Month: July 2016

On the following, I’d like to note that a Democratic president already has appointed a liberal-leaning justice to the Supreme Court. It’s just that the Republicans refuse to grant Merrick Garland a hearing or a confirmation vote.

Still, this is an interesting point.

If a Democratic president appoints a liberal-leaning justice, [Chief Justice John] Roberts would become the first chief in decades to preside over a court on which the majority holds an opposite ideology.

I can’t imagine that this would be very fun for Roberts. How does he react?

My summer soccer league has started up and I had my second game this morning. Two games, two goals scored by me. My body is starting to remember how to do what my brain tells it to do, which is nice because it was disconcerting in the Spring to realize the degree of communication breakdown that occurred since I last hit the pitch as an eighteen year old. I played competitive football and full court pickup basketball until I was about thirty (plus some three-on-three tourneys), but I let my athleticism lapse over the last fifteen years.

I didn’t really realize how much I missed the camaraderie and just banging bodies in a competition, but it’s already rewarding now that I am at it again. It kind of makes me want to play (American) football again, too, but I’m not that crazy.

If you want to know why some people, like me, encouraged Bernie Sanders to stay in the race and accumulate as many delegates as possible, maybe you can understand now. The race certainly got bogged down in some stupid stuff, and I began to lose patience with some Bernie supporters who didn’t have a decent grip on reality, but progressive Democrats can’t really argue with the results.

On Saturday morning, Hillary Clinton released a new health care policy proposal that emphasized several major progressive priorities, including a public option and increased funding for community health centers.

In the proposal, Clinton pledged:

To give Americans in every state a “public option” health insurance plan

To let Americans as young as 55 years old opt in to Medicare

And to double funding for primary care services at community health centers

Meanwhile, Sanders also won some victories on the party platform, including a commitment to a $15/hour minimum wage.

Sanders is happy with the results and reportedly will be endorsing Clinton on Tuesday in New Hampshire.

Indeed, in a press call after Clinton’s announcement, Sanders described her health care proposal as an “extremely important initiative” and “an important step forward” — and emphasized that it was made “after discussions with our campaign.”

Sanders also praised Clinton’s new plan to encourage free tuition at public universities, which she announced Wednesday. He called the plan, which was deeply influenced by his own ideas, “a very profound proposal” that would help “revolutionize the funding of higher education in America.”

“I think it’s fair to say,” Sanders went on, “that the Clinton campaign and our campaign are coming closer and closer together in trying to address the major issues facing this country.”

The late stages of the campaign were intensely unpleasant, but that was the price of maximizing his power and influence.

It was worth it.

They could and should have done more, but I’m happy that Congress was able to get their act together to put more juice in the Freedom of Information Act. It should be easier now to pry information out of the government, and they’ll have a hard 25 year limit on what they can hide.

This has been the worst Congress of my lifetime, and they’ve accomplished almost nothing. This is something they can be proud of and it will benefit the people in immediate and longterm ways.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting an entirely new painting.  I am using the photo seen directly below.  The house is in Goshen, New York, a historic town in the Hudson Valley.  It is a circa 1875 Second Empire Victorian.  I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas.

I started with my usual pencil grid.  Utilizing the grid, I was able to sketch the house in pencil.  Once I was satisfied, I used some thin paint to go over the sketch.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

Michael Hoexter in New Economic Perspectives has this:

Democratic Party Platform 7/1/16 Draft Would Lock In Catastrophic Climate Change

Party platforms are the one place, every four years, for American political parties to project a unified vision to the public at large, even if that vision is only used as an electioneering tool and not as a basis for policymaking.  For the Democratic Party, as the leftward or supposedly “liberal” major Party, this means that the Platform would be a place where political ideals and plans, if they are at all tangential to upcoming policy initiatives, might be expressed.

Once again, the message is that wishy-washy language will not deflect the inevitable attacks but bold and specific language with good background fleshing out of the plank will both attract support, inform the campaign debate, and provide the framework for rapid delivery once in office.  There needs to be a (1) a credible plan for offsetting the jobs currently in the fossil fuel sector and (2) a credible plan for how rewriting the tax code will cover the costs of the proposals within a finite time.
Hoexter argues that the timing of the locking in of global catastrophic climate change has now reached an point of no return and that the failure to act implied in the Democratic Party Platform is a failure of fundamental governance–the building of a vision and a mandate.

Hoexter then turns to address the specific weaknesses in the platform:

1. The preamble is a call for kum-bah-yah politics without any urgency, especially with respect to responding to climate change (not to mention other areas of collapse).
2. The preamble statement of climate change, although corrects, lacks motivating language.

Democrats believe that climate change poses a real and urgent threat to our economy, our national security, and our children’s health and futures, and that Americans deserve the jobs and security that come from becoming the clean energy superpower of the 21st century.

Unfortunately, the reality of climate change is not a matter of “belief”.  Also, dealing with climate change involves more than just changing the energy infrastructure of the US economy.  Mitigating the consequences of 30 years of inaction is also a necessary issue that should of rights motivate action.

Hoexter proposes:

Despite progress in some areas over the past 8 years, we are faced with twin challenges: not only are many Americans falling behind or left out of prosperity and a sense of social belonging but also we have not yet fully faced our greatest challenge: the imminent danger of catastrophic climate change.  We Democrats think though, as in facing the Great Depression, World War II and the superpower competition with the Soviet Union, the fundamental solutions to our multiple large-scale social problems should and must be addressed through the work of Americans and government together.  We Democrats believe that the best solution to our multiple sustainability dilemmas involves creating by government financial instruments, which have always been at our disposal, a full employment economy that pushes our society within a decade to a post-fossil fuel economy where everybody participates in just, equitable reward and also, for a time, shared sacrifice.

As part of a great mobilization to save our American civilization from likely destruction from eventual famine, flood, drought, or other climate-related calamities, we must via a combination of replacing fossil energy with renewable energy, energy efficiency improvements, and conservation reduce annually our global warming emissions by 10% or more per year until they are at zero within less than a decade.  We can do this by building an all-electric energy infrastructure powered by renewable energy that also uses energy and resources wisely.  As we have done in the past, government initiative and finance will help individuals, families, businesses and nonprofit public service agencies create together a livable prosperous future for all Americans.  Government leaders will also ask for reasonable sacrifices or conservation efforts such as choosing to ride bicycles on safe bike routes rather than drive, which may also function as life enhancing options.  The achievement of targets of a 10% reduction in emissions per year over a period of 10 years will create a net zero emissions society.  A list of some initiatives follows:

1. Declaration of a national climate emergency and an accompanying national discussion of climate solutions and sacrifices for the benefit of the young and future generations.
2. A renewable energy smart supergrid to enable renewable energy to replace 24/7 fossil fuel electricity generation and tap into a wide variety of energy sources from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
3. Electric roadways and electric vehicle charging infrastructure to enable our vehicles to use renewable energy to move about
4. A continental high-speed rail and maglev rail system to enable an emissions-free long-distance travel across North America
5. Retrofitting existing buildings and building new buildings that require little energy input to remain comfortable in heat and cold
6. Creating an electric-bus, electric-rail and safe bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure in urban and suburban areas to create mobility options beyond the personal (electric) vehicle, reduce congestion and increase overall health.
7. Creating an agricultural and forestry system that pulls more carbon out of the air while providing nourishing foods and useful sustainable materials for a variety of uses.
8. A Job Guarantee that enables all Americans to work in the transition to a sustainable energy economy or in supplying necessary services during that transition
9. Shape markets and business decisions by a stable carbon tax starting at $80 per metric tonne and rising $10/year

We as Democrats believe that we will build on our tradition of working together to help ensure that our children and grandchildren will enjoy the same or better prospects that we have enjoyed.  That starts now with ensuring that the natural basis of our wealth is not destroyed by our current dependence on fossil fuels.  

Hoexter then turns to the specific planks.  Most interesting is the plank on environmental justice.

Then this section about fossil fuel leases on public lands:

The fossil fuel banning language starts off bold:

“We oppose drilling in the Arctic and off the Atlantic coast”

But then loses conviction in the next phrase:

“…and believe we need to reform fossil fuel leasing on public lands.”

Hoexter then recommends nine edits of the text of this section, starting with:

1. Declaration of a Climate Emergency. While there is the potential for abuse of an emergency declaration, there is no substitute for recognizing that climate action is not a patch on our existing energy-related social arrangements but a thoroughgoing effort to eliminate excess greenhouse gas emissions rapidly.  Climate action is the paramount priority of government and of the American public. Political rights must be maintained, in part because that is the foundation of the American Republic, but also because the effort to stabilize the climate must fully harness the creativity and good will of the public throughout.

And every single candidate campaigning as a Democrat must be supporting this direction and using consistent messages of support in their campaigns.

Democrats must not just squeak by in winning, they must win, be able to govern, and be able to deliver some pretty tall orders that have the effect of actually making America great again by hitting stride in its self-transformative tradition.

It is worth reading Hoexter’s entire argument.

I originally posted this as a reply to a comment that Tarheel Dem made on Booman’s recent post A Federal Response to Police Violence. On further consideration, I am now posting it here as a standalone article.

==================

Tarheel Dem asks; I answer:

Is this the moment when the Wall Street media look into the abyss or not?

Not.

Bet on it.

Not the abyss of which you speak, anyway.

This occurrence will only add to the geometric progression of violence in the U.S. that has been fueled by militarily-supported economic imperialism both abroad and domestically. The main job of the so-called justice system here in the U.S. is to maintain order by force in the ghettos in which we keep the low wage earners. End of story. Every ghetto is now a potential Fallujah, and both the controllers and their hired domestic military…the police…know it. They cannot fall back. There is nowhere available for retreat.

This society is coming apart at the seams.

Read on for more.
The fondest dreams of Osama bin Laden are now coming true. So-called “ordinary” citizens have quite plainly seen that terrorist actions work very well to destabilize countries and societies. They don’t need to go to the Middle East to train; they just have to pick up the gun(s) that they own…often guns that they have owned for a long time and if not, available on any bad street in any bad ghetto of the U.S., so stop dreaming about “gun control”…step out of their dwelling prepared to die and start shooting.

This particular snowball is running ever faster downhill, Tarheel, and neither gun control (the left’s so-called solution) nor increased police action (the right’s version) is going to stop it. The old saying “A snowball’s chance in hell” doesn’t seem to pertain in the hellish ghettos of the mind.

Watch.

Only real justice…not currently represented on either side of the dominant centrist political spectrum of the U.S…will slow this snowball.

Buckle up…the rough ride is only going to continue no matter which side of the aisle is in real control, and it will get even faster if neither side dominates.

Watch.

AG

P.S. Do you know the real secret to survival?

Surviving.

By any means necessary.

The ancestors of almost all here who were not shipped over as slaves came to the U.S. to escape the same sort of escalating violence…war, poverty, pestilence, hunger, the whole lot…that we are now witnessing in the U.S.

Now? Now there is nowhere to go that’s even a halfway good bet.

I got yer “globalism,” right here!!!

Watch.

We are all up against that particular wall.

Who ya gonna call?

Ghostbusters?

Riiiiiight….

Scott Lemieux (most famously of Lawyers, Guns and Money) has an excellent piece on the Supreme Court in The New Republic. The article is equal parts a review of the Court in the Obama years and a look forward to what comes next. Both elements are well done and interesting, and there are several areas rich for discussion.

One that I’d like to talk about is the prospects for the Court avoiding the kind of poisonous polarization that has taken over Congress. I think Lemieux’s take on this is worth considering.

Could anything stop the Court from becoming as polarized as the rest of the political order? If current party polarization persists, probably not. But it’s not certain that it will. Tom Keck, a political scientist at Syracuse University and the author of an excellent recent book analyzing the Supreme Court in the context of contemporary partisan politics, told me that if the Democrats finally take control of the Court, the Court could become “ever more polarized, with Roberts, Alito, and Thomas serving as a perpetually dissenting GOP wing.” But it’s also possible that “the 2016 election marks a significant realignment of the party system, such that our current patterns of polarization get displaced. If/when this happens, internal divisions within each party (and within each party’s judicial wing) may be brought to the fore, such that voting alignments on the Court again start to fall on lines other than partisanship.”

In other words, if the Republican Party reacts to a likely Trump defeat at the polls by continuing its relentless march to the right, the polarization of Court is essentially inevitable. But if the current alignment proves unsustainable, all bets are off. My guess is that Trump will not cause a fundamental realignment, because a Republican Party that’s uncompetitive in presidential elections can still compete at state levels and in congressional elections where various structural factors favor conservatives. But this is ultimately a guess, and demographic changes will probably cause some partisan realignments down the road.

I’d like to offer two thoughts in response.

The first is that the Republicans spent most of the time in the Congressional minority between 1933 and 1994, and, as a result, they really didn’t have a lot invested in the postwar federal government edifice we built up to both wage the Cold War and to fight poverty and protect civil rights. They had so little say in the details of this architecture that they developed a permanent minority mentality. It makes it hard for them to take responsibility for funding and overseeing our federal agencies and it means that they’re actually quite comfortable (most likely, more comfortable) being in the congressional minority. They can tolerate a lack of power in Congress.

But that’s not to say that they can tolerate being shut out of the White House, too. While they were stuck having little say on federal appropriations for most of sixty years in the mid-to-late 20th Century, they also enjoyed two terms each with Eisenhower, Nixon/Ford, and Reagan in the White House. They had at least a little congressional power during Eisenhower’s presidency (the first two years) and they owned the Senate for the first six years of Reagan’s presidency. They also had a term with Poppy Bush in that time period.

The situation now is nearly reversed. They seem locked out of the White House but they’re ensconced in Congress, particularly in the House. The Democrats may occasionally seize control of one or both houses of Congress, but it’s doubtful that they can sustain majorities for any period of time.

So, really, the Republican Party (if not necessarily conservative Republicans) needs to evolve to reflect their ownership of Congress. Obviously, they don’t have to do this, but our government cannot work with an anti-Federal power Congress working with an endless stream of Democratic presidents.

The second thought I have is that a bad Trump loss does have the potential to accelerate this process. Conservatives are already losing the ability to define what conservatism means. Issues like free trade, immigration and gay rights are splintering the movement, and environmental issues have the potential to do the same. If the Republicans can’t sing from the same hymnal, they’ll lose the ability to churn out ideological judges in patently conservative molds. We can already see a lot of daylight between Roberts and Kennedy, on the one hand, and Thomas and Alito on the other.

The future is very uncertain at the moment, but I think the conservative movement is cracking up sufficiently that ten years from now, the clear divides we see on the Court will have become a lot more blurred. And that means that the Court will probably be less polarized.

It seems prescient now that Nancy LeTourneau chose yesterday afternoon to write a piece calling for a federal response to the civil rights challenge of our time, which she characterized as “both the over-incarceration of black and brown people and the police abuses that have been capturing the headlines once again.”

As she noted, “most of the control over these issues is currently in the hands of state and local governments” and “progress is – at best – a patchwork, and tends to come in jurisdictions that are probably already in the lead on addressing them.”

As if to drive home the urgency of LeTourneau’s point, later in the evening a sniper shot numerous law enforcement officers in Dallas, Texas, killing four policemen and one DART officer, and wounding seven more cops and two civilians. It was the deadliest day for American police officers since September 11, 2001.

“We are working very diligently on processing the crime scene to find evidence to bring any other suspects to justice,” [Dallas Police Chief David Brown] said.

But during the overnight standoff, the suspect told a police negotiator he acted alone and wanted to kill white people, especially white police officers, Brown said.

“He said he was not affiliated with any groups,” Brown said. “He said he did this alone.”

The police were in the area because a rally was being held to protest the deaths of 37-year-old Alton Sterling in Louisiana and 32-year-old Philando Castile in Minnesota. Both black men lost their lives at the hands of cops in what certainly appear to be unjustified shootings.

The Dallas police chief seems to understand the urgency of the situation:

“We’re hurting, our profession is hurting,” Brown told reporters at the news conference. “There are no words to describe the atrocity that occurred to our city. All I know is that this must stop, this divisiveness between our police and our citizens.”

I am sure that there are unique and preexisting tensions in Dallas that fed into this, and it’s also perhaps the responsibility of a deranged mind, but the police chief isn’t wrong to see the atrocity as emblematic of a more general lack of trust. After all, the immediate impetus for the protests wasn’t anything that the Dallas police had done. People were in the streets to complain about something much more systemic and widespread.

Historically, the aftermath of a cop killing isn’t a time of thoughtfulness and reflection. It’s a time when people rally around the fallen officer and the department he or she served. Discussion of possible underlying causes is very unwelcome, as it might be interpreted as some kind of justification for a murder. Yet, perhaps the very scale of this incident is sufficient to break that rule.

It won’t be easy, particularly since the shooter so clearly expressed an anti-white racial motivation. This is a real invitation for people to rally to their tribe, whether that be the men with badges or just whites vs. blacks.

To avoid that, we need good, solid leadership on all sides. The Dallas police chief already recognizes that there’s a larger issue here, and he and other defenders of the police don’t need to be battered over the head with the argument that they’ve brought this on themselves. That will make them withdraw at a time when they might be open to discussion. At the same time, the temptation will be there to blame the protesters for stoking so much hate that they motivated this attack. That will make the protesters harden their positions and stop listening.

As LeTourneau documented, the administration has been very active in working on this issue, but they’re limited in what they can accomplish without more congressional authorization. Our current Congress can barely pass a bill to rename a post office, but we’ll have a new Congress in a few months. With the right makeup, the next Congress may find a law enforcement community that is willing to work with them on finding some federal solutions.

In the meantime, our thoughts should be with the families of the victims in Dallas, as well as with the families of the victims of police violence.

More bad news from the city that incited the murder of a beloved president in 1963 …

In a coordinated ambush, 5 officers killed while in the line of duty they served to protect …. while citizens protested two recent blue on black shootings.

 « click for more info
AMBUSH! Snipers fire from elevation positions on protest (Dallas News)

More guns to solve insecurity on the dtreets of America. No end in sight for this madness, just escalation. How very sad that violence has spread into the fabric on modern society in the US. A perpetuum movement of the pendulum towards horror at regular intervals. U.S. Congress failing its citizens.

In Dallas I have left a few tears of mine on a personal loss. We planned to attend a wedding of a dear nephew with a wonderful young woman from Arlington. A sweet and perfect couple about to start life’s journey together. He was killed in a traffic accident, a large 4×4 swerved out of control and crashed through barrier head-on killing him instantly. The wedding celebration became a very moving celebration during a funeral mass. Family members surrounded by fellow students and friends from his home state of Illinois.

In the few visits to Dallas on other occasions, I found Texans warm and friendly. After today’s event, one can only gasp once again … WHY?

 
[Update1:] It was a headline I didn’t prefer to use, but it did cross my mind: “It’s War!”

It didn’t take long for right-wing extremist USA to threaten Obama and the BLM movement …

Former Congressman Threatens Obama and Black Lives Matter Movement With ‘War’ | Newsweek |

Former U.S. Republican Congressman Joe Walsh reacted to the murders of five policemen at a protest against police brutality on Thursday by declaring “war” on President Barack Obama and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Snipers from rooftops in Dallas targeted police officers in the city’s downtown, killing five and wounding six more in an attack that police said was a premeditated ambush. It is one of the deadliest attacks on police in U.S. history.

Police arrested three people and a fourth gunman killed himself with a gunshot, according to local media. The fourth gunman had warned of bombs planted in the city but authorities are yet to comment on the validity of his claims.

“This is now war. Watch out Obama.
 Watch out Black Lives Matter punks.
 Real America is coming after you”

Joe Walsh tweeted following the attack, before later deleting the post.

[Update2:] BREAKING: Dead suspect was killed by police bomb

The suspect that was killed after a standoff with Dallas police was killed by a bomb that authorities detonated, Dallas Police Chief David Brown says. “We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was. Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb.”

[Update3:] Suspect killed by police using a robot with explosives named as Micah X. Johnson, 25, a resident of Mesquite, Texas. WTF why murder a suspect by police authority?

Dallas police chief Brown: “The suspect said he was upset at white people and he wanted to kill white people, especially white police officers. He expressed anger for Black Lives Matter.”