Caution! - (Repeated from earlier Jackspotpourri postings)
Make of this what you wish: In today's political climate, it might be personally dangerous to write specifically about certain topics, and all members of the staff (at present, just me) at Jackspotpourri are aware of that. No one wants the DOJ chasing after them, and lawyers are expensive. Sometimes leaving certain things 'unsaid' can be more effective than saying them. We must learn to 'read between the lines.'
*Abide!
JL
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Happy Birthday, Abe!
Celebrating the February 12 birthday of America’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, here is historian Heather Cox Richardson’s ‘Letters from an American’ dated February 11. Read it, copy it, and send it to your friends, especially the ones who have forgotten what America is about. (See if you can identify today’s version of ‘that same old serpent’ that Lincoln talks about in the closing paragraph of what follows.)
“On February 12, 1809, Nancy Hanks Lincoln gave birth to her second child, a son: Abraham.
Abraham Lincoln grew up to become the nation’s sixteenth president, leading the country from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865, a little over a month into his second term. He piloted the country through the Civil War, preserving the concept of American democracy. It was a system that had never been fully realized but that he still saw as “the last, best hope of earth” to prove that people could govern themselves.
Lincoln grew up in rural poverty as wealthy enslavers took over prime land in his family's home state of Kentucky and pushed them across the Ohio River to Indiana, where Nancy Lincoln died. From there, they moved on to the frontier state of Illinois, where Abraham sowed seed, hoed fields, grubbed roots, cut trees, made fences, and harvested crops both at home and for farmers to whom his father hired him out for wages, for the elder Lincoln never managed to get his feet under him after leaving Kentucky.
In 1831, finally an adult, Abraham set out to make his mark in the world, as did thousands of other young men in his dynamic era. But making it on his own wasn’t much easier for the young Lincoln than it had been for his father.
He settled in the town of New Salem, a village of about a hundred people on a bluff above the Sangamon River, where he failed as a storekeeper, then cobbled together various jobs, eking out a living splitting rails and making deliveries. Government appointments, first as a postmaster and then as a surveyor, kept him afloat and made him well enough known that in 1834, voters elected him to the state legislature, and he was on his way to prominence.
Lincoln’s time as a young man on the make had made him think hard about the relationship between Americans and their government. In his era, elite southern enslavers insisted that government had no role to play in the country except in protecting property, a concept of government that permitted them to amass fortunes thanks to the labor of their Black neighbors. But Lincoln had watched his town of New Salem die because its settlers—hard workers, eager to make the town succeed—could not dredge the Sangamon River to promote trade by themselves.
Lincoln later mused, “The legitimate object of government is ‘to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves,’… as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.”
Once elected to the presidency, Lincoln joined with members of his new Republican Party to make the government work for the American people. They created national money and the income tax. They took land from speculators and gave it to men willing to farm it. They established public colleges to enable poor men to get an education, the Department of Agriculture to make sure poor men had access to good seeds, and transcontinental railroads so poor men could both get to western lands and get their products back to eastern markets. And they used the power of the federal government to end human enslavement in the United States except as punishment for crime.
A generation later, under Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, progressives at the turn of the twentieth century expanded on Lincoln's understanding of the role of government in supporting the American people. In that era, corrupt industrialists increased their profits by abusing their workers, adulterating milk with formaldehyde and painting candies with lead paint, dumping toxic waste into neighborhoods, and paying legislators to let them do whatever they wished.
Those concerned about the survival of democracy worried that individuals were not actually free when their lives were controlled by the corporations that poisoned their food and water while making it impossible for individuals to get an education or make enough money ever to become independent.
To restore the rights of individuals, progressives of both parties argued that individuals needed a strong, active government to protect them from the excesses and powerful industrialists of the modern world. Under the new governmental system that Theodore Roosevelt pioneered, the government cleaned up the sewage systems and tenements in cities, protected public lands, invested in public health and education, raised taxes, and called for universal health insurance, all to protect the ability of individuals to live freely without being crushed by outside influences.
Reformers sought, as Roosevelt said, to return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”
In the 1920s, the idea that the government should be run as a business eclipsed Roosevelt’s progressive government, but after the Great Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s offered a “new deal for the American people.” That New Deal meant that the government would no longer work simply to promote business, but would also regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure. World War II accelerated the construction of that active government, and by the time it was over, Americans quite liked the new system.
After the war, Republican Dwight Eisenhower embraced the active government. He explained that in the modern world, the government must protect people from disasters created by forces outside their control, and it must provide social services that would protect people from unemployment, old age, illness, accidents, unsafe food and drugs, homelessness, and disease.
He called his version of the New Deal “a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands of the welfare of the whole Nation.” One of his supporters echoed Lincoln when he explained, “If a job has to be done to meet the needs of the people, and no one else can do it, then it is the proper function of the federal government.” Both Republicans and Democrats embraced this idea, which became known as the “liberal consensus.” In the second half of the twentieth century, they expanded the role of government to protect civil rights, the environment, access to healthcare and education, equal opportunity in employment, and so on.
But those who objected to the liberal consensus rejected the idea that the government had any role to play in the economy or in social welfare and made no distinction between the liberal consensus and international communism. They insisted that the country was made up of “liberals,” who were pushing the nation toward socialism, and “conservatives” like themselves, who were standing alone against the Democrats and Republicans who made up a majority of the country and liked the new business regulations, safety net, infrastructure, and protection of civil rights.
That reactionary mindset came to dominate the Republican Party after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.
Republicans began to insist that anyone who embraced the liberal consensus of the past several decades was un-American and had no right to govern, no matter how many Americans supported that ideology. And now, forty-five years later, we are watching as a group of reactionaries dismantle the government that serves the needs of ordinary Americans and work, once again, to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of an elite.
The idea of a small government that serves the needs of a few wealthy people, Lincoln warned in his era, is “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”
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Before we leave Professor Richardson, please remember to check out her thoughts every day at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ . Sign up for it there so that her prior evening’s writings show up each morning in your email. You can just CLICK HERE. Its basic version (which is all I have right now) is free. Today’s posting (dated Feb. 12) deals with what amounts to Trump’s handing over the presidency to Elon Musk.
JL
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Jackspotpourri is ‘Going to the Dogs’
With college and NFL football finished until late August, and baseball Spring training still weeks away, and not much interesting happening on the hockey and basketball scenes, other than guesswork about who will dominate ‘March Madness,’ I spent some time this week watching the 149th annual Westminster Dog Show on TV from Madison Square Garden. It’s really a big deal, Manhattan’s Empire State Building being illuminated with the Show’s purple and gold colors.
This Show is very important for the breeders, owners, and handlers of these elite members of the canine world, their royalty going head-to-head in sort of their own World Series or Super Bowl.
The Show divides about 200 breeds of dogs into seven groups (Herding dogs, Working dogs, Sporting dogs, Non-Sporting dogs, Terriers, Hounds, and Toy dogs) and selects the winner in each group after a handler runs them through a less than one minute routine. Many of the competing dogs are prior dog show winners and have been there before. They are pros.
Then, the seven group winners compete for the ‘Best in Show’ award, though this final judging is no real competition because each of the seven have different attributes and talents, noteworthy perhaps only in their ‘group.’ It’s sort of like comparing apples and oranges, so this final judging seems to be more subjective than objective.
The 2025 ‘Best in Show’ title went to a Working dog, Monty, a Giant Schnauzer, who had won the Working dog group title for the past three years and I guess whose time had come for the big prize.
 |
| Monty finally measured up! |
It had been 21 years since a Working dog won ‘Best in Show’ in the Westminster. Second place went to a hound, Bourbon, a nine-year-old Whippet coming out of retirement, and who resembled the many racing dogs now unemployed because of the shutting down of many dog tracks out of compassion for these creatures.
What surprised me was the quiet manner in which these animals sat, held on a short leash by their handlers, awaiting their turn before the judges, not paying any attention to each other, just a few feet apart, and avoiding the biological activities with which anyone who has ever walked a dog is familiar. I don’t know if this was accomplished by diet or drugs, but the floor of Madison Square Garden remained pristine throughout the competition. Perhaps what appeared on TV was edited.
Although the ‘Best in Show’ winner was a 'Working' dog, much of the Show’s audience seated down-front in the Garden, many in formal attire, did not seem to be the kind of people who ever did any kind of ‘Working’ whatsoever. Their generous applause seemed to represent a longing for the human royalty or nobility that has disappeared over the past centuries but remains celebrated in the canine world by dogs like Monty, who probably doesn’t do very much ‘Working’ these days either.
JL
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Illegal, Unconstitutional, but Who Cares
It is easy to find numerous examples of ‘the new administration, specifically President Trump, performing acts that are illegal and/or unconstitutional. Just pick up a newspaper or watch TV news shows on any channel other than Fox News. The lower courts are filling up with cases objecting to such acts.
The administration broadly hints that it might disregard some court decisions ruling against some of its firings, refusals to act on legislation passed by Congress, including spending allocated funds, or even changing the structure of government, ignoring the rule of law on which our government is based.
It's okay to be frightened by this! Why?
It amounts to a constitutional crisis. Our government is based on checks and balances among its legislative, executive, and judicial branches, established and written into a Constitution in 1789 and occasionally amended since then. Ignoring this three-way balance creates a constitutional crisis. One branch cannot be superior to the other two as the president seems to claim the executive branch is, of which he is the head.
In ‘Banana Republics,’ usually the military plays a role in resolving these problems. Fortunately, in the United States, the ‘rule of law’ prevails instead, with our courts filling that role, but they must not hesitate to act.
If the Supreme Court, where these matters will ultimately end up, disagrees with some of the President’s actions, what will he do? The longer it takes for this issue to come before the Supreme Court, the more difficult it will be to deal with such a constitutional crisis. Meanwhile, our posture should be to
*abide for as long as possible!
JL
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What Happens when No Candidate Wins a Majority of the Electoral College
There has been a lot written about the undemocratic nature of the Electoral College in which each State has the number of electors equal to the number of members of the House of Representatives it has, plus one for each of their two Senators. This puts ‘a thumb on the scale’ for States with small populations, each of which gets two electors regardless of their populations, in addition to one for each of their seats in the House Representatives.
I doubt that this inequity will ever be remedied. Amendments to elect the president by national popular vote have been suggested for over two centuries and have gotten nowhere. This goes back to the days of the Founding Fathers who peddled compromises in order to get the Constitution ratified by the necessary nine of the thirteen original States.
But there is another inequity less spoken of that warrants change. If a candidate for president doesn’t secure a majority of electoral votes, one more than half of them, the Twelfth Amendment sends the election to Congress, where the House of Representative selects one of the three top candidates to be president, and the Senate selects one of the top two candidates to be vice-president. In both of these deliberations, each State has only one vote, regardless of its population. That is not particularly democratic.
The problem, though, is that the Twelfth Amendment doesn’t go into how that one vote per State is determined, leaving it to each State’s delegation to work that out. It gets more complicated if there is a tie at that point in either of these Houses of Congress. For the solution, read the Twelfth Amendment and hope it never happens.
Really, the Electoral College needs to be eliminated or at least modified to better reflect the nation’s population. Remind your grandchildren to tell their children about this because I don’t see it happening within this century.
JL
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Where Loyalty is a One Way Street
Republicans, especially President Trump during his 2024 campaign, did not hesitate to equate the benefits favored by Democrats to serve the needs of the people with ‘socialism,’ as practiced in the autocratic, if not totalitarian, states from which many here, particularly from Latin America, had fled.
Those in the United States who had managed to attain citizenship probably voted for Trump last year, and the rest, here illegally or with expired visas, still ardently supported him, misled into associating the Democrats with the Maduro-type socialist dictatorships to our South or in the countries Trump called ‘shit-holes’ while campaigning. Let’s look at some facts.
Fact #1: Over three hundred thousand Venezuelans who were not citizens and had no other basis for remaining in the United States, were granted ‘temporary protected status’ (TPS) by President Biden and avoided the risk of deportation. Presently, for a variety of reasons, illegal immigrants from seventeen countries have such ‘temporary protected status,’ all of which the Trump administration is reviewing.
Fact #2: Well, those ‘illegal’ Venezuelans have just learned what trusting Republicans, especially Trump, risks. He has just revoked their ‘temporary protected status’! They now face deportation. They seemed to have ignored how he screwed many of the contractors and vendors with whom he worked before he failed in the gambling casino business. With Donald Trump, loyalty is a one-way street.
Fact #3: Besides the aforementioned Venezuelans, Donald Trump also is hurting many of the misled and misinformed who voted for him. In his efforts to save money and reduce taxes for the very wealthy and corporations, President Trump is reducing our government’s role in aiding people to get done with government support what they could never accomplish as individuals. Healthcare is a good example.
Inner-city minorities are not the only ones benefiting from such ‘safety net’ programs; many in ‘red’ States count on them too, possibly more than in ‘blue’ States. As consumer prices rise resulting from the president’s turning to higher tariffs as a solution to economic problems, a strategy with which few economists agree, the need for that ‘safety net’ becomes increasingly evident while Trump loyalists are busy shredding it.
But there’s more going on, revealing the true nature of Donald Trump.
His preposterous plan to take over Gaza and resettle its Palestinian population in Arab States that do not want them has firmly alienated the Muslim world against him and can scuttle the tenuous cease-fire and hostage exchange that has brought a glimmer of hope to the Middle East. Russia and China will gladly replace the United States as the benefactor (and weapons provider) for Jordan and Egypt if Trump insists on trying to leverage our present role there to force them to agree to his crazy plan for Gaza. And you don’t have to read between the lines to sense his betrayal of Ukraine.
Slowly but surely the world is realizing what a shallow phony Donald Trump is. Unelected advisor Elon Musk, whose presence partially shields the president from direct criticism, knows it and is trying to destroy the regulatory functions of our nation’s government as quicky as possible, striking while the iron is hot, and so long as he is in Trump’s favor. He knows that will not be forever. Washington is littered with those who were once Trump’s buddies but who were ultimately dumped by him or quit on their own when they could take no more of his incompetence and insolence.
There is a limit to the amount of the illegal and/or unconstitutional acts of the administration and the president that Americans can stomach. The courts are not ignoring them either! (See my remarks above about a pending Constitutional crisis.)
Eventually, that iron will cool off, as more and more people in the United States and elsewhere are offended or hurt by the president of the United States and desert him.
These include many Republican legislators, who only support him now because of his threats, spoken and unspoken, to run more MAGA-friendly challengers against them in primaries in their districts.
Some of them may even grow spines but most of them are still reluctant to challenge him, and go along with his malignant agenda. That is a Republican disease. Meanwhile, all we can do is to * abide for as long as possible!
JL
* When I use the expression ‘abide,’ more fully explained in Jackspotpourri’s January 15, 2025 posting, I mean to ‘endure adversity, but not to yield to it.'
(But even the limits of that are beginning to come into sight.)
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JL
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