Eight Days to Election Day!
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It matters not whether you vote at an
early voting location or wait until November 8, at your assigned voting precinct
location, the important thing is that you
Vote*
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Important: At this point, I
wouldn’t risk sending a mail-in ballot by mail.
It might not make it in time.
Instead, drop it in a drop box, if one is available, or be sure to bring it with you to an
early voting location or your actual polling place. (Otherwise, your vote might have to be a ‘provisional’ one.)
Please Forward this Blog posting to your friends, relatives, and neighbors, or direct them to visit
https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com
JL
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As I have repeatedly pointed out on this blog, there are many important
things at stake in this election:
1. The right of women to choose an abortion,
2. Keeping military-type weapons out of civilian
hands,
3. Guaranteeing voting rights to all Americans,
and most
of all,
4. The preservation
of American democracy!
Democratic majorities in both Houses of
Congress are needed.
Your votes are crucial! The votes of women and persons of color may
decide the future direction of America. Vote! And get others to do so, as well!
JL
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Reasons NOT to Vote for Ron DeSantis
‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ were the words of English historian, parliamentarian, and philosopher Lord Acton back in 1887. They seem to well describe Floriduh’s Governor Ron DeSantis.
By now, if you follow this blog’s postings, I have made it clear that voters should reject Governor Ron DeSantis’ bid for re-election as Floriduh’s governor. But let’s get specific as to why. Here are fourteen reasons.
DeSantis has made it
clear that he is:
(1) opposed to a woman’s right to
choose to have an abortion,
(2) opposed to stricter gun control
measures in a State where Parkland and Pulse massacres took place,
(3) opposed to teaching American
history as it actually happened in the State’s public schools, condemning what
he considers ‘woke,’ preferring that students be asleep to the existence of documented
facts,
(4) opposed to recognizing gender
issues in public schools, again condemning what he
considers ‘woke,’ again preferring that students remain asleep to the existence
of documented facts.
(5) actively endorsing those who would ban
books in local school districts, as is done in most totalitarian countries.
(6) He has appointed as State Surgeon General a physician poorly regarded by the medical profession, also securing him a lucrative position on the University of Floriduh’s medical school faculty.
(7) Currently, he is appointing a conservative Republican senator from the Midwest, with minimal academic experience, as president of that university, seemingly without competition.
(8) He prides himself on keeping Floriduh ‘open for business’ during the Covid pandemic, discouraging masking as well as vaccinations with thousands of avoidable deaths directly resulting from his actions.
(9) Not recognizing the legal limits of his powers, he has suspended a twice-elected State Attorney who broke no laws but politically disagrees with him, as well as interfering with legally elected school boards throughout the State.
(10) He has illegally arranged to fly
migrants, in this country legally awaiting action on their asylum requests,
from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard to embarrass Democrats, at State expense.
(11) He has single-handedly erased two Congressional districts that usually elect candidates of color, by pressuring gerrymandering by the Republican legislature which behaves as his lapdogs.
(12) He has formed an ‘election integrity’
police force, whose aim seems to be to frighten away those who might vote
against him.
(13) He ordered the arrest of former felons who voted, after being advised that they might vote by County authorities which provided them with voter ID cards. His actions are currently being reversed by courts that recognize them as illegal. True incidents of election fraud (like voting twice), such as those in the always-Republican Villages area, are treated lightly and barely punished.
(14) He has refused to state that, if
re-elected, he will complete his term of office, clearly putting the
capture of right-wing support from the defeated former president ahead of his
State responsibilities as governor. He tries
to paint himself as espousing similar ideas but without the defeated former
president’s numerous and conspicuous flaws. In fact, his phony facade of legitimacy makes DeSantis worse than him!
JL
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Forwarded This Blog Posting?
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The
next posting of Jackspotpourri will provide reasons NOT to vote for Marco
Rubio who is running for re-election to the Senate.
JL
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Forwarded This Blog Posting?
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‘Walking the Walk’ and Worse!
The Pelosi Assailant
Here’s a reprint of a posting from this blog three days ago!
‘Talking the Talk’ vs ‘Walking the Walk’
“In the news about the conviction of several men who helped train those planning to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer whose policies they opposed was this quote from one of their defense attorney’s arguments to the jury: ‘In this country, you are allowed to talk the talk but you only get convicted if you walk the walk.’ To some extent, this is true.
But ‘talking the talk’ can also inspire others
to ‘walk the walk’ and that is where they cross the line into actually ‘aiding
and abetting' the carrying out of a crime. Does this also
describe the defeated former president on the morning of January 6, 2021?”
Well,
as I asked then, does this also describes the lies and misinformation which led
thousands of right-wing supporters of the defeated former president to attack
the Capitol on January 6, 2021? Sure
it does!
To that, I must add that such misinformation,
lies, and extreme conspiracy theories also were the ‘talk’ that seduced the pathetic misfit who broke into
Speaker Pelosi’s San Francisco home and attacked her husband, while seeking
Speaker Pelosi with the aim of murdering her, just as the invaders of the
Capitol had sought to do on January 6.
Such ‘talk’ is not free speech. It is far
beyond any protection provided by the First Amendment. It is poison designed to destroy democracy in
the United States. And while the assailant ‘walked the walk,’ those who ‘talked
the talk,’ inspiring him are equally guilty.
Our government knows the sources and the
individuals behind them inhabiting the crevices in the deep ‘rabbit holes’ into
which millions of gullible and ignorant people have crawled and come up from,
infected as the person who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband was, contaminated by
these lies, misinformation and phony conspiracy theories.
It would not be a violation of the First
Amendment for Congress to pass legislation permitting the Department of Justice
to drop the legal equivalent of a nuclear weapon down those ‘rabbit
holes,’ incinerating the putrid ideas found there and indicting those that
originate and spread them.
- Just for the record, the Freedom Forum
Institute lists the following as legitimate areas where the First
Amendment does NOT provide protection:
- Obscenity
- Fighting words
- Defamation (including libel and slander)
- Child pornography
- Perjury
- Blackmail
- Incitement to imminent lawless action
- True threats
- Solicitations to commit crimes
JL
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To How Many People Have You Forwarded This Blog
Posting?
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A History
Lesson
Here is a lesson in American history from Boston College’s Professor Heather Cox Richardson that appeared on her daily online newsletter, ‘Letters from an American,” on October 29. (Check it out. It’s free to read each day.) It well illustrates how Republicans spread misinformation and gives those who want to preserve democracy in the United States more than adequate reason to avoid voting for them. It lays out the historic facts.
It is difficult not to conclude that In 2022, Democrats are the ones defending the Constitution and the values that Americans believe in, and the Republicans are the ones representing the malignant forces intent on tearing them apart, forces to which the Republican Party has succumbed in order to get their votes.
The positions of political parties have shifted significantly over the years since the mid-nineteenth century. Read on. If you agree, please forward this posting to voters whom you think her words might help educate.
Here is that excerpt for ‘Letters from an American,’ written by Professor Richardson. It’s a great short course in American political history. (It’s worth three credits in the ‘University of the Mind.’)
 |
| Professor Heather Cox Richardson |
'This week, news broke that as a guest on the right-wing Real America’s Voice media network in 2020, Republican candidate for Michigan governor Tudor Dixon said that the Democrats have planned for decades to topple the United States because they have not gotten over losing the Civil War. According to Dixon, Democrats don’t want anyone to know that white Republicans freed the slaves, and are deliberately strangling “true history.”
Dixon’s was a pure white power rant, but she was amplifying a theme we hear a
lot these days: that Democrats were the party of enslavement, Republicans
pushed emancipation, and thus the whole idea that Republican policies today are
bad for Black Americans is disinformation.
In reality, the parties have switched sides since the 1850s. The shift happened
in the 1960s, and it happened over the issue of race. Rather than focusing on
party names, it makes more sense to follow two opposed strands of thought,
equality and hierarchy, as the constants.
By the 1850s it was indeed primarily Democrats who backed slavery. Elite
southern enslavers gradually took over first the Democratic Party, then the
southern states, and finally the U.S. government. When it looked in 1854 as if
they would take over the entire nation by spreading slavery to the West—thus overwhelming
the free states with new slave states—northerners organized to stand against
what they called the “Slave Power.”
In the mid-1850s, northerners gradually came together as a new political party.
They called themselves “Republicans,” in part to recall Jefferson’s political
party, which was also called the Republican party, even though Jefferson by
then was claimed by the Democrats.
The meaning of political names changes.
The new Republican Party first stood only for opposing the Slave Power, but by
1859, Lincoln had given it a new ideology: it would stand behind ordinary
Americans, rather than the wealthy enslavers, using the government to provide
access to resources, rather than simply protecting the wealthy. And that would
mean keeping slavery limited to the American South.
Prevented from imposing their will on the U.S. majority, southern Democrats
split from their northern Democratic compatriots and tried to start a new
nation based on racial slavery. They launched the Civil War.
At first, most Republicans didn’t care much about enslaved Americans, but by
1863 the war had made them come around to the idea that the freedom of Black
Americans was crucial to the success of the United States. At Gettysburg in
1863, Lincoln reinforced the principles of the Declaration of Independence and
dedicated the nation to a “new birth of freedom.” In 1865 the Republican
Congress passed and sent off to the states for ratification the Thirteenth
Amendment to the Constitution, ending enslavement except as punishment for
crime (we really need to fix that, by the way).
After the war, as southern Democrats organized to reinstate white supremacy in
their states, Republicans in 1868 added the Fourteenth Amendment, giving the
federal government power to guarantee that states could not deny equal rights
to American citizens, and then in 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing
Black men the right to vote. They also established the Department of Justice to
defend those rights. But by 1871, white Republicans were backing away from
federal protection of Black Americans.
Democrats continued to push white supremacy until 1879, when former
Confederates took over Congress and threatened to destroy the government unless
the federal government got out of southern affairs altogether (it’s a myth that
the army left the South in 1877). Voters turned so vehemently against the
former Confederates trying to impose their will on the nation’s majority that
national Democrats began to shift away from their southern base, which dominated
the southern states. In 1884 they ran New Yorker Grover Cleveland for office
and won.
For the next fifty years, both national parties would waffle on race, trying
mostly to ignore it.
But World War II changed the equation.
Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt had begun to offer some economic protections
to Black Americans with the 1930s New Deal, but Black soldiers coming home from
the war demanded true equality. The blinding of Black veteran Isaac Woodard in
1946 by South Carolina law enforcement officers woke Democratic president Harry
S. Truman up to the need for equal protection of the laws.
Unable to get civil rights laws through Congress, Truman worked to desegregate
federal contracting and military installations. Immediately, racist southern
Democrats, led by South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, broke away from their
own president to form their own short-lived “Dixiecrat” party backing racial
segregation.
Then, in 1954, Republican Dwight Eisenhower put Earl Warren, the former
Republican governor of California, at the head of the Supreme Court. It
promptly used the Fourteenth Amendment to declare the segregation of public
schools unconstitutional in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. It seemed
both parties had come around to supporting racial equality.
But white supremacists in the South responded to desegregation by attacking
their Black neighbors. So in 1957, with a bipartisan vote, Congress passed a
civil rights act to protect Black voting. Thurmond launched the longest
filibuster in U.S. history to try to stop it.
Republicans who hated the government’s postwar regulation of business saw an
opening to get the Dixiecrat contingent on their side. In 1960, The Conscience
of a Conservative, published under the name of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater,
called for getting rid of the business regulation and social safety laws passed
since 1933, and claimed that the Supreme Court’s protection of civil rights was
unconstitutional.
When Democrat John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, he gave a rousing inaugural
address promising to bring freedom to the world but, afraid of alienating
southern Democrats, didn’t mention race at home. World War II veteran James
Meredith promptly decided to test just how committed to human rights Kennedy
actually was. Meredith sued for admission to the University of Mississippi, and
when the courts ruled the state had to admit him in 1962, Kennedy had to choose
between the northern wing of his party that supported civil rights, and the
southern racists. Pushed by his brother and attorney general Robert, Kennedy
backed Meredith’s registration with federal troops.
Republicans already mad at business regulation now worked to pick up the white
supremacists who had backed the Dixiecrats and who, by 1964, were attacking
Black Americans and their white allies as they tried to enroll Black voters. In
1964, Republicans ran Goldwater for president on a platform calling for
slashing federal power and empowering the states to run their affairs as they
wished. Goldwater lost the election, but Strom Thurmond publicly switched
parties, and Republicans picked up the five states of the Deep South (as well
as Arizona) for the first time since Reconstruction.
Democrats, meanwhile, went all in on racial equality. Kennedy had come around
to calling for civil rights legislation, and after his assassination, his
successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, pushed hard first for the Civil Rights Act of
1964—which Congress passed while FBI agents were searching for three murdered
civil rights workers in Mississippi—and then, after law enforcement officers in
Selma, Alabama, attacked voting rights advocates as they crossed a bridge named
for a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Democrats had become the party of equality. But the votes for the civil
rights laws had been bipartisan, and it was not at all clear that the
Republicans wouldn’t also back civil rights. After all, Goldwater had gotten
shellacked when he made common cause with white supremacists.
But in 1968, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon knew he had a hard
fight ahead of him. He figured he needed to pick up the old Dixiecrats, who
were now politically homeless. He went to Thurmond with a quiet promise not to
use the federal government to protect Black rights in the South in exchange for
his support. This “Southern strategy” worked. Thurmond publicly backed Nixon.
From then on, white supremacists made up a key part of the Republicans’ base,
and the party increasingly pushed on old racial themes—Ronald Reagan’s welfare
queen, for example, or George H.W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ad, or the trope of
“makers” and “takers”—to keep them on board.
The parties had switched positions over equality and hierarchy. Since 1964,
Republicans have always won the majority of the nation’s white vote, while
Democrats rely on Black voters, especially Black women.
And that is the actual true history of how it happened that a Republican
candidate for office, representing a party that once defended civil rights,
made white power rants on public media.’
JL
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After reading that, to
How Many People Have You Forwarded This Blog Posting?
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Where I Get My Information
Media is very important. It is essential to know at least something about what is going on in the world, the nation or even just locally. We depend upon such information coming to each of us through various kinds of media because physically, it is too big a job for anyone to become personally familiar with all that is going on. Let me identify the media from which I get my information. (In fact, it would be a good idea for everyone to make such an inventory of the sources of their information.)
Every morning, over my breakfast, I read a print edition of a newspaper. Currently it is the South Florida SunSentinel. I occasionally refer to the online edition of the Palm Beach Post to which I also subscribe. I also get daily headlines and access to some articles and columns from the New York Times. None of these sources are free. I also faithfully read Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s daily newsletter, ‘Letters from an American,’ and occasionally look at Bari Weiss’ more conservative ‘Common Sense’ blog to help balance things. I do watch news and current affairs programming on television, mostly on MSNBC, but occasionally on CNN as well. I also admit to reading books.
Although I used to post occasionally on Facebook and its photo subsidiary, Instagram, I have made a point of ignoring both for the past few years. Similarly, although I once signed on to Twitter, I never look at it. And as far as TicToc goes, I have never accessed it. Until recently, I thought it was the sound a clock makes. All of these are gateways to misinformation but without the warning signs a precarious roadway along the edge of a cliff usually has.
I do communicate with a few people via traditional email and might look at what they may attach to an email, but that is a very minor part of the media to which I am exposed. Some of it appears to come from areas of social media with which I am totally unfamiliar and accordingly, I give it little if any weight. If I am unfamiliar with the details of a particular subject, I usually ‘google’ it to try to learn something but am careful of the links to which such a search leads me.
These are my media
sources, and what I glean from them is reflected in my blog postings on Jackspotpourri. I suppose that in the first quarter of the 21st
century, where everyone else seems to be infatuated with social media (which
usually comes without a charge), that makes me a dinosaur. Well, at least I am a happy dinosaur and
hopefully, a creditable one.
JL
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Halloween Addendum:
Many people of the Jewish faith do not observe Halloween, which is actually a Christian religious holiday, the eve of All Saints Day. Some believe that it was an occasion when supernatural demons roamed the earth and spirits rose from their graves. Historically, in Europe, this was also a time when Jews hid in their homes, fearing pogroms that sometimes took place on Halloween.
But this should not stop Jewish children from dressing up in costumes and joining in Halloween fun. There is much in Judaism dealing with supernatural beings, ghosts, etc. which roam the earth. Find out more by checking out an interesting article on 'My Jewish Learning' all about such goings-on. It can be found at:
Visit https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/monsters-demons-and-other-mythical-creatures-in-jewish-lore/ or just try Clicking Here.
JL
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* As I have repeatedly pointed out, there are many important things at stake in this election:
1. The right of women to choose an abortion,
2. Keeping military-type weapons out of civilian
hands,
3. Guaranteeing voting rights to all Americans,
and most
of all,
4. The preservation
of American democracy!
Democratic majorities in both Houses of
Congress are needed.
Your votes are crucial! The votes of women and persons of color may
decide the future direction of America. Vote! And get others to do so, as well!
* * * *
* Vote
* * * *
Okay, one last time ...To How Many People Have
You
Forwarded This Blog Posting?
That’s Not Enough!
https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com
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