Ginsberg wimps out

Ruth Bader Ginsberg says Mr. Trump is unfit to be President and then considers this is a violation of decorum and apologizes.

She is being politically incorrect and then becomes politically correct.

The right thing to do is to say, "Hey, Mr. Trump is all about being politically incorrect. Now I'm doing that. How's that work for you, Mr. Trump?"

The problem with liberals is we are wimps.  Was Justice Ginsberg inappropriate? In one sense, of course. But why apologize?  Let that shot across the bow sail by.  Congress is misbehaving toward he Court.  Trump misbehaves toward everyone. Why should you just sit there and take it?  This guy is behaving way beyond acceptable norms, and sometimes you have to say, look the system works if we all cleave to some rules of behavior, when you stop doing that, we adjust.

Of course, the problem is, nobody in a position of power is going to convince any of Trump's supporters or those who claim to be wavering. There can be nobody on the fence here.  Sure, Mussolini made the trains run on time and Hitler built the Audubon and the Volkswagen and got the farmers in better financial shape, but you ought not have accorded him the same deference you would afford a normal political opponent, after reading "Mein Kampf"or listening to him at a Nuremberg rally.

That is the rule every progressive/liberal should use in relation to Mr. Trump.  What would have been appropriate if you were around in 1934 and faced Hitler? Would you have spoken as if he were some normal opponent or would you have said, "This is really different and has got to be stopped?"

Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir?

Mr. Welch

My father believed the turning point in the demagogue, Senator Joseph McCarthy's career came at the televised hearing when the Senator was confronted by a decent man, a lawyer named Welch, who famously said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

Sleaze bags, McCarthy and Cohn

I've watched this exchange on TV and never been as impressed, never could see why it seemed like such a cataclysmic event for McCarthy, but googling it, it seems to have been.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1eA5bUzVjA

Oh, how we need Herblock now

But now, driving along Rte. 27 from Exeter, on my way back to Hampton, I've seen two lawn signs with the simple question: "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" and there can be no mistaking the message. The most effective lawn signs I've ever seen in any campaign. 

I wanted our local Democrats to print up stickers with the word "Chump" so I could paste them on any Trump lawn sign I saw, but faint hearted as they are, the Hampton Democrats refused, saying this was defacing an opponents signs, and if not illegal, at least dirty pool. 

At least one Dem suggested to me I might be shot by the owner of the sign who might feel he had to exercise his Second Amendment right in my direction. 

Rep. Jordan, House Oversight Committee

I will attempt to capture a photo of these lawn signs soon, but until then, I'll content myself with pictures of Mr. Welch and pictures of current day Republicans who are vying for the McCarthy combustible award of pseuo dramatic political personage. 

Pin head simian Gowdy

I do want that lawn sign. In fact, if we could get enough of these signs, we could start a movement, and people who never heard of Joseph McCarthy might start asking why all these signs are sprouting up all around Hampton, New Hampshire. It would be, as they say, a teachable moment.

Police

Does she really frighten these robocops that much? 

Police, it must be admitted, have a tough job.  

I've known plenty of cops over the years, from New York City cops who were cops because their fathers and uncles and brothers were cops, to suburban cops, to undercover cops, to FBI agents, to small town cops. Women cops, men cops. Old cops, young cops. There are lots of different types of cops, but most of them shared a pretty jaded point of view of humanity. They saw the raw side of life and had to deal with some pretty insane people and some pretty stupid people and some violent nasty people and some who were all three.

The "Police Log" which runs in a the Portsmouth Herald, unadulterated, gives some insight into what cops have to deal with. My favorite posting was: "Called to see woman who claimed her neighbor called her 'obese.'"

We also know cops from "The Wire," which is the best portrait I've ever seen of cops, and matched what I saw completely, and this is no surprise since the show was created by and written by a police reporter (David Simon) and a cop (Ed Burns.)

But one thing which typifies American cops is they are different from English cops, and different from the cop on the beat so many of us knew in our youth.

Now they are the heavily armed cops who look like they are in the employ of the Empire, those robo cops with the body armor.

His father murdered by police

For some time, I've thought, "We'd be better off without any of these guys around. Keep them in the station house. Call them in when things really get hot."

Of course, the other problem is the station house, where cops can strip down your daughter if they drag her in for rolling through a stop sign.

When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he listed the affronts to dignity and human rights perpetrated by the King, but he did not list strip searching. That omission was addressed in the Bill of Rights, with the fourth amendment which prohibited unreasonable search and seizure, but in the 18th century they were not talking about the virtual rape of women in jails; they were talking about soldiers ransacking your house--a violation to be sure, but nothing compared to what goes on daily in our local jails across the country.

And now we have murderers with badges stopping cars for broken tail lights or for no good reason at all, the real threat to life and limb today.

Bad cops: Nothing really all that new

We really ought to think again about how we arm our police and about what their job and their personality should be.  

Unthreatening: The Very Image of a Good Cop

If Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton could return today, how appalled would they be by what we allow our police to do in what they conceived as a "free" country.

Hamilton

Maybe, what we ought to do is to disarm our policemen, or allow only a Taser and a club.  If we are really worried about their safety, keep one cop with the gun back in the car and let the less threatening, unarmed cop walk up and get the driver's license.  For cops walking the beat, let them walk in pairs. 

If we were really worried about their safety, rather than their egos, we'd disarm our police.

Who's Afraid of the Second Amendment?

Likely, they would be appalled by the NRA

Antonin Scalia was many things, but one thing most people can agree upon is he was a man of "faith."  The mayor of Dallas, speaking after the shooting of five police officers proclaimed that like his police chief, he too is a man of faith, which is Southern for "I am a good man."

Scalia was famous for being an originalist, which in his mind, apparently was not exactly the same thing as being a strict constructionist.  For Scalia, the Constitution should be interpreted as a reasonable man of the 18th century would have interpreted it. This means that had the Constitution said no man could be beheaded, hanged or shot, that would mean the government could not execute a man by any of those techniques but it might also mean the reasonable 18th century man might also conclude he could not be boiled alive or drawn and quartered, as what the authors of the Constitution were doing were trying to delineate humane executions. 

So, while there were subtleties  and nuances in Scalia's idea, he was still cleaving to a document, to a text, as if it were a holy scripture, and he was trying to stay anchored in "original meaning" as if that is even possible from the vantage point of the 21st century. 

Kensington, NH

Such thinking meant that in the case of the Heller vs  District of Columbia, Scalia found that the Second Amendment implied a right for any individual citizen to own a gun, virtually any gun. And yet, here is the entire text of the Amendment:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

I am no legal scholar, but my copy of the Constitution is only 34 pages long and nowhere in that document can I find any declaration of rights or any passage in which the authors provide a reason for a particular declaration. 

There is only one other place  in the Constitution --the Preamble--where any sort of explanation is given, and in this case it's not to explain a particular right, but to set for the general aims of the government the authors wished to create:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

This Preamble gives the reasons, and after that, except for the Second Amendment, no more explanations. Why? Because if you are looking for a reason for why the freedom of speech shall not be abridged, you have only to look at the Preamble. But in the case of the 2nd amendment, the authors felt they had to explain that one.

  The 2nd amendment is unique in that it actually explains why the Constitution grants this particular right, i.e. because in order to have a militia, you've got to allow members of that militia to keep their guns at home, presumably, they were thinking of muskets over the fireplace, not cannon. Any reasonable 18th century American would understand that.

The insanity of saying we ought to feel bound to what men living at the time of Washington, Madison, Adams, Hamilton and Burr were thinking in their world is mind boggling. In their time, Arms mean muskets, cannon and swords. Could Jefferson, Madison or Hamilton have imagined a time when a man might order over the internet an assault rifle which could fire on hundred rounds in under 30 seconds and laid waste to an entire regiment, not to mention a police department or a playground full of eight year olds in less than a minute?  Would Washington have signed a document which would allow a man living in an apartment in New York City to acquire a thousand rounds of ammunition, a hundred hand grenades and a dozen rocket propelled grenades?  

Why would Scalia or anyone in his right mind want to tie himself to a century before amplification of the human voice, photography, television, mass communication, social networks played such a potent role in the national life?

Scalia explained, in part, that the Supreme Court is the least democratic branch of government and he was very loathe to empower 9 unelected judges to over rule the will of Congress or the elected President. So hewing closely to the text was a way of restraining the judges from making new law without the consent of the governed.

Osgood Road, Kensington, NH

Of course, this applied when the court approved of same sex marriage, approved Obamacare, approved of statutes discriminating against homosexuality, because, for Scalia, the elected bodies of the states or the Congress would never approve of this, so who was the Court to force these things upon an unwilling country?

But the whole idea of the Court and the Constitution is to say, "This is something you cannot vote about. There are limits to what can be done in the name of popular will." So the idea of having separate public schools for blacks and for whites under a separate but equal doctrine is unfair and struck down. (Brown vs Board of Education.) And the idea that a slave cannot sue for his freedom in the Supreme Court because a slave, being property and not a man, has no standing to sue (Dred Scott)--that has to be decided by a court, for better or for worse.

Of course, there is no more political branch of government than the Supreme Court. The simple expedient of reading a one paragraph description of any court case with significant social content and asking a reasonably interested citizen, like myself, to predict how Justices Alito, Thomas, Roberts will vote and how Justices Soto-Mayor, Kagan, Ginsberg and Breyer will vote, with 90% accuracy provides proof enough.  In fact, there is no more predictable branch of government than the court.

Exeter, NH 

Reading the most excellent "Fallen Founder" by Nancy Isenberg, about Aaron Burr is a lesson in just how different these 18th century men were from men today. Of course, there are basic threads of humanity which connect them to men of the 21st century, but their ideas about honor, sex, propriety, loyalty, freedom of speech, gossip, economy are all very foreign to life in the 21st century.

They were doing the best they could, and they learned from the oppression of British rule as well as from the enlightenment, but they were very different from us. If I could time travel back to Philadelphia in 1776 to 1783, I would likely find myself disoriented and I would have to remain very quiet, for every sentiment I expressed would betray my alien status.

Likely, I would feel more comfortable talking to Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Thaddeus Stevens, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Emily Dickensen. (Oh, I'd love to visit her in Amherst.)  But the men who wrote our Constitution--I'd be biting my tongue.

What this country really needs is not a good 5 cent cigar. What this country needs to do is to face reality. Reality in this case means we recognize the Court is what it has always been: Just another political instrument.  Justice Scalia was right to worry about the un-elected nature of the court, about 9 entrenched, possibly isolated judges making rules and by those rules, laws for the country. But the way Scalia saw to deal with this was to try to rationalize his gut votes as the will of Jefferson and Hamilton.  But what we need to do is to tie the Supreme Court to the will of the people as determined by elections:  When a new President takes office, give him the right to appoint justices who will vote on the court. 

 We need a new process for the Supreme Court--9 voting justices, 2 appointed each term by the President, only the most recent 9 voting.  If a President gets two terms, he gets 4 of 9 justices. If we have a liberal President, a Franklin Roosevelt, he gets justices who will not block his recovery programs. If George W. Bush gets elected, well he can try to move the country to the right and the Supreme Court will cheer him on. But at least we are not dealing in fantasy--nobody who watches the court can believe these are simply umpires calling them as they see them.  Judging cases is not governed by a defined strike zone; it comes down to judgments and those judgments are ingrained and embedded in the philosophy of the Justices. Let's not try to deny that, but let's not be stuck with the same justice for 40 years. Nothing in the Constitution would require an amendment to do this. No number of justices, nothing about their voting status is specified.

Cape Fear, NC

We need to disarm our citizens to the extent an extant 300 million guns will allow, but at the very least we need to control the flow of bullets. 

We'll need a Supreme Court which will allow this to happen.

And we need to disarm our policemen, as the Brits have done successfully, so our cops are no longer viewed as a lethal threat but as benign social workers. 

Bernie talked about a revolution because he wanted to reign in Wall Street. That was no revolution. What I am talking about--that is revolution.

Yesterday's Murders: Old News

What do they know about policing we do not know? 

TO understand the significance of the shooting of 6 Dallas policemen last night by looking at the television coverage, one would think the story is one of how the police dead can be spun in the discussion of police murdering Black citizens.  Some of the coverage has made this into a "Black Lives Matter vs Police Lives Matter" story.

The palpable concern on the part of all the talking heads on TV was, "Oh, this is too bad because now the conversation shifts from how beastly the police are to how we have to protect the police, how we have to give them more license to be violent and how we have to stop worrying about Black lives matter and start worrying about police lives matter, so we've lost the argument."

Of course, all of this is nonsense and only highlights the stupidity of television news people who ask the wrong questions and see the wrong issues. The fact is, there is no argument: Murder is murder.

Significantly, Donald Trump said nothing about the Baton Rouge murder or the Minnesota murder, but he did say the shooting of the Dallas police was "an attack on our country." In doing so Mr. Trump was trying to gain political advantage from the six dead. He was trying to transform the act of murder into a symbolic act. But this sniper was not attacking America. He was  simply a murderer. 

Remarkably, the sniper in Dallas was quickly located and he was killed by a bomb wielding robot, after negotiations failed. 

According to Wade Goodwin, the Dallas NPR correspondent, the Dallas police had  actually been reasonably progressive,had been very open about police shooting citizens statistics; so they were, in a sense, an unlikely target.

But, of course, when you come to young lunatics  who plan to murder,  you cannot expect them to mind the demographics.  This sniper was not  like the crazies who flew the airplanes into the twin towers: Those lunatics could be said to be making a political statement. This particular lunatic was not making a political statement any more than the lunatic shooter at the Orlando night club, just another maniac with a gun. 

Which is not say there is no background to the shootings:  Goodwin did describe a scene at a 7/11 store which followed the shootings. The plate glass front of the store had been shot out by a stray sniper bullet and looting by neighborhood people began quickly. Thirty police responded and stood in front of the store to prevent further looting but then a crowd of youths, who were apparently intent on continuing pilfering, gathered and started taunting the police about the officers who were shot. 

So there is resentment and hate in Dallas. But there is resentment in Lawrence, Massachusetts and, for that matter in Hampton, New Hampshire,  but if you kill a policeman you are merely a murderer, not a revolutionary.

We had the chief of police in Greenland, New Hampshire killed by a white lunatic with an arsenal of guns some years ago. Donald Trump did not claim that was an attack on our country. The man was just exercising his second amendment rights, I suppose. Just another guy with gun. 

I also saw footage on TV of a Black teenager who was grinning ear to ear as he held up his arms as if he were firing a rifle, describing what he had seen of the snipers.  It was the imbecilic glee of a kid who just loves mayhem.  You got a glimpse of what police have to deal with--the young,the ignorant, the stupid, who can be quite lethal.

Of course, none of this has anything much to do with what we saw on the videos 48 hours ago, videos of police murdering, in separate incidents, two Black men.

The fact is, murder is murder, whether it is a white cop murdering a Black citizen or a Black man murdering a white cop. 

You can make the case, as some of the pundits have tried to do, and others will continue to do, that the killing of the white cops was a response of the rage of the Black communities, which feel the cops are an occupying force and who have no faith in the cops. But when a man pulls a trigger as a sniper in Dallas, he is not a soldier expressing the will of a group, or a revolutionary expressing the rage of an under class: He is simply a murderer.  He is not the bull driven to rage by the banderillas he is simply a mad dog who has to be put down.

The fact is, the response of the Black community, if such a thing exists might be better expressed by that amazing woman who sat in her car seat and video'd the murder of her boyfriend by police in a suburb of St. Paul, MN.  Clearly, she could not call 9-11 for help. 9-11 had already arrived and it was the problem.  So she called out to the internet for help. She might have believed there were other people out there, some of them white, who might help her. 

If NPR radio is to be believed, fewer police have died in the line of duty over the past five years than in previous years. Police are actually not being killed, even with the six dead in Dallas with increasing frequency.   But that does not matter when you think about Dallas. Statistics are scant comfort to the families of those dead cops. Murder is murder, not revolution, not a political statement, not an expression of the rage of an underclass. It is simply murder. No way to justify the snipers. No way to justify those cops who  are murderers. 

Each case is separate, must be tried separately. 

Once again, we might think again about the way policing is now done in this country, in every town and city.  We might learn from others, like the English. We might learn from the past, when we had cops on the beat who knew the members of the community personally.  But even if we do all the right things, as long as there are guns and as long as there are lunatics, we will have murder.

Police and Their Guns

Oh, yes, clearly a visible threat to two officers

Watching the video of two Baton Rouge policemen shooting Alton Sterling to death, while he was pinned helplessly on his back I had to think of the professor of criminology they had on The News Hour tonight, who warned us that the investigation of this act is still on going, that we still do not know what preceded the actions shown on this video and I could only think: Like that could even matter. 

FBI investigators should, no doubt, approach their investigation to the event with an open mind, whatever that is, given the video footage, but you don't need 4 years of college, or a law degree or a degree in criminology to know what you see before your eyes. I don't care if the man had shouted "I've got a bomb!" or "I'm going to kill you!" There is enough on the video to show he was tackled to his back and laid out on the ground and with two sizable (white) cops in total control of him and one reaches for his own gun, draws it from the holster and shoots Sterling in cold blood. 

Thugs with a Badge?

There are two videos of this event easily viewable on the internet and in one you can hear a woman sobbing, "They shot him!"  The astonishment in her voice crosses all racial and class barriers. It speaks volumes. She had seen enough to know this was an unexpected outcome.

One would think this video would be the only piece of evidence you'd need to present to a jury of peers. Just play it two or three times and say, "I rest my case."

We are witnessing cold blooded murder by at least one policeman, who should be in jail.

But this is not an isolated event. We have been told for years, at least since the O.J. Simpson trial white police commit wanton acts in Black communities but now we are in the video age and we can see what our fellow Black citizens have seen, and it simply cannot be denied. For Mr. Sterling, justice can be served if his murderer is quickly brought to trial, convicted and sent to prison for life.

But when we think of Mr. Sterling as one example of a larger problem, then we are talking about formulating rules for a larger problem. I would think we now have enough evidence of a pervasive enough problem we should think anew about how to respond to the problem of armed police who behave badly often enough to consider police a threat to public safety. 

Dead for selling CD's 

The problem is clearly not police training, or not enough sensitivity training. The problem, I would hazard a guess is in the nature of the sort of person who wants to be a policeman, to carry a gun and shoot it. 

We do we arm police?  Presumably, there are two reasons: 1/ So they can protect themselves against murderous thugs they are trying to arrest 2/ So they can protect others.  

Unarmed and Usually Unharmed

In England Bobbies are not armed and somehow very few are ever killed. Of course, this may have changed as England has become more diverse.  But, if the internet is correct, English police, when they need armed assistance call in their equivalent of the SWAT team. America is not England, but  as I understand it what the Bobbies do is  surround the miscreant  and overwhelm with numbers or box him in.  England also invested in lots of public cameras so felons could be identified and tracked down later.  

I'd like to see the statistics--and police departments are all about statistics now--which demonstrate that policemen fired their weapons and saved their own lives or the lives of innocent citizens more often than they fired their weapons and killed the innocent.

When statistics regarding ambulances were analyzed, decades ago, it turned out more people were killed by speeding ambulances than were saved by those ambulances and after that ambulances were forbidden to speed through crowded streets, and death rates for both innocent bystanders and passengers declined.

Of course, if we disarmed American policemen, likely a lot of men who would want to be police would no longer want that line of work. I would have to say: Good riddance.

Knucklehead's Guide to the 2016 Election

"Hamilton," the musical got me thinking about what a truly patriotic vote would mean this election.

Hamilton was a man of great energy, likely pretty manic (or bipolar, as we would call him today) with a certain disdain for the hoi polloi, born of his early exposure to the seamy side of humanity in Barbados; growing up poor and desperate he had no romantic illusions about what the underclasses are like. Like Franklin, Burr and Lafayette, he was a man of avid sexual appetites, and would win no prizes from the pulpit regarding his "character."

Jefferson, his rival and political enemy, apart from his curious attachment to slavery, Sally Hemings etc, was more the man of "character" with whom voters could identify as an icon of virtue, a renaissance man, architect, writer, philosopher, theologian. John F. Kennedy put it succinctly, looking out over a dining room filled with Nobel prize laureates in the White House, he said,

 " I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

 And yet, had I to vote for a President, I would, with the perspective of time and history, have voted for Hamilton over Jefferson.  While it is true, Jefferson had the vision and wisdom to buy the Louisiana Purchase from France, thus assuring America would become the continental colossus it became, he did so in an act of uncharacteristic executive over reach,  which Hamilton would have approved. Jefferson did not consult Congress or become too concerned about proper channels, or  advice and consent. He simply acted as an executive, or some might say, as a king.

But Jefferson's idea of what the United States should become was a nation of upright farmers, free from the heavy hand of government, tilling the land, as he did, or as his slaves did for him, while Hamilton saw clearly the critical role of finance, the need for a national bank.  

The Continental army, which had suffered as no other American Army has since, was in revolt, marched on Congress because they had not been paid for a year and faced debtors' prison as soon as they were discharged and their anger so so great Congress had to flee Philadelphia for Annapolis and there could be no fixed national capital because the Congress could not raise funds to pay the army and so became, literally, a fly by night institution.

Hamilton saw the need for a central, federal government, a permanent army and a permanent Congress and a permanent capital, none of which Jefferson, in his proto libertarian mode of thought necessary.

John Adams, an upright citizen if there ever was one, loathed Hamilton and decried his inclination for intrigue and back room dealings and in some cases apparent duplicity.  But without Hamilton, the nation would have sunk beneath the waves of insolvency and much as you might hate this early version of a Wall Street oligarch, we needed him and his system of finance. Curiously, Hamilton did not enrich himself personally, but his system allowed others to grow rich and allowed the country to achieve real power and stability through sound finances.

So, had Hamilton actually ever run directly against Jefferson, I would have voted for Hamilton, because I would have known, whatever my misgivings about his inclination for "intrigue" and political wheeling dealing, he was the best choice for the country.  

When you look at the choice between Ms. Clinton, with her cozy relationship with Wall Street, her $225,000 "talks" to the capitalists, you might see a Hamilton like figure and you may find it difficult to vote for her.  

Donald Trump has been called a unique and original figure, but he is not unique or even original.  Rush Limbaugh, had he run for President, would be in about the same place as the Donald is today. They are cut from the same cloth, but, of course, comparing Donald to Rush is like comparing the choir boy to the archbisoph.

What is really disturbing about Trump is not Trump but the Trump Chumps, who scream their lungs out at his rallies, the knuckleheads and skin heads in the mosh pit. Are these just anomalous mutants or do they actually form only the most visible elements of a multitude?  This is what elections are all about.

One can only hope even the knucklehead, when he returns home, will be capable of flipping on the youtue of Hillary in the last couple of hours of her Benghazi testimony and you can see, whatever you think of her, she knows her stuff.  You can well imagine her analyzing the problems presented a President cooly.  She is a woman who can manage a strain. She made those noxious, ignorant, blustering Republican members of the House Oversight committee look like amateurs, which, of course, they were.

Thinking of the Donald confronted with Putin moving into Ukraine or maybe Poland, or ISIS moving into an alliance with the Taliban in Afghanistan, you can only imagine what the Donald would do.

In the end, one would hope, once they've had their fun at the rally, the knuckleheads will calm down and cast a vote for the good of their country.