Liberty or . . . Death by Covid?

Some people have to work for a living.

This reality does not just go away. In the next few months, we will see every shade of compliance and non-compliance with pandemic prohibitions and practices.
In a free nation, we should get used to the fact that not everyone is in agreement about strategies to strike a balance between defeating Covid and preventing a new epidemic of poverty.
Remember too, strategies vary, state by state. It just so happens that the New York Covid epicenter is also the media capital of this continent. Stringent restrictions for defeating Covid have been admirably initiated and administered by Gov. Cuomo in New York State. Media mouths and talking heads headquartered in the Northeast reflect the urgency of that region's life-or-death struggle with coronavirus.

New York — especially the City — is a special case due to the extreme density of population there and the widespread use of mass transit.
In other states, however, especially southern states in which mass transit is not as highly developed, population is more widely spread out. There is far more space already existing between people, towns, suburbs, institutions, retail outlets, public parks, etc. Governors in these states, including many in the west and southwest, will have— regarding their policy responses and timetable — more flexibility in their judgements. Every Governor, every public official is now involuntarily sucked into an unprecedented, massive public problem: how to balance public policies to accomplish the defeat of Covid vs. preserving what is left of economic viability.

The immensity of this epidemic’s destruction is unprecedented in the history of our nation . . . except perhaps the dire destruction and loss of life of the Civil War, and the 1918 wartime war against a flu epidemic.
Official responses in states with low population density will not be as extremely restrictive as in high-density states; nor will such prohibitions extend as far into the months ahead. Balancing Covid-control against this unexpected 1930's-ish poverty wave will be no walk in the park. Our entire nation--indeed the whole world--has been blindsided by this epidemic.

As Governors and other officials respond according to their states’ respective needs, so will the citizens therein be reacting in a wide variety of strategies,with some citizens acting much more cooperatively in the public space than others.
Many Americans still take quite seriously the words of Patrick Henry in 1775:

“Give me liberty or give me death.”

Liberty does not come cheaply. The cost is dear.  Back in the day. . . 1970ff, Crosby Stills Nash Young Gilmour sang out a dirgeful reflection of just what this life comes down to. . .
     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-Y0SMitMpk

“Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground."

Do not expect all the citizens of this free nation to agree on all the strategies for controlling Covid while preserving freedom. Many will die, but many will not. The best you can do is be an example in wearing your PPE and mask while ardently exhorting others to do so, for as long as this damned disease requires.

Let's not forget, though, that freedom of assembly is a Constitutional right. Public declarations in that realm are not too be taken lightly. Ultimately such restrictions are subject to the 1st Amendment assurance of our shared liberty.
So don’t expect that all Americans will agree with the myriad of public prohibitions and practices that are provoked by the spread of this disease; do expect that you will hear about, read about, and surely encounter in public places . . . unmasked citizens who are not wearing the politically correct mask and/or PPE. Pshaw! on them.

Also, get used to the fact that our showman President is clueless when it comes to speaking publicly about this very large problem. In his public persona, the man is too obsessed with interpreting every development in terms of whether those persons are for him or against him. If you don’t like what he does, vote for Joe.
As for me, I don't care who is President next year. I care about defending my family and our households against this disease, while upholding the freedoms we are entitled to as Americans.
We sincerely hope that whatever measures our President initiates, implements, advocates  . . . will effectively reinforce the efforts and precautions undertaken by all Americans to slap this dreaded disease back down into the ground.

Lean on your state .gov and local officials for guidance.

As for me and mine (my ICU nurse wife). . . we wear the mask and use hand sanitizer while visiting enclosed places in our Appalachian town.
And remember: not every masked person you meet is a bandit.

Glass Chimera 

The Dark Spots in Our Republic

I am defining Dark Spots this way.

Dark spots: locations in which election vote numbers are suspect, due to fraud, corruption, tampering, discrimination or miscounting.

Dark spots in our democratic republic are everywhere. No doubt they can be uncovered in numerous locales throughout our entire system of governments. Such dysfunction is a symptom of our human predicament and the institutions we devise to help us all solve our problems together.

I think the number of suspect dark spots is revealed in higher and higher numbers as our counting moves downward to the local level.

There is no statistical explanation for this except that the complexity of voter rolls gets progressively higher and higher as the numbers get bigger and bigger.

In our massive system of vote-counting, the likelihood of corruptive shenanigans is everywhere throughout the nation. The extent of corrupt data/numbers is directly proportional to the number of polling stations in the nation. There will always be a few bad apples in any batch. Knowing which ones are suspect probably requires more time and integrity than our civil authorities can effectively monitor.

It is partly because of this fully expected complexity that the founders of our democratic republic instituted an Electoral College. Admittedly, there are other factors that determined the outcome of this foundational decision, such as: all the writers of  our Constitution were middle-aged white guys who had plenty of land and money. But that was 18th-century politics in the New World and there is nothing that can change that.

To amend the Constitution is a very long, difficult process involving all of our state legislators and Congress. If there are any parties among us who have a mind to do so, you are welcome to go for it. Good luck with that. The Constitutionally-prescribed procedure would require a lot of time and coordinated effort on the part of a large number of citizens.

Now, as to the matter of the dark spots, I continue.

Regardless of the inevitable hundreds or  thousands of illegal or deceased voters and subsequent illegal votes cast throughout our United States-- the final number that actually determines who will be President —that number is systematically honed to  a very manageable, low number that is easy to count. So that we can make a definitive appointment that will be held as legitimate for the next four years.

538 electors is the number of Constitutionally determined delegates who declare who will become our President in each four-year period.

270 is the majority number that establishes the outcome of that Electoral College.

In 2016, those numbers were: 306 for Trump and 232 for Clinton. All ye Democrats, read 'em and weep. That's life in the big country. 

There's always next election, so get busy.

The integrity of our selection procedures, from the lowest precinct level all the way up to Congress and the Presidency, is a matter of interest for all of us in both parties.

Let's keep it as clean and legitimate as we can, from the top to the bottom.

Now, what about those dark spots of electoral meddling that I mentioned earlier. . .

My theory is that in a democratic republic, especially one as huge as ours, there will always be some dark spots somewhere; to sniff them all out and correct them would be an impossible, never-ending project.

We will never get rid of all the irregularities of selective process that our Constitution has prescribed and our  nation has retained for 238 years.

We can try to clean up corruption, tampering, illegal voting and dead people voting etcetera etcetera.That’s all well and good, But we’ll never undo all the evil that men do.

Especially men; blame the men, haha, especially the ole white guys like me, although I am not one of the rich privileged ones.

Nevertheless, as a citizen of the United States of America, I am entitled to a vote, which figures at a certain level in the selection process. Then those who are selected by the compilation of my vote and yours will go on to vote on the larger decisions, including who will actually be President.

Along with the vote I am entitled to my opinion,  and I am endowed by the Constitution to express it in any ways that do not infringe on the rights of my fellow-citizens.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

And the Constitution, including the Electoral College—that’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

That’s our history and we’re sticking to it.

Like it or not, according to the above procedure, 270 is determined as the necessary majority number if you wanna be President. 

Now let’s get started on the next election cycle. The American people will select our next President according to the systematic process that our founders instituted and we have retained for, lo, these many years.

And if you Democrats out there have a better person for the job, well let’s see what you come up with. Then we will  collectively render our decision in December of 2020.

May the best citizen for the job win.

Glass half-Full

Rigged Whirlwind

God bless the President of the United States.

God bless the President-elect of the United States.

Nevertheless, our President-elect hath brought down upon himself, and upon his budding administration, a whirlwind of contention about the legitimacy of the very election that puts him in charge of things.

Now Jill Stein, the Green Party's defeated nominee, is demanding recounts in some battleground states. Some Democrats are also rattling their cages with similar demands for recounting. Furthermore, some irate leftists are actively attempting to convince Electoral College delegates to violate the electoral mandate of their respective state delegations, by voting against the Republican Presidential nominee.

The overall effect is casting, in some quarters, a pall of doubt, and an implication of illegitimacy over our 2-centuries old Constitutionally-established electoral process.

Who is responsible for this dubious development?

Donald Trump.

He was the candidate who publicly proclaimed that our election system was "rigged."

His accusation, loudly stated months before the election, was a desperate attempt to capture the support of disgruntled voters in flyover country who have felt, for many years, deep down in their bones, distrust for our Democratic-Republican system of government. These so-called rust-belt-dwelling, middle-aged, middle-class, honky-white denizens of tea-party insurrection have felt, for the last eight years or more, that somehow the whole damn elite-controlled, media-manipulated, inside-the-beltway, special-interests-driven .gov-slouching Establishment is stacked against them.

But on Nov. 9, a funny thing happened on the way to the Electoral College. President Trump's strategy of sowing seeds of doubt--about the fairness of the System--it worked. Instead of getting him a recount, it got him a victory!

Who'd've thunk it? Probably the Donald himself. One thing's for sure. He's smarter than the average bear, and his timing must be damnear perfect. He played against the odds, like challenging the dealer in an Atlantic City casino. And guess what? He won.

Nevertheless, as the old Book--and sometimes the bookie--says, you sow to the wind, hey, you reap the whirlwind.

We Americans now fined ourselves feeling a whirlwind of discontent that ariseth from the other direction, like the hurricane after the eye has passed. This strange bellowing stirreth up electoral troubles anew, when we thought the whole damn thing had blown over.

Hence, post-election, leftist wolves now Occupy those Boston tea-party rumors of discontent; they howl beneath a full moon of coveted anarchy--contending that the system is rigged. It is rigged by our out-of-fashion Constitutional electoral process, and by election improprieties in several key states, and also by the fact that Sec. Clinton has reportedly gathered more popular votes.

"Rigged!" so they say. Who came up with that allegation?

President Trump.

You reap what you sow.

Glass half-Full

Conscience and Constitution

My fellow Republicans, excuse me please.

I see nothing wrong with addressing a national convention with the message that Ted Cruz presented last week. The Senator's exhortation to let conscience be our guide is totally appropriate. And his emphasis on the Constitution is supportive of our steadfast heritage as free Americans whose human rights are assured by that amazing covenant.

The covenantal power of our 235-year-old Constitution goes far, far beyond the power of any one man to guarantee our liberty.

So let the conventioneers leap frantically on their bandwagon of TrumpPower.

Let them boo Ted to their heart's content. I don't care; obviously, Ted doesn't care either. He did what he had to do.

Those rude conventioneers were deriding a man who is brave, and smart enough to stand on principle instead of bending to politics, a man who has petitioned the United States Supreme Court nine times. He is no spring chicken when it comes to Constitutional rights.

So, for him to admonish his own party and the nation to retain Constitutional perspective instead of playing fast and loose with politics-- this is no offense to Republicans, nor to any of us as Americans.

If I could add a contemporary person to the annals of President Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, it would be Cruz.

Trust Ted.

And I'm not talking about "Ted in 2020". I'm talking about what he said the other night.

Which is to say. . .

Preserve the true guarantor of our liberties, the Constitution of the United States, and

Follow your conscience.

As for me and my vote--I'll decide that when it is time to make a decision, in November.

And if you think I'm a RINO instead of an elephant, that's no big deal to me. Maybe I'd rather have "more of the same" than take a chance on a high-roller who thinks he can trump every hand that dares to contend with him.


Because this ain't Atlantic City; this is America.

We've got from now until election to decide between Hillary and Donald; we will examine their characters and their motives as they contend for the highest office in our land.

I don't like either one of them. Nevertheless, may the better leader win.

But here's my admonition to you: no matter who the next President is, watch your wallet, and your constitutional rights.

Smoke

Mad

They say all the political powers that be are quaking in their boots because voters are mad and nobody can accurately predict what's going to happen.

Young Dems, hyper venting under the rhetorical influence of Bernie, are magnetizing progressively leftward toward a newly-discovered frigid frontier which must be the absolute dead-0 Socialist north-pole, heretofore unseen by any yankee marauders, but well-known to their European vanguards. They better get to their fragile pole quick because that could-be black-hole which used to be a white-hole , having been sighted now at the Leftward arctic pole hole is--it is wholly disappearing fast, having fallen under the destructive influence of global warming, climate change and them infamous heat-seeking carbon emission missiles.

Channeling the wicked witch of the North, the possessed pole is reportedly melting because Dorothy blew in from Kansas or maybe it was Texas and put a crimp in their plans by drillin' in some frickin' fracking destructionics down south where people are living and taking up space and generally messin' up the planet. But it'll be a high tide in hell before anything gets done to stop the global carbon juggernaut, even though they've pointed out, from Paris, Lima, Copenhagen and Kyoto, poles are melting, according to the polls.

Speaking of Poles, where's Lech Walesa when you need him?

But I digress, although I think it should be pointed out that the opposite of "digress" is "progress", which I used to advocate until the Democrats absconded the term for their own socialist identity crisis antithesis. That said, I like progress, not progressive. Progress is what Republicans used to facilitate with their capital by investing it in American industry before all the derivatives and the MBSs and the CDOs and the credit default swaps and the debilitating .gov regs, and the nuts and bolts stuff getting moved offshore or wherever it went after Nafta and Chairman Mao got a hold of it. Now you understand of course you'll have to take that with a grain of salt as I move into phase II of my political analysis.

Republicans, on the other hand, unlike the hyper-magnetizing Dems, are furiously de-magnetizing, which is to say they're falling apart at the seems under the hyper-influence of Trump's methodical craps-table croupier call of snake-eyes, which will damn-shure be a rude awakening for them when those two little black dots show up on white dice, staring back at them, instead of the Seven that the republican rabble thought would turn up when they staked all their chips on Donald Duck, or excuse me, that other Donald. You thought there was trouble in Paradise and Camelot, just wait and see what happens in Dodge City when the chips fall where they may, probly long about May of 2017, after the Donald has terrorized all Washington's heretofore decent and proper bureaucratic denizens by trumping their full suited straight-flushes and de-levitating their long-standing no-trump pipedreams of legalese and illegal ease. After he will have been yanking their yonder inside-the-beltway chain-games for a few months with very little response from the sedentary Establishment, he'll get flustered enough to fire them all if not even call down the goons on em. "Get 'em outa here; get 'em outa here," will be the order of the day.

This is quite different from what, say, Ted Cruz would do.

You see Ted is mad too.

"We're all mad," he said to Megyn Kelly yesterday when she asked him something about who is mad or why the people are mad, or something like that.

There we were in closed venue, which happened to be a church in North Carolina, about 600 of us Americans listening to Megyn Kelly interview Ted. I mean, sure, it was a friendly crowd, not like the 47%ers.

And he said that, yes, the people are mad, and something needs to be done to change the way things are done in Washington, so that the .gov reflects the will of the people instead of imposing the .gov's will on the people.

He mentioned a few revisions, long overdue, such as abolishing superfluous federal agencies that presume to do for the people what the people can actually do for themselves. Hence, phase out: the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, Housing/Urban Development. He mentioned repealing Obamacare and Common Core, defunding Planned Parenthood, and abolishing IRS by implementing a flat tax.

All of which should be done, but systematically--the way a, say, Constitutional attorney would do it, legislatively organized and judiciously authenticated. Not undertaken recklessly like a Trumpian bull in a china shop would do it. Let's just get our government back to Constitutional basics. That's all we can afford without taxing We the people into scurrilous servitude.

However, it is obvious that the whole streamlining process could prove to be disruptive.

Therefore, the formidable task of deconstructing our overbloated, overbudgeted, overdeficited Federal government should be entrusted to someone with a Constitutional conscience. I'd trust Ted to lead it before I'd trust a high-rollin', trash-talkin' robber baron with a smirk on his face who's got a bouncer at the door.

Just sayin'.


Glass Chimera

Perfect Constitutional Ambiguity

Eleven score and nine years ago, our forefathers brought forth upon this nation an original Constitution, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that people can govern themselves.

Now we are engaged in a great political debate, testing whether our nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.

We are met now on a great battlefield of that nation's politics, a battle-boulevard that stretches from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other.

We have come to this crossroads to dedicate a vacant seat to that great cause for which many of us have labored, and for which many of us have given our strength, our endurance, our political partisanship, our blood sweat and fears and in some cases our very lives.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this--that we should dedicate this vacant chair.

It is for us, the living, to be now dedicated to the task remaining before us--that from this honored dead Justice we take increased devotion to that cause for which he gave the last full measure of his jurisprudence--that we now highly resolve that this dead Justice shall not have served in vain, and that that timeless Constitution upon which our freedom and liberty has been laid shall not now itself be sacrificed upon the battlefield of partisanship, but that, accordingly, the President "shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate," a Justice of the supreme Court, and that:

Our Constitution's prescribed procedure, set forth in perfect ambiguity so that neither one Branch of our government, the Executive, shall presume to dominate the other Branch, the Legislative, nor shall the Legislative obliterate the the Executive. . .

Therefore do we resolve that this embattled chair--our untimely and inconvenient ninth-chair vacancy--can, and should be, and will be, determined and thus fulfilled by us, the living, in this our 21st-century circumstance as it exists here and now, and still yet through the Constitutional protocol that was set before us, lo, these many scores of years ago. . . and furthermore that:

Our government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.



Glass half-Full