So here he is, using burner phones, hiding messages, inciting a mob, and nothing happens to him. And here are all these poor dumb schmucks who think they are doing something patriotic, who listen to his lies and take them seriously, who are egged on by the President of the U.S., and they go to jail. They should go to jail, but so should the man who instigated the action.
That, however, is not how justice works in America. Ask Clarence Thomas’s wife.
During World War I thousands of African-Americans were sent to Europe to fight, but they fought under the French flag. Many white Americans refused to consider the idea of a white soldier saluting a Black superior officer.
When the Black soldiers were assigned to the French command, General John Pershing issued a directive to the French commanders. He instructed the French to “treat black Americas as white Americans did,” and went on to say “we must not eat with them, must not shake hands or seek to talk or meet with them outside the requirements of military service. We must not commend too highly the black American troops, particularly in the presence of Americans. We must prevent the rise of any pronounced degree of intimacy between French officers and black.”
Two quick points:
The French ignored the directive.
The situation had not changed at the beginning of World War II.
The quote is from Paul Dickson, The Rise of the G.I. Army 1940-1941. N.Y.: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020. I recommend this book. It is an amazing account of how Gen. Marshall and FDR rebuilt the American armed forces prior to Pearl Harbor.
1st candidate: I kissed Trump’s ass more than you did.
2nd candidate: No, I was kissing his ass from the very beginning. I’m a much better ass-kisser.
3rd candidate: You guys must be kidding. I am the most passionate Trump ass kisser who ever lived.
The debate continues like this for another hour.
I love movies. I see two a month now that we can go back into movie theaters. Before Covid I would often see one a week. I taught a class in political films. I occasionally watch Turner Classic Films. I am what is called a movie buff.
So why is an industry whose main reason for being is entertainment unable to put on an Academy Award show that isn’t stupid and boring. What is with that?
And why wasn’t “Jackass Forever” up for an award?
In order to get the Democratic candidate for the 122nd District of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives on the ballot, we needed to gather the signatures of 300 Democrats in Carbon County Pennsylvania, and we had only eight days to do it.
Today we turned in the petitions for our candidate, Richard Kost of Palmerton. A team of 30 volunteers gathered 526 signatures in eight days! What an amazing effort. If we can sustain that, we can win the 122nd in November.
I’ve heard people blame Biden for Europe’s dependence on Russian energy supplies. A C.I.A. memo warned that the gas pipeline from Siberia to Germany was direct threat to the future of Western Europe and would cause a dangerous reliance on Russia’s products.
This was a C.I.A. memo from four decades ago. It was for President Ronald Reagan, who, to his credit, took the memo seriously. In 1981 Reagan tried to block the pipeline, but he received blowback from the Kremlin, from European nations who wanted the gas, and–wait for it–the American oil and gas companies that hoped to make a killing. Exxon was one of them.
Now, after the Ukrainian invasion, Shell, BP, and Exxon say they will end their Russian investments. It is too late. About 40% of Europe’s gas is imported from Russia.
See Hiroko Tabuchi, “How Europe Got Hooked on Russian Natural Gas,” New York Times (Mar. 24, 2022), pp. B1, B4.
Axis Sally
Real name Mildred Gillars. Radio personality working for Nazi Germany. Directed propaganda at American GIs during WWII. American citizen. First woman convicted of treason. Released from prison in 1961.
Tokyo Rose
Collective name given to a number of Japanese women broadcasting to soldiers in the South Pacific. After the war one woman, American citizen Iva Toguri D’Aquino, was convicted of treason. Pardoned by President Ford because of witness tampering propagated by the American Legion and the FBI.
Hanoi Hannah
Vietnamese propagandist who urged American troops to desert, but somewhat popular because of the music she played. Real name Trinh Thi Ngo. Died in 2016 at the age of 85.
Tucker Carlson
Fox News broadcaster in the U.S. who beams Russian propaganda and lies to a large audience in the U.S. Sponsored by major American businesses. Still broadcasting.
In Florida in the 2020 election, election officials made 75 referrals to law enforcement agencies on potential voter fraud. That was 75 out of over 11 million voters. 75 out of 11,000,000. Four of those cases were deemed worthy of prosecution.
Nonetheless, earlier this month the Florida legislature created “the election police” to go after voter fraud. Of course this will discourage participation. My mailing address is Lehighton. On the petition I just signed, I must enter my name written and printed, then my house number, then my street, and then my “municipality.” Suppose I write down Lehighton, my address, instead of Towamensing, my municipality? Is that “fraud”? Can I be arrested? Best not to even sign the petition. And that is what these laws are about. If you can get arrested for an honest mistake, maybe you are better off not voting. That is what we call voter suppression.
Statistics for this post are from Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti, “GOP pushes voter fraud crackdown,” New York Times, republished in the Morning Call, March 22, 2022, p. 19.
Because of the court actions on the redistricting, we only have eight days to collect 300 signatures from Democratic voters in Carbon County if we want to get our candidate for the 122nd House district on the ballot. If that does not seem like many signatures, you obviously haven't worked on a campaign. People aren't home, or they've moved, or they changed parties, or they won't answer the door, or they "don't sign anything." It is a slow process, one signature at a time. Say you average three an hour. That means 100 hours of collecting, and you can't go out in the morning, and forget after dark.
It will be a close thing. I'll let you know if we made it on Monday, when the petitions must be filed.
It’s complicated. I once taught a course in Pennsylvania government, but I faked the part about the courts. There are three appellate courts, and two of them are required to hear appeals brought to them. I didn’t know that. The state Supreme Court, on the other hand, can pick and choose its cases.
Tonight I heard a lecture by Attorney Strubinger of Palmerton explaining the whole court system. He was clear and concise. I finally got it. If I’m ever charged with a felony, I want that guy as my defense attorney.
Ms. Jackson, about to be grilled by a bunch of Senators whose knowledge of the Constitution is sketchy, will make a fine Supreme Court Justice, smarter and more reasonable than at least six of the sitting justices. (You can figure out who they are.)
Here is another issue to consider. Why are all the Supreme Court justices attorneys? Where does it say that in the Constitution? The Court does not decide fine points of the law. Rather it decides philosophies and principles. Whether abortion should be legal and safe is not a point of law, it is a matter of philosophy. Same for election finance, or tribal sovereignty, or bail reform or anything else the Court decides.
Attorneys are taught to think in a certain way. There are two sides. There is a contest, a dispute, arguments. There are winners and losers. How about a rabbi or a philosophy prof or a labor union leader as a Supreme Court justice to bring a different mindset?
We hear a lot of talk about the need for diversity. I agree. The Court might have men, women, or trans members. It might have Blacks, Latinos, Asians, or American Indians. As long as it is all attorneys with a preponderance of them from Ivy League elite law schools, we will not see real diversity.
We managed to get another 20 signatures on our nominating petitions in Nesquehoning today, even though the weather was cold and windy. The idiocy of Pennsylvania state rules on nominations has become abundantly clear. For example, you need to write down your municipality, not your address. You are required to enter your house number, then your street, and then your municipality.
I write down 6495 (the house number), then Pohopoco Drive (the street), then Towamensing. But my address is Lehighton. While I have done this enough times to know what to do, many people automatically will enter their post office. It is a natural tendency.
In Nesquehoning today about half of our signers were retired. Some have trouble writing. Nonetheless, they must print “Nesquehoning” in a small space. I can’t do it for them; they are required to do it themselves. If they use ditto marks, their signature doesn’t count. These are arbitrary rules that have no reason for being other than to make things difficult and set up challenges.
Incidentally, one woman told me, “I never sign anything.” How does she ever submit her income tax form or write a check? She could read the petition, she could look at her neighbors’ names. I’m not asking for money. I don’t get it.
On the other hand, most people are polite and pleasant, even Republicans. That’s what keeps me going.
Some weeks ago Lancaster Farming, an agricultural newspaper I subscribe to, ran a photo of a dairy farmer who runs long-distance races. She was dressed in “race attire.” I may have glanced at the photo, but I don’t remember it. The paper has received a number of letters complaining about the “pornography.”
Being the kind of guy I am, I could not let this pass without comment. I sent in the following letter which was published on March 19. I thought you might enjoy it.
Editor:
I’m fairly certain I received the Feb. 12 issue of Lancaster Farming, but somehow I missed the “pornography” on the front page. Perhaps you could run it again.
Roy Christman
The Black areas of Houston had a very high rejection rate (approximately 15%) for applications for mail-in ballots, much higher than for white areas. I am sure that Republican legislators in other states are eying the Texas law as a model for their own states. You don’t even need to call yourself a racist; just hold rallies to preserve “the integrity of the election process.”
The Pennsylvania courts did not do us any favors. The petitions for candidates for the state General Assembly (that’s the House and the Senate) were not available until today. We need 300 signatures of Democrats by Sunday, March 27, for Richard Kost, the Democratic candidate who is running to in the 122nd House district. (The petitions are due on the 28, but we will need to organize everything before we drive up there.)
We need to coordinate lists, volunteers, petitions, drop points, pick-up locations, and instructions. Usually you have 20 days to do this. If we include tomorrow, when we are distributing lists, and the 27th, when we will need to collect them, that gives us ten days, but in reality eight. Can we collect that many signatures in eight days? (And you always get more than the minimum.) I’m fairly confident we can when the voters learn Mr. Kost’s opponent.
Congress and President Biden today were given a lesson on how a democracy should behave. Any American watching Zelensky who saw the video was given a lesson in how ordinary people in a democracy work together, how ordinary people can be brave, how ordinary people value democracy.
What big action has Congress taken lately? Well, it got rid of Standard Time so we are on “daylight savings time” all year long. Whoa!
What big action has the Executive branch taken lately? The President called Putin a war criminal. That’s gotta hurt.
What big action have the citizens of the U.S. taken lately? Well, if somebody comes from Missouri to Pennsylvania to get an abortion and I aid her, Missouri can ask for my extradition to that state for trial. On another subject, we still have one of the lowest vaccination rates of any country.
Unfortunately, most Americans never even saw Zelensky’s speech.
I have been feeling kind of sickly since Sunday. I’ve been tired, lethargic, and yesterday had a fever over 100. I was pretty sure I had Covid, but since I’ve been vaccinated and boosted, I was hoping for a mild case. I really didn’t want to know, but Linda said this morning I should be tested.
We used the same in-home kit that millions of Americans received recently. We did the swabbing, used the liquid, and waited 20 minutes to see if a line appeared on the indicator announcing you have Covid. The line never appeared. I’m Covid free.
Now the question is, what do I have?
Nope. Sorry. Didn’t happen. Governments of China, Russia, and Iran have all put up barriers. When Putin’s troops crossed into Ukraine, Russia also censored foreign websites and internal protests. Journalists and website operators can face up to 15 years in prison for violating Russian guidelines.
The idea that the internet is a tool for democracy that would lead authoritarian countries to open up was a pipe dream. Actually, in my personal view, it hasn’t helped much in the U.S.
See Adam Satariano and Valerie Hopkins, “Web Limits Push Russia Into Isolation,” The New York Times, (Mar. 8, 2022), p.. B1, B4.
U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman and U.S. House candidate Susan Wild came to Lehighton this afternoon to meet with approximately 90 supporters at a petition party at the “Wine and More” tasting room on 1st Street.
Fetterman pointed out that he is campaigning in rural counties like Carbon, noting that people in those counties also deserve to be heard. Wild, who just returned from a congressional fact-finding mission to Poland, will be running in a district that now includes Lehigh, Northampton, Carbon, and the west end of Monroe.
The audience was enthusiastic. Carbon may be a “red” county, but you would not have known that this afternoon.
Mesa County is the home of Grand Junction, Colorado. Tina Peters, the top county election administrator of Mesa County, is a Trump supporter. She is currently running for the position of Secretary of State of Colorado where she could influence Colorado’s election process.
She has also recently been indicted by the Mesa County district attorney on ten criminal counts related to charges that she tampered with the election equipment after the 2020 election.
Ms. Peters says the whole thing is a plot by the Democrats to get her. She is currently in custody.
You can’t make this stuff up.
The number of Covid cases, according to the latest information, is as high in counties that went heavily for Biden as in those counties that voted for Trump. That may be due to a number of factors; Biden counties tend to be more urban with more contact, and people in Biden counties get tested more. The other lesson has been that the Omicron variant was so contagious that people were more likely to get it, mask or no mask.
Where the significant difference showed up was in Covid deaths per 100,000 people. Over the past three months the death rate in counties that Trump won in a landslide have been more than twice as high as the rate in counties that Joe Biden won in a landslide.
The lesson is–get vaccinated. Fortunately readers of this blog post already knew that.
Graphs of the death rates in selected states and counties can be found on page A22 of today’s New York Times.
For approximately 50 years a nuclear exchange between the two nuclear superpowers was prevented by the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, or M.A.D. The concept was based on the idea that if one side launched a nuclear attack, the other side would still have enough weaponry left to annihilate the the attacker. A nuclear attack, therefore, would be suicide.
The doctrine had its flaws. It did not prevent conventional warfare among non-nuclear powers (Israel vs. the Arab states). It did not prevent civil wars (Rwanda). It didn’t prevent the superpowers from waging proxy wars. (U.S. in Vietnam; USSR in Afghanistan). The M.A.D. doctrine also was strained as more and more countries acquired nuclear weapons. (India, Pakistan, China, Israel). Nonetheless, the last nuclear bomb in war was the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.
As long as both sides–or all sides– were run by rational leaders, stability was achieved. Two big problems remained. First, what if an accident triggered a counterstrike for a non-existent attack? The “hotline” was put in place to allow the U.S. and U.S.S.R. to off-set this problem. The other major issue was what would happen if a madman somehow was put in charge.
That is the worry with Putin. How rational is he? How rational are the people around him? And if Trump is elected in 2024, a possibility, and Putin is still in power, then we would have the two largest nuclear powers headed by men who are unstable. Unstable is a euphemism.
The common belief is that we have a free market for labor. You don’t like working at MacDonalds, walk over to Burger King. You aren’t getting benefits at your janitor’s job, walk over to the next office building and apply there. You think you should get paid at least as much as your fellow workers, so you ask them how much they are making an hour.
Nope. None of those things.
A new report by the Treasury Department details ways that employers keep wages down. Noncompete agreements bar workers from moving to a competing business. Nondisclosure agreements keep workers from sharing info about wages and working conditions. Contractors control wide swaths of certain industries, like janitorial staff or security guards; there is no competing company to go to.
Only 6% of the private sector belong to a union. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. The system sucks.
Info for this post is from Eduardo Porter, “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Labor Market, Study Finds,” New York Times, (March 8, 2022), p. B5.
Dave Argall, State Senator from Schuylkill County, has introduced legislation to limit the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ability to draw legislative districts. Argall said, “Now that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has chosen to gerrymander the state’s congressional districts for the second time in four years....,” the state must act to prevent that.
Argall isn’t stupid. He knows that the Court drew districts that are reasonable. He knows that the Republican legislature created gerrymandered districts that were mocked across the country. Since he knows those things, we must assume that Argall lies in an effort to keep his party in power. He is obviously beyond shame, but I plan to write him anyway to point out his lack of integrity.
This morning about 300 snow geese landed in the corn field stubble behind our house. They raised a racket and blanketed the field. It is easy to see why they are called snow geese. I called our neighbors so they could also enjoy the sight. They were a wonderful respite from the human world.
Then, about 3 p.m., I looked out the back window and saw what looked like a dead Rhode Island Red. That’s what it was; one of ours. The head was mostly gone, but the rest seemed untouched. At 5 p.m. when I was complaining to Linda that the least the hawk could have done was to have eaten it, she said, “It’s eating it now.” There it was, a big fella, ripping feathers off to get at the meat. It was there about 15 minutes ripping and chewing away. It was either a Coopers or a Red Tail. Even with field glasses, we couldn’t be sure, and we didn’t see it fly away, which might have shown us the full view of the tail.
In 1936 the fascist Francisco Franco and his armed forces attacked the democratically-elected government of Spain. Franco was aided by Mussolini and Hitler, who sent planes and tanks and advisors. The democracies, including France and Britain, did nothing. The U.S., of course, didn’t even consider getting involved; we were in one of our “isolationist” periods with the slogan “America First.”
An international volunteer force was formed to aid the Spanish Republic. Some Americans joined, calling themselves the Abraham Lincoln brigade. The elected Spanish government did receive support from the Soviet Union, although it did not match the aid and material from Hitler and Mussolini. By 1939 Franco was in power and remained in power for over three decades.
You know the lesson the Fascists drew from the Spanish Civil War. Democracies were weak. They would do nothing. They did nothing when Japan attacked Manchuria. They did nothing when Hitler took over Austria. They did nothing when Mussolini attacked Ethiopia. Nothing when Hitler demanded the Sudetenland. Finally, when Germany attacked Poland, they declared war. It was too late.
The United States, of course, did nothing until Pearl Harbor.
A group of truckers drove to Harrisburg today as part of a “freedom convoy.” They were protesting mask mandates.
Thousands of Ukrainians are battling invading Russians. Those Ukrainians include teenagers and old men and women, often with makeshift weapons. They also want freedom.
Those truck drivers have no idea of what it means to lose one’s freedom.
Approximately 60 people marched on behalf of Ukraine in its fight for freedom against Russia. We stood along the wall of the Carbon County Courthouse Annex, held up posters and signs, and waved Ukrainian flags. I have been in quite a few demonstrations in Jim Thorpe, but I have never seen so much support from passing drivers.
We ended in the park in downtown Jim Thorpe. Commissioner Rocky Ahner spoke, Linda said a few words, and Ulana of the Ukrainian Homestead, a local Carbon County fraternal organization, read a poem about liberty in both English and Ukrainian. The rally ended with the singing of the Ukrainian national anthem. It was both moving and sad.
When you are in the middle of an international conflict, you never telegraph to your enemy what you won’t do. Biden should never have said that no U.S. troops would be sent to Ukraine. He may think that, he may know that, but he should never say that. Keep Putin on edge. Keep him worried that maybe if he goes too far, kills too many civilians, gets too close to American military bases in Poland, he will be facing not the Ukrainian army but the American army. It will make him far more cautious.
