April 29, 2024 - Common Sense from Thomas Paine, a Lesson for the SCOTUS, Required Reading, and Resolving Our Crisis

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Be aware that we are living in historic times!

 

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Time for Some ‘Common Sense’ from Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine

Thomas  Paine, in his pamphlet, ‘Common Sense,’ answered those asking ‘where is the King of America?’  That pamphlet played a significant role back in 1776 in convincing British colonists in North America to cut ties with their king and start a new nation. ‘In America,’ Paine went on, ‘the law is king.  For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.’

Conservative members of our Supreme Court have lost sight of this because of the Court’s political appointees nominated by the forty-fifth president.  Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, bathed in hypocrisy, led this corruption of the SCOTUS when he delayed for a year the consideration of a Justice nominated by the Democratic forty-fourth president to replace the deceased Antonin Scalia.  

McConnell was hoping for a Republican president in 2016, which he got in the person of Donald Trump, who lied and bribed his way into office as is currently being revealed in litigation in New York’s courts, and who was able to put three political appointments, with McConnell’s support, on the SCOTUS bench.  

Trump's total lack of ethics is being daily demonstrated in that Manhattan courtroom, where even his family is ashamed to show up as he sits alone and forlorn, except for lawyers, at the defendant's table.  And this is the same person, already declared to be a rapist in a civil case, that the Republican Party will nominate to run for president in November, even if he has to do so as a convicted felon. (Bribery in connection with election funding is a felony in New York.)

This is just more evidence that quite simply, the ‘default’ position for Republicans is that they are very bad people, for whom playing dirty is acceptable, putting the interests of the nation far behind those of political expediency.  Because they cannot win elections honestly, their efforts are directed at interfering with them by making it difficult to vote and spreading lies about other candidates and hiding shameful truths about themselves. 

It is necessary, to save democracy as Thomas Paine saw it, as a place where the law was the people’s ‘king,’ for the Democrats to act  promptly when, as I predict and hope they will, re-elect President Biden to the White House in November.  His immediate priority should be to nominate four additional Justices to the SCOTUS, which still suffers from its poisoning carried out by McConnell and Trump.  To do this, he would need Congress to allow the expansion of the number of SCOTUS Justices, something not specified in the Constitution, and a Senate majority to confirm the appointments.  So in pulling this off, he would not be playing ‘king,’ but acting within the law, of which Paine might approve. 

In Biden’s hoped-for effort to accomplish this, I am more concerned with the Democrats retaining control of the Senate which looks like a more difficult task in 2024 than his own re-election or taking control of the House of Representatives.  

That is why I am actively supporting Democrats whom I feel are crucial to maintaining their present Senate majority, essential to Court expansion.  Adding four Justices to the Court, giving the Republicans a dose of their own medicine, seems to be the best way to guarantee that in America, ‘the law is King,’ as Thomas Paine put it.  This is crucial because the Republican candidate, an admirer of Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban, and other autocratic heads of state, seems to believe otherwise.

Right now, I am donating monthly to the campaigns of Debbie Muscarsel-Powell in Florida and Jon Tester in Montana, running for crucial Senate seats.  I hope followers of Jackspotpourri become similarly involved in supporting Senate candidates who recognize that in America, ‘the law is king,’ and not some autocratic leader who feels that presidential power should be unlimited and unchallengable, a position the presently corrupted SCOTUS is reluctant to properly challenge.

 JL

 

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Required Reading

I've frequently asked you to check out the 'Letters From an American' postings by Boston College Professor Heather Cox Richardson.  Those that are doing that learned a lot from her posting there dated April 28.  I suggest the rest of you read that posting by CLICKING HERE RIGHT NOW.  Reading it shouldn't take more than two minutes.

JL

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A Lesson for Supreme Court Justices: Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

Judges should know that ‘justice delayed is justice denied.’  There are many legal citations concerning such delay of which the learned Justices sitting on our Supreme Court should be aware.  In addition, outside of the courtroom, Martin Luther King Jr., used that phrase saying that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied’ in his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ and the Bible goes even further in providing legal advice in Deuteronomy 16:19 telling us ‘Don't delay justice; don't show favoritism. Don't take bribes because bribery blinds the vision of the wise and twists the words of the righteous’  Sounds like there were Republicans in those days. 

There was a violent invasion of the nation’s Capitol on January 6, 2021, over three years ago.  There is a lingering question as to whether the defeated forty-fifth president, still in office at that point prior to his successor’s inauguration, and claiming victory without any honest basis whatsoever to do so, was involved in instigating that riot which attempted to prevent the official tabulation of electoral votes, and whether he can be punished for doing so. Three years is long enough of a delay!   

It is clear to me that delaying resolution of these issues prevents justice from being served.  The matter, pending before Federal Courts, and that has now  reached the Supreme Court, is complicated by that defeated former president being a candidate for the presidency in the November elections.  It should be clear to the entire Supreme Court that the election’s results will be greatly affected by these issues remaining unresolved.  Or are their eyes closed to that? 

Resolution of these issues before the elections is essential so that justice may be served.  Failure for that to happen before the election can amount to denying justice and a permanent cloud over the next presidency, regardless of who wins. Such a cloud still persists over the election of John Quincy Adams to the presidency precisely two centuries ago. 

In earlier years, It was acceptable for legal actions to proceed slowly, but with the imminent presidential election, that is not the case today.  Delaying the resolution of the current litigation regarding January 6, 2021 and events leading up to what then happened, seems to be the primary political strategy of one of the presidential candidates, who if the winner, is certain to make sure that the question of delayed justice is made moot by terminating the litigation.  That would not be a good thing for democracy in America. 

If the SCOTUS had the power to do so, they would be correct in postponing the upcoming election until the pending litigation is resolved.  But they do not have that power.  

But there is nothing to stop them from clearing everything else from their agenda and devoting their entire energies and time to directly resolving the litigation concerning the forty-fifth president, not only for his benefit, but in the interest of serving justice for the nation.  Any trial, if the SCOTUS decides there should be one, should take place before the Supreme Court itself and not a lower court.  By doing that, the issue can be resolved by the Fourth of July at the latest, four months before the election.  If they cannot do that, then the SCOTUS becomes an accomplice to a delay which can result in a denial of justice, and the Justices who support that delay do not deserve to sit on the highest court in the land.

Possible Enablers of Delayed Justice

The statue in front of the Supreme Court building has Lady Justice wearing a blindfold.  But such blindness need not be manifested by avoiding issues.  Even worse for the nation would be the SCOTUS avoiding this issue for political reasons.  

(A few postings ago, in Jackspotpourri, I suggested a twelve-year limit on the terms of Supreme Court Justices to give it a more current perspective.  Today’s SCOTUS would be vastly different were such a limit in existence right now, with five of its nine members, two liberals, two conservatives, and the not quite-so-conservative Chief Justice, retired.  Of course, we do not know who would have replaced them.)   

 

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But Here’s My Bottom Line - What Really Will Happen (In My Opinion) The SCOTUS will ignore that ‘justice delayed is justice denied’.  Their quasi-decision will come down to encouraging further debate over what presidential ‘immunity from prosecution’ turns out to be.  The SCOTUS will diddle with this taking up some valuable time, and then send it back to the lower court to handle, following whatever they instruct it to do, probably passing them the buck of distinguishing between acts the forty-fifth president did as part of his official duties (immune from prosecution) and those that were his personal acts (not immune), an extremely hard, if not impossible and time-consuming distinction to make.  There is no way this will be resolved before the November election, amounting to Donald Trump’s succeeding in denying justice by delaying it, whatever it turns out to be, at least until the November election, at which time YOU will become the court of last resort, the deciders of final judgement. 

SO FORGET ABOUT THE SUPREME COURT. FORGET ABOUT THE SPOUTING OFF OF ALL THE LEARNED LAWYERS ON BOTH SIDES.  JUST REMEMBER THE DETAILS OF WHAT HAPPENED ON JANUARY 6, 2021, AND WHO DIRECTLY INSPIRED IT,  REMEMBER THAT YOU SAW IT ALL REPORTED IN EVERY NEWSPAPER AND ON EVERY TV STATION IN THE NATION. BELIEVE YOUR OWN EYES AND EARS!

THEN GO OUT TO VOTE ON NOVEMBER 5 (OR EARLIER, PREFERABLY BY MAIL) TO MAKE SURE THAT  ‘JUSTICE DELAYED’ DOES NOT TURN OUT TO BE ‘JUSTICE DENIED.’  THE FAILURE OF THE COURTS TO RESOLVE THE ISSUE MEANS THAT THE DECISION WILL BE YOURS. 

IF I HAVE TO SUGGEST WHOM TO VOTE FOR IN THE CONTESTS FOR THE PRESIDENCY, THE HOUSE, AND THE SENATE, (AND STATE OFFICES AS WELL) YOU HAVEN’T BEEN PAYING ENOUGH ATTENTION TO JACKSPOTPOURRI.

Be aware that we are living in historic times!  You will tell your grandchildren all about it, but the important thing is that democracy survived because you voted to preserve it back in 2024 when it was threatened.

JL

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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri

Strange “Hits’!  The large number of those accessing Jackspotpouri from Singapore has suddenly ceased. In their place, however, there have appeared large numbers of ‘hits’ on each posting in the hundreds, and as was the case with those from Singapore, but this time from Hong Kong!  I suspect that the Chinese are playing around with internet transmissions, possibly to try to identify who is reading them.  

Email Alerts:  If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do.  And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com. 

Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it. Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.

If you want to send someone the blog, you can just tell them to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or you can provide a link to that address in your email to them.  

There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though!   Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible.  If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog posting will be forwarded, along with a brief comment from you.  Each will receive a link to click on that will directly connect them to the blog. 

Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting. 

Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it, particularly if they are a registered voter.  We are living in historic times and this is an election year.  Spread the word.

 

 

JL

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April 25, 2024 - Staying Minimally Informed, Polling vs Voting, and Life Insurance for the Unhealthy

 

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Stay Informed

Too many people do not read a daily newspaper, and too many don’t bother with the extensive reporting major papers post on the internet.  This results in their not being familiar with the news that affects their daily lives, and of course, the nation as well.

They sometimes seek out a shortcut to being informed and often select the wrong one.  Here is one I feel might be ‘right one’ for many.  It’s short and very informative, and provides links for those who might want to explore something in greater detail.  It’s provided by local NPR stations.  I check it out each day and you can too, by visiting

https://www.npr.org/newsletter/news?utm_source=google&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=20062866420&utm_content=149885269346&utm_term=npr%20newsletters&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw_qexBhCoARIsAFgBlesD1QWli6oYEh5AqXFCHZaDbf6Cejc6kkTnDYTWqOlpWg1WMfYfuHgaAsP2EALw_wcB  

but that's a pretty long URL so why not just CLICK RIGHT HERE

JL 

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Polling Elects No One - Voters Do!

I just do not believe the recent poll (FAU Political Communication and Public Opinion Research Lab - PolCom Lab - Mainstreet Research polling) that shows Rick Scott far ahead of Debbie Muscarel-Powell in the Florida senatorial race.  Other polls have the race as much, much, closer.  

As the Biden campaign gets into full gear, and as the legal system removes the curtain of lies blinding most Republicans, each day sees more and more voters beginning to realize that voting Republican means voting for Donald Trump, with all of his baggage and lies, and for those who remain in his shrinking camp, and that includes Rick Scott.  

Six years ago, Scott was elected by only 10,000 votes statewide, despite coming off of his two terms as Florida’s governor.  Since then, he has done nothing in the Senate whatsoever than be among the chief obstructionists to constructive legislation there, besides voting for Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees, the crew that reversed Roe vs Wade.  I don’t know precisely who was polled in the polls that have him far ahead, but let’s look at two voting groups.  

Seniors:  Debbie should be an easy choice for seniors (even the ones who are registered as without party affiliation, independents and Republicans), considering Scott’s historic opposition to Medicare and Social Security both of which he wanted to put up to a fresh vote in Congress every five years. He has shut up about that right now, but if re-elected, believe me, it remains high on his agenda.  There are many seniors in Florida. Scott’s positions directly attack their pocketbooks where it hurts, the cost of their health care and their retirement income!  Democrats must publicize this! 

Women:  Scott’s opposition to women’s abortion rights should bring many women into Ms. Muscarsel-Powell’s camp.  The presence on the ballot of an amendment to enshrine abortion rights in the Florida Constitution should augment this too!   Democrats must publicize this, too. 

However, Democratic strategists must be careful because that amendment is included along with a bucket full of other ones, and too many voters are in the lazy habit of voting ‘no’ on all questions on their ballot, assuming ‘yes’ votes will cost them money.  Clearly, voters for the amendment guaranteeing abortion rights will not vote for Scott, so publicizing its importance deserves the very highest priority. 

In addition, Scott’s efforts to make voting more difficult, aimed at minorities and immigrants (Debbie is one), should bring the votes of Latinos and those of color to the Democratic column as well.   Remember, polling elects no one.  Voters do! 

I know Floridians are far from being the brightest folks in the nation, their repeated choices of awful governors proving that, but I don’t think this applies to a majority of seniors there and most women too!  And they might be just enough to turn the State blue, and that could include the legislature in Tallahassee and several congressional districts as well!  

For more information about Debbie Muscarel-Powell, visit  https://www.debbieforflorida.com/ or just CLICK RIGHT HERE.  You might want to join me in setting up a monthly donation to her campaign. 

Let me repeat: ‘Polling elects no one.  Voters do!’ 

You must do your part to make that happen.

And while on the subject of polls, I have little faith in the New York Times/Siena University polling that still puts Trump slightly ahead of President Biden.  Americans are just not that sick.  That poll might be.

JL                                        

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Life Insurance

Seeing those ads on TV (or in the AARP magazine) about life insurance for seniors with no health questions asked leads me to share some information with you about life insurance.  I’ve included this before on Jackspotpourri but its repetition never hurts. (My experience in the life insurance industry spanned over four decades, most of which was in non-sales activities.)

1.    All life insurance policies, regardless of company, are based on the same or very similar mortality tables that tell insurance companies how many individuals at a given age will die within one year.  There are no exceptions to this.

2.    These mortality tables assume that the insureds are healthy, having at least answered health questions before being issued a policy.  If this not the case, the number expected to die is arbitrarily increased, as explained below.

3.    The insurance company must collect enough ‘premiums’ to cover the anticipated number of deaths that these mortality tables indicate will occur within that one year.

4.    The same procedure follows for each succeeding year, during which, simply because of aging, an increasingly larger number of insureds will not survive the year, and more premium dollars must be collected to pay that year’s death claims.

5.    This kind of insurance is known as one-year-term insurance.  Individuals at younger ages can purchase it, usually in one, five, ten, or twenty- year packages.  Insurance companies, however, use that one-year term cost at all ages internally in structuring the premiums for all of the policies they sell.  All of them!

6.    Because life insurance policies (excluding term policies), especially at older ages, are usually sold with premiums that remain the same, insurance company mathematicians known as actuaries, figure out a ‘level’ premium to be paid each year.  It is far in excess of the ‘one year term insurance’ premiums required to cover deaths in early years, but far less than the ‘one year term premium’ needed to pay death benefits in later years.  Taking interest rates into consideration, this amounts to overpaying in a policy’s early years and underpaying in its later years.  (Paying premiums using cash values, dividends, and loans does not change the fact that the cost of one year term insurance at a given age is at the heart of determining premiums.)

7.    The idea of ‘whole life insurance’ with a level premium lasting ‘forever’ is just a combination of the early years’ overpayments, saved up in what is called the policy’s cash value, internally supplemented by enough one-year-term insurance to add up to the policy’s death benefit each year. Ultimately, in a true ‘whole life’ policy, no one-year-term insurance at all will be needed at very advanced ages, its cost then being prohibitive, with the cash value alone then sufficing to be the entire death benefit.  All varieties of life insurance are variations of this approach, including endowment policies, universal life policies, and stripped-down term policies that usually run out before becoming death claims.

8.    Policies offered to seniors with no health questions being asked usually have two safeguards that insurance companies include so that they don’t issue policies to those on death’s doorstep.  These are: (a) the full death benefit is not available for the policy’s first two years, with that death benefit usually graded down to the actual premiums paid plus interest during that period, and (b) because the insurance company is insuring individuals about whose health they know nothing, the premium for the one-year-term insurance portion of the death benefit, as determined in 3, 4, 5, and 6 above, is significantly increased.  For example, at an age when 20 deaths during the year per 1000 among insureds who have answered health questions, is anticipated by the insurance industry’s established mortality tables, the actuaries might double that number of anticipated deaths to perhaps 40 per 1000 to account for those whose physical condition is unknown to them, anticipating that using that increased number of deaths will provide enough to pay for the portion of the death benefit not available from the cash value, as explained above in number 7 above. This increase in the cost of this ‘term insurance’ portion of the death benefit will, of course, continue through succeeding years. That is the way these kinds of policies are internally structured, although the premium paid is a level one.  The smiling pitchman on TV doesn't go into that.

9.    Conclusion:  If one desires or needs life insurance at any age and can qualify for it by answering health questions, it will be far less costly than a ‘no health questions’ policy, in which the underlying one-year term premium as explained above is increased because the insurance company is unaware of the insured’s health, and the full death benefit is not usually available for the first two years.  But before purchasing any life insurance policy, at any age, a need for it must be first determined. 

 

JL                                        

 

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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri

Strange “Hits’!  The large number of those accessing Jackspotpouri from Singapore has suddenly ceased. In their place, however, there have appeared large numbers of ‘hits’ on each posting in the hundreds, and as was the case with those from Singapore, but this time from Hong Kong!  I suspect that the Chinese are playing around with internet transmissions, possibly to try to identify who is reading them. 

Email Alerts:  If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do.  And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com.

Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it. Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.

If you want to send someone the blog, you can just tell them to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or you can provide a link to that address in your email to them. 

There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though!   Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible.  If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog posting will be forwarded, along with a brief comment from you.  Each will receive a link to click on that will directly connect them to the blog.

Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting.

Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it, particularly if they are a registered voter.  This is an election year.  Spread the word.

JL

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April 21, 2024 - Republicans and a Recommended Book

 

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The Truth About Republicans

For many years, the Republican Party was the party of respectability. It stood for what most Americans saw as traditional values.  It was graced by the memory of Abraham Lincoln, probably our greatest president.  It favored healthy small town and rural values, and avoided being associated with urban problems, which even immigrants who initially settled in cities tried to escape.  It championed individual accomplishment and tried to discourage foreign influences as well as foreign involvements. Any hints of radicalism were left to the Democrats.  When crooked politicians turned up, they were not found in the Grand Old Party. That was the stuff of Democrats, rumored to be in cahoots with organized crime.  Choosing to be a Republican was the safe, honorable, and respectable way of being an American!

Republican women were sometimes known as ‘cloth coat Republicans’ because they preferred a durable, stylish, cloth coat rather than furs, and that symbolized to many the party’s ties to the common working person.  I recall, when growing up, that my father, a unionized salesman, selected the New York Herald Tribune as his Sunday newspaper of choice. I doubt that he agreed with its editorial page but that was the respectable thing to do in those days. He liked being seen as the reader of the Trib. (During the week, he stuck with the Newark Evening News, another conservative paper.)

But here’s the big news!  It is no longer respectable to be a Republican. It has become the party of permanent opposition.  Even worse, it treats those on the other side of the aisle not as opponents but as enemies.  Its strategies are based on lying and cheating. 

• It opposes a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion.  
• Its members oppose immigration policies that brought their own parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents here.  
• It opposes government support of health care for all Americans and even minimal retirement benefits. 
• It readily accepts those who are against efforts to achieve racial equality and regulations to protect the environment.  
• It favors reduced taxation of the wealthy and businesses believing in the fairy tale that their wealth will ‘trickle down’ to those their businesses and investments employ. 
• It thinks isolationism is a valid defensive strategy 
• It says ‘no’ to regulating the proliferation of weapons among civilians. 
• It claims a close relationship to the Bible and wraps itself in the American flag, when in reality, its actions daily deny what the the Bible and the flag represent. 

But even then, it manages to maintain a patina of respectability.  Really though, that is just an illusion.  Some Americans, because of greed, selfishness, and possibly even fear of their innate prejudices being exposed, despise a democracy chosen by all the people, and most importantly, one that works to serve the interests of all of the people.  They ignore the equality of all men promised in the Declaration of Independence. These people have found a home in the Republican Party and have taken it over.  They are today’s Republican Party. 

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?  At first tolerated because they produced votes, the bait that attracts all politicians, some unruly and dissatisfied Americans turned to the Grand Old Party and soon they became crucial to its electing its candidates to any office whatsoever and had no scruples about lying to accomplish that.  Without them, Republicans found they could not win elections.  

Violence is not excluded from their tactics. Think of the rioters at the Miami Board of Elections in 2000, trying to stop the count of Florida’s vote there in the election that took the Supreme Court to put George W. Bush into the White House.  Think of the rioters who stormed the Capitol in January of 2021 to stop the electoral vote count. Think of the demonstrators in Charlottesville a few years ago screaming antisemitic slogans whom then-president Trump included among the ‘good people on both sides.’ Think of those feared by the witnesses, jurors, and Court officials in the current litigation concerning the defeated former president, defenders of whom are not beyond stooping to violence.  These are today’s Republicans!  Watch them gloat and threaten nightly on Fox News!  

They are not just blowing hot air. The stage for their acceptance of violence was set late in the last century with the rejection of government authority by the armed Branch Davidians in Waco who died fighting the enforcement of Federal laws, inspiring the terrorists who later blew up the Federal Building In Oklahoma City with great loss of life, and even some of the subsequent shootings at schools and entertainment venues. It was reinforced by the gross misinterpretation of the Second Amendment by the Supreme Court in D.C. vs Heller in 2008 allowing the proliferation of weapons in this country, bringing about thousands of deaths in this country over the years since then.  The pro-gun opinion of Justice Scalia (another flawed Republican idol) in that case will be remembered along with the Dred Scott pro-slavery decision in 1858 as one of the depths of American history.

These ruthless people have gotten control of local governments, school boards and many State legislatures and their influence has crept into the Federal government as well. 

You can find it, tragically, among some in law enforcement and in the military who confuse patriotism with Republican opposition to those they personally see as political enemies.  Some were even among those arrested for their participation in the January 6 rioting! 

They even elected a lying and cheating snake oil salesman to the presidency in 2016, who supposedly unknowingly, has been used by the nation’s enemies to further their causes.  Russian propaganda is voiced on the floor of Congress by those who couldn’t locate Russia on a map. The forty-fifth president still does not, along with many of his supporters, accept the fact that he was defeated in  2020! These are the people who pass as Republicans today. 

Republicans no longer condemn the world’s despots and dictators but seek to emulate their efficiency.  With the three politically motivated Justices that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell shoehorned into the Supreme Court during Trump’s presidency, Republicans try to twist our laws and legislative bodies to serve their purposes, many of which seem aimed at weakening our Federal government’s role in best serving the people, replacing it with easily manipulated State laws.

It does not matter that some Republicans are not as bad as others, because when push comes to shove, most hold their noses, and nonetheless, stick with their corrupted party.  While those Republicans who choose not to run for re-election, retiring from corrupted Republican politics, are to be commended, their replacements usually come from the ranks of the very extremists whose presence brought about their retirement.

 ‘Respectable’ Republicans like New York’s Jacob Javits or Nelson Rockefeller of the last century no longer exist.  At the G.O.P.’s 1964 Convention, Rockefeller was humbled by the supporters of right winger Barry Goldwater, where physical violence almost erupted.  Goldwater preached the backward looking, ‘off the wall,’ conservatism of author William Buckley (who was the ghost writer for Goldwater’s book, ‘The Conscience of a Conservative’).   Really, very few Republicans today have what is considered a ‘conscience.’  Or a heart for that matter. That year, 1964, marked what really was the death of respectability for the Republicans, despite traces of sanity sometimes being detected occasionally, such as when the Republican-controlled House depends on Democratic votes to act on crucial legislation, or in the personages of those like the presently ostracized Liz Chaney.   

That is why Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and even the naïve Ronald Reagan, who didn’t know what he was buying into when he accepted the support of these vile interlopers into the G.O.P., would roll over in their graves if they knew that Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed to be Republicans.  It is very simple, folks …

 

Do Gaetz and Greene Call fhe shots for the GOP?

To be a Republican today is a disgrace.  

JL                                        

 

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A Book to Read

Portions of my piece about the Supreme Court in the previous posting of Jackspotpourri were inspired by scholar Louis Menand’s review in the April 15 issue of the New Yorker magazine of retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s new book, ‘Reading the Constitution: Why I chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism.’ The book, Menand points out, ‘is accessible, rather repetitive, and neither theoretical nor technical … and addressed to non-lawyers.’  I’ve added it to my reading list.

JL                                        

 

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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri

Strange “Hits’!  The large number of those accessing Jackspotpouri from Singapore has suddenly ceased. In their place, however, there have appeared large numbers of ‘hits’ on each posting in the hundreds, and as was the case with those from Singapore, but this time from Hong Kong!  I suspect that the Chinese are playing around with internet transmissions, possibly to try to identify who is reading them.  

Email Alerts:  If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do.  And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com. 

Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it. Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.

If you want to send someone the blog, you can just tell them to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or you can provide a link to that address in your email to them. 

There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though!   Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible.  If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog posting will be forwarded, along with a brief comment from you.  Each will receive a link to click on that will directly connect them to the blog. 

Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting.

Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it, particularly if they are a registered voter.  This is an election year.  Spread the word.

JL

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