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But please, read through the whole thing till you get to these words again.
JL
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Good Stories Beat Good Arguments
Film maker Ken Burns was quoted the other day by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times as saying “The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view; the only thing that can do that is a good story. Good stories are a kind of benevolent Trojan horse. You let them in, and they add complication, allowing you to understand that sometimes a thing and its opposite are true at the same time.”
Arguments, however strong and compelling, will not usually convince anyone of anything. To change minds, they must be personally affected or plainly see others being hurt.
That’s where the ‘stories’ come in.
While the tax reductions that the Republican scoundrels (I can think of no better word) in Congress and the Administration have pushed through will take effect shortly, the cuts that will personally hurt many millions of Americans, such as those involving Medicaid, are scheduled to kick in only after the 2026 mid-term elections. Until then, they will be mostly ignored by the misinformed voters who put Republicans into office.
 |
| (AP photo carried in many newspapers nationwide) ‘But where are the clowns? Send in the clowns! Don't bother,
they're here.’ … Stephen Sondheim |
Eventually, however, enough Americans will be so hurt by the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ that none of the clowns pictured above will ever again be elected to public office.
And even if they wanted to run, there won’t be a Republican Party for them to pretend to be part of any longer, after Americans finally realize that today’s Republican Party is no more than a vehicle for the very wealthy and the business enterprises that brought them their wealth, very little if any of which ever ‘trickles down’ to the rest of the country as their discredited economists always claim it would supposedly do.
That’s when the ‘stories’of which Burns spoke become realities. That’s when ‘stories’ of how the government isn’t looking out for them will be told by and listened to by plain citizens. Talking about getting rid of FEMA, or leaving it to the States to manage disasters, true or false, only reinforces such ‘stories.’
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Right now, there are such ‘stories’ stemming from the tragic floods in Texas. Although blame for them cannot be specifically attributed to the reduction in government spending to which the Administration is committed, there are those who will see it that way. There have been unfilled vacancies in the agencies that monitor our weather, and the flooded county that was most affected had decided that it didn’t want to spend money on a ‘siren’ system that might have helped, because it would have raised local taxes.
But who is to say that anything would have prevented the tragedy in view of its suddeness, its dimensions, and the very early morning hours when it struck. As for the cell phone warning messages sent in the middle of the night, checking them out is likely to be postponed by most people until the next morning. Isn’t that what you might have done?
But still, there will be ‘stories’ and wrong or right, they will have an effect.
JL
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How Come the Wealthy Have So Much Money
I am beginning to think that some people have too much money. And that includes everyone who was invited to the Bezos’ recent wedding in Venice. I cannot understand how so many people accumulated so much wealth legitimately.
Here’s a thought and a hypothetical question it raises.
Based on what a dollar is worth today, does it sound reasonable to you that no one, no matter how skilled or talented, is worth more than ten or twenty million dollars a year in ‘after tax’ compensation? To 99.9 % of people, that is BIG, very, very, BIG money. And some people are earning, or stealing, or however acummulating, far, far, far more than that amount of money, almost inconceivable amounts of it.
I’ve just deleted the half dozen paragraphs I had planned on including in this Jackspotpourri about this. Why? Paul Krugman said it better than I could and I was beginning to sound like Karl Marx, which is not my intent. Copy and paste https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/inequality-part-v-predatory-financialization on your browser line or just CLICK HERE. Here’s an excerpt from what Krugman writes:
‘What do I mean by financialization? Actually I mean two different but related things. One aspect is the extraordinary rise in the share of the U.S. economy devoted to financial activities as opposed to production of goods and services. A second is the pervasive way in which financiers and financial institutions like hedge funds and private equity have changed how even nonfinancial business operates. These changes have almost always increased inequality.’
(While Krugman’s posts offer more detail for those who subscribe to read what he writes ‘beyond his paywall,’ a place where I do not go, there is still a lot of information available ‘for free’ right there in his many postings at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/ .)
Many of the guests in Venice at the Bezos nuptuals were there because of the ‘predatory financialization’ of which Krugman writes. I believe that suggests that when money itself becomes a commodity, it is always at the expense of those without much of it.
There are also the Federal Estate tax rules whereby an individual is exempt from paying any tax on the first $13,999,000 inherited (double that for a couple filing jointly). That continues to keep the amassing of such wealth ‘in the family.’
It ought not be possible for anyone, or any group, to amass amounts of wealth greater than what those generous annual ten or twenty million after-tax dollars would enable them to create. But do not kid yourself! Such super-massive concentrations of wealth, do however exist and lead to a ‘oligarchical’ concentration of power, and ought to be prevented by Federal and Stae tax policy. Unfortunately, our tax policies seem to be directed in the opposite direction! (We’ve left that to the ‘clowns’ pictured above in the preceding article.)
Democracy should rule our economy and not wealth. That’s what I think. What do you think? And that is not a hypothetical question.
JL
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The White House and the Supreme Court
Check out Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American dated June 27, which centers on the ignorance of the President of the United States. Copy and paste https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ on your browser line, or just CLICK HERE. Further on in this posting, I suggest that you check out her more recent postings.
I am for intelligence testing, including a familiarity with American history, for all who run for any Federal office. I believe our President would flunk any such testing of historical knowledge. Actually, most voters would too, but while I feel this should be required of candidates, it would be undemocratic to require it of voters. But It would have at least prevented our putting a poorly educated dunce back into the White House last year.
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Trump-like ignorance didn’t stop the Supreme Court from ‘procedurally’ limiting lower court decisions supporting birthright citizenship to the Appellate district where a decision was made; elsewhere in the country, separate litigation, complicated and costly, would be required if individuals wanted to raise the question of birthright citizenship.
But they did not specifically rule on birthright citizenship itself, something the President is removing via an Executive order. This refllected the SCOTUS’ reluctance to deal with the crucial question of whether a federal court in the United States of America may order the Executive to follow the law.
The Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the the Civil War, very clearly grants citizenship to anyone born in the U.S., with a few very minor exceptions. And that is the way they have ruled for the past 127 years in the past when the question came up. It was a settled matter, and became part of what is known in law as ‘stare decisis’ in 1898 in the case of the United States v. Wong Kim Ark. It should take a monumental changing in the nation’s basic philosophy to reverse something enshrined as is ‘stare decisis,’ which means looking to previous decisions for guidance and precedents in making current decisions.
Period!!! End of story!!!
Or at least it should be.
If one Court of Appeals rules on something, doesn’t it make sense that the Supreme Court cannot continue to allow different interpretations of that Amendment to prevail in different regions of the country by differing Appellate Courts? That would be crazy. But that is what they have done from a procedural standpoint. Other than Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, our Supreme Court majority seems to be ignoring ‘stare decisis’ in regard to citizenship just as they ignored it in regard to the Second Amendment in 2008, resulting in many unnecessary deaths from the proliferation of weapons.
These politially motivated Republican appointees, forming the Supreme Court’s majority, should stop messing with American history just to make the President happy.
For your information, here is Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment. It seems pretty clear to me, but I am not a lawyer.
‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’
In a related story, a Republican Congressman from Tennessee has asked that the citiizenship of New York’s likely next mayor, Zohran Mamdani, born in Uganda but who becam a naturalized citizen in 2018 be investigated by the DOJ so that he might be deported because of the lyrics of a rap song that praised Palestinian terrorists that he performed before becoming a citizen.
Regardless of what you think of Palestinian terrorists, Republican dummies cannot run around ignoring the Constitution and its Amendments. The President has even threatened the same thing for his erstwhile buddy, naturalized citizen Elon Musk, who dared to criticize the dummy’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill.’
JL
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Back to the NYC Mayor’s Race
And speaking of Zohran Mamdavi, likely to be elected New York City’s Mayor in November, he still has to somehow more strongly modify his past endorsement of a global Intifada supporting a Palestinian uprising again the State of Israel.
While Mamdavi now acknowleges the right of the State of Israel to exist, his views in regard to the Palestinians there must be made clearer. Not doing so will cripple his administration, just as corruption has crippled the present Mayor’s.
In New York City, the cultural and emotional center of the nation’s Jewish population, that is an enormous factor. It means that unless a Mayor Mamdani properly addresses this issue, his hands will be tied or that there will be a mass exodus from the City, and not only of Jews, significantly changing its economic and cultural nature.
One solution might be for Mamdani to come out for a vaguely designed ‘two state solution,’ which would be an improvement over his past support for a global Intifada.
Of course, this would open him to charges of hypocrisy and be insufficient for both those who are totally against any Palestinian state whatsoever as well as those who are totally against the State of Israel being there at all.
I suspect that such ‘vagueness’ will open the way for Mamdani to cut some sort of a deal with any one of, or all of, several candidates, all of whom are on his right, ranging from militant Republican Curtis Sliwa, Andrew Cuomo (who might not go away so fast), the present Mayor, the corrupt Eric Adams, now Donald Trump’s NYC deportation tool, and other candidates at this point either declared or unannouced. Combining all of them together for one candidate might come close to defeating Mamdani in November. Remember, the November election does not follow the ‘graded choice’ format.
Mamdani might ‘deal’ to get the strong support of at least one ot these other candidates. But is he a ‘unifier’ or a ‘disrupter’? Who knows? And that’s where we are right now.
JL
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Four Simple Remedies in National and State Elections for Those Getting a Headache
• 1. Aspirin
• 2. Advil
• 3. Tylenol
• 4. Just don’t vote for any Republicans.
Republicans with at least half a brain are choosing not to run for re-election and the rest of them do not deserve to be in office.
Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ike Eisenhower were exceptions and probably would be Democrats today! This is not to say all Democrats are angels. There are some I would not vote for, and that I have not voted for.
But from reading what apparently erudite columnists write (Paul Krugman, Timothy Snyder, Maureen Dowd, and Heather Cox Richardson are four examples; there are many more) and what appears in the ‘letters’ columns of various newspapers and on concerned viewers’ contributions to internet sites, a safer remedy for those who do not want to get a headache from spending too much time thinking about politics appears to be to always vote for Democrats and let it go at that. New York City may be an exception to that remedy.
JL
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Paywalls and an Important Closing Thought
While many Internet sites provide a lot of information ‘for free,’ many offer more material or deeper insights to those who subscribe (usually that costs about five dollars monthly) to breach what is called a ‘paywall.’ The trouble with that is that there is usually so much more material made available beyond these paywalls that one who goes there doesn't have enough time left to lead an otherwise normal life! You can’t let the time demanded by the Internet control your life.
Right now, I pay $4 a month to only one site, that of the New York Times, for a minimal subscription to get more of what it offers. There’s a lot beyond the paywalls of The Free Press, the Washington Post, Krugman, Richardson, and Snyder … but I just don’t have time for them.
Professor Richardson’s ‘Letters from an American’ always offers a lot on the ‘free’ side of her paywall, and provides links to her sources as well, if you want to do the work of following up on them. Right now, it is vitally important that you check out her July 7 and 8 postings by copying and pasting https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ on your browser line or by just CLICKING HERE. Then go eat your breakfast or lunch, if you still have stomach for it.
Thinking Americans must recognize that they are involved in a struggle to limit the unwarranted changing of the Executive Branch into a autocratic dictatorship. Ultimately, it will end well but until then there will be trials and tribulations making life uncomfortable for all of us … (the words with which this posting opened.)
JL
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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
Your comments on this ‘blog’ would be appreciated. My Email address is jacklippman18@gmail.com.
Sources of Information on Jackspotpourri: The sources of information used by Jackspotpourri include a delivered daily ‘paper’ newspaper (currently the Palm Beach Post, a Gannett publication) and what appears in my daily email.
Be aware that when I open that email, I take these steps:
1. I quickly scan the sources of the dozen or two emails I still get each day at my old email address to see from where they are being sent. Most are from vendors which I may have used years ago. Without reading 99% of them, I usually immediately delete them.
2. I then go to the email arriving at jacklippman18@gmail.com. Gmail enables ‘Promotion’ emails to be so designated and separated out. I believe their criteria are whether or not they end up asking for donations or if they are no more than advertisements. I ignore most of these ‘Promotion’ emails without reading them, deleting them. A very few, perhaps one or two a day, get moved over to the two or three dozen other emails which I will actually open.
3. Then I read my email.
Besides email, my other source of information is the Google search engine where I can look up any subject I want.
Lately, these search results have been headed by a very generalized summary clearly labeled as being developed by AI (Artificial Intelligence). On occasion I might use such search results, but when I do, I will say that I am doing so. Generally, however, I try not to use such summaries in preparing Jackspotpourri.
Following such ‘AI’ search results, there follows the results of my initially having accessed Google (or any other search engine) for information. Contrary to the AI-generated summaries, the sources of these results are clearly indicated.
I feel that It comes down to who YOU want to be in the driver’s seat in seeking information, yourself or something else (AI), the structure of which somewhere along the way had to have been created by others, with whose identity I am neither familiar nor comfortable. Caution should be exercised in using Artificial Intelligence.
(In doing searches on Google, I have found that these AI summaries can sometimes … but not always … be avoided by saying so in your search. For example, instead of searching for ‘FDR’s New Deal,’ I might search for ‘FDR’s New Deal – No AI.’ This is a work in progress.)
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.
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.
JL
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