What Else?

I’m glad the Zimmerman trial is over. Now we can learn what else is happening in the world. It’s not that the trial was unimportant, but that I knew the ending to the story. There was no way he was going to be, or should be, convicted beyond a reasonable doubt of second degree murder for a shooting that took place during a fight. A guilty verdict would have made pariahs of the six jurors who rendered it in Seminole County and well beyond. This says something of a trial by a jury of one’s peers. I say that if justice is a concern these peers should come from diverse parts of the country. This point is demonstrated precisely by the trials of Rodney King’s beating by local police and of O.J. Simpson, whose trial was a mirror image of Zimmerman’s. I’d say that in this case the prosecution left something to be desired. At times I suspect the second degree murder charge was to make it harder for any kind of conviction.

My feeling about the trial doesn’t mean that I believe justice was done. An armed man who violates police orders by getting out of his car, leading directly to the fatal shooting by that man of another, clearly deserves incarceration.

The trial is now history. But it should raise again the perennial question of who enforces our laws. As I understand it amateurs have a legitimate role in vigilance although Zimmerman clearly violated its limits. But the purview of pulling triggers belongs exclusively to professionals who have been trained for the job. Putting one’s hand on a rock, looking to the sky and saying “I am a cop” doesn’t qualify. Had this propriety been observed in Sanford the killing would never have taken place.

As Zimmerman said in the last words of his cell phone call to the police, “they always get away.” It looks as if this also applies to deluded racists like himself.  

Who Goes There?

Given what is known now about the George Zimmerman case I believe he is guilty of the racially inspired murder of Trayvon Martin. He was an armed aggressor stalking an unarmed person without any justifiable cause. If anyone was standing his ground it was Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman ignored police instructions to remain in his car. He was a man looking for trouble. Nevertheless if I were a juror I’d probably vote to acquit. The fact that there was a fight just before the shooting opens the door for “beyond a reasonable doubt” against the serious charge of second degree murder.

My greatest concern is the consequences, whatever the verdict, neither of which bodes well. We’ve seen inner city reaction to adjudication of Rodney King’s beating which was limited to Los Angeles and the assassination of Martin Luther King which went national. In this case I fear that reaction to acquittal would more closely resemble the latter. The consequences of a conviction, while less predictable, are potentially as ominous.

Given the inter-racial nature of the event, it may seem that we are dealing with race, which to an extent we are. But of equal importance in the longer run is the place of vigilantism in this country. It involves militias, guns and the thinking that goes with them. There’s no mystery how this issue will play out along political lines. Days after the event Fox was soliciting donations for Zimmerman’s defense in a trial more than a year away. This was not for his benefit.

There are many gated communities in this country and their occupants have a legitimate concern for their security, in many cases the reason for living there.  But there was no legitimacy to Zimmerman’s behavior prior to the confrontation.

An acquittal would just postpone an inevitable showdown. My hope is for a guilty verdict for something less than second degree murder. As I see it legitimate law enforcement is the purview of only authorized people. We know that some of them are less than perfect. For this reason it makes no sense to entrust these life or death jobs to people who are even further from perfect.

 

Who's In Charge Here?

Who are the most influential spokespeople within the Democratic Party? I can only think of one, Barack Obama. We are a relatively diverse bunch that only knows what we hear or read, so we aren’t privy to much of what happens behind closed doors. But as microphones go the president has a loud one.

It’s much easier with Republicans where three names leap out, Rush Limbaugh, Grover Norquist and Rupert Murdoch. The Fat Man is listened to by so many of the faithful for three hours a day that no Republican with serious ambitions dares criticize his most atrocious statements. Norquist demands a “no new tax” pledge from candidates that has been taken by all but a handful of current party members in both Houses of Congress. He considers elimination of deductions and subsidies as tax increases, although I doubt that he thinks of Medicaid as such. Murdoch, through Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and other sources of “information” specializes in turning fiction into fact beneficial to the right wing in general.

One thing these three men have in common is that none has served elective office nor, as far as I know ever tried. Yet here they are telling people who have been elected how to vote, indirectly in Murdoch’s case.  

What this says about the nation has provided material for many books. What it says about the Republican Party leads to the inescapable conclusion that many of its members if challenged would respond with old GOP warhorse, “They all do it.”

No Virginia they don’t. To my knowledge it’s now unacceptable for lobbyists to sit next to Congressmen while in session and examine the text of proposed legislation before a vote is cast. In any case the pioneers of this practice were Republicans in the wake of the Gingrich Revolution.

The words spoken by Lincoln at Gettysburg, ”government of the people, by the people, for the people” may apply in some manner today, but differently to our two major political parties. If voter suppression efforts by Republicans say anything they are thinking of fewer people. By allowing private citizens to publicly give marching orders to their elected officials they are clearly thinking of the wrong people.

 

 

Wolf In Sheep's Clothing

It warmed the cockles of my heart to hear Bill Maher take Ronald Reagan apart in the finale of his June 7 show. He opened by taking issue with Bob Dole’s saying that Ronald Reagan himself couldn’t make it today as a Republican. Hogwash! In Maher’s words “He wrote the Tea Party playbook on every issue of consequence.” “Ronald Reagan was anti-government, union busting, race baiting, anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-intellectual, who cut rich people’s taxes in half, had an incurable case of military industrial complex and said Medicare was socialism that would destroy our freedom.”

This is Tea Party “logic” almost verbatim. But its current adherents are speaking it in anger and often fury, occasionally brandishing weapons to show they mean business. Reagan on the other hand knew that many voters saw him as the radical right winger he was, so he put his Hollywood experience to use by gently crooning lyrics that would have been X rated if sung by Barry Goldwater 16 years earlier.

Of course Reagan wasn’t elected on charm alone. He was lucky in having an unpopular incumbent as his first opponent. It’s should be mentioned that possibly the biggest of Jimmy Carter’s problems was, in my opinion, exacerbated by private citizens comprising Reagan’s campaign making foreign policy with another nation, Iran during the hostage crisis. This is commonly known as treason.

The world of politics is directly affected by and can’t be fully judged without considering the time in which events take place. Nixon is lauded by many of his fans as some sort of enlightened bi-partisan for having signed clean water legislation, an idea that would be out of the question for a Republican with presidential ambitions today. Even George Bush never suggested some of the things that this crop of Congressional Republicans has. Does that qualify him as a moderate?

As to “Ronrico,” as I used to refer to our 40^th president, I disagree with my friends on the left who criticize Barack Obama for calling him a transformative president. He was certainly that and in a big way. So was a World War 1 German corporal named Schicklgruber.

History Lesson

Republicans, who have been aiming their guns at Barack Obama for the past four plus years are now aiming them at Hillary Clinton, his heir apparent. They must be finding it harder to beat up on a white woman that a man of color, judging by a recent right wing electronic missive I received through a third party.

It cites six presumably damaging quotations from her that are by themselves rather innocuous, except by Tea Party standards. These patriots might find the first, “we’re going to take things away from you for the common good” more than a little dicey, not knowing that this is precisely what happens every time a tax is raised or a benefit reduced. Whatever the context in which she spoke rather bluntly, it had to be in support of a larger point or I’m overestimating her acumen.

From this point on their case against her falls apart. “It’s time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few and for the few……and replace it with shared responsibility.” Isn’t shared responsibility pretty much what is expected of a democracy? I’m curious as to how or if Republicans would argue otherwise publicly.

“We have to build a political consensus and that requires people to give up a little bit of their own in order to create this common ground.” This sounds mighty like JFK’s “Ask not” words spoken at his inauguration, not during his campaign.

“I think it’s time to send a clear message to what has become the most profitable sector in the economy that they are being watched.” The only people that would disagree are those who are, or are deserving of, being watched.

Whatever the effect of this piece comes from the format, a multiple choice quiz to “see how much history you know.” The choices for answers to the first question are Karl Marx, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin and “None of the above.” Naturally “None of the above” is always the correct answer and always happens to be Madame Clinton. If she says anything that Joseph Stalin or Karl Marx might have said, that makes them all fellow travelers. How about “it’s a nice day”

The others with whom she must keep company on this “history” quiz are (2) Lenin, Mussolini and Idi Amin, (3) Nikita “Khrushev,” (if the writer won’t look up the correct spelling why should I?) Joseph Goebbels and Boris Yeltzen, (4) Mao Tse Dung, Hugo Chavez and Kim Jong Il, (5) Karl Marx, (what again?) Lenin and Molotov and (6) Pinochet, Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. I’m terribly disappointed that the writer omitted two of my favorites in this hall of fame, George Steinbrenner and Donald Trump.

 

State of the States…or a Word to the Wise

I can’t remember an election, general or mid-term, that someone didn’t say would be the most important in our history and I’m certain next year’s will be the same. 

But there is a serious difference this time in the dramatically increased importance of state elections. Not all of them of course! What happens in Massachusetts and Texas is predictable. But control of governorships and state legislatures in six states, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Virginia and Florida could affect America for years to come, and not for the better.

It’s common knowledge that Republican governors in these states, with sympathetic legislatures, were considering reapportioning the state’s votes in the Electoral College by Congressional Districts rather than popular vote. This is perfectly legal and is he law in Maine and Nebraska. But had it been the process last year Mitt Romney would be president today.

One of these governors, Michigan’s Rick Snyder, publicly flirted with the idea before speaking against it. Of course he finally publicly rejected it. Why tell the world what you’re planning nearly two years before an election in which the seats of state legislators whose votes are needed will be at risk? There’s little public support for a state electoral college to add to the already unpopular federal version.

 I think and hope Republicans screwed up by mentioning the subject so early.  Governors in three of these six states were more circumspect during their election campaigns, saying nothing about their drastic plans for labor. This should not be forgotten!

This ugly possibility is a direct consequence of the Tea Party inspired Republican landslide in 2010. Being a census year the Congressional maps of the states became etched in stone for ten years. As I see it the repeal of the Bush tax cuts should have been put to the Senate then, not two years later. The decision was made by party leaders in that body. But I strongly suspect the president was influential, preferring to postpone the issue until his reelection year.

Granted my opinion is debatable.  A presidential election trumps all others and Democrats might have lost both if they’d done as I’d hoped. But having been warned now there’s no excuse now for them not to make this a major issue in next year’s state elections. A word to the wise should be sufficient.

 

Exclusive

Among the “scandals” plaguing the Obama administration the one that interests me at the moment concerns the scrutiny given applications from right wing “Social Service” organizations for tax exempt status. A logical place to start is with the rules, or law if you prefer, as written by Congress in 1954. It states that for an organization to be eligible for tax exemption it must be “not organized for profit but operated exclusively(italics mine) for promotion of Social Welfare.” This rule is still on the books. In 1959 the IRS, on no authority other than its own, changed the wording of the practice, not the law, from “exclusively” to “primarily.”

A change from zero tolerance to a theoretical 49% makes it harder for the IRS inspectors to monitor this requirement which involves more than a random selection of audits. Some groups are statistically more likely to cheat than others. Outfits with letterheads including the words “Tea Party” and Patriot” are suspect, particularly when they debut in an election year. These are mostly small operations. Serious righties like Karl Rove use non-committal letterheads like “Crossroads.” Words like “minority rights” or “choice” would also draw red flags. But either there are fewer of them, or lefties are more subtle.

This unique IRS interpretation has been with us for more than half a century and wasn’t as much of a problem until Citizens United. Now corporations as “people” also qualify for this tax exemption, so the agency’s work load has increased considerably while Congress has cut its budget.

Whoever is to blame for what has happened, the solution is obvious. Simply enforce the law as it stands. No legislation is needed and no potential filibuster stands in the way. Many Americans, possibly a majority, oppose public financing of political campaigns. Something on the order of “what, my tax money being spent to pay for these crooks’ elections” is common parlance. Yet this is precisely what is happening with as much as 49% of many “charitable” donations and more in some cases. These organizations cannot be primarily and legallylegitimate unless they are runexclusively for social service.