And the Band Played On

 

The Florida Batistero community, who fled Cuba when Castro took power and were looking for revenge pushed the duller minds in our government for fifty years.

They instituted Cuban policies that hurt Cuba and eliminated U.S. trade with that island nation. None of it made sense. Cuba is the closest non-contiguous bordered nation to the United States. Keeping them at arms length just wasn’t fruitful -for them or us.

Then in 2014 Barak Obama instituted new policies that opened Cuba to American trade and businesses. No it didn’t make any political difference down there but like any totalitarian country that is opened to democracy and capitalism, inroads were being made as people learned what they were missing.

Now the catastrophically uninformed Trump, needing a headline and a hint that he is actually doing something, has instituted a new plan that he claims is aimed at changing Cuba’s anti-humanitarian policies. So since Obama’s Cuban policy didn’t change their humanitarian abuses in 3 years we are now, because of the loser in the White House, going back to a policy that didn’t change Cuba’s humanitarian abuses for 50 years. That’s called Trumpian logic.

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We’re ass deep in noise from the investigation of the Russian intervention hyped to the sky by the shootings of the congressmen in Washington and all Donald Trump is worried about is how it affects him. There seems to be no interest on his part about how all thais affects the country. He had nine meetings with James Comey and never asked him about the investigation into the elections, only how it affected Mike Flynn and him.

Trump possesses no sense of duty and no grasp of his responsibilities as President. He only wants to know how he is perceived and how he is doing. The disgusting cabinet meeting last week in which each of the subservient cabinet members had to kneel and give obeisance to the leader’s greatness is a perfect example of what the world saw in 1939 when Adolph Hitler turned Germany into a world threat. We seem to have grown our own German dictator.

Of course Trump’s malady is spreading down the chain of command. We see this in our top law enforcement officer, Attorney General Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions who admitted in Senate hearings that he knows nothing about the Russian intervention. He has not bothered to look into allegations concerning the greatest threat to our Democracy since the cold war.

The primary job of the President of the United States is to protect the nation. Trump has declared that threat to be North Korea. Yes, North Korea is a definite threat but it is a small rogue nation halfway around the world that has no allies and so far, no technological capabilities to harm us.

This is not true of Russia. It is omnipresent and has already displayed the technology to affect our electoral process, to damage our own technology and to wage a full-scale cyber war. But Trump and his AG show no interest in what is going on. They know nothing about the threat and show no desire to search out information about it, none at all.

Trump’s only concern about the Russian intervention has to do with how it makes his minority election look. If the Russian’s helped him it could mean that his Electoral College election would be more suspect than I already is and for an egomaniac like Trump that is catastrophic. The reality is Trump probably hasn’t colluded with the Russians, but for him that’s just a footnote. In his world, having the American public know that the Russians helped him is just not acceptable. The fact that the Russians actually hacked our elections has no importance to him, only how it looks to his voters.

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Speaking of our uninformed AG. You know, the one who knows nothing about Russia’s incursion into our election system. Well he does have an interest in something other than saving confederate statues in southern cities. Yes, he is also interested in prosecuting users and sellers of cannabis, whether it is legal where they exist or not. But before we get into the reality of this, let’s look at the hypocrisy. Federal law holds the possession and sale of pot as illegal, but many state laws hold it legal. For years idiots like Sessions have fought for states rights even when states couldn’t possibly handle the situation under consideration. Now because it doesn’t suit his needs, Sessions wants to throw states rights out the window. This is typical of a GOP approach to government, but even more a Trump approach; If it’s expedient in moving our agenda or that of our lobbyist bosses ahead, then do t.

The whole idea behind trying to turn pot smoking or dealing illegal is a spinoff of the private prison industry, which is another racist GOP disaster. Private prisons thrive on the sentences handed out to pot users for minor offenses. Small dealers and users, mostly black and Hispanic, fill the current prison industry swelling the numbers of incarcerated far past reason. It costs the nation billions in tax dollars and it makes those billions for the fat cat GOP bribers who fill the coffers of our dishonest congressmen.

We have the largest number of incarcerated people in the world. A huge percentage of those incarcerated are there on drug charges. We could reduce our prison costs by billions of tax dollars, shrink our prisons, give young men and woman a better shot at life simply by nailing Sessions on collusion with the Russians and changing our drug laws to reflect reality.

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Newt Gingrich, apologist for Trump, was on the tube raving about how Bob Muller, the special council who is investigating the Russian involvement in our election was doing stuff he shouldn’t be doing. This is the same Muller that Gingrich was praising to the heavens just a month ago. Now it serves the forever-dishonest Gingrich to attack him. Why? Why does the Newtish one have his nose so far up Trump’s ass? Well, the real reason may be the ambassadorship to the Vatican he is forever touting for his wife. Now we all know that, aside from giving money to the President’s campaign the qualifications for being an ambassador are only slightly lower than for spearing trash along highways. Even at this level, however, Newt’s wife fails the smell test. She married a sleaze that spent the time his then wife was dying of cancer, screwing her in the sick wife’s bed. Well, maybe ambassador to Burkina Faso would be okay but only if they had to live there.

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There was a column in this blog last week about the aftermath of the shootings in Washington and how there had been a reaction against the demeaning political rhetoric that had possibly led to it. The reaction to my column was split pretty much down the middle, for and against my position. I guess that’s good, balance is always nice, but my point seems to have been missed by at least half the respondents, a couple of whom quoted Joe Biden saying that we have to stop questioning the motives of those on the other side. I disagree completely. It is exactly the motives of our opponents that we must always question because their motivation is what defines the problem. Their motivation is pleasing those that fund them and that kill their voters. If we don’t question this motivation then we must assume that these men who are voting to kill Obamacare, to lower taxes on the rich, to destroy the EPA, are simply evil men. I like to think they are not. They may be greedy beyond all acceptance but they are not just evil. What they are currently doing is running in exactly the opposite direction from the needs of their constituents. What they are doing is taking the money and screwing their voters.

When we see legislators proposing legislation that will lose healthcare for their constituents, even while it is proposing a huge tax cut for their wealthy contributors, we must question the motives of that immoral decision. When we see congressmen voting in favor of the big lobbying fossil fuel industry to the determent of those whose land and livelihood those polluters are destroying, we must question their motives, their morals and anything that leads them to these destructive decisions. When we see legislators cutting back on entitlement programs to save a few tax dollars for the rich fat cats who provide campaign funds and second yachts, we absolutely must challenge their motivations. That’s our job. It has nothing to do with making nice with the other side.

When Kristen Soltus Anderson states that we are saying the GOP wants people to die she is making a wrong assumption. We are not saying the GOP wants anyone to die. We are definitely saying that the GOP doesn’t care if anyone dies as long as they get paid.   When the other side learns to tell the truth and decides that their obligation is to its voters and not to their contributors, then and only then will we be able to stop questioning their motives because then and only then will their motives be transparent enough for the voters to see the truth.

There is a current notion that we have gotten to be a meaner society in the last twenty years but personal accusation has always existed in politics, Maybe it ramped up a little this time because we had a leading candidate who used name calling, lies and vitriol as his normal plan of attack. There has never been as uncivilized a candidate as Trump but his crass behavior worked for him so well he has carried it into the White House where he spends his time attacking anyone who has anything bad to say about him instead of ignoring that crap and trying to run the country. It was Trump’s uncivilized behavior that prompted an uncivilized response. You don’t bring a pen to a gunfight. Besides if you did write something before you were shot, Trump couldn’t read it.

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Watched Jay Sekulow one of the liars hired by Trump to protect him during the current investigations. This guy is a riot. I have not seen so much double talk since the last show of Professor Irwin Corey. Of course he has an impossible job, denying that Trump is being investigated even while Trump is announcing that he is being investigated, denying that Trump fired Comey because Comey was leading the investigation of the Russian involvement in our elections even though Trump has admitted it on national TV. One wonders how much these crooks are being paid to lie on national TV and what kind of man it takes to swallow all his respectablity just to afford his own DC6.

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The Supreme Court has made a monumental decision. It will not result in any earthshaking changes to the American landscape but it will certainly open the door to a monumental one. I am referring to the Court’s decision to consider a case on “gerrymandering.”

For those of you who have been living in a balloon the last hundred years or so, gerrymandering is the practice by which state controlling political parties can redraw their voting districts to create a positive voting balance in their favor. Right now, it’s the Republicans who are most guilty of gerrymandering because they control most state legislatures but the Democrats have been just as guilty when they were in power.

And that’s the problem with getting rid of gerrymandering. All politicians look forward to the time when they can rig the vote in their favor so none of them really wants to end the practice. It’s only the voters who actually want their vote to count for something that want to see gerrymandering end.

So let’s see how gerrymandering works. I live in Manhattan, which is pretty strongly a Democratic enclave except for the area that runs from 5^th Avenue to Lexington Avenue and from 60^th Street to 96^th Street, which is heavily Republican. Now, under these conditions, if Manhattan only had one Representative that person would always be a Democrat. But if the Republicans took over the state legislature they could carve out that 5th to Lexington area and make it a different electoral district. So they would get that rep in the House and a member of the Electoral College for the presidential election. This is exactly how it was and is being done all across the south and mid-west and how Trump won in the Electoral College while he lost the popular vote.

But since congress will never vote to eliminate this egregious policy the Supreme Court has decided to consider its constitutionality. For years the Court has been called on to invalidate state electoral maps that have been illegally drawn to reduce influence of racial minorities by depressing the impact of their votes.

Now the Court has accepted a case in Wisconsin where GOP leadership pushed through a redistricting plan so partisan that it violated the Constitution’s First Amendment on equal rights protections. Briefs and arguments will commence in October. But even if the Court decides that the current system is unconstitutional there will still be the problem of how to actually redraw the voting district lines in a fair way. Fair isn’t a word that resonates in Washington.

This blog has dealt with this question before and it seems that the only equitable solution is to draw the voting districts along existing county lines, which are not based on voter demographics, have been established for many years and do not, change with any regularity. Yes, some districts will be as obscenely partisan as they have ever been, but at least if the makeup of the district changes, the district’s voting preferences will change with that makeup and it will not be able to adjust its boundaries to support the same party.

One of the principal benefits to this system will be that it will eventually reduce the ipact of parties and could eventually lead to the emergence of excellence based rather than party based candidates for public office; something this country sorely needs.