Our Rule of Law trumps Trump

 Twenty (20) former US Attorneys who are Republicans have issued a letter explaining why they will not endorse Donald Trump in this current election.

I discovered this letter in today's Washington Post, a publication to which I subscribe, but a paper that is unfavorably regarded by some of my very old and dear friends.

If you care to view the entire text, and the accompanying text in the Washington Post, check it out:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republican-us-attorneys-back-biden/2020/10/27/c1b55702-17fd-11eb-befb-8864259bd2d8_story.html

Even so, I am taking the liberty to post an entire paragraph of these Prosecutors' communication to all citizens who have ears to hear or eyes to see, in these times of divisive electoral politics.

Herewith you may read and consider. . . the most important paragraph of their urgent letter, signed by Republican prosecutors, all of whom served in Republican administrations, dating back to the days of Eisenhower.

To whit:

"As we watch the turbulent events unfolding in our country today, we are concerned that the President has departed from this traditional mandate in several troubling ways. First, the President has clearly conveyed that he expects his Justice Department appointees and prosecutors to serve his personal and political interests in the handling of certain cases – such as the investigations into foreign election interference and the prosecution of his political associates – and has taken action against those who have stood up for the interests of justice. He has politicized the Justice Department, dictating its priorities along political lines and breaking down the barrier that prior administrations had maintained between political and prosecutorial decision making – a barrier that has been fundamental to maintaining confidence among the American people that their Justice Department is acting as a fair and impartial arbiter of prosecutorial discretion. Finally, he has undermined the Department’s ability to unify and lead our nation’s law enforcement by picking political fights with state and local officials in a naked effort to demonize and blame them for the disturbances in our cities over the past several months. For these reasons, we believe that President Trump’s leadership is a threat to the rule of law in our country, and we do not support his reelection."

As a citizen of these already-Great United States of America, I submit their statement to you for your consideration during these critical times of sectarian division, which will be resolved into a soon-to-come period of recovery and reconciliation during the administration of President Biden who will, I am sure,  speak to all of the people, not only to those who support him and stroke his ego.

Glass half-Full

We Gotta Cure America

 I keyed into an online discussion this morning; they were asking a lot of timely questions and answering some of them.

https://urbancure.org/cureamerica/1471/The-State-of-Black-America

Star Parker, Marc Little, Dr. William Allen, Henry Olsen: They were talking . . .

~ Four million people were released from slavery in 1865. How did they survive?

Hint: It wasn't .gov!

~ Is the “color blindness” that Civil Rights Era leaders strove for now being set aside for  Color Obsession?

~ How can Americans achieve mutual love and respect without obsessing over color? 

~ Is America even a suitable home for Afro-Americans?

~ Somebody said Marriage is only for white people. Say what?!

~ Is marriage rooted in systemic racism?

~ Identity politics is being pushed. “The Narrative” is a narrative of a black community apart.

The most extreme that this discussion ever got was:

~ “Unless black people save the country it will not be saved.”

Say what?!

But really, hey, seriously . . .

~ How do you wake up in the morning and bring value to your family?

~ How do you get a good education so you can put food on the table?

~ There's Marc Little, California pastor, conservative, opposed idealistically to programs that entrench .gov dependency, which would also include. . . Obamacare.

And yet, and yet, Pastor Marc Little facilitated a large sign-up for Obamacare among his people because, because . . .

“I looked in the face of people who had a need, and I had no solution.”

~ Star’s asking: Where is the resilience in our community just to ‘figure it out’?

~ Is God or .gov your supplier?

Star Parker’s a real spark plug for this kind of self-initiated activism, not for the victimhood sob-story that identity politics is pushing now.

~ Victimhood ideology is Poison.

Aw c’mon now, seriously. . .

~ How do we build prosperous communities?

~ Dr. Allen said there can be no security without freedom. Not the other way around! Check it out:

https://urbancure.org/cureamerica/1471/The-State-of-Black-America 

 

Glass half-Full

Welfare by any Other Name

 Looking back on my 69 years, many long-gone images jump into mind.

One that is still relevant is the image of Henry Paulson on the tube. He was Treasurer of the US in 2008.

During the financial crisis, which, at that time, initiated our Great Recession (it’s been really great hasn’t it?!), Henry was pleading with the US Congress to bail us out. 

The top dogs in our financial industry had screwed up badly with their MBS-CDS-CDO-driven speculative frenzy in the stock market.

So Hank and the other major players got together and tried to figure it out—just how they might rescue our whole damned economy from disaster.

Well they couldn’t figure it out, because they couldn’t assemble enough pieces of their newly-configured financial wizardry to get a fix for the cataclysm that was going down—even as we speak, or . . . as we spoke, or as they were speaking, or, anyway—crashing and tumbling on wall street and main street and easy street and park place and broadway, not to mention mediterranean ave and baltic—God only knows what they were going through.

Well the head honchos couldn’t figure it out so they went to Congress and pleaded the 5th—or, rather, pleaded for money.

Well Congress kicked it around a little bit and they couldn’t figure it out either so they said No.

They said what ?

They said no. Congress said they would not bail out the formerly hyper-inflated financial industry.

Well this would never do, as everybody knew. 

So Hank went back on the tube and begged for money again and so they twisted a few arms over on the hill and made some deals and wheel’n’dealed a bit and came up with some appropriations and the Congress of the United States bailed the bankers out. 

TARP it!

So, this image of Hank on the tube pleading. . . I’m not sure if I actually saw him doing that at the time, because we are not TV people, we never had cable or even a TV itself. I was a radio guy and I remember hearing about all this and remembering now that i was sitting in my car in a parking lot at 7:55 in the morning before going into our local elementary school to help teachers with special children. And it was Chi Risdall or Bob Edwards or some speaking voice explaining what was going down at the time, which was just about everything or so it seemed . . .

So I don’t know if I ever actually saw Hank’s pleading at that time.

But later . . .

Much later, years later, after we’d amplified all our online connectivity and gotten the big mac and signed into netflix and prime and all that . . . I happened to catch a documentary on netflix about the Financial Crisis that brought on the Great Recession (it’s been great hasn’t it?)

So I think it was on that documentary that the image of Hank pleading with the American people—but mainly the Congressional portion of the American people—sticks in my mind.

Good ole Hank, God bless ‘im.

Anyway, its funnny how these images float around in mind now during the Age of Online, since imagery is everywhere  now, even in the palm of your hand and on your dashboard and every waiting room and blahblah . . .

And as I approach the bottom line here, I do remember Hank and our Congress bailng out wall street. Welfare for wall street.

Money tossed—via the US Treasury and hocus-pocus US Federal Reserve—money deposited into our financial system at the very highest level . . .

So it trickles down.

Now since our big money guys got on welfare back in the day and this trickle down thing has been keeping “our economy” on fiat life support with greenbacks but mainly supercharged electrons and and. . .

And right now that’s not really working out so good for folks in the rust belt and the sun belt and even inside the beltway maybe we should do a replay and try another bailout, only this time from the other direction.

This time, instead of going GOP trickle-down, we’ll do Dem percolate-up.

Toss the Repubs out and bring the Demmies in for awhile and let them throw money at poor people for awhile so it can percolate back up through the system to where it always ends up anyway, at the top instead of just starting up there to begin with. 

Ever since the big bailout in ’09 when wall street went on welfare— now everybody’s on the Fed-Treas hot-air gravy train and so republicans and other former conservatives can no longer complain about po’folks doin’ nothin on welfare after  Nixon said we’re all Keynesians now and glass-steagall is forever shattered and from which direction the money moves it doth no longer matter . . .

Glass half-Full

We Need True Leadership

 In September of 1953, Chief Justice of our Supreme Court, Fred Vinson died.

Shortly thereafter, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed the new Chief Justice: Earl Warren

Earl Warren was a natural-born leader. By the time he was appointed as our nation’s highest Judicial official, Warren had already served the people of California as District Attorney of Alameda County, California Attorney General, and Governor. 

Very soon after Chief Justice Vinson’s death, Eisenhower wasted no time in nominating Earl as our new Chief Justice.

In like manner, Chief Justice Warren wasted  no time in initiating the Court's impending consideration of a case that he knew would be a landmark in the history of these here United States, Brown v. Board of Education.

On December 12, 1953, Earl Warren hit the bench running, with a bold intention to consider the case and decide it in such a way as to forge a new platform of legally recognized equality for black citizens in our Justice system. 

Historian Bernard Schwartz, in his definitive book, History of the Supreme Court (Oxford University Press, 1953), reported that Chief Justice Warren’s words to his new brethren were quoted as follows:

“I can’t escape the feeling that, no matter how much the Court wants to avoid it, it (we) must now face the issue. The Court has finally arrived at a place where it must determine whether segregation is allowable in public schools.”

Warren’s preliminary remarks to his associates went on to assert, right off the bat,  that the Brown case should be the instrument to overturn at last the old Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) unjust decision by which “separate but equal” laws and conditions allowed racial discrimination to persist in our nation, especially in the South.

The Southern boy who now writes this blog was two years old at that time, but that’s neither here nor there.

In concluding his introduction of the case to the other Justices, Earl confided:

“My instincts and feelings lead me to say that, in these cases we should abolish the practice of segration in public schools—but in a tolerant way.”

And that is exactly what they did. Warren’s initial five-Justice majority— including Alabama native Hugo Black, and Justices Douglas, Burton and Minton— was ultimately joined by the other four Justices, including  two other Southerners, Reed and Clark.

In 1954, the Supreme Court of our United States rendered a unanimous decision, Brown v. Board of Education. In so doing, they changed the course of history, and they initiated a process for leveling, for the first time, the scales of Justice. 

In his History opus, Bernard Schwartz states that Justice Stanley Reed acceded to the majority in that landmark decision because, as Schwartz reported it:

“He (Justice Reed) had . . . recognized that, in practice,  Plessy  (case 1896) had not produced anything like equal facilities for blacks . . .”

Looking back into history, we see that Earl Warren’s leadership was bold and effective from the start, and most effective at a juncture when a Court decision made a very big impact on our life in these here United States. 

Thanks to Earl Warren’s savvy, black folks have had a better deal than they had before that 1954 wrinkle in time and jurisprudence. 

Now . . . here in 2020, we have a candidate among us whose leadership experience echoes that of Californian Earl Warren:

Kamala Harris, formerly District Attorney of San Francisco, and Attorney General of California and now U.S. Senator. 

Presently, she is running on the Biden ticket  for Vice President of these here United States.

Now vice-presidents are not generally known for their extraordinary leadership. This is largely because their gifting is generally dimmed in the high profile of the president under whom they serve.

In our present situation, we have a very capable Vice President, Mike Pence. He is a seasoned political leader who was formerly Governor of Indiana. 

God bless Vice President Mike Pence. 

He is an upright man, an honorable man and an experienced leader. I voted for hm in 2016.

Unfortunately, the light of Mike’s gifting was tucked under a bushel when he agreed to serve under the self-obsessed twitterite who now occupies the white house.

Therefore, I will be voting for his opponent in a couple of weeks: Kamala Harris.

And here is why:

We are now positioned, historically, in a Brown v. Board of Education moment. But the issue on the hotplate this time is not so much . . . discrimination or double standards in education,etc.

Our present, high-profile injustice is police brutality, as is evidenced by the George Floyd incident, Breonna Taylor, Freddie Gray. . .et al

We still have now two different systems of law enforcement in these here United States of America. And that is not true Justice.

We need to reconstruct the whole arrangement of law enforcement in our big cities. This is what the "defund Police" blahblah is all about. It's not about some pie-in-the-sky idea of doing away with police. It's about updating our notions about their real function in our neighborhoods and why we need them.

Inappropriate, knee-jerk Police brutality against black citizens has got to go.

Just like segregation had to go in 1954. 

And I perceive that Kamala Harris, soon to be Vice President of these here United States and thereby President of the Senate . . . is the bold leader whose savvy can make a real difference, somewhat like Earl Warren's seasoned leadership did back in ’54.

We’ll see what happens after Nov. 3, if donald doesn’t throw a big monkey wrench to wreck our electoral system. 

Glass half-Full

The Roberts Shift

 In 1930’s Depression era America our Supreme Court spent five years resisting New Deal legislation proposed by President Roosevelt and legislated by a Democratic Congress.

In his definitive volume A History of the Supreme Court, historian Bernard Schwartz documents the Court’s rejection of progressive New Deal Acts:

“The effort to move the nation forward came up against the restricted view of government power still held by the Supreme Court. The result was a series of decisions that invalidated most of the New Deal legislation. In 1935 and 1936 cases, the Supreme Court struck down two key New Deal antidepression measures, the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act.”

Beginning with the stock market Crash on ’29, our nation’s struggles against economic disaster had become more and more desperate. More and more Americans were out of work, losing resources, even starving. By 1937, the Supreme Court changed its tune, relented, and began approving the Congress’ New Deal interventions to restore, at least minimally, some measure of prosperity.

Justice Owen Roberts was the “swing voted” that turned the tide of Court resistance to approval of Congress’ relief measures. 

In his 1993 History, Bernard Schwartz identifies Justice Roberts’ early view of an activist Presidential/Congressional intervention during the Depression time of trouble. 

“It was his key vote that enabled the conservative bloc to prevail in the decisions striking down . . . important New Deal measures.”

But Justice Roberts’ changing point of view later became the linchpin upon which the Court began reversing its earlier resistance against Congressional activism. Bernard Schwartz identified this shift when he wrote:

“It was Justice Roberts’s vote as well that enabled . . . Chief Justice (Hughes) to bring about the great jurisprudential reversal that took place in 1937.”

Maybe my assessment of complex legal information is too simplistic when I read about Justice Roberts' shift: He changed his mind. 

Somewhere back in time, some wise person said that history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. 

Now, eighty-three years after Justice Owen Roberts’ cast his votes to turn the tide of governmental relief intervention, we may have a “rhyming” historical situation, with a different Justice Roberts.

In our present circumstances, Chief Justice John Roberts, generally regarded—like the earlier Justice Roberts—as conservative, and having been appointed—like the earlier Justice Roberts—by a conservative Republican President (Bush) . . . surprised everyone in 2012 with his “swing vote” on the Affordable Care Act. 

In 2012, Chief Justice Roberts  chief sought a way to preserve the Affordable Care Act on some constitutional grounds, by calling it a tax.

At least that’s my oversimplified citizen’s-view of what he did. The outcome is that we still have the Affordable Care. 

Like our present-day Justice Roberts, the 1930’s Justice Owen Roberts turned the tide of some important relief legislation, by taking  a different—perhaps more compassionate—view of a progressive President (Obama’s) partnering with a Democratic Congress to make life a little easier for Americans during hard times. 

Thus we see that history does sometimes rhyme, as Roberts rhymes with Roberts.

Glass half-Full

Sunshine Rhyme

What sunshine sounds like

 

Sun rise brings us day

What will we do and say

In sun’s  light today?

Water refracts sun

Water ripples light asunder

Refraction wonder

Cloud disperses sun

Scatters all around our town

Happy sun shine down.

Sunlight splash on down 

Shine upon us all around

Burn away my frown.

 

We collect sunshine.

Is it even worth a dime?

Worth more  than my rhyme!

 

Glass Chimera 

Run the Bully out of Town

 Whether folks will admit it or not, Joe's skillful refutation of Donald's bully a few weeks ago, was a stellar performance. 

The encounter revealed one determined gentleman consistently knocking down every rude and crude offense that Donald could muster. 

The statesman outwitted the joker on every point.

And Joe will do it again. 

Also, if you playback a collection of random facial shots during the encounter, you will likely see one scowl after another on Donald's face, while the Joe mugs will reveal a guy who smiles a lot and understands how to maintain a stable attitude under a barrage of trash talk.

Glass half-Full

Proud Authoritarians

 This is what Antifa and others are warning you about:

Pay attention. Beware.

Glass half-Full