How The System Gets Rigged

NPR did a wonderful piece on the way the Michigan legislature dealt with a federal welfare program  designed to encourage states to deal with teen age out of wedlock pregnancies.  The MIchigan legislators reasoned keeping girls in college would reduce unwanted pregnancy rates, since, apparently, coeds get pregnant less often than girls who do not go to college, as if it was being in college that convinced girls to engage in contraception while those girls who went to work or just sat home, got pregnant a lot. 

A very odd interpretation of cause and effect, in Michigan.

So NPR interviews a family which has sent both its kids to private colleges using this loophole, and they interviewed the dean of the college which got the money and they interviewed the legislator who got it into law.

When the father was confronted with the reality that the grant he got from Michigan for his kid's tuition was a welfare program, he said, well, this college education will mean my kids earn more money, eventually and will pay higher taxes, which will benefit the poor, eventually. 

When told she was sending her kids to college using welfare, the mother said, well, it's really hard on a family to have two kids in college at the same time, and they are really pressed, financially. Of course, their joint income is $225,000 and they live in a 3,800 square foot house with an in ground swimming pool, but she said it was really hard keeping things going on that income with two kids in college. What about sending the kids to a less expensive state school? Well, but then they wouldn't be as happy there. 

The daughter said she was sympathetic to people on welfare, who needed welfare to buy a winter coat, but then when she was a college graduate she'd pay more taxes to buy more coats for more welfare kids.  When asked whether she thought the money had served its purpose, to prevent her from getting pregnant before she was 20, before she was married and economically secure, she laughed.  "Does going to college keep me from getting pregnant? Well, I think maybe the birth control pills have something to do with that."

The son said, "Hey, if they want to give me money, I'll take it."

I liked his answer best. 

As the NPR reporter said, "There you have it in Michigan: Trickle down from the welfare program."

The college dean said his college was highly ranked and deserved money from the government, which he needed.

The legislator said, hey, if the federal government approved using welfare funds for college expenses, it was legal.
Sadly, nobody asked the legislator how he had voted about funding Planned Parenthood.

All this reminds me of that study in which students were given Monopoly games to play, but some of  the students were given twice as much money and lots of hotels at the start and when the students were questioned after the game, the advantaged students said they had won the game because they were smarter, took more risks and were more worthy.  

The capacity to rationalize injustice is wondrous to behold. 

That Certifiable Forty Per Cent

Walking my dog on the beach this morning,  I ran into Bernadette, who walks her dog at low tide along with about a dozen other regulars who know each other by their dogs.  I know all the dogs' names but Bernadette is one of the few owners whose name I know.  Bernadette is French, and she has a little black dog which is one of those little dogs who doesn't know she is a little dog and she gives no ground to bigger dogs, much like her owner.

I asked Bernadette if she had any relatives in Nice, and she said no. Her family is from the West Coast of France.  But, it turned out Bernadette grew up in Morocco and read the Koran in school.  She said France has tried the "tough" approach to Islam, declaring that France is a secular country, which officially embraces no religion and as part of that forbids expressions of religious belief in public places--so no ha-bib or veils or head scarves in public schools paid for by public funds or in other places of public business.  But that has not worked very well, in terms of forcing a more civil society, as the attacks in Paris and now Nice reveal.

In fact, there are "ghettos" which encircle Paris, populated by French Muslims of North African descent, often places of poverty, resentment, ferment.  Some might say, this is the price of colonialism, just as American inner cities were once the legacy of slavery. 

What has astonished Bernadette is the appeal of Donald Trump, who is the alienate-or in chief with respect to Muslims. Why would you want to institute an approach which has failed so miserably in France?  As if by marginalizing, scapegoating people you can make them behave better?

For Bernadette all religions are pernicious--people do things to be good Muslims or good Christians they would be horrified by outside the context of religious action: A man can shoot children, blow them up with a bomb because God demands it. 

It's the old story of Abraham and Isaac.  God told me to kill this child and you never stop to ask: Wait, would God really demand such a thing? Could I be mistaken about having heard the voice of God on this one?

I pointed out something I heard David Brooks say:  Trump has been polling at 40% from the very beginning. His numbers never vary. Which goes back to that infamous Mitt Romney statement about the 47%.  But in Trump's case, that seems to apply. Forty percent of the citizens of the United States are certifiably insane, and it's simply up to the other 60% to actually go to the polls. 

Bernie Sanders got that right.

The wonder is about portions of that 60%.  I hear people say they could never vote for Hillary.  As if not voting for Hillary is not voting for Donald Trump. 

What are they thinking?

It should not be forgot Adolph Hitler won his 1933 election with 33% of the vote. 

Paul Ryan was pressed yesterday on whether he thinks Donald Trump would make a good President. And he insisted that is not the question. "The question is whether Donald Trump would make a better President than Hillary Clinton."

The same question has got to be asked by the Democrats: "Do you think Hillary Clinton would be a better President than Donald Trump?"

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.