Considering the general drift of the presidential campaign, the following should be considered ironic.
Feeling optimistic about the future?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
It should be considered ironic anyway, given the subject matter of the song.
Went to University of Texas when Timbuk 3 was playing around town. They even did a fundraiser for our local chapter of CISPES. The song was originally intended to be ironic commentary on the frat rats running around campus in wayfarers.
And nuclear war.
Amusing:
I am.
BLM exists. It didn’t used to.
There are climate change activists. They are no longer called “eco-terrorists” … or nuts.
We elected a black man, twice. In SPITE of openly racist campaigning. No dog whistles there.
Gay marriage is legal throughout the US. Without interference from the courts, it would have been legal in 10-15 years anyway.
We have the ACA. You might not like it, you might rail against its shortcomings, it could (in theory) go away … but its there. It never was before.
Are we in Nirvana? Of course not. But as someone whose lived thru Vietnam, Nixon, Reagon and Fob James:
Yeah. Its better. And I think it will continue.
Arc of the moral universe and all that.
Some days I’m with you, some days I’m glad I have a valid passport.
Politico — Netanyahu’s former chief of staff joins Carson campaign
Why didn’t Trump, Cruz, or Rubio think of that?
…but, yes.
The New Attack on `One Person, One Vote’
It’s been settled law for five decades–but now the Supreme Court might shoot it down.
By Ari Berman
In 1963, while preparing for his speech at the March on Washington, John Lewis saw a photo in The New York Times of a group of black women demonstrators in Rhodesia holding signs that read: one man, one vote. The 23-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) adopted the phrase as a rallying cry against the disenfranchisement of black Americans in the segregated South.
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While literacy tests and poll taxes kept African Americans from registering to vote, malapportionment helped preserve the power of segregationists in places like Lowndes County, Alabama, which in early 1965 was 80 percent black but didn’t have a single registered African American. The county’s 15,417 residents had as many representatives in the Alabama Senate as the 600,000 residents of Birmingham’s Jefferson County.
The Supreme Court ended this perversion of democracy in a series of landmark cases in the 1960s, most notably Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims, ruling that legislative districts had to be roughly equal in population. “The conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing–one person, one vote,” wrote Justice William Douglas. Chief Justice Earl Warren famously added, “Legislators represent people, not trees or acres.” The Court’s rulings shifted power from rural to urban areas, where people actually lived. In tandem with the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965, the “one person, one vote” cases led to “the greatest peace-time change in representation in the history of the United States,” wrote Harvard University political scientists Stephen Ansolabehere and James Snyder. Warren called it his most important achievement on the bench.
But on December 8, the Supreme Court will hear a new challenge to “One person, one vote” in Evenwel v. Abbott, brought by the same conservative organization, the Project on Fair Representation, responsible for the gutting of the VRA in the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder. The obscure Evenwel case, which challenges the drawing of State Senate districts in Texas, will have major ramifications for political representation in the United States.
The plaintiffs want legislative lines to be drawn based on eligible or registered voters instead of total population as measured by the US Census Bureau, thus not counting children, immigrants (documented and undocumented), prisoners, and other nonvoters. They claim the current system, by including nonvoters, denies “eligible voters their fundamental right to an equal vote.” Edward Blum, founder of the Project on Fair Representation, calls it “the principle of `electoral equality.'”
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A three-judge federal court in Texas dismissed Blum’s claim as “a theory never before accepted by the Supreme Court or any circuit court.” But if he prevails, legislative districts would become older, whiter, more rural, and more conservative. “It clearly is a case designed with the intent to shift political power from urban areas to rural areas and, quite frankly, from Democratic areas to Republican areas,” says lawyer Emmet Bondurant, who argued the 1963 malapportionment case Wesberry v. Sanders. Of the 38 congressional districts where more than 40 percent of residents are ineligible to vote, for example, 32 are represented by Democrats, in such cities as Los Angeles, New York, Houston, Dallas, Miami, and Chicago.
http://www.thenation.com/article/the-new-attack-on-one-person-one-vote/
Oh, I think you can assume that the 5 conservative male activists that voted to gut the VRA and grant plutocrats/CEOs a constitutional right to throw any US election are surely going to modify the “one person one vote” rule of constitutional law to benefit their political party. They know that the gaming of the election system is the most critical component of the continued control of the gub’mint by their party in future and it is very clear that all five are very, very strongly united in this goal.
This conservative lawyers group exists solely to bring these extremist cases before the Gang of 5. So much for the “umpire simply calling the balls and strikes” analogy–the most egregious of CJ Roberts’ many lies to Congress at his confirmation hearing and a perfectly valid and suitable basis for impeaching him.
Anyway, the fact is that the upcoming alteration of OPOV will be as unknown and unremarked as the gutting of the VRA. Oh yes, the lib’rul blogosphere has some understanding of it, but the average boob watching corporate media or the Noise Machine–none. And if the Noise Machine watchers were informed of it they would strongly agree, just as they will agree with the upcoming gaming of OPOV. The un-leveling of the playing field to favor the Repubs is simply unknown—which is how the plutocrats running the corporate media want it, of course.
This (effectively permanent) rigging of the election system via spurious constitutional rulings from the 5 conservative male activists posing as “justices” is just one of the torrent of reasons one cannot really at bottom be even slightly optimistic about the future of the country.
Sigh… Not happy about that at all. Simply validates the left’s concern about ignoring the Labor Party and electoral politics altogether. All that wasted potential energy…
For what it’s worth, NBC news tonight addressed Trump’s comments about Muslims and started reminding viewers that he’s embracing a dangerous policy. Tom Brokaw had a brief appearance in which he discussed our recent history’s treatment of the Japanese American citizens, the McCarthy hearings, and the treatment of African Americans as “dangerous others”.
If we don’t stand up against this ridiculous hate speech, it will get worse. If it were only Trump shooting his idiot mouth off, that’s bad enough. But he’s drawing in crowds of believers who will back him up and create resentment in the world the likes of which we hoped to never see again.
Is genuine pushback from a national news source a good sign? I think so.
Yes, it’s a genuine push back, but the downside is it’s because the right wing multimillionaires controlling the media fear they can’t control Trump, so they are taking him down so one of their puppets can replace him.
Its funny, but in all of this I start to see the outline of a Democratic Landslide. I have been mostly pessimistic.
Todd Gitlin in his book on the Sixties suggested the existence of a revolutionary loop. To wit:
So it is, I think, with the far right. The North Carolina polling numbers are the scariest thing I have ever seen: a majority of GOP voters want to close Mosques.
So the right has arrived, finally, at fascism.
To be sure, it is scary as hell. And in my lifetime I have seen the country move far more to the right than I would have ever thought.
But this is surely too far
Right.
So, authoritarians who are also bigots (pigpeople, h/t Driftglass) usually have to use dogwhistle, conjuring words to self-identify to their tribe members, while demonizing the other.
Sometimes, they’re able to vote for fascists who scream through their dogwhistles. This usually gets the pigpeople very, very excited.
With Trump, they’ve found a fascist strongman who has thrown his dogwhistle down, stomped on it, and outright screamed his bigotry. And the pigpeople fucking LOVE it. They can’t get enough of it.
I’d say the pigpeople, otherwise known as the deadenders of the Bush II era (about 27-28% of the population) are going to support Trump as long as he’s running. They may throw their support behind Cruz if Trump drops out, but that’s only because their first choice fascist strongman isn’t there to scream out loud. Cruz is still screaming through his dogwhistle, and the pigpeople don’t find that nearly erotic enough to drop their support of a fascist like Trump.
Trump is getting all sorts of attention because he says very loud, obnoxious things, and ultimately, the media is going to cover it for free. And people post stuff on Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the social media sewer, and it gets him attention.
But, not all of that attention is good. For example, I know a young woman who doesn’t vote, who is now aware of just how awful Trump and the Republican party is, because she uses Facebook, and the people in her little circle of friends aren’t pigpeople and know who Trump really is.
Unless HRC has a stroke after becoming the nominee and before the general election, she throatstomps Trump in the general election. I’ve been saying for years here that while HRC may be thought of as a neoliberalcon, center-right puppet for Wall St, or the 12th coming of Satan, Progressives who want to do something more than complaining about how they don’t have enough sway to get a actual Progressive nominated, should be doing their best to get her some coattails in local/city/state elections. This is especially true if Republicans are crazy enough to nominate an outright fascist like Trump.
Bernie Sanders is great. But if he can’t win the nomination, then just saying his name three times and tapping your heels together doesn’t mean a damn thing. Trump is a catastrophe for the Republican party, and they damn well know it.
Is Trump using “Congressman Best’s” crib sheet? Getting close to the end of it:
Comedy > tragedy in two decades.
Nancy Pelosi Drives Hard Bargain With Paul Ryan on Spending, Taxes
By KRISTINA PETERSON
Dec. 8, 2015 6:45 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON–In case House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) was in any doubt, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) has made it clear this week that she drives a hard bargain.
The two House leaders are facing their first serious battle of wills over Congress’s pile of year-end legislation. Republicans will grade Mr. Ryan, elected speaker in late October, on how many conservative policy measures he manages to attach to the spending bill needed to prevent a shutdown when the government’s funding runs out Friday night.
Mrs. Pelosi, determined to block as many GOP policy measures as she can, is demonstrating to the new speaker that Democrats’ support on must-pass legislation won’t come cheap. As such, she is working to prevent Republicans from securing all but the slimmest of policy victories. The outcome, if these issues aren’t resolved, could be a delay in securing government funding for fiscal year 2016, or, worse, a shutdown.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/nancy-pelosi-drives-hard-bargain-with-paul-ryan-on-spending-taxes-144961
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She shouldn’t be focusing on limiting republican policy shifts. She should be focused on trading policy shifts. No trade – no votes.
Unfortunately, at this moment, the RWNJs want a federal shutdown, as do their supporters. If the GOP “cooler heads” could see 2016 electoral gains for themselves with a shutdown, they’d go for it and not much Pelosi could do about it. She’s playing defense because she and DEM elites also can’t project with any degree of certainty that a shutdown wouldn’t favor the GOP next year.
It just results in “Both parties today voted for …” giving political cover to those awful policies.
Meanwhile, a little to the north…
Here’s hoping some of this will rub off.