Bucky
Bucky's JournalAs our Republican compatriots love pointing out, we're a republic, not a democracy
Of course as a government teacher for the last ten years, I should clarify that these aren't mutually exclusive terms. The US is a republic and a democracy... and a federation of fifty states that are all to be guaranteed "a republican form of government" (Article IV, Section 4) by our Constitution. We're complicated like that.
I like to think about it this way: as a nation, as one people indivisible as a nationality, Americans are culturally democratic. That's the part of you that finds it sketchy that Colorado's Supreme voted 4-3 to remove Trump from the primary ballot. If we want to put Trumpism down, it won't be with legal technicalities. It can only happen with a strong political repudiation of his cult-like following at the polls in November. The law alone won't stop a movement rooted in believing it's above the law.
But as a country, as a legally constituted political entity called the United States, Americanism is in large part defined by a commitment to the rule of law--the law that we should all stand equal before. That's what we mean by guaranteeing a republican form of government. And the letter of the law is quite plain: someone who has taken an oath of office but then went on to engage in insurrection can hold federal or state office.
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
Of course our Republican friends who no longer uphold the principles of either democracy or republicanism (or the fundamentals of truth) will cling to the idiotic argument that the presidency is not "an officer of the United States," and I fully expect Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito to cling to this fiction. They'll argue that the job of the president wasn't enumerated among the offices the rebs were disqualified from (Senator, Representative, elector), but as originalists they're also supposed to contend with the fact that the authors of the 14th never could have imagined any political party would be so foolish or so petty as to nominate a traitor to be president. Ha! Shows what they knew! Anyway, the argument that the president isn't an officer of the United States is moronic. Hence my expectations about Thomas and Alito.
But the grownup argument -- and this is what I've said from the beginning of this debate -- is that Donald Trump is so far accused of attempting to forcefully overthrow the government two weeks before his term ended, but hasn't been convicted of this specific charge. I think the evidence is overwhelming that he's guilty of it. But I admit I'm not unbiased. More importantly, there hasn't been a conviction by judge or jury on the charge--and I contend that because laws matter, because equal right for all matters, there needs to be a factual conclusion by a court of law reached proving that Trump rebelled against the United States. And maybe I'm being boneheaded in demanding legal certainty against the wild-eyed conjectures of Maga conspiracy theorists who don't even accede to the consensus reality. But where men fall for lies, we must always keep well lit the beacon of truth.
I am, as an American culturally, more eager to see Trump's threat to the nation put down by a small-d democratic vote, even if that's a risk that the "mobocracy" that the Founders feared could be hornswaggled by a demagogue into voting against their own liberty. And I am, as an American politically, convinced that the Coppertone Mussolini needs to be found legally guilty by a court before he can be disqualified under the laws of the Republic. The laws matter. Or at least, if civilization is on the line, the laws matter until they don't. Donald Trump is an agent of chaos. He threatens civilization. If civilization is to be held up, we have to uphold the laws that make us civilized.
In practical matters, of course, none of this matters. Regardless of how the SCOTUS rules on Trump's disqualification, he's only going to ever be removed from the ballot in a handful of Blue States where he couldn't have won the electors anyway. It's a hollow gesture to remove him from the ballot. It will have no effect, except to have validated his ridiculous argument that the system is rigged against him. As a partisan Democrat, I don't believe in validating ridiculous arguments.
Well, this is destressing... Russian person-in-street interviews on "Should we invade Poland next?"
Our greatest enemy is propaganda.
I love this YouTube channel, 1420, which does street interviews of ordinary Russians. Over time I've seen a big generation gap, at least in the Moscow and St Petersberg interviews. The people over 40 have bought Putin's "everyone's a Nazi" propaganda. Dmitri Medvedev comes in for some ruthless bashing in the interviews. In the small town interviews you rarely see young people, so the opinions in the hinterlands are lot more uniformly pro-war. The young people in the big cities have a more balanced view of the west and they usually take the pose of "I'm not a political person" before making anodyne statements about "everyone in the world should just get along."
But hoo-boy are the Russians ready to pile it onto the Poles. There's some beef there. One old lady seems to keep on saying some verb that gets bleeped -- even in the captions. From context, I think she's pro-genocide. Putin's propaganda only gets a C- in the west, now that the farce of it all has been exposed. But he's rocking a solid B+ on hardening his own peoples' hearts.
This is crazy! Fox's Bret Baier compares Student Loan Relief to Trump's Coup attempt
Fox anchor Bret Baier compares Biden’s vaccine mandates and student loan relief to Trump’s attempted coupThis is The Wall Street Journal. This is not a MAGA op-ed here, and they say, “Trump as Dictator Is a Classic Case of Projection.”
“Abuse executive power. Ignore the law. Run roughshod over individual liberties. Retaliate against political opponents. Mr. Biden and his allies have done exactly what they warn Mr. Trump will do if he returns to the White House. Unlike Mr. Biden, however, Mr. Trump would have to contend with a hostile media and federal bureaucracy that would be throwing pots, pans and candlesticks at him at every step.”
Interview guest Liz Cheney responded "Well, I think they’re wrong. I think if you, again, if you look at — we don't have to guess about what next President Trump would do because he did it before... {and the} people who told him what he was doing was illegal. Those people won’t be around him."
Baier then challenged Cheney. “But you haven’t been vocal about President Biden when, like executive orders to cancel student loans, ban evictions, mandate COVID vaccines.
Follow the link to see the bizarre video
Haven't you ever enjoyed having the perks of a wealthy friend? Oh Clarence... you're so judicial
I love this argument from Clarence. One friend paid the $60,000 school tuition for a child Thomas was helping to raise. What's the matter, liberals, you sudden got a problem with the "it takes a village" system? That same friend paid $133,000 to buy Thomas's mom's house and hand over the deed to the Thomases, plus also had another $36,000 of improvements put in. But who can blame a. man for taking care of his mom (or letting a billionaire "friend" do so)? I'm sure Harlan Crow helped more than a few needful chums this way.
"I prefer the company of simple folk, like what you'd find in a Walmart parking lot"
- Ayup, me too, Clarence
And look, Mr Snoopy McSnooperBusiness, who are we to criticize a SCOTUS needing a simple land-boatus to get away from it all? So what if yet another jillionaire loaned "Justice" Thomas $267,000 to buy a luxury RV and then completely forgave the loan? Why cynics like you are probably insinuating that it would be identical to just bribing him outright. We don't know of any quid pro quo involved here, so it's probably simply one guy bein' a pal to another guy, who just happens to be for sale. But you wanna make it all seem crooked. Shame on you.
I'm sure there's no quid pro quo. You just want to help the poor fella to see the benefits of being business friendly
Creepy news: "Trump Laying Groundwork to Co-opt Military in 2025" (TPM)
Trump Laying The Groundwork For A Coopted Military in 2025“Every institution in America is under attack from this Marxist concept of equity,” Trump said, before promising to “get this extremism” out of the military and other agencies.
That might sound like typical GOP rhetoric, decrying diversity initiatives as a beachhead for Marxism. But for Trump, experts and a review of plans released by allies suggest, the rhetoric has an objective. It’s not about whatever chimerical meaning pro-Trump partisans might assign to “equity” or “wokeness.” Rather, calls to excise “wokeness” and DEI initiatives from the military work as a way to accuse the armed forces of becoming politicized — and to pave the way for a future Trump administration to politicize the armed forces.
Trump’s advisers have reportedly been discussing invoking the act on the first day of the administration to put down protestors. Jeffrey Clark, who attempted to take over the DOJ on Trump’s behalf during his 2020 coup attempt, is leading research into how the Act might be used, the Washington Post reported last month.
At the same time, Trump and those around him have increasingly leaned on rhetoric aimed at the military which describes officers who aren’t Trump loyalists as “treasonous” or “woke.”
Some of that commentary is aimed at military officials who dissuaded him from taking extreme courses of action like deploying 250,000 troops along the U.S.-Mexico border or invoking the Insurrection Act to order troops to shoot protestors while he was in office.
unrelated image from elsewhere online
I always suspected Trump fed intel to Russia, but was Mark Meadows in on it too?
?si=1q7X25ygTT6VJOiZNot that any of these revelations will turn the cult off from voting for them.
But shuttling off 10-inch binders of raw intelligence data is bad, very bad. At least some of that data is almost certainly in Moscow now. Who knows how many confidential sources for the CIA are now jailed because of this leak.
And remember that spate of oligarch defenestrations at the start of the Ukraine war last year? At the time everyone was speculating this was Putin removing dissident billionaires unhappy with the early going in the war. Only none of them were known to be openly critical of the Ukraine invasion. It might actually have just been Uncle Vlad plugging leaks that he found out from this intelligence file!
Good luck getting $148Mil out of Rudy Giuliani
Those wonderful patriotic ladies deserve more than that. Lord knows Rudy deserves to lose more than that. I worry that (a) he doesn't near have that much left, and (b) he does have that much but he's figured out how to squirrel it away.
I really need to thank Ken Paxton
I'm teaching landmark Supreme Court cases to my high school government classes right (before we do Final Reviews for next week). And the students are so attentive to the discussion about the evolution of precedents from Roe v Wade to Dobbs v Jackson to the current case against Kate Cox, who Paxton is trying to kill or sexually mutilate (whichever his god of arbitrary pawnsmanship wills).
Of course as a teacher I always make every concerted effort to conceal my biases and only present the relevant facts. But for some reason this particular discussion is really riveting their attention. They seem to think Paxton is acting recklessly with regard to a citizen's life and health and health needs. Although I remain dispassionate, the students seem downright outraged by this use of governmental power and genuinely engaged in the lesson--yes even that devout kid in the front row who was so adamantly pro-life when we discussed ideology alignments last month. So I owe my state's attorney-general a thank you today.
Couldn't have done it without you, Ken.
There's no known photograph of Homer Plessy (of Plessy v Ferguson fame)
If you google for an image of Homer Plessy, you get a bag of this image:
Only that ain't Homer Plessy. It's a photo of 19th century Louisiana acting-governor P.B.S. Pinchback, who was also of partial African ancestry (his mother was a freed slave who moved her family to Ohio after his white father's death in 1848.
During the Civil War he moved to New Orleans and help raise colored troop units, even serving as one of the few black officers in the US Army at the time. Then he got into politics and was briefly acting governor of Louisiana, albeit 20 years before young Homer Plessy brought his famous lawsuit against the East Louisiana Railroad. (Fun fact: the ELR and most train lines in the south opposed the state's Separate Car Act because it raised their operating costs unnecessarily, so the civil rights group--the Comité des Citoyens-- that had recruited octoroon Plessy to buy the whites-only ticket had to hire their own private detective to arrest Plessy for the transgression)
Now, in trying to find a photo of Plessy for a Powerpoint for my US government class this week, I ran into this obscure history and wanted to find a photo of the man. But even as late as 1896 getting a personal photograph apparently wasn't something that happened all that often. So we don't know what Homer even looked like. A pity. His case ended in an overwhelming victory for Jim Crow, but he definitely laid some of the groundwork for a better and more equitable country.
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Name: Mister ReaGender: Male
Hometown: Houston
Home country: Moon
Current location: afk
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 53,998