoritarian
designs, pointing out, principally, that Trump’s refusal, for the first time in
US history, to accept the will of the people and submit to the peaceful transfer
of power after unquestionably losing an election is intolerable, illegal and
unacceptable. She believes, with every conservative bone in her body, that her
party must either ensure that Trump never again holds office, or it will become
the vehicle for American democracy’s suicidal demise.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As such, Liz Cheney,
more than any other personality in the conservative world, has become the
poster-girl for democracy, and the clear voice of reason in an America gone
insane. Her role as vice-chair of the January Sixth Investigative Committee, has
graphically demonstrated her level of commitment to trying to save the United
States from the now ever more obvious advance of authoritarianism, since the current
GOP leadership, in a cold-sweat panic born of the virulence of Trump’s slavish
MAGA entourage, has chosen to embrace the Trump cult of personality—akin only
to the rise of far-right populist dictatorships witnessed historically in
pre-1990s Latin America, or to today’s populist far-left authoritarian regimes
in such places as Venezuela, Cuba or Nicaragua—rather than losing their seats
in Congress.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Cheney, for her part,
has risked <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">everything</i>, placing Nation
before party, the common good before personal political ambition and democracy
before obedience to the GOP hierarchy, of which she is no longer a part. This
last is thanks to her demotion by top House Republican and Trump sycophant
Kevin McCarthy, who has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that he will
forsake all that is sacred in American democracy and in the “Party of Lincoln”
in pursuit of his all-consuming ambition to be the next Speaker of the House.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Of the ten Republicans
who dared confront the autocratic nature of the former president and vote with
Democrats for his impeachment, the Trump political machine has left only two
standing: namely, Washington State’s Fourth District Representative Dan
Newhouse, and California’s Twenty-Second District Representative David Valadao.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Valadao was unique in
that he was the only one of the ten that Trump and his mob didn’t target. This,
despite the fact that he stated his unequivocal view in voting for impeachment
that Trump was “without question, a driving force in the catastrophic events”
at the Capitol. Perhaps it was a California thing. Despite being The Land of
Reagan, California is considered by Trumpster loyalists to be a place of evil
bent on imposing its mighty will and sinful liberal ideals on God-fearin’ folk
from coast to coast. So maybe they felt there was no point spending good
campaign money to primary Valadao in a largely heathen Democrat land where one
Republican was as likely (or unlikely) to carry through as another. Who knows?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Newhouse, for his part,
managed to survive being primaried by Trump loyalists, largely due to the
“top-two style” open primary system by which candidates are picked in
Washington State. According to this system, all candidates are listed on the
same ballot. The top two vote-getters, regardless of their partisan
affiliations, advance to the general election. As a result, in that state the
Trump camp’s practice of primarying an incumbent who doesn’t toe the boss’s
line is way less effective than elsewhere, because by this method you could
even conceivably have two candidates from the same party running against each
other in a general election and no candidate at all from the other party. It’s
all about who the two top vote-getters are in the primary process, regardless
of party affiliation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiri5sdRnuAEtNafJMTgwKPfyjZP1fzBYHDzP1bQFzoKFLundk9xNy4o9cDwZuOERBSm45a_uhJlG54n8Izk0He-GNiY4o-L656TlD9sVN_GzDOU0hudyNhgNUQQavP3-naPJD1z6PnsIIxULCj8YwZxmtiJSlHtJrHJlFcbvvLVmBGs3mmqFTSa-C1pQ/s904/anthony-gonzalez.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="904" data-original-width="868" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiri5sdRnuAEtNafJMTgwKPfyjZP1fzBYHDzP1bQFzoKFLundk9xNy4o9cDwZuOERBSm45a_uhJlG54n8Izk0He-GNiY4o-L656TlD9sVN_GzDOU0hudyNhgNUQQavP3-naPJD1z6PnsIIxULCj8YwZxmtiJSlHtJrHJlFcbvvLVmBGs3mmqFTSa-C1pQ/w384-h400/anthony-gonzalez.jpg" width="384" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Ohio Representative Gonzalez</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">The first of the GOP’s anti-Trump ten to be
undermined was Anthony Gonzalez, who represents my home state of Ohio and my
home voting district in Cuyahoga County. Although a young man, Gonzalez is an
old-style Republican who actually believes in serving the public, in the
tradition of political compromise, and in the nation instead of himself and has
proven to be well-viewed across party lines. He was the sort of candidate who
appealed to independents and even to some conservative Democrats because of his
commonsense, non-reactionary approach to issues. He has, for instance, been a
staunch critic of the appointment of millionaire businessman Louis DeJoy to the
job of Postmaster General as part of the Trump camp’s attempt to derail mail-in
voting in the 2020 General Election. </span><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">After voting for
Trump’s impeachment following the January Sixth Capitol Insurrection, Gonzalez
was censured by his party for having "betrayed his constituents (and
having) relied on emotions rather than the will of his constituents and any
credible facts." Trump supported his own former White House aide Max
Miller to run in a primary against Gonzalez in 2022, but the Ohio
congressman—and much admired former college and pro football player—preempted
that decision by announcing that he would not run again. Gonzalez’s unfortunate
decision wasn’t based, however, on the primary challenge, but on multiple credible
threats against the physical safety of both himself and his family that he has
been receiving from anonymous MAGA fanatics who, Gonzalez clearly believes,
will stop at nothing to impose Trump on American society, whether he wins in
fair elections or not.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">A month after Gonzalez
announced that he wouldn’t run again, the much more high-profile Congressman
Adam Kinzinger did the same, and for the same reasons. The Illinois Sixteenth
District representative became the target of a deluge of death threats from
MAGA activists and was subject to hostility from his GOP colleagues in
Congress. But the former Iraq War Air Force combat pilot hasn’t allowed that
decision—or the death threats—to sway him from his criticism of Trump as a
would-be tyrant and a danger to democracy. Like Cheney, he has been active and
front-and-center on the January Sixth Investigative Committee, as well as
becoming a familiar face on television news shows whenever the subject of
Trump’s un-democratic actions has been the subject.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtUi_RkWgyM7nOSERb9ELZvmmASfiCG9-_qje47um8l_WEmPOBNM_RSfFt-L63Rezq8eFpjAabeAxlXjT7vnxkhbY4Lb7p9uum_K0bwJs8fQdwPQV_n2fd7vnbClyVRqLlb5NVnTsuT45HWwD3rSZllgGIc6OHNShOsf291EhUsT8vYypgB8IxzoZlPA/s896/Kinzinger.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="623" data-original-width="896" height="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtUi_RkWgyM7nOSERb9ELZvmmASfiCG9-_qje47um8l_WEmPOBNM_RSfFt-L63Rezq8eFpjAabeAxlXjT7vnxkhbY4Lb7p9uum_K0bwJs8fQdwPQV_n2fd7vnbClyVRqLlb5NVnTsuT45HWwD3rSZllgGIc6OHNShOsf291EhUsT8vYypgB8IxzoZlPA/w400-h279/Kinzinger.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Rep. Adam Kinzinger - not going quietly</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">One of Cheney’s veteran
congressional colleagues who, like her, voted to impeach following January
Sixth is Michigan Sixth District Representative Fred Upton. Faced with a
Trump-backed primary challenge in the midst of constant death threats, Upton
decided to end his thirty-year career in Congress and retire.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Fifty-nine-year-old New
York Twenty-Fourth District Representative John Katko made a similar decision
after the impeachment vote. He had served four terms in the House following a
long career as an attorney.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The other four,
including Cheney, who broke ranks and voted to impeach, deciding that Trump’s
role in the January Sixth Insurrection was inexcusable and impossible to ignore
for the sake of American democracy and constitutionality, were all primaried by
the Trump camp and have since lost their seats in Congress as of next year.
These include Washington State Third District Representative Jaime Lynn Herrera
Beutler, Michigan Third District Representative <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Peter Meijer</span>—who was only narrowly ousted by Trump-endorsed
challenger John Gibbs—South Carolina Seventh District Representative Tim Rice,
and, finally, Cheney herself who represented Wyoming At Large.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">After a career as a
State Department official and Republican presidential campaign strategist,
Cheney won her congressional bid in 2016 and has been elected to three
consecutive terms since. In her blood red state of Wyoming, her very
conservative views and her father’s iconic Republican persona made her a
veritable shoo-in for Far West voters. But her vote to impeach Trump and, worse
still, her major role in the January Sixth investigation were viewed by the
vast majority of far-right Wyoming voters as a betrayal of their trust in her
conservatism and loyalty to “their president”.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpkWUVxIoHwU3HY7Fz5uVfd4mHhYd72honpc7u1_HXqFZozUhNWp2x_bNd6jFMmTLByAs0YT2VTNAcZRU4GUf49LfaqCF8rR6qQrlxncrNeNZ0Jmsz7NunNyAAurqRlunnf8d8QV5osvgVjE-NYy7Km8CZZVqnB0osUuC2vufKsYpKYhC0YgKLKiPXuw/s1206/Dick%20Cheney.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="906" data-original-width="1206" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpkWUVxIoHwU3HY7Fz5uVfd4mHhYd72honpc7u1_HXqFZozUhNWp2x_bNd6jFMmTLByAs0YT2VTNAcZRU4GUf49LfaqCF8rR6qQrlxncrNeNZ0Jmsz7NunNyAAurqRlunnf8d8QV5osvgVjE-NYy7Km8CZZVqnB0osUuC2vufKsYpKYhC0YgKLKiPXuw/w400-h300/Dick%20Cheney.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Former VP Dick Cheney - Liz is fearless</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In the lead-up to the
Wyoming primary, former vice-president and conservative icon Dick Cheney filmed
a TV spot in which, wearing his western Stetson, he looked directly into the
camera and said, “In our nation’s two hundred-forty-six-year history, there has
never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald
Trump. Liz is fearless,” he went on. “She never backs down from the fight.
There is nothing more important she will ever do than lead the effort to make
sure Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office, and she will succeed.”<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Despite those moving
words from her veteran Republican father, Cheney’s Trump-endorsed challenger,
Harriet Hageman, trounced her, walking off with sixty-six percent of the votes.
Wyoming was clearly the wrong place for Cheney’s democratic fervor, patriotism
and loyalty to the Constitution. Her message, though absolutely right for
America, was utterly wrong for winning an election in the most MAGA state in
the Union.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">All of this is
particularly disturbing to me because of my background as an opposition newsman
during dictatorial rule in Argentina. Listening to the statements of
Republicans who have decided not to run following threats to them and their
families strikes home in a very real way with me. As do stories from news
professionals in the US who have also enumerated the vicious threats made
against them for reporting honestly about the dangers facing US democracy. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">These mob tactics being
employed by the MAGA crowd particularly bring to mind a time shortly after my
boss and mentor, Robert Cox, walked out on a twenty-year career at the Buenos
Aires paper where we worked. Until then, 1979, he had stoically borne the heavy
burden of his editorial decision to oppose dictatorial tyranny, but when death
threats were directed at his wife and five children, the die was cast and he
decided to submit to self-exile in the United States—that was decades before
the Trump regime would seek to make dictatorships popular and to express actual
admiration for them.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiKkDLJEflkRoOet6WJ0uN6u1h8mBNM4U_8CqoOa5a7lcqOnhBUisqWTAmpZd725HBZquF-dFjuBfJL9Ak-zzm79j9KxpMNLPzuvysyHva0RUHu2XDFUPXkA0M2apG5JC_FGhtWyisSZJGrkHNs0vJLgVULQ-phxsGKejt4KI6IinmLojzU-UVB-C1KQ/s1741/Cox.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1741" data-original-width="1283" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiKkDLJEflkRoOet6WJ0uN6u1h8mBNM4U_8CqoOa5a7lcqOnhBUisqWTAmpZd725HBZquF-dFjuBfJL9Ak-zzm79j9KxpMNLPzuvysyHva0RUHu2XDFUPXkA0M2apG5JC_FGhtWyisSZJGrkHNs0vJLgVULQ-phxsGKejt4KI6IinmLojzU-UVB-C1KQ/w295-h400/Cox.jpg" width="295" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Cox, the editor who took on tyranny</i></b> </td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Very soon after his
departure from the paper and the country, a colleague who was marrying into one
of the wealthy families most connected to the crony system supported by the
dictatorship was invited to a cocktail party as her fiancé’s date. While
bumping shoulders with some of the strongest supporters of the authoritarian
regime, she realized the woman talking to her mother-in-law to be was the wife
of the top general in charge of Intelligence and, as such, the man directly
responsible for the reign of terror that the dictatorship employed to maintain
its power. Drawing near, she overheard the woman say, “See how we finally ran
Cox out?” and watched her mother-in-law smile with genuine glee and
congratulate the other woman.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">You can be sure there
is some version of this going on in the Trump-usurped GOP as well, as MAGA
leaders gleefully watch the remaining true Republicans in the party give up and
walk out on what they see as a lost cause, or at least as an environment too
toxic for them to remain in. Indeed, in her comments this past week at The
Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Cheney not only said that she would abandon
her party if Trump was the candidate, but also opined that the fact that Trump
could incite an insurrection and refuse to permit a peaceful transfer of power
after losing an election and still have the GOP leadership’s support for the
possibility of his running again in 2024 indicated “just how sick” the party
is. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Cheney said she would
do “whatever it takes” to try and ensure that Trump is not the GOP nominee in
the next presidential election. She repeated her pledge to do “everything in
her power” to stop Trump’s presidential bid when festival moderator Evan Smith asked
if she herself was considering running for president in 2024. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This, to my mind,
brings up an interesting point. It is clear that the nefarious influence of
MAGA Republicans in the GOP has made it next to impossible to survive
politically in that party for true believers in and defenders of democracy like
Cheney, Kinzinger, and the other eight in the House who voted to impeach Trump,
as well as for people like Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)
in the Senate, who are managing to hang on to their seats but amid Trump-camp
primary challenges and attempts among their peers in Congress to ostracize them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So how can these true
conservatives buck the autocratic MAGA trend and return their party to the
values of such icons as Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush,
when the MAGA bandwagon is blaring the message that “this isn’t your grandpa’s
GOP” and indicating by it that not supporting the authoritarian personality
cult surrounding Donald Trump is tantamount to being a traitor to the party and
to the country—a message that the new MAGA-Republicanism has in common with
every dictatorship that has ever existed worldwide? As I see it, the answer is,
they can’t. At least not in this lifetime. The GOP has been hijacked by a
neo-fascist crowd that is bent on winning by hook or by crook, that has zero
interest in democracy or a two-party system, and that is touting the notion that
no idea that comes from anyplace but its own hierarchy is viable or acceptable.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But there is clear
evidence that the handful of true supporters of the tenets of American
democracy, justice and political tradition that remain active in the party have
a following. And Liz Cheney’s courage and true leadership have done much since
2020 to advance that support. I personally know Republicans who are
never-Trumpers and were sorrowfully yet patriotically willing to forsake their
life-long affiliations to vote against Trump, even if only for a tiny third
party candidate with absolutely no chance of winning, while others held their
noses and voted for the Democratic candidate simply to make sure that Trump
wouldn’t occupy the White House for another four years. These are people who
are now discouraged and confused since their conservative democratic ideals are
served neither by the current MAGA-Republican leadership nor by the Democrats. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">There is also evidence
to suggest that Liz Cheney and never-Trump Republican politicians have further
garnered potential support among conservative independents and even among some
conservative Democrats, as well as among non-MAGA Libertarians. These are all
people who are both fed up with the drama of MAGA-Republicanism, with the
toxic autocratic image of Donald Trump, and with what they see as ever more liberal
trends in the Democratic party.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">These people are all
hungry for change but see no vehicle for it, when potentially powerful leaders
like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and Mitt Romney have been definitively
sidelined in an off-the-rails GOP. And although they have been systematically
whittled down to a handful by the Trump machine in Congress, the roster of valuable
current, former and would-be conservative influencers who see Trump as an
existential threat to democracy and, indeed, to the Republican Party as such,
is actually impressively long and star-studded. You can get an idea of just how
impressive from this list: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Republicans_who_opposed_the_Donald_Trump_2020_presidential_campaign">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Republicans_who_opposed_the_Donald_Trump_2020_presidential_campaign</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So, what’s missing
here? A new vehicle. A new party. A democratic conservative party for true
conservatives instead of a party dominated by MAGA autocrats and coup-mongers. Many
people are afraid of any modification in America’s traditional—for all intents
and purposes but not always in absolute fact—two-party system. But seeing what
has happened in the past six years, I have to ask myself if, perhaps, the US
two-party system hasn’t effectively run its course, coming dangerously close to
a shooting war between two political organizations that are striving more for
superiority over each other than for a working democracy, a constructive debate
of ideas and policies, the final compromises and balance between which are
actually beneficial to the citizens who vote for them. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">A strong, authentic and
democratic conservative party could go a long way toward bringing party
politics back toward serving the people instead of continuing to be a
destructively self-serving force by, for and of itself and in detriment to the
nation it was meant to serve. Could a new conservative party win the 2024
election? Perhaps—Independent Bernie Sanders’ near-victory in the Democratic
Primary in 2016 provides an encouraging example—but probably not. It could,
however, make enormous inroads toward isolating and disempowering authoritarian
influence in the American right wing. And it could hold out a promise of
conservative authenticity that would only strengthen its influence in the
future. If the purpose of Liz Cheney and her fellow small-d democratic
Republican colleagues and constituents is really to do “everything in their
power” to halt the advance of Trump and MAGA-Republicanism, a conservative
third party could well head them off at the pass if Trump is a candidate in
2024. And it could continue to be a bright new democratic force to be reckoned
with in the future. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The even bigger problem
with cults of personality than their own undemocratic origins and selfish goals
is that, like all of us, personalities die. They are not larger than life. They
are mortal. And personality-isms, therefore, always devolve into some entirely
other “ism” once their self-centered leaders succumb to mortality—usually
something far worse, even, than their originally undemocratic selves. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The solution to Trump
and MAGA’s takeover of the GOP must come from within democratic Republican
ranks. A patriotically-founded conservative party could gain force on the strength
of its incipient resistance to the advance of authoritarianism and on the
strength of its power to split the Republican vote between true conservatives
and the MAGA autocracy in the coming election cycles, thus also serving to purge
and cleanse the right of its current authoritarian orientation. In short, it
could properly and honorably represent genuine conservatism in the United
States, while literally saving the life of American democracy. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-34725602947233539932022-09-16T20:17:00.005-03:002022-09-16T20:20:12.809-03:00GUTTING THE POST OFFICE<p><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt;">Okay, here's another
thing Americans can "thank" the Trump regime for: Destroying the US
Postal Service. It's just one more American institution that Americans can no
longer trust after the Trumpster onslaught. Trump appointed Louis DeJoy Postmaster General just a
few months before the 2020 election with the obvious secret mission of
torpedoing the Postal Service in an attempt to curtail mail-in voting, whether
absentee or early ballots.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisq7z323wgeP5Zk1pAMwjXG2HQtx_0EY5ySWBKjn1SdIiVokcmjrHSe-U-m0IjY2qyO_ljIVW0UNnSMKtRR-TAMHf9SVOrZ81kCIPvGO4-0E4JVaS9UZog9BT2W0MHxePZXwiAX6en7MIfphp2ycGers4kP56vKs-4APKVowvnRICuHP1Ob8vCqBw_lg/s1732/The%20Package_01.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1732" data-original-width="982" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisq7z323wgeP5Zk1pAMwjXG2HQtx_0EY5ySWBKjn1SdIiVokcmjrHSe-U-m0IjY2qyO_ljIVW0UNnSMKtRR-TAMHf9SVOrZ81kCIPvGO4-0E4JVaS9UZog9BT2W0MHxePZXwiAX6en7MIfphp2ycGers4kP56vKs-4APKVowvnRICuHP1Ob8vCqBw_lg/w226-h400/The%20Package_01.jpg" width="226" /></span></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The idea was that
Democrats were the ones most likely to utilize mail-in services, that MAGA
Republicans were the type of people who would go to the polls on Election Day
and physically vote for their candidate, since they entertained numerous
conspiracy theories about mail-ins being altered, fraudulent, or simply thrown
out, when it was to the advantage of the Democrats. In other words, in a
purposely crippled post office, the votes that wouldn’t make it to their
destinations on time would most likely be Democratic votes. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">DeJoy immediately set
to work ripping out hundreds of public mailboxes, shutting down postal branches
and laying off postal workers. In a move that Trump saw as advantageous to his
cause—although not advantageous enough, as it turned out, to counteract the
seven million-vote margin by which he lost the 2020 election—the USPS ended up
being cast into chaos by the enormous volume of extra work that the general
election signified while also having to deal with branch closures and personnel
layoffs and slashed financing. On top of these other handicaps, DeJoy also
ordered the removal of vital mail sorting and handling equipment that might
have made the job of managing the increased volume easier. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In early August of
2020, three months before the election, DeJoy described his actions as seeking
to fix “a broken business model.” With that announcement came the reassignment
or removal of twenty-three senior postal officials including two top executives
whose job it had been to oversee day-to-day operations. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Virginia Democrat
Gerald Connolly, the representative who chairs the House <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Post Office and Civil Service Committee</span>,
which oversees the USPS, countered DeJoy’s announcements by stating that the
so-called “reorganization” spearheaded by the new Postmaster General was
actually “deliberate sabotage” of the Postal Service. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As customers began to
complain <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">en masse</i> about the sharp
deterioration in postal services, DeJoy said that these perceived service
failures were “unintended consequences” of his cost-cutting reforms. But it
wasn’t until congressional pressure prompted the postal inspector general’s
office to announce a review of DeJoy’s policy changes, and until an
investigation into whether he was complying with federal ethics rules was
initiated that DeJoy announced he was suspending his reforms until after the
election. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Postal workers and the
postal union, for their part, said in no uncertain terms that DeJoy’s measures
were clearly designed to hamstring the postal service and slow delivery
dramatically. And in the midst of all this, then-President Donald Trump
admitted in an interview that he himself was blocking post office funding as a
means of discouraging and curtailing mail-in voting.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0f1V4fO5nIlUuNkUEDptE6-UlL5rE9wptwSZVWNA4xX7Qq_NdFTpli3wZvojkt1jAzgObQlDIMfj0d8ie4ATwHX0UMXfXfRaXBI2W1-cJlQrZfCHhMU6Na7PfHcCpy0iJoqxaTpXekLzxe50XJGNW5kisrQSOqAECaQZTg_tNoFdvo-qF_uvOyvpP6w/s361/DeJoy.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="361" data-original-width="313" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0f1V4fO5nIlUuNkUEDptE6-UlL5rE9wptwSZVWNA4xX7Qq_NdFTpli3wZvojkt1jAzgObQlDIMfj0d8ie4ATwHX0UMXfXfRaXBI2W1-cJlQrZfCHhMU6Na7PfHcCpy0iJoqxaTpXekLzxe50XJGNW5kisrQSOqAECaQZTg_tNoFdvo-qF_uvOyvpP6w/w346-h400/DeJoy.jpg" width="346" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">Louis DeJoy</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The IG’s probe scared
DeJoy enough that he eventually reiterated that he would be halting any further
cuts in postal services until after the elections. But the damage had been done
by then and he made it clear he wouldn’t backtrack on any “reforms” already
carried out.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In the end, what was an
obvious maneuver by the Trump camp to throw the presidential election didn’t
work. Trump was voted out and almost had to be dragged kicking and screaming
from the White House while thousands of his supporters tried to overthrow the
government and perpetuate him in power. But the horrendous damage that Louis
DeJoy has done to the USPS persists—as does he in office—up to the present day.
How extensive is that damage? Estimates tend to show that his moves to
essentially cripple the postal system—while claiming to be making it more
cost-effective—have affected about forty percent of all first class mail
services, rendering them slower by a ratio of more than a hundred percent.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So why is DeJoy still heading
the PO? From the time he entered office, President Biden has sought to remove
him, but the decision regarding whom the Post Master General will be doesn’t
lie with the president. That is the province of the USPS eleven-member board of
governors. When Biden came to office, the chairman of that board was a Democrat.
So one would have thought it should be a slam-dunk that DeJoy would be packing
his bags. Not so. The Democrat in charge, Ron Bloom, ended up demonstrating
himself to be DeJoy’s biggest ally, saying that he thought the Trump-appointee
was “the proper man for the job”. This, despite the fact that DeJoy—a major GOP
donor and fundraiser—famously had zero-post office experience and was the
founder and CEO of New Breed Logistics, a freight hauling and logistics company
that, still today, holds contracts with the USPS and that, potentially, would
stand to benefit from the deterioration and privatization of mail delivery
services. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So what was it about
DeJoy’s profile that persuaded Bloom that he was the man for the job, despite
the president’s profound reservations? Well, the fact—as revealed in his financial
disclosure documentation—that DeJoy bought about three hundred thousand
dollars-worth of bonds from an asset management firm owned by Bloom might have
had something to do with it. This led some Democratic senators to confirm that
they would not be supporting Bloom’s re-nomination for chairman when his term
was up last December, but it failed to solve Biden’s immediate goal of
replacing DeJoy. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">When Bloom’s term
finally expired, the USPS Board of Governors immediately turned around and
elected as its chairman Roman Martinez IV, a staunch Republican, who again declared
that “The best team needs a leader, and I believe that Postmaster General DeJoy
is that person, to carry out the restructure that is needed.” And so it
has gone, with the current White House agonizingly seeking to inch closer to
removing the Trump appointee—who continues to pose a clear and present danger
to the postal voting system, which once formed part of the underpinnings of an
ever more inclusive democracy—but still to date unable to swing it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGyZJqghkpFsNLI9To5ZGlTIz9KM3y83sn0ZAWaK2wghoo4bHxGzqNJgJ21OR1lMDZN4lkw7Lc0V-3S2HJ25rojbJFRlrfVtOYfKT9ce6w-6RJuQ_OAsicvJyDg2QZ8sIQL0bJQx9txrSkGBrOTQbFrixUaJ3pVecwtGW1W9FR2tPH1oMyXFaJpAaVcg/s1561/The%20Package_03.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1066" data-original-width="1561" height="274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGyZJqghkpFsNLI9To5ZGlTIz9KM3y83sn0ZAWaK2wghoo4bHxGzqNJgJ21OR1lMDZN4lkw7Lc0V-3S2HJ25rojbJFRlrfVtOYfKT9ce6w-6RJuQ_OAsicvJyDg2QZ8sIQL0bJQx9txrSkGBrOTQbFrixUaJ3pVecwtGW1W9FR2tPH1oMyXFaJpAaVcg/w400-h274/The%20Package_03.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I recently had a chance to discover just how
disastrous USPS services have become under DeJoy. Last April, when I was
planning a trip back home to the US from my home abroad in Patagonia, I asked
my sister, whose address in Cleveland is my stateside residence, to send me
some important documentation I would need on my arrival in Miami before I
continued my journey to Ohio. A close and trusted friend of mine in Miami
agreed to receive the documentation at his home.</span><br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">My sister sent the
package of documentation about ten days before my arrival date. Trusting in the
Post Office efficacy that people of our generation had come to expect, she
decided to ship it via two-day priority mail from Cleveland to Miami. I told my
friend in Miami to expect the package anytime within the next forty-eight to
seventy-two hours. This was in mid-April and the priority tag on the package
metered in Cleveland said the estimated delivery date would be 04/21/22. I was
arriving in Miami on the twenty-sixth. When the package hadn’t arrived by the
twenty-third, my friend notified me. I told him not to worry, that it was sure
to come while I was in transit. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But when he picked me
up at Miami International on the twenty-sixth, he told me that it still hadn’t
arrived. He said that he’d been so worried that he had gone to see the
postmaster at his local post office. They put out a tracer and it came back
saying that the package had arrived in Miami from Cleveland on the twentieth
and had been “given to an agent for delivery.” So who was the agent, my friend
wanted to know? The manager said we’d need to contact the central post office
in Miami for that. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">We did, and were
told—astonishingly—that there was no way of knowing. That overnight and other
priority services were no longer delivered by the post office but by private
contractors. Okay, so give us the name of the contractor or agent. We were told
that there was no way of knowing. The contractors were “several” and how was
this manager supposed to know which one had it?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I was getting more and
more incensed. This was priority mail, with a tracking number and strict
delivery date. And the USPS had no idea where it was? The guy we talked to said
the post office only tracked it until it reached the branch from which it would
be turned over for final delivery. After that, it wasn’t their problem. But
wasn’t the whole idea for it to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">delivered
</i>to its final destination? Sure, but that was up to the contractor. And the
USPS doesn’t bother having some way of knowing what happens to a piece of
priority mail once the contractor walks off with it? The guy was like, hey, I
just work here. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5a3bXJT2UeOWd5LVqZul0WptZ9WVS4ipKcB6ACzf9Rg8dDeespFcdUd_KvV98W-PYuOdX1DgzLXcVmDW3akCPaC-K9BcUgHYMso1kr7bcPpn0XExlT_iCaLafrweRir0amtuhhJ79Tr3mJrHh9kx1BeZSlxvONSXHA7aWSA9bYtjNsUMpzccJSdsbsw/s2058/The%20Package_02.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2058" data-original-width="1162" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5a3bXJT2UeOWd5LVqZul0WptZ9WVS4ipKcB6ACzf9Rg8dDeespFcdUd_KvV98W-PYuOdX1DgzLXcVmDW3akCPaC-K9BcUgHYMso1kr7bcPpn0XExlT_iCaLafrweRir0amtuhhJ79Tr3mJrHh9kx1BeZSlxvONSXHA7aWSA9bYtjNsUMpzccJSdsbsw/w226-h400/The%20Package_02.jpg" width="226" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">My sister and I made further inquiries but got
no satisfactory answers. The branch post master in Cleveland from which she’d
sent it told my sister that “this sort of thing happens all the time in Miami.”
And an official that my friend in Miami spoke to said, not to worry, that it’d
probably turn up eventually. “Sometimes these contractors will ship mail to
Panama or someplace and back before they ever deliver it. We have no control
over their routing schedules.”</span><br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Eventually, I had to
cut my losses and take emergency measures through my bank and the three main
credit unions to ensure no one could use the information in the package to take
out loans, pay liabilities or make purchases in my name. I also had to get a
whole new set of credit and debit cards, which meant that I had to pay cash for
my hotel and all other travel services until I reached Cleveland. And after a
month or so, I just tried to put the incident behind me and promised myself
never to use the post office again.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Fast forward to
yesterday, a full four months after my sister mailed me the “priority” package,
and my friend in Miami sends me the pictures illustrating this entry. Pictures
of my priority package that, finally, reached his home. In the time it took, a
mail carrier could have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">walked</i> from
Cleveland to Miami to deliver it. And when it finally did arrive, it was with
the priority mailer package that the Cleveland post office placed it in ripped
open.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So I’d like to thank
Donald Trump and his hatchet-man Louis DeJoy for curing Americans of yet
another fantasy about the sanctity of long-held American traditions and trusted
institutions. Trump and MAGA Republicans will make cynics of us all yet!<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><br /></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-37868382579810997872022-07-30T13:42:00.007-03:002022-07-30T14:06:00.560-03:00I HAVE A CEMETERY QUESTION<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_mDKy24zT8iefTcQQ_FiejaXTRYiZNALbUIvSr-PjRV3xTQbEA23ue0bdd7chPtxseCV5__wgFLOsMa0WiY-zoCrq_RxpPOQUgLtEnZDsCMJxlsZHVVhMQ2fIqD96nFMwfEiyEZTCgOMOrDC5r-6son2guWAqt7bSniZosN-SAF2uGxjW7zAUfFY4rw/s275/IVANA'S%20GRAVE.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_mDKy24zT8iefTcQQ_FiejaXTRYiZNALbUIvSr-PjRV3xTQbEA23ue0bdd7chPtxseCV5__wgFLOsMa0WiY-zoCrq_RxpPOQUgLtEnZDsCMJxlsZHVVhMQ2fIqD96nFMwfEiyEZTCgOMOrDC5r-6son2guWAqt7bSniZosN-SAF2uGxjW7zAUfFY4rw/w400-h266/IVANA'S%20GRAVE.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>Ivana rests "in the rough" at Donald's NJ golf property</b></i> </td></tr></tbody></table><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;">Question: With the
burial of Donald Trump’s ex-wife at his golf property in New Jersey, has that
property technically become a "cemetery"? Here's why I'm asking:</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">According to NJ law,
"cemetery companies" are tax exempt.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Specifically, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Cemetery company” means any individual,
corporation, partnership, association, or other public or private entity which
owns, operates, controls, or manages land or places used or dedicated for use
for burial of human remains or disposition of cremated human remains, including
a crematory located on dedicated cemetery property. <o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Cemetery
companies are prohibited from engaging in any of the following activities: <o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">•
Manufacture or sale of vaults, private mausoleums, monuments, markers, or
bronze memorials <o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">•
Conduct of any funeral home or the business or profession of mortuary science</span></i><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">(I don’t see anything
there about golfing).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Exemptions:
<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The
Act relieves cemetery companies from the payment of: <o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">•
Real Property Taxes on lands dedicated to cemetery purposes; <o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">•
Income Taxes; <o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">•
Sales and Use Taxes; Rev. 5/17 Publication ANJ–22 About New Jersey Taxes:
Cemeteries, Funerals and NJ Taxes <o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">•
Business Taxes; and </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">• Inheritance Taxes. </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Cemetery property is exempt from sale
for collection of judgments. Cemetery trust funds and trust income are exempt
from tax and exempt from sale or seizure for collection of judgments against
the cemetery company.</span></i><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Data collected from the
NJ State Division of Taxation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-41474844012183518602022-07-17T20:29:00.004-03:002022-07-18T08:08:23.123-03:00CAPITULATION<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt;">With what he may have thought was a harmless and
indifferent gesture, US President Joe Biden this past week issued a powerful
message not only to Saudi Arabia but also to human rights advocates everywhere:
When it comes to the choice between defense of human rights, free speech and
democracy or cheap fuel for America’s gas-guzzling SUVs, we’ll take cheap gas.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJJr7cz3bctBXCneqrvuheNV0Aol1FUZ5MJnGgfGA7VP0WPiNq2hfILw1F6EiKNxWrybPx0xH6m3tzfIx6Q8tse9SZl4eKSnqPYBtuaEsUooi6sAdqjB9XEsaGwlTeLMmDx132v0B4z0YVrNPCQd3z-rDLF5OMBBbsJ-zdGZyy5XrtFdeATcLenOqAFA/s512/Khashoggi.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="440" data-original-width="512" height="344" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJJr7cz3bctBXCneqrvuheNV0Aol1FUZ5MJnGgfGA7VP0WPiNq2hfILw1F6EiKNxWrybPx0xH6m3tzfIx6Q8tse9SZl4eKSnqPYBtuaEsUooi6sAdqjB9XEsaGwlTeLMmDx132v0B4z0YVrNPCQd3z-rDLF5OMBBbsJ-zdGZyy5XrtFdeATcLenOqAFA/w400-h344/Khashoggi.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">Murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">There can be little doubt that when Biden had to
confront the inevitable photo op with the ruthless Saudi leader, Crown Prince
Mohammed Bin Salman, it was an embarrassing moment. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">It looked way too much like what it was—humiliation,
desperation, the flailing of a drowning man.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">After all, this was the guy
whom Biden had promised in fiery campaign speeches a couple of years ago that
he was going to hold to account and shun as “the pariah that he is.”</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">But with Putin’s war in Ukraine turning the
oil market head over heels, and soaring gasoline prices at home fueling nearly
double-digit inflation and inversely scuttling the president’s popularity
ratings on all fronts, the question Biden probably asked himself was, as the
BBC’s veteran worldwide correspondent John Simpson quipped, “Who has a lot of
oil? Exactly!”</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">While the president would share a warm handshake
with Saudi King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, he made sure that it was clear that MBS
only merited a quick fist-bump. One wonders if this was supposed to allay the concerns
of the liberals who had voted for him or to have prompted the international
community and human rights activists to say, “Ha, see there, fist-bump. I guess
Biden showed him!” Because if that was supposed to be the message, it didn’t
take. The word that more likely seems to have been the first to come to mind
was “capitulation” rather than scorn.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilkVmgaa-N_hRKDcWzngj4UXszyk2tLGxOKI_vzyNgPMK-ufcbYrnwdziotaFkWgGFBZKCs__mPIYfvG6jOpy2IITDMZ61UMFgek3VzD25lEXmmnbATU1kxXJdTIyOjOCK5CQv9Nl5Fcm5_jcIIBh4UF_-Tsl8qnQdIfTfkD5FuCyH0W0bH33nb6K61g/s980/Fist%20bump.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="553" data-original-width="980" height="232" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilkVmgaa-N_hRKDcWzngj4UXszyk2tLGxOKI_vzyNgPMK-ufcbYrnwdziotaFkWgGFBZKCs__mPIYfvG6jOpy2IITDMZ61UMFgek3VzD25lEXmmnbATU1kxXJdTIyOjOCK5CQv9Nl5Fcm5_jcIIBh4UF_-Tsl8qnQdIfTfkD5FuCyH0W0bH33nb6K61g/w411-h232/Fist%20bump.jpg" width="411" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">The politically costly fist-bump</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In the lead-up to this unfortunate meeting, Biden’s
West Wing had indicated he might not meet at all with MBS and would instead
only officially meet with the king. But too many foreign affairs experts made
it clear that if that was the plan, he might as well stay home, because the
cock who currently rules the roost in Saudi Arabia is the crown prince. The
king, they pointed out, is a mere figurehead for life, with no real power to
decide anything. If you want to talk to the Saudis, you can’t avoid talking to
MBS, because Saudi Arabia is a one-man show.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Which is precisely the point about the murder of
Saudi <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Washington Post</i> columnist Jamal
Ahmad Khashoggi. Nothing of consequence happens in the Saudi regime without the
knowledge and complicity of MBS. To believe the official story of the Saudi
government that the murder was committed by rogue outliers without the crown
prince’s knowledge is to believe in fairytales—especially since the grisly
assassination took place within the premises of a Saudi diplomatic mission.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">For anyone who might need to refresh their memory
regarding this major international incident, here’s a brief summary of the
facts. Jamal Khashoggi was a high-profile Saudi dissident, journalist and
author, who had long campaigned against the bloody regime, not as a radical,
but as a moderate who was willing to advocate gradual democratic improvement
without pushing for the overthrow of the Saudi government. Prior to his work as
a columnist for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Washington Post</i>’s
Middle East Eye section, Khashoggi had served briefly as the editor of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Al Watan</i>, a Saudi newspaper that he sought
to mold into a platform for progressives seeking respect for human rights and a
more democratic opening. He was a particularly strong advocate of equal rights
for women in his country. But his trenchant opposition to the regime’s domestic
policies caused him to be sacked.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirSQytbpNwv4BNZY23-IB8KHHHKLLAEUN5agIy7jrTzsK682XqSW-VNxdM71F_yOIzIpV6Uwauc9kVjcUOUZT79zf-mtoxeVJVm2CXDmJ5ILfd_iipqAMMOyBPIbQBtyVsCdTVWNben2PAXUHBvQELWIftRM8LL0_yYEw1jL1TrSXWhc_GT-Oer5Dr6w/s1930/Saudi%20King.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1611" data-original-width="1930" height="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirSQytbpNwv4BNZY23-IB8KHHHKLLAEUN5agIy7jrTzsK682XqSW-VNxdM71F_yOIzIpV6Uwauc9kVjcUOUZT79zf-mtoxeVJVm2CXDmJ5ILfd_iipqAMMOyBPIbQBtyVsCdTVWNben2PAXUHBvQELWIftRM8LL0_yYEw1jL1TrSXWhc_GT-Oer5Dr6w/w400-h334/Saudi%20King.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">No fist-bump for the Saudi king.</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">After the Saudi regime banned him from Twitter in
2017 for his criticism of the brutal policies supported by the king and crown
prince, Khashoggi had reason to believe that his life was in danger and in September
of that year, he left Saudi Arabia for self-imposed exile in the US. While in
exile, besides working for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Washington
Post</i>, he also became general manager and editor-in-chief at the Al-Arab
News Channel, and continued to be a powerful voice for democratic change in his
native country. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He was, additionally, a staunch critic of the war on
Yemen waged by Saudi Arabia with US backing, which had fostered one of the
world’s worst humanitarian crises. Of that war, he once wrote: “The longer this
cruel war lasts in Yemen, the more permanent the damage will be. The people of
Yemen will be busy fighting poverty, cholera and water scarcity and
rebuilding their country. The crown prince must bring an end to the violence…Saudi
Arabia's crown prince must restore dignity to his country by ending Yemen's
cruel war.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">On October 2, 2018, the fifty-nine-year-old
journalist was happily planning his upcoming marriage to then
thirty-six-year-old Hatice Cengiz of Turkey. On that date, Khashoggi went to
the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul to request some documentation he would need for
his marriage. CCTV footage recorded him entering the embassy, but he was never
recorded coming out. Later investigation revealed that the journalist had been brutally
murdered inside the premises of the diplomatic mission and his body dismembered
and removed to another location. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">After releasing a series of thin and conflicting
stories to try to cover up the heinous crime, the Saudi government eventually
admitted that the murder had occurred but has maintained ever since that it was
carried out without the crown prince’s involvement or knowledge. This, despite
the fact that in 2017, MBS had told another Saudi journalist that Khashoggi's
work was tarnishing his image, and that he would go after Khashoggi “with
a bullet.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Less than two months before his murder, Khashoggi
wrote, “Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince…is signaling that any open opposition to
Saudi domestic policies...is intolerable." As an example of this
repressive policy, he pointed to government measures “…as egregious as the
punitive arrests of reform-seeking Saudi women.” He wrote that “while MBS is
right to free Saudi Arabia from ultra-conservative religious forces, he is
wrong to advance a new radicalism that, while seemingly more liberal and
appealing to the West, is just as intolerant of dissent.” Khashoggi went
on to write: “MBS's rash actions are deepening tensions and undermining the
security of the Gulf States and the region as a whole.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Following careful investigation, the CIA has concluded
that there is no doubt that Khashoggi’s assassination was on orders from MBS
and that the crown prince had reached across international borders to carry it
out, sending a hit squad of more than a dozen agents to murder the journalist in
Turkey and make his body disappear. This is consistent with the fact that no
few of the regime’s other opponents have simply disappeared without a trace.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Despite President Biden’s initial promises to hold
MBS and Saudi Arabia to account for the murder and for the generally ruthless
policies of the regime, and in spite of repeated calls from human rights
advocates and liberal politicians for the severing of diplomatic ties with the
Saudi regime, this past week’s meeting with the crown prince rendered his good
intentions moot. Furthermore, that single meeting overshadowed Biden’s entire
Middle East tour, eclipsing everything else, which, even without the MBS
factor, didn’t go well.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">To wit, besides fist-bumping his way into one of the
still most burning human rights controversies of today, sparking the outrage of
every human rights group at home and abroad that was looking to this
administration to restore the basic decency unceremoniously trashed during the
Trump presidency, he failed to get anything significant in return. There is no
real evidence to suggest that Saudi Arabia has the installed capacity to
significantly increase its production, or that, like the rest of the
international oil cartel, it would be willing to do anything that might spark a
drastic decrease in the price of oil. And the trip rendered no immediate
solution to high fuel prices in the rest of the region either. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">While Biden managed to give the appearance of
inching bitter enemies Saudi Arabia and Israel somewhat closer together, there’s
no reason to believe that MBS will risk major conservative opposition at home
to appease Washington and Tel Aviv, nor is there any guarantee that the
right-wing Netanyahu camp won’t return to power in Israel and undo any progress
made. Furthermore, while he did his best to appear tough on Iran, he
simultaneously said that his administration still believed that diplomacy was
the answer and made clear his commitment to piecing the Iran nuclear accord
achieved under the Obama administration back together. While that was sure to
please those of us who believe that the way to deal with Iran is by bringing it
back into the concert of nations, it is a policy that is unlikely to garner any
support whatsoever after the mid-term elections when Democrats may very well
lose their tenuous hold on Congress. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">To add insult to injury, while he was touring the
Middle East, Biden was once again blindsided by West Virginia senator and Democratic
outlier Joe Manchin, who again threw the president’s domestic policy plans into
utter chaos. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So what could the US president possibly have to gain
from capitulating to MBS? The answer is “nothing,” and his advisers should have
made him aware of that fact. Because by fist-bumping with a ruthless murderer,
the only thing the president has earned is the contempt of the international
human rights community and the further erosion of his support among liberal
Democrats.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-20777979343760052822022-07-05T21:54:00.007-03:002022-07-06T10:17:30.312-03:00FOURTH OF JULY REFLECTIONS<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;">I wanted to wish all of
my fellow Americans a happy Fourth of July yesterday…but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
Couldn’t muster any happiness about what’s happening in my native country
today. It’s all just too grim.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Maybe it’s the weather.
Here in Patagonia, it’s raining and snowing, cold and dark. It’s more fitting
of the state of my nation—once the beacon of democracy, the temple of
individual rights—than a sunny day full of brass bands, fireworks, picnics and
beer.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ7f1FFVjs8bT_ANCXEsTIQOL08FL-CC4nWgTH-3usxG_su5eHBInoqiH-QYtD_dpoJhtRVfAGHWL63CFwAKXu5M9uDngrMmDAepFj2Zg3DCkYxYyv6XqqxKLCwTFaTp0HwQW5KuNmFDEBqIlrU94Tsa0vEz2flfvO9127R47K3ODsda4uHa6Xu6GMCg/s517/Lady%20Liberty%20in%20tears.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="517" data-original-width="502" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ7f1FFVjs8bT_ANCXEsTIQOL08FL-CC4nWgTH-3usxG_su5eHBInoqiH-QYtD_dpoJhtRVfAGHWL63CFwAKXu5M9uDngrMmDAepFj2Zg3DCkYxYyv6XqqxKLCwTFaTp0HwQW5KuNmFDEBqIlrU94Tsa0vEz2flfvO9127R47K3ODsda4uHa6Xu6GMCg/w389-h400/Lady%20Liberty%20in%20tears.jpg" width="389" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But then again, if we
give any thought at all to the actual significance of the Fourth of July, we
Americans—at least every small-d democrat among us—should have been in mourning
yesterday. Not for our origins, which were noble, but for what we’ve lost along
the way, and especially what we’ve lost in the last five and a half years.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I would like to
say—have wanted to say since January 20, 2020—not to worry. That things can
only get better. But that appears to be a fatuous lie. Indeed, in terms of
freedom, civil rights and justice, we are abysmally worse off than we were just
last month. With the far-right in Congress throwing their full support behind
an insurrection that—let’s stop pussyfooting around and call it like it is—sought
to overthrow the government of the United States and perpetuate the reign of an
autocrat who had clearly lost a free and fair election, and with that self-same
autocrat refusing for the first time in US history to leave office peacefully
after his election defeat, the Supreme Court was the last bastion standing against
this indubitable war on democracy and what used to be known as “The American
Way”. But in the last days of June before the Fourth of July recess, that ship
clearly sailed as well.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Events in that
democratic bloodbath at the Supreme Court in the fateful last days in June
included a judicial restructuring that very apparently sought to bolster the
ambitions of one segment of the population while debilitating the rights of
another. In the process, the power of the Court—like the GOP before it—was unmistakably
usurped by the far right, effectively sidelining the normally moderating influence
of the chief justice. That institution’s erstwhile principles of respect for
settled judicial precedent when it favors individual freedoms, as well as for
legally acquired rights, were cavalierly tossed out the window. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This was the intended
mission that former President Donald Trump—and the major party that he managed
in a few short years to take over through a veritable political reign of terror—hoped
the three justices they named to the Court would take up. They haven’t been
disappointed. And those newly appointed justices have found an echo for their
extreme beliefs in senior Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who was previously
a sort of judicial lone wolf in his far-right opinions.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In the latter days of
June, and in practically one fell swoop, the Supreme Court of the United States
struck down one of the most essential of women’s civil rights—the right to autonomy
over their own bodies and their own destiny. This was a hard-fought right that
had been federal law in the United States for very nearly a half-century.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">With the exception of
the right to vote, which women didn’t enjoy for the first time until 1920, and
which was a mere first small step in their equal rights struggle that continues
today, Roe v Wade was arguably the most consequential decision in favor or
women’s rights in the history of the United States. It eschewed the political
and religious strictures that had been imposed on women since the nation’s
founding (a sort of Christian “sharia law” that precluded a woman’s right to
corporeal autonomy), and upheld the right of women to invoke the principle of “my
body, my choice.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Coco Das, an organizer with
Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, put it succinctly when she told <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Guardian</i>, “This decision not only goes against the will of the
people—the majority of people support abortion rights, legal abortion—it goes
against modern progress, the progress of history.” Das describe the Supreme
Court’s controversial decision to overturn Roe v Wade as being “based on
biblical literalism, a fundamentalist Christian fanatical movement.” As I said
before, the equivalent of Christian “sharia law”. She added that the Court’s
so-called “conservative” majority are “really trying to transform (American)
society to one that’s dominated on the basis of white supremacy, male
supremacy, Christian supremacy. It’s very dangerous. Without the right to
abortion, women can’t be free, and if women aren’t free, nobody’s free.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But the Court didn’t
stop there in its June onslaught in favor of the extreme right. Its far-right
justices also ruled in majority decisions against states’ rights when it comes
to arms control, against environmental protection, against Native tribal law,
and against the founding constitutional principle of separation of Church and
State. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The Court ruled to
disallow a 1911 New York state gun law that imposed strict restrictions on
carrying firearms outside the home. The decision, in New York State Rifle &
Pistol Association v Bruen, came halfway through a year in which the US has suffered
a record three hundred nine mass shooting incidents in which two hundred twenty
people have died. In his opinion, echoed by the “conservative” Court majority,
Justice Thomas posited that New York laws that recognized people’s right to
keep guns in their homes, but restricted the right to carry them freely in the
street without good cause violated the “right to bear arms” embodied in the
Second Amendment. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU1sREctIW4p-I7ocoXXoYAER63u5ialVJtwHfJJN9SN7I4jmuzg0To32M26lpFSGgk8K52J1MNAOZV8TWPeUkTkn9kwZn9SosTFlhHJMLnVp7Mzzr7Qqzbu2pCdHlkRG4qcNAF64mcnRrwIhrKzdRdUlDGQs4ezbn0M_HGhmv3PcjeSiIaOeRGS46tA/s311/Lady%20Liberty%20in%20tear_02.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="162" data-original-width="311" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU1sREctIW4p-I7ocoXXoYAER63u5ialVJtwHfJJN9SN7I4jmuzg0To32M26lpFSGgk8K52J1MNAOZV8TWPeUkTkn9kwZn9SosTFlhHJMLnVp7Mzzr7Qqzbu2pCdHlkRG4qcNAF64mcnRrwIhrKzdRdUlDGQs4ezbn0M_HGhmv3PcjeSiIaOeRGS46tA/w400-h208/Lady%20Liberty%20in%20tear_02.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">The Court also voted in favor of a former
high school football coach who was suspended for praying with athletes on the
field after games, a practice which imposes religious manifestations on secular
public school activities and flies in the face of a sixty-year-old precedent
indicating that imposing prayer of any kind on public school children violates
their First Amendment right to freedom of religion. The justices also rejected
a Maine law that prohibited religious schools from drawing tuition aid from
public funds. In her dissent against this measure, Justice Sonia Sotomayor
wrote, “This court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church
and state that the framers fought to build.” </span><br /><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And finally, the Court
also in June moved against a long-held precedent of tribal law on Native land
and curbed the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to pursue major polluters.
The rightist majority decided that, from now on, state prosecutors will be able
to pursue criminal cases for crimes perpetrated by non-Native persons against
Native persons on tribal land—a decision which, according to Cherokee Chief Chuck
Hoskin Jr, signifies that “the US Supreme Court (has) ruled against legal
precedent and (against) the basic principles of congressional authority and
Indian law.” The next day, the Court decided to support litigation brought
by West Virginia that insisted the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) be
restricted in its regulation of planet-heating gasses from the energy industry.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Regarding this last
measure, former New York Mayor and current special envoy to the UN Michael
Bloomberg said, “The decision to side with polluters over the public will cost
American lives and cause an enormous amount of preventable suffering, with the
biggest burden falling on low-income communities and communities of color.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Lawrence Gostin, a law
professor at Georgetown University and director of the World Health
Organization’s center on Global Health Law made a realistic assessment of the
current situation in the US when he said, “We’re absolutely in a constitutional
crisis. And our democracy is now one of the most fragile democracies among our
peer nations. We haven’t fallen over the cliff—we still abide by the rule of
law, more or less, and still have elections, more or less—but the terms of our
democracy have really been eviscerated by the Supreme Court.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This is not a conspiracy
theory. The lines of what’s happening have been sharply drawn. Never, since the
Civil War, has the United States been so deeply divided, or so in danger of democratic
dissolution. To my mind, then, this year’s Fourth of July was the saddest in
all of my seventy-two years. I’m fervently hoping that better, more democratic
times lie ahead, but I won’t hold my breath while I wait. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-68024124838819838392022-06-27T21:13:00.002-03:002022-06-27T21:24:35.968-03:00THE LONG TAIL OF THE DECISION TO REVERSE ROE VERSUS WADE<p><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"> <span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;">If there was one thing
we learned in the first stage of the Trump Era, it was that no matter how bad
things got, they could only get worse. We were seeing things happen that would
have been unthinkable previously, and none of them were good. They all tended
toward a concerted assault on freedom and democracy. We even witnessed
something that we, and most other people around the world, would have thought
an utter impossibility in the United States of America: a serious attempt to
foster a violent overthrow of the prevailing order and to install an
autocratic, single-party regime in power.</span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnow1NVD7hlWMZkDFsxvkdjZqo1mmCGeQ8q3sffJ1TSLsQxO_824fCU7owMaO0vRPc8FbVENvm945MPl9VZYBQWXIMkLq1BMWCV0OZQYc8qK-Xycy2eHboHqOwTakt74MQLRvc6mhCtEBoOitX0LBYRHH-765-_iOf-9j4Hamo3agavy34HZS-S50Pfw/s301/images.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="167" data-original-width="301" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnow1NVD7hlWMZkDFsxvkdjZqo1mmCGeQ8q3sffJ1TSLsQxO_824fCU7owMaO0vRPc8FbVENvm945MPl9VZYBQWXIMkLq1BMWCV0OZQYc8qK-Xycy2eHboHqOwTakt74MQLRvc6mhCtEBoOitX0LBYRHH-765-_iOf-9j4Hamo3agavy34HZS-S50Pfw/w448-h263/images.jpg" width="448" /></a></span></span></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The other thing we
learned in the first stage of the Trump Era was that there is a second stage.
Although the majority of Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief when
the democratic transfer of power actually took place—after being unable to
believe our own eyes and ears when it seemed that it wouldn’t—that relief has
proven a false friend. There has been no return to normalcy, no prosecution of
the real perpetrators of the almost coup, no vindication of those who literally
risked everything to re-establish democratic order. On the contrary, the
offending parties are bolder than ever, are defying legal processes and are
counting on again taking over power, while changing voting laws, districts and
procedures (and, in the process, violating hard-won minority voting rights) in
any way they can to ensure that they do.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Perhaps the biggest
sigh of relief that true democrats breathed was when, in the aftermath of the
2020 election, it became clear that, finding no accomplices for his patently
false accusations of election fraud amid more than sixty federal judges, a
number of whom he had appointed to the court, a defeated but implacable Donald
Trump planned to use the Supreme Court—which he had packed with three
ultra-conservative justices—to seek to legitimize his phony fraud claims. Our
relief came when none of the Trump appointees agreed to hear voter fraud cases
brought to the Court by Trump surrogates including, prominently, attorney
Sidney Powell. The only dissenting opinion in the Court regarding hearing any
of the cases that Trump World sought to bring before it was that of Associate
Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas’s wife Ginni has since been outed as a diehard
Trump supporter who may well have played an important role in propagating the
so-called Big Lie and in other efforts to overturn the legitimate presidential
election results.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Once again, however, we
were falsely lulled into believing that the checks and balances were working,
and that, even when the Republican side of Congress was packed with
coup-mongers, the Supreme Court would still prevail in protecting the inherent
rights of American citizens against violation by a far-right autocratic
conspiracy. Nevertheless, if those attempts at undermining the election rights
of Americans were too blatant for the Court to abide, we are now seeing that
the far-right onslaught is continuing in not much subtler ways. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilOIO7qZ9oyA_gZY8qzVPj-bE19Zz4Qc4DFocYnYlmh_79pCqHGZPd9Oja1QXYsdxr-8eeGdPKdWiriy79bAM3EadWnw66LIIWeUOA0szbcvGJWutGNNef1IB1pfSjw7ckUAEfiMEV58JimX35hZ3GNTEBPXqetz-IX-RZkJeXDi9g3ko9bboPTI9wZQ/s701/extreme%20right%20plus%20one.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="393" data-original-width="701" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilOIO7qZ9oyA_gZY8qzVPj-bE19Zz4Qc4DFocYnYlmh_79pCqHGZPd9Oja1QXYsdxr-8eeGdPKdWiriy79bAM3EadWnw66LIIWeUOA0szbcvGJWutGNNef1IB1pfSjw7ckUAEfiMEV58JimX35hZ3GNTEBPXqetz-IX-RZkJeXDi9g3ko9bboPTI9wZQ/w400-h224/extreme%20right%20plus%20one.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Kavanaugh, Coney Barrett, Thomas and Alito</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">The first open manifestation of this agenda took
shape this past week when the conservative majority of justices struck down a
half-century old SCOTUS decision (Roe v Wade) that basically determined that it
was unconstitutional to deny women the right to an abortion, and thus, the
right to the pursuit of their own destiny and to exercise control over their
own bodies. Among the five assenting opinions were those of the three Trump
appointees. While this may come as no surprise, it is worth noting—as have no
few liberal members of Congress and even a few conservatives—that during their
congressional confirmation hearings, all three testified under oath that they
viewed Roe v Wade as a “settled precedent” and thus, the law of the land.</span><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In constitutional law,
settled precedents are, as the name suggests, questions of law that have been
settled once and for all. In the case of Roe v Wade, what that meant—should
anyone be in doubt—was that, in the US, abortion was a constitutionally
guaranteed women’s right, a fact that coincides with international human rights
standards. Authoritative interpretations of international human rights law have
long established that denying women and girls access to abortion is a form of discrimination
and jeopardizes an entire range of human rights. United Nations human rights
treaty bodies regularly call on governments to decriminalize abortion in all
cases and to ensure access to safe, legal abortion in at least certain
circumstances—rape, incest, pregnancy in minors and pregnancies that jeopardize
the health and welfare of the potential mother.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">No matter how you look
at it, the action taken to strike down a substantive legal precedent that has
empowered and protected a woman’s right to autonomy over her life and body is
invasive and difficult to justify. In the face of opposing opinions that are
more dogma-based than practical, the Supreme Court could have just as easily
allowed the settled precedent to stand as to reverse it. That is to say, the
Court has gone out of its way to overturn a decision supporting a human and
civil right based largely on the subjective beliefs of a minority portion of
society.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Indeed, nationwide
polls have shown that more than eighty percent of Americans believe that
abortion should be legal at least under certain circumstances—incest, rape,
etc. And the vast majority believe that it is a right that the state should
protect rather than interfere in. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Polls also indicate
that only a little more than a third of the country wanted to see Roe v Wade
overturned—not surprisingly that proportion is about equal to the segment of
society that currently supports Trump World and the Big Lie. Coincidence?
Probably not. Meanwhile, a full two-thirds of those polled have consistently
said that Roe v Wade should stand. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">More revealing still
was one poll that indicated that more than sixty percent of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Republican</i> women surveyed believed that
abortion was a matter between a woman and her doctor in which government should
have no role. So, on whose behalf was the Court deciding to strip women of a
right guaranteed by a long-settled precedent? The answer is, a subjective,
non-secular minority—likely made up to a much larger extent by men than by
women (who are now more vulnerable to discrimination than before)—that is
seeking to impose its self-righteous authoritarian principles on the whole of the
population in detriment to majoritarian democratic society.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">There is a ripple
effect in breaking with long-held principles. If one person’s rights can be
legally violated, then all people’s rights are placed at risk. So the Court’s
decision has also debilitated the judicial security of other sectors of
American society. While Justice Alito, who wrote the conservative majority
opinion, hastens to say that "we emphasize that our decision concerns the
constitutional right to abortion and no other right,” and that, “nothing in
this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not
concern abortion,” this would appear to be a personal opinion or wishful
thinking with no real legal foot to stand on. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDR8MBmcbQKu22pUtQcivfaI8rNhA-3G7cYk9hwlDZKFcf5Dhi3-iXmkNLDL3jrKShNZFTKy5RHj9_DfVDP15l1G-ixpCZNAP7qvtc6ltSNuZAl30LNZR-_KdcyrQtCFq7FhVGnsasHG3-PfjMSA64QsLfJ0_AA6EyWFlV-cOnxEL2h3fwvVRiJREsMQ/s1206/clarence-thomas.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1206" data-original-width="1206" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDR8MBmcbQKu22pUtQcivfaI8rNhA-3G7cYk9hwlDZKFcf5Dhi3-iXmkNLDL3jrKShNZFTKy5RHj9_DfVDP15l1G-ixpCZNAP7qvtc6ltSNuZAl30LNZR-_KdcyrQtCFq7FhVGnsasHG3-PfjMSA64QsLfJ0_AA6EyWFlV-cOnxEL2h3fwvVRiJREsMQ/s320/clarence-thomas.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Thomas</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Indeed, in a separate
concurrence that he wrote to accompany his sign-off on the quashing of Roe v
Wade, Justice Thomas gave his own far-right view, saying “I write separately to
emphasize a second, more fundamental reason why there is no abortion guarantee
lurking in the Due Process Clause. As I have previously explained, ‘substantive
due process’ is an oxymoron that ‘lack[s] any basis in the Constitution.’”
According to Thomas, substantive due process (i.e., rights granted by court decision
rather than directly by the Constitution) has to do with the Constitution’s
guarantee of due process before someone is denied the right to life, liberty or
property. But he opines that it has no bearing on what those rights actually
encompass. Thomas says that since the Due Process Clause “does not secure any
substantive rights,” including a right to abortion, then the Supreme Court
should “reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Other writing by Thomas
on constitutional law suggests that he favors an enormous departure from how
the SCOTUS has traditionally approached the right to due process—a legal
tradition that goes back one hundred fifty years. In keeping with that
historical approach, the Court had interpreted the basic rights granted by the
Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to protect substantive rights granted by legal
precedent. In that way, the US legal system has granted an ever-growing list of
liberties that we citizens enjoy, rather than seeking interpretations of the
Constitution that strip citizens of legally acquired rights, as the reversal of
Roe v Wade does. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Now that the Court has
set an entirely new precedent for removing rather than protecting rights
granted by law, Thomas has made it clear that he wants to see all such due
process rulings reviewed. And he has specifically—despite Alito’s assurances
that this is a one-shot deal—indicated that such a review should first focus on
<i>Griswold v Connecticut, </i>1965 (governing the general right to
privacy and the specific right of married couples to use contraception), <i>Lawrence
v Texas, </i>2003 (decriminalizing intimate relations between persons
of the same sex), and <i>Obergefell v Hodges,</i> 2015 (legalizing
same-sex marriage). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBrXiyS8ZM0KlWCFrCz6cGPSq0GeuWUYXweufSw86K3qcHZGNiYANzfqhdFLlX4jI-oXtml0a98eyKVvt-IoxbagCAku_bKZs6SvhhVtGrOplPi1f7YsVFxGRA3AFYgvWyOJ6x748Av_ahpjBrfmk45Kcda6qW4v0MrArjMjMJN6mE99gTy2VZBPGUjQ/s977/liberal%20justices.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="619" data-original-width="977" height="254" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBrXiyS8ZM0KlWCFrCz6cGPSq0GeuWUYXweufSw86K3qcHZGNiYANzfqhdFLlX4jI-oXtml0a98eyKVvt-IoxbagCAku_bKZs6SvhhVtGrOplPi1f7YsVFxGRA3AFYgvWyOJ6x748Av_ahpjBrfmk45Kcda6qW4v0MrArjMjMJN6mE99gTy2VZBPGUjQ/w400-h254/liberal%20justices.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">If Obergefell were thrown out, perhaps the most
significant human right acquired in the twenty-first century (the right to love
whom you wish) would be torn from the law books, which could in turn
re-criminalize same-sex relations altogether (Lawrence v Texas). The Court
could further invade American bedrooms by banning such preventive contraception
methods as IUDs and morning-after pills. It’s not hard to imagine further
progressions to anything that “interrupts pregnancy”, such as vasectomy for
males or tubal ligation for females.</span><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">In their dissenting arguments,
Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan addressed this issue head-on, saying,
"Either the mass of the majority's opinion is hypocrisy, or additional
constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other…" They
added, "We fervently hope that does not happen because of today's
decision…But we cannot understand how anyone can be confident that today's
opinion will be the last of its kind." </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The departure from a
healthy legal tradition that this decision signifies appears to also have
opened a veritable schism in the Court, one that Chief Justice Roberts’ usually
moderating influence has been unable to span. Indeed, last week’s decision
seems to signal that Roberts has lost control of the court, with Justice Thomas
riding on the cusp of an extreme right turn in which his influence as a senior
justice is added to the willing cooperation of the three Trump appointees (Kavanaugh,
Coney Barrett and Gorsuch) and to the acquiescence of Alito.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBz3SraHFIPcefiectJQB4Wnfz39UB48pjLbGbF7TBZBtE90paEVH_T0yHlWBBVIu2Y7g5E9738jfth0hQxnzMd01BOsAy4Rm-DCf5zVDHByOegv2tR_2jKeQW1dUjqDvtddU98dO8WcIxTHdrWtkCq2lXoohNaLYF9nTtsVJWSuNYjWAtAnj_XkFiXw/s170/Roberts.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="170" data-original-width="125" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBz3SraHFIPcefiectJQB4Wnfz39UB48pjLbGbF7TBZBtE90paEVH_T0yHlWBBVIu2Y7g5E9738jfth0hQxnzMd01BOsAy4Rm-DCf5zVDHByOegv2tR_2jKeQW1dUjqDvtddU98dO8WcIxTHdrWtkCq2lXoohNaLYF9nTtsVJWSuNYjWAtAnj_XkFiXw/w294-h400/Roberts.jpg" width="294" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Chief Justice John Roberts</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In the controversial
majority opinion, Alito wrote that abortion was not mentioned as a right in the
Constitution as such, nor was the right to privacy. Incredibly, this last has
not been stressed by the media, but the idea, according to the Court, that we
have no constitutional or precedential right to privacy should come as a shock to
Americans as a whole and should be a source of genuine outrage. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In their minority
opinion, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan noted that since the framers of the
Constitution were all men, “perhaps (it is) not so surprising that the
ratifiers were not perfectly attuned to the importance of reproductive rights
for women's liberty…" More specifically, the dissenting justices stated: "When
the majority says that we must read our foundational charter as viewed at the
time of ratification (except that we may also check it against the Dark Ages),
it consigns women to second-class citizenship."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The dissenting opinion
adds that the court's ruling discards a balance set by past abortion decisions.
"It says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights
to speak of." <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It would be difficult
not to characterize last week’s Supreme Court decision as blatantly political
rather than judicial. There are clear indicators that support this. First and
foremost is the fact that this sort of decision is unprecedented in the highest
court in the land. Although extremely rare, it’s not that the Supreme Court has
never reversed a former decision. But the fact is that when this has happened
in the past, it has consistently been in the interest of granting ever-greater
freedom to Americans and ever-growing autonomy in the face of authoritarian
advances by government. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This is a glaring exception
to that rule. This is the power of the court being used to suppress a right and
freedom that citizens had already won. It’s clearly a far-right revisionist
attempt to turn back the hands of time to a more repressive era and to undo one
of the major victories of the battle for broader women’s rights. The question
now is, which other legally acquired rights will follow as the “evangelical” far-right
continues its implacable assault on freedom and democracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-78490746163705167222022-03-12T12:56:00.004-03:002022-03-17T10:28:02.298-03:00APPEASEMENT - HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF IN UKRAINE<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;">The tragedy that is unfolding in Ukraine
at the moment is the consequence of the kind of ruthless, murderous, criminal
behavior that the world—shocked though everyone seems to be—should by now have
come to expect from Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. It is a repetition of the kind
of unprovoked invasion and scorched earth tactics that he has commanded during
his twenty-two-year reign in places like Chechnya and Syria. And it mirrors the
same lack of concern over geopolitical consequences and humanitarian
considerations that Putin demonstrated nearly a decade and a half ago in
Georgia, where he launched the first European war of the twenty-first century.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgwc7a9BFrioXf6vVzIAz-3ltov9m3Z2T1IIREN-vdqigmLs1M8DnJ98LiOX1SFQQEkGEfPf12jg4Qq4MMCrDjBdDLLmigsAdCmFEcQp1M6ujXdpi2tgxnRzQIJZjsAoPdD9YhDyRoaD0JlQLKUFQ0LZhrWTjInDHBGFclTFEABjCPR-P8R8IhSFGLZog=s626" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="470" data-original-width="626" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgwc7a9BFrioXf6vVzIAz-3ltov9m3Z2T1IIREN-vdqigmLs1M8DnJ98LiOX1SFQQEkGEfPf12jg4Qq4MMCrDjBdDLLmigsAdCmFEcQp1M6ujXdpi2tgxnRzQIJZjsAoPdD9YhDyRoaD0JlQLKUFQ0LZhrWTjInDHBGFclTFEABjCPR-P8R8IhSFGLZog=w400-h300" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But leaving aside the similarities
between the ruthlessness that Putin has exhibited in Ukraine and those he has
employed in earlier armed interventions, there are also historical similarities
between how the world is reacting to this latest naked aggression in Europe by
the Putin regime, and the earlier policy of appeasement that permitted
unfettered expansion by the armies of the most undisputedly emblematic dictator
of the modern era. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Since the two world wars fought in the
twentieth century, “appeasement” has become a technical term for any diplomatic
policy that is based on making concessions to an aggressive power in order to
avoid armed conflict. The term’s most iconic historical application has been as
a means of describing the diplomatic policies of the then all-powerful British
Empire in dealing with the rapid rise of fascism in Germany and Italy and the
brutal expansionist doctrines instituted by both nations—but particularly by Nazi
Germany—in the run-up to World War II. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The scapegoat for the appeasement shown
toward German dictator Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime has traditionally been
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was heading the British
government when Nazi Germany’s aggression in Europe could no longer be ignored
and spilled over into the start of World War II. But truth be told, previous British
prime ministers, including Ramsay McDonald and Stanley Baldwin, had preceded Chamberlain
in their hands-off approach to the brutal rise and aggression of both European
dictators, embracing appeasement even as both Hitler and Mussolini consolidated
their power in Europe in the period between World War I and World War II.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In all fairness, those were different
times, the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when the world didn’t yet have the
historical context of World War II to look back on. World War I was still being
thought of as the “war to end all wars” and as “the Great War”, and most people
at that time couldn’t have imagined that Germany’s European aggression would
once again spark a worldwide conflict that would prove far more deadly and
horrific than the first one. Appeasement, at that time, was not seen as
“backing down” in the face of naked aggression, but rather as a policy aimed at
preserving the peace that had cost all of Europe such tremendous sacrifice
during the First World War. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Appeasement was also seen as the price
Europe was paying for the exaggerated and highly vindictive sanctions and contemptuous
treatment to which the Allies had subjected Germany following the Great War. There
was no more outspoken critic of those sanctions than renowned British economist
John Maynard Keynes, </span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjABuNHxDwhrlq0UXEWpKRJESHZycWBgoShYj3QKSEWOByFU4qEyxjUi4jtXgMoB0gmMUJuQc2mxInAo03VoQ6-wBcaJnZVME8jtjejYJLe_-L9qqqhG_Yg4JZB7B3EBoMmplh-GFRJWIXjyc2TMv4StGiu-cA2RaYxrYNTTaYkgRYnmki6hPJdPwDsjg=s458" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="458" height="328" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjABuNHxDwhrlq0UXEWpKRJESHZycWBgoShYj3QKSEWOByFU4qEyxjUi4jtXgMoB0gmMUJuQc2mxInAo03VoQ6-wBcaJnZVME8jtjejYJLe_-L9qqqhG_Yg4JZB7B3EBoMmplh-GFRJWIXjyc2TMv4StGiu-cA2RaYxrYNTTaYkgRYnmki6hPJdPwDsjg=w400-h328" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">John Maynard Keynes</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">whose book, <i>The Economic Consequences of Peace</i>,
published in 1919, was to become a worldwide bestseller. In that book and at
the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where he was the British Treasury delegate,
Keynes argued that applying a “Carthaginian peace” with the purpose of further crushing
an already defeated Germany would lead to new consequences for European peace
in the future. He advocated not imposing crippling reparation payments that
would impoverish the German people and lay waste to the country’s economy, or
at least limiting those reparations to no more than two billion pounds.</span><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Keynes’ advice fell on deaf ears among
the Allies in their drafting of the Treaty of Versailles and other associated treaties.
And the terrific hardships that the people of Germany suffered in the
post-World War I years are historically cited as the main social and
humanitarian catalyst that permitted Hitler to become the most powerful man in
Germany and the country’s undisputed <i>Fuhrer</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As Great Britain and the US began,
during the late nineteen-twenties, to visualize the consequences of the Treaty
of Versailles, appeasement commenced to be viewed as the most desirable way to
avoid escalating new hostilities between Germany—allied with fascist Italy—and
the rest of Europe. Appeasement garnered powerful support among the British
upper classes, including the House of Lords, British royalty, and big business,
at the time headquartered in the City of London. Conservative media, such as
the BBC and <i>The London Times</i>, were also supportive of appeasement as a
tool of peace.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The left and the lower and middle-class
public at large were, however, far less convinced of the wisdom of permitting
Nazi Germany to aggressively expand without drawing a line in the sand. As
Hitler advanced beyond German borders, much of the liberal press and popular
public opinion decried the former Allied powers’ increasing failure to contain
Hitler and drive Nazi Germany back, Prime Minister Chamberlain could think of nothing
better to do than to impose censorship on the liberal press, meet with Hitler
in Munich and then declare himself the architect of “peace in our time”.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Much in the way that Putin is today
seeing the desire of the West to maintain world peace and not get into a
shooting war with him as acquiescence that he can take advantage of in order to
prosecute his expansionist policies, Hitler seized the opportunity provided by
appeasement to annex Austria, parts of Czechoslovakia, Bohemia and Moravia,
before invading Poland, which finally became a bridge too far, and sparked the
start of World War II. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Historians remain divided on the issue
of appeasement, however, with one school of thought positing that the policy of
appeasement was precisely what permitted Nazi Germany to become so powerful and
to gain such a European foothold while the other school of thought is that in
the run-up to the war, Hitler’s Germany was already so powerful that early
engagement might have permitted him to win the conflict, while appeasement gave
Europe time to better prepare for what was, in the end, an unavoidable
conflagration.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgJIWJ7mf57m-kf8jiTTLEW4a1NT5QxhxEeOvnY3ytD2IUPX7tL-NcXJNyOxY7b9EjSeB9OWgv5Q6lokK-tkZL6QZswK4TQl6VxugxIgfK72HcxSxW3csVq_TqAWJFmahjaSi7esHjgO3noINUFyqwJc-f6H5AhIlTlsMmKhkxEvJokLrwroQ-uuWANaA=s884" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="546" data-original-width="884" height="248" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgJIWJ7mf57m-kf8jiTTLEW4a1NT5QxhxEeOvnY3ytD2IUPX7tL-NcXJNyOxY7b9EjSeB9OWgv5Q6lokK-tkZL6QZswK4TQl6VxugxIgfK72HcxSxW3csVq_TqAWJFmahjaSi7esHjgO3noINUFyqwJc-f6H5AhIlTlsMmKhkxEvJokLrwroQ-uuWANaA=w400-h248" width="400" /></a></div><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Like Hitler in Germany following the Treaty of
Versailles, Putin built his popular strength as a dictator on the rubble of the
fallen Soviet Union. As a ranking intelligence officer in the former KGB, Putin
worked closely with former head of state Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first freely
elected president following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and managed to become
Yeltsin’s protégé. His reputation as a strongman and <i>eminence gris</i>
behind Yeltsin placed him first in the line of succession when Yeltsin, in
ill-health and highly unpopular after a crippling recession in Russia that some
economists have compared to the Great Depression in the US and Europe, resigned
from office in 1999. In exchange, one of Putin’s first acts was to provide
immunity from prosecution to Yeltsin, who was facing possible charges of
corruption and dereliction of duty.</span><br /><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiHUuMCRzBi8g33v5NoGOxqAZVoUfB7QQwz8qAXfZUrwzyg42phJxkTHuXNZoOcRK4UBEq3XGUOCM2cKJrg6aY6qZ1mvUH-rO1lcOMb8bP_4n69LTgUXT5oGDAibB4qC2y-Sy4zJSBT5Le6x9W5-u_b_rywfmKPMka1OocJObqsj5yycdsXCi1_XI6k6A=s626" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="328" data-original-width="626" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiHUuMCRzBi8g33v5NoGOxqAZVoUfB7QQwz8qAXfZUrwzyg42phJxkTHuXNZoOcRK4UBEq3XGUOCM2cKJrg6aY6qZ1mvUH-rO1lcOMb8bP_4n69LTgUXT5oGDAibB4qC2y-Sy4zJSBT5Le6x9W5-u_b_rywfmKPMka1OocJObqsj5yycdsXCi1_XI6k6A=w400-h210" width="400" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">If Yeltsin had tried unsuccessfully to
convert Russia from a seventy-five-year-old communist regime to a free market economy
overnight, Putin took a more pragmatic approach, taking advantage of the more
open market to position himself at the forefront of a highly lucrative
oligarchy that helped him consolidate his power and made him, as well as his
cronies, a very wealthy man into the bargain. Although Yeltsin had considered
the Soviet era over and done with, if anyone was paying attention, it was easy
to see that, despite his taste for capitalism, Putin was nostalgic for the
enormous power that the Soviet Union had wielded on the world stage, and which
had waned to only a shadow of its former self under the post-Berlin Wall
Russian Federation. In this regard, cavalierly relegating the two world wars to
a position of secondary importance, Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet
Union had been, “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He also took clever advantage of the
so-called “glasnost” policy first introduced by his predecessors Mikhail Gorbachev
and Boris Yeltsin, which actively sought ever-closer ties with the West. He
established strong trade ties with Western Europe and the US and succeeded in
making some of the most powerful countries in Western Europe—most notably
Germany—largely dependent on Russian oil and gas, the Federation’s main export.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He was at first seen in the West, then,
as the new face of Russian democracy and capitalism and gained “most favored
nation” trade status with Western nations including the United States—a status
that, incredibly, even as he lays waste to Western ally Ukraine, he continues
to enjoy, and it is only now that the US and Western Europe are reluctantly
considering revoking it. It wasn’t until he was certain that he was in the best
position possible to ensure that any Western moves against him would not come
without injury to Western economies that he began to reveal who he really was—a
ruthless, anti-democratic dictator with an agenda aimed at rebuilding the
Russian Federation to the level of power once wielded by the Soviets, but
without the all-pervading communist Politburo to hamper him. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Establishing a political partnership
with Dmitry Medvedev in which they basically passed the offices of prime
minister and president back and forth between them for nearly two decades—a
“tandemocracy” as international journalists dubbed it—Putin was clearly always
the strong man and Medvedev his shill. Two years ago, Putin decided that he had
consolidated sufficient autocratic power to dispense with this farse and pushed
Medvedev, who has since been demoted to deputy chairman of the Russian Security
Council, to resign. Medvedev did so, saying that he was leaving office to
permit Putin to introduce constitutional changes—obviously designed to further
entrench him in power permanently.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhwtVs_asqj14fidAg2k9WMx6-zhzGqeKMAFWzI_10gvRG0WmCHNVZH9GZOBP7UUEp8aC0tljyYzu4_8WBq_wZZRvV4_m5hswUJ2tdRg4Y_XsGP9T0-ACkjj5ewJH-hfdhxJRiNmAaHTE8Dnp_Nj6xXSvssrrSzKjru4C4g8b6QQ7vU0E5gjA1QWh0EOw=s904" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="679" data-original-width="904" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhwtVs_asqj14fidAg2k9WMx6-zhzGqeKMAFWzI_10gvRG0WmCHNVZH9GZOBP7UUEp8aC0tljyYzu4_8WBq_wZZRvV4_m5hswUJ2tdRg4Y_XsGP9T0-ACkjj5ewJH-hfdhxJRiNmAaHTE8Dnp_Nj6xXSvssrrSzKjru4C4g8b6QQ7vU0E5gjA1QWh0EOw=w400-h300" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>"Strategic target" - a Ukrainian kindergarten</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is utterly
unprovoked and brutal. His main goal in doing so is to prevent Ukraine, as an
independent sovereign nation, from seeking membership in NATO and the European
Union and thus from becoming a basically Western country. A large country of
more than forty million people with valuable resources, Ukraine was one of the
many Eastern European nations dominated by the Soviet Union from World War II
until the end of the cold war, when, like other former satellites of the USSR,
Ukraine declared its independence from Moscow.</span><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As of the start of his reign in 1999,
however, Putin set to the task of re-introducing Russian domination by
infiltrating Ukrainian politics and eventually installing a puppet government
in Kyiv that was loyal to Moscow and beholden to Putin. In 2013, mass protests
erupted in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, the main purpose of which was to
seek closer ties with the West, and particularly with the European Union.
Although opposed by the ethnic-Russian minority—mostly centered in Eastern
Ukraine and Crimea—this movement became a full-fledged civil uprising known as
the Revolution of Dignity, in which at least ninety-eight people were killed, a
hundred went missing and some fifteen thousand were injured. In 2014, the
protests boiled over into what was essentially a popular <i>coup d’état</i>, as
a result of which Putin’s surrogate Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych was removed
from power and fled to Moscow.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhlqLmFSzzNtInKfvssAEsA2Iuo5GbQRaUR_AA_U88vyBXvDw2ph2XDq0QS5EXq92tD2oJ301Cf0twr6cQ29WEFwik1Mf8nFrM0IRZ2Bu52YoNYQLnBMgeF01KGAexIs5CNJ_UVoK6eIyjX3W4Cbr4cluinn3WF0OJ0o4BOg2TaVANjTG9hDihxXSFtfQ=s1990" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1123" data-original-width="1990" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhlqLmFSzzNtInKfvssAEsA2Iuo5GbQRaUR_AA_U88vyBXvDw2ph2XDq0QS5EXq92tD2oJ301Cf0twr6cQ29WEFwik1Mf8nFrM0IRZ2Bu52YoNYQLnBMgeF01KGAexIs5CNJ_UVoK6eIyjX3W4Cbr4cluinn3WF0OJ0o4BOg2TaVANjTG9hDihxXSFtfQ=w400-h226" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">Putin is using thermobaric bombs that crush the <br />lungs of anyone within their killing range.</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">New—this time free—elections were called,
and Petro Poroshenko won by more than fifty percent of the votes, running on a
pro-European Union platform. Since then, Putin has actively and violently moved
to retake Ukraine by force, first through the direct annexation of Crimea and
by providing material and military support to pro-Russian insurgencies in
Eastern Ukraine, and now, with the strengthening of pro-Western overtures under
the government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, by means of the full-scale
invasion and destruction of the country as a whole.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The excuse of NATO for not doing more to
militarily help the Ukrainians—among other things, at least establishing a
no-fly zone so that cities in that country don’t have to contend with Russian
air support for its bloody invasion—is that Ukraine isn’t a NATO country. But
it’s not for lack of trying on the part of Kyiv. Since once and for all
declaring its independence from Moscow, the main thrust of Ukraine’s foreign
policy has been to be accepted into the West.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEigLSyyzSNzKt2WWcD5GBMTdfUq9o9_wsJ8vb4RwIL1GSJAQBFGqYrFysTgDDfFHuwpDvArskubU1BoDvlT0ZIqL8aolDjTHfqkSpzRC0EO3FkYbM1yKTNZuLYL4p9O--bL56v02AS23GlscPTNwUf8YQ_sWRnsc4z3uy11XGFMycNlZv6nntEV4Efw9w=s626" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="386" data-original-width="626" height="246" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEigLSyyzSNzKt2WWcD5GBMTdfUq9o9_wsJ8vb4RwIL1GSJAQBFGqYrFysTgDDfFHuwpDvArskubU1BoDvlT0ZIqL8aolDjTHfqkSpzRC0EO3FkYbM1yKTNZuLYL4p9O--bL56v02AS23GlscPTNwUf8YQ_sWRnsc4z3uy11XGFMycNlZv6nntEV4Efw9w=w400-h246" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">A Ukrainian school hit by Russian cluster bombs.</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="line-height: 107%;">Cl</span><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">early, Ukraine would be a positive
addition to the West. It is the second-largest country in Europe by area (after
Russia). Its population has free access to excellent education. Full secondary
school is compulsory, and the country has a literacy rate of about ninety-nine
percent, compared to the US with only an eighty-eight percent literacy level. Higher
education is free with admissions being provided on a competitive basis. The
country’s Lviv University was established in 1616, and the rest of Ukraine’s
major cities also host centuries-old institutions of higher learning—a total of
nearly one hundred fifty, with a student population of eight hundred fifty
thousand. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The country boasts significant natural
resources, including lithium,<sub> </sub>natural gas, kaolin, timber, and
an abundance of arable land with a temperate climate that permits a long
growing season—even if in certain regions it is vulnerable to environmental
issues such as inadequate potable water, air and water pollution, and
radioactive contamination in the northeast due to the Chernobyl atomic reactor
disaster that took place in 1986, while Ukraine was still dominated by the USSR. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg1ZaQyAqNa3ML7zj0yR04JD_zHBGHTHwOoErZzSgx1i_iVtoaOAS8bnZ5m_7ro8eFeUU-dj4ihMA_3HxxxgiO3XUoKDyWEKtyEm0LBIjop8I1KYeviucM0akIPqBEIIzc-RV4oy5XAJ5btqsSXbjL8AP5gB9wocPP3HfOFqTH8o5RfDuBh-kMTbLI2IA=s844" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="564" data-original-width="844" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg1ZaQyAqNa3ML7zj0yR04JD_zHBGHTHwOoErZzSgx1i_iVtoaOAS8bnZ5m_7ro8eFeUU-dj4ihMA_3HxxxgiO3XUoKDyWEKtyEm0LBIjop8I1KYeviucM0akIPqBEIIzc-RV4oy5XAJ5btqsSXbjL8AP5gB9wocPP3HfOFqTH8o5RfDuBh-kMTbLI2IA=w400-h268" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>A bombed out apartment building</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Ukraine has a score of major industries including
power-generation, fuel, ferrous and non-ferrous mining, chemical and
petrochemical production, natural gas, machine-building, metallurgy, forestry, woodworking,
wood pulp and paper production, construction materials, and food production, among
others. The country also has a massive high-tech industrial base in such areas
as electronics, arms production and aerospace. </span><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Unfortunately, its economic performance
fails to reflect its very real potential since it has always been subject to
the vicissitudes of the Russian economy or has been punished by Russia for
seeking its independence, a problem that Western Europe and the US have failed
to systematically offset. Add to this the fact that, in just three weeks,
Russia is estimated to have destroyed a hundred billion dollars in Ukrainian
economic assets—or a little less than two-thirds of the GDP—and Ukraine is
currently the poorest nation in Europe.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhc4tDpP1kT2zfVsODP2igGYMpCXrlznDFzvg-c4kjjnFb5VPXfeUUZMPQVWhbxQq2btjSjn5GvIojphOYdlzPfFlXj9t7jAMxZovRldh1Ta18RO8x54ZM2Jma9mfHe74qlUBoIya_Y9VF2C2L1G-dbTQMuaugFLDSlFJrxeQu4OO7GYwFI1uxl08UDCw=s626" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="376" data-original-width="626" height="259" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhc4tDpP1kT2zfVsODP2igGYMpCXrlznDFzvg-c4kjjnFb5VPXfeUUZMPQVWhbxQq2btjSjn5GvIojphOYdlzPfFlXj9t7jAMxZovRldh1Ta18RO8x54ZM2Jma9mfHe74qlUBoIya_Y9VF2C2L1G-dbTQMuaugFLDSlFJrxeQu4OO7GYwFI1uxl08UDCw=w432-h259" width="432" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So why hasn’t the EU done more to
embrace Ukraine and make it a progressive Western emerging economy, since the
country is not only willing but eager to do just that? Again, the answer is
appeasement. It is the West caving to Putin’s refusal to allow a sovereign nation
to exercise self-determination. Had the West moved in 2014 to bring Ukraine
into the European Union, and more importantly, into NATO, it would have taken a
much bigger Russian commitment to war than the one it is now making by
ruthlessly invading Ukrainian territory.<o:p></o:p></span></p><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">While it may be a laudable goal to try
and avoid Western armed conflict with one of the world’s two most advanced
nuclear powers—especially considering that it is someone as ruthless and brutal
as Putin who currently has his hand on the Russian nuclear trigger—as happened
with Hitler before World War II, appeasement very likely will prove to be a
policy of postponement rather than of avoidance in facing down the Russian
dictator. Seeing Putin’s performance to date, it is very hard to imagine that
following NATO appeasement in Ukraine, he will not want to test the Western
alliance’s resolve in acting on its all-for-one-and-one-for all Western defense
policy.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhyiF1nb-MNtgPXR-ZUQErXzcK9Z963IAL-9ngUF6iw1b0ZJfV7MJR0APo73ic6frFuC87YuV8t7d00Bi7ikYVmPBszVnyK8kA3sGL3wQ3eQ4bbuYyDpBf6OJIViZXQ8nrkdR--DqUWHj-oPBTFm-xH6MA0p3hpFiIpOpV-SnTNWIYy8d1Lwy3s5tkUZA=s532" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="352" data-original-width="532" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhyiF1nb-MNtgPXR-ZUQErXzcK9Z963IAL-9ngUF6iw1b0ZJfV7MJR0APo73ic6frFuC87YuV8t7d00Bi7ikYVmPBszVnyK8kA3sGL3wQ3eQ4bbuYyDpBf6OJIViZXQ8nrkdR--DqUWHj-oPBTFm-xH6MA0p3hpFiIpOpV-SnTNWIYy8d1Lwy3s5tkUZA=w400-h265" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Russia with a defeated Ukraine would
pose an immediate threat to Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, and, thanks to its
alliance with Belarus, Lithuania. Poland would also be immediately vulnerable,
as Putin sought to make good on his dream of returning to the past glory of the
powerful Soviet Union. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The choices are clear: How NATO in
general and the US in particular react to further Russian expansion will almost
certainly either lead to a NATO-Russian shooting war, or it will lead to the
nullification of NATO as a viable body for the protection of Western security
and to the severe erosion of world security as a whole. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhUgy3xRYJNTndN1TI5QDCHJccozFgrTwBlGBK8aZ64URmgAHayMZc9fuBbFNchJzbQMSox3pem0ROcDzmr86zTL0CBMHYHhWqabyyyXTx5iM0vgogmBsGXkSBODlEu-rbc0ibaVi1Oob9xN5rQePF3wBxhhrU-o0WaXmk8UoW5AgHpvtW1HM-39FQlYQ=s409" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="252" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhUgy3xRYJNTndN1TI5QDCHJccozFgrTwBlGBK8aZ64URmgAHayMZc9fuBbFNchJzbQMSox3pem0ROcDzmr86zTL0CBMHYHhWqabyyyXTx5iM0vgogmBsGXkSBODlEu-rbc0ibaVi1Oob9xN5rQePF3wBxhhrU-o0WaXmk8UoW5AgHpvtW1HM-39FQlYQ=w246-h400" width="246" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Meanwhile, Ukraine remains the
sacrificial lamb in a still cold war between East and West. Putin is determined
to use unadulterated state-terrorist tactics to bring Ukraine to its knees,
while the West appears to be content to stand by with its arms folded in the
hope that Putin will shoot himself out in that country and perhaps not then
push on to attack others. <o:p></o:p></span></p><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">The price of both opposing strategies is tragic.
Ukraine, in just three weeks, has suffered indiscriminate bombing in sixteen of
its twenty-five regions. As in Syria and Chechnya in the past, Putin’s war
isn’t nearly as much on the Ukrainian military as it is on the Ukrainian
people. His bombs have repeatedly destroyed apartment blocks, food and water
supplies, heating facilities, stores and shops, markets, schools, churches,
and, at last count, at least twenty-four hospitals. His attack on that country
is the largest in any European country since World War II, already generating
two and a half million refugees, predominately the elderly, women and children.
In some locations, like the city of Mariupol, it has given rise to
unprecedented humanitarian crises. Also in Mariupol, in just three days of
Putin’s siege, at least one thousand three hundred civilians were slaughtered,
and Ukrainian officials were forced to start creating mass graves to handle the
war dead.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;">In short, the valiant people of Ukraine—who
only sought to live in peace and democracy—and their courageous president are
being sacrificed as pawns in the latest East-West power struggle, constituting
the most heart-breaking human tragedy in Europe since the end of World War II. </span><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><br /></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3203081344028906101.post-47232043727659543692022-03-08T20:52:00.006-03:002022-03-08T20:52:56.131-03:00A SOMBER WOMEN’S DAY AND AN INTERNATIONAL OUTRAGE<p> <br /></p>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">How very sad on
International Women's Day to see millions of refugees, mostly women and
children, as their men stay behind to defend their homeland, fleeing the
unprovoked wrath of yet another madman dictator who is placing the security of
people everywhere in imminent danger.</span><div><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;"><br /></span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiFvqH1_JLQV9-ylLG8At5pzP-GgxVDEMNdlr1PgpzrrFb-slvAiphaS3oZPyymphfJQsAVWNY6Jmpyfi-Ad1zUJlFMZM6NBuwAEE48erUQYWUMpqER6_7KNQ1rucbnIA2a3eVWx8WPuTXr3JoGLBMQaAr0HRe7eZs0ms5l-ngX3pkYV4_sgU1PYsXlcw=s804" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="604" data-original-width="804" height="564" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiFvqH1_JLQV9-ylLG8At5pzP-GgxVDEMNdlr1PgpzrrFb-slvAiphaS3oZPyymphfJQsAVWNY6Jmpyfi-Ad1zUJlFMZM6NBuwAEE48erUQYWUMpqER6_7KNQ1rucbnIA2a3eVWx8WPuTXr3JoGLBMQaAr0HRe7eZs0ms5l-ngX3pkYV4_sgU1PYsXlcw=w647-h564" width="647" /></a></div></span></div>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808659212364459371noreply@blogger.com0