tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90699552024-03-17T10:17:16.637-04:00Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State<center>"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom,<br>go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; <br>may your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!" <br><strong>--Samuel Adams</strong></center>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.comBlogger3608125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-50628668539773441592024-03-17T09:55:00.001-04:002024-03-17T10:16:44.989-04:00Schumer’s Peace<p><i></i></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmIR4zTHRMchJsx77vDtSrKqULsNk3WHos1xM4L1SMcCzL4ZHG4N9APpey9Wym15bPNTEPFu9KMPypIZ5Z5s_fO42SYn8RRdmqnSK0tAmNLV8Fn2WZNs6U6VWSmHheNDAYMeoUtB9HDDDg86bzQLnZ7Cf-67NkSJfIX78Z1HnVazG1Ivep2hGv/s1024/Schumer%20Getty%20Image.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="1024" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmIR4zTHRMchJsx77vDtSrKqULsNk3WHos1xM4L1SMcCzL4ZHG4N9APpey9Wym15bPNTEPFu9KMPypIZ5Z5s_fO42SYn8RRdmqnSK0tAmNLV8Fn2WZNs6U6VWSmHheNDAYMeoUtB9HDDDg86bzQLnZ7Cf-67NkSJfIX78Z1HnVazG1Ivep2hGv/s320/Schumer%20Getty%20Image.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Schumer</td></tr></tbody></table><i><br />“They have dressed the
wound of my people with very little care, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is
no peace [at all]” </i>-- <b>Jeremiah 6:14,
from a Hebrew translation</b>.<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">According to an <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/top-democrat-schumer-calls-for-new-elections-in-israel-saying-netanyahu-has-lost-his-way/ar-BB1jT2av"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">AP report</b></a> reprinted with some
excisions in the Hartford Courant on March 15, 2024, “Senate Majority Leader
Chuck Schumer on Thursday called on Israel to hold new elections, saying he
believes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ‘lost his way’ and is an
obstacle to peace in the region amid a growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Schumer, the first Jewish majority leader in the Senate and
the highest-ranking Jewish official in the U.S., strongly criticized Netanyahu
in a 40-minute speech Thursday morning on the Senate floor. Schumer said the
prime minister has put himself in a coalition of far-right extremists and as a
result, he has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is
pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“’Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah,’ Schumer
said.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Among its enemies, of course, Israel has been a pariah state
ever since its inception in the modern period. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The AP report notes that “Schumer has so far positioned
himself as a strong ally of the Israeli government, visiting the country just
days after the brutal Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and giving a lengthy speech on the
Senate floor in December decrying ‘brazen and widespread anti-Semitism the
likes of which we haven’t seen in generations in this country, if ever.’<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“But he said on the Senate floor Thursday that the ‘Israeli
people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the
past.’<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Schumer says Netanyahu, who has long opposed Palestinian
statehood, is one of several obstacles in the way of the two-state solution
pushed by the United States. Netanyahu ‘has lost his way by allowing his
political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel,’
Schumer said.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The full text of Schumer’s remarks calling for new elections
in Israel that will lead to a replacement of Netanyahu as Prime Minister of
Israel, Schumer hopes, was printed in full by the <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-senator-chuck-schumers-speech-israeli-elections-are-the-only-way/"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Times of Israel</b></a> on March 15, 2024.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The opening of Schumer’s remarks is significant, if embarrassingly
self-important, because it invests Schumer with an air of authority as “a
guardian of the people of Israel.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Addressing his colleagues in the U.S. Senate and, beyond
them “friends” of Israel, Schumer rose “to speak today about what I believe can
— and should — be the path forward to secure mutual peace and lasting
prosperity for Israelis and Palestinians.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Schumer’s path to peace is remarkably well worn. Years ago
when Joe Biden was Vice President during the administration of President Barack
Obama, the president, hoping to derail the re-election of Netanyahu, sent his
campaign professionals into Israel to aid Netanyahu’s opponent. Friends of
Israel here in the United States concluded that Obama wished to shove Netanyahu
from the political stage because he did not want loose tongues to jeopardize
clandestine U.S. negotiations with Iran, now the principal deep-pocket
supporter of anti-Israeli terrorist groups in the Middle East. Obama’s Iranian
inducements included planeloads of cash delivered to Iran – without the
approval of the U.S. Congress – under cover of darkness. Few Democrats at the
time dared call it bribery.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“I speak for myself,” Schumer declaimed, “but I also speak
for so many mainstream Jewish Americans — a silent majority — whose nuanced
views on the matter have never been well represented in this country’s
discussions about the war in Gaza.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“My last name is Schumer, which derives from the Hebrew word
Shomer, or ‘guardian.’ Of course, my first responsibility is to America and New
York. But as the first Jewish Majority Leader of the United States Senate, and
the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in America ever, I also feel very
keenly my responsibility as Shomer Yisroel — a guardian of the People of
Israel.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And the guardianship of Israel can best be assured, Schumer
insisted, by replacing Netanyahu as a Prime Minister of Israel at war with
Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran, a nation pledged to destroy Israel that
has directed and financed the present expanded war on Israel.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It remains to be seen whether Schumer – like Senator
Blumenthal of Connecticut, also Jewish and presumptively a friend of Israel –
is a more faithful guardian of Israel than Netanyahu.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There can be no doubt that Schumer and Blumenthal are faithful
political water carriers for President Joe Biden, whose understanding of the
history of Israel since the Israeli state was formed in 1948 is lacking in
detail and less precise than that of Netanyahu and the Israeli military.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Voices within the Democrat Party are hardly speaking in
unison. Socialist Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, also Jewish, wishes to
return Israel to its <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">status quo ante</i>
before the assault on Israel on October 7, 2023 convinced some in the United
States that Iran’s vision of a Middle East without the state of Israel has been
put on a progressive path. Any successful military opposition to Iran and its
terrorist helpmates might easily be portrayed by accomplished political
rhetoricians – Sanders is one of these -- as needlessly violent and a blow to a
“two state solution” that, largely because of Iranian opposition, has never and
will never succeed. Sanders entered the U.S. Senate in2006, Schumer in 1999
but, in the matter of chutzpah, Sanders is by far the senior politician.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">To his credit, Schumer, in his <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-senator-chuck-schumers-speech-israeli-elections-are-the-only-way/"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">unedited remarks</b></a>, has plainly said
that Hamas cannot be one of the states in any two-state solution, and he does
manage properly to affix blame for the undoubted failure of a two-state
solution squarely on Iran, the terrorists and, not mentioned, American leftist politicians
seemingly unfamiliar with the last three decades of Middle East turmoil. It
should be noted, however, that Schumer and Blumenthal have yet to launch any
serious objection to Sander’s notion that the United States must immediately halt
all aid to Israel until such time as prominent Israelis warmly embrace the
failed two-state solution and immediately put a stop to their aggressive
military maneuvers.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">No prominent American politician on the right has yet
proposed that Israel should impose on Gaza a decades-long protectorate that
will allow Gazans to develop organically in the absence of terrorist tunnels
built under hospitals by Hamas terrorists and the pressure brought to bear upon
them by its governing authority in league, as we all know, with Iran, whose
leaders have yet to suffer any serious disappointments.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Repeating the errors of the Obama administration, Biden has
removed oil distribution sanctions imposed on Iran – far more lucrative than
plane loads of cash – in hopes that the leaders of Iran, declared enemies of
both Israel and the United States, will be brought to their knees by goodwill
gestures.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Biden is not a creative president, and the fog of war in the
Middle East is far less foggy than the fog of an American election campaign. The
“path forward” to a two-state solution, pursued unsuccessfully for decades by
lovers of peace and prosperity in the United States, may have been a spectacular
failure for all but Iran and the enemies of peace and prosperity in Gaza, but
hope springs eternal, despite the prophetic warnings of Jeremiah, a prophet well
acquainted with the deceptive actions of those who offer superficial solutions
and false assurances, especially in the face of significant challenges.<o:p></o:p></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-60844617862379373382024-03-12T09:32:00.006-04:002024-03-12T14:04:45.287-04:00A Guide For the Politically Perplexed: Hamas and Israel<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKTZ65ENlUFpRq-Dvf58wRwuG_ShZkoLNvE3BYbfUoD4NQ91jtOD1BOpP0CGvHpZhhf4hU0UArXRbtLR43nlxzBxqoCOecwCr_NXC-uVSkZPPTfjy3XoilIKDq26x10Z-J_hpR8fTlw7EOJ-P3uhJiBx9tnWpWMtm_ytaLqg-BZnXMU-kJqq-0/s455/Netanyahu%20and%20Biden%20--%20Avi%20Ohayon,%20Israeli%20Government,%20via%20Associated%20Press.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="color: black;"><img border="0" data-original-height="399" data-original-width="455" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKTZ65ENlUFpRq-Dvf58wRwuG_ShZkoLNvE3BYbfUoD4NQ91jtOD1BOpP0CGvHpZhhf4hU0UArXRbtLR43nlxzBxqoCOecwCr_NXC-uVSkZPPTfjy3XoilIKDq26x10Z-J_hpR8fTlw7EOJ-P3uhJiBx9tnWpWMtm_ytaLqg-BZnXMU-kJqq-0/s320/Netanyahu%20and%20Biden%20--%20Avi%20Ohayon,%20Israeli%20Government,%20via%20Associated%20Press.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Netanyahu and Biden -- Avi Ohayon, Israeli Government, via Associated Press</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Hamas is one of three terrorist entities supported
financially and ideologically by Iran, one of three permanent enemies of the
United States. The other two are Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China.<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Not only is Hamas a terrorist fox in the bosom of Israel, it
is the once and once-only elected <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">government</i>
of Gaza-Palestine, supposedly one of the “two states” often mentioned by
American politicians when they begin prating about a “two state solution” to problems
in the Middle East. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It has become clear in recent days that the Biden
administration favors the much sought after, politically mystical “two state
solution.” That is, the Biden administration looks kindly on the treacherous
fox in the bosom of Israel that threatens to destroy it and had on October 7,
2023, through its aggressive military actions, very publically declared open
war on Israel.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Following the brutal surprise attack on Israel by Hamas, Prime
Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu -- loathed by both the Biden
administration and that of his predecessor, former President Barack Obama -- --
rightly declared war on Hamas, vowing to destroy it root and branch.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There has been <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/biden-may-condition-aid-for-israel-after-a-rafah-invasion/ar-BB1jImc0?ocid=socialshare&pc=U531&cvid=240a1dead8c44218b98948a43428a385&ei=35&fbclid=IwAR2CD_mJrjv2OWRXZM2Y21DYxgtOLW_fi44GZiPG6SHH4IIfvZvb4JQFSME">evolution</a> in the Biden administration’s solid
support of Israel. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Biden early announced his support of Israel but lately has
hedged his bets by also supporting a pause in the war or a temporary cessation
of hostilities. Strategists who know something about war have denounced them both
as strategic measures that will allow the enemies of Israel – Iran, Hamas,
Hezbollah and the Houthis, an Islamist political and military organization that
emerged from Yemen in the 1990s -- to regroup in order to continue their
unremitting destruction of the Israeli state.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Try to imagine what then General Dwight Eisenhower’s response
might have been had then President Franklin Roosevelt decided, prior to the
landing at Normandy, that he would yield to political opponents who were
encouraging him to make “negotiation not war” with a German Chancellor on the
run. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Those who fear the widening of the war have managed agilely
to leap over the whole history of Iranian supported aggression. The war already
had been widened by Iran ever since Israel withdrew troops and Israelis from
Gaza way back in 2005, when Hamas replaced The Palestinian Liberation
Organization (PLO or Fatah) as Gaza’s governing institution. Israel’s current
response to Hamas and Hezbollah and Houthi aggression is an honest and
forthright answer to a widened war.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hamas, an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood movement,
established itself in 1987, but it had been active in the Gaza strip as early
as the 1950s. Following the defeat of Fatah in a series of violent clashes in
June 2007, Hamas has governed the Gaza portion of the Palestinian territories.
Its first attack against Israel, the abduction and killing of two Israeli
soldiers, occurred in 1989.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Of Iran's 89 million inhabitants, 99 percent are Muslim,
according to a 2023 census. A sizable majority, 88 percent, embrace Shia Islam,
and 12 percent are Sunni, according to a 2016 census.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Biden is waging a reelection campaign; Netanyahu is waging a
war against the real, persistent and ideologically committed enemies of Israel,
many of them trained and armed by Shia Iran. The two ambitions clash at
important points.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Wars are either won or lost. Campaigns are either won or
lost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the loss of a war or political
campaign removes the loser from making important decisions that undoubtedly
affect the fate of nations. Peace negotiations are either successful or unsuccessful.
And the most successful peace negotiations are undertaken by those who have
successfully won wars.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The map of Europe, the peace of Europe, following World War
II, was decided by those who won the war. The unity of the United States was
decided by <a href="https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2009/01/tried-by-war.html"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Abraham Lincoln</b></a>, who successfully
prosecuted a bloody insurrection by slave holding states. The peace that
followed was decided at Antietam and Gettysburg, two of the bloodiest battles
of the Civil War.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Wars and the victors of wars matter. Successful negotiations
– more properly, the choices of those who will shape the peace – are, more
often than not, decided on battlefields. All history cries out to us -- to lose
the war is to lose the peace that follows war.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Successful foreign policies are shaped by politicians who
are wise enough to discern enemies from friends. American voters in November
2024 will have an opportunity to decide who will shape the peace in the Middle
East -- the friends or enemies of Israel. And the same calculus applies to
Eastern Europe, now holding its own in a defensive war with Vladimir Putin’s
Russia. Who wins the war wins the peace. We can only hope they will choose
wisely.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwGQWx1yEPg"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Victor Davis Hanson’s</b></a> written
commentary is widely available through distribution agencies, but he cannot be
found in most Connecticut newspapers. The author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the
Peloponnesian War</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Second
World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won </i>is
particularly luminous on the matter of war and its consequences.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hanson is not certain the American Republic will survive
recent assaults upon it by neo-Marxist pedagogues or, for that matter, the
a-historical architects of American foreign policy. And patriots who have
survived Ivy League universities in recent days tend to agree with him. Yet the
man makes too much sense to be included among the commentariat in our state’s
newspapers.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Go figure.<o:p></o:p></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-27213719283003724352024-03-09T19:14:00.001-05:002024-03-09T19:15:25.008-05:00The Left’s Anti-Christian Gag<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbFKihKUlHdfhmaBQvsvK4d4sYfxf278BDCTTtNVoVS0D9nZThmMGhRmRuG6nLz99FJMlpYRlcERd4nC8uJNQwhGgSB5ZE1II1q21ErOQLQ5Mg-CZFDtkXoLTm5ABO27dMpSXlVWr8EvJYRRjsGtQJs2GJTQk76E_zLnxZg3tJJd_mGVF_mGH9/s3651/Orwell%20George.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3651" data-original-width="2730" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbFKihKUlHdfhmaBQvsvK4d4sYfxf278BDCTTtNVoVS0D9nZThmMGhRmRuG6nLz99FJMlpYRlcERd4nC8uJNQwhGgSB5ZE1II1q21ErOQLQ5Mg-CZFDtkXoLTm5ABO27dMpSXlVWr8EvJYRRjsGtQJs2GJTQk76E_zLnxZg3tJJd_mGVF_mGH9/s320/Orwell%20George.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">George Orwell</td></tr></tbody></table><br />State Representative Jillian Gilchrest, a Democrat from West
Hartford, is vigorously supporting a legislative proposal that would,
according to a piece in <b><a href="https://ctmirror.org/2024/02/28/ct-abortion-law-religious-objections/">CTMirror</a></b>,
“ban religious objections to reproductive health care in Connecticut.” She is “one
of several lawmakers who recently unveiled legislative priorities for
reproductive rights.”<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Christians, anti-Christians and practical atheists will note
the distortion in language here: Reproductive rights – that is, abortion rights
– rarely result, when broadly exercised, in the reproduction of the species.
The expression “reproductive rights” is used most often on the left as a
euphemism for “abortion rights.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Gilchrest and a supportive group in the State’s General
Assembly, the legislature’s Reproductive Rights Caucus and Reproductive Equity
Now censors, are likely to be disappointed once their legislation, if passed,
wends its way through appellate courts that regard the First Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution as more than a passing fancy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Three rights are bundled together in the Constitution’s
First Amendment: religious rights -- “Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” – freedom
of speech and the press – “[Congress shall make no law] abridging the freedom
of speech or of the press” – and freedom of association and petition --
“[Congress shall make no law affecting] the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court transfer to states
the imprescriptible rights affirmed in the First Amendment. The “Congress shall
make no law” clause applies as well to state legislatures and municipal
governments.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Any criminal worth his salt may be familiar with the
doctrine "<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nulla Poena Sine Lege</i>"
-- where there is no prohibitive law, there can be no punishment, a bedrock
concept in criminal law ensuring fairness and predictability that protects
individuals from arbitrary prosecution.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Reproductive [abortion] rights advocates are eyeing a
change in state law that would no longer allow medical providers to deny a
patient reproductive [abortion] health care based on a religious or
conscientious objection,” CTMirror advises. The “change in state law” advocated
by Gilchrest and abortion rights advocates in the General Assembly,
dispassionate observers will note, is incompatible with the First Amendment.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“To combat these refusal laws in the state,” officials from
Reproductive Equity Now wrote in a memo, “Connecticut [legislators] can act to
ensure health care institutions, such as religiously affiliated hospitals, do
not prohibit providers from providing medically accurate information regarding
a patient’s health status, counseling, and referrals for care that may not
align with an institution’s moral or religious beliefs.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Rhetorical contortionists will admire the misuse of language
here by officials from Reproductive Equity Now. What has abortion, the
termination of life in the womb, to do with “health care”? Are not most laws –
say, laws that punish bank robbery, rape and incest – “refusal laws”? Should
bank robbers and bank tellers be treated equitably because both handle cash? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And why should religious hospitals<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>-- doctors, nurses and staff – be stripped of
their First Amendment rights , their “moral or religious beliefs,” so that some
legislators may with an unbruised conscience feel free to violate what used to
be called the religiously informed conscience of individuals luxuriating in
their First Amendment rights. Would members of Connecticut’s media settle for
an originalist interpretation of the freedom of speech and the press clauses of
the First Amendment if advocates who favor neo-progressive rights were to
agitate against the wide berth of freedom afforded to members of the media by
the First Amendment?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It was liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg,
close friends with Justice Antonin Scalia, who reminded her colleagues “We are
all originalists now.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“It is morally obtuse and unconstitutional said Chris Healy,
the executive director of the Connecticut Catholic Conference, “to require a
health care provider to perform an abortion or any medical procedure that
conflicts with their religious rights as well as the religious tenets of the
provider. There are plenty of options available to women, but the abortion
lobby can’t control their extremism and want to dictate to people of faith. Catholic
hospitals are the targets, and we will vigorously oppose it to protect the
religious rights of dedicated health care workers.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">George Orwell, who remained a socialist all his life, considered
himself a custodian of the English language – and so he was. When he submitted <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Animal Farm</i> for publication, it was
rejected by one prominent publisher because, “We do not publish children’s
books.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Orwell’s <span style="line-height: 115%;"><a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/"><b><i><span style="line-height: 115%;">Politics and the English Language</span></i></b></a></span>
is well worth reading even today – most especially today.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“In our time,” Orwell writes, “it is broadly true that
political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found
that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not
a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless,
imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading
articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of
course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost
never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches
some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases –
bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the
world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is
not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which
suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s
spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind
them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of
phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The
appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved
as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is
making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be
almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the
responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not
indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In the United States, the orthodox neo-progressive left
makes use of its own hackneyed and deadening -- pun intended -- phraseology.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Orwell’s undying message is -- corruption, in all its
various guises, follows the corruption of the language.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-80822453118844967402024-03-02T15:57:00.001-05:002024-03-02T15:57:22.385-05:00Welcome to Bridgeport<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4DUpzLDTaZjmGwdUz1xEi3s9qUhMmpPDzzfwiib_s0hcoOnsowxVqMNiMxiYWl-clGVIZHPQglCpL6LXIIcmI_yXDaf0hKLYMou7xJOAQIRpz7wDCNu8vhzYMHRT01llQbfgK3JzQk0qydavOSpD_8N3gqknSIUVqGYYCRGpCMRIP9WXIwDnj/s422/Joe%20Ganim,%20(Ned%20Gerard,Hearst%20Connecticut%20Media).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="422" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4DUpzLDTaZjmGwdUz1xEi3s9qUhMmpPDzzfwiib_s0hcoOnsowxVqMNiMxiYWl-clGVIZHPQglCpL6LXIIcmI_yXDaf0hKLYMou7xJOAQIRpz7wDCNu8vhzYMHRT01llQbfgK3JzQk0qydavOSpD_8N3gqknSIUVqGYYCRGpCMRIP9WXIwDnj/s320/Joe%20Ganim,%20(Ned%20Gerard,Hearst%20Connecticut%20Media).jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Joe
Ganim, (Ned Gerard, Hearst Connecticut Media)</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Henry Mencken reminds us that “Democracy is the theory that
the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Welcome to Bridgeport, Connecticut’s most populous city.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The current mayor of Bridgeport is ex-felon Joe Ganim.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ganim was Mayor of Bridgeport from 1991 to 2003, having been
elected six times. He was convicted in 2003 on multiple corruption charges.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The mayor was sentenced to nine years in prison and fined
about $300,000 in restitution, in addition to $175,000 he had previously
stipulated he owed. U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton noted at the time
that Ganim's crimes were "stuff that cynicism is made of" and she
determined that Ganim had "lied to the jury when he denied any knowledge
of fee-splitting deals and other incriminating evidence.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A 2001 New York Times piece, “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/20/nyregion/bridgeport-mayor-convicted-on-16-charges-of-corruption.html"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Bridgeport Mayor Convicted On 16 Charges of
Corruption</b></a>,” noted that “today's conviction appeared to be a
career-ending blow for a politician whose appetite for luxury, thoroughly
documented by prosecutors and their witnesses at trial over the past two
months, exceeded his ability to acquire it legally.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Times noted that “Though he is Connecticut's fourth
big-city mayor in 13 years to face criminal charges, and the second to be found
guilty of at least some crimes, Mr. Ganim was convicted on such a broad array
of charges that a political comeback is all but out of the question, political
and legal experts said today. In Bridgeport, former Mayor Philip A. Giordano of
Waterbury [a Republican] is on trial in federal court, accused of sexually
abusing two young girls.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Times’ piece ends on a note of mortal uplift: “State
legislators are scheduled to hold a hearing on Thursday evening to discuss the
need for new laws to force officials convicted of crimes to resign.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Alas, Bridgeport voters in 2015 put the experts to shame.
That was the year Ganim, five years out of prison, was reelected mayor of
Bridgeport.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Fast forward to 2023. Ganim is declared the winner of the
Bridgeport Democrat primary for mayor of the city after having defeated his Democrat
primary challenger, former Bridgeport chief administrative officer John Gomes,
by 251 votes out of 8,173 cast.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Large cities in which the opposing Republican Party has all
but disappeared rely upon primaries rather than general elections to appoint
municipal office holders, who are rarely challenged. Intra-party challenges can
be embarrassing and, well, challenging. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Gomes challenged the race successfully in a three day trial
in which surveillance video footage was presented that showed two women stuffing
white envelopes into outdoor absentee ballot drop boxes. After Gomes' lawyer
had tallied the submission of 1,253 absentee ballots, despite surveillance
videos only showing 420 people using the boxes, Judge William Clark invalidated
the Democratic mayoral primary results.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The two women, Clark found, were both Ganim “partisans.” The
ballot stuffing was not random, the judge ruled, but “shocking… conscious acts
with a partisan purpose.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Eyebrows were raised. Gomez was, after all, a very
attractive candidate for mayor and an astute campaigner. But he was only a
solitary concerned individual. Ganim, on the other hand, has been for decades a
significant cog in the Democrat Party’s well-oiled urban political machine.
Ganim never had much to fear from an aroused Republican Party establishment in
Bridgeport. The last Republican Party mayor of Bridgeport was Mary Moran. The
first and only woman to serve as Bridgeport mayor left office in 1991.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ganim’s 2024 candidacy, post-ballot-stuffing, was supported
by most of the twinkling lights of Connecticut Democrat Party establishment.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Connecticut Examiner (CTExaminer) noted in its coverage
of Ganim’s victory party last month – “<a href="https://ctexaminer.com/2024/02/28/ganim-closes-out-elections-returns-for-eighth-term-as-bridgeport-mayor/"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Ganim Closes Out Elections, Returns for
Eighth Term as Bridgeport Mayor</b></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">”
</b>– that Ganim “received endorsements from Gov. Ned Lamont, Sen. Chris
Murphy, Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Rep. Jim Himes days before the last general
election.” Governor Ned Lamont’s congratulatory message was fulsome and heartfelt
and quieting.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The governor’s message to Bridgeport and the world was
delivered by his chief spokeswoman, Julia Bergman: “The governor respects the
right of citizens to elect who represents them, and Tuesday's vote showed
another decisive victory for Joe Ganim. The governor, like many residents, is
ready to turn the page and looks forward to working with the mayor and the
entire Bridgeport (legislative) delegation to continue to support the city's
bright future." <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“If God is with us,” the good book tells us, “who can be
against us?” A revised apothegm suitable for modern times applies with
particular force to Connecticut’s large cities. “If the Democrat Party machine
is for us, who can be against us?”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Mencken, every honorable journalist’s picture-perfect
commentator, answered that question long ago: “The whole aim of practical
politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to
safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them
imaginary.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Bridgeport machine no doubt will find room in its broad
bosom for vigorous challengers such as Gomes, if only to remove him as a threat
to its continuing dominance. <o:p></o:p></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-9354058693964400432024-02-29T16:51:00.003-05:002024-02-29T16:51:52.137-05:00A Primer on Connecticut’s News Business, 2024<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgew0xMHnPjVTqjVjz755MzB9V24jretr-kleHQ4DzSCOI7iH1Ct22peB-nTQxoxzrOR6Pq74LYLT6iZQdspZJG-bwIzR8bfQ093IrnuprDfLVpuGMYFCiYWiSi5ePe5cTAVOJ4sxqkELd23TYyUNovOZwAcTCNOCVR1eJFjboj67CU8gM4jOQ9/s1200/Bismarck,%20people%20never%20lie%20so%20much%20(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="1200" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgew0xMHnPjVTqjVjz755MzB9V24jretr-kleHQ4DzSCOI7iH1Ct22peB-nTQxoxzrOR6Pq74LYLT6iZQdspZJG-bwIzR8bfQ093IrnuprDfLVpuGMYFCiYWiSi5ePe5cTAVOJ4sxqkELd23TYyUNovOZwAcTCNOCVR1eJFjboj67CU8gM4jOQ9/s320/Bismarck,%20people%20never%20lie%20so%20much%20(2).jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />What is the difference between political commentary and
reporting?<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The distinction between the two is not as sharp now as it
once was, or pretends to be.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: -0.5in;">Pretends to be?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I do not think a convincing case can be made that print
media in the United States had ever been <a href="https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2023/09/john-miller-at-blake-center-for-faith.html"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">politically unconnected</b></a>. News
writers gather their news from working politicians – that is politicians
holding office.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Here in Connecticut, Democrats have ruled the political
roost, particularly in the state’s large cities, for almost half a century. The
last Republican mayor of Hartford, Connecticut’s Capital City, was Antonia
(Ann) Ucello, who left office in 1971, a distant 53 years ago. The state’s
General Assembly is dominated by Democrats; all the members of Connecticut’s
U.S. Congressional Delegation are Democrats, the last Republican U.S. House
member, Chris Shays, having been defeated by Jim Himes in the 2008 election;
the last two governors are Democrats. And registered Democrats outnumber
Republicans in the state by a two to one margin.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There are no indications that this radical imbalance between
Democrat and Republican elected officials at the state level will be more
equitably adjusted any time soon. And this means that reportorial clients are
majority Democrats. Reporters do their business with Democrat office holders.
Republicans from time-to-time may be permitted to shout out alternative
political programs from the sidelines. But they really fall outside of Teddy
Roosevelt’s political “arena,” powerless lingerers in the audience, among other
non-participating witnesses to political events.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Roosevelt is often cited: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the
strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The
credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by
dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short
again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but
who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a
worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high
achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring
greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who
knew neither victory nor defeat.”<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I doubt that Republicans in Connecticut’s political arena may
properly be characterized as “cold and timid souls” bereft of “great
enthusiasms” or “great devotions” who dare not dare. I do know they are
underrepresented by a state media whose business it is to fill their papers
with news hawked by Democrat officeholders.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But this was not always the case. How did things get this
way?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There is a synchronicity, as mentioned above, between
Connecticut’s media and politicians, and not all of it is business related.
State Democrats are anxious presently, for campaign reasons, to portray the
Republican Party in Connecticut as having been abducted by “Trump the
Terrible.” But Trump’s influence upon Connecticut’s GOP as such is not likely
to extend much beyond his possible last term in office.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There are -- thank God and the authors of the Federalist
Papers, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison – constitutional bars
that prevent muscular presidents from the ever-present temptations of tyranny.
Or, as my dear old mother used to put it, speaking long ago of an obnoxious
candidate for president, “He only has four years, eight at the most,” to
unravel America’s unique experiment in personal liberty.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The claim that Trump, if re-elected to the presidential
office, will “destroy democracy in America” is clearly absurd, little more than
a campaign bumper sticker. One wonders whether any of the Democrat politicians
making this claim, largely for campaign reasons, have ever read Alexis de
Tocqueville <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Democracy in America</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“The American Republic,” Tocqueville wrote in a stunning
prediction, “will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the
public with the public’s money.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Other elements that have transformed Connecticut into a
Democrat sinecure are, in no special order of importance, reportorial timidity,
a too friendly business relationship with politicians in power, intellectual sloth,
a crushing long-term Democrat Party majority in the state, and political
inertia.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-stink-war.html#more"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Chris Powell</b></a> is far more dangerous,
both as a commentator and a newsman, than most political operatives in
Connecticut, primarily because thinking about politics is, for him, not just an
entertaining pastime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was, when he
first began working for the Journal Inquirer over in Manchester, the youngest
managing editor of a newspaper in the state. The paper he worked for, once
independently owned, is now a part of the Hearst chain of newspapers. The Hartford
Courant, once independent, is now part of the Tribune chain of papers.
Newspaper chains tend to have their own stables of reporters and commentators
and live in quiet despair that imprudent commentators will disturb their
carefully groomed sources, most of them in-office Democrat politicians and
their staffs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Powell thinks people are becoming politically illiterate,
especially in the cities, and the remaining lonely literati have been
captivated, if not captured, by outworn credos, among them noxious post-Marxian
claptrap, refabricated and updated of course. These are two permanent stops on Powell’s
commentary organ. Some people may have noticed that rational argumentation no
longer plays a decisive part in political discussion. Powell still believes –
he has always believed – that rationality should trump the media-political
complex, and he has quoted in an approving manner Joseph Pulitzer’s maxim that
a “good newspaper should have no friends.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Powell’s columns may be found at <a href="https://chrispowellcolumn.com/"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Chris
Powell Columns</b></a>. He once butted heads with the editorial staff of the
Hartford Courant concerning an editorial he wrote, and the collision produced
an entertaining and instructive point-counterpoint preserved by Connecticut Commentary
under the title<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> “</b><a href="https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-stink-war.html"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Stink War</b></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">.”</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Journalism should be a dangerous and disruptive enterprise. In
Trump’s case, there is no lack of opposition within the legacy media, but Biden
is left to graze undisturbed in fields of grain. Not so long ago, op-ed pages
in most newspapers carried vibrant contrary opinion. But presently contrary
opinion on the shrinking op-ed pages of many Connecticut newspapers invites
stern and humorless opposition from politicians who generally think they have
cornered the market on prevailing political opinion. What is the point, after
all, in enraging in-office politicians from whom many reporters and
commentators get their news?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A good news editor would from time to time dare disturb the
political universe and assign his reporters the task of presenting to majority
politicians in his state important questions that might ruffle the feathers of
the political birds in office.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It is not at all difficult to cite examples of politicians
in Connecticut who have not been grilled on important matters.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We know that the border crisis has produced a corresponding fentanyl
crisis in the United States, and we know that the product used to produce
fentanyl comes from China. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is,
Peter Schweizer tells us in his newest book<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">,
Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans</i>,
but the tip of the spear.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“You look at a situation like the fentanyl crisis,”
Schweizer recently told <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2024/02/25/mark-levin-schweizers-blood-money-is-jaw-dropping/"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Mark Levin</b></a>. “It’s killing 100,000
Americans a year. And a lot of people know that the precursors come from China.
What they don’t know is that China is involved in every single chain in this
link that leads to the deaths of Americans. The precursors come to a port at
the port of Manzanillo in Mexico. It’s run by a Chinese company. They send
those precursors up to a small border town in Mexico, where 2000 Chinese
nationals help them turn it into fentanyl. They take pill presses that are
imported from China, that are sold to the drug cartels at cost by the Chinese.
They make these pills. They then bring them across the border into the United
States.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">According to a <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/17/politics/biden-overdose-deaths-record/index.html"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">CNN</b></a> report, “More than 100,000
people died of drug overdoses in the United States during the 12-month period
ending April 2021, according to provisional data published Wednesday by the US
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s a new record high, with overdose
deaths jumping 28.5% from the same period one year earlier.” By comparison, In
2021, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 48,830 people
died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">CDC</b></a>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">South American drug cartels have been enriched considerably
by a border they regard, correctly, as little more than a demarcation line on a
map. Border patrol agents, the last line of defense against aggressive South
American drug runners and their Chinese enablers, are now busily processing
illegal migrants, a change in function necessitated by the sheer numbers of illegal
immigrants crossing the border, <a href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/million-migrants-border-biden/"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">7.2 million</b></a> since Biden assumed
office. Major sanctuary cities in the United States have been overrun by
illegal immigrants. Leading urban Democrats such as Mayor Eric Adams of New
York City have long felt the pinch.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Most recently, according to <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/migrant-crime-forcing-dramatic-political-shift-nyc-mayor-calls-sanctuary-law-changes-benson"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fox News</b></a>, “Adams on Monday doubled
down while speaking to a group at a town hall meeting in Canarsie, Brooklyn,
saying the sanctuary city law needs to be modified so that any migrant who
commits a felony can be turned over to ICE and deported.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Statutorily, Connecticut’s relationship with ICE,
particularly on deporting illegals in the state’s sanctuary cities, is icy.
Legislation barring sanctuary cities in New Hampshire failed in 2022, according
to a piece in National Public Radio (NPR) ironically titled “<a href="https://www.ctpublic.org/2024-02-03/state-house-republicans-pursue-focus-on-illegal-immigration-even-as-data-shows-few-border-crossings"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">State House Republicans pursue focus on
illegal immigration even as data shows few border crossings</b></a>.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A competent news editor would suggest to his or her paper’s
best investigative reporter that he or she put the following question to every
one of the all-Democrat members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation:
There were in the United States in 2021 twice as many deaths from fentanyl than
reported deaths from firearms misuse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Recent reports indicate that China is implicated in the manufacture and
distribution of fentanyl over what appears to be a highly porous southern
border. What bills have you written or supported that would reduce the mass chemical
murder of American citizens?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The question, well worth asking, will no doubt ruffle the
feathers of current Democrat officeholders up for reelection in 2024. But
ruffling the feathers of office holders is what an instructive and honorable
media is supposed to be doing.<o:p></o:p></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-8997237714714618542024-02-25T08:47:00.005-05:002024-02-25T13:57:10.459-05:00Connecticut, the Abortion State<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYrfraSK_NnpSbkpAiNpfdCMXWGOjtoF6iXBafQZM2Xd-UPUWAPjIAHWU-zxtoT1Jw1dAcmhOJN6Z8UUL0DeX90e2dtGMsTvLU3j8FxqonKuqOVlmBQBmx3-aHSwgH6DE0tOzbp3W1Sqv_vuJhH62A77YhxvHUiSHMBk7pJPmkEjE2xj6gdtFE/s920/Duff%20--%20Wilton%20Bulletin%20(2).jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="735" data-original-width="920" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYrfraSK_NnpSbkpAiNpfdCMXWGOjtoF6iXBafQZM2Xd-UPUWAPjIAHWU-zxtoT1Jw1dAcmhOJN6Z8UUL0DeX90e2dtGMsTvLU3j8FxqonKuqOVlmBQBmx3-aHSwgH6DE0tOzbp3W1Sqv_vuJhH62A77YhxvHUiSHMBk7pJPmkEjE2xj6gdtFE/s320/Duff%20--%20Wilton%20Bulletin%20(2).jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Duff -- Wilton Bulletin</td></tr></tbody></table><br />It’s been decades since former President Bill Clinton said
that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”, a formulation launched by
Clinton in 1992.<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">According to a 2019 article in <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/10/18/20917406/abortion-safe-legal-and-rare-tulsi-gabbard"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Vox</b></a>, “The language was likely meant
to appeal to people who supported the right to an abortion in principle but
still felt morally conflicted about the procedure — a large group, according to
some polling. But many abortion rights advocates argued that calling for the
procedure to be ‘rare’ placed a stigma on people who seek it.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The use of the word “stigma” in such a context is bitterly
ironic, and a profanation. The word “stigma’ is derived from the Latin word
“stigmata,” the wounds of Christ on the cross transposed onto the human flesh
of saints in the Christian Church such as Francis of Assisi.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In <a href="https://www.cga.ct.gov/2022/rpt/pdf/2022-R-0281.pdf"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Connecticut</b></a>, abortion, both surgical and medical – within a
certain period, women may abort their fetuses by taking a pill, widely
available and at low cost – is hardly rare.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Some non-religious agnostics in Connecticut are wondering
why the so called abortion pill, an inexpensive abortifacient easily obtained, has
not yet supplanted surgical abortions. The pill is safe to all but fetuses, as
babies in the womb have come to be called, as<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>the Planned Parenthood abortion industry tells us -- and hardly rare.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Indeed, Connecticut, some politicians believe, would do well
to advertise itself – perhaps by means of neon billboards dotting the state --
as “the abortion state,” a national draw, according to many pro-abortion
members of the state’s neo-progressive General Assembly and its Governor, Ned
Lamont, who bills himself as an economic conservative and a social progressive.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">An updated Connecticut statute favored by pro-abortionists
permits those seeking abortions hailing from states that limit abortion rights
to travel to Connecticut to receive surgical abortions.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Decades ago, the U.S. Supreme Court, hoping to settle the
abortion hash once and for all, passed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Roe
v Wade</i>, which made abortion widely available and struck down inconvenient
abortion laws in all states.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Problem solved.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As it happened, the problem was not solved. Anti-abortion
fervor in the United States continued apace, driven, pro-abortionists reasoned,
by a “religious opposition” that perversely insisted that abortion violated
God’s law -- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and science</i>, which
appeared to support the view that the fetus was not, merely “a part of a
woman’s body,” somewhat like a diseased liver or an impacted wisdom tooth.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The poorly reasoned <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Roe
v. Wade</i> -- see progressive Supreme Court justices such as Ruth Bader
Ginsburg on the point -- finally was junked by a judicially enlightened Supreme
Court a couple of years ago. The Roe<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> v.
Wade</i> ruling had not lived up to its billing , and opposition to abortion
had become fiercer.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Supreme Court repealed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Roe v. Wade</i>, but it did not repeal abortion.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The high court, usually verbose on such matters, said, in so
many words, abortion was a political matter that should be decided by state
legislatures, and not morally and scientifically obtuse justices of the supreme
or appellate courts: “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue
of abortion to the people’s elected representatives. The permissibility of
abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are to be resolved like most important
questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then
voting.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Problem solved.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The states would be able through statute to affirm the “sanctity”
of abortion – or not, as it pleased state legislatures and residents.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Here in Connecticut, the state’s neo-progressive, Democrat
dominated General Assembly more or less incorporated <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Roe v. Wade</i> into state statute way back in 1991. Given its ruling
in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/24/us/politics/supreme-court-dobbs-jackson-analysis-roe-wade.html"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dobbs
v. Jackson</i></b></a>, the high court is not likely to reverse itself and
declare that statutory abortion rights in Connecticut, affirmed by the state’s
legislature, are in some sense unconstitutional – unless state legislators,
dancing far out on a limb, propound a measure that is clearly unconstitutional,
such as forbidding clerics from denouncing abortion citing religious
proscriptions.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“In 2022,” Hartford Courant reporter Chris Keating tells us,
even before a draft of the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion in the Dobbs case
was leaked, the state legislature moved quickly to pass additional protections
in the most far-reaching abortion bill in Connecticut in the past 32 years.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“The bipartisan bill increased the number of medical
specialists who are allowed to perform abortion services — allowing advanced
practice registered nurses, physician assistants and nurse-midwives to provide
medication and aspiration abortions in the first trimester.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Problem solved.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Keating handles the issue gingerly in a recent story, “<a href="https://www.courant.com/2024/02/22/advocates-pushing-ct-constitutional-amendment-on-abortion/"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Advocates pushing CT constitutional
amendment on abortion</b></a>.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Leading the Democrat Party charge for a redundant state constitutional
amendment in Connecticut affirming the right to abortion is “Senate majority
leader Bob Duff, a Norwalk Democrat, [who] said he is concerned that former
President Donald J. Trump nominated three conservative justices who have
shifted the balance of power on the nation’s highest court.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">To put Duff’s concern more pointedly, the senate majority
leader fears that the high court, having shifted decision making on the matter
of abortion from courts to state legislatures, will -- because the court is
top-heavy with conservatives, and may become more so if former President Donald
Trump, avoiding a jail sentence, secures a second term as president -- reverse
its most recent decision and rule that justices rather than state legislatures
should decide the nettlesome issue of abortion nation-wide in favor of
unenlightened anti-abortions protestors whose secular passions have been
stirred by religious prescriptions.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">These fears, according to Chris Healy, once the Republican
Party Chairman in Connecticut, now executive director of the Connecticut
Catholic Conference, are not grounded in reality. Healy is quoted in the
Keating story to this effect: “As bad as abortion is, it’s clearly part of the
law. This [the constitutional amendment proposed by Duff and passionately
supported by Big Abortion] would lead to unbridled infanticide. There are no
standards [in the draft amendment] for late-term abortions. It is pure
politics. They want to use it as a political hammer.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The difficulty in passing a constitutional amendment in
Connecticut may have convinced Healy that the real purpose of the amendment
proposed by Duff is to advance the upcoming Democrat 2024 campaign. According
to the state <a href="https://www.cga.ct.gov/2022/rpt/pdf/2022-R-0260.pdf"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Office of Legislative Research</b></a>, “a
resolution proposing a constitutional amendment must be approved by a three-fourths
majority of each chamber's membership to appear on the 2024 state election
ballot,” a high hill to climb in the case of fractious abortion amendments. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The beads of sweat dotting Duff’s forehead spring chiefly from
campaign considerations.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In politics, you cannot sell nothing for something, and it
now appears that President Joe Biden will not be replaced at the Democrat Party
Convention by a younger more mentally fit candidate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Biden’s policies, foreign and domestic, have
been laid on the media’s analytical table and found wanting, often by moderate or left of center metaphysicians. The precipitous withdrawal from
Afghanistan was, most alert reporters might agree, a ham-fisted disaster.
Measures advanced by Biden early in his administration affecting the U.S.
southern border have busted the border, now wide open to an assortment of
illegal immigrant from numerous nations. WOLA, which tracks “<a href="https://www.wola.org/2022/11/migration-country-by-country-at-the-u-s-mexico-border/"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Migration, country by country, at the
U.S.-Mexico border</b></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">,”</b> has
produced a list. Biden has been advised by politically knowledgeable Democrats to
shelve Bidenomics until the price of eggs, gas and energy return to more
manageable pre-Biden levels.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">National Republicans are preparing a campaign that
underscores such issues. Democrats have abortion, an issue that will not be
settled – because it has not been settled since 1973 when <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Roe v. Wade</i> toppled abortion laws nationwide.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Healy in his brief remark on the dangers of Duff’s
constitutional amendment is being much too kind – too Christian, one might say.
The proposed constitutional amendment, wholly redundant, would replace a
statute – repeal proof, according to the reasoning of the Supreme Court’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dobbs v. Jackson</i> decision that replicates
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Roe v. Wade</i>. This effort is a
shameless attempt, by campaign hungry politicians, to violate with impunity the
consciences of people in Connecticut, religious or otherwise, including
reporters, who should be able to recognize a discreditable campaign foil when
they see it. And Duff should not be so anxious to bruise the religiously
informed consciences of those of his constituents who have not yet swallowed
the whale of secular pro-abortion propaganda. <o:p></o:p></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-4580200018641011512024-02-23T14:34:00.004-05:002024-02-24T14:24:34.227-05:00Hillsdale’s Matthew Spalding on George Washington<p><a href="https://www.hillsdale.edu/staff/matthew-spalding/?targetid=dat-2333369832645323:aud-808123949:loc-190&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&appeal_code=MK617PP1&msclkid=4b0b4d3f788015cdeb6e28e7a63fb1f2"><b></b></a></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigW4FVmUtIPSFNtVei-7Ud2y3NYkXV3H3NAAcwgZ8vWc6vi0kGrpxdPnN4fX0rF2ICXpc0n8lhtHUXra4Jsidh-tWiV_4uzZtsmtZbSf4MLfIZDd3zWR-j1tYJMCKK5KXLfNHh-eh_AKsOlYMxBu7ulPkAJ1lHiYMMIRzOafBsO-a4exlYCFbD/s1500/Matthew_Spalding_1000x1500.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigW4FVmUtIPSFNtVei-7Ud2y3NYkXV3H3NAAcwgZ8vWc6vi0kGrpxdPnN4fX0rF2ICXpc0n8lhtHUXra4Jsidh-tWiV_4uzZtsmtZbSf4MLfIZDd3zWR-j1tYJMCKK5KXLfNHh-eh_AKsOlYMxBu7ulPkAJ1lHiYMMIRzOafBsO-a4exlYCFbD/s320/Matthew_Spalding_1000x1500.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Matthew Spalding -- Hillsdale</td></tr></tbody></table><b><a href="https://www.hillsdale.edu/staff/matthew-spalding/?targetid=dat-2333369832645323:aud-808123949:loc-190&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&appeal_code=MK617PP1&msclkid=4b0b4d3f788015cdeb6e28e7a63fb1f2"><br /></a></b><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://www.hillsdale.edu/staff/matthew-spalding/?targetid=dat-2333369832645323:aud-808123949:loc-190&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&appeal_code=MK617PP1&msclkid=4b0b4d3f788015cdeb6e28e7a63fb1f2"><b>Matthew Spalding</b></a> is Vice President
for Washington Operations and Dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of
Government at Hillsdale College. Those reading these words who know little of <a href="https://www.hillsdale.edu/?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=brand_search&utm_term=hillsdale%20college&utm_content=544297350942_tis_gs&utm_id=544297350942&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI05TnvrvBhAMVI3FHAR3gKgeMEAAYAiAAEgJcS_D_BwE"><b>Hillsdale College</b></a> in Hillsdale, Michigan
have some homework to do.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Hillsdale has a post in Somers Connecticut, The Hillsdale
College Blake Center for Faith and Freedom. Spalding’s address on February 22,
2004, “Pater Patriae: George Washington as America’s Founder,” was delivered
before a standing room only, appreciative crowd at the Blake Center, and
Spalding did not disappoint.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">The Blake Center itself, an architectural wonder, a brick by
brick accurate replica of Thomas Jefferson’s Home in Monticello, was, in many
ways, a perfectly appropriate site for Spalding’s remarks. Spalding’s address
sought to answer, among other questions: Does character in politics matter?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">It does and did, prior to, during and after the American
Revolution.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">The larger question that confronts us in our post-Marxian
period is: Should history as such survive?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">History is more than – but it may never be less than -- the
application of character on the times in such a way that the times, always
amorphous and confusing, does not obscure a saving message to future
generations. To put the question in post-Marxian terms: Does history matter at
all? Why can’t we just reinvent the past in such a way that an imaginative
reinvention may confirm Marx’s perception, often expressed by him and his
ideological proponents, that philosophers in the past have merely interpreted
history, but it is the ambition of Marxian revolutionary philosophy to change
history?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">The impress of the character of George Washington on the
history of the American Revolution stands before this Marxian effrontery with
hand outstretched, yelling STOP!<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Spalding’s address, full of delicious tidbits – Spalding has
been studying and writing about Washington for about forty years – focused on
Washington’s prudence, his attention to detail, his finely honed sense of
honor, his relationship to power and the creation, pretty much out of whole cloth,
of the fundamental principles that later would be enshrined in both the
Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">After Washington had been selected general of the
revolutionary armed forces, before the signing of both documents, Congress
twice invested Washington with absolute power to do whatever was militarily
necessary. Both times, after military aims had been partly secured, Washington
returned that investment of power to Congress where, prudence told him, it
belonged.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Moderns think of prudence as a check on action. Washington,
steeped in Cato, his favorite Roman rhetorician and philosopher, knew that
prudence walked hand in hand with virtuous action. Prudence was only a bar to <b><i>imprudent</i></b>
action, but it did not render its practitioners immobile in the face of right
action.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Following Washington’s victory over the British at Yorktown,
a group of patriots arose, Alexander Hamilton among them, who thought that
Washington or Brigadier General Andrew Lewis should assume political power in
the country, still in its infancy.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Hamilton, Spalding told the audience members, all quiet as
church mice during his presentation, had volunteered to invite Washington to an
event attended by Washington’s troops. Hamilton and others wanted to persuade Washington
to take control of the nascent government in order to exert pressure on
Congress.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Washington told Hamilton in a brief note, “An army is a
dangerous instrument to play with,” and he declined the invitation. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">However, Washington did choose to attend the meeting and
address the troops in what later came to be called the Newberg Address. The
troops attentive to him, all hardened in battle and fiercely committed to liberty
and independence, hung on their general’s every word. The tested loyalty of the
troops to Washington was as solid as Washington’s sense of virtue and honor.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Personally, Washington was a domineering presence. He was
tall, six foot two inches, and was said to have been the best horseman in
Virginia.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Washington had prepared a nine page statement to read to his
troops. The man was never unprepared.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Before addressing his troops, Washington pulled out of his
pocket eye glasses to read the carefully prepared document. His troops had
never seen him wear glasses and were deeply affected by the gesture and his
words. His eyes, he told the assembled troops, had grown weary in the service
of his country.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">A self-taught student of the collapse of the Roman Republic,
Washington was present to prevent an army from seizing control of political
power, always in history the death knell of vibrant republics.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">“Washington knew,” Spalding told his audience, “exactly what
he was doing.” Throughout the war, Washington’s spy service was much better and
more fiercely and prudently dedicated to republican government than, say, the
various spy services of the 21<sup>st</sup> century.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">“By an anonymous summons,” Washington said, “an attempt has
been made to convene you together—how inconsistent with the rules of propriety!
how unmilitary! and how subversive of all order and discipline—let the good
sense of the Army decide… As I have never left your side one moment, but when
called from you, on public duty—As I have been the constant companion &
witness of your Distresses, and not among the last to feel, & acknowledge
your Merits—As I have ever considered my own Military reputation as inseparably
connected with that of the Army—As my Heart has ever expanded with joy, when I
have heard its praises—and my indignation has arisen, when the Mouth of
detraction has been opened against it—it can scarcely be supposed, at this late
stage of the War, that I am indifferent to its interests.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">The Newburgh Address touched on themes central to Washington
throughout his career: public duty, honor, civilian control of the military and
civic republican virtue.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">His conclusion of his address to his troops was masterful
and gives us a glimpse into Washington’s character: “And let me conjure you, in
the name of our common Country--as you value your own sacred honor—as you
respect the rights of humanity, & as you regard the Military & national
character of America, to express your utmost horror & detestation of the
Man who wishes, under any specious presences, to overturn the liberties of our
Country, & who wickedly attempts to open the flood Gates of Civil discord,
& deluge our rising Empire in Blood.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">The reference to “sacred honor,” Spalding asserted, pointed
to the final words of the Declaration of Independence: “And for the support of
this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence,
we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred
Honor.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In answer to a question following his luminous address – To
what extend was Washington moved by religious presuppositions? – Spalding noted
that Deism had been much overdone by some post-Enlightenment historians.
Washington was, in fact, a vestryman at both Fairfax Parish and Truro Parish.
And he, like Lincoln, had -- God bless them both -- escaped Harvard. This
slight on Harvard produced a wave of chuckles from the audience. Spalding
described Washington as “a great-souled man.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Another questioner asked whether Spalding thought the United
States might make good use of another Washington, given the present confusing
condition of modern politics?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">He answered, yes and no. The nation could always use men and
women willing to pledge their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to uphold the
republic left to us by sacrifices earlier made. Character that rises above
pedestrian concerns will always be important. But we must not suppose that out
forbearers left to us a nation that had not developed over time to fulfill the
novel experiment in American liberty.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">“There are plenty of good legislators in Washington, and in
the states as well,” Spalding confidently affirmed.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">
</p><p class="MsoNormal">Then too, despair is the sin foretold in scripture that will
not be forgiven, for it is a denial of a continuing work of salvation by the
author of all good things.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><a href="https://www.hillsdale.edu/staff/matthew-spalding/?targetid=dat-2333369832645323:aud-808123949:loc-190&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&appeal_code=MK617PP1&msclkid=4b0b4d3f788015cdeb6e28e7a63fb1f2"><b></b></a>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-64866376963639321942024-02-19T17:33:00.000-05:002024-02-19T17:33:00.472-05:00Alexei Navalny and the Essential Burke<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS78HPfET4mnr9xgZhcoESKggWo3zm7-BT4uXeLPuywfl1p7kANVoXrYnj0Wt0wRVk5NtR23gxn_MIK0ZpcBXP3gP9vh7tcriRjTptrUD9iUiH5msbNfiHhxsSL60eFo_NESoR8FQogPH1fgpB-V-Go1uHbnCpYbV3bsnpb99BtDpa58KWYuPn/s2045/Navalny.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1507" data-original-width="2045" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS78HPfET4mnr9xgZhcoESKggWo3zm7-BT4uXeLPuywfl1p7kANVoXrYnj0Wt0wRVk5NtR23gxn_MIK0ZpcBXP3gP9vh7tcriRjTptrUD9iUiH5msbNfiHhxsSL60eFo_NESoR8FQogPH1fgpB-V-Go1uHbnCpYbV3bsnpb99BtDpa58KWYuPn/s320/Navalny.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Navalny</td></tr></tbody></table><br />The death of Alexei Navalny at the hands, and perhaps the
orders, of Russian President Vladimir Putin was, according to a Hobbesian view
of power, either necessary or not necessary.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It is true that Navalny was a vigorous opponent of Putin’s
attempt to turn Russia’s strategic orientation from West to East. Likewise,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a vigorous opponent of Saint Stalin, an eastern
oriental potentate who little understood that Russia belongs to the West, not
the East. The Putin restoration of a debased Stalinism is perhaps his most
fatal mistake.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The rejection of Western perceptions cuts against the
Russian grain from Peter the Great to Chekov, who wrote some of his most
memorable plays in Ukraine. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Necessity, Thomas Hobbes tells us, is a cruel master – life
in a Hobbesian universe, one without ordered liberty, is “nasty, brutal and
short” -- but a master none-the-less. Once ethics and morality are removed from
politics, power and force alone reign supreme. In a police state, where all the
powers of the state serve modern tyrants such as Putin, power is at the service
of a ruling unitary party.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Navalny was decidedly not a member in good standing of
Putin’s fascist state. Yes – <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fascist</i></b> state.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It was Mussolini who provided to the West a working
definition of fascism: “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state,
nothing above the state.” That, it turns out, is also the Stalinist vision of a
unitary world-government. With deadly blows , fascism eliminates what G.K.
Chesterton and others, notably<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Edmund
Burke, used to call “the little platoons of democracy.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">In “A speech during the debate on
the defeat of Burgoyne’s army at Saratoga” in 1777, Burke addressed the
mistakes of Great Britain’s military and political ministry. Had the British
House applied to him at the beginning of the war of American Independence,
Burke said, he could have told them – and did in fact tell them – of the many
wants under which the Americans labored. “But,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lloyd’s Evening Post</i> reported at the time, “he could also have
informed them that men fighting for liberty were not influenced by such
particulars” as recounted by Burke – “as being without salt, without shoes,
without a rag on their backs -- that these affect only the body, but that the
souls of the Americans were unreduced.” The passage above is taken from <a href="https://archive.org/details/onamericanrevolu0000burk"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Edmund
Burke, On the American Revolution, Selected Speeches and letters, edited by
Elliot R. Barkan</i>.</b></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Running for re-election to office
in 1780, Burke told his constituents – many of them, like himself committed
Royalists – that references to Americans as “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">our</i> subjects in America, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">our</i>
colonies, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">our</i> dependents [emphasis
original]” was little more than a “way of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">proscribing
the citizens by denominations and general descriptions</i> [emphasis original]…
nothing better at bottom than the miserable invention of an ungenerous ambition
which would fain hold the sacred trust of power, without any of the virtues or
any of the energy that give title to it, a receipt of policy made up of a
detestable compound of malice, cowardice and sloth.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">This description perfectly
portrays power hungry tyrants who use synthetic divisions to reduce the
liberties of the people, proclaiming all the while that the font of liberty
lies in the generosity of the state and not in the natural moral propensities
of humankind.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Burke knew he would lose his
election at Guildhall, Bristol. Never-the-less, he did not temper his speech in
support of essential liberties: “…arbitrarily, to class men under general
descriptions, in order to proscribe and punish them in the lump for a presumed
delinquency of which perhaps but a part, perhaps none at all are guilty, is
indeed a compendious method an saves a world of trouble about proof. But such a
method, instead of being law, is an act of unnatural rebellion against the
legal dominion of reason and justice; and this vice, in any constitution that
entertains it, at one time or other will certainly bring its ruin.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Putin is playing with fire. He
and tyrants everywhere are the ruin of states that rest upon the essential
liberties of its people. Liberty is not a product of statecraft, though a
realist and honorable state will do its best to preserve the “little platoons
of democracy” without which the liberty of the people cannot survive.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">You can kill a man with a bullet,
or a <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/International/navalny-long-history-russian-poisonings/story?id=72579648"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">shot of nerve agent poison</b></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">,</b> or an extended stay at The IK-3
prison camp, nicknamed the Polar Wolf, located in the Yamalo-Nenets region well
above the Arctic Circle. But the idea of ordered liberty under law, a quick
review of the history of Rome to “The Second Rome,” the pre-Soviet Russian
Empire, shows us that the idea of liberty under law is more durable and fully capable
over time of withstanding the indignities of random force. <o:p></o:p></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-65507945215423913602024-02-18T14:14:00.003-05:002024-02-18T18:32:45.592-05:00The Enduring Adam Smith And A Republican Reclamation Project<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw3Fm1pfXkuqf7jghofNUoFL6Uxtn31ZIVaWWqLValO8OGcjGoZpxHs_03nUKjd-ZJr1QNBJfjkcAg_H-IwiYMIg7haUgUPQScHSkrbwn2iev1Zk9gPoIIxeJJWSbSl8AOtVOB41MTp-85Dd8aROTO11HOrx1lmZmXgzq1wIkDIEyIihkATm81/s1200/Adam-Smith-quote-about-freedom-from-The-Theory-of-Moral-Sentiments-2a12166.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw3Fm1pfXkuqf7jghofNUoFL6Uxtn31ZIVaWWqLValO8OGcjGoZpxHs_03nUKjd-ZJr1QNBJfjkcAg_H-IwiYMIg7haUgUPQScHSkrbwn2iev1Zk9gPoIIxeJJWSbSl8AOtVOB41MTp-85Dd8aROTO11HOrx1lmZmXgzq1wIkDIEyIihkATm81/w486-h255/Adam-Smith-quote-about-freedom-from-The-Theory-of-Moral-Sentiments-2a12166.jpg" width="486" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal">Republicans will never become a majority party in
Connecticut – or, indeed, anywhere else – unless they are able to reclaim what
used to be called, in pre-neo-progressive days, the vital center of American
politics.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The vital center has become far less vital than it had been
in the waning days of Camelot, the morally enlightened administration of the <a href="https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2022/09/biden-connecticut-democrats-and-that.html"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">John F. Kennedy</b></a> administration.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Kennedy was a genuine liberal, in the fashion of John Locke,
Adam Smith and the founders of the American Republic.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The founders of the American Constitutional Republic were
intimately familiar with Smith’s writings. His 1759 book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Theory of Moral Sentiments, </i>written long before his seminal
work, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wealth of Nations</i> in 1776,
provided the underpinnings to his later works, including <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Essays on Philosophical Subjects </i>in 1795, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms</i> in 1763.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The works of Smith are less read in academic circles these
days than, say, <a href="https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2021/09/paulo-freire-pedagogy-and-oppression.html"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pedagogy of the Oppressed</i></b></a>, a
book<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>written by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian
Marxist, first published in English in 1970. The book is widely considered –
even at Harvard, where Frere was invited to teach that all teaching as such was
a form of oppression – as one of the primary texts of critical pedagogy. The
book proposed a new Marxian connection between teacher, student and society.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The vital center of western politics, preceding and
following Smith, was rooted in a shared, organic sense of moral values
animating all else, including politics. Today, we say that politics “lies downstream
from culture.” That is to say, it is culture that gives rise to politics. To
assume the reverse is to place the cart before the horse.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">However, reversing the importance of culture to politics is
the animating idea of all authoritarian regimes. Caesar’s ambition throughout
the ages always has been to use politics to change cultural perceptions. In
totalitarian states, politics has been effectively deployed to change stubborn
cultural presuppositions. Hitherto, Marx said of the Hegelian philosophers of
his day, philosophers and historians have been content to describe accurately history
and the history of philosophy, but the prime object of revolutionary Marxism is
to change both.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The forced collapse of the Stalinist and Post-Stalinist
world-order following the administration of President Ronald Reagan gave the
lie to totalitarian overreach. The Soviet Union had run out of moral suasion
long before it ran out, in Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher’s formulation, “of
other people’s money.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Smith is singularly unwilling to offer the sometimes
despised rich a primacy of place in a free market economy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“The rich only select from the heap what is most precious
and agreeable,” he writes. “They consume little more than the poor, and in
spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their
own conveniency (sic), though the sole end which they propose from the labours
(sic) of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own
vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their
improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same
distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the
earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus
without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society,
and afford means to the multiplication of the species.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So long as the governing hand remains invisible in the
countless free transactions that occur between consumer and seller, though
apparent to those who have carefully read Smith’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wealth of Nations,</i> freedom remains indivisible, quite beyond
the reach of autocrats, dictators and tyrants. It is the ambition of tyrants
everywhere to transform the invisible hand into a balled fist, the better to
shape the nation’s moral presuppositions and its future. The iron hand of
government autocracy has throughout the ages been hidden from middle class
producers in velvet gloves.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">At some point, the national and state Republican Party – no
longer the party of the idle rich, whose contributions to an assisting
government flow in equal measure towards the enablement of the party that holds
power over them – must begin a reclamation process. And that process will be
deeply rooted in a free market economy that is not captive to the agents of
government.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Smith’s works are the high ground on which to mount rational
howitzers manned by men and women who know that freedom is not to be attained
by Washington D.C. suppliants. That is the undying message of the founders of
the American Republic who constructed their novel experiment in liberty on the
broad shoulders of apostles of liberty such as Smith.<o:p></o:p></p><br />Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-41524863264923966522024-02-13T23:04:00.000-05:002024-02-13T23:04:16.012-05:00Murphy’s Wars<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY3l3cKJ35b6s-8ClP-UCmDxsaI8TSYmYUNQqrHei3MoP2Dl0aBdvssFE7ACsToM0xoYkkIYRhbhIq5vvIrUIMngNbqLzrcXuUzfOFH7f5If_uZt1ek2Rc9grTS080IhMFx4AsoTHZR-SJgX7O3hyYNmdMvMoXacVKSLkY87voKBl_FgygpXy1/s1024/murphy%20getty%20image%201.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="682" data-original-width="1024" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY3l3cKJ35b6s-8ClP-UCmDxsaI8TSYmYUNQqrHei3MoP2Dl0aBdvssFE7ACsToM0xoYkkIYRhbhIq5vvIrUIMngNbqLzrcXuUzfOFH7f5If_uZt1ek2Rc9grTS080IhMFx4AsoTHZR-SJgX7O3hyYNmdMvMoXacVKSLkY87voKBl_FgygpXy1/s320/murphy%20getty%20image%201.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Murphy</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Hartford Courant Political writer Kevin Rennie delivered a glancing
blow to U.S. Senator Chris Murphy in a recent column, “<a href="https://www.courant.com/2024/02/10/kevin-rennie-how-lamontspeak-border-issues-and-saudi-money-reflect-on-ct/"><b>Gov. Ned Lamont, and U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy
and Richard Blumenthal stepped into different spotlights last week</b></a>.”</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Rennie noted, “In his 2020 book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Violence Inside Us: A Brief History of an Ongoing American Tragedy</i>,
Murphy wrote, ‘it is likely that no American ever exported more violence from
our shores onto foreign soil than Dwight D. Eisenhower.’ Murphy uses the Second
World War Allied invasion of France as a premier example of the ‘violence we
export.’<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“In the 80 years since the D-Day invasion, the people of
free nations have considered the liberation of France an achievement that
deserved unqualified celebration, and always will. Murphy notes that D-Day ‘resulted
in a stunning 425,000 troops on both sides being killed or seriously injured.’
That other side, the murderous Nazis, goes unmentioned.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Indeed, life, most especially life in war, Shakespeare tells
us, is but “but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour
upon the stage/And then is heard no more. It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full
of sound and fury/ Signifying nothing.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Dwight Eisenhower was a General during World War II, not yet
a president.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">When President Franklin Roosevelt at long last formally
entered World War II following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, one of his
persistent critics, U.S. Senator from Connecticut’s 4<sup>th</sup> District
Clare Booth <a href="https://www.cwhf.org/inductees/clare-boothe-luce"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Luce</b></a>, the first woman to represent
Connecticut in the U.S. House of Representatives, said of Roosevelt that he had
“lied us into war because he was afraid to lead us into war.” Towards the end
of the war, Luce issued warnings about the threat of aggression from the Soviet
Union. She was also an advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment and the racial
integration of the armed forces.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Murphy is now supporting two U.S. wars, both undeclared by
the U.S. Congress.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The war of aggression against Ukraine prosecuted by
President Vladimir Putin of Russia began 2014 and dramatically escalated in
2022 when Russian invaded Ukraine. The Russian invasion was, it is generally
agreed, the most significant attack on a European country since World War II.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">According to one <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Joe_Biden"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Biden</b></a> biographical account, “By
June 2022, Russian troops occupied about 20% of Ukrainian territory. About 8
million Ukrainians had been internally displaced and more than 8.2 million had
fled the country by April 2023, creating Europe's largest refugee crisis since
World War II. Extensive environmental damage caused by the war, widely
described as an ecocide, contributed to food crises worldwide.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Biden continues to pummel Ukraine as this is written. A
couple of years ago, Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal strongly advised
that Biden send U.S. fighter jets to Ukraine, a suggestion smothered in frigid
silence. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The second war of aggression is that of Iran and its
sponsored terrorists units against the State of Israel. Neither Putin nor the
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's current spiritual leader and its highest
authority, have suffered diminishment as a result of their repeated deadly
aggressions.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Throughout history, purely defensive wars that do not punish
aggressors hiding behind proxies are doomed to fail. Wars are won by aggressive
means, which is why Murphy bothered to mention in his anti-war philippic, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Violence Inside Us</i>, that “a stunning
425,000 troops on both sides” were killed or seriously injured during World War
II.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Murphy has little noted, nor has he long remembered the
dead, north and south, at Shiloh and Gettysburg. One soldier’s diary recalls
that the battlefield at Shiloh was so littered with dead bodies that he had to
step on them to reach the enemy. Of the forces engaged at Gettysburg, nearly
one third were casualties, 7,058 were fatalities: 3,155 Union and 3,903
Confederate.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Hard going for Murphy last week,” Rennie noted, “but he’ll
always have his victory for Houthi terrorists now wreaking havoc on world
shipping and firing missiles at American ships. Murphy asked the Biden
administration in 2021 to remove the designation of terrorists from the
Houthis. It’s good to have friends.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rather than
presidents, senators and military advisors comfortably situated far from the
war in Israel who most resembles President Abraham <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><a href="https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2009/01/tried-by-war.html">Lincoln</a></b>.
One can only imagine what the present state of the union might look like had
Lincoln’s well-meaning advisors prevailed on him, following Gettysburg, to
submit to a “two state” solution rather than prosecuting the Civil War to its
appointed end. Our bloody Civil War was followed by the restoration of the
Union, the end of slavery, the pacification of an insurrectionist South and –
not at all incidentally – 159 years of peace and prosperity.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In war, it matters a great deal who wins and therefore is
able to dictate the terms of peace. <a href="https://www.schatz.senate.gov/news/press-releases/schatz-leads-group-of-49-senators-in-announcing-amendment-to-reaffirm-us-support-for-a-two-state-solution"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Murph</b></a><b>y</b>, like Biden, supports a “two
state” solution in Israel.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“The only way to achieve a just and lasting peace between
Israelis and Palestinians is a two-state solution. The United States must be
crystal clear in our commitment to preserving that path,” said Senator Murphy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It may strike students of war other than Murphy that Hamas –
both the government of Gaza and a terrorist organization supported by Iran
pledged to the destruction of Israel – cannot be one of the two states
participating in a future peace between Israel and Gaza. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-3819096632915997362024-02-07T01:05:00.002-05:002024-02-07T01:05:27.353-05:00Murphy on the Rocks<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEippsyxmnBjWq_liMfgONTiRGsHyZxg-Y-sXX4UzRrI7TzYYI8rjpWqtdhhs17DvSw_PVa4UzUNRp6vL_jWd885b6ALRzMl9cX-QyXPXP9e4eBzCCU_AEQQbqm4LCm82hSGEErR-EnlCIDJuDC9hgPzRr7J81vSgWWA1wPhxPMe7Feeyvdt5kTL/s768/Murphy%20Anna%20Moneymaker%20--%20getty%20ijmages.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="432" data-original-width="768" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEippsyxmnBjWq_liMfgONTiRGsHyZxg-Y-sXX4UzRrI7TzYYI8rjpWqtdhhs17DvSw_PVa4UzUNRp6vL_jWd885b6ALRzMl9cX-QyXPXP9e4eBzCCU_AEQQbqm4LCm82hSGEErR-EnlCIDJuDC9hgPzRr7J81vSgWWA1wPhxPMe7Feeyvdt5kTL/s320/Murphy%20Anna%20Moneymaker%20--%20getty%20ijmages.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Murphy, Anna Moneymaker -- Getty Images</td></tr></tbody></table><br />U.S. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut appears to be
teetering on the edge of a perilous Either/Or: Either the U.S. southern border
is secure, or it is not secure.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Only a few weeks ago, the Democrat members of Connecticut’s
U.S. Congressional Delegation were in lockstep agreement that the southern
border was secure. They were citing Cuban-born United States Secretary of
Homeland Security<a href="https://headlineusa.com/fact-check-mayorkas-denial-border/"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> Alejandro Mayorkas</b></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>to that effect, and Mayorkas’ repeated
postulations left little room for descent within the ranks. Scripts produced in
Washington DC during campaign seasons are rarely disputed once they have been
parceled out to party factotums.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In fact, the border is not secure, and the abandonment of
policy prescriptions during the Biden administration that served to keep
illegal entry numbers low – such as a “remain in Mexico policy” while amnesty
cases were being adjudicated -- has resulted in chaos at the U.S. open border.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Appearing on <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/02/05/sen_chris_murphy_republicans_can_allow_chaos_at_the_border_to_continue_because_it_helps_trump_or_fix_it.html"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MSNBC's 'Morning Joe,”</b></a> a friendly
venue, Murphy told viewers, “The president doesn't have the legal authority,
without additional legislation, to control the border and fix the broken asylum
system in the way that needs to be done… We do see migrants right now living on
the streets, crowding our homeless shelters. Well, this bill specifically
addresses that crisis because it also gives more immediate work authorizations
to immigrants who come to this country and who are legitimately likely to win
their case for asylum.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">David Ignatius of the Washington Post first congratulated
Murphy “on getting this bipartisan deal set in the [Democrat controlled U.S.]
Senate, but then noted there were objections in the Republican controlled U.S.
House.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">He asked, “If it ends up getting turned down in the House
and being seemingly stopped in its tracks, do you think that President Biden
should just try to take this issue away from the Republicans who seem to be
playing politics with it and use every bit of his executive authority to address
the border crisis on his own? Say basically, won't pass the legislation? Okay,
I'm going to do it myself.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It can’t be done, Murphy insisted, unless the U.S. Congress
invests the president with additional authority. He then went on to impute
malign motivation to Republicans who continue to believe that what had been
undone through executive orders by the Biden administration may be redone
through executive orders reestablishing a successful border policy protocol.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“I think Speaker Johnson wants to kill this bill in the
Senate,” Murphy said, “because he knows there will be enormous pressure on him
to call up this bill for a vote in the House because if it passes the Senate
with a big bipartisan vote, where I think there's a very good chance it will,
then there will be the votes to pass this in the House of Representatives. And
if he's not willing to bring this exact bill up, then there will be pressure
from his colleagues in the House who support Ukraine funding to come up with an
alternative.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“So,” Murhy continued, “Speaker Johnson would sort of love
to let this issue lie. He'd love for there to continue to be chaos at the
border so that Donald Trump has a political advantage. He would love to avoid
the question of Ukraine because it splits his caucus, but he will not be able
to avoid that debate if the Senate does its job.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Chaos at the border, largely the result of a progressive
Democrat administration in denial for the breath and length of the Biden
administration, currently benefits Republicans. Policy is always subservient to
political advantage, except on those rare occasions when the advantage falls to
politically pure at heart Democrats who never, ever, act from base political
motives.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Murphy wants us to believe that policy changes made at the
southern border through executive actions taken by President Joe Biden early in
his campaign cannot be ameliorated by means of a reversal of executive actions.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">That seems highly implausible.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, not a politician easily
infested with MAGAism, disagrees on the point and regards the bill avidly
supported by Murphy as, if not a Trojan Horse, then a campaign ploy that, once
enacted, will not settle the enduring border hash.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/new-data-reveals-number-msn.comillegal-aliens-who-entered-us-under-biden-exceeds-population-of-22-states/ar-AA1i3dBi"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">New data</b></a> issued 3 months ago disclosed
that, according to a Judiciary Committee report, the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) released “at least 2,148,738 illegal aliens into the United
States.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The committee found that only 5,993 of those encountered at
the southern border were placed in removal proceedings. “In other words, of the
at least 2.1 million aliens released into the United States since January 20,
2021, the Biden administration has failed to remove, through immigration court
removal proceedings, roughly 99.7% of those illegal aliens,” the report says.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The report notes that an additional 1.7 million “known
‘gotaways’” successfully evaded Border Patrol agents and entered the United
States, bringing the total estimated number of illegal aliens who arrived and
stayed under the Biden administration to 3.8 million. That population exceeds
the number of residents of 22 different states and the District of Columbia.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Some may regard such belated admissions of culpability as a
positive sign that the border has not been secure since the beginning of the
Biden administration’s dismantling of useful border protocols.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The way to stop a leak in the border bucket is to patch the
leak first before allowing new illegal entries to further flood the border. We
know that normalizing illegal entries will not in the long run reduce the flow,
just as we know that normalizing bank robberies will not persuade criminals
from robbing banks. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-58524989904104464642024-01-30T15:07:00.002-05:002024-02-06T00:24:22.541-05:00Let Us Now Praise Famous Women -- Andrée Pesci<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKkTMc0avYWLoCeTZNiKwvWgGvZ9QNnu2qe77d3ucXqzxa6oHjuQtukLebjscmy6u3EOxZjIox9DnIrvARsE8XK-ZcL6zoLyXdMIBkwKAjAhWtrMzWuxXWTc7YahKeU7UiPLSZ4hj5rglpP7jV1pmLAJCvzuI5iDVi3xCBXc4MNKUzicq5L9gT/s720/andree%20and%20titan.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="720" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKkTMc0avYWLoCeTZNiKwvWgGvZ9QNnu2qe77d3ucXqzxa6oHjuQtukLebjscmy6u3EOxZjIox9DnIrvARsE8XK-ZcL6zoLyXdMIBkwKAjAhWtrMzWuxXWTc7YahKeU7UiPLSZ4hj5rglpP7jV1pmLAJCvzuI5iDVi3xCBXc4MNKUzicq5L9gT/s320/andree%20and%20titan.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Andree and the Mighty Titan</td></tr></tbody></table><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 9pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal">Before there was an Andrée Pesci, there was an Andrée
Descheneaux of Fairfield, Connecticut.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Her father, Ernest, was French Canadian from Trois-Rivières on
the Saint Laurence seaway, and her mother Margaret was Slovakian, a delightful
lady, sweet but, as concerned her children, a bar of tempered steel.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">I first noticed Andrée around 1963 as she was performing a
solo dance at Western Connecticut State College in Danbury, Connecticut. I did
not know, until later in our budding relationship, that she had been legally
blind since birth, largely because this was a matter of indifference to both
Andrée and her mother, who treated her no differently than her siblings, a
brother Earnest and twin sisters Sandy and Sonia.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">By the time The Lions Club came knocking at her mother’s
door, Andrée had excelled in all her elementary school classes. She had an ear
for music and sang wonderfully well. Much later, early in our marriage, she and
a piano accompanist opened a new venture, a club in Glastonbury owned by Gordie
Howe, “Mister Hockey” of the Whalers. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">She excelled as well in college. She made Who’s Who in
Colleges Across the United States and mastered fencing, although she had been
stricken since birth with pendular nystagmus, a condition brought about, her
mother said, by a forceps delivery. Those afflicted with pendular nystagmus are
unable to focus because their eyeballs oscillate quickly back and forth. She
also was subject to migraines.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">The Lions visitors told her mother that if she permitted her
daughter to attend what later became WESTCONN – then Danbury State Teachers
College -- the Lions Club, devoted to the sight impaired, would pick up the tab
for all expenses including tuition, books and readers.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Her mother told the visitors she’d think about it.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Fast forward four or five years. After graduating from
WESTCONN, Andrée was told the college would not certify her to teach in public
schools. The reason given her was that she was legally blind and could not be
expected to teach sighted students.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Almost immediately she wrote to then Governor John Dempsey,
who had a soft spot in his heart for the visually impaired, recounting her
accomplishments in great detail and asking the governor if he could intervene
with the decision makers.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">He wrote back there was nothing he could do. So, Andrée
secured a teaching position at a Catholic girl’s high school in Greenwich
Connecticut – where she, unsurprisingly, excelled.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">One of her students, upon graduating from college, secured a
writing position at the Wall Street Journal. This student used to travel by
bicycle from Greenwich to Stamford, Connecticut to visit with her former
teacher, where Andrée had found a second position at yet another Catholic
girl’s school.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">She wrote again to Dempsey citing her recent accomplishments
and employment as a teacher in Catholic schools. He wrote back saying – sorry,
there was nothing he could do.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Andrée later attended Fairfield University, where she met
Father Bond, who taught a course in aesthetics, and greatly influenced her.
Bond was the author of four novels, one concerning the establishment, growth
and development of Saint Francis Hospital in Hartford under the tutelage of a
French Mother Superior who spoke a kind of pidgin English accented with
mellifluous French overtones.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Andrée’s world, thanks mostly to her mother, was populated
by heroic personalities who regarded difficulties as bridges to success.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">On receiving her masters in American Studies from Fairfield
University, the first college in Connecticut to offer a degree in this new
discipline, she wrote once again to Dempsey, who wrote back – “Andrée, you
win,” after which she was certified to teach in public school.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">It will be well to note here that the vision impaired are
too clever for words. When you cannot rely on your eyes, you rely on your wits
and other of your senses, including your common sense, sometimes misused by
those who are too perfect for words.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">One day, picking Andrée up in Greenwich, I noticed she had
covered her blackboard with scribbling’s, her lesson plans for the day.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">“Andrée, what use is all this? You can’t see the board.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">“They don’t know that.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">“They?”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">“The students.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">They didn’t know she was blind. She had memorized the
scribblings on the blackboard, pointing to this or that text as she went along.
During her tests, she patrolled the aisles, and there was no cheating.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">One day, I had a problem finding a specific pair of socks in
a cluttered sock drawer. It took her about five seconds to discover the
invisible socks.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">“Andrée, how is it you can’t see and I can see – and you can
find the socks, but I can’t?”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In her most compassionate, teacherly voice: “Well, Donald,
we see through the eye, but <b><i>with</i></b> the brain.” <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Dempsey was himself familiar with the surmounting of
difficulties. He succeeded Abraham Ribicoff as Connecticut’s governor, large
shoes to fill, who left office to become a member of President John Kennedy’s
administration. Dempsey was the first governor since the colonial period that
had been born in Europe -- Cahir, County Tipperary, Ireland -- and began a 30
year period in which Connecticut, a former puritan colony, had only Catholic
governors in office.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">At a time of sometimes undisguised anti-Catholicism, this
arc, pointed in the direction of political equity, was revolutionary. Governor
Ella Grasso, the first in the nation woman governor who had won office in her own
right, was a regular attendant at Saint Mary’s Church in Windsor Locks.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Andrée’s first public school employment was at Ridgefield
High school, where she taught American Studies, among the first teachers of the
subject in Connecticut. She also taught film study, Composition and, a rarity
at the time, semiotics and vocabulary. And no one mumbled in her classes.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Two of her students told her, forty years after they had
graduated, that she had significantly influenced them. One became a lawyer who
had, he said, home schooled his children. He saved a framed comment – not flattering
– she had made on one of his papers decades earlier. The second student, a
lifelong friend of the first, also saved a decades old favorable comment she
had made on one of his papers. And he recently sent her two books, one a
collection of humorous stories he had written concerning his boyish adventures
at a camp, and the second a memoir he had edited of a Jewish family displaced
in a prisoner of war camp in Poland and Russia.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Both remarks, kept for so long a period of time like pressed
flowers of the field in an old book, fragrant with age, provide testimony of
how the heart, an always young athlete, leaps over time to set the always
living past blazingly before our eyes.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Her sight had grown worse as a result of the close work she
had done teaching. Dempsey would have been proud of her subsequent years
laboring for the state. She worked for the state for nearly three decades years
before retiring. She moved quickly through the ranks from an intake worker to a
fraud investigator to an energy consultant.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">During her last few years with the state, her husband
noticed that she had begun to withdraw. As he put it, “That world conquering
smile of yours has dimmed,” possibly the result of her failing sight.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">All this changed with the arrival of Jake, a Fidelco guide
dog for the blind operating out of Bloomfield, Connecticut. Jake, the most
regal of German Shepherds, brought her out of the doldrums and liberated her
spirit. She was independent once again, a force of nature. This independence
was Andrée’s natural state and, once recovered, it would suffer no diminution.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">As a fraud investigator, Andrée saved the state millions of
dollars. There was a hitch, of course.
Saving money reduces the budget for the succeeding year. Such cost-saving measures were not looked
upon kindly by state administrators who depended upon fixed budget increases.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">As an energy consultant, she saved state expenses by
advising state’s clients how they might more economically spend taxpayer funds.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">As her mother had done when she was yet a restless but unfailingly obedient child, Andrée became
masterful at saving pennies, which both of us used, in successive trips to
Europe, to see the Old World before her sight deteriorated altogether. We
traveled on separate trips to Italy, three times, to France, three times, to
Spain, to Scotland, and then as our funds diminished, to places in the United
States, most memorably to a horse farm in Tennessee.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Riding horses was an easily fulfilled passion with Andrée.
Everywhere we went, we searched out horses and military cemeteries. In a small,
overlooked cemetery in Italy, glistening with white, sun-washed stones, we
paused and prayed at the tomb of Audie Murphy’s best friend. We did this, among
other reasons, to honor Andrée’s father, Ernie, who operated in four branches
of the service and had in his basement in Fairfield, Connecticut, ration cans
from World War II <b><i>and</i></b> a firing range.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">All these good people, including members of my own family,
the heroes of my boyhood, are now gone.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">“I wish,” Andrée said to me a couple of weeks go, “there
were something more permanent than a fleeting memory I could keep among my
treasured things so that beauty will not be lost forever.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Well now my beauty, perhaps this poor offering may serve as
a casket of memory. Had you written it, it would have been far better -- but
also, more boastful. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">
</p><p class="MsoNormal">And both of us know how you hate to boast about your
triumphs.<o:p></o:p></p><p></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-24243652468267734102024-01-26T13:16:00.002-05:002024-01-26T16:53:51.643-05:00Lamont, “Get Thee to an EV”<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoPUP83UFpufRjqnPrLuubKWquOp93uJTDjg9VNhkdbCSAAEjbCBqilVFi9C-W0VXIXOV6QhYFQix1HVGexe53Wf_ZBnVwJlTXuHiTHaNdGYb0xCNoZ_hCkMTmdeN79D_VRrLrqqGIHRXtWFvbiShNRzaPwf0r8jbhgxaS6pUr_fiZB_xhAJFv/s474/Lamont,%20John%20Moritz,%20Hearst%20Connecticut%20Media%20Group.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="266" data-original-width="474" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoPUP83UFpufRjqnPrLuubKWquOp93uJTDjg9VNhkdbCSAAEjbCBqilVFi9C-W0VXIXOV6QhYFQix1HVGexe53Wf_ZBnVwJlTXuHiTHaNdGYb0xCNoZ_hCkMTmdeN79D_VRrLrqqGIHRXtWFvbiShNRzaPwf0r8jbhgxaS6pUr_fiZB_xhAJFv/s320/Lamont,%20John%20Moritz,%20Hearst%20Connecticut%20Media%20Group.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""Calibri","sans-serif"" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">John
Moritz, Hearst Connecticut Media Group</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Electric Vehicles have been pushed in California by Governor Gavin Newsom who, some commentators tell us, has his eyes set on the big prize: the presidency of the United States. Should Newsom secure the office in the not-too-distant future, Governor Ned Lamont of Connecticut might easily be his spokesperson.<p></p><p>Speaking before what Chris Keating of the <a href="https://www.courant.com/2024/01/24/ct-gov-lamont-says-electric-cars-a-must-do-in-push-for-special-session/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank"><strong>Hartford Courant</strong></a> calls “the top environmental lobbying groups at the state Capitol,” more than 300 souls vigorously applauding Lamont’s honeyed words, the governor pulled out all the stops on his pipe organ.</p><p>Lamont favors a measure that would outlaw the sale of gas-powered vehicles in Connecticut in a little more than a decade. His confederates in the state General Assembly, Keating tells us, “are calling for a plan that all new car sales in Connecticut starting in 2035 would be electric and plug-in hybrid.” No gas-powered vehicles permitted.</p><p>Here is a sampling of Lamont’s sheet music: “This is no time to turn back now. Right, Connecticut?” Lamont’s sales pitch was directed at “more than 300 attendees at the 2024 environmental summit of the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters, which is among the top environmental lobbying groups at the state Capitol,” according to Keating.</p><p>Lamont continued, “I need your help to remind the legislature it’s worth doing. I remind everybody in this room, we’re doing this because it’s the right thing to do. … Make it affordable. Make sure it’s realistic for people. Affordability is very important in a state like this. The hybrids — it’s going to save you money, not cost you money. Don’t let them tell you otherwise. Don’t let them say we’re outlawing gas cars. What the state’s going to look like over the next 10 to 15 years, you’re a big part of that. … I love the crowd here. I just want you to make sure that you weigh in with the legislature. Tell them this is not a nice-to-do. This is a must-do. Push back on the things that are not true.”</p><p>Here are some things Lamont regards as being “not true” that are, in fact, true.</p><p>What has been left of the “free market,” following the tinkering of politicians such as Lamont and Newsom, has not taken kindly to the politically pumped up sales of EVs. “Out of more than 3 million vehicles registered in Connecticut as of July 2023,” Keating tells us, “only 36,000 were electric, according to state statistics.” Only a smattering of people is rushing to the table to eat the EV roast beef. If you live in toney Greenwich, home base for both Lamont and U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, both millionaires several times over, the purchase of an EV likely will not put a dent in your budget.</p><p>It is true that Lamont and the neo-progressive Democrat gang at the state Capitol wish to outlaw the sale of gas-powered vehicles in Connecticut after 2035. When you outlaw the sale of gas cars in Connecticut, you outlaw the purchase of gas cars in Connecticut, and the purpose of the bill under consideration in Connecticut’s Democrat dominated General Assembly is to artificially adjust the purchasing preferences of Connecticut citizens. Who says A must say B is a rather inflexible rule in rhetoric, and it applies with special force here.</p><p>It is not true that the purchase of an EV will save the purchaser more money than the purchase of a gas-powered vehicle. The average purchase price of an electric vehicle (EV) is $51,532, more than $11,000 higher than the average price of a full-size gas-powered car and nearly $30,000 more than the average compact car sale, according to a study by Car and Driver. How many members of Connecticut’s General Assembly own EVs?</p><p>It is not true that the infrastructure supporting EVs is in place in Connecticut. Presently, this infrastructure is being financed in large part by dollars shipped to states by the Biden administration. The funding source is self-elapsing, which means the state of Connecticut must fill in the gap when funding runs out. The abstemious Lamont often boasts that he is the owner of a late model car one expects to find in the pitted driveway of a middle-class worker – and taxpayer – in <a href="Census%20data%20from%20the%20American%20Community%20Survey%20for%20the%2021%20cities%20in%20Connecticut%20with%20more%20than%209,000%20people." rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank"><strong>Hartford</strong></a>, the poorest city in the state according to census data taken from the American Community Survey for the 21 cities in Connecticut with more than 9,000 people.</p><p>Connecticut’s capitol city is no Greenwich.</p><p>Connecticut Democrats are following closely in Lamont’s and Newsom’s footsteps, but two notable, pragmatic Republicans have put their feet down on solid political ground. State Senator Rob Sampson, whose political jeweler’s eye can spot a fraud a mile off, early noted that Democrats want to handle the EV issue in a special session – only two weeks before the regular legislative session opens – because they wish to avoid a settled process that allows clarifying public hearings.</p><p><a href="https://ctsenaterepublicans.com/home-sampson/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank"><strong>Sampson</strong></a> was named “Legislative Champion of the Year” in 2021 for his leadership in promoting transparency in government and budget matters. And State Senator and Republican Leader <a href="https://ctsenaterepublicans.com/home-kelly/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank"><strong>Kelly</strong></a>, who is fast making common sense the revolutionary point of the sword among legislative Republicans, insists public hearings are indispensable in matters affecting every voter in the state of Connecticut.</p><p>“When we got out from under the Capitol Dome,” he is quoted in Keating’s piece, “what we heard from working and middle class and urban and rural families was: EVs are not for everyone. These concerns are legitimate. We need a public hearing process to make sure we have an informed choice.”</p><p>The moral of this political tousle might well have been that, for Democrats who control the General Assembly by a nearly veto proof margin, informed choice is less important than the exercise of brute political power. However, a groundswell of opposition from those in Connecticut who regard the adoption of California’s stringent anti-environmental laws as unnecessarily disruptive convinced campaign conscious Democrats in the General Assembly to allow a democratic discussion of the pros and cons of RV regulations. And so, the anticipated special session was scotched.</p><p>At some point, Democrats will come to understand that Connecticut is not California, and the discovery will at last permit Connecticut to be Connecticut. Campaigning for neo-progressive votes, most voters in the state would agree, is not governing, which requires an ear large enough to include pragmatic objections to harmful proposals.</p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-12302111190504921872024-01-23T00:22:00.001-05:002024-01-23T16:29:56.215-05:00Trump and the Politics of Litigation<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKlc1Ffr6BM_xaUBeCbqsd_2Pgx6ZCxtlGp0HwWHDUnZ1RVjgZ4q-HwRW4GpBuz-omw2Xw0yCXkKLz2858RTKZm9bPxiIjhGOxjjCl18bXoQCh7mb-hwE_qz3x4elJex0GtSSLoF6l8L5RgLI-ZgjKsLX5OzpcfYdE0R5iWQv_C0rHJO-I06W-/s908/Trump,%20Politico%20Magazine.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="629" data-original-width="908" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKlc1Ffr6BM_xaUBeCbqsd_2Pgx6ZCxtlGp0HwWHDUnZ1RVjgZ4q-HwRW4GpBuz-omw2Xw0yCXkKLz2858RTKZm9bPxiIjhGOxjjCl18bXoQCh7mb-hwE_qz3x4elJex0GtSSLoF6l8L5RgLI-ZgjKsLX5OzpcfYdE0R5iWQv_C0rHJO-I06W-/s320/Trump,%20Politico%20Magazine.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><p class="MsoNormal">Trump, Politico Magazine<o:p></o:p></p></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br />The usual response of any incumbent politician to any
hypothetical during campaign season is a resolute refusal to step into the bear
trap: “Sorry, I’m not going to answer any hypotheticals.”</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But hypotheticals in court rooms are more common.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Suppose a president orders Seal Team Six to murder his
opponent. Would federal prosecutors be justified in arresting the president for
murder without first impeaching him? This question was put by a judge to former
President Donald Trump’s lawyers. The lawyers answered, in so many words –
lawyers do tend to verbosity – the president must first be impeached, then
tried.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Almost immediately, possibly because the hypothetical
president was Trump The Usurper, the Democrat political universe erupted in
displeasure.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Republicans were unwilling to lounge in the improbable
hypothesis, which presents numerous difficulties. Trump is not President, as
the hypothesis supposes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A more probable hypothesis might run like this: President
Joe Biden, perceiving that Trump leads him by a narrow margin in most polls as
Election Day 2024 nears, orders Team Seal Six to assassinate his rival. The
deed is done. Must Biden be impeached before he is tried in federal court for
murder?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The answer is “Yes.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Trump is no longer president, rendering impeachment -- i.e.
removal from office after an indictment in the U.S. House and a trial in the
U.S. Senate upholding the indictment -- unnecessary. But – there is always a
“but” – can Trump be tried for offenses he may or may not have committed when
he was president?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Short of murdering his chief political opponent, the likely answer
is a qualified “Maybe.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The charge brought against Trump, and hotly disputed by him,
is that he conspired in an insurrectionary act, and the 14<sup>th</sup>
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not look kindly on insurrectionists.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But – there is always a “but” – did the attack by an unruly
mob on the Capitol building when Congress was toting up electoral votes amount
to an “insurrection” as the authors of the 14<sup>th</sup> Amendment understood
the term “insurrection?”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Constitutionalists familiar with the history of the 14<sup>th</sup>
Amendment should feel free to answer this question with a resounding “No,” and
those who insist the answer should be “Yes” may be engaging in what Mark Twain
called “a stretcher.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The general public, if not partisan news outlets, sense that
the purpose of the litigation against Trump, perhaps the most prominent
political figure within the last few years, is political rather than judicial,
however the courts may dispose of various claims. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So it would seem in the minds of a huge portion of voters
polled in recent days who prefer Trump over Biden. Then too, the Biden
administration has been bitten on the cheek by charges of corruption. For this
reason, jurists presiding over a truly massive litigation effort to hobble the
presidential candidacy of Trump may appear to the general public to be engaging
in dirty politics, despite disclaimers from presumptive non-partisan
prosecutors that they are innocent of political skullduggery.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Commentator <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/07/15/smr-will-trump-face-trial-before-election.cnn"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Michael Smerconish</b></a> of CNN, not a
fan of Trump, passed his eye over the many judicial assaults facing the former
president and provided an answer to the question: Will prosecutors determine
the fate of Trump before the American people do in the upcoming presidential
election?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Smerconish’s answer is “No.” The host of CNN and CNN
International, who is also a Sunday newspaper columnist for The Philadelphia
Inquirer, supposes Trump wants to run out the clock on possible convictions and
then, having been elected president, pardon himself. Even so, “He [Trump] is
not wrong in saying that his cases raise unique questions that need to be
litigated pre-trial, including the approval of the search warrant from Mara
Lago, the piercing of attorney-client privilege, and the impact of the
Presidential Records Act,” among many other necessary pre-trial judgments.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Given the campaign calendar, a final resolution in the four
major cases brought against Trump cannot be resolved, according to Smerconish,
before Trump either is or is not elected president.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Trump’s prosecutors want judges and juries in multiple cases
to determine the once and perhaps future president’s guilt or innocence before
the judicial pie has been fully baked in the judicial oven, effectively denying
Trump the presidency. But half-baked pies and half-baked prosecutions are
equally unsavory, and the American public appears to be latching on to the
political nature of Trump’s multiple prosecutions.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">If elected president, Trump may or may not pardon himself.
He may just as well seek vindication from a justice system that, some suppose,
is blind to down-and-dirty political motivations. Self-vindication in American
politics is not always possible, as witness the trials and tribulations of
former Presidents Dick Nixon and Bill Clinton. And the notion that Trump’s
multiple trials can be “non-political” when each and every one of them will
have determinative effects on Trump’s election prospects is patently absurd.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-2615729306204609652024-01-20T00:03:00.000-05:002024-01-20T00:03:57.412-05:00Signs of the Times, 2024<p><i><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFwe-CRBrHnomDB4LB3K-qnKkjZrxzGLZCt4-7U0hCw1LXgwUBGynU6luxA_ezCjpB3AR6yYpW3284hkc-jmqsAi9szbxQmzWnm0cTsKMUsE0Z9ZSPgOuBLvtLlkkNFZF8Gi9sY-AjHJN2vHZcys33AyU6RXwo4oM8NWdruDQV46cd64JUj_5H/s1859/Fani%20Willis%20--%20Lynsey%20Weatherspoon%20for%20TIME.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1408" data-original-width="1859" height="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFwe-CRBrHnomDB4LB3K-qnKkjZrxzGLZCt4-7U0hCw1LXgwUBGynU6luxA_ezCjpB3AR6yYpW3284hkc-jmqsAi9szbxQmzWnm0cTsKMUsE0Z9ZSPgOuBLvtLlkkNFZF8Gi9sY-AjHJN2vHZcys33AyU6RXwo4oM8NWdruDQV46cd64JUj_5H/s320/Fani%20Willis%20--%20Lynsey%20Weatherspoon%20for%20TIME.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr></tbody></table></i></p><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><p class="MsoNormal">Fani Willis – Lynsey Weatherspoon for TIME<o:p></o:p></p></td></tr></tbody></table><p><i><br />And indeed, there will
be time/… And time yet for a hundred indecisions/ And for a hundred visions and
revisions/ before the taking of a toast and tea</i><b> – </b>T. S. Elliot, <i>The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Harris For President<o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Republicans, some unaffiliateds and some Democrats believe
that President Joe Biden is decomposing before their very eyes; therefore, any
vote for Biden in 2024 will be a vote for Vice President Kamala Harris as
president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Depending upon when Biden exits
the scene – some suppose sooner rather than later -- Harris could be president
for two plus terms. Her approval rating is about 1% lower than Biden’s.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The <span style="font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><a href="https://www.latimes.com/projects/kamala-harris-approval-rating-polls-vs-biden-other-vps/"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Los Angeles Times</span></b></a></span> tells us, “As of <st1:date day="9" ls="trans" month="1" w:st="on" year="39">Jan. 9, 39</st1:date>% of
registered voters had a favorable opinion of Harris and 55% had an unfavorable
opinion — a net rating of -16 percentage points, according to a Times average.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Is the above scenario likely or unlikely?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It’s certainly <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">possible</i></b>. Whether it is likely or
not time will tell and time, before the upcoming 2024 presidential election, is
growing short.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The United States has trudged along in the absence of
presidential leaders more significant than Biden or Trump. What Democrats are
pleased to call “the democracy” did not collapse upon the death of Franklin
Roosevelt on Apr 12, 1945. The day Roosevelt shucked off this moral coil, was
followed by April 13, 1945 – and Harry Truman, Roosevelt’s Vice President.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Truman replaced Henry Agard Wallace of Iowa, who had
replaced John Nance Garner of Texas, Roosevelt’s first Vice President from
1933-1941, a lengthy run. Perhaps even more given to plain-speaking than
Truman, Garner, asked what he thought of the office as such, said, “It wasn’t
worth a warm bucket of spit.” Actually, Garner used a different term than “spit,”
still regarded as unprintable by fussy newspapers.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But Garner’s characterization of the office is not too farfetched.
A president’s vice president is supposed to be the president’s shadow in
office. Harris has been a serviceable shadow for Biden. There are some
reporters and commentators, none of them writing for what former President
Donald Trump contemptuously calls the nation’s “fake media,” who have suggested
that Biden himself is a shadow president – and also a plagiarist. That would
make Harris the shadow of a shadow.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fani Willis<o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Fani Willis is the Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney
who has, according to George Washington University law professor Jonathan
Turley, recently made a serious unforced error. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/fani-willis-just-made-a-critical-mistake-legal-analyst-warns/ar-BB1gXnYR"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Newsweek</span></b></a></span> tells us: “On Thursday, Willis' attorney,
Cinque Axam, filed a motion to stop Willis from being forced to testify by
subpoena in the divorce of Nathan and Joycelyn Wade on January 23, according to
the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Her testimony at the divorce trial likely will be
embarrassing to Willis, who has been in an affair with Willis’ current paramour
and prosecution partner Nathan Wade. But Willis plans to argue in court that
her paramour’s wife has, by calling her as a witness in the divorce proceeding,
“conspired with interested parties in the criminal election interference case
to use the civil discovery process to annoy, embarrass and oppress District
Attorney Willis,” according to her defense attorney.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Turley believes such claims may not be helpful to the
oppressed Willis: “The level of animus and vexatious language in the filing
only magnifies the concern over the Willis-Wade relationship. By attacking the
estranged wife of her alleged lover, Willis only increases concerns over the
professional separation between Willis and Wade in making decisions in the
case… The accusatory motion was a mistake in my view. Willis could have
objected to the necessity of the deposition on factual and legal grounds (as
she does) without escalating the rhetoric and recriminations."<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Willis evidently wants to win both the political and moral
high ground and, at the same time, tilt the scales of justice in favor of
Nathan Wade in his contested divorce case.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There is a stinger in Willis’ accusatory motion. Who can
forget that Willis has used RICO legislation to pursue charges against former
President Donald Trump, even though the architect of initial RICO legislation
warned that it should never be used in political cases? The purpose of the RICO
ACT was to facilitate the prosecution of mob and gang members accused of
conspiring with others to avoid prosecution. The RICO law in Georgia, some
would argue, has been distended to the point of absurdity.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Wade’s estranged wife, Willis asserts in her legal claim,
has “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">conspired</i></b>
with interested parties in the criminal election interference case [involving
former President Donald Trump] to use the civil discovery process to annoy,
embarrass and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">oppress</i></b> District Attorney Willis [emphasis mine].” But, of
course, discovery proceedings are far less oppressive than RICO proceedings
and, as we have been told countless times, no man or woman is above the law in
the United States.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The office of the oppressed Georgia District Attorney has
paid Wade nearly $654,000 in legal fees since January 2022, according to the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Does Willis propose to ensnare her paramour’s estranged wife
in her larger RICO case against Trump and associates? Or is her counter claim
an effort to snuff out a fire in the political kitchen that might affect her
effort to bring her charges against Trump to their appointed end before
citizens of the United State go to the polls to choose their next president?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Time will tell.<o:p></o:p></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-47707144424122745122024-01-15T17:06:00.000-05:002024-01-15T17:06:02.541-05:00Martin Luther King Day 2024<p class="MsoNormal"><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgblWfvffgWdHxqyIyBR0ysQP6GUNvPHdINKqx58NrnXJXbATzLqGtc2xGNfrp_JGHgGrizrbLAxUsJqCVR6nYO9PQqbt5BwhcjEHcUWblN7UzHSehlDm-VNMnJTYCWXctz1i_pYnkdAxJUR1ceVpodxpjxvhotbKH9s0RijzhOYQObV2cPZh5T/s640/MARTIN-LUTHER-KING-JR.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="476" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgblWfvffgWdHxqyIyBR0ysQP6GUNvPHdINKqx58NrnXJXbATzLqGtc2xGNfrp_JGHgGrizrbLAxUsJqCVR6nYO9PQqbt5BwhcjEHcUWblN7UzHSehlDm-VNMnJTYCWXctz1i_pYnkdAxJUR1ceVpodxpjxvhotbKH9s0RijzhOYQObV2cPZh5T/s320/MARTIN-LUTHER-KING-JR.jpg" width="238" /></a></b></div><b><br />In honor of Martin
Luther King, may I offer the following CC pieces on him:<o:p></o:p></b><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">1)<b> Republicans,
Martin Luther King, And The Strangers In Our Midst</b><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2014/01/republicans-martin-luther-king-and.html">https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2014/01/republicans-martin-luther-king-and.html</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">2) <b>Obama, MLK and The
Clintons</b><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2008/01/obama-mlk-and-clintons.html">https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2008/01/obama-mlk-and-clintons.html</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">3) <b>The Black Family
After MLK</b><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2014/02/addresses-never-delivered-to-blacks-in.html">https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2014/02/addresses-never-delivered-to-blacks-in.html</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">4) <b>Lincoln And King<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2013/08/lincoln-and-king.html">https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2013/08/lincoln-and-king.html</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">5) <b>Lincoln, Martin
Luther King, And The Not For Sale African American Vote</b><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2024/01/lincoln-martin-luther-king-and-not-for.html">https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2024/01/lincoln-martin-luther-king-and-not-for.html</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b> </b></p><p class="MsoNormal">6) <b>Politics and
Memory<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2021/11/politics-and-memory.html">https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2021/11/politics-and-memory.html</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">7) <b>John Brown: The
150th Anniversary Of The Raid On Harper’s Ferry<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal">And lastly, something on John Brown. Fredrick Douglas and Brown
were on speaking terms.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"> <a href="https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2009/10/john-brown-150th-anniversary-of-raid-on.html">https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2009/10/john-brown-150th-anniversary-of-raid-on.html</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-30216146311249659032024-01-15T09:13:00.000-05:002024-01-15T09:13:06.845-05:00The Disappearing “Insurrection”, And Disappearing Republican Reporters<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS9rH7Z84lbt0tqBX_Sq-7MSsLPDM8UQT2r4oCqg1Czf6ZMAA29mM082Q1UsLBCRAtGaTWo3pIeGmhp5eGpcpYzPzKDy4OBcrgKebcwYIfk6frdV8EsygYC4Uj71PpXro1bnqYpctbgJ995kAHcLvlQWyyn-y8OxS_VF2VD0KoS2_mjXmi3HH0/s600/Insurrection%20%20headline.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="567" data-original-width="600" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS9rH7Z84lbt0tqBX_Sq-7MSsLPDM8UQT2r4oCqg1Czf6ZMAA29mM082Q1UsLBCRAtGaTWo3pIeGmhp5eGpcpYzPzKDy4OBcrgKebcwYIfk6frdV8EsygYC4Uj71PpXro1bnqYpctbgJ995kAHcLvlQWyyn-y8OxS_VF2VD0KoS2_mjXmi3HH0/s320/Insurrection%20%20headline.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Strapped to a lie detector, many Americans – and a sizable
chunk of President Joe Biden worshippers – might admit that the riot at the
U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 was <b><i><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">not</span></i></b><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span>an insurrection. Most
recently, even the <a href="https://apnews.com/hub/2021-united-states-capitol-riot"><b>Associated Press</b></a> (AP), rarely
friendly to once and future chief insurrectionist Donald Trump, has used other
less inflammatory expressions in its news accounts.<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Here are a few January 2024 AP headlines mentioning “riot”
rather than “insurrection”:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trump downplays Jan. 6 on the anniversary of the Capitol siege and
calls jailed </i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">rioters </span>‘hostages’<o:p></o:p></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Former President
Donald Trump campaigned in Iowa and spent time there marking the third
anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. [sic Capitol building].<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">To plead or not to plead? That is the question for hundreds of Capitol </i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">riot </span>defendants<o:p></o:p></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hundreds of people
charged with storming the U.S. Capitol three years ago have had a powerful
incentive to plead guilty rather than go to trial.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On Jan. 6 many Republicans blamed Trump for the Capitol </i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">riot</span>.
Now they endorse his presidential bid<o:p></o:p></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Democracy scholars
warn that political parties must accept the results of fair elections, reject
violence and break ties to extremists. They say in the Trump era, Republicans
have violated all three rules.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hundreds of convictions, but a major mystery is still unsolved 3 years
after the Jan. 6 Capitol </i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">riot</span><o:p></o:p></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Three years after the
Capitol attack, Washington’s federal courthouse is flooded with trials, guilty
plea hearings and sentencings stemming from what is now the largest criminal
investigation in American history.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Proud Boys member who went on the run after conviction in the Jan. 6
riot gets 10 years in prison<o:p></o:p></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A member of the Proud
Boys extremist group has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in
the Jan. 6, 2021, </i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">riot </span>at
the U.S. Capitol.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Headlines from December were similar. During the last couple
of months, the widely reported “insurrection” has given way to a widely
reported – and certainly more accurately reported -- “riot”.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Chiefly for political reasons, the term “insurrection” will
be bandied about in courts and among politicized prosecutors who hope see Trump
frog-marched into jail, where he will no longer be able to torment neo-progressive
Democrats. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/us/politics/indictment-trump-jan-6-violence.html"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Prosecutors</b></a> have not charged Trump
with insurrection. Republicans are hoping that a clarifying Supreme Court
decision will be handed down on the 14<sup>th</sup> Amendment’s use of the term
“insurrection” months before bewildered voters march to the polls on November
2024. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Not only have the insurrection hawkers changed their
verbiage, reporters across the fruited plains have abandoned the Republican
Party altogether, according to a recent survey of the former ink-stained
wretches conducted by Syracuse University titled “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The American Journalist Under Attack</i>,” soon to be issued as a book.
The Syracuse University study was based on an online survey of 1,600 U.S. journalists
in various media organizations conducted from January to April 2022.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">An Executive summary extract of the survey tells us:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“<a href="https://www.theamericanjournalist.org/_files/ugd/46a507_4fe1c4d6ec6d4c229895282965258a7a.pdf"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">More Journalists Say They Are Democrats</b></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Compared with 2013,
the percentage of full-time U.S. journalists who claim to be Democrats has
increased 8 percentage points in 2022 to about 36 percent, a figure higher than
the overall population percentage of 27 percent, according to a 2022 ABC
News/Washington Post national poll. This is the third highest percentage of
journalists saying they are Democrats since 1971. Journalists who said they
were Republicans continued to drop from 18 percent in 2002 and 7.1 percent in
2013 to 3.4 percent in 2022. This figure is notably lower than the percentage
of U.S. adults who identified with the Republican party (26 percent according
to the poll mentioned earlier) in 2022. About half of all journalists (51.7
percent) said they were Independents, which is about 12 percentage points above
the figure for all U.S. adults (40 percent). Overall, U.S. journalists today
are much more likely to identify themselves as Independents rather than
Democrats or Republicans—a pattern similar to 2013.”<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">At some point, one hopes, some objective school of
journalism will set itself the task of accounting for this stunning migration
of reporters from one party to another. The more important open question is: Do
party preferences among journalists indicate a political bias in news reporting?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Surveying the survey, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/just-3-4-percent-of-american-journalists-identify-as-republican-survey-5556033"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Epoch Times</b></a> noted, “According
to an October Gallup poll, 39 percent of Americans did not trust the mass
media, while 29 percent held very little trust. Only 32 percent reported having
trust in the mass media.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">To what extent, then, is the extensive mistrust of the media
among the American public – nearly 70 percent -- related to the ingrained ideological
preferences of reporters? And, assuming anyone is willing to correct the
imbalance, how may the trust of the American people in its journalists be most
quickly restored?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-5390464024624892742024-01-13T16:09:00.000-05:002024-01-13T16:09:23.553-05:00Wanted, Political Skeptics<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_OF8e6s_qiDv_DO7KmIJ8AZAQEj2Q-zqPGRCdgVsgy9bAIuzHRYqMzHE_5N4qs-NkFfCDRoNvHfQoT289D2fl07HiVCGaIBYSrFNeyxikNJulOzdkd2yA3Pw7GPwicrOI5l22R3OXPq8diTT7zgEGF5r3g0oZ5gbW0QXZrJfyK5gNOpjmhfr2/s595/julien-benda-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="376" data-original-width="595" height="202" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_OF8e6s_qiDv_DO7KmIJ8AZAQEj2Q-zqPGRCdgVsgy9bAIuzHRYqMzHE_5N4qs-NkFfCDRoNvHfQoT289D2fl07HiVCGaIBYSrFNeyxikNJulOzdkd2yA3Pw7GPwicrOI5l22R3OXPq8diTT7zgEGF5r3g0oZ5gbW0QXZrJfyK5gNOpjmhfr2/s320/julien-benda-2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Anyone who has written about politics for longer than, say,
a few months sooner or later will find himself descending into skepticism, a
critical wrestler’s crouch.<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Skepticism is not simply a temporary purgatory on the way to
a blissful heavenly utopia.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Voltaire, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Candide</i>,
got the categories right. At best, the optimist is a fool imprisoned in his own
optimism. At worst, he is blind, deaf and dumb to the realities than envelop
him, chiefly because he believes he is the architect of the realities. But reality,
in the long run, will not be mocked in this way.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Using words to reshape reality, the post- modern politician
somewhat confusingly mistakes his rhetoric for reality, and the resulting
production is always grossly distorted.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As always, it is best to let Voltaire speak for himself:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Optimism,” said Cacambo, “What is that?”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Alas!” replied
Candide, “It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is
worst.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the
others?”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“It is demonstrable,” said he, “that things cannot be
otherwise than as they are; for all being created for an end, all is
necessarily for the best end.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The skeptic is that person who rejects the underlying
misperception that has caught Candide in its net. Not to spoil the ending of
Candide, our hero shakes free of many of his misperceptions through painful
real-world personal experiences.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It is perfectly obvious -- on the face of it, as the lawyers
might say -- that this kind of reasoning is a tangled tautology. What is – is.
What will be -- will be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why protest?
All of it, sooner or later, will end in universal felicity. If one lives in a socialist
utopia, for instance, in which state terror and propaganda has been used to
crush reality – for the betterment of humankind, of course -- why protest? <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Most people who have done wrong know they have done wrong.
The pricks of conscience leave claw marks on the soul. Wrong, in politics, is a
relative term only because politicians are uncomfortable with certainties that
present obligations.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Niccolò Machiavelli may have been among the first of the
modern political philosophers to realize this. And, of course, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Prince</i> ought to be read, hand in
hand, with the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Discourses on Livy</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Modern Machiavellian scholars now tell us that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Prince</i> was a job application
presented to anti-republican autocrats of the day such as the Borgias. But,
they note, Machiavelli was himself a fierce defender of the Florentine
republic.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Prince</i>,
then, a skeptical parody of the uses of power?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">How would Machiavelli view the modern republic of the United
States were he looking for a job in Washington DC??<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The short answer to this question is – skeptically.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Thomas Jefferson, discredited in our day as a slaveholder,
both admired and abhorred the power of newspapers.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In an admiring mood, Jefferson could say, “The basis of our
governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to
keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a
government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not
hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should
receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This is the same man who said, “I do not take a single
newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for
it.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Jefferson kept a bust of Voltaire on his writing desk, and
his experiences during his political campaigns scorched him.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Newspapers in our own time have taken a political battering
– and not because former President Donald Trump considers the media a “fake
news” production machine.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">They are taking a battering because there are too few political
skeptics within the mainstream media.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The skeptical faucet, it appears to many news readers, is stuck on “off”
when the prevailing power falls to left of center on the political spectrum.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There are good reasons to think that Biden’s policies, both
foreign and domestic, have been visible and undeniable failures. One of the
most glaring failures of the Biden administration is a campaign strategy devoted
almost entirely to the demonization of former President Donald “The Fascist” Trump
as an enemy of “the democracy.” Virtually all polls indicate that Trump may be elevated
into the White House by this almost comic overreaction and an inability to sell
to a dubious public current administration policies that have spectacularly
failed.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a policy pratfall. Not
only were Afghans delivered, bound and gagged, to the Taliban, Bagram Air Force
Base, a watchtower close to China, was also abjectly surrendered.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The undoing of partly successful Trump policies at our
southern border has resulted, not surprisingly, in a vanished border.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">No one in the mainstream media seems able to settle on a
proper definition of inflation, classically defined as too many dollars chasing
too few goods. Less government borrowing and cuts in spending have in the past
proven to be effective anti-inflation prophylactics. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The use of political force – and tax dollars – to create a
new non-viable market in electric vehicles has been decisively rejected by the
real public market, and investments in energy producing windmills seem far less
promising than investments in new fusion and fission nuclear reactors.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The recent attack on Israel by Hamas -- and idiot college
students -- has ripped the mask off latent anti-Semitism the world over. The
Biden administration, largely responsible for the political failings mentioned
above, seems determined to re-install in Israel some version of a “two party
state” that always has been fiercely opposed to the Israeli democracy, and it
will not be long before the Prime Minister of Israel begins to feel the point
of a friendly dagger at his back.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">One real skeptic such as Voltaire, Machiavelli or Jefferson,
given adequate space in our legacy media, would blow all this politically
inspired nonsense to bits.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Unfortunately, space is limited to upholders of a
dangerously ineffective <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">status quo</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-91977270076812156552024-01-12T07:10:00.000-05:002024-01-12T07:10:00.432-05:00Trump’s Trials and Tribulations: What Would Alice Think?<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_7I82fSsMrXE4YCzB7FuuxmztZtytT5uXmO6R1TGPOY40kkAETOmnnQpMMlPIK7h7olSJxsDzYLYJUu-EaWXb_qzJzekoaIvhKpUFe4xrZ5V7FjUvgipqi-IQ2OYseU6OAdLfT2fo0HJHOY9q-A4D6H7GMT4shp35hK8OU3oaeITvhe5UuvCO/s676/Judge%20Arthur%20Engoron%20--%20source,.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="532" data-original-width="676" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_7I82fSsMrXE4YCzB7FuuxmztZtytT5uXmO6R1TGPOY40kkAETOmnnQpMMlPIK7h7olSJxsDzYLYJUu-EaWXb_qzJzekoaIvhKpUFe4xrZ5V7FjUvgipqi-IQ2OYseU6OAdLfT2fo0HJHOY9q-A4D6H7GMT4shp35hK8OU3oaeITvhe5UuvCO/s320/Judge%20Arthur%20Engoron%20--%20source,.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr></tbody></table></p><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><p class="MsoNormal">Judge Arthur Engoron – source, Jeenah Moon/UPI<o:p></o:p></p></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br />“First the verdict, then the trial, the imperious Queen of
Hearts says to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s <i>Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland</i>. Alice, whose sense of Justice has been refined by
centuries of English Common Law, knows immediately that something is wrong with
that proposition.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ordinarily, just verdicts follow, they do not precede,
trials.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Carroll, a very creative mathematical scholar, loved word
play because he knew that words were emblems of reality. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In "The Mouse's Tale," a shaped poem in the same
book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"Fury said to a mouse, that he
met in the house, 'Let us both go to law: I will prosecute you - Come, I'll
take no denial; We must have a trial: For really this morning I've nothing to
do.' Said the mouse to the cur, 'Such a trial, dear Sir, with no jury or judge,
would be wasting our breath.' 'I'll be judge, I'll be jury,' Said cunning old
Fury: 'I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death.'"<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The poem is presented in the shape of a mouse’s tail.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Carroll’s word play may have a modern – or post-modern, as
some would say – application.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">That President Donald Trump may have cut corners when
evaluating his own properties had been asserted by his multitudinous critics
decades before the issue was brought to trial in Judge Arthur Engoron’s court. Previous
claims were not seriously considered by judges because there were no victims
harmed by Trump’s… shall we call them stretchers? All the principals involved –
Trump, investors in his properties, and bankers who issued loans to Trump based
on his property valuations – profited by the loan transactions.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">If there are no victims, no complainants, can there be a
crime? Told that the answer to the question is, ”Yes, there can be a crime
without a victim,” Alice, relying on centuries of British Common Law
jurisprudence, might be forgiven for thinking – there’s something wrong with
that proposition. Consistently applied, it would allow a judge to suppose a
non-existent “victim” in the absence of a justifiable complaint and then thuggishly
bring to trial any judicial victim he chooses.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It is difficult to imagine Trump – loud, brash, a verbal
brawler given to sometimes outrageous hyperbole – as a victim. Bill Buckley got
his character right when he said that Trump was “a vulgarian.” But then, in a
country in which no one is either below or above the law, vulgarians have
rights too. Generally, people who appear in courts to answer charges brought
against them are vulgarians of one sort or another, and, generally,
prosecutorial charges are brought by lawyers acting on behalf of complainants
and victims who wish to be made whole by lady justice. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The following quotes in this piece are all taken from an
Associated Press (AP) report printed in the Hartford Courant on January 11,
2024 under the title <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">“</b><a href="https://apnews.com/article/trump-fraud-trial-closing-arguments-420997f889922423dbce8a0945f0c348"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Judge: Trump can’t speak at close of civil
fraud trial</b></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">.”</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Trump trial in New York, rooted in a charge that Trump
had overvalued his assets in order to obtain loans from banks is, mercifully,
coming to a close. Naturally, there will be appellate appeals and perhaps a
final Supreme Court disposition of the case. All this takes time, and Trump’s
prosecutorial Javerts – Javert being the relentless prosecutor in Victor Hugo’s
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Les Misérables</i> -- want a quick and
certain disposition of the case well before <a href="https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/calendar"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">voters</b></a> are given the oportunity to re-elect Trump as President
on November 5, 2024.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In some states, Democrats are attempting to deny Trump’s
appearance on voting ballots, apparently in violation of what they call “the
democracy.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The lede on the AP story reads, “Donald Trump won’t make his
own closing argument after all in his New York civil business fraud trial after
his lawyers objected to the judge’s insistence that the former president stick
to “relevant” matters and “not deliver a campaign speech.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Judge Engoron is unwilling to permit a former – and, some
might say, based on most recent polls, future – President of the United States
to deliver “a campaign speech” in his courtroom.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A judge’s courtroom is pretty much like a ship captain’s vessel.
Indeed, the captain of a ship has broad authority on the high seas to assert
his power and, likewise, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>within the
confines of his courtroom, Judge Engoron has equally awesome powers to enforce
proper discipline. But a judge’s powers fade when the theatre of action is
removed from his courtroom. Just as a sea captain has no authority over
landlubbers, a judge has little authority over politicians who make what he
deems to be “a campaign speech” on the hustings in the midst of a presidential
campaign.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The AP story tells us Judge Engoron “had initially indicated
he was open to the idea [of Trump addressing the court] saying he’d let Trump
speak if he agreed to abide by rules that apply to attorneys’ closing
arguments. Among other things, Engoron wanted the former president and current
Republican front-runner to promise he wouldn’t assail his adversaries in the
case, the judge or others in the court system.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">These restrictions are poorly defined. The “court” in this
case is not a jury of Trump’s peers that might be influenced by the accused
“campaign speeches’, but the judge himself who – see Alice above – unilaterally
decided the case in favor of the prosecution. The restrictions he has imposed
apparently are designed to prevent Trump from unjustly influencing the decision
of the court – and the court is Engoron, who unilaterally decided that Trump
was guilty as charged. The sole purpose of the trial in New York is to affix
penalties. And the penalties also will be decided by Engoron – without demurral
from Trump.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">First the verdict, decided by Engoron, then the sentence,
also decided by Engoron. At first, Engoron generously allowed Trump to make in
his court a final statement. Then he denied Trump the mercy of a final
statement before he was to deprive Trump of his property and liberties. Finally,
he decided that Trump might make a court censored statement, heavily redacted
by Engoron. To the very last. Engoron played with tragic precision the part of
old Fury in Carroll’s “The Mouse’s Tale” -- “'I'll be judge, I'll be jury,'
Said cunning old Fury: 'I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-461497734034436172024-01-06T22:44:00.000-05:002024-01-06T22:44:02.001-05:00Lincoln, Martin Luther King, And The Not For Sale African American Vote<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9nzbMDll8xn9h8hTCH09N3RUf5IQ76lCZNxfNQfyAh63cLRzZ7QXv4Eadgo16sLXJk70f4e-9NmFHdh38wr-3AViWH-TzVz-Dsc0kZUhYW0lK3p-qlKewUH-aWVCPFHtzpOydC4AYI7q2yH8bVRcoy7YsgpnImmIVHrw98c6s1Z7Xi4T3rhvW/s1422/Image%20-%20stories%20(6).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1422" data-original-width="800" height="452" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9nzbMDll8xn9h8hTCH09N3RUf5IQ76lCZNxfNQfyAh63cLRzZ7QXv4Eadgo16sLXJk70f4e-9NmFHdh38wr-3AViWH-TzVz-Dsc0kZUhYW0lK3p-qlKewUH-aWVCPFHtzpOydC4AYI7q2yH8bVRcoy7YsgpnImmIVHrw98c6s1Z7Xi4T3rhvW/w254-h452/Image%20-%20stories%20(6).jpg" width="254" /></a></td></tr></tbody></table></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">
<p class="MsoNormal">Civil Rights leaders pose in the Lincoln Memorial during the
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington DC, August 28, 1963 --PhotoQuest
/ Getty Images<o:p></o:p></p></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br />Neo-Progressive leftists in the United States are
bewildered.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">How is it possible that former President Donald Trump, the
campaign footstool of Democrat opponents, is gaining in reliable polls after a
bevy of prosecutors has thrown everything but the kitchen sink at him?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A few weeks ago, they hurled the kitchen sink at Trump.
Several states pulled Trump’s name from their ballots, citing <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/29/trump-14-amendment-ballot-troubles-00133318"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">dubious Constitutional authority</b></a>.
Their reasoning was as follows: 1) The January 6, 2021 protest run wild at the
state Capitol in Washington DC was an insurrection; 2) Trump participated in
the insurrection, more or less by word of mouth, when he encouraged protestors
to march “peacefully” on the Capitol in which electors were casting ballots for
president; 3) therefore, Trump had engaged in a conspiracy that amounted to an
insurrection.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">All of these propositions have been challenged, none of them
in court, by people that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once called, in the heat of her presidential
campaign, “a basket full of deplorables.” That basket was large enough, some
campaign scholars asserted following Trump’s victorious presidential campaign,
to deny Hillary the presidency.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Why hasn’t the assertion that Trump had engaged in an
insurrection been tested in court? The concise and correct answer is: None of
the multitudinous Trump prosecutors have charged in any of their formal
citations that Trump himself had engaged in an insurrection, very likely
because they know such a charge could not be defended before any judge who had
a nodding acquaintance with the Constitutional provision they cite as
supporting their untried claim.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">African Americans -- who know a few things from personal
experience about judicial imperfections – appear to be drifting towards Trump,
much beset by a judicial establishment used recently to decide political and
sociological questions by judicial fiat, a bad habit that corrupts both the
judicial and legislative process.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In early November 2023, The New York Times published a
worrisome story, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/us/politics/biden-trump-black-voters-poll-democrats.html"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">As Black Voters Drift to Trump, Biden’s
Allies Say They Have Work to Do</b></a>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">According to the one-year-old Times Story<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">: “Black voters are more disconnected from
the Democratic Party than they have been in decades, frustrated with what many
see as inaction on their political priorities and unhappy with President Biden,
a candidate they helped lift to the White House just three years ago.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“New polls by The New
York Times and Siena College found that 22 percent of Black voters in six of
the most important battleground states said they would support former President
Donald J. Trump in next year’s election, and 71 percent would back Mr. Biden. <o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“The drift in support
is striking, given that Mr. Trump won just 8 percent of Black voters nationally
in 2020 and 6 percent in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center. A
Republican presidential candidate has not won more than 12 percent of the Black
vote in nearly half a century.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Mr. Biden has a year
to shore up his standing, but if numbers like these held up across the country
in November 2024, they would amount to a historic shift: No Democratic
presidential candidate since the civil rights era has earned less than 80
percent of the Black vote.”</i><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And the news in the Times story touching on Democrat
strategists may be even more nerve wracking: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“A number of Democratic strategists acknowledged that the downbeat
numbers in battleground states extended beyond Black voters to the party’s core
constituencies, warning that the Biden campaign had to take steps to improve
its standing, particularly with Black, Latino and younger voters. The
Times/Siena polls surveyed registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan,
Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.”</i><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">When Democrat strategists raise such doubts, it may be time
to begin looking for a hole in the hull of the Democrat Party.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin Luther King told us that African Americans wanted to
be included in the American experiment in freedom and liberty. They did not
want to be patronized by those who could not properly appreciate King’s
important distinction between the content of one’s character and the color of
one’s skin. <a href="https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2013/08/lincoln-and-king.html"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">King’s message</b></a>, delivered from the
Lincoln Memorial, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i></b> Lincoln’s message.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“The Almighty has His
own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be
that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we
shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the
providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His
appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and
South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall
we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the
believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently
do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God
wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred
and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood
drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said
three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord
are true and righteous altogether.’”<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">These words, graven on the North Wall of the Lincoln
Memorial, were burned into the brain and marrow of King and other notable black
leaders such as Fredrick Douglas. They fittingly served as a backdrop for King’s
“I Have A Dream” speech.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Lincoln and King are the north stars of American freedom and
liberty. We wander far from them at our own peril. Nothing is more fearful than
to be on the sea without compass or hope of return to a safe landing.<o:p></o:p></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-28930409505637663532024-01-03T10:37:00.004-05:002024-01-03T10:38:34.550-05:00A Republic, If You Can Keep It<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrAuXrQxCeWItf0fE_3yN53TAHZnIqpJQVSgH7ZtnD6FtKbpIK7pJ5ceIqgX3emN5NPEFGnQdmqbwEcjXqWbkpiYXPQ1DB-TlLKxqZ4zfgfrmOrJSLN6RDxIGr4e9XXPcKnmVrhVf8oZDTrj7HNtGxr-J35C8cnNg4yGVToFf8dOk90hi4OApJ/s1422/Image%20-%20stories%20(5).jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1422" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrAuXrQxCeWItf0fE_3yN53TAHZnIqpJQVSgH7ZtnD6FtKbpIK7pJ5ceIqgX3emN5NPEFGnQdmqbwEcjXqWbkpiYXPQ1DB-TlLKxqZ4zfgfrmOrJSLN6RDxIGr4e9XXPcKnmVrhVf8oZDTrj7HNtGxr-J35C8cnNg4yGVToFf8dOk90hi4OApJ/s320/Image%20-%20stories%20(5).jpg" width="180" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bob MacGuffie</td></tr></tbody></table><br />As Ben Franklin emerged from the Constitutional convention on
its last day, Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked him, “Well Doctor, what have we
got, a republic or a monarchy?”<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal">“A republic,” replied the Doctor, if you can keep it.”<o:p></o:p></p><p>One thing is absolutely certain, my favorite cynic tells me:
“Because we live in a representative Republic in which politicians stand for
election by the public, the public ALWAYS deserves the politics it receives
from its representatives.” Or, as Henry Mencken once put it, “Democracy is the
theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good
and hard.”</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">None of the founders of our country, democracy tooters may
be surprised to learn, favored democracy as a form of government. Students of
history, the founders knew that democracy could only be successful in small –
very small – political units. The demos, the root word in our modern conception
of “democracy,” and the polis, the root word in our modern conception of
politics, the founders believed, might most successfully be governed through a representative
republic.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Democracy, possible within town hall municipal meetings, an
assembly of constituents, is nearly impossible in state political gatherings
such as Connecticut’s General Assembly, a conventicle of elected representatives.
Even less so is democracy possible in larger political organizations such as
the U.S. Congress.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Alexander Hamilton put all this in sharp focus when he said
in a speech to Congress in 1788, “It has been observed by an honorable
gentleman, that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most
perfect government. Experience has proved that no position in politics is more
false than this. The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves
deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very
character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The five members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional
Delegation, all Democrats, claim they are representatives of their
constituents, as they repeatedly tell us, even though a sizable portion of
their constituents are members of an opposition party or unaffiliateds. Because
there are among the members of the U.S. Congressional Delegation no dissenters
from a different party, majority Democrats are also motivated by party interests,
and therefore display a double allegiance: first, they say, to their
constituents, and secondly to their party, state and national.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Take, by way of example, U.S. Representative Jim Himes of
Connecticut’s 4th District. We are told on Himes’ fluffy “House Government
About” page that Himes is now serving his “eighth term. He serves as Ranking
Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and on the
House Financial Services Committee.” These committees affect national matters
that extend far beyond the borders of the 4th District.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In fact, most matters considered by any and all of the
all-Democrat members of Connecticut’s U. S. Congressional Delegation are more
extensive than those parochial issues affecting only their constituents, both
Democrat and Republican, who live in their respective Districts. U.S. Congresspersons
are national representatives whose political purview is much different than
that of a state or town representative.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And so, one would expect national interests – particularly
representative votes on matters of national<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>interests such as budget expenditures, foreign policy issues, etc. – to
loom large in any reelection campaign involving prospective U.S.
Representatives.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">However, robust discussion of national issues has rarely
occurred among Himes and his Republican challengers.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">That may change if Bob MacGuffie emerges from a Republican
primary as a party endorsed candidate in the once bipartisan U. S.
Congressional Delegation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Sacred Heart University Professor Gary Rose, often consulted
by Connecticut reporters on state politics, suggests a robust battle may emerge
–provided it is permitted to emerge -- between MacGuffie and Himes. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Rose stated in an e-mail interview with Patch.com,”
reporter <a href="https://patch.com/connecticut/brookfield/macguffie-takes-hard-hitting-lane-toward-winning-u-s-house-seat"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Scott Benjamin</b></a> writes: “‘MacGuffie
is waging a bare-knuckle campaign intended to unseat Congressman Himes. As a
candidate, MacGuffie is quite unlike the previous Republicans who have sought
to unseat the congressman. MacGuffie's style is hard hitting, provocative and
he has conducted an impressive amount of research regarding Himes' position and
votes on a variety of national issues.’<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Rose added, ‘<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><a href="https://www.bobmacforcongress.com/campaign-updates">MacGuffie's campaign
updates</a></b> posted on the internet are unlike anything that I have observed
during my many years of following and writing about congressional politics in
the 4th CD.’”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Bob MacGuffie likes to mix it up. He says of his forthright
approach to things political, “I came out of Queens. I came out of the school
yards. I was small. Naturally you get picked on. So naturally I developed a
sharp tongue and dressed these guys down.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A former leader of the Tea Party in Connecticut, MacGuffie
last March announced he was seeking the Republican nomination to run against
Himes in the upcoming 2024 election. Himes’ previous challengers, MacGuffie
said, “didn’t run aggressive campaigns. They were afraid of the aggressive line
of attack.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Here is a partial listing of <a href="https://www.bobmacforcongress.com/campaign-updates"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MacGuffie’s campaign updates</b></a>:<o:p></o:p></p>
<ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">11-9-23: Jim Himes Fails to Vote
for Aid to Israel - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/49qnm9T" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/49qnm9T</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">10-17-23: Witness to Two-Tiered
Justice in America - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/46UF5UO" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/46UF5UO</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">10-10-23: Back to the Future – It’s All
About the Debt - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/46FGWwI" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/46FGWwI</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">9-20-23: We’ll Have to Defeat
Ballot-Tampering in 2024 Too! - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/3Lx72K9"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/3Lx72K9</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">9-12-23: Data Shows Democrat Policies are
Shrinking American Life - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/3r9sxK2"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/3r9sxK2</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">8-29-23: The Importance of
‘Independent’ Local Media - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://www.bobmacforcongress.com/%20https:/conta.cc/45uDjth"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> https://conta.cc/45uDjth</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">8-15-23: Republicans Own the Campaign
Issues & Solutions for CT’s Cities - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/45qtWug"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/45qtWug</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">8-2-23: Jim Himes is Now
the Center-Pawn for House Democrat Messaging - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/45fBfoF"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/45fBfoF</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">7-25-23: Jim Himes Votes to Politicize
401k Investment Plan Decisions - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/3DsZtzN"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/3DsZtzN</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">7-18-23: Jim Himes Recommends Sexually
Explicit Books for Kids’ Summer Reading- </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/3XYtsch"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/3XYtsch</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">7-13-23: A Call to Patriotism in the
Wake of SCOTUS Rulings - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/46JXQey" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/46JXQey</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">
<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">6-27-23: Jim Himes Goes Easy on the
Chinese Communists - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/4420j22" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/4420j22</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">6-20-23: Jim Himes Votes AGAINST ‘Save
Gas Stoves Act’ - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/46puimm" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/46puimm</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">6-13-23: Meeting Solid-Citizens on the
Campaign Trail in CT-4 - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/3CohrD2" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/3CohrD2</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">6-6-23: Himes Fails to
Stop Money-Printing - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/3NetpVT" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/3NetpVT</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">5-25-23: Himes Video-Demagogues
Today’s Debt Ceiling Impasse - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/43byEeH" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/43byEeH</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">
<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">5-16-23: Himes Votes AGAINST the
Secure the Border Act - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/3Mt1MZ1" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/3Mt1MZ1</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">5-9-23: Yes – the Debt
Crisis CAN be Solved - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/42DZKdH" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/42DZKdH</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">5-2-23: Jim Himes Turns
His Back on Abortion Survivors - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/3oUFJ3X" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/3oUFJ3X</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">4-25-23: Jim Himes Votes to Abandon
REAL Women - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/3HenmgG" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/3HenmgG</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">4-19-23: Jim Himes Votes AGAINST the
‘Lower Energy Costs Act’ - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/41CtyqH"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/41CtyqH</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">4-11-23: Jim Himes Video-Gaslights Us
on the Debt Ceiling - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/3MycnSM" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/3MycnSM</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">4-4-23: Himes Votes Twice
to Double IRS Enforcement - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/42X8DjA" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/42X8DjA</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">3-28-23: Himes Votes Against the
‘Parents Bill of Rights’ - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/3TRHf28" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/3TRHf28</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">3-21-23: Jim Himes and the Banking
Crisis - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/3JxY4L5" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/3JxY4L5</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #3a3a3a; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 6pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">3-14-23: Jim Himes Won’t Vote to
Denounce Socialism - </span><span color="windowtext"><a href="https://conta.cc/3TbAHLH"><span style="color: blue; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">https://conta.cc/3TbAHLH</span></a></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">
<o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ul>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Even a compromised partisan media will notice that nearly
all of MacGuffie’s postings rightly relate to matters of national importance,
the province of U.S. Congressional representatives.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It is rather fortunate for Himes that Connecticut’s
lackadaisical media has not, so far, permitted MacGuffie to stretch himself out
in their mainstream media outlets.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">No surprise there. Connecticut’s media is even less
interested than Himes in probing matters of national importance during a
robustly contested election campaign, a rarity in Himes’ case. The opposite of
a robust campaign is one smothered in acceptable party treacle churned out by media
favored incumbents, one of the reasons there has been very little turnover in
Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation.<o:p></o:p></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-64708659661719477352023-12-31T18:14:00.000-05:002023-12-31T18:14:01.035-05:00Out with the Old, In with the Old<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXCV7q75MitG16QS0isiFDqSNm3ajvNlFOpvAqSHPHJ_PvK86ZzGuIcaWlGdTU_i38TMSxaZi1b4zjs56_MZKjZsxaRJvuRa86KzfIv3rYtG51LwDuYamBQe4diA7ReX-sjq9bSdIsghJ7rTMkZRXUy4meC8LpEXRQUNjg7eQ5IjTguPY8tA5G/s1100/Biden%20and%20Trump%20--%20source.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="619" data-original-width="1100" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXCV7q75MitG16QS0isiFDqSNm3ajvNlFOpvAqSHPHJ_PvK86ZzGuIcaWlGdTU_i38TMSxaZi1b4zjs56_MZKjZsxaRJvuRa86KzfIv3rYtG51LwDuYamBQe4diA7ReX-sjq9bSdIsghJ7rTMkZRXUy4meC8LpEXRQUNjg7eQ5IjTguPY8tA5G/s320/Biden%20and%20Trump%20--%20source.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Biden and Trump -- source, CNN<br /><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>The common expression every New Year is “Out with the old,
in with the new.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Whatever one’s politics may be, the New Year promises to be
a repeat of past times, at least nationally. The two leading candidates for
president are former President Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden,
oldies but, their parties assure us, goodies.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The dish on Biden is that he is well past his prime. His
enemies are saying the man is a doddering old fool, while his friends have been
slightly more charitable. He’s just old, and perhaps doddering, but certainly
no fool. Even so, Democrat luminary David Axelrod, former Democrat President
Barack Obama’s Wizard of Oz, has said the old guy should bow out, in favor of
someone else whose poll numbers are… ahem… more encouraging.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/david-axelrod-warns-barring-trump-from-2024-ballot-will-tear-the-country-apart/ar-AA1mfarO"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Axelrod</b></a> recently has given aid and
comfort to the enemy by insisting that booting Trump off the ballot in numerous
states would be a disaster worse than… well, the erasure of our southern
border. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Said Axelrod, “I have very, very strong reservations about
all of this. I do think it would rip the country apart if he [Trump] were
actually prevented from running because tens of millions of people want to vote
for him.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Indeed, Americans can be ornery when they are told by
anti-democrats in black robes that they may not vote for a former president who
likely will be a party’s prime choice for president. This attempt to sink a
rival before he can be sunk in an honest election appears to be, on the face of
it, anti-democratic.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The dish on Trump is that he is a menace to the Republic, an
out-of-the-closet fascist, an enemy of the democracy presently bound and gagged
by Biden-friendly prosecutors.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In the postmodern era, important decision-making agencies,
including the presidency, are held by A but run by B. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Biden’s frailties, under such circumstance, may
not be determinative. The U.S. political Land of Oz is a bewitching façade but,
so long as a relatively competent wizard is pulling the right strings behind
the curtain, appearances will continue to be charmingly deceiving. “Who is the
Wizard Running the Democrat Party?” was a much played board game in the old
year. Some said the Clintons, Bill and Hillary, were running the political
shop. Others said no, it was the Obamas. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Still others said President Biden was at the helm
blunderingly guiding the ship of state onto one shoal after another. He touched
Afghanistan, and it turned to ashes. He touched the southern border and it
collapsed. Few noticed the border had disappeared so long as illegal aliens pouring
across – more than ten million souls since Biden laid his hands on a bible and
vowed, “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the
Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability,
preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States"—were
problems only for certain border states. But then border states full to the
brim with illegals began exporting unwanted migrants to Martha’s Vineyard,
Massachusetts, New York City and other welcoming sanctuary states, producing
pandemonium and ethical revaluations.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“More than 10 million people have been reported illegally
entering the United States since President Joe Biden took office in January
2021,” the <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/illegal-border-crossers-total-over-10-million-since-biden-inauguration"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Washington Examiner</b></a> reported last
October, “the greatest number in history and of any administration. They total
more than the individual populations of 41 states.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Passionate political advocates – those leaning conservative
or neo-progressive – seem to be immovable. What used to be called “the vital
center” of American politics is fast disappearing. In 2020, Biden ran for
office as a typical John F. Kennedy liberal Democrat. Having achieved office,
following a kerfuffle at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Biden tailored
his past policies to new neo-progressive demands made by the left wing of his
party. Most people from both political camps – free-marketer Republicans and
proto-socialist Democrats – might, given truth serum, agree that Biden’s first
term in office was the most radical we have seen in living memory. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It has not taken long for politically observant Americans to
catch on to the shift in the political template. And polls suggest they do not
like an overbearing central government bent on making intrusive decisions
better made by states and municipalities – not to mention most women in the
United States who are happy with their non-electric stoves.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">According to a reliable <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/547763/biden-ends-2023-job-approval.aspx"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Gallup</b></a> poll, “President Joe Biden’s
job approval rating is 39%, marking a slight improvement from the 37% low point
in October and November but the fifth time his rating is below 40% in 2023.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-s-polling-problem-running-for-re-election-in-2024-the-president-ends-2023-underwater/ar-AA1mhg57?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=fdcc0cea0afb4abaa8d8dfac354a5a21&ei=16"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Biden’s most recent approval ratings</b></a>
are fathoms below water even though, despite dire warnings from Environment
Czars John Kerry, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg, the world’s polar ice caps have
not yet fully melted.<o:p></o:p></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-3252009573041699042023-12-29T09:39:00.003-05:002023-12-29T09:39:47.056-05:00Have a Christian Christmas<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpeiPTqddj6KCFnhvtUBGtoPK-2unW0kagG6UjmYBJmwvys_-Cep3LR6_ViwLBvyMtCZQmusCbMxt83Nll_hpHaKJNJPwMt26iMaCbd08sp1cmPPaYXCSqvabegavKiokTSK5R_HGnNkxXS_12WVku4WPrk_Mh6l_ljEf2h7XesNKJOdEkBDNE/s1024/Madonna%20and%20Child.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="798" height="470" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpeiPTqddj6KCFnhvtUBGtoPK-2unW0kagG6UjmYBJmwvys_-Cep3LR6_ViwLBvyMtCZQmusCbMxt83Nll_hpHaKJNJPwMt26iMaCbd08sp1cmPPaYXCSqvabegavKiokTSK5R_HGnNkxXS_12WVku4WPrk_Mh6l_ljEf2h7XesNKJOdEkBDNE/w366-h470/Madonna%20and%20Child.jpg" width="366" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Who do you say that I
am?</i> – Mathew 16:15<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As we grow older, everything tends to vanish. Our interests
and focus is repurposed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have tucked
Charles Dickens’ “Christmas Past” in our memory banks, but draw upon our
reserves to give us the pleasure of seasonal joy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">King Lear is old, and painfully wise. A terribly sane Lear,
suddenly dispossessed of his kingdom, finds himself, along with his faithful
fool, on a forbidding heath in Great Britain’s frigid north, while winds and hurricanes
beat about them. A friendly Kent, disguised as a beggar, points the way to a
shabby hovel.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Lear addresses his fool: “In, boy. Go first, you houseless
poverty.” And he then challenges the unforgiving storm: “Poor naked wretches,
wheresoe’er you are, that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, how shall
your houseless heads and unfed sides, your looped and windowed raggedness
defend you from seasons such as these? O, I have taken too little care of this.
Take physic, pomp, expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, that thou may’st
shake the superflux to them, and show the heavens more just.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The superflux is the superfluity of our wealth, that portion
of our assets we may give to the poor and the stranger among us without
suffering much discomfort.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This is, in great part, the message of Christianity to an
unheeding world.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We cannot call ourselves Christians – that is, followers of
Jesus, the Christ – and avert out eyes from the poor or the stranger among us. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And those of us who believe that the way of
Christ is a smooth and straight path that leads inescapably to eternal felicity
should be forced, if necessary at the point of a gun, to re-read Soren
Kierkegaard’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Attack on Christendom</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The way to Christ leads<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> through the cross</i></b>, and the true
“witness” to Christ is the one gladly willing to suffer the obloquy of
unbelievers who cannot bring themselves to believe that Christ himself and his
message will always be a stumbling stone to those who lack the courage to act
on their faith -- that one, believing in Christ, may mount to Heaven on a cross
of suffering because he or she has been redeemed by the blood of the lamb.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In Christianity, suffering is not a mere nullity – the
absence of a good, as the pre-Christian philosophers of Greece and Rome taught
us. And the stranger among us bears within himself the image of Christ on the
cross.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Mary, the mother of Jesus, also saved by his sacrifice on
the cross, fully understood the message of Christ, which is why the Christian
Church honors her as its first and truest theologian. The angel Gabriel sent by
the Father brings to her, a lowly servant of the word, the glad tidings that
await mankind, and she responds instantly, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord.
Let it be with me according to your word,” Luke 1: 38.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">According to early Christian tradition, most of the Apostles
were martyred for their faith. Peter was crucified upside down in Rome; Andrew
was crucified on an X-shaped cross in Greece; James was stoned to death in
Jerusalem; Philip was crucified in Hierapolis, Turkey; Bartholomew was flayed
alive and then beheaded in Armenia; Matthew was stabbed to death in Ethiopia;
Thomas was speared to death in India; James was stoned and then clubbed to
death in Jerusalem; Jude was killed with arrows in Persia; Simon was crucified
in Persia; and Matthias was stoned and then beheaded in Jerusalem.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">During this Christmas, among our family and friends, we
should try to form for ourselves an answer to the question Jesus put to his
apostles – Who do you say I am?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">How can one help but be joyful at the good tidings brought,
Luke tells us, by angels to shepherds tending their flocks by night: “And the
angel said to them: Fear not. For, behold, I bring you good tidings of great
joy that shall be to all the people. For, this day is born to you a Savior, who
is Christ the Lord, in the city of David. And this shall be a sign unto you.
You shall find the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger…”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But let us not forget the words spoken to Mary by Simon, a
devout man who had been promised by the Holy Spirit that he would not die until
he had seen the Messiah: “Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,
that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed (Luke 2:35).”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-77135734901367346582023-12-29T09:39:00.002-05:002023-12-29T09:39:34.664-05:00Trump the Insurrectionist<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9-wCFLOQdUrZ0OiCfa1syZJUjVqZSwt4LmmpBpBDrolER_HYpoSsLWlTMb1m07Gwy5lGGAFTHwraab-GT_dLgSAhC1WkHY_TWv-u2gfHtsiud42Hdz5oLKUezYGusKxV0TRORI-sOHRILHgOYCP727ZVhjnbYUkhodd-WVnvRq5lS4ej0GJND/s2500/trump-indictment-charges-newsweek%20(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1701" data-original-width="2500" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9-wCFLOQdUrZ0OiCfa1syZJUjVqZSwt4LmmpBpBDrolER_HYpoSsLWlTMb1m07Gwy5lGGAFTHwraab-GT_dLgSAhC1WkHY_TWv-u2gfHtsiud42Hdz5oLKUezYGusKxV0TRORI-sOHRILHgOYCP727ZVhjnbYUkhodd-WVnvRq5lS4ej0GJND/s320/trump-indictment-charges-newsweek%20(2).jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Trump -- Newsweek</td></tr></tbody></table><br />CNN’s Data Reporter Harry Enten is depressed. The figures he
has been examining show prices for essential goods increasing and real wages
decreasing, the result of an inflationary dragon scorching the house with its
fiery breath.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Just look at this, Enten noted: “From the first year of a
president’s term to now in a term -- look at this! We’ve actually had negative
growth. We have actually decreased the amount of disposable income we’ve had,
2.7% for the Biden administration. Look at that. The average for the president since
JFK, is plus 4.5 percent. And even in the last few months, the last six months,
the growth that we’ve had — just 0.2 percent. The average six months since 1960
[is] 1.1 percent, so we’re even behind on that metric.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“It is kind of depressing.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">CNN, it should be noted, is not part of the Republican Party’s
anti-democracy plot to return former President Donald Trump to office in 2024.
Political readers should know that the station is just the opposite,
consistently anti-Trump and pro-Biden. President Joe Biden’s flagging spirits –
he has plummeted in reliable polls – should have been lifted by a decision
rendered by the Supreme Court of Colorado that, shortly after Enten’s depression,
sanctioned the removal of Trump from the state’s ballot.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Associated Press, suppressing its joy at the decision,
noted dryly, “The Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday, Dec. 19, declared former
President Donald Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S.
Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s
presidential primary ballot, setting up a likely showdown in the nation’s
highest court to decide whether the front-runner for the GOP nomination can
remain in the race.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The decision from a court <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">whose justices were all appointed
by Democratic governors</i></b> (emphasis mine) marks the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">first time in history</i></b>
that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential
candidate.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Section 3 of the post-Civil War 14<sup>th</sup> amendment
reads in full: “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.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The purpose of the amendment was to deny public office to
public officials in the post-Civil War period who had engaged in a real
secessionist insurrection against the national government of the United States.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Former President Donald Trump had not caused either of the
two states he called home, New York or Florida, to succeed from the Union and, whatever
else Trump may be, he is no Jefferson Davis or General Robert E. Lee.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">While it is true that Trump, backed by a slew of lawyers and
political confederates, contested the results of the 2020 national election, he
left office peacefully following the interrupted vote, after which, it has not
been sufficiently noted in news reports, national Democrats unaccountably
sought to abolish the Electoral College that had decided a close election in
their favor. No prominent Democrats were found screaming from the rooftops that
other prominent Democrats, by ridding the nation of its electoral college, were
engaging in political insurrection. Trump had, it is true, contested the
electoral count, but he had not gone so far as to call for its abolition.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We do not know at this point whether the decision of the
Colorado Supreme Court has further depressed CNN’s Data Reporter Harry Enten –
not likely. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Possibly the court’s misapplication
of the U.S. Constitution’s 14 amendment in its effort to rid politically
pristine Colorado of a noxious Republican presidential contender has lifted Enten
from his slough of despond.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In the meantime, the “swamp” Trump threatened to drain in
his first term in office has since swamped him with challenging judicial
affronts. Toting up all the judicial offences Trump is facing, many of them
highly unorthodox, Trump will, if Democrat politicians have their way, emerge
from the judicial wrack both poor and a jailbird. In addition, some state supreme
courts, Colorado but not <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/michigan-supreme-court-rejects-bid-to-keep-trump-off-2024-ballot/ar-AA1m6jBI"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Michigan</b></a>, have taken measures to
remove Trump from the 2024 presidential elections. Coincidentally, the cry that
Trump is a threat to the democracy of the United States appears to be lost on
Democrats who fail to understand the notion of irony.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So far, Biden, also deeply immersed in multiple corruption
investigations, has attempted to explain his difficulties, both personal and
political, by explaining them away, but even ardent pro-Biden neo-progressives
appear to be jumping ship. Living in his own outworn political cocoon, Biden
truly believes that he may, in words attributed to Lincoln, “fool all the
people some of the time and some of the people all the time…” Lincoln, of
course, added “but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It is the lofty ambition of ambitious politicians to prove
Lincoln wrong on this last point.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Time will tell whether they are successful.<o:p></o:p></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9069955.post-16562169113866617582023-12-21T16:31:00.002-05:002023-12-21T16:31:51.338-05:00War and Peace, Israel and Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinumVIGyp5MmO5Q0HdlSXbGnYfh143cAPLJkuQl06lFfdiVxfPbSw17P5QvXvAgIZFlhH4yg3QYiiigQs9GcKtPQ24FCxKHO0apf5DcYlqy1FQfgv8PObeEzIJPXAhNEET-8dXdgQjZiOuUEGnoYHhwDe_FVKAbq1grWUJpUo47-oVocTxbCTd/s455/Netanyahu%20and%20Biden%20--%20Avi%20Ohayon,%20Israeli%20Government,%20via%20Associated%20Press.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="399" data-original-width="455" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinumVIGyp5MmO5Q0HdlSXbGnYfh143cAPLJkuQl06lFfdiVxfPbSw17P5QvXvAgIZFlhH4yg3QYiiigQs9GcKtPQ24FCxKHO0apf5DcYlqy1FQfgv8PObeEzIJPXAhNEET-8dXdgQjZiOuUEGnoYHhwDe_FVKAbq1grWUJpUo47-oVocTxbCTd/s320/Netanyahu%20and%20Biden%20--%20Avi%20Ohayon,%20Israeli%20Government,%20via%20Associated%20Press.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Netanyahu and Biden -- Avi Ohayon, Israeli Government, via Associated Press</td></tr></tbody></table><br />The views of <b><a href="https://portal.ct.gov/SOTS/Election-Services/Find-Your-Town-Clerk-Registrar-and-Elected-Officials/US-Senators-and-Representatives">Connecticut’s
all-Democrat U.S. Congressional Delegation</a></b> on war and peace in Israel
are remarkably similar, as if they had all flowed from the same mind and pen.
Very likely they did. Democrats are famous for producing campaign scripts and
assuring that all the players, both nationally and in-state, rigidly adhere to
them. This saves politicians the trouble of thinking independently.<o:p></o:p></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">We owe to the Harford Courant’s <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/congressman-larson-says-netanyahu-failing-his-country-as-israel-hamas-war-continues/ar-AA1lKMfB"><b>Chris Keating</b></a> an unobstructed view
of the delegation’s scripted mindset. And the mind of the delegation is set in
concrete political narratives.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">U.S. Representative John Larson of Connecticut’s 1st
District, which has lain sleeping in Democrat hands for 64 years, may serve as
an example. To the politically unlettered observer, the district appears to be
horseshoe shaped gerrymander. The principal cities in Larson’s district are
Bristol, Hartford, and Torrington. The district has been represented by Larson
since 1999. The last Republican to hold the seat was Edwin May, who left office
in 1959.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/congressman-larson-says-netanyahu-failing-his-country-as-israel-hamas-war-continues/ar-AA1lKMfB"><b>Congressman Larson says Netanyahu ‘failing
his country’ as Israel-Hamas war</b></a><b>,
</b>the Courant proclaimed in a top of the fold, front page story on December
20<sup>th</sup>.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Larson wanted the paper’s readers to understand that Israel
“’has the unequivocal right to defend itself’ following an invasion by the
Hamas terrorist group on Oct. 7.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">But there is a “but.” Larson told the Courant that “Israel
needs to take further steps to bring peace in a war-torn land.” And, he
continued, “Continued failure to heed President Biden’s warnings about
prioritizing the protection of civilians, developing a plan for Palestinian
governance of Gaza post-war, and putting an end to settler violence in the West
Bank are eroding support for Israel among the international community and here
at home in the United States. I am calling for a new pause in fighting until
Netanyahu and his government are able to lay out a strategy that would protect
civilians, provide for sustainable delivery of humanitarian aid, remove Hamas from
power, and begin immediate multilateral talks on securing a two-state solution.
As with the previous humanitarian pause, it must also include the release of
hostages from Hamas.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Several questions arise, none of them answered in the
Courant story.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Israel, in the person of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/International/timeline-surprise-rocket-attack-hamas-israel/story?id=103816006"><b>declared war</b></a> on Hamas – both a
terrorist organization and the <b><i>government</i></b> of Gaza -- shortly after
Hamas had murdered 1,200 unarmed and defenseless Israelis on October 7, a
declaration of war heartily backed at the time by President Joe Biden. Larson
also has Israel’s back, but he has reservations (see above), and Israel’s back
has of late been conditionally protected by Democrat politicians who had vowed
immediately after the Hamas assault on Israel – not to worry – we’ve got your
back.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">It simply is not true that Israel has renounced reasonable
measures to protect Gazan citizens unconnected with Hamas. Indeed,
extraordinary measures to protect Gazans had been put in place <b><i>before</i></b>
Biden and Larson’s remonstrances.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">What precisely are Larson’s demands at this juncture?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Larson wants a new pause in fighting “until Netanyahu and
his government are able to lay out a strategy that would protect civilians,
provide for sustainable delivery of humanitarian aid, remove Hamas from power,
and begin immediate multilateral talks on securing a two-state solution.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">It would be simpler, and more honest, had Larson demanded an
immediate end to hostilities – that is to say, an end to Israel’s declared war
against Hamas – because his own declared ends are incompatible with his
approved destruction of Hamas by Netanyahu’s military.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Israel has left Gaza to its own devices for 18 years. In
2005, Israel unilaterally dismantled Israeli citizen settlements in Gaza. So
much for recent claims of Israeli colonization. At the same time, the Israeli
army evacuated from inside the Gaza Strip. Rather than using money pouring into
Gaza to uplift its population, the government of Gaza – Hamas mass murderers –
used the funding to lay its made-in-Iran military plans, built miles of tunnels
leading from the sea into Israel proper to help Islamic extremists financed by
Iran to “drive Israel into the sea,” with the bloody results we now see plainly
before us.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Larson knows all this, and so do other long serving Democrat
members of Connecticut’s all-Democrat U.S. Congressional Delegation such as U.S.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, and foreign policy wunderkind U.S.
Senator Chris Murphy. They all know that the war against Hamas—and also a
hearty opposition to a menacing Iran – must be won decisively before Hamas
oppressed Gazans can enjoy a prolonged much deserved peace.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Wars are not peaceful affairs. Sustainable peace arrives
only after one of the contesting parties is victorious. Who wins the war shapes
the peace, and it has become plain, even in the midst of war, that Gazans who
have for 18 years suffered fear and want at the hands of their governing
oppressors, may be rooting for the Israelis – not Hamas or Iran. Indeed, a sustained Western backed Israeli
protectorate in Gaza at war’s end, may bring a sustainable peace and prosperity
to long suffering Gazans and Israelis. The protectorate should be spearheaded by
Israel and supported by the United States, its allies, and reliable Arab states
such as Saudi Arabia with a view to thwarting the malign influence of Iran. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">President Barack Obama’s highly romanticized vision of Israeli
lambs lying down peacefully with Hamas/Iranian lions was always a pipe dream.
There can be no “two state solution” if one of the states is either Hamas or
some updated version of the former Palestinian Authority.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Blumenthal’s realpolitik is a more just and workable
solution. The Courant’s Keating tells us that “U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal is
offering bipartisan legislation with U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican,
to clamp down on Iran for providing funding for Hamas, which attacked Israel on
Oct. 7, prompting an ongoing war.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">“‘They are equipped, supplied, trained by Iran,’ Blumenthal
said recently. ‘They are fueled by the financial wherewithal that comes from
Iran’s sales of oil. The United States has said it is imposing sanctions to
prevent Iran from selling that oil. But all too often, these sanctions have
been unenforced. The result has been a deluge of dollars going to Iran’s
proxies. That’s the stark, undisputed truth. Hamas would not exist without
Iran.’”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Someone in Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation –
Larson, DeLauro, Murphy, Blumenthal – should put a bug in Biden’s ear. So far,
President Biden has advanced Iran’s cause by relieving the once and future
caliphate of its crippling sanctions. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">“Without Iran’s support, Hamas could not operate and would
have run out of supplies long ago,” Blumenthal said.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">
</p><p class="MsoNormal">Nail, meet hammer. Likewise, without Biden’s end to
sanctions, Iran long ago would have run out of money with which it has purchased
the murderous activities of Iran’s terrorist proxy armies in Gaza, Lebanon and
Yemen.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p><br /></p>Don Pescihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11167988001948356357noreply@blogger.com0