The power of the president is enormous – and may be even more so with presidential emergency action documents (PEADs), classified orders granting vast presidential authority in response to extraordinary situations. PEADs are so secret even Congress cannot see them – and that troubles constitutional scholars. “Sunday Morning” special contributor Ted Koppel reports
If you watch it, you’ll see that the only person who is not troubled by the vast powers claimed by the 48-odd PEADs (or up to 60) is John Woo, the Torturers’ Lawyer, a man who, if the US was not so powerful, would have been tried in The Hague a long time ago for crimes against humanity.
So what happens if Trump uses those powers to suspend habeus corpus, to postpone or cancel the election, to round up his enemies? Short answer: Nobody knows.
During the 1970s, when military officers engaged in informal discussions in the wake of the Nixon Administration, it was the majority consensus that, if Nixon had done such things, that the military would have obeyed their oath of fealty to the Constitution and moved against Nixon.
Note from Ray: I had to look for a few seconds before I got what conservatives are finding scandalous this time.
Wisconsin was abused again by the Democratic National Committee’s decision to reduce the party’s national convention to the size of a typical Wednesday night softball league tournament. The Democrats actually removed Wisconsin from the logo for the national convention.
Old Logo New Wisconsin-free logo
We don’t rate a visit from the Democrats’ candidates. We don’t rate a visit from their delegates. We don’t even rate a silhouette on the convention logo.
In 2007 (or thereabouts) researchers from Colby College, US, the University of Connecticut, US and the College of the Holy Cross, US, jointly came up with the ‘Rocking Chair Paradigm’.
The paradigm provided a new method to investigate whether, in some situations, people are prone to (consciously or unconsciously ) synchronize their movements with each other. The paradigm differs from previous methodologies (e.g. using swinging pendulums*) in that the experimental participants don’t have to be instructed to oscillate – they like doing it, and so they do it anyway.
Why Trump is holding up your payments, your cards, your letters, your medication [Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash]
From nojo:
You run out of things to say after awhile. Anything new, anyway. That thing you’re thinking of saying, you already said it, what, two years ago? Three?
“Donald Trump spent the weekend at one of his resorts after Puerto Rico’s infrastructure was devastated.” We said that almost three years ago. Iowa’s been dark all week. Trump went golfing again.
Here’s something new we can say: It’s not just Brown people any more.
But at least that’s a natural disaster. Trump’s been demolishing the post office without divine assistance. Part of this is a longtime Republican dream to put a public service in private hands, where profits can be made. More immediately — well, you know that part. The easier it is for people to vote, the easier it is to vote against him.
See the past ten years of American history for more information. Or the past 230.
But in this latest attack on American citizenship, there’s a new twist: It ain’t just ballots. A lot of stuff still gets mailed in the Internet age. Bills. Payments.
Anger [Photo by Lacie Slezak on Unsplash]
From Athena Scalzi at Whatever:
I understand that people just naturally care about a certain handful of issues, or one specific issue, more than all the rest. Like, maybe you care a lot about the BLM movement, but not so much about the rain-forest being destroyed. Maybe you care a lot about homelessness, but not so much about mask/face-covering laws and whatnot. It’s okay to put the focus of your attention towards the things you care about, I totally get that.
For someone that lives in Flint, maybe the issue they care about the most is getting clean water to their community. If you live in California, maybe your focus is on wildfires. It is totally valid to be more concerned about your community than one across the country — even if, ideally, you should care about both. It doesn’t have to be an equal amount of focus you put towards the issues, but you should at least care a smidge about the other.
Let’s say there are multiple buildings on fire at the same time. It’s possible that one fire is much larger than the others and should be focused on a little more, or maybe the contents inside the building are somewhat more important that the others’, but the other fires should not be ignored entirely. This is basically a metaphor to the fact the world is constantly on fire (sometimes literally), and there’s a lot to focus on.
So now that it’s been established it is okay to care a little more about certain topics than others, it’s important to address something I’ve been seeing a lot lately, which is people posting things like “this topic is more important than all the other issues in the world right now” or “this is the only topic that matters to me and if you don’t agree then you’re wrong.”
The long-awaited 5th volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding Russian active intelligence measures is public, and goddamn. So, Russia was definitely trying to interfere, right? And the Trump campaign was definitely okay with that. And it really looks like there was probably kompromat, and like Trump lied about whether he ever spoke with Roger Stone (you know–this Roger Stone) about Wikileaks, and it looks like Wikileaks was laundering the DNC emails for Russia, and Paul Manafort is understood to have definitely been sharing campaign information with a “Russian intelligence officer”, Konstantin Kilimnik. It also shows that criminal referrals were made to DOJ regarding untruthful statements being made by folks like Steve Bannon and Don Jr. in 2019–although somehow the DOJ must have eaten them, because whatever could have happened? (Why, AG Barr happened, just like he happened to the end of the Mueller report. I reckon he means to be the wall-to-wall rug of Trump cover-ups.)
What we find is, in short, there was plenty of reason for a counter-intelligence investigation into the potential manipulation of a US presidential election by a hostile foreign power (not that Donald “Love Letters to Dictators” Trump understood it as such) and real concern about the many contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. along with the obvious business connections Trump had in Russia, despite his vehement denials about both (which only made things more suspicious). It would have been derelict not to have investigated.
And now, here we are–the Senate Intelligence Select Committee produces this (with intriguing redactions) report covering what I’ve been trying to cover with TrumpWorld Grab-Bags. The conclusion appears to be that, well, it looked bad because it was bad.
Infidel753 writes with an interesting observation about the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, the amendment formalizing and guaranteeing the right of women to vote.
Incredible, in a way, that this was only a century ago. So many things we take for granted now came surprisingly late in history.
I had written about conversations with my grandmother about her experiences as an adult in those days.
Those of my generation have been privileged, in our own way. We are the last to have actually met and spoken with eye witnesses to, participants in, and victims of, history that most of humanity can only know from history books and video documentaries. As a society, we live with slight transmutations of many of the same issues. Our collective imagination puts us farther from history than a real perspective would permit.
Our discussions often went past written history to daily life. My grandmother talked with me about the excitement in the schoolhouse in which she and her cousin taught after she managed to obtain the schedule of a local doctor. The two teachers lined their pupils at the front of the one-room building so they could all watch as he drove by, witnessing the first automobile they had ever seen. My grandparents explained road construction in those days, including regularly spaced dips in roads at steep hills, dips into which wagon wheels fit, allowing horses briefly to rest.
I do not believe I ever met anyone who experienced slavery in the old south. But I do know that former slaves from pre-Civil-War days were alive and telling their stories as I was growing up. The children of slaves had their own stories. An elderly woman told me there were two places she never wanted to go: Hell and Mississippi. An old man talked with me about the harshness of treatment that greeted a young black passenger of a train when he objected to segregated seating. The old man chuckled at the absurdity of challenging the awesome violent power of white supremacy.
And, of course, a rare living witness came to the nation in the mid-1950s. I may have seen the television program. I was too young to understand the significance until later. I’ve got a Secret was hosted each week by Garry Moore, who would introduce a series of guests to a celebrity panel. Members of the panel would each ask a few yes-or-no questions and try to guess the secret.
One guest in 1956 was 95 year old Samuel J. Seymour. The studio audience was stunned. As a youngster, he had been taken to Ford’s Theater, where he saw the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He watched, with the limited understanding of a child, as the great man was gunned down. He was still alive to talk on national television about the terrible moments as he witnessed them.
We are not that far removed from the glory and shame of our history, the role played by those who some of us have met, from whom we have learned.
My grandchildren may one day be called upon to explain the events they witnessed, including the evils perpetrated with the acquiescence of so many of today’s adults.
Perhaps it is not too late to improve the account they might give when asked what their grandfather did about the horrors of the times in which he lived.
Shyamala Gopalan Harris – with a famous daughter
From Infidel753:
Much has been made of Kamala Harris’s status as the first black woman on a major-party presidential ticket, and this is indeed a historic milestone. But the other side of her background — the Indian side — deserves attention too.
Harris’s early exposure to Indian culture was substantial. As a child in California she attended both a Christian church and a Hindu temple (this in itself an encouraging sign that her parents were not dogmatic about religion), and also visited her mother’s family in Chennai in India several times. The name “Kamala” is of Indian origin. Even if she doesn’t strongly self-identify as Indian-American, she’s certainly far more familiar with India and its culture than most Americans are.
This matters because she has a strong chance of succeeding Biden as president.
A couple of news stories/ headlines from recent days (as of this writing) bring this problem home with blunt force. One is from The Oregonian, and covers the extensive protests in Portland. The headline reads:
Portland protest deemed ‘riot’ Saturday after fire set in police union building
The impression you get (and are almost certainly intended to get) from that is that protesters en masse wrought extensive havoc and destruction. But if you bother even to read as far as the first paragraph, you will see this:
A small group of demonstrators lit a fire inside the Portland police union building Saturday, sparking a riot declaration by police, who then advanced on the hundreds who gathered nearby.
Although labeling the troublemakers as “protesters”, which they probably weren’t, the reporter al least mentions that they were a (very) small group, and were separate from the actual protest — upon which nonetheless the police vented their anger. Yet that’s a very different picture from what is suggested by the headline above it.
This kind of journalistic or editorial ineptitude/ malfeasance leaves the American media wide open to tampering and manipulation. And it appears the Russians have taken note, planting phony or greatly exaggerated stories designed to stoke right-wing outrage.
Did not apply to all women
Ratified exactly 100 years ago today.
My grandmother and I talked about that day. She was teaching in Chemung County, New York, when the news came.
I asked her about her feelings when she heard about women’s right to vote being constitutionally guaranteed. She said it made her very happy, especially for a good friend who was a suffragette.
Seems like such a primitive time, and yet my life overlapped with that of a wonderful woman who lived it as an adult.
