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The Democratic Choice for PresidentIn the previous posting of Jackspotpourri, I
recommended that the Democrats name Vice-President Kamala Harris as their 2024
presidential candidate. She is really the only possible replacement for President
Biden. She already totally knows what
the job entails and has, as vice-president, been through the time consuming full
‘vetting’ process it requires. I had earlier suggested that her vice-presidential
running mate might be President Joe Biden! If it turns out that he is not
available for that role, I suspect Harris would choose Kentucky governor Andy
Beshear as her running mate. I did pass
the idea of a Harris/Biden ticket on to my Representative in Congress, as well
as in a still-unpublished letter to the Palm Beach Post. Here’s a copy of that letter:
‘The fears of
some Democrats that a Biden presidential candidacy would damage their
performance nationwide can be put aside by their nominating someone else
for president. The candidate who is best prepared to fill that role is
Vice-president Kamala Harris, despite President Biden's continuing to claim, despite
his age-related challenges, that he is the candidate most capable of defeating
Donald Trump. The Democrats should nominate Harris as their
presidential candidate and Biden as their vice-presidential candidate, a
position from which he can aid Harris and take on Trump without his frailties
affecting other Democratic candidates. In addition, Kamala Harris
possesses strong abilities and credentials of her own.’
Of interest is that the Palm Beach Post has published a Clay Bennett
(Chattanooga Times Free Press) cartoon showing a wearer of two buttons, one
reading ‘Biden/Harris’ and another reading ‘But Not Necessarily in that Order,’ so I am not the only one thinking in that
direction. But still, I have not encountered
anyone coming up with that idea in writing anywhere else but right here on
Jackspotpourri.
Meanwhile, various pundits and politicians, are
urging President Biden to withdraw from the presidential election because they
believe his slowing down due to aging will result in his losing, with both
Houses of Congress becoming Republican.
Others say that President Biden is the only Democrat who can defeat
Donald Trump.
Although I am neither a pundit nor a politician,
I agree with the former, as I indicate just above.
JL
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Daily Papers and Lessening the News Deluge
Each morning when I go out to my driveway to
pick up my daily newspaper, which I read over coffee, I note that not too many
other houses get their news that way anymore. It is true that what it contains
in print is often stale when compared to news received electronically, but it
offers a very necessary perspective, that which comes from you personally being
in charge of what your read, and not choices cultivated electronically for your
consumption.
But if you still prefer to look to your phone’s
screen or a tablet for your daily news, and are sick of being deluged by just too
many online news sources each morning competing for your attention, consider that National Public Radio (NPR) has
a free one available that is brief, non-partisan, easy to read, and will tell
you what you need to know for the day in just a minute or two. Give it a try by visiting https://www.npr.org/newsletters/
JL
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Do Foreign Dictators Influence the Republican Party ?
Professor Heather Cox Richardson starts off her
July 18 posting of ‘Letters from an American’ (appearing the morning of July
19) with these words: “Paul Manafort
walking onto the floor of the Republican National Convention yesterday
illustrated that the Republican Party under Trump has become thoroughly
corrupted into an authoritarian party aligned with foreign dictators.”
The details of how Manafort and others aligned
the G.O.P. with such foreign dictators is no secret, nor is the fact that the
Mueller investigation, running from 2017 to 2019, revealed much of this
connection, only to have it soft-pedaled and whitewashed by Trump’s Attorney
General, William Barr. Nevertheless, Manafort,
in enabling the Russia misinformation machine to influence the 2016
presidential election, and in dealing with their representatives, broke our
laws. He ended up in prison, only to
receive a pardon from Trump late in 2020. Well, Manafort is back, hoping Trump
will be as well.
Today’s naïve and gullible Republicans might
only awaken to this corruption of their party if Trump wins the election
prompting congratulatory messages to start pouring in from dictators like
Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin.
Here's an excerpt from Professor Richardson’s
posting that goes into some detail in explaining what Manafort and his Moscow
based associates conned the G.O.P. into supporting:
“Before
2016 the Republican Party stood staunchly against Russia, and getting
Republican voters to forget that history required adopting the argument of
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who is aligned with Putin and Trump,
that democracy has ruined the United States. In this argument, the central
principle of democracy—that all people must be equal before the law, and have a
right to a say in their government—destroys a country by making women, people
of color, immigrants, members of religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals
equal to heteronormative white men and permitting them to influence government.
In place of democracy, they want to impose their version of Christianity on the
nation, banning abortion, rejecting immigrants, and curtailing the rights of
gender, religious, and ethnic minorities.”
JL
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G.O.P. Convention Report
And as for Trump’s 90 minute acceptance speech at the Republican
Convention, it was a dud, causing some there to doze, and many at home to turn
off their TVs and go to sleep. He
started by detailing the unsuccessful attempt on his life on last Saturday,
from which he was saved only by the intervention of the Almighty he claimed,
made a quick plea for unity among all Americans and then deserted his
teleprompter and took off with his usual diatribe about immigrants who rape and
murder, how foreign countries rip us off daily, how crime is rampant in our
streets, how the government wastes our money, how we pay too much taxes, how
America is in decline, etc. etc. etc., ending up claiming he’ll quickly fix it
all up when elected. (Fact checkers must
have dozed as well since they only reported 25 lies in his speech.)
Donald Trump lives in an alternate reality. The presence of entertainment wrestler ‘Hulk Hogan,’ a theatrical athlete who ripped off his shirt at the convention to display a ‘Vote for Trump’ undershirt, claiming to be a buddy of Trump for 35 years, is part of that alternate reality in which many of Trump’s supporters live. Unfortunately, Donald’s alternate reality has nothing to do with the world the citizens of the planet inhabit. Trump had a glimpse of that reality when a failed assassin tried to kill him with a weapon allowed to be put into his hands by believers in false realities.
I hope Americans are smarter
than those who filled the arena in Milwaukee this week and vote for the
best candidates to deal with the challenges presented by the reality we all
face daily. None of those candidates are
Republicans.
JL
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Thoughts on Wealth and Power
Some people are wealthy and others are
not. Their wealth is perhaps the result
of an inborn talent on which they capitalize, or years of hard work and study,
or shrewd investments, or a running start provided by family wealth, or the
luck of being in the right place at the right time, or a combination of these
things.
Such wealth, if they wish, enables them to enjoy
totally satisfying, and even luxurious, lifestyles which extend into their
retirement years, to provide generous financial jump starts as well as
excellent educations for their children, grandchildren and other relatives, and
to establish and support charitable and cultural organizations if they are so
inclined.
Yet still, when the wealthy reach this often
stratospheric level, (there ARE people with incomes of thousands of millions of
dollars annually), their desire and ability to acquire still more wealth does
not wane, even though they have no conceivable need for it. Let’s try to figure out why this seems to be
so.
Along with the wealthy, there have always been
less wealthy segments of any society which occasionally might be awakened to
political and social philosophies which claimed that governments ought to exist
with the consent of those being governed.
Does this sound familiar? Check
out Seventeenth Century English philosopher Thomas Locke and our own
Declaration of Independence, which declared ‘all men to be created equal.’
Some may even extend such ideas to the
plentiful resources the world provides that they see in the hands of the
wealthy and wonder why they do not have their share and even seek to remedy
what they see as such inequities. Broadly, while such ideas of wealth
redistribution are sometimes connected with socialist movements, including
Marxian communism, they also can be achieved through a benevolent ruler, progressive
taxation, or a government providing those it governs with such benefits as
healthcare or retirement security, where necessary.
Aware of this, the wealthy, beyond possessing
everything they could conceivably need in this world, continue to acquire
wealth with just one further goal in mind and that is to have the power to
protect and preserve that wealth. Wealth
can enable them to have such power which can be used politically and
economically to attain that goal, assuring that the bulk of their wealth does
not fall into the hands of others.
Thinking back through history, this is the
pattern that numerous societies have followed in Europe, Asia, as well as in
ancient and Biblical times. Invariably,
the wealthy, while rarely losing outright, have had to make compromises,
particularly when they find their initial allies and supporters are not permanently
on their side. Although he was referring
to power, rather than to wealth, Julius Caesar asked of his supposed ally, ‘Et
Tu, Brutus?’ as the dagger was pushed into his gut.
(Now stop and try to figure out why this piece is being included in this posting.)
JL
* * *
StickBuddies
Back in the 1950s when I was in the Army in
Germany, we often listened to AFN (Armed Forces Network) which tried to provide
the kind of radio programming to which Americans were used. Every day, they carried a country music
program called ‘StickBuddy Jamboree.’ I
understood the point of that title to mean that ‘You and your buddies from the
sticks, we stick together,’ unifying those from the Carolina foothills, the
Kentucky ‘hollers,’ the one-traffic-light towns in Alabama and Arkansas, and
other parts of the rural south sharing their common musical tastes. When I heard JD Vance, raised in Southern
Ohio, accept the Republican vice-presidential nomination the other night,
‘StickBuddy Jamboree’ was the first thing that came to mind.
(Incidentally, another daily AFN program to
which we sometimes listened was a noon-time interview show called ‘Luncheon in
Munchen,’ the German spelling of Munich.
That in itself was always good for a laugh.)
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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