Old Mortality: Scalia

The Overseers 

The death of Antonin Scalia evokes a strange feeling in the  liberal soul. 

In one sense, you do not want to celebrate the death of an opponent who did not threaten you personally, with whom you disagreed vehemently, but for whom you wished no personal harm.

It was odd to think he went to the opera regularly with Justice Ginsberg.

The Angry Authority

And yet one cannot help but react with hope. Hope because his death might allow this pivotal institution, this bastion of conservative power, to be changed.

With the possible exception of  Justice Clarence Thomas, there was no more conservative and predictable and destructive member of the court. All you needed was a single sentence summary of any case which carried social significance and you knew exactly how Justice Scalia would vote: always with the powerful, always against the underdog, always to resist rulings which allowed the weak to protest the rules to be made by the strong.

In Citizens United, he led the charge to ensure money and the power it can buy prevailed.  Even in as purely symbolic a case as Bong Hits for Jesus, he sided not with the student, who was forced by authority in the person of his principal to line up along a road to cheer the passing of the commercial Olympic torch, but he sided with the principal who tore down the student's protest banner. In the case of a Black man arrested while riding as a passenger in a car because his name was mistakenly included in a police warrant record on a computer, strip searched and subjected to repeated rectal exams, Scalia voted the authorities had a prevailing interest in maintaining strip searches to protect the jailers, to protect those who had guns and jails and manpower to protect themselves, against stripped and shackled prisoners. He claimed to be an originalist, a man who sought in the holy parchment the law as laid down by the founding fathers, but when it came to the Second Amendment, the only sentence in the Constitution where the founding fathers explain why they confer a right to the people ("A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state...") he ignored what is so clearly stated to find in that sentence an affirmation of the right to individual gun ownership. Again, the rich and powerful NRA spoke more loudly to him than the voices of gun violence victims. 

His contempt for the powerless was visceral.  Like so many people who embrace religion, he believed  holy scripture contained The Word, whether that was the Bible or the Constitution, and he thought he could hear that word when others could not.

 His contempt for the dispossessed, the underclass, the poor, the weak was writ large  in every opinion and in his taunting questions from the bench during oral arguments.

It is hard to mourn his death, from the point of view of a citizen who did not know him, but who knows only the effects of his rancid decisions as they rumbled like an angry river breaching its banks across the every day life of the community.

As a father, as a colleague, as an opera aficionado, he may have been a wonderful man.  But as a man with a vote more powerful than all but eight other citizens, in a land of 300 million,  he was a scourge.

I cannot bring myself to feel any more sadness at the news of his death than I would feel hearing the news of the death of George Wallace, Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford or any other bigoted, pitiless man. There are men who feel smug about the power they wield because they feel they deserve to have it and to exert it, and these men are usually the men who use power most destructively.

Of course, we all expected to hear the announcement of the death of Justice Ginsberg, given her age, or Justice Sotomayor, considering her diabetes, but Scalia simply seemed too mean to die. 

President Obama will nominate a new Supreme Court Justice and the Senate will refuse to confirm, but at least the Supreme Court will come front and center during this year's Presidential Election. The importance of the power of the President to nominate a Supreme Court Justice will not be an abstraction or a what if. It is now concrete.

Bernie Sanders: War Consigliere in the Stormy Present

Counseling Caution

"The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country. "

--Abraham Lincoln

There is a moment in "The Godfather" when Michael Corleone assigns various members of his organization specific tasks but  he dismisses his loyal adviser, Tom Hagen.  
Tom turns to him and asks what he has done wrong. "Michael, why am I out?"  
"You have been a good consigliere, Tom," Michael says,  "But you are not a war consigliere. Right now, I need a war consigliere."

Michael has cooly assessed the forces arrayed against him and concluded accommodation, amelioration, reaching agreements with those whom the Corleones will naturally come into conflict is not realistic.  In the more tranquil past,  the aims and interests of the Corleone family could be negotiated, but  those prudent compromises of the past will no longer serve. 

Democrats, and the nation as a whole now face much the same choice.  Reading over today's Huffington Post piece by Zach Carter, which outlines all the compromises President Obama has had to make as he faced the intemperate, determined and unyielding Tea Party Republicans who have made the term "loyal opposition" only half true, I have nearly come to the conclusion we are at a point where we need a war consigliere. 

President Obama has in fact been a very tepid liberal; he is a pragmatist concerned with solving problems and, given the choices he had, he compromised wisely, and got at least something of an improvement in health care. But in order to sustain the ungainly, jerry-rigged contraption we call Obamacare, he had to allow the health insurance industry to get what they wanted and that is not, in the long run, what the American people need.  All of the inefficiencies in the details are obvious, but  the main problem with a commercial health care system is that the ultimate mission of the health insurance industry is to generate profits for stockholders, while every other advanced country in the world defines the mission of health care to be good health care, not profits. So our system is twice as expensive as it needs to be--we spend $9000 a patient where England and Canada spend $4500. That other half goes to buoy up all the middlemen, all the hangers on, who do nothing but process claims or sell policies.

President Obama had to compromise on benefits for the elderly, on the Trans Pacific Trade Pact, which corporations love but unions hate, on the stimulus package, and he appointed Larry Summers and Tim Geithner who are hardly liberal economists, to oversee his response to the Wall Street crash of 2008. In doing all this, he saved the ship of state from going down in a maelstrom, but now we have to plot a new course for new conditions.

Recognizing the  Inevitability of Coflict

And it is hugely important that no Wall Street miscreants, whoever they may, be went to jail for their attempted homicide (or perhaps simply criminal negligence) which nearly killed the American economy and precipitated the great recession.

Keep your government hands off my Medicare!

Meeting the man who tried to assassinate his father, Michael Corleone looked across the dinner table and assessed his opponent. Be reasonable, Michael was told. Why go to war, when we can coexist and do business?  But Michael understood the nature of his adversary, who would never stop trying to kill the Godfather. That is what we are facing in the persons of McConnell and company. They will sound reasonable, but they intend to kill every Democratic/ progressive program from Social Security to Medicare to Obamacare.

Can Hillary hope to accommodate this pack of jackals?

Like Tom Hagen, Hillary Clinton has served loyally and well, but the crucial insight Bernie Sanders offers is we now need a different sort of consigliere--we need a war consigliere.  

True believers do not bend

We cannot negotiate with Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Paul Ryan or the rest of the ultra right wing which is the  Republican party we now face. They are as uncompromising and implacable as the five families arrayed against the Corleones. Simply put, these Tea Party Republicans are out for blood and there is no way of dealing with them other than war.

These two make Trump look benign

This is not a new problem for democracies peopled by citizens who abhor war:  Neville Chamberlain gave the British what they craved, when he promised "peace in our time." Winston Churchill was seen as curmudgeonly, inflexible, bull headed, but he clearly understood the nature of his opposition. And he was right. Are we not in the same position today, as we look across the aisle and see those who are arrayed against us? Can you see in the faces of the Republicans in Congress and on the Presidential stage anyone we can trust? Louie Gomhert, McConnell, Paul Ryan, any of them? 

Louie reacts to Mexican rapist invasion

Is anyone listening to Hillary?

That is the basic choice--accommodation or war.  

Zippy the Pinhead: Try negotiating with him

If we choose Ms. Clinton we will see Social Security, Medicare, health care, unions, the middle class die by a thousand cuts.  

Might it not be better  to take the risk and lose, than to slowly exsanguinate?

Hillary In Full

This youtube video is actually labeled, "Hillary Clinton laughs for no apparent reason at the Benghazi hearing."  

Which says something about whoever posted it.

The reason she laughed is so very apparent.

It would have been more satisfying if Secretary Clinton had said what was so obvious, but it was good just as it was.

But I would have loved to hear her say, "Congresswoman Roby, you have just asked me whether I spent the night alone. What exactly did you expect me to answer? 'Oh, no actually, I went home to go to bed with...you fill in the blank.  General Petraeus perhaps?'  Oh, the hour is late and we are all getting a little punchy. Well, I speak for myself. Clearly, you are not getting a little punchy. In your case how would we know?"

Reading reviews of last night's debate from Vox and the New York Times, it's apparent people see what they want to see in these debates, a la "Rashamon."

I, for one, wanted to see Ms. Clinton rise to the level she did during the Benghazi hearings.  I also wanted her to answer Mr. Sanders's most damaging blow, which is that he is pure and accepts no money from Wall Street or any other rich and powerful elite, while she is tainted by the money she has accepted.

She might say, look every Congressman, every politician, from mayor to President spends an obscene portion of time calling people and begging for donations. You have done this, until you got famous enough this time to rely on online donations from individuals. Well, I'm happy for you. I'm happy you can fund this way and I'm doing the same thing, but as yet, with less success.  But that doesn't mean money is speech. If you believe that, then you are in line with our current Supreme Court. 

The fact is, we all hate dialing for dollars and I agree with you I'd like to change the system and have public financing of elections. It's just not the system we have, and like President Obama before me, I'm not going to unilaterally disarm just because you did. I want to beat the Republicans in the Fall.

Or words to that effect.

Wowser: War in Wisconsin, The Fox and the Hedgehog

After tonight, a Hillary Clinton/ Bernie Sanders ticket in 2016 does not look likely.
Like the most memorable prize fights, the most astonishing flurry of punches often occured in the last few seconds of each round.

Tonight, Hillary Clinton, who had been throwing effective but largely inconsequential left jabs in Bernie Sanders's direction in early rounds unleashed a right hook and left cross toward the end of the debate when she accused Bernie of denigrating President Obama, said Bernie had called the President a disappointment and chastised Senator Sanders for saying Democrats should have buyer's remorse in a blurb for some upcoming book by an un named author.

As he had all night, Bernie counter punched effectively, saying the blurb said nothing about buyer's remorse but said future Presidents had to bring people together. He also gave a passionate attestation to his admiration for President Obama,  and expressed gratitude for Mr. Obama's campaigning for him in Vermont, and he slipped a slightly below the belt blow, saying he was the only candidate on the stage who had never run against President Obama. Then he accused Ms. Clinton of punching below the belt.

When Mrs. Clinton attacked Senator Sanders for his vote against immigration reform, he explained he had voted against that specific bill because it would have turned immigrants into slave laborers and the bill was opposed by important Latino organizations.  In every instance when Ms. Clinton attacked a specific vote from the Senator from Vermont, he explained why he had voted that way and sounded perfectly consistent and reasonable.

The fact is, Bernie Sanders is more effective in these debates for the same reason Trump has success in front of crowds: He is not burdened by a lot of facts and knowledge and he is free to push on the emotional buttons.  When he described visiting the refugee camps in Turkey he evoked real feeling; when Hillary describes the same problems she cannot help but rattling off facts and figures.

Only at the very end, when she was summarizing did Hillary Clinton electrify the crowd by describing Scott Walker as attempting to "rip the heart out of the middle class" in Wisconsin by destroying unions.

Bernie uses history more effectively, describing FDR and even Winston Churchill in evocative, simple terms, with nothing more than the basic facts most school boys know. 

He also knows how to resurrect zombie monsters, raising that nasty Henry Kissinger as an example of someone he would not like to be like in an allusion to Hillary Clinton's description of Kissinger as a mentor. She responded she didn't admire Kissinger's role in Vietnam and Cambodia but she admired his role in China, leaving her guard down and allowing Bernie to land a devastating left hook to her chin, as he said, "Oh, yeah, he opened the door to China for the U.S. so China  could suck jobs away from us and bring them home to an authoritarian dictatorship." 

Hillary really needs to step away from her preparation format for these debates. She is the fox who knows many things; Bernie is the hedgehog who knows only one thing, but he knows it very well.

Round Two: Hillary vs the Man from LaMancha

One talking head, after the last Bernie/Hillary debate said it was Ali/Frazier, meaning it was a great fight and both fighters were at their best and each took some jarring shots: Bernie painted Hillary as a cynical politico who dances with the boys at Goldman Sachs even if she never allows herself to be seduced, she looks the worse for it. Hillary pictured Bernie as self righteous who thinks of himself as the only pure soul in the room.

Tonight's show will likely be as good or better, now that they've had a chance to take the measure of each other.

Of course, now Bernie does not look like such a long shot. As Barney Frank remarked, what Bernie really had going for him was that even he didn't really think he had much of a chance to win the nomination; he didn't really take himself seriously, which gave him a certain freedom. It's okay to tilt at windmills as long as nobody is really depending on you to actually save them from real threats.

Hillary must be frustrated beyond tears to think that she has to deal with someone, who is, in his own way, as divorced from reality as Trump. He acknowledges if he were elected he would be in no better position to accomplish anything than President Obama, and his "revolution" would likely be as frozen and stymied by a Republican Congress as was Mr. Obama.  
But his impossible dream is so intoxicating, he can get some people to sing along with him, at least for now.

His positions are so extreme, he would be trying to fly the airplane sitting at the far end of one wing;  most pilots have enough on their hands when they are sitting in the cockpit.

His only answer has been that well, we will need more than simply a new President, we'll need a "revolution" which means send me a new progressive Congress.

But, as every political scientist now extant says, the Congress is frozen in concrete. Ninety percent of all Congressional seats are nearly uncontested. Nothing's going to change in the legislature until and unless Gerrymandering ends, campaign financing laws change and Hell freezes over. 

We wanted revolution in the 60's, too, but that didn't make it happen.  Oh, we got premarital, extra martial, elder sex, but we didn't change the world all that much, politically. The war in Vietnam ended, which seemed pretty amazing at the time, but what we got was eternal war, more smaller Vietnams which didn't matter to you personally unless you lived in the wrong zip code and were one of those unfortunates who had no better financial option than joining the Army.

What Bernie is selling is, in some ways, pie in the sky. He's a political version of Timothy Leary, selling a new high. Until you can show how you are going to revolutionize Congress, how you are going to sweep out all the Mitch McConnell's, the Trey Gowdy's, the knuckle draggers who were on display during the Benghazi hearings, you are selling a fantasy.  

Even if only a third of the country is Trump country, that's still enough to block up the hall and prevent any forward movement. The country has as many inbred banjo players in West Virginia and Kentucky as it has independent, forward thinking Yankees in Vermont and New Hampshire.  For every free thinking resident of Massachusetts and New York, there are Bible thumping evangelists in Iowa and Alabama.

President Obama told the Illinois legislature yesterday that the whole system of government in this country was and is designed to create gridlock and the art of government is to figure out ways to clear out some intersections so some traffic can get through.

Ms. Clinton's task tonight is to hammer home the portrait of Bernie Sanders as the Don Quixote of our generation, the man who rides into combat on an ass and tries to knock over that windmill.  But the Impossible Dream is just that, impossible.

If she can sing Man from La Mancha tonight, she might just bring a lot of dreamers to their senses. 

The Answer to the $675,000 Question

George Bernard Shaw, in "Major Barbara" argued there is no such thing as "dirty money" or "clean money" in a capitalist society.  Even the Salvation Army is supported by contributions from weapons manufacturers.  Each part of society is interdependent. 

But Bernie Sanders has stung Hillary Clinton with his focus on her speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, reputed bad guys in the financial crisis.  And, remarkably, she has had no good answer; despite all her resources, her answers have ranged from the lame to the tone deaf.

Paul Waldman, writing in a Washington Post blog, recently offered the best answer to the question of why Hillary Clinton accepted so much money from Goldman Sachs, which essentially was an embrace of the cynicism endemic to members of the political class. What you have to do is allow your audience backstage, and simply reveal your underlying disrespect for the very people who give you money; you bite the hand who feeds you. 

You have to "dis" these people. You have to tell the blue collar audience what twits these rich benefactors really are. You have to tell the truth. "They gave me money because I am famous and I have been important and if I win the Presidency,  I will be even more important,  so they want to put a picture of themselves shaking my hand on their 'brag wall,' and they want to be able to tell their buddies on the golf course what they told Hillary at dinner, so they think they've bought a celebrity buddy, but of course, they have not." Or words to that effect. 

And the truth is, if any of your had a chance to make money this easily, you'd do it too. Grip and grin, take the money and run.

Of course, to reveal all this is risky, because to say all this is to throw your contributors under the bus. Saying  this might best be said by others, by journalists and bloggers (like me) or surrogates to have the public trust, like Barney Frank.

What you are saying to your audiences in the 99% is that you have played the 1% for suckers, because you took their money without really loving them. In a sense, you are playing the role of the lady of easy virtue: Pay me, and I'll be seen on your arm, I'll eat dinner with you, I'll drink your wine, but although I may accommodate you, my heart is elsewhere and I think you are repugnant. You are saying you were insincere with these rich people, but now you are being open with the masses. The joke's on them. 

This is a very tough dance to pull off, but Hillary must find a way to do it. If she has any real friends, they will spend a lot of time helping her. 

She was very smart and canny to hit Bernie at his strength:  You are just so pure, you do not accept that anyone else is as pure as you; nobody measures up to your standards, not even Paul Wellstone, who, inexplicably, voted for DOMA.  Certainly not President Obama, who took Wall Street money.

But including Mr. Obama in that retort was not adroit: Plenty of liberal Democrats, most especially Elizabeth Warren, have been disappointed and bewildered by Mr. Obama's failure to jail any Wall Street executive for his role in the financial disaster of 2008.

Trouble is, when you read Elizabeth Warren's white paper on the too big to jail problem, of the 20 cases she lists as examples of cases where somebody should have gone to jail, only the London whale was a case of clear cut fraud.  A lie is an untruth told by someone who knows it is untrue. Simply being wrong about rating mortgage backed securities as AAA when you should have done due diligence is deeply inept and irresponsible, but it's not clear it's criminal.  Doctors who fail to do all the things they ought to do to proceed safely may be negligent, but few would argue they are criminally negligent. 

And, as many have argued, there is Wall Street and there is Wall Street. There are some enlightened, socially responsible, environmentally concerned players on Wall Street.

What Hillary fails to understand is there are voter resentments not uncovered by the media and politicos who simply miss things. Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon was almost never mentioned in the campaign with Jimmy Carter, but exit polls found this motivated many voters, even Republican voters to vote for Carter. 

Hillary Clinton may not appreciate the depths of resentment about Wall Street and the dopes who brought us the mess depicted in "The Big Short," which I think is an under-appreciated force in this election. 

Today, my fellow Granite Staters are voting and I've already cast my ballot for Bernie. But, as I've said in the past, if I were voting in the general election, rather than the primary, I'd vote for Hillary. She will make a solid, reliable President. But before she gets there, she has to learn to take a chance and burn some bridges with the upper 1%.
I have voted in every primary and every election in New Hampshire since 2008. I have never been asked questions by anyone doing an exit poll, never seen anyone doing such a poll or known anyone polled. 
What this means to me is the politicos, whether they are academics or operatives are no better at their jobs than those dummies depicted in "The Big Short" who had no clue who held those mortgages in the mortgage backed securities. It was easier to listen to your equally ignorant peers over lunch than to do the difficulty, tedious and laborious work of actually looking at the real data in which the truth resides. 

I know exit polls are taken in New Hampshire, but what I'm saying is there are not nearly enough.  In early voting, we need to know what the voters are trying to say and that means the sampling has to be thorough and visible and pervasive.  At least in my own worm's eye view, the lessons of New Hampshire will probably be missed. 

Barney At The Airport

Seeing Barney Frank at Logan this morning, I was reminded of something you tend to forget when you watch public figures on T.V. 
Living in Washington, DC it was easy to remember those images on TV actually belonged to real people. I filled my car tank at the gas station on River Road where Wolf Blitzer filled his tank.  Henry Waxman bought milk at the High's store in Glen Echo. Supreme Court justices belonged to my swimming pool. When you see people in the flesh, you realize, oh, they're just people, but you tend to forget that when your only connection is television.

I've never met Hillary, but everyone in my town seems to have met her and they all remark how small she is, physically. (Not spiritually.)  Her energy and warmth do not translate well to the cool medium of TV, apparently.

I've been roiling that my favorite politician, Barney Frank, is not running for President, or perhaps, Vice President with Elizabeth Warren for President.

But seeing Barney Frank today, I could understand immediately why he retired. He is vastly overweight and moves painfully, his trousers slipping down below his gut, the cuffs dragging along the floor as he walks. He pants with the short exertion required to get him to the ticket counter. Nobody says anything to him, either because they don't recognize him with his scruffy beard, or because they are Bostonians and they respect his space. 

But, it is clear, physically, he is struggling. And it is sad to see a man with such a lively brain, with a steel honed wit, capable of great clarity and insight, carrying the cross of physical infirmity. He could not run for President because he could not muster the stamina to walk, much less to run, much less to rule.

I have seen Bernie from a distance, and despite his age, he looks pretty good for 74. But even on TV, he does not look vital and vigorous. 

We have to remember the Presidency is a marathon punctuated by sprints.

I'm not even sure Hillary, who was born the same year I was, is physically up to the task. But she looks like a better bet.

If either Hillary or Bernie wins, I sure hope they pick a vigorous Vice President. Martin O'Malley looks fit enough.
And let's not forget Elizabeth Warren.