Sunday, February 03, 2019

Of Pots And Kettles

Actually, he pretty much has:
The picture plays second fiddle to the  proposed abortion law. Only in the next tweet does it become "terrible," but the racism issue goes unmentioned except for how it would have cost Northam the election.

Would have been much worse if it didn't matter, right?

Oh, and the real reason for the second tweet:
Nothing the man speaks of isn't about him.
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Ariel Poems: Epiphany 2018


There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish – which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.
The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,
So that the surprises, delight in new possessions
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),
The expectation of the goose or turkey
And the expected awe on its appearance,
So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to the children
(And here I remember also with gratitude
St. Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):
So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(By “eightieth” meaning whichever is the last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.

--T.S. Eliot

The late addition to the "Ariel" poems.
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Saturday, February 02, 2019

Digging In


TC says things like this all the time:

Anyone who would choose the banal, historically inaccurate and dishonest propaganda of The Freedom From Religion Foundation over Walter Brueggemann's  radical alternative to even that adjunct of the market totalism is too stupid to argue with. 

No, not the part about Ron Reagan, Jr.; the part about Walter Brueggemann.  In fact, if Brueggemann were a public office holder, not an otherwise obscure Biblical scholar (not obscure in his field, but not well known beyond it), I wonder if he's be subject to a "fact check" for his ideas:

I think I'll either find where this talk is published as text or transcribe it over the next month in lieu of reposting my series on the history of abolitionism from several years ago.  This talk is all about how we are enslaved even as slavery is abolished, especially those who were alleged to be emancipated.  

That description puts Brueggemann miles beyond what AOC (I'm lazy, sue me) said in an interview on MLK Day this year:

But I do think a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong. And I think it’s wrong that [1] a vast majority of the country doesn’t make a living wage, I think it’s wrong that [2] you can work 100 hours and not feed your kids. I think it’s wrong that [3] corporations like Walmart and Amazon can get paid by the government, essentially experience a wealth transfer from the public, [4] for paying people less than a minimum wage. And it not only doesn’t make economic sense, but it doesn’t make moral sense and it doesn’t make societal sense.
I don't think Brueggemann would argue with her; I know I don't.  I bring this up because it prompted a "fact check" from Glenn Kessler at WaPo where he awarded AOC 3 "Pinocchios" for having the temerity to make an economic argument that didn't praise capitalism in all its rapaciousness.  Yeah, IMHO; but I think this, the heart of the analysis I recommend you read, is accurate to a pinpoint:

So, read in context, everything AOC said was true, even if we accept Kessler’s factual counterclaims! The entire fact-checking ritual was a charade. As I suggested earlier, it was really a boundary-policing episode, meant to keep her “radical” ideas outside the sphere of legitimate debate by portraying her as untrustworthy. Further, it was meant to deter others from similar infractions while trying to break through the barriers excluding them from legitimacy. (See AOC’s related Twitter thread on “gravitas” here.)
Fact-checking is a way of excluding from the conversation ideas the "mainstream" doesn't like.  Such exclusion doesn't mean excluded ideas are sound (racism is rightly excluded, for example); but it does mean only certain ideas merit attention or study, while others don't.  I can agree that Marx was a lousy economist (and historian; but I blame Hegel and the 19th century for that; it's a long discussion); but I can't reach that conclusion without at least reading Marx (something that was considered heresy in my childhood; we were to take Marx as "wrong" and be done with him).  Maybe AOC is as wrong, too (no, I don't think so, but the argument has to be considered).  How do I know until I test her arguments, and the best way to do that is to consider that her arguments may be right, and mine may be wrong.

It takes a bit of effort to learn to do this, but it's worth the price of admission.

It wasn't so long ago that capitalism was not the be all and end all of human existence; partly the withering away of the church as a place where you might get a counter-narrative (it's certainly in the Scriptures, even if most denominations hide from it) is the reason for its supremacy today.  The meanness of spirit, the withering of generosity, the narrowness of vision, are all hallmarks of a generally accepted philosophy that scarcity is the rule and want is the demon, and we must hold tightly to what we have and protect it against all takers who would rob us of our futures, if not our present.  That's the fear I detect in Kessler's analysis of AOC's observations (and the article at the link is right, too, about the radical MLK which we prefer to replace with the anodyne version who basically only "had a dream"); the fear that the future is arriving behind her, and is going to snatch away all the comforts he has.  The theology of scarcity, Brueggemann calls it; the idea that everything is limited and must be hoarded because the future that faces us is as grim and despairing as any apocalyptic cinema vision of the ruin that awaits us all, that we can at best postpone but can never avoid.

There's a reason apocalyptic movies and video games are still so popular; or at least visions of a doomed future our heroes might be able to prevent before the final credits, still creates the rising action in so many films and games.  More and more we believe there is less and less available, and our doom is certain and unshakeable; whether we have brought it on ourselves or it will be brought upon us, is irrelevant to the analysis, to the fear.  We must be afraid but we must be more afraid of those who would show us a different, a better path, because while this path is doomed, all other paths lead to damnation.  AOC, in the spirit of Dr. King, is saying it doesn't have to be this way, it can be better; Kessler, in the spirit of those who reviled Dr. King (and they were legion; ah yes, I remember it well), says it can only be "this way," and AOC is not only a fool but a dangerous one.

While, as the article points out, Donald Trump crosses the threshold of 8000 established lies since he took office, and that number, as this week's events proved, is only going up ever more sharply.  But Trump is just a bull in a china shop; AOC is the threat to the existence of the china shop; apparently.  And the first step, the one we've taken most successfully, is to erase history (it is no accident the Hebrew Scriptures are dominated by a recording of Israel's history, and why the God of Abraham is present and active in history):

Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell laughed at the idea [of a 70% tax rate, as proposed by AOC], and said he thought it would be bad for economic growth. “Name a country where that’s worked,” he responded. “Ever.” Sitting there with him was MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who supplied the example: the United States, throughout most of its post-World War II expansion. It was a rare, Marshall McLuhan-in-“Annie Hall” moment. Usually, when the super-rich or their sycophants spout off like that, truth does not intrude. Certainly not from the fact-checking media.
Dell is much younger than me, and obviously much more ignorant of history.  What does he need to know, except that his skill and genius made him rich?  They didn't, of course; in a country with no access to the markets, infrastructure, industrialization, established social order, and educated at public expense work force, Michael Dell would likely be an unknown citizen.  That's another leg of the theology of scarcity:  I alone can do it, when in reality, as Donne said, "no man is an island."  It's not just that the funeral bell tolls for thee, but that apart from each other we are each one nothing.  Donne refused to imagine such a society; we refuse to imagine it any other way.  Who is the richer for our radically different visions of community?

And consider this "crazy idea" from George Soros, the man you've heard about yet likely never heard from:

For the last 25 years … the motor of the world economy that has been driving it was consumption by the American consumer, who has been spending more than he has been saving, all right? Than he’s been producing. So that motor is now switched off. It’s finished. … You need a new motor. And we have a big problem. Global warming. It requires big investment. And that could be the motor of the world economy in the years to come.
Has the motor been switched off, and only momentum gives us the impression we are still being powered?  That's the lesson, and the fear, of apocalyptic:  that we've run out, scarcity is upon us, and before us lie deserts of vast eternity; vast, and empty, and lifeless.  There they are, and there's nothing we can do about it; or there is, and it's more of the same that got us here.

What's the definition of insanity?

Fact checkers will not save us from ourselves, nor protect us from reality.  The bird in Eliot's poem was right:  humankind cannot bear very much reality.  But we are still obligated to come up with ways to do so, rather than spend ever more energy finding ways to refuse it.



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Candlemas 2019

Νϋν άπολύεις τον δοϋλον σου, δέσποτα,
κατά τό πήμά έν είρήνη
οτι είδον οί όφθαλμοί μου τό σωτήριόν σου
ό ήτοίμασας κατά πρόσωπον πάντων τώυ λαϖν
φϖς είς άποκάλυψιν έθνϖν
καί δόξα νλαοϋ σου ‘Ισραήλ

Ceremony upon Candlemas Eve--Robert Herrick

Down with the rosemary, and so
Down with the bays and mistletoe;
Down with the holly, ivy, all
Wherewith ye dressed the Christmas hall;
That so the superstitious find
No one least branch left behind;
For look, how many leaves there be
Neglected there, maids, trust to me,
So many goblins you shall see.


At Candlemas--Charles Causley

'If Candlemas be fine and clear
There'll be two winters in that year';

But all the day the drumming sun
Brazened it out that spring had come,

And the tall elder on the scene
Unfolded the first leaves of green.

But when another morning came
With frost, as Candlemas with flame,
The sky was steel, there was no sun,
The elder leaves were dead and gone.

Out of a cold and crusted eye
The stiff pond stared up at the sky,

And on the scarcely breathing earth
A killing wind fell from the north,

But still within the elder tree
The strong sap rose, though none could see.


The Gospel according to St. Luke, Chapter 2

22 And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord;

23 (As it is written in the law of the LORD, Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord;)

24 And to offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.

25 And, behold, there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Ghost was upon him.

26 And it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost, that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord's Christ.

27 And he came by the Spirit into the temple: and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him after the custom of the law,

28 Then took he him up in his arms, and blessed God, and said,

29 Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word:

30 For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,

31 Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;

32 A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.

33 And Joseph and his mother marvelled at those things which were spoken of him.

34 And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against;

35 (Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.

36 And there was one Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser: she was of a great age, and had lived with an husband seven years from her virginity;

37 And she was a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day.

38 And she coming in that instant gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem.

39 And when they had performed all things according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city Nazareth.

40 And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him.

The date for Candlemas does not come from "pagan" Irish holidays, but from Mosaic law (Leviticus 12:2-8). As New Advent notes, the earliest attestation to any observation of the day is in the Jerusalem church, where the event was observed on February 14th, meaning Christ's birthday was, as at least one version of The Cherry Tree Carol has it, on Epiphany, not December 25th. (Interestingly, that carol has roots in Pseudo-Matthew, where it's a palm tree, not a cherry tree (of course), something I didn't know, but suspected. Chapter 20, if you're wondering. Interesting how these "apocryphal" stories persist, isn't it?)

Anyway, the folklore connected with this day is that now, finally, Christmas is over, because the last public act of Christ the child is conducted.   The Christmas celebration ends with the άποκάλυψιν, the apocalypse, again. What Simeon sings is that this child, presented at the Temple, will be a revelation, an "apocalypse," to the έθνϖν, the "ethnown," the Gentiles. People like Luke. People like most of us. Lord, now let us depart in peace.

 
Rain and grey clouds and falling temperatures here on the Third Coast. (The pagan connection is that this day, midway between winter solstice and spring equinox, marks the start of spring.) No unfolding first leaves of green. I was taught by a farmer's daughter (watch it! She was my mother's age when I met her) that winter isn't over here until the pecan trees start to bud, so I wait patiently; and, as ever, hope only to depart in peace.
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Friday, February 01, 2019

Only Connect

The Washington Examiner notes:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could move to block President Trump from invoking a national emergency to build a border wall, forcing Senate Republicans to choose between preserving congressional power and crossing the White House.

The California Democrat, under a seldom-used statute, could put a binding “resolution of disapproval” on the House floor to counter Trump should he claim constitutional powers to unilaterally build a border wall. The president is threatening action if Congress refuses his demand for $5.7 billion in border wall funding. Friday, Trump expressed skepticism that a bipartisan commission seeking a deal on the wall to avoid another government shutdown would succeed, saying there was a "good chance" he would declare an emergency.

The lawmakers are desperate to avoid another standoff over immigration and are worried about political anger and even retribution from the pro-Trump base. Yet they are wary of endorsing an unprecedented expansion of presidential emergency powers. Some fear the powers, once in a Democratic president's hands, could be used to justify all sorts of progressive priorities.

The resolution would almost assuredly pass the Democratic House. Then, in a quirk of the law — the Congressional Review Act — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would essentially be forced to hold a floor vote, with only a simple majority required for passage rather than the customary 60 votes.

Mitch McConnell thinks it would pass the Senate, too:

At least a half-dozen Republican senators are fiercely opposed to the idea of an emergency declaration, generating enough opposition that a disapproval resolution could pass the Senate,” the report says.
So does the Majority Whip in the Senate:

“We have a lot of folks who are uncomfortable with [an emergency declaration] for different reasons, some of which are constitutional and separation of powers,” Senate Majority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., said Thursday. “We prefer that not be the direction that the administration chooses to go. But the Democrats have to be willing to play ball here if we’re going to get a deal.”

Thune is not ruling out that several Senate Republicans could join with the Democrats to block Trump from declaring an emergency. A second Republican senator, speaking on condition of anonymity, predicted the president would suffer major defections if a vote on a resolution of disapproval is held.

And he wants to strike a "defiant tone" at the State of the Union.  As I've said, Trump's presidency is over.  All that's left now is the funeral.  He's a lame duck from here on.

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History Lessons

You'll just make things worse...

In 1949 the state of Texas implemented the school system the state has functioned under ever since.  It gave school districts the power to raise local taxes to support themselves, and established state funding of 75% state funds to 25% local funds.  70 years later that formula has flipped:  the state provides roughly 32% of funding to schools, the schools have to raise the other 68% themselves.  What schools are required to do, from students it must educate (special needs) to tests it must administer (statewide testing) add to the financial burden without adding money to relieve that burden.

Hang on to this factoid, we'll return to it in a moment.

Several years ago I was involved in a traffic accident; I pulled out of a parking lot onto the street and was struck by an oncoming car, one I couldn't see because of traffic.  When a tow truck showed up, I told the driver to pull my car out of the road into the parking lot.  The attorney for the other driver was there and objected, claiming I had to wait for the police to arrive and write out an accident report.  Now, I was reading those reports and the diagrams of the accident police used to make before this attorney was born (she was quite young), and I also knew the law had changed, certainly before she entered law school if not before her birth, to "no fault," so the police would not be making the detailed report that was once common.  I knew the best thing to do was to clear the road, and get a police report for my insurance purposes.  I knew that because I'm a lawyer, too, and I know that area of the law.  I was quite sure she didn't, but she "knew" what the law was; even though it hadn't been the law for probably as long as she'd been alive.

Don't go away, we're getting there.

In the 1980's the State of Texas was sued, and the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the funding mechanism for education, much tinkered with since 1949, was unconstitutional under the State Constitution.  The legislative remedy was to apply a new system atop the old (rather than remove the old and replace it root and branch, as had been done in 1949), a system whereby "property rich" districts would pay a portion of their tax revenues to the state, which would distribute those monies to "poor" districts and thus make the entire funding system "equitable."  There was much fanfare over this, so much that I knew about it even though I'd left the state by the time the laws were finally passed.  But most people in Texas seemed blissfully ignorant of this sea change.

The school districts weren't, however; but the smaller districts in the large urban areas (there are 5 such districts in the Houston Metro area, most of which barely rate a blip even on otherwise excellent local news coverage on the local NPR station, to this day) were hit first and hardest, being 'property rich' according to the formula, and therefore most able to pay.  The scheme is still called "Robin Hood" for obvious reasons.  Smaller districts went through multiple years of layoffs, and even when it hit the classrooms, the parents and taxpayers didn't seem to much notice.  Then Houston Independent School District (HISD), the largest single district in the state, became a "property rich" district, and suddenly everybody was aware of how public schools were being funded; or, more accurately, defunded.

Part of that awareness led to a new lawsuit against the state, this time by the school districts (the first was by parents stuck in a substandard school system by state laws).  To understand that you need to understand something else as much part of the common knowledge of Texans once upon a time as the need to get an accident report complete with pictures of the wreck, to determine fault in court.  That piece of knowledge is that Texas, by our state constitution, doesn't allow a statewide property tax.  Counties and cities and school districts and other specified entities (there are about half a dozen in Harris County, where Houston is located) can assess property taxes; the state cannot.  This was a rallying cry in Texas politics in my youth; it's where I first learned about it.  So a statewide property tax to fund schools (an income tax, which would solve the problem, is tantamount to declaring the state religion to now be Satanism) is verboten.

And that was the argument against Robin Hood, because the handful of people aware of the law assumed the money going from one school district was sent directly to another; but that was not so.  Monies sent to Austin by the school districts "too rich" by the formula of Robin Hood went into the general fund, to be spent as the Lege decided.  The formula for funding schools from Austin, as I said earlier, flipped in 70 years; the amount of money going from ISD's to Austin, rose dramatically in about 25 years.  Money taxed to fund local schools became money spent to pay the costs of state agencies, or for any other general purpose the Lege had in mind.  Legislators in Austin knew about this; but they didn't advertise it.

School districts facing financial disaster (as HISD now is) for years from Robin Hood did all they could to inform their taxpayers; but you can lead a horse to water only.  The school districts sued to change Robin Hood, but the Texas Supreme Court, brave in the '80's when they tried to solve this problem, blinked in the 21st century, and said there was no state property tax issue involved here (even though there clearly is).  And what did the taxpayers do about this clearly constitutional crisis, this shameless and indefensible decision to not touch this hot potato or defend the plain language of our founding state legal document, this complete capitulation on a crucial issue of state governance?

Nothing.  By and large, they still don't understand it happened.  Small districts in Houston have been bled dry by Robin Hood, and are on the verge of bankruptcy from it.  The local NPR station, which prides itself on its local news coverage, has yet to report on that.  When HISD suddenly had to pay Austin, rather than just receive from it, local NPR (and the rest of the state) suddenly noticed this law was on the books.  But they still aren't reporting on the Texas Supreme Court decision, or the multiple and myriad problems with education funding in Texas.

Something is rotten in the state of the Lone Star.  But if no one talks about it, is it happening?

You can, at this point, put a lot of blame for this on the media; and I do.  But as I say, school districts have been sending out letters annually to taxpayers explaining where the money is going:  no one listened, no one cared, no one noticed.  There was a huge campaign when "no fault insurance" became the law in Texas; 40 years later, people not born when that law changed still think it's not the law yet.  School funding has gone from being a state obligation to a state burden, and yet the burdens heaped on the schools (we started the school testing craze.  Thanks, Ross Perot!, and we haven't realized the folly of it yet.) have gone up (it takes a full time staff of administrators to keep up compliance with those tests, and the bigger the district, the more people you need just to do that).  And what is the real problem?

The real problem is the responsibility of democracy.  If you don't pay close attention to what the people acting in the name of the People are doing, they will rob you blind and thank for your letting them do it.  Texas wasn't always such a benighted and backwoods realm of would-be robber barons; accepting the stupidity of the "free market" philosophy is on us.  But if we ignore what our elected officials are doing, if we assume we know the state of things when we haven't a clue what reality is and we don't want to really pay attention because, you know, we're busy!, then we have no one to blame in the end but ourselves.

Which is why, I suppose, I keep posting from Donald Trump's Twitter feed.  It's there in plain sight now.  He's trying to arrange reality so he can declare victory on a wall that is never going to exist, in a fight only he is having, and it is with himself.  It isn't gaslighting if it doesn't work to perplex the victim; it's just the rantings of a delusional man.  If that man was living under a highway overpass near me pushing a shopping cart full of crap, I would feel sorry for him, or maybe try to help him.  But that man is the President of the United States, and he's saying things so clearly at odds with reality it should make us wonder why the 25th Amendment is not being invoked, and how much more careful we really need to be next time.

And how much attention we have to pay, because Trump's victory and what power he's had, has rested largely on the fact we just assume the person saying what we agree with is the truth, without ever wondering once what the truth really is.  I dunno, maybe once the system was more adversarial or just more responsible, and the competing ideas about foreign policy at least had the core of protecting America and preserving order.  It may be the INF is a flawed treaty and the Obama administration was concerned about Russia's violations, too; but coming from the guy who thinks he convinced North Korea to give up its nukes and that the public testimony of his intelligence chiefs was misreported, I don't trust his actions now, and the Congress is too supine yet to tell him shutting down the government and declaring yourself king are both non-starters and not the way to run a government, and grounds for serious questions about the President's fitness for office.

And the rest of us seem to be interested largely in Anyone But Trump; which is not exactly the lesson we should be learning, here.
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"A patch of ice doth not a winter make"

I never liked Dan Crenshaw.  I voted against him, but in the "blue wave" of last November he still managed to surf to victory (most Republicans did, sadly).  I evenresented the boost SNL gave him.  This is why:


As Raw Story pointed out, there's more than a bit of disparity here between Ms. Kayyem and Mr. Crenshaw:

Juliette Kayyem is a John F. Kennedy School of Government Harvard professor, a national security analyst for CNN, and serves on the Council on Foreign Relations. She has served on Secretary Jeh Johnson’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, and if that weren’t enough, she was the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Intergovernmental Affairs.

In the 1990’s she worked at the Dept. of Justice and served as an advisor to Attorney General Janet Reno. She was appointed to the the National Commission on Terrorism, and was Massachusetts’ first Undersecretary for Homeland Security.

Kayyem has also written a book on homeland security for homeowners and was a columnist writing about national security for the Boston Globe.

Rep. Crenshaw was a Navy Seal.

Raw Story also gives you a nice sampling of the responses to Mr. Crenshaw's mansplaining.  What it won't give you is her excellent retort:

This appears to be the tweet she's referring to:


She's right; it's a fair point.  The second tweet is just childish and unbecoming an adult, much less a U.S. Representative.

Ms. Kayyem's reply is how you do it; and why I didn't vote for Dan Crenshaw.  Being a Navy Seal who can get Pete Davidson to apologize to him is not qualification for U.S. Representative.  Driving around with a Border Patrol agent does not make you an expert on the issues of a 2000 mile border that bounds 4 different states and encompasses landscapes from the Sonoran Desert to the Big Bend to the Pacific coast to the Gulf of Mexico (not to mention the people who live along it, and know it better than Crenshaw ever will).

With any luck he'll only serve two years.
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Nothin' but GOOD times ahead!

What's the old joke? "The economy is creating so many jobs!" "Yeah, I have 3 of them."

The classics never go out of style. Meanwhile, the delusions are not just on Twitter any more:
Add this to the rest, and the cause for concern only increases.
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Time Past Is Time Forgotten


That was then, this is now:

These days, one must run as fast as one can just to stay in one place:
Apparently the Wall is no longer an obstacle to governance.



So you see, nothing to worry about. Congress might as well get on to other work. The only thing left now is to stop calling the wall "peaches." CALL A WALL A WALL!
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Thursday, January 31, 2019

Same Song, 22nd verse


He's been saying that for 2 years now; and now he's back to it.  Odd, if you think about it:

“That is all you need to know about where Trump is on the wall negotiations today,” Wallace noticed. “His meandering, at times incoherent ramblings in front of the press poll this afternoon had that same head-scratching theme to it.”

“Asked if he, the president, who presided over the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, costing an estimated $11 billion, could’ve done anything differently, here’s what he said,” she continued.

“Could we have done it differently? No, not really,” Trump argued in the Oval Office. “I think by having the shut down we’ve set the table for where we are now.”

“If I didn’t do the shutdown people wouldn’t know, they wouldn’t understand the subject,” he continued. “Now they understand the subject, they realize what a humanitarian crisis it is.”
Almost as odd as that, of this, from the same event:

A reporter asked if he spoke to the officials, which the president said he did.

“I did and they said they were totally taken out of context,” Trump said.

He added that the officials claimed reports were fake news.

The reporter interrupted to say that the officials testified before Congress and were recorded on television saying something contrary.

“Excuse me, excuse me!” an irritated Trump said. He went on to tell the reporter they were there to talk about China.

He said that the assessment by intelligence chiefs about border security doesn’t mean anything because “we need a wall.”

“But they didn’t bring it up as part of the national security assessment,” the reporter said.

“Next,” Trump said pointing to someone else. 
At least when Reagan retreated into fantasy it seemed grandfatherly and benign (when it didn't seem like Alzheimer's).  And whither the "national emergency"?  Well, that could split the GOP, according to today's reports (tomorrow's reports may well say the GOP is all for it).  But the tweet seems to indicate where the White House is today:

“His aides have to feel he did a whole lot more than set the table,” suggested Wallace, a former White House communications director. “He did damage to his poll numbers and he didn’t build any support for the wall.”

“At this point, Nicolle, White House officials tell me the president has to make a decision — the way he keeps talking about a wall is about existing fencing at the U.S.-Mexico the border,” he explained. “If Democrats offer something to bolster existing fencing can he walk away and call it a deal or not. If not we face another shut down.”
Which is probably why Nancy Pelosi said this:

As for another shutdown:  even Sen. Kennedy from Louisiana can't justify the last one, or another one.

So much winning!
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"Does the silence scare you?"


rustypickup put me on to this in comments.  The opening passages, the discussion of the "paradox" of Merton the loquacious monk in an order devoted to silence, made me think of Julian of Norwich, and the idea of the anchorite.  The idea of the anchorite is a very medieval one; it didn't survive the period it arose in, unlike even the extreme disciplines of the Trappists at Gethsemani.  The anchorite "died" to the world; he (usually she, however) went through a funeral service before entering the cell she would spend her life in.  For Julian that was something of a double passage, as she suffered an illness that took her to the brink of death and provided the experience for her Shewings, an experience she meditated on for the rest of her days.  but her cell was not the hollow of a tree somewhere deep in the forest, or in an obscure spot far from human dwellings:  it was in the chapel.  The anchorite could, from her cell, participate in the celebration of the Mass, and could also receive requests from parishioners and offer spiritual counseling to them.  There was no vow of silence, but the ritual funeral was meant to impress upon her death to an old life, and resurrection into a life wholly devoted to God.  Sort of like this:

In addition to his obligations to the community, Merton would always be involved in extensive correspondence with readers. Throughout his life at Gethsemani, he received international visitors seeking his opinions and advice, and he fielded frequent requests for books and articles from New York editors and publishers.

He befriended writers, scholars and prominent religious figures from around the world with whom he would correspond, and some of them would come to Gethsemani. The Trappists, too, looked to him to write religious histories and commentary. The pressures and demands of the writing life were enough to send him dreaming of a hermitage.

The hermitage would truly be a place others would have to seek out.  The anchorite was always accessible (if not always immediately available).

Monastic life is a radical reorientation that questions the priorities valued by the world beyond its walls, but the world also challenges the monastery and is inextricable from it in many ways.

Pondering the practice of the anchorite shows us this challenge is as old as religious devotion itself.  The martyrdom of Stephen in the Acts of the Apostles questions the priorities valued by the world, but it is the world that challenges the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, forcing the gospel writers to explain how it is a beginning and not an end, forcing the church to establish doctrines explaining what it means (the idea of the atoning sacrifice wasn't settled until the 4th century, and still faces legitimate, IMHO, challenges today). The individual may challenge the world's priorities, but the world insists on an explanation that doesn't mark the individual as simply lunatic.  There has to be a paradox involved in the sacrifice, else the sacrifice is simply misguided at best, a dangerous example at worst.

Merton's words, which make me think even more of the ancient role of the anchorite:

The contemplative life is not, and cannot be, a mere withdrawal, a pure negation, a turning of one’s back on the world with its sufferings, its crises, its confusions and its errors … The monastic community is deeply implicated, for better or for worse, in the economic, political, and social structures of the contemporary world. To forget or to ignore this does not absolve the monk from responsibility for participation in events in which his very silence and ‘not knowing’ may constitute a form of complicity.
And these words as well:

  ‘The monk is essentially someone who takes up a critical attitude toward the world and its structures,’ he remarked, ‘somebody who says, in one way or another, that the claims of the world are fraudulent.’
The anchorite, beyond the practice of the monk, is dead to the world; speaks to the fraudulence of the world from beyond it.  "I am Lazarus, come back to tell you all, and I shall tell you all...."  Or perhaps that is not it at all; perhaps that is not what I meant at all.

It is so difficult to say just what I mean!  But the nature of the paradox is surely central to the life of faith, whether it is faithfulness lived in a cell, in a hermitage, or among other people of all faiths and no faiths and deep antipathy to faith.
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Wednesday, January 30, 2019

If you don't remember it's like it never happened

Over and over and over again....

And, of course, almost a year ago:
Because it had to go down to go back up, TWICE, to the same level on one year.  So much winning!
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Be Careful What You Ask For....


The fun part of the internet is being able to quote things; it's easier than writing it yourself.  I was just browsing this Atlantic article on the idea of teaching the Bible in public schools, because it said pretty much what I'd already said, except I wish I'd said this, too:

And this only addresses issues of historicity and interpretation. The social teachings of the Bible could also create issues in a public-school setting. A recent thesis project in sociology at Baylor University suggested that increased Bible reading can actually have a liberalizing effect, increasing one’s “interest in social and economic justice, acceptance of the compatibility of religion and science, and support for the humane treatment of criminals.” Every community that reads the Bible places unequal stress on certain books or passages. While evangelicals are generally more politically conservative, teachers in public schools might choose to emphasize the Bible’s many teachings on caring for the poor, welcoming the immigrant, and the problems of material wealth.

It's the reference to sociology at Baylor (a Southern Baptist university, ironically) that really piqued my interest, because the claim is not one based on my own theological predilections.  It's also just the matter of hermeneutics, and once you stop treating scripture as sacred and claiming the only hermeneutic to be applied to it is the one your religious community approves of, all manner of uncomfortable things can happen.  I mean:  I think that's the proper interpretation of Scripture; but this study provides evidence that interpretation arises from simply reading Scripture without a narrow frame of interpretation applied to it.  Read the Scriptures as a text, and all manner of uncomfortable things might arise from it.

I prefer to call these things "truths," but we can just agree it could make you think thoughts, and not just about the historical nature of the scriptures (does Genesis describe a literal event, or a theological claim on the nature of God and of creation?), your parents might not want you to think.  Which, most parents would agree, is not what public education is for.

"Conventional wisdom," after all, as Jaroslav Pelikan point out, "is the dead faith of the living."


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"I wish people wouldn't hate me



but it does give me another excuse to hate them."

I was formerly a liberal my whole life, but my views changed over time and now I’m a Republican and ardent supporter of President Trump.

I have been wearing a Make America Great Again aka MAGA hat almost everywhere I go for approximately the last year.

In person I have received only positive feedback other than a few dirty looks and under-the-breath mutters.

Social media is a whole different story. Somehow, on social media, people feel emboldened to say things they would never have the courage to say to my face and many people hide behind fake/anonymous names and photos.
....
It is the Democrats who are obsessed with “people of color” and gender. Republicans look at people for who they are not for their gender or skin color.
....
White men are the most hated and discriminated against group of people in the United States now. If you don’t believe that, you simply aren’t paying attention or looking at it objectively.
....
I truly would like everyone to be civil and respectful to one another, but I must admit in one way I get a kick out of the hate I get from liberals by wearing my MAGA hat – it shows either they misunderstand or they’re just closed-minded, hateful and intolerant.

And they said irony was dead.
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I am not saying Franklin Graham is a Monkey

In an interview on MSNBC, host Craig Melvin pointed out to Graham that The Washington Post counted 8,158 false or misleading claims made by the president during his first two years in office.

“Well, I don’t know how to reconcile that, because I don’t know,” Graham replied. “You have a fact checker for the president but I don’t know if you have a fact checker for the media at the same time.”

“Pastor Graham, you and I both know this president has said things over and over that aren’t true,” the MSNBC host pressed.

“No, I don’t know that,” Graham insisted. “I don’t sit around and try to find every fault in the president every day, looking for everything that he might have misspoken or mis-said. I don’t do that.”

“But you can acknowledge that the president has said things that aren’t true,” Melvin asked.

“I don’t think the president is sitting there behind the desk trying to make up lies,” Graham said. “I don’t believe that for a second. Has he misspoken on something? Sure, all of us do that, you do it, I do it.

“So I think the president is trying to do the best that he can under very difficult circumstances,” the pastor added. “But no one person can fix this, it’s too complex. We need god. As a nation, we’ve turned our back on god.”

But you can draw your own conclusions.  I am, however, old enough to recognize this monkey statue; and to remember when lies were not considered a Christian virtue, or even a necessity, and willfully ignoring lies was not considered a Christian value.

But then, I'm an old man....
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Come Together


Apparently the Schultz platform:

Starbucks is “the only company in America that gave comprehensive health insurance, equity in the form of stock options, and free college tuition,” Schultz continued. “Elizabeth Warren wants to criticize me for being successful? No. It’s wrong.”

Is that we all have to work for Starbucks.
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What was their first clue?


"A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest."--Paul Simon


And, of course, the source of all REAL information:
Lordelpus!

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Just Another Figure of Speech In The Metaphor


If you look at The Daily Beast, GOP Senators are ready for Trump to declare a "national emergency" over his wall.

However, according to WaPo (via Raw Story; paywalls suck), McConnell sez:

“I’m for whatever works, which means avoiding a shutdown and avoiding the president feeling he should declare a national emergency.” 

Now the logical question is:  which is it?  And the answer is:  both and a little bit of neither.

According to DB, GOP Senators don't love the idea of a national emergency, but they'll take it if that's what it takes to end this nonsense without them being in the position of overriding a Trump veto (that part is implied, never stated).  The presumption is this would be Pelosi's flowers on the border (a lovely image):  Trump declares victory, and the government goes on its merry way, having finally left this stinking turd of an issue on the roadside behind it.  (Trump has been bragging for two years that his wall is being built, so he'd just declare that we've always been at war with Eurasia and move on.)

Except, of course, the courts are likely to ball that up in short order; which is fine, because who really cares if Trump gets his wall or not?  This whole fight isn't about the wall, anyway, but about governance.  The Democrats stated plainly and to anyone who would listen that they couldn't give in to Trump's idiotic (and baseless and unfounded) demand to "Build a Wall and Crime will Fall!"  In that, they were right.  Now comes Lindsay Graham saying the issue should be tied to the debt ceiling, because that'll put the fear of God into the Democrats and make 'em give Trump his wall; but that raises the same objection, for the same sound reasons.  That idea, too, is getting some support among Senate Republicans; anything but voting against Trump, apparently.

So do the Senate Republicans really care about this damned wall?  No.  Does it matter if the wall is ever real, ever concrete or steel slats or even just flowers?  No.  The wall is irrelevant and immaterial; all that matters is Trump declare himself "Winner!" and Anne Coulter and FoxNews not point out to him how naked an Emperor he is, again.  And then this whole road apple can be nothing but a memory in the rear view mirror.  Would that mean the wall is being built, contracts being let, land being appropriated, immigrants and asylum seekers and drug mules facing finally the impenetrable barrier keeping their brownness from our white country?

Who cares?  (And:  no, anyway).  So the wall is not now, and never will be in the future, a wall.

It's just a metaphor.  And metaphors are better left to literature; messy bastards when they get loose in real life.  Helluva way to govern, too.  A complete clusterfuck in its own right.  The system is not saving us; so what will?
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Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Remember When.....?



After flagging tens of thousands of registered voters for citizenship reviews, the Texas secretary of state’s office is now telling counties that some of those voters don’t belong on the lists it sent out.

Officials in five large counties — Harris, Travis, Fort Bend, Collin and Williamson — told The Texas Tribune they had received calls Tuesday from the secretary of state’s office indicating that some of the voters whose citizenship status the state said counties should consider checking should not actually be on those lists.
The burden here is still on the counties; the Texas SOS can't tell them what to do, no more can the Texas AG; but the big counties can look into it carefully, and it's clear they will:

In Harris County, which encompasses Houston, the Texas secretary of state’s office initially flagged 29,822 names as potential noncitizens on the rolls. But Douglas Ray, a county attorney, said state officials told them those names included people who initially got a driver’s license as noncitizens and then registered to vote at the DMV after becoming naturalized. State officials had validated the citizenship of those people, Ray said, and they were erroneously included on the list.

Ray could not provide an exact number but said county officials believed a “substantial number” of the people flagged by the secretary of state’s office met those criteria. 
What we have here, as the fella said in "Cool Hand Luke," is a failure to communicate:

It’s unclear at this point how many counties have received these calls. County officials said Tuesday they had not received anything in writing about the mistake. It's also unclear how many people will be removed from the original list of approximately 95,000 individuals flagged by the state. The secretary of state's office did not respond to questions Tuesday about how much this would reduce the initial count.
Better known as a clusterfuck.

Smaller counties, unfortunately, aren't waiting around:

Most of the counties with the most registered voters in the state said they were holding off on sending “proof of citizenship” letters to the voters who were flagged. Just Galveston County officials said they were dropping some letters in the mail Monday, starting a 30-day countdown for voters to provide proof of citizenship such as a birth certificate, a U.S. passport or a certificate of naturalization. Voters who don't respond will have their voter registration canceled.

Galveston County officials did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. 
And for those who think this is all about fraud and the destruction of our democratic way of life:

His office hadn’t determined how many voters would be removed from the list of flagged voters, but he noted officials had found two noncitizens on the rolls. In both of those cases, the individuals had indicated they were not citizens on their voter registration applications but were mistakenly added to the voter rolls, Oldham said.

“That happens,” Oldham said. 
No doubt, no doubt.  And that's why we have courts, and lawsuits:

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in San Antonio, lawyers for the League of United Latin American Citizens' national and Texas arms alleged that Texas Secretary of State David Whitley and Attorney General Ken Paxton violated a portion of the federal Voting Rights Act that prohibits the intimidation of voters.

They point to an advisory issued Friday in which Whitley’s office said it was flagging individuals who had provided the Texas Department of Public Safety with some form of documentation — including a work visa or a green card — that showed they were not citizens when they were obtaining driver’s licenses or ID cards. The state put the number of registered voters who fell into that category at approximately 95,000 — 58,000 of whom had voted in one or more elections from 1996 to 2018.

In its announcement, the secretary of state’s office said it had immediately turned over the data to Paxton’s office. On the same day, Paxton posted the news on Twitter prefaced with “VOTER FRAUD ALERT,” the lawyers noted in the lawsuit.

“These two Texas officials have carefully crafted and orchestrated a program that combines an election advisory ostensibly directed at ensuring that all those registered to vote in the May election are citizens eligible to vote with the use of data that is suspect on its face and a blackout on public access to the data,” LULAC’s lawyers wrote in the complaint.

The secretary of state's office declined to comment, referring a question to the attorney general's office.

The same AG who started this turkey walk.  Heh.  I'd say again that Paxton is a clown; but I say again, it's a representative government.  Because the voter registrar of Travis County is right:

“These allegations of widespread voter fraud are premature and irresponsible. I certainly stand by that statement,” he said. “The story has changed significantly, and we haven’t even started to investigate yet. We don’t know where this is going to end up. It could be we have a serious issue in Texas and maybe we don’t. But statements like that only serve to undermine the integrity of our elections.”

It's bad enough when the Russians are doing it to us; but when we do it to ourselves....

You get what you vote for.
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Reading Law

Something there is that does not....


The problem with reading statutes is that what the statutes words say is not necessarily what the courts think those words say; or instantiate, to be a bit clearer.  We think of statutes as imprecatory and even as imperative:  the statute says it, and it is so.  But what the statute says is determined by the court, sometimes by the case before the court.  So, could Trump use the National Emergencies Act to build a border wall?

Probably not.  Elizabeth Goitein makes an interesting, but wholly non-legal, argument that Trump has dithered for so long he cannot now claim an "emergency" exists which Congress doesn't have time to act on and so Trump must.  Sounds interesting, but at no point does she ever cite a case where the courts have defined what an "emergency" is within the scope of the National Emergencies Act.  I think her thesis is fundamentally sound:

Trump no doubt thinks he looks more reasonable if he gives Congress plenty of time to act before declaring an emergency. He might also think that Congress’s repeated failure to provide funds shows the need for emergency action. The truth is the exact opposite. By giving Congress time to definitively establish its unwillingness to fund the border wall, Trump is both taking away any legitimate justification for emergency action and proving his intent to subvert the constitutional balance of powers.

But, to put the matter bluntly, that's a common sense argument, not a legal argument (and there's a reason legal arguments don't always track with common wisdom, but I can't belabor it now).  The court needs a bit more than "it's been too long" to go on.  I think the case is clear that Congress has chosen not to act on the President's demand, and he can't simply declare an emergency in order to get his way.  But will the courts agree?  No one can say; aside from the Youngstown case, I've yet to read an analysis that cites any relevant case law, especially cases directly regarding the National Emergencies Act (which post-dates Youngstown by a few decades).

But the National Emergencies Act is not itself a blanket dispensation of authority.  As Goitein points out:

The only powers the president can access during a national emergency are those Congress has granted. However potent some of these powers might be, the source of the president’s authority in all cases remains a legislative delegation—one that is granted in advance because true emergencies require immediate action. A president using emergency powers to thwart Congress’s will, in a situation where Congress has had ample time to express it, is like a doctor relying on an advance directive to deny life-saving treatment to a patient who is conscious and clearly asking to be saved.

Again, lovely analysis, but not really a keen legal argument.  Still, the point in the first sentence is sound:  the President only has the emergency powers the Congress grants; the President cannot grant himself the power to suspend Art. I, or Amendment 5, for that matter.  And the National Emergencies Act explicitly recognizes this, because there are laws the President cannot suspend under the terms of the Act:

(a) The provisions of this chapter shall not apply to the following provisions of law, the powers and authorities conferred thereby, and actions taken thereunder:
(1) Chapters 1 to 11 of title 40 and division C (except sections 3302, 3307(e), 3501(b), 3509, 3906, 4710, and 4711) of subtitle I of title 41;
(2) Section 3727(a)–(e)(1) of title 31;
(3) Section 6305 of title 41;
(4) Public Law 85–804 (Act of Aug. 28, 1958, 72 Stat. 972; 50 U.S.C. 1431 et seq.);
(5) Section 2304(a)(1) [1] of title 10; [2]

This is the pertinent part of the text of one of those provisions (50 USC 1431, to be exact):

The President may authorize any department or agency of the Government which exercises functions in connection with the national defense, acting in accordance with regulations prescribed by the President for the protection of the Government, to enter into contracts or into amendments or modifications of contracts heretofore or hereafter made and to make advance payments thereon, without regard to other provisions of law relating to the making, performance, amendment, or modification of contracts, whenever he deems that such action would facilitate the national defense. The authority conferred by this section shall not be utilized to obligate the United States in an amount in excess of $50,000 without approval by an official at or above the level of an Assistant Secretary or his Deputy, or an assistant head or his deputy, of such department or agency, or by a Contract Adjustment Board established therein. The authority conferred by this section may not be utilized to obligate the United States in any amount in excess of $25,000,000 unless the Committees on Armed Services of the Senate and the House of Representatives have been notified in writing of such proposed obligation and 60 days of continuous session of Congress have expired following the date on which such notice was transmitted to such Committees. For purposes of this section, the continuity of a session of Congress is broken only by an adjournment of the Congress sine die at the end of a Congress, and the days on which either House is not in session because of an adjournment of more than 3 days to a day certain, or because of an adjournment sine die other than at the end of a Congress, are excluded in the computation of such 60-day period. 

Sorry for the legalese, but the upshot is:  the President will have to declare the border wall to be a matter of national defense (is Mexico invading us?  Still, I can see the court declining to define that phrase narrowly); and cannot authorize contracts in excess of $25 million without notice to Congress and then the contracts (the language says "obligate" the US, not sign a single contract for that amount) and wait 60 days after that.  This is not a measure meant to be used only for emergencies, but neither can it be suspended on the declaration of an emergency.  And here is where the legal reasoning comes in.

A viable legal argument could be based on this provision of law, and the above provision of the National Emergencies Act, indicating there is no emergency because the wall itself is not a military necessity, and the President cannot enter into a contract to build it on an emergency basis.  If he has to wait 60 days (at least), he can't claim construction is needed immediately, because he can't start construction immediately (as a matter of law; he can't start construction immediately as a matter of fact, either, but the courts will probably be more comfortable with what the law does, or does not, allow).  If construction can't start the day of the declaration of emergency, and if Art. I establishes that Congress decides how to spend the money, then even if Trump says it must be done instanter, it can't be, as a matter of law; and so there is no legal reason to recognize a declaration of emergency under the circumstances, because the declaration would be seeking the power to enter into contracts post-haste, and that's a power explicitly excluded from the National Emergencies Act.  Which means the President can't use the Act to declare an emergency to get his wall built, or even started, or even planned (it has to be planned, first, though Trump talks as if his words will cause the wall to spring forth in a "Fiat Lux" manner), because he can't use the Act to bypass the authority Congress has already granted to enter into contracts on behalf of the federal government.  His declaration is, under the law, a nullity.

Off the top of my head that's an interesting legal argument, anyway.  Moving away from legalisms a moment, the situation of a government shutdown (or the debt ceiling, an issue added to the mix by the Senator from South Carolina) raises another question: if the government can't spend money (or borrow money) Congress hasn't authorized (hence a shutdown or a debt crisis, respectively), on what Constitutional theory can the President do so?

Just wondering....
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