To all the conservatives out there who keep posting your idiotic comments on my FB page:

You’re taking everything out of context and running with them and at the same time complaining that the Democrats are doing the same.  Obama’s recent statement about entrepeneurs not getting where they are by themselves was from the middle of a campaign speech about how we all have to rely on one another.  In other words, in case you missed the rest of the speech (or didn't understand it), a business owner wouldn’t have any goods to sell unless someone made them or grew them.  They wouldn’t be delivered without a truck.  The truck wouldn’t exist without someone to build it, the truck wouldn’t go anywhere if there wasn’t someone to drive it, and he couldn’t drive it unless there was someone to build the road.  So they weren’t successful all by themselves, they relied on a lot of other people to get them where they are.

And for all you conservatives who think that government stimulus or “hand outs” as you call them, are so bad, let me tell you a true story, a personal American history story.  My grandfather owned a warehouse in the 1920’s, storing personal belongings of the wealthy and overstock from companies.  When the stock market crashed in ’29 many people pulled their storage or just left it there and didn’t pay their bills.  He eventually went broke and was unemployed for years.  The week that my aunt Germaine was born in 1939 he made $5 doing odd jobs.  But he took advantage of FDR’s work programs and took a free course in sheet metal working which led him to a job at Bethlehem Steel, and then eventually to the Staten Island shipyards.  Stimulus works, and it always has.  Get off your damn high horses.  If YOU were in that position you wouldn't be complaining about those "hand outs".

Memo to Newt

Newt, you ended tonight’s debate in Jacksonville with another comparison between President Obama and Saul Alinsky.  I’ve heard you make the same comparison on news talk shows and in your campaign stump speeches.  It’s obviously meant to be a disparaging comparison, and I’ll admit that I didn’t know who Saul Alinsky was.  I doubt that the majority of Americans know who he was.  So I googled him.

And you know what Newt?  He was a great guy.  Now I’m starting to think that you don’t know who he was.

Here’s a short history lesson.  Saul Alinsky was a community organizer, (like Barack Obama), who strived to improve poverty stricken communities in major cities across the United States.  He started in the slums of Chicago.  His early efforts to “turn scattered, voiceless discontent into a united protest aroused the admiration of Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, who said Alinsky’s aims ‘most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and dignity of the individual.’”[i]

His success in Chicago led him to other large cities with slums or ghettos from Kansas City to Detroit to New York and Southern California.  Although some of his tactics were unconventional, he’s considered a master organizer.  In fact, his book Rules for Radicals has been handed out to Tea Party organizers as a guideline on grass roots organization. 

Just before his death in 1972 he described his plans to take his organizations to help middle class America who he felt were living in frustration and despair and worried about their future.

In his own words from his 1946 “Reveille for Radicals” he states:

“A People’s Organization is a conflict group, and this must be openly and fully recognized.  Its sole reason in coming into being is to wage war against all evils which cause suffering and unhappiness.  A People’s Organization is the banding together of large numbers of men and women to fight for those rights which insure a decent way of life.” 

He was not a communist or socialist or Marxist, in fact, he never belonged to any political organization.  He just happened to think that poor people and the middle class needed help giving themselves a voice.

The fact that you continue to refer to him in a denigrating manner leads me to believe that you disagree with his principles of organizing poor or middle class communities in order to improve themselves.

So then Newt, what are you for?  Oh that’s right, you’d rather spend money on a lunar colony. 

Oh my you do make me laugh!

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[i] Saul Alinsky “Playboy Interview”, Playboy Magazine, 1972

The Hypocrisy of Newt

I’m watching the CNN Republican debate as I write this.  In the first place, I’m angry at the moderator John King for starting with a question for Newt Gingrich about his second wife’s allegations that came out today.  It gave Newt the opportunity to take the high road and point his finger at King and say he’s “APPALLED” that he would open a presidential debate with such a question,  adding that the question bordered on “despicable”.

But Newt, you didn’t answer the question.  I’d like you to explain a few things. 

Please explain why you notified your first wife of your divorce proceedings while she was recovering from cancer surgery.

Please answer the allegations that your second wife made today claiming that you asked her for an “open” marriage because you were having a long term affair with your current wife Calysta.

And most importantly, please explain how it is not the height of hypocrisy that while you were in the midst of your six year extra-marital affair with Calysta, you were leading the Republican charge to impeach President Clinton for having an affair.

So as much as you like to point fingers and yell “appalled”  I think that your unwillingness to answer the question is appalling.  

Your credibility is already compromised by your history as Speaker of the House after being overthrown by your own party and fined for ethics violations. 

Face it Newt, you are a HYPOCRITE, and I think you've made it very obvious.

A History Lesson for the Candidates

I watched the Republican candidates debate again last night.  And then this morning I watched the pundits pick it apart. 

The candidates said a lot of different things, most of which I disagreed with, but one thing in particular jumped out at me.  Newt Gingrich wants to call judges to the Congress and impeach them if they write opinions that are contrary to the majority of the legislators.  Michelle Bachmann agreed with him and went even further by stating that the judicial branch was intended to be the weakest of the three branches of government.  Some pundits agreed with Bachmann, stating that the Federalist Papers implied that the Judicial branch was supposed to be the weakest of the three branches of government. 

This entire argument is ludicrous.  In the first place, the Federalist Papers are a collection of opinion pieces written by Alexander Hamilton about the way he viewed the U.S. Constitution.  They are not the law and were never meant to be.  They are just opinions.  I’m amazed that two candidates, one a historian and the other a Tea Party Constitutionalist, don’t know that according to Article I, sections 1, 2 and 3 of the Constitution, all three branches are actually equal. 

Let’s have a brief history review.  The Executive branch has certain powers, checked by the Legislative branch, and both are checked by the Judicial branch.  In other words, if the legislature writes a bill and votes to pass it into law,  it has to be submitted to the president for approval.  If the president agrees with the law he signs the bill and it becomes law.  If he disagrees with the bill or any part of it he can veto it and send it back to Congress.  With a 2/3 vote the Congress can over-ride the President’s veto and the bill would become law despite his objections.  If anyone, an individual or a state, disagrees with the law they have the opportunity to claim that it is unconstitutional.  The Judicial branch then reviews the law and decides if it is within the guidelines of the Constitution.  If they decide that it is not, then the law is overturned.

A perfect example of this is the continuing struggle by Congress to pass a law banning flag-burning.  The Supreme Court has several times overturned any effort, stating that flag burning can be considered an expression of speech and thus protected by Article 1 of the Bill of Rights.

Mr. Gingrich thinks that some “liberal”  judges are “activist”, making their own laws by overturning real laws.  Those judges, he says, should be called to Congress and questioned.  As Ron Paul said last night, that would be opening a whole can of worms.  Any judge’s decision can be overturned by a higher court.  Mr. Gingrich then went on to say that Abraham Lincoln would have agreed with him because he tried during his presidency to change the judicial system.  Well, as far as I know, and I’m not a Ph.D. like Mr. Gingrich, Lincoln vehemently disagreed with Roger Taney’s deciding opinion in the Dred Scott case, but he never tried to change it.  He also suspended the writ of Habeus Corpus by executive order which was overturned by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roger Taney.  [i]

The Republican candidates keep referring to the Federalist Papers as if they were law.  As I stated above the papers were a collection of opinion pieces and in no way intended to be law.  They also forget to mention, or more likely choose to ignore, that there was a collection of Anti-Federalist Papers written by Hamilton’s opponents, most notably James Madison. 

They also fail to recognize the meaning of the Federalist Papers.  The term “Federalist” itself implies a strong central government with limited states’ rights.  This is exactly the opposite of what the modern Republican party believes in.  The only thing in the Federalist Papers that coincides with modern Republican beliefs is the opinion that major industrialists be a major influence in the policies of the government.

They need to review the Constitution and their history books. 

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[i] Lincoln suspended the writ as an emergency measure to prevent the state of Maryland from voting for secession immediately after the beginning of the Civil War.  Congress objected to this executive order and took it to the Supreme Court.  The court, led by chief justice Roger Taney, a native of Maryland, ruled against Lincoln.  Lincoln ignored Taney’s decision, and although as the President in the time of insurrection or rebellion he had the Constitutional power to order the suspension without Congressional approval, in order to expand the suspension to some secessionist or anti-draft mid-western states,  he formally asked Congress to approve of the suspension. They agreed.  By the way, three later presidents suspended the writ.  U.S. Grant in order to stop the KKK in some southern states, FDR to send Japanese, German and Italian Americans to internment camps during WWII and George W. Bush to arrest  any suspected “military combatants” during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  All did so without Congressional approval. 

The Field So Far

The economic outlook is kind of grim.  The stimulus plan hasn’t worked as well as we thought it would.  Should President Obama be worried about his reelection hopes?

Well, here’s who he seems to be contending against so far. 

Newt Gingrich:  On his third or fourth wife.  One of those wives he divorced while she was recovering from cancer surgery in order to marry his mistress.  He has explained his moral lapses by stating that he had such passion for his public service to a country that he loves so much that he lost himself in the moment.  Huh?

 Mitt Romney is back-pedaling away from his own health insurance program so vigorously that he may hurt himself.  And I mean literally physically hurt himself.

Michelle Bachmann making a speech in Iowa months ago explained that our founding fathers “worked tirelessly” to rid the nation of the horrible blight and scourge of slavery.  “John Quincy Adams worked all his life to rid this country of slavery.”  I have to give credit where it’s due, she’s right that J.Q. Adams did spend his 17 years in the House of Representatives after he was the president to change the 3/5 clause in the Constitution. But he was not one of the founding fathers.  In fact about half of the founding fathers, George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson, the author of the phrase “All men are created equal” were slave holders.  She also seems to think that the first shots of the Revolution happened in New Hampshire, while in fact Lexington and Concord are in Massachusetts.

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey just reluctantly handed over a personal check to the state treasurer to pay for the use of state police helicopters to attend his son’s high school baseball games after months of claiming that the state can’t afford to pay for police and firefighter pensions. 

John Boehner, after the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives made a speech on the steps of the Capitol, explaining that Republicans believe in a strict interpretation of the Constitution.  He then proceeded to read what he thought was the preamble to the Constitution.  It was the Declaration of Independence.  (I saw this live on CNN and what amazed me was that no Republican standing near him seemed to know the difference).

Now Sarah Palin is on her bus tour, for whatever reason.  She went to Boston today.  When asked what she and her family did today she said, and I have to paraphrase here, “Well we saw where Paul Revere hung out as a teenager which was kinda cool, ya know before he went off to warn the British that we were coming so that they would know with all the bells ringing and the gunshots that they couldn’t mess with us and take our guns away.”  Huh?  

With minds like this even I could win.  Obama has nothing to worry about.

Happy 150th Anniversary

Years ago I had a friend from Dallas named Bert, whom I met through work.  He was a big burly man with a deep gravelly voice and an even deeper Texas accent.  When he first met me his first question was, “Barbara are you a Yankee or a damned Yankee?”  I asked what the difference was and he answered,  “A Yankee is a Northerner who comes to visit us, and a damned Yankee comes to stay.”  

It was my first inkling that the Civil War has never really ended.

Today, April 12^th, marks the 150^th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War.  At 4:30 a.m. Confederate forces at Fort Moultrie unleashed a barrage of artillery fire at Fort Sumter, a federal military installation in Charleston harbor.   More than 38 hours later Fort Sumter surrendered.  Except for a mule, there was no blood shed in this first action of the war, prompting former South Carolina Senator James Chestnut to boast that the Confederate forces were so superior that only a thimble full of blood would be spilled before the Union surrendered.  The war lasted four years and caused over 620,000 casualties before the Confederates finally surrendered.

But the war didn’t really end with General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.  The era of Reconstruction, which included Federal occupation, increased taxes and carpetbaggers who bought land for pennies on the dollar, lasted until 1877.  After Reconstruction the South fought back with the KKK and Jim Crow laws.  They lost their last battle when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964.  

I have participated in many Civil War forums over the years, and I’m still amazed at the number of people who continue to deny the true cause of the Civil War.    I’ve heard everything from states’ rights to high tariffs all the way down to Lincoln was just an evil dictator.  I have never heard a Southern apologist admit that the war was about slavery.

In fact, slavery was the cause.  And the Civil War didn’t really start on April 12, 1861.  It started in 1787 when the Constitution was ratified where in Article I Section 2 it outlines the apportionment of representatives “among the several states according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.”  All other persons referred to slaves. 

In the 74 intervening years the Southern slave holding states threatened to secede several times trying to protect that 3/5 clause and their equal representation in Congress.  To maintain the Union, Northern congressman appeased them with one compromise after another.  But when Lincoln, who said that he wished to restrict the territorial enlargement of slavery into the new west, was elected to the presidency, the Southern states seceded one after another.  The era of compromise was over.

That “peculiar institution” of slavery was the basis of the Southern agrarian economy, and if they didn’t have political equality in Congress their ability to sustain slavery as an economic institution was doomed.  

There is no article in our Constitution that forbids secession of any state.  So the argument that the slave holding states had a right to secede is plausible.  But they were seceding to protect the right to own slaves.  There were cultural and social issues involved as well, all stemming from the institution of slavery, but the “states’ rights” argument is an easy way to gloss over the moral issue of slavery by claiming that they had a right to secede, thus claiming that Lincoln had initiated a war of “Northern Aggression”.  

Lincoln had been thinking and speaking about the future of slavery for years prior to his presidency because he believed that the thoughts and ideals of human equality expressed in the Declaration of Independence outweighed the strict limitations of the Constitution.  In his “House Divided” speech to the Illinois state senate in 1858 he proclaimed his belief that “this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided.  It will become all one thing or all the other.”

Lincoln was right.  And it took much more than just a thimble full of blood.  

Ironically Bert and I became very good friends.  I sent him postcards and a bullet from Gettysburg and he sent me a huge box of shrapnel from Vicksburg.   Though he never would admit that the war was about slavery, and he always called me Yank, we overcame our sectional and political differences.    Bert passed away a while ago and I miss him.  But he can rest in peace knowing that I’ll never be a damned Yankee.