JOHN OLIVER DECONSTRUCTS VOTER SUPPRESSION

As Bernie Sanders has noted, when the voters turn out, Democrats win. 
When turn out is low, Republicans, who represent the 1%, do well.
The way to stay in office when your ideas favor a small minority is to try to keep only a small minority voting.

Fortunately, given the great American tradition of holding a vote for 300 million people on a single day and on a working day when middle class people cannot easily get to the polls, things have worked out well for Republicans.

In a recent rant, John Oliver examines the one study which suggested voter fraud, i.e. a person voting more than once on election day, may actually occur, and, it turns out, when you look at that study, what it really shows is this almost never happens.
As Mr. Oliver notes, voter fraud has occurred in American history, but almost never the kind of fraud voter ID laws address. 

Stuffing ballot boxes, yes, but a voter voting more than once for a candidate is terribly inefficient, waiting in line to vote multiple times--how much could that actually affect an outcome when millions are voting? 

What he does show is a Tennessee legislator who inveighs righteously about how important the voting process is to a democracy explaining her bill to limit voting registration, and then it shows her voting electronically on bills before the legislature by pressing not just the button at her desk but the buttons on desks for any legislator who is not present at his desk, i.e. she is cheating and voting for absent members. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NK-oP1lRCI


Ah, there is the essence of concern for the integrity of democracy.

Supreme Court Formula

For some time now Mad Dog has been working on a formula to predict the outcomes of Supreme Court decisions, which, if implemented might save the government considerable time and money and might save the public needless anxiety and speculation.

This effort is a work in progress and began when Mad Dog realized that he could predict  with 95% accuracy the outcome of any case before the court containing any significant social/cultural implications, based on a three sentence summary of that case and the issues involved.  Aware he possessed no particular powers of clairvoyance, Mad Dog realized there must be some law of nature, or law of political science or psychology operating.  

Here's what we've got so far:  Mad Dog has tentatively called his formula the Decision Opinion Predictor Estimator or D.O.P.E., for short.

If D = the Decision
and if P= the number of powerless or poor people affected
and if $= the number of rich or powerful or people in authority affected
and if Y= the number of Democrats on the bench (we already used "D" for Decision)
and if R= the number of Republicans on the court 
and if F= the fudge factor, other wise known as Anthony Kennedy

then 

D=  P x Y
      _____                + F x 1/9

      $ x R X 50 

And that corresponds, roughly to the chance the case will be called for the poor and powerless. 


This works with a 95% accuracy rate, but not 100%,  because every once in a while someone like Justice Roberts will inexplicably vote for Obamacare or Justice Kennedy will break out in a warm glow of humanity,  like some people get flushed when they watch "It's a Wonderful Life," and he'll vote for gay marriage.


But in most cases, it's a lock.  In DC v Heller, the court voted for the gun manufacturers and the NRA, and this included a vote from Justice Scalia, who always insisted he voted because he was influenced only by what was written in the text of the Constitution, but that phrase, "A well organized militia being necessary to the security of a free state" which is the first half of the Second Amendment apparently escaped his notice, and all he saw was the "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It is possible he had what is called a "visual field defect" and could not see that first part, but more likely, the formula simply predicts.

Then there was the Flowers v Freeholders, case in which a man was arrested for riding while  Black in a car and strip searched multiple times in various jails but that was not unreasonable search and seizure because he was, well, Black and poor, so two strikes you're out. The Court held the jailers needed to be protected from men like him-- or from women who might be walking around with knives or explosives tucked away in their vaginas just in case they wound up in jail where those things could be used against their jailers.

But, best of all is Morse v Fredericks, in which a high school student was marched out of his high school so he could join his class cheering a parade for the Olympic Torch, ( a shameless publicity stunt organized for that billion dollar scam called the "Olympic Movement") and he responded by unfurling a banner saying, "Bong Hits for Jesus," which evoked the ire of the school principal, who ripped down his banner and suspended him.  The Court held students have no right to freedom of speech, despite the originalist text of the First Amendment, which, again, Justice Scalia reasoned did not apply to students because, well, they are powerless. Of course, Justice Scalia might have argued that though the First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech," nowhere in that text did it say, "The Supreme Court shall make no law abridging freedom of speech."  And that is just exactly what the Supreme Court did in the Bong Hits for Jesus case.

How Change Happens

I do not know who Christopher Cook is, but his article in the Atlantic is persuasive.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/the-pragmatic-case-for-bernie-sanders/462720/

When you think of gay marriage, integrated public bathrooms and schools, women gaining admission to medical schools in equal numbers to men, women entering traditionally male jobs like telephone repairmen, factory workers, none of these changes seemed possible when they were first proposed, but pressures from a variety of developments made them happen.

Forty years ago, some of my college classmates were enjoying a story at dinner about a guy who had been caught with a girl in his room in violation of "parietal hours" and he had plead  his case by saying he had lent his key to the coed in question so she could take a study break nap. How was he to know she'd take the nap naked and sleep until he arrived back home after midnight?  Much hilarity ensued as each of my friends opined about the likelihood of this formulation succeeding.

Then I said, "You know, years from now, we'll probably not have in loco parentis at all. We'll probably have women living in our dorms, the way women lived down the hall from you if you get an apartment in New York City, in real life."
My friends fell out of their chairs laughing. The very idea of females legally living in the male bastion of Diman House, in the Wriston Quadrangle, sleeping down the hall from male students! 

Of course, that happened within 10 years of our discussion.

Attitudes change. Minds change. Demographics change.  Change does not always happen because a President wills it, but it may happen if he simply allows it.

Look at that American pie graph of wealth distribution. Does that not look evil to you? Can you not imagine, if enough people were made to face that graph, they would not respond to it? 

The Donald: Serene upon the frigid heights of infallible egotism

"Serene upon the frigid heights of infallible egotism"


Shelby Foote, among others, quotes this description of Jefferson Davis, whose statue still stands along Canal Street in New Orleans and who still lives in the street names and park names throughout the South.

We can only hope, and fervently pray it is the Donald who the Tea Party, which has swallowed the Republican party whole,  will choose. 

As Gary Trudeau has demonstrated in yesterday's rendering, the Donald is the candidate Democrats most yearn for, as he truly represents the groups who now constitute the GOP.  Exit polling in New Hampshire, such as it is, revealed voters who feel immigrants are a threat, undeserving citizens receive welfare, Obamacare is a disaster, white males are under attack and in danger of losing their just position of power and the Donald can take back what Obama has taken from them and "make America Great again."
www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2016/02/14


Can't you just see Bernie Sanders taking on Mr. Trump on stage?

Bernie: The Great Communicator

After dismissing Ronald Reagan as a fringe candidate, too old to be elected, too intellectually light weight to ever become a force in American politics, the pundit class had to deal with the reality of his nomination and, later his election. Well, he may not have all the lights on upstairs, but he sure can deliver a line written for him and he sure can put his ideas into quotable phrases. You can hum his tunes. He had melody and his songs may not appeal to the Beethoven crowd, but you sure could sing them.  He became, "The Great Communicator!"

Reading 10 Bernie quote selections from the last debate posted on Reddit Progressive, it becomes clear why Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the establishment in the Democratic party, who believe Ms. Clinton has earned the right to ascend to the throne, have been so eager to limit Mr. Sanders' exposure: Whenever he is on stage, he draws all the light from everyone else and he beams it back in a wonderful way.  

Hillary doesn't come close to his stage presence, which is remarkable, because she is much prettier and has Hollywood hair, great teeth and bone structure.  Bernie is more like that woman Susan Boyle, who walks out on the stage, all frumpy and physically unattractive, but then belts out "I Dreamed a Dream" with such virtuosity, the audience rises to their feet and cannot stop cheering.

Here's just one selection from Bernie's last debate.

All over this country we have Republican candidates for president saying we hate the government. Government is the enemy. We're going to cut Social Security — to help you. 

We're going to cut Medicare and Medicaid, federal aid to education — to help you, because the government is so terrible. 

But, by the way, when it comes to a woman having to make a very personal choice, ah, in that case, my Republican colleagues love the government and want the government to make that choice for every woman in America.”

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?