* * * Honoring Rickwood
Former New York Yankee Reggie Jackson’s remarks in a Fox interview at Birmingham’s Rickwood Field ceremony on Thursday, (honoring the first baseball stadium in the United States, the Negro baseball players excluded from the American and National Leagues who played there, and appropriately, in view of his passing this week, Willie Mays), were the only parts of the program that were not sugar-coated.
Instead, Reggie went straight to the heart of racism in this country, mentioning Sheriff Bull Connor, the deaths of children killed in the KKK bombing of a nearby church, and the humiliating segregation that legally existed until the middle of the last century, and is not entirely wiped out today.
JL
* * *
States' Rights are the Problem
After the Civil War, it was almost impossible to find a Southerner willing to admit that the Confederate States’ secession was based on slavery and its westward expansion and not the preservation of ‘States rights’ as written into the Constitution.
They had some basis in doing so because the Constitution intentionally gave smaller, rural, States (the kind where slavery was prevalent) the same two-senator representation that much more populous States, where slavery didn’t exist, had in Congress. And those two undeserved seats were also counted in determining the number of presidential electoral votes each State had. Also, the Constitution’s Second Amendment was included so that slave-holding States could quickly raise a militia if the Federal government ever used its army to crack down on slavery. How did this happen?
Many of the so-called Founding Fathers were slave owners and one of them, James Madison, was the prime author of these pro-slavery Constitutional provisions, which passed muster as protective of ‘States’ rights.’ Northern opponents of slavery, in order to secure passage of the Constitution, went along with Madison, hoping slavery would eventually wither on the vine of its own accord. It didn’t, until Abraham Lincoln, about 75 years later, made that happen in the course of defending the Union against those who put their States ahead of their nation. Almost 400,000 Americans died in the Civil War.
Well, slavery is gone in this country, but ‘States’ rights’ is still being used as an excuse by today’s Republicans to oppose almost any Federal action aimed at making life better for most Americans. This is why gun violence is so difficult to control, women’s rights to choose to have an abortion are a perpetual issue, and the ignorant legislators of Louisiana voted to display the Ten Commandments in all Louisiana classrooms, a clear violation of the First Amendment.
States’ rights serves as the last remaining tool the opponents of democracy in this country possess.
If I were a Virginia landowner (otherwise I could not vote in those days), I would not have voted for James Madison.
JL
* * *
Baidu is the largest internet search engine in China, headquartered in Beijing and loosely affiliated with Amazon. I’ve determined that is where large number of ‘Hong Kong’ hits on Jackspotpourri are coming from. The Chinese people are eager to sample what’s on the internet outside of China, even on as minor a site as Jackspotpourri. I am sure their government knows exactly who is checking out those sites, so they should at least be aware of that.
JL
* * *
Diplomacy is Preferable to War
The other day, on ‘X’ (what used to be Twitter), leading American scientist, security analyst, and former presidential adviser Jon Wolfsthal recalled the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that successfully limited Iran’s nuclear program during the Obama administration. Of course, during his former presidency, the Republicans’ likely 2024 candidate was quick to abandon it with vows to produce something better … which, typical of his promises, he never did.
Now, there is no real monitoring or control of Iran’s nuclear program. Wolfstal noted that the JCPOA was an example of what diplomacy can do in situations where ‘wars and promises of a better deal’ don’t come up with answers. (Wars are what happens when diplomacy fails.)
It is reason enough to keep the convicted felon now running for president as far away from the White House as possible. He shouldn’t even be allowed to buy a ticket for the daily visitors’ tours of the place. Same goes for the Capitol building.
JL
* * *
What's With This 'Weaponizing' Stuff?
Republicans, especially the convicted felon they will be running for president in November, constantly accuse the Democrats, and President Biden particularly, of ‘weaponizing’ the Department of Justice, the Court system, and other government entities against them. This is a fiction but one easily accepted by their MAGA supporters because that is what they try to do, whenever they have the opportunity.
What quickly comes to mind is ‘Judge’ Aileen Cannon, a last-minute, barely qualified, Trump appointee, who has ‘weaponized’ her courtroom by delaying, seemingly forever, the ‘document theft’ trial in which the former president is a defendant.
(There is an unconfirmed theory circulating that suggests that in the last few days of his presidency, Ms. Cannon came very highly recommended to President Trump for a place on that courthouse’s janitorial staff, and Trump, then immersed in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, didn’t bother to read past the word ‘recommended’ and knowing that she was a loyal Republican, routinely named her to fill a vacant judgeship there, a position she quickly accepted as preferable to mopping the courthouse’s marble floors. Stranger things have happened. Democrats will gleefully accept that I made this story up … which I did … but for the benefit of gullible Republicans, it really didn’t happen this way.)
Another example of 'weaponizing' is the intentional delay the Supreme Court, controlled by Republican appointees, is cultivating before finally announcing its decision regarding the former president’s permanent immunity from criminal acts committed while he was in office.
Watch for that decision in a week or two, which really won’t matter very much because the delay has already ruled out the possibility of a trial before the election, the unspoken intent of the SCOTUS majority.
But really, Republicans don’t have the slightest idea what ‘weaponizing’ the Justice system really is, and they are just begging to be taught that lesson.
When President Biden is re-elected with a solid Democratic Congress to back him, he will become their teacher, poised to do exactly that by having the Senate allow him to expand the number of Justices on the Supreme Court resulting in his appointing at least four new Justices to negate the Republican majority on the SCOTUS.
Now that would be true ‘weaponizing.’
It might not be necessary, however, if the threat of that being done suffices to bring about the resignations of Justices Thomas and Alito, both of whom are ethically unfit to sit on the Supreme Court, failing to meet the standards applied to judges on lower courts, but which do not apply to SCOTUS Justices at present. President Biden would then name two replacements for them.
FDR’s threat during the 1930s to similarly increase the number of Justices on the SCOTUS was sufficient to convince the Court’s Justices to begin to decide cases in a manner that benefited the American people rather than those who had supported the conservative presidents who had appointed them years earlier. That might be adequate precedent for that happening now.
JL
* * *
(If you want a copy of this on a flyer to mount on a piece of sturdy cardboard and display in you car’s rear window, as I do in mine, just ask me for one!)
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
* * *
No comments:
Post a Comment