In Regard to the Upcoming Election, in Only 26 Days:
- If you support the right of a woman to choose to have an abortion, or
- If you support increased gun
control measures to reduce the frequency of mass murders, or
- If you support a broadening,
not a narrowing, of access to voting for all Americans, regardless of race or
ethnicity,
In Florida, your choice is a
simple one. Governor DeSantis, Senator Rubio, and almost all Republican
legislators in Congress and State legislatures OPPOSE these things. Democrats, like Val Demings and Charlie Crist SUPPORT them.
(And if you are not a Florida voter, the same kinds
of simple choices will be on your ballot in your State.)
That is why you should only vote
for Democrats and get your like-minded friends and relatives to do the same. Please remember
that a vote for any Republican
who does not denounce the defeated former president, in any election
whatsoever, is actually a vote for the replacement of democracy with the
authoritarian rule he represents.
JL
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Republicans Aren’t all Bad! - Four Fine Ones!
Is America's Experiment with Democracy Failing?
Presidents
Lincoln, Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower all recognized the role of
government as the servant of the people, working in their interest. But the rest
of them, including Reagan, all worked to take power away from the people and
rest it elsewhere, usually somewhere in the private sector. (Some Democrats were also guilty of this but
it was not a built-in part of their belief system, as it was, and is, with
Republicans.) Their phony-baloney ‘trickle-down’ economic theory is a part of
this.
Today’s Republican
Party is just a continuing manifestation of that, directing power away from the
voting public, seasoned with appeals to racism and bigotry. But this time around,
it also ignores, tacitly going along with, acts of violence such as that which
occurred on January 6, 2021. Could this
be just another indication that America's great experiment with democracy is
failing?
What more
evidence of that do we need than the fact that millions of voters support
Republican candidates who not only refuse to accept election results but
advocate the diminishing of voters’ rights and women's rights to make personal
medical decisions as well.
Something is
wrong with a system in which such candidates will still receive millions of
votes from those who are willing to toss American democracy as we know it into
the trash can. Regardless of the results of the mid-term elections on November
8, we should start thinking about how democracy can be modified for it to be
able to make a comeback from the precarious state it is in today.
Meanwhile, make
sure that you vote and urge others to do so as well!
JL
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A Movie I Will Be Seeing
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| Blanchett in 'Tar' |
There’s an interesting review of a new film, ‘Tar’ (with an accent mark over the ‘a’) in last week’s New Yorker magazine. Starring Cate Blanchett, it's about an eminent symphony conductor who had conflicts of her own. I have yet to see the movie, but before even doing so, one comment by reviewer Anthony Lane drew my attention, since it is a thought that I have had myself lately. Here’s the quote:
“During a class that she’s giving to would-be conductors at Julliard, one of them claims, ‘as a BIPOC pangender person,’ not to be ‘into Bach, who is very dead and very white and had the patriarchal nerve to father twenty children.' Lydia (played by Blanchett) strikes back. According to taste, you will either cheer her majestic gutting of twenty-first-century self-regard, and her stout defense of high aesthetic principles, or agree with the student that she’s ‘a fucking bitch.’ But wait. The battle lines between such opposing points of view, Field (the film’s director) suggests may not be as clear as all that, and, over two hours and forty minutes, the war grows very messy indeed."
I will see this film
JL
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Russian Colonialism Cannot be Resurrected
England, France, and even Portugal developed colonial empires to acquire natural resources. Eventually, they could not prevent these 'colonies' from going their own way. And once this happened, they could not get them back, no matter how hard they tried. England, France, and Portugal learned this in Africa, Asia, and North America where Algeria, Vietnam, India, Egypt, Angola, Brazil, and even the United States are examples.
Russia's empire was developed not for natural resources, but to provide geopolitical security on its borders, starting centuries ago under Catherine the Great. When these unofficial 'colonies' were permitted to go their own way, as happened with the disintegration of the USSR in 1990, getting them back was also no longer possible. Vladimir Putin is learning this lesson the hard way in Ukraine.
JL
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Sports Conversation Overheard in 2050
Grandpa, what’s an ‘umpire’? Is it something like one of those scary creatures
from Transylvania who suck blood?
No, no, honey! An umpire was someone who used to make the
decisions that had to be made in most sporting events. Sometimes they were also called ‘referees.’
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| Ballplayer arguing with an umpire in 'old days' before they were automated out of their jobs. |
But whatever they were called, why would anyone need a human being to do these things, Grandpa? For as long as I remember, they’ve been done by artificial intelligence, like in video games.
Yes, that’s the way it is nowadays but
once upon a time, it took a human eye to determine if a baseball pitch was a
ball or a strike, or whether a base runner was safe or out. But once all of the ‘rules’ that went into
decision-making were coded into the system, it was easy for such decisions to
be made without any human intervention.
Wow! Now
I finally understand why there must be thousands of high-definition cameras capturing
everything that happens on the field from every possible direction in every
professional baseball game played in the country. I've heard about them but I've never seen them. Is that true?
Yes, it is! That's because they're so miniaturized, no one ever notices them! They're really tiny. They got that idea from the old gambling
casinos, before they all shut down after gambling went totally online. It worked so well with baseball that it soon
also became routine for football, basketball, hockey, horseracing, and even
tennis.
That’s why, I guess, football players don’t
argue anymore about whether a pass is incomplete, where the ball is placed
after a play, if they played too rough, or if some rule or other was broken.
And there are hundreds of those
rules! Helps a lot on the basketball
court especially in calling fouls. And
there are no more ‘dead heats’ in horseracing.
The kind of cameras we have now can determine the winner, even if it is
by a millionth of an inch.
But tell me, what did we do with the people who
had jobs as vampires and referees?
Umpires, not vampires, honey! Most of them got jobs with the concessions at
the sporting events, like selling hot dogs or beer.
Thanks a lot, Grandpa! I have to run now. I am going to watch a big pickleball match my
school is playing in this afternoon.
I wonder if they have cameras there too. Check it out and let me know!
JL
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A Sports Quiz
There are six States hosting NFL teams but do not boast having a major league baseball team. Can you name them?
And where can you find the one place
that has a major league baseball team but doesn’t have an NFL franchise within
its bounds as well? Can you name it?
Answers: The six States hosting NFL teams but
which do not have a major league baseball team are North Carolina
(Panthers), Tennessee (Titans), Indiana (Colts) Louisiana (Saints), Nevada (Raiders)
and New Jersey (Jets and Giants). The
only NFL team in New York State is the Buffalo Bills, the Giants and the Jets being based across the Hudson River in New
Jersey,where they play all their home games.
And Toronto, home of the Blue Jays baseball team, is the
only major league baseball location without an NFL team.
JL
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The Dirty Truth About Republicans
This morning, Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson posted the following on her daily free newsletter, 'Letters from an American.' (You should subscribe.) Its sources, as usual, are thoroughly documented. Here is the text of her posting, which tells the truth about the evil ideas that permeate today's Republican Party. Read it and pass it on! JL
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Last Thursday, October 6, the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee tweeted: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”
On Sunday, October 10, after his Instagram account was restricted for antisemitism, rapper Kanye West, now known as “Ye,” returned to Twitter from a hiatus that had lasted since the 2020 elections to tweet that he was “going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” This was an apparent reference to the U.S. military’s “DEFCON 3,” an increase in force readiness.
Today, Ian Bremmer of the political consulting firm the Eurasia Group reported that billionaire Elon Musk spoke directly with Russian president Vladimir Putin before Musk last week proposed ending Russia’s attack on Ukraine by essentially starting from a point that gave Putin everything he wanted, including Crimea and Russian annexation of the four regions of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia, as well as Ukraine’s permanent neutrality. This afternoon, Musk denied the story; Bremmer stood by it.
On Sunday, at a rally in Arizona, Trump claimed that President George H.W. Bush had taken “millions and millions” of documents from his presidency “to a former bowling alley pieced together with what was then an old and broken Chinese restaurant…. There was no security.” (In fact, the National Archives and Records Administration put documents in secure temporary storage at a facility that had been rebuilt, according to NARA, with “strict archival and security standards, and…managed and staffed exclusively by NARA employees.”)
Then Trump went on to accuse NARA of planting documents—his lawyers have refused to make that accusation in court—and, considering his habit of frontloading confessions, made an interesting accusation: “[The Archives] lose documents, they plant documents. ‘Let’s see, is there a book on nuclear destruction or the building of a nuclear weapon cheaply? Let’s put that book in with Trump.’ No, they plant documents.”
Antisemitism, Putin’s demands in Ukraine, and stolen documents seem like an odd collection of things for the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees the administration of justice in the United States, to endorse before November’s midterm elections.
But in these last few weeks before the midterms, the Republican Party is demonstrating that it has fallen under the sway of its extremist wing, exemplified by those like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who tweeted last week that “Biden is Hitler.”
Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) this weekend told an audience that Democrats are in favor of “reparation” because they are “pro-crime.” “They want crime,” Tuberville said. “They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have,” Tuberville told the cheering crowd in an echo of the argument of white supremacists during Reconstruction. “They want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that. Bullsh*t. They are not owed that.”
On October 6, New Hampshire Senate nominee Don Bolduc defended the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the subsequent loss of recognition of the constitutional right to abortion. The issue of abortion “belongs to the state,” he said. “It belongs to these gentlemen right here, who are state legislators representing you. That is the best way I think, as a man, that women get the best voice.” Republican super PACs are pouring money behind Bolduc.
Even those party members still trying to govern rather than play to racism, sexism, and antisemitism are pushing their hard-right agenda.
Senate Republicans have introduced a bill to get rid of the drug pricing reforms the Democrats passed in the Inflation Reduction Act. That law, which received no Republican votes, permits Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies and caps annual drug costs for seniors on Medicare at $2,000. It also caps insulin for Medicare patients at $35 a month. (Insulin is ten times more expensive in the U.S. than in other wealthy countries: a 2018 Rand Corporation study found average prices per vial of $98.70 in the U.S., $12 in Canada, and $6.94 in Australia.) Republicans say that these price caps will kill innovation and that government should not oversee the price of drugs.
The measure will not stand a chance in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but that Republicans felt comfortable introducing it is strong signaling for their intentions going forward. It is, after all, in line with Senator Rick Scott’s (R-FL) plan to sunset all laws automatically every five years, repassing them piecemeal if Congress is so inclined.
David Montgomery of the Washington Post has written a roundup of what 21 experts “in the presidency, political science, public administration, the military, intelligence, foreign affairs, economics and civil rights” say would happen should Trump be reelected in 2024.
They argue that upon taking office, Trump would install super loyalists to do his bidding and would ignore the Senate if it tried to stop him, as he largely did in his term. He has, after all, already outlined a plan to fire career civil servants and has explored a rigorous system for guaranteeing loyalists for those posts. Next, the experts suggest, he would deploy the military at home against his enemies while disengaging internationally and turning things over to Putin and other authoritarians. America’s global leadership would end, not least because no other nations would trust our intelligence services. Political violence would become the norm, giving Trump an excuse to declare martial law, and our democracy would fall.
We ignore this at our peril. After all, more than half the Republican nominees for office in November are election deniers, and on Saturday, October 8, Republican nominee for Nevada secretary of state Jim Marchant told a rally, “We’re gonna fix the whole country and President Trump is gonna be president again.”
But there is an interesting dynamic afoot. In some cases, Republican lawmakers, especially Representatives Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Liz Cheney (R-WY), have urged voters to back Democrats rather than election-denying extremist Republicans. And, as historical essayist Sarah Vowell noted on October 6, in deep red states like Montana and Utah where voters will not consider voting for a Democrat, Democrats have teamed up with never-Trump Republicans to back Independents who are now running strong against the radical extremists.
Scholars who study how to defeat rising authoritarianism agree that such cross-party cooperation is vital. And we have an illustration of just how that has worked here before. In the 1864 U.S. elections, in the midst of the Civil War, Republican Abraham Lincoln and party leaders knew that Lincoln could not win reelection without support from Democrats, who would never vote for a Republican after spending a decade attacking them on grounds of racism.
So Lincoln rebranded his coalition the “National Union Party” and crossed his fingers that it would work to attract moderate Democrats, a hope encouraged when the extremist Democrats split into angry factions at their own convention. Still, by summer, no one knew if the coalition would hold or not, and Lincoln himself thought he would lose unless something major happened on the battlefields. It did: Atlanta fell on September 2. And in November, Lincoln won the election at the head of the National Union Party.
The next year, Congress ended the policy that had thrown the country into war in the first place, passing the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished enslavement except as punishment for crime, and sending it off to the states for ratification.
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