Whose Rights Does the Bill of Rights Protect Anyway
The conflicts in our governments between the government in
Washington and the governments of the 50 States united into the United
States of America are nothing new!
After the Founding Fathers wrote a Constitution that created a far stronger national government than had existed under the old 1777 Articles of Confederation, the Framers designed ten ‘Amendments’ that make up the Bill of Rights, measures that appear quite democratic on the surface but actually served to hold back government power. Sounds strange, but many did not want them to go too far with this new document ‘uniting the States.’
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| Madison |
Virginian James Madison was the point man on this effort. The Founding Fathers had to do this to satisfy the slaveholding States that feared a strong central government which might someday attack slavery, the crux of their economy (and as some today say, the entire nation’s economy as well) at that time. Without such a rein on government power, they would not vote to ratify the Constitution, and that failure might have well amounted to welcoming back George III. (Smells like today’s Republicans refusing to use the nation’s credit to borrow to pay its existing bills unless it goes along with their legislative philosophy!)
Understand that the Bill of Rights was not entirely designed
to protect YOUR rights, but also, if not more so, the rights of individual
States if challenged by the Federal government.
Of course, individuals benefited from these rights as well, particularly
the First Amendment, as court decisions developed over the years, but the original
ten Amendment Bill of Rights might more properly have been named the ‘Bill of
States Rights’ because of the Second and Tenth Amendments.
Take a second and read their content. Certainly the language of the other Amendments dealt
with protecting the rights of individuals, but the big payoff came with the
Second and Tenth Amendments which clearly gave enormous power, including
military power, to the States.
But don't go running for a magnifying glass. The text of these two Amendments follows.
The Second Amendment gave individuals the right to bear and possess arms, but that was really to enable slaveholding States to quickly recruit a militia to defend themselves against the Federal Government. Here is its language. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
The
Tenth Amendment left everything not specifically given to the Federal
government to the States, and ‘the people,’ whatever that means (the people of the entire nation, of the individual States, or simply State govenment taken as representative of a State's people?) Here is its language. "
This struggle between what the Federal government wants and
what some individual States want goes on today.
Democrats are usually on the side of the
Federal Government while Republicans are usually on the side of preserving
States’ rights. The conflict comes to a
head over such issues as gun rights, voting rights, and abortion rights. But its origin goes back to the wheeling and
dealing that created the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
JL
* * *
Ho, Hum, Another Shooting
And speaking of gun rights, there’s been another shooting,
taking five lives, in Texas. As I have
said before on the blog, ‘The Second
Amendment should be repealed and replaced by State
legislation setting down reasonable rules for gun possession by hunters,
sportsmen, and for business or personal protection.’
Go back to the April 21, 2023 and the March 31, 2023 postings on this blog to
find out why there is no longer any rationale for the Second Amendment to exist
and how it came into existence in the first place. The Supreme
Court Justices who believe otherwise do so because of the political opinions they
hold and this includes the three of them who were appointed to the Court for
that reason in the first place by the defeated forty-fifth president, not
because of their legal acumen.
The Justices who swallowed and continue to accept the late
Justice Scalia’s misinterpretation of that Amendment, ignoring its first thirteen words (although they pride themselves as having a literal,
‘orignalist’, belief in the Constitution) are unable to render just decisions
because of the political influence which put them on the bench in the first
place. Shame on them!
It is time to end this bullshit and repeal the Second
Amendment.
That will take a while, but so long as a Democrat sits in the
White House and there is a Democratic majority in the Senate, the Supreme Court
should be expanded so that, until the repeal of the Second Amendment is
consummated, it can at least not stand in the way of gun control (and voting
and women’s rights) measures that come before it.
By the time you read this, there will be more unnecessary
shootings and further blood on the hands of the Supreme Court Justices
responsible for them. And soap won’t
wash it off, as Lady Macbeth found out.
JL
* * *
The Validity of Covid19 Statistics
Did masking play a role in stemming the
Coronavirus epidemic? It may have, and
then again, it may not have. But it
certainly didn’t do any medical harm to those who masked.
Statistics regarding the effect of wearing masks
vary tremendously, based on their sources, the ‘controls’ under which they were
gathered, what kind of masks we’re talking about, how they defined causes of
death, and whether the studies were totally empirical or presented to validate
an existing pro or con position regarding masking.
We had better get our statistic-gathering protocols in order before there is a ‘next time,’ as there someday will be because government action to combat any disease threat will be statistically-based. An interesting ‘opinion’ article in the New York Times sheds some light on the matter. Check it out by CLICKING HERE or copying the following on your browsr line.
JL
* * *
Banking Problems
Besides the debt ceiling debate, currently at the top of Washington’s agenda, the banking industry is becoming a focus of financial concern.
The well-heeled investors and financial world gurus who chose to take advantage of the comfortable relationships (cheap mortgage and loan rates) offered to them by boutique institutions like the Silicon Valley, Signature and now, First Republic banks were much smarter than the bankers, hungry for deposits, with whom they dealt.
They recognized the danger signs and pulled out their deposits, decimating these banks as the inflation-fighting Federal Reserve raised interest rates, hobbling these banks' locked-in investments, well before the banks themselves and the government agencies regulating them fully recognized the danger.
There is only one answer: Increased government spending for increased regulation of the banking industry.
JL
* * *
Biden, Jefferson, O’Neill, and JacksPotpourri are in
Agreement
President Biden included in his remarks at the
White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday evening a quote from Thomas
Jefferson. Our third president
once said that if given the choice between having ‘government but no
newspapers’ or ‘newspapers but no government,’ he would choose the latter.
Of course, this is a purely hypothetical
impossibility, and the President was obviously saying it to compliment his
audience of journalists, but it plays up the importance of newspapers. Without knowing what is going on, are voters
adequately prepared to vote in a democracy?
I believe they would not be.
Choices made by uninformed or
even worse, misinformed, voters are hazardous to democracy.
That is why I have been hammering home repeatedly
in Jackspotpourri the necessity of reading, preferably in a paper version but
also usually available online, a newspaper each and every day. Other media sources just don’t cut it.
I grew up with the now defunct Newark Evening News in my home every day. Later in life, I continued with Long Island Newsday filling that role, and currently, the Palm Beach Post. These
three papers have one thing in common.
In addition to providing access to State, national and international
news, they provide an open window to what is going on locally.
The late Tip O’Neill, former House Speaker, said
that ‘all politics are local.’ Therefore,
keeping up with local news, which is what all three of these papers do (or did)
well, is crucial to democracy. I think
Thomas Jefferson would agree with that.
I know that I do.
Blind conservatism is rampant in State
legislatures, doing the nation great harm, because of such local voting based
on local politics! That is the challenge
we face.
Of course, reading the great national newspapers
like the New York Times and the Washington Post or even the Wall
Street Journal, is fine, but unavoidably, they do not cover local news and
issues, which can ultimately have national impact. The public needs this local information up
front for the reason O’Neill stated (‘all politics
are local’) and papers like the
three I mention provide it.
For example, both the Times and the Washington
Post sent reporters to cover the recent massive railroad accident in
East Palestine, Ohio, but neither of them would bother to do that for a single
accident that happens at a local grade crossing somewhere in the country where
one automobile and its passengers are demolished. But newspapers like the three I mention do
cover local events like that, and if the public is to be able to form opinions,
either pro or con, regarding railroad safety legislation, for example, local
reporting is crucial. Subscribe today to either a daily paper's physically delivered version or its online duplicate.
JL
* * *
Well, It’s May,
and as Promised, the Original ‘Chrissy
Frost’ Stories are Back!
All eight of
them, originally included on this blog back in 2017 recounting the story of a
Florida entertainer, are now re-appearing on the blog. Together they form what
might be a novella, entitled ‘Time After Time – The Crissy Frost Story.’
Here are the
first two stories, chapters, or whatever you want
to call them. The remaining six will
follow over the next few postings.
* * *
Chapter
1: Blue Water and Wind-Tossed Palm Trees
– A Chrissy Frost Story
(“Chrissy Frost” is an entirely fictitious creation. My apologies go to anyone who might happen to
share that name, and I know there are some of you out there.)
Jack Lippman
Crissy Frost leaned back and fussed with her hair as Herman,
her agent, played with some papers on his desk before he spoke.
“Ya gotta face it, Cris, you’re not getting any younger. Seventy-seven is no longer a spring chicken. You know what things are like on Broadway,
off-Broadway, in the sticks, in the clubs, in the rooms at the hotels. Lotsa young talent coming along. There just ain’t much around for you
anymore.”
“Come on, Herm, I got three gold records hanging in my living
room. And you know the album I made with
Sinatra is still selling.”
“That’s the problem, Cris.
Nobody buys albums anymore except collectors. Records, cassettes, even
CDs are all history. It’s all streaming
now on the internet, ITunes, Spotify, that’s where it’s at today, and that’s
where you ain’t. Like those albums of
yours, you don’t want to be a collector’s item, do you? Have you ever considered that maybe it’s time
to hang it up?”
Crissy started to cry.
As she wiped her tears with the tissue Herman handed her, her eye caught
the big picture hanging on the side wall of the office. Sand, surf, blue water, wind-tossed palm
trees, azure skies, beckoning white towers surveying it all.
Herman paused and saw that Crissy was staring at a poster
from the Miami Tourism Bureau which he had framed and hung up to cover a crack
in the plaster on the wall. He looked
hard at her and spoke out.
“That’s Florida, Cris.
Would you consider?”
“What can you get for me down there, Herm? I hear they’re selling out in Miami,
Lauderdale and even West Palm. That true?”
“You know, Cris, that might actually work for you. A lot of performers are down there who would
be working the Catskills if the hotels there hadn’t folded. I think I can find some nice slots for you,
but you can’t use that walker. I think a
cane would be okay, but no walker.”
Crissy perked up, smiling for the first time during the
meeting.
“Now you’re cooking, Herman, baby! The word is that there’s some nice venues
down there too. I don’t need those big
sports arenas, like the Garden, but I’d love it if you could book me into the
Arscht, the Broward or even the Kravis.
I hear they’re great, almost like the big New York halls.”
“Actually, Cris,” the agent replied, “I was thinking more of
places like a couple of the Century Villages or maybe Kings Point. And there’s some really nice venues in some
of the fancy gated communities.”
“You mean the over-55 places, like where my dead brother’s
wife lives in down in Boynton? You want
to put me on the condo circuit, Herm?
Me, with five gold records!
Really?”
“Three, Cris, Three.
Think about it and give me a call when you make up your mind. I got some connections down there. ”
As she shuffled out of the office, Crissy took one last look at
that picture on the wall. Sand, surf,
blue water, wind-tossed palm trees, azure skies and beckoning white
towers. Once downstairs on the sidewalk,
she found herself in the midst of a bone-chilling gray 20 degree afternoon
typical of January in New York, complete with some dirty slush at the
curbside. She called Herman back as soon
as she got home.
The “showcases,” events where performers looking for bookings
on the South Florida condo circuit display their talents, weren’t too bad,
something like what a slave market must have been like before the Civil War but
without the chains. In fact, Crissy
picked up a dozen dates which would earn her about ninety thousand after she
paid for a lighting tech, a sound man and the combo to accompany her. A place to live was no problem since she
would move in with her sister-in-law in Boynton.
“You know, Cris,” one of the other performers said to her one
evening before she went on, “This is a hell of a lot better than the cruise
ships. On them, you can get seasick, and
when you get depressed with where your career is ending up, you might even be
tempted to jump overboard. Happens. But all you can do here is fall off of the
stage.”
“Won’t happen to me,” she replied. They’re even letting me use my walker
tonight! The Stage Manager says it seems
to bond with the audience, and takes their mind off what’s happened to my
voice.”
She smiled, winked her eye, and pushed her walker out into
the spotlight to a thunderous round of applause as the emcee’s deep baritone
voice intoned, as if he were officiating at a wrestling match, “Miss
Criss-eeeeeeeee Frost!”
* * *
Chapter 2
- The Man in the Maroon Blazer – A Chrissy Frost Story
(“Chrissy Frost” is an entirely fictitious creation. My apologies go to anyone who might happen to
share that name, and I know there are some of you out there.)
Jack Lippman
Crissy Frost was
reminiscing about the time she first hit it big, playing in the grand show room
at Grossinger’s over forty years ago.
The audience was rapping on the tables with those wooden sticks with
balls at the end which the hotel provided in those days. They connected with her most when she belted
out her signature tune, Sammy Cahn and Julie Styne’s great 1947 hit. “Time
After Time.” She loved that rhyming of
“time” with “I’m.” It really clicked
with audiences.
“Time after time, I tell myself that I’m, So lucky to be
loving you…”
She noticed a man in
the second row of tables getting up, as the audience applauded and rapped
away. He wore white slacks and a maroon
blazer and held a bouquet of pink roses in his hand. Running up to the stage he tossed it at her
and then retreated back to his table.
Not knowing what else to do, she had caught it and ran backstage.
Fifteen years, and two
divorces later, at the 400 seat lounge at the Sands in Vegas, where she had
landed a six-month gig, the same thing happened.
“So lucky to be, the one you run to see, in the evening when
the day is through…”
“Was it the same guy?”
she afterwards asked herself. “White
slacks, maroon blazer, pink roses. It
had to be. You don’t forget something like that, especially since no one
usually tossed bouquets at singers in Las Vegas, or Grossinger’s, for that
matter. Hey, I’m no opera star.” She
looked out over the audience but he was gone.
A decade later,
Chrissy’s latest incarnation was as a fiftyish, both age-wise and music-wise,
chanteuse serenading midnight patrons who liked the “oldies” in the Giraffe
Room in the Waldorf in Manhattan. Most
of that night-cap crowd, many of whom had been attending formal events there
earlier in the evening, were still dressed to the nines. That’s why the fellow in the white slacks and
maroon blazer stood out. And when she
saw the bouquet in his hand, she knew what was going to happen.
“I only know what I know, the passing years will show, you’ve
kept my love so young, so new…”
This time, after
catching the bouquet, Chrissy whispered to the piano player to play some
Gershwin for a couple of minutes.
Gingerly hopping down from the stage, she chased after the maroon
blazer, catching up with him in the lobby.
Before she could say a word, he turned to her.
“Chrissy, I’m your
biggest fan ever. I’ve followed you for
years. After my wife, I love you most of all.”
“Gee, thanks! I really appreciate that! But what’s your name, anyway?”
Before she could say
another word, he had bolted out the door, and turning his head, called out to
her as he waved down a taxicab.
“Sam Fink from the
Bronx, that’s me!” And he was gone.
And now, years later,
here was Chrissy Frost, seventy-seven years young, just starting to make it on
the “condo circuit” in South Florida.
Perhaps it was the sunshine and the walking in the pool, but her left
leg, the one that the stroke six years earlier had affected, was regaining some
of its musculature and strength. She was
able to put away her walker and now only occasionally carried a cane which she
really didn’t need too often for support, but liked to use as a pointer, and as
a stage prop.
Florida agreed with
Chrissy. She had almost cracked up
mentally when her career up north dead-ended, but performing for retirees in
Palm Beach County seemed to have given her a second life.
It was in the theatre
at Huntington Lakes where she spotted him, about ten rows back. No mistaking him. Same guy, same white pants, maroon blazer and
that bouquet held at the ready on his lap.
When she sang, she fixed her gaze directly on him. She even pointed her cane at him in a gentle
manner as she finished the lyric, and blew him a kiss.
“And time after time, you’ll hear me say that I’m, so lucky
to be loving you.”
After the applause
subsided and she took her bows, Chrissy wanted to go down and talk to him if
she were able to catch him in the theater lobby, but the crowd was thick, and
there was a hubbub at the door. People
were stopping her to shake her hand, asking her to autograph the CDs they had
just bought and complimenting her on her performance, so she wasn’t able to
catch up with Sam Fink.
Once back at her
sister-in-law’s place in Boynton, where she still was staying, the telephone
rang. She picked it up.
“Miss Frost?”
“Speaking, who is
this?”
“My name is Estelle
Fink. I think you may know my husband,
Sam. Or at least that’s what he has been
telling me for the past 48 years.”
“Actually,” Chrissy replied,
“That’s sort of the truth.”
“Well, I think you
should know that Sam passed out on the way out of the theater tonight. He has a bad heart. That’s what the delay in
the lobby was all about, waiting for the EMTs to come. He’s in Delray Hospital
now, and they don’t think he’ll make it.
Would it be too much for me to ask if …”
“Mrs. Fink … Estelle,
I’ll be right over.”
Unfortunately, Chrissy
didn’t make it in time, but three days later at the funeral chapel on Jog Road,
after the rabbi chanted the "El Malei Rachamim,” Estelle asked her to step to the
microphone. She glanced at the walnut
casket, and then at Estelle down in the first row whose tear-stained face
brightened imperceptibly as Chrissy quietly sang.
“Time
after time, I tell myself that I’m, so lucky to be loving you
So
lucky to be the one you run to see, in the evening, when the day is through
I
only know what I know, the passing years will show, you’ve kept my love so
young, so new
And
time after time, you’ll hear me say that I’m, so lucky to be loving you.”
Time
After Time: Music by Sammy Cahn, Lyrics by Jule Styne. Copyright 1947
JL
* * *
Housekeeping on the Blog
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there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and
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Either
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Again, I
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Have a
nice day!
* * *
* * *
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