Tending to Business

Tending to Business

Today, as never before perhaps -- given the genuinely apocalyptic threats unfolding around us -- Americans have an obligation to themselves, their families, and society to quit whining, stop comparing notes on who is more diseased, addicted, or dysfunctional, and just tend to business.

Steve Salerno - SHAM - How the Self-Help Movement Made American Helpless, p. 141

Dick Henthorn

16 Oct 2019

Demagogue

Demagogue

It is not hard to see how feelings of Victimization would make groups of people who share in a common form of oppression exquisitely susceptible to the demagogue: the politician or political activist who vows to level the playing field and win proper redress for his constituency. The demagogue consolidates his power by fanning the flames of your impotence. He plays to the paranoia of those who feel downtrodden and persecuted, which SHAM [Self-Help and Actualization Movement] counsels just about everyone to feel in one sense or another.

Steve Salerno, SHAM - How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, p. 241-42)

Dick Henthorn

15 Oct 2019

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

In his topsy-turvy tale, “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,” Lewis Carroll explores the underside of life in the chaos of Wonderland, where "everything's got a moral if only you can find it." Adults almost inevitably find that Wonderland is like life. The comically absurd situations give us a chance to laugh, which we must all do at times or die of despair.

When Alice follows the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole, she is plunged into a place where nothing, including language, works in a familiar way. Even the traditional dimensions of orderly time and space are nowhere to be found. Desperately reciting memorized lessons, she tries to make sense of the present chaos in terms of the stable past. When Alice can no longer count on her beliefs to make sense, she first loses her security and then her identity, asking throughout her adventures, "but then ... who am I?”

Like Alice, as we face our own disorganized world, we're tempted to escape back into the reassuring innocence of childhood. Choosing to act unhampered by conventional wisdom gives us greater freedom. Still, that freedom is hard to hold onto. We have to trust ourselves even when everyone else seems to agree that we don't know what we're doing.

There are times when your freedom depends on believing in yourself, no matter what else no matter what anyone else thinks. 

Sheldon Kopp in “Blues Ain't Nothing But A Good Soul Feeling Bad” - November 6

Dick Henthorn
4 Oct 2019

Interpreting the Constitution

Interpreting the Constitution

Like Obama himself, [Elena] Kagan did little to fight back against these notions, but there was a cost to their silence. Left unrefuted, originalism began to look like the status quo. There was no one to say that an eighteenth-century document that embraced slavery, that ignored women, and that limited the right to vote was an imperfect guide in resolving contemporary problems. No one made the argument that it was impossible to determine precisely what the framers meant in every provision (or that they often disagreed with one another about what the words meant). No one said the Constitution's values might be as important as its specific words, or that the framers never wanted or expected later generations to honor their precise understanding of their words or that the Supreme Court's own interpretation of those words over time has value, too.
The Oath - The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Toobin, Page 229

Dick Henthorn
28 Aug 2019

Theodore Roosevelt and Campaign Finance

Theodore Roosevelt and Campaign Finance

[Theodore] Roosevelt won a landslide election in 1904, helped in part by vast campaign contributions by corporations. Roosevelt drew heavily from railroad and insurance interests and, in the last days before the election, made a personal appeal for funds to a group of wealthy businessmen, including Henry Clay Frick, the steel baron. Years later, Frick recalled of Roosevelt, “He got down on his knees to us. We bought the son-of-a-bitch and then he did not stay bought,” Almost as soon as TR won the election, he turned his attention to passing the first campaign finance reform act in American history -- trying to outlaw the very techniques he had just used to hang on to the presidency. Roosevelt put the effort to ban corporate money in politics near the top of his agenda. In his annual message to Congress on December 5, 1905, he recommended that “all contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law.”

Roosevelt’s efforts came to fruition in 1907 with the passage of the Tillman Act, named for the eccentric rogue “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, the South Carolina senator who sponsored the las.
The Oath - The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Toobin, Page 148

Dick Henthorn
27 Aug 2019

Extractions from "One Nation After Trump"

One Nation After Trump

A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusiioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet-Deported.

by

E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Norman J. Ornstein

Thomas E. Mann

I recently finished reading this book that I borrowed from the county library.  I thought the book was Excellent.

This post is includes a few extractions from the book.

Fake News - page 54

The road to "fake news" was paved by the disdain in a large part of the conservative movement for real news. The trail to "alternative facts" was blazed by a mistrust of those whose jobs and professional ethics required them to report and rely on real facts.

Election of Donald Trump - p. 175

... But his [Donald Trump's] election ought to jar those who make up our nations's governing class. They now know that Americans in large numbers were so disaffected that they embraced a candidate whose temperament and behavior were plainly ill suited to the requirements of the nation's highest office.

Lessons - p, 220

Among the many lessons to take away from the Trump campaign is how destructive a candidate who capitalizes on and encourages a lack of empathy can be.

Community p. 223

Writing about the devastation of a seemingly indestructible mountain culture in a West Virginia community struck by flooding in 1972, the sociologist Kai Erikson described the human role of community as clearly as anyone has, "It is the comminity that cushions pain, the community that provides a context for intimacy, the community thar represents morality and serves as the repository for old traditions." His classic Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood underscored how fragile community can be.

Citizen Involvement - p. 246

Getting more citizens into the democratic fray is essential to defending and repairing our republic.

But as Ivins would insist, democracy is not for wimps or for those who seek purity in all things.  Ours is a complex, pluralistic, representative democracy, one in which political parties play an essential role in elections and policy making.  People pursue their right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" in many ways, some of them boisterous and inconveniet.  Powerful group identities shape the relations between representatives and the represented.  Getting into the fight will mean devoting outselves to the often-hard work of politics, even when it makes us uncomfortable.  It will require recognizing that we will not always be successful but that each experience will sharpen our skills. It will demand creative approaches to effecting change.  It will mean becoming involved with some of the oldest forms of political action, inside parties and at the precinct level, while at the same time being willing to embrace new political alliances.

Electoral College - p. 257

Why should Americans who choose to live in California be punished by having their electoral power reduced? Should it not be more troubling that 4.27 million voters in California mattered far less than 10,704 voters in Michigan, 22,748 voters in Wisconsin, and 44,292 voters in Pennsylvania? Either we are a democratic republic, or we are not.  We either believe in one person, one vote, or we don't. 

Consider Trump - p, 286

Consider the aspects of Trump’s persona and approach that incite such disquiet and rage: the ease with which he demonizes whole groups of Americans; his indifference to fact; his willingness to lie with impunity; his lack of even elementary knowledge or intellectual curiosity about policy; his proclivity toward shifting positions again and again; his quest to tote up “wins” without any concern about the content of the proposals he is pushing; his lack of any historical sense; his belief that everything is about a “deal”; and his refusal to acknowledge any need to separate his personal financial interest from his public duties. 

Dick Henthorn

20 Aug 2019

Senator Mitch McConnell

Senator Mitch McConnell

... Control of the presidency is therefore the Holy Grail for both parties. In October 2010, for instance, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell made clear that "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." When he decided this was best accomplished through a campaign of merciless obstructiion, McConnell brought the government to a halt. Here we see how the emergence of an extremely powerful presidency encouraged destructive forms of political warfare.

 From To End A Presidency - The Power of Impeachment, p. 208, by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz

Dick Henthorn
7 Apr 2019