What rhymes with Putin?

I don’t know Ukrainian, but I’m sure Ukrainians have their zingers.

In English, Zero clued in works.

Rasputin stand-in does the job.

This frivolous Putin query comes as we approach the anniversary of a madman’s attempt to rewrite world history. On February 24th, 2022, Putin let loose the power of the Russian military – with a destructive force not seen in Europe since World War 2 – on a peaceable neighbor, Ukraine. There was nothing frivolous about Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.

What rhymes with madman?

Con man.

Convinced I can.

Bad man.

Putin thought he was invincible.

What rhymes with invincible?

Despicable.

Unpredictable.

Unthinkable.

This time last year, Putin was on top of the world, about to rewrite Russian history; he imagined himself emulating Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, also known as Catherine the Great, once Empress of Russia, his long dead and gone heroine.

What rhymes with Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst?

I have no idea.

I do know what rhymes with Putin’s attempt to rewrite history.

Dark night.

Quenched light.

Instead of imposing his will on the populace of Ukraine, approximately 44 million souls, or about the populations of Florida and New York State combined, or even Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Georgia combined, Putin became the first easily identifiable despot of our new century, shockingly pushed back to where he came from by the pure force of Ukrainian willpower.

What rhymes with despot?

Guess what?

Crackpot.

On February 24th, 2022, Putin lent his name to a mega invasion of a nonbelligerent neighbor on an international level never imagined. The consequences were disastrous.

In November, 2022, mere months ago and just months after Putin’s initial decision to ‘take’ Ukraine, the BBC reported that the most senior US general, Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated that 100,000 Russian and 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or injured in the war in Ukraine so far. Gen Milley added that at least 40,000 civilians had died by November of last year.

Thanks to our zero clued in, Rasputin stand-in, demented man in Moscow, epicenter of Putin’s mythical former USSR, innocent lives are being lost on a daily basis in Ukraine in numbers that are nothing short of abominable.

What rhymes with abominable?

Dishonorable.

Unconscionable.

And what rhymes with demented?

Disoriented.

Unbefriended.

Dented  – big time where it counts, in Putin’s internal psyche.

Lest we get suckered into a Putin-defined cesspit and bogged down in the mindset of an autocrat, I was inspired by one of the catchiest songs of 2023 so far, the brilliant Colombian Shakira’s take-down of her ex, to imagine how Putin might deserve his own rhyming put-down.

In a hugely publicized 2022 breakup, the former Barcelona football player Gerard Piqué left Shakira, his wife of 12 years and the mother of his 2 children, for a new paramour, a much younger woman called Clara Chía.

Shakira is resilient if anything. She is no push-over. On Jan 11th, she released a masterpiece, a blockbuster hit with the enigmatic title of SHAKIRA || BZRP Music Sessions #53.

Even though sung in Spanish, the title shot to the top of Apple’s iTunes charts in the U.S. on release. Many, so many of us it would seem, can resonate with revenge. The song’s video, with English subtitles, went viral. The song is not only catchy, bitching and biting, but cathartic. It broke YouTube records, registering more than 64 million views within 24 hours. Lord, does Ukraine need revenge!

Think about it for a minute. Millions upon millions of us can resonate with what is happening to Shakira. Millions more of us around the world identify with what is happening to Ukraine. Billions of us have reasons to get angry with Putin over Ukraine daily. The man seems unaccountable.

What rhymes with unaccountable?

Incomprehensible.

Unfathomable.

Shakira is a genius at rhyming. In her Spanish lyrics for SHAKIRA || BZRP Music Sessions #53, she found a way to connect her philandering ex, Piqué, to mortification, (te mortifique), chewing up (mastique), and a host of other rhymes and homonyms that might be enough reason for any year-abroad undergraduate or graduate student to want to learn Spanish. Shakira doesn’t let go. The video has already had 288,109,016 views on YouTube as of this writing. It’s averaging more than 5 million new views daily.

Imagine if Shakira took on Putin?

Imagine how she, stand-in for Ukraine, could destroy this pseudo Westerner, this false Russian prophet, this wannabe Catharine the Great, this Putin, with just a few rhymes and words.

Shakira can do that. She has that power. She is, after all, the reigning queen of World Cup Soccer anthems. Her Waka Waka video from the 2010 World Cup has had more than 3,472,939,423 (3 billion!) views.

Shakira knows how to garner world attention. Sorry Piqué. Maybe she’s right. Maybe you did choose a Twingo over a Ferrari, just as Putin fell into his own Twingo hell with his decision to try to absorb Urkaine into a mythical Russia.

Here’s how Shakira might put Putin – our present-day world pariah – in his place. And here, too, is how that very same Putin might feel, shamed, hearing himself belittled in a song where billions more than the billions that have watched Shakira’s Waka Waka see him as a wuss.

Just imagine Shakira’s singing these rhymes as she does on SHAKIRA || BZRP Music Sessions #53, but addressed to Putin, and here we go:

Putin?

Zero clued in

Rasputin stand-in

Madman?

Con man.

Convinced I can.

Bad man.

Invincible?

Despicable.

Unpredictable.

Unthinkable.

Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst?

History rewrite?

Dark night.

Quenched light.

Despot?

Guess what.

Crackpot.

Abominable.

Dishonorable.

Unconscionable.

Demented.

Disoriented.

Unbefriended.

Dented

Unaccountable?

Incomprehensible.

Unfathomable.

Despicable.

Unpredictable.

Unthinkable.

Abominable.

Dishonorable.

Unconscionable.

The post Shakira nails Putin appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In June of 1950, Joe DiMaggio got his 2,000^th hit. Guam was designated a United States Territory, and its residents were granted US citizenship. Budge Patty won his first of 2 Grand Slam titles at the French Men’s Tennis Championships, beating Jaroslav Drobný 6-1, 6-2, 3-6, 5-7, 7-5. Doris Hart was the women’s French Tennis Champion.

All through June of 1950, The Third Man Theme, an instrumental played on the zither by Anton Karas, was the most popular song on Billboard’s Best Sellers in Stores chart in the US. It was also the Most Played in Jukeboxes. The most popular song Played by Jockeys was Hoop-Dee-Doo by Perry Como. Jukeboxes, Jockeys, yes we are that far away from then now.

I was born in June 1950. Although that fact ages me now, until recently I knew nothing about the month in which I was born. The New York Times on June 9, 1950, the day of my birth, saw a scary world. U.S. Reds Go Underground To Foil F.B.I., Hoover Says is centered on the front page. The sub-headline goes on to state that 540,000 Communists and Followers Seek Our Atomic, Military, Industrial Secrets, He Tells Closed Senate Unit Session. Page 2 tells us that the FAR EAST SITUATION is VIEWED AS GRAVE. In fact, Peace Treaty With Japan Now Would Throw That Country to Russia, Navy Expert Says.

Reds was a word much in fashion in 1950.

But even so, over at the New York Times not all was doom and gloom. The paper, on page 26, had a Coco-Cola ad touting the beverage as the Natural Partner of Good Things to Eat. Who knew!  Altman & Co showed DISTINGUISHED DRESSES OF HOPE SKILLMAN COTTONS, all in caps, for $19.95, on page 7. These dresses were available in 1950 with a cool well-bred air all of their own. Not only that. You could have the first dress in blue, maize or rose as shown – as shown was in black and white, a minor detail – or in a different stripe design in brown, blue or green, size 10 to 20. But wait. For the second dress, there were other options. The second dress was available in orchid, gold or rose; or in a stripe with amber, blue or green predominating, sizes 12 to 20. Unfortunately, those size 10 were out of luck with the second dress option.

But just a minute, what about those sizes 4, 6 or 8, much in demand today? So sorry, those sizes did not seem to be available in the 1950’s. Everybody was big then, or so it would seem.

On page 28 of the New York Times on June 9, 1950, were the movies of the day. Annie Get Your Gun, The Picture the Country’s Been Waiting For – News. Maureen O’Hara and Macdonald Carey were in Comanche Territory. Elizabeth Taylor (the Bride of the Year) was in Conspirator, an MGM hit. The Little Carnegie on West 57^th (between 6^th and 7^th Avenues, the ad adds for reference) was showing Faust and the Devil, BEST FILM OF ITS KIND YET MADE – Journal American.

What was news in June of 1950 is today just an annotation in history, patchily available on Wikipedia and Google Images. It might be good for us to remember that in another 50 to 100 years, our preoccupations of today, our pandemic, the newly hatched harebrained notion that Trump might be legitimately reinstated as President in August 2021, however we define the world as we know it now and no matter how impassioned we are about our present, all of our concerns will one day be lodged somewhere as just plain ole yesteryear.

Zeroing in on June 9, 1950, the Panhandle Herald in Carson County, Texas noted on page 2 that there was a problem getting good seed wheat that year. On its front page the same paper reported that a radio and rifle had been stolen from a farm belonging to one Jim Mecaskey. On page 5, we discover that Alma Medlin, Bride-Elect, was Given a Shower. And on page 7, we learn that Frank Duby Took a Business Course.

Regional newspapers around the country and around the world reported on everyday events going on that same day. The Amherst News-Times in Ohio reported that their Council had authorized Parking Meters Here, and that Funeral Services would Be Friday for Adam Hahn.

In Ireland, sometime during that day of June 9^th 1950, I was born, one among an estimated 266,848 babies born on that date worldwide.

I have just recently discovered that there are web sites dedicated to revealing to me essential facts of my existence that I might have missed. One site tells me that according to their calculations, it’s most likely I was conceived on Friday, September 16, 1949. In all honesty, I had never wondered about that before they brought it to my attention. Now I’m wondering if I should somehow celebrate September 16 as a sort of alternate birthday. Happy Conceived Day!

I was born, it turns out, just weeks before the outbreak of the Korean War. That war began on June 25^th 1950 when forces from North Korea invaded South Korea. On June 28^th, North Korean forces captured Seoul, the capital of South Korea. The times were not so innocent after all. I have no memory of the Korean War at all: nothing, no images, no sound bites, no anecdotes.

My memories of the 1950’s are bathed in dull colors, sepia browns, indistinct grays and dusty blues. If there were reds (other than Hoover’s) or yellows or greens in those years, then they were dull too. I often think of that when I look at the vibrant, soul enhancing and screamingly alive colors of David Hockney who also lived through the dulled colors of the1950’s. Hockney is the anecdote to the visual world in the 1950’s, even the 1940’s.

Who else was born in 1950? Do I want to do this and date myself? I guess so.

Among those in the public eye born in 1950 were Bill Murray, Dr. Phil, Stevie Wonder, Joan Lunden, Victoria Principal, Daniel Auteuil, Morgan Fairchild, Natalie Cole, Mark Spitz, Peter Gabriel, Cybill Shepherd, Miou-Miou, Neil Jordan, Julie Walters, Bobby McFerrin, William Hurt and Martin Short.

For the rest of us born in 1950 still alive, untouched by fame, we too have achieved a milestone. We have witnessed 71 years.

The post What June 1950 can teach us about June 2021 appeared first on Occasional Planet.

With the release of a public letter explaining their reasons for supporting the impeachment of Donald J. Trump, more than 750 American historians are sounding the alarm about the duty and necessity for lawmakers to vote in favor of impeaching the president.

Co-authored by Sean Wilenta, professor of American history at Princeton University, and Brenda Wineapple, author of a book about Andrew Johnson – the first of only three U.S. presidents to be impeached thus far –  the letter sites the uncannily prescient words penned in 1792 by the venerable Alexander Hamilton:

We are American historians devoted to studying our nation’s past who have concluded that Donald J. Trump has violated his oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” His “attempts to subvert the Constitution,” as George Mason described impeachable offenses at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, urgently and justly require his impeachment.

President Trump’s numerous and flagrant abuses of power are precisely what the Framers had in mind as grounds for impeaching and removing a president. Among those most hurtful to the Constitution have been his attempts to coerce the country of Ukraine, under attack from Russia, an adversary power to the United States, by withholding essential military assistance in exchange for the fabrication and legitimization of false information in order to advance his own re-election.

President Trump’s lawless obstruction of the House of Representatives, which is rightly seeking documents and witness testimony in pursuit of its constitutionally-mandated oversight role, has demonstrated brazen contempt for representative government. So have his attempts to justify that obstruction on the grounds that the executive enjoys absolute immunity, a fictitious doctrine that, if tolerated, would turn the president into an elected monarch above the law.

As Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist, impeachment was designed to deal with “the misconduct of public men” which involves “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” Collectively, the President’s offenses, including his dereliction in protecting the integrity of the 2020 election from Russian disinformation and renewed interference, arouse once again the Framers’ most profound fears that powerful members of government would become, in Hamilton’s words, “the mercenary instruments of foreign corruption.”

It is our considered judgment that if President Trump’s misconduct does not rise to the level of impeachment, then virtually nothing does

Hamilton understood, as he wrote in 1792, that the republic remained vulnerable to the rise of an unscrupulous demagogue, “unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents…despotic in his ordinary demeanour.” That demagogue, Hamilton said, could easily enough manage “to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day.” Such a figure, Hamilton wrote, would “throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

President Trump’s actions committed both before and during the House investigations fit Hamilton’s description and manifest utter and deliberate scorn for the rule of law and “repeated injuries” to constitutional democracy. That disregard continues and it constitutes a clear and present danger to the Constitution. We therefore strongly urge the House of Representatives to impeach the President.

If you are an historian, you are invited to add your signature to this historic document. Click on the link below.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScorrGrlDoKp-BdaUfreuvDfQiidP2pIq84BwsAOrwKuWHcPg/viewform

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American children are taught in grade school that the Pilgrims came to North America seeking religious freedom.  In actuality, they had disembarked  for America from a life in the Netherlands, where they had  religious freedom  to worship as they wished. This wasn’t enough; they wanted to establish a theocracy. Landing near Plymouth Rock in what is modern-day Massachusetts, in 1620, the illegal  immigrants were ill-prepared to start a life in the wilderness. Despite the abundance of game, fish, plants, and medicines around them, they slowly began to starve as well as die of disease brought with them. They chose for their settlement a cleared area belonging to the Wampanoag, the first people of this area, in their summer village. The Wampanoag leader Ousamequin (known as Massasoit to the Pilgrims) brokered a treaty with them, and an escaped Wampanoag slave, who was called by the English Squanto, helped teach them to plant crops suitable for the area.

The following fall, 1621, the Pilgrim settlers –not inviting their hosts the native people, as we were all taught — gathered together for a feast consisting of New World foods. Was turkey included as it is today? No one knows for sure. Most likely that first feast consisted of venison, berries, ducks, geese, perhaps corn as well and plenty of  thanks for their God and his bounty. By then, the Wampanoag and the Pequot people had begun to fall ill and die from disease brought by the Pilgrims, a fine repayment for their aid and for allowing the ungrateful Pilgrims to take over their summer village.  This is the idyllic event school children are taught about, but it was not the first official Thanksgiving.

That date belongs in the year 1637. “On that day (May 26)  the Massachusetts Colony Governor, John Winthrop, proclaimed such a “Thanksgiving” to celebrate the safe return of a band of heavily armed hunters, all colonial volunteers. They had just returned from their journey to what is now Mystic, Connecticut where they massacred 700 Pequot Indians. Seven hundred Indians — men, women and children — all murdered.” (Huffington Post).  According to another source: “In 1637 near present day  Groton, Connecticut, over 700 men, women and children of the Pequot Tribe had gathered for their annual Green Corn Festival which is our Thanksgiving celebration. In the predawn hours the sleeping Indians were surrounded by English and Dutch mercenaries who ordered them to come outside.  Those who came out were shot or clubbed to death while the terrified women and children who huddled inside the longhouse were burned alive. The next day the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared “A Day Of Thanksgiving” because 700 unarmed men, women and children had been murdered.” (Manataka American Indian Council).

Why were these people slaughtered? Their land was valuable and desired by the influx of Old World settlers. Although even as early as the late 1490s, native populations were being decimated by the invaders, this sad chapter marks the  beginning of the end for native people in what would later  be known as the United States of America, land of the free and the brave.

Thanksgiving as a modern holiday came into being in 1863, as a proclamation by President Lincoln. Since then its origins have been sanitized for generations of school children, finally codified in textbooks in the early 20^th century. It’s said  that history  is written by the winners. If so, we “winners” have little to be thankful for or proud of.

Sources:

The true story behind Thanksgiving is a bloody struggle that decimated the population and ended with a head on a stick
https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-thanksgiving-2017-11

The True Story of Thanksgiving
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-greener/the-true-story-of-thanksg_b_788436.html

The History of the First Thanksgiving
http://historyofmassachusetts.org/the-first-thanksgiving/

Native History: It’s Memorial Day—In 1637, the Pequot Massacre Happened
https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/native-history-it-s-memorial-day-in-1637-the-pequot-massacre-happened-CPEC3BR9hkm5SoXp3X9uFg/

THE REAL STORY OF THANKSGIVING
https://www.manataka.org/page269.html

The post The true story of Thanksgiving: Not what we learned in school appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Robert Byrd served in the United States Senate for 51 years representing the people of West Virginia as a Democrat. 51 years is worth several lifetimes in politics and the country changed in a myriad of ways from 1959 to 2010, and so did Robert Byrd. Growth is important not just in politics but in life and often if one is a politician those can look like the same thing, but there is a difference between genuine introspection and political gamesmanship. Byrd falls into the former, and so far, former Vice President (and Senate contemporary) Joe Biden has fallen into the latter.

Before Byrd was elected to office he was still active in local politics, he recruited over 150 people to form a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and he was elected the top officer of his chapter by a unanimous vote. Byrd in his capacity as a Klan leader was a prolific writer and one of his letters addressed the possibility of an integrated army, “I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.” Eventually Byrd left the KKK but he did not leave behind the ideas of that organization, for decades Byrd clung to his beliefs that were without question rooted in white supremacy and he pursued policies that protected racist institutions.

Byrd joined Senate Dixiecrats in filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a filibuster that lasted over 80 days and the legislation was only able to pass after the Senate invoked cloture for only the second time since 1927. Byrd’s personal filibuster of 14 hours and 13 minutes remains today the 11th longest filibuster in the 213-year history of the practice. Byrd also voted against the Voting Rights Act and the nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, going as far as to solicit the help of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to dig up dirt to kill his nomination. Byrd didn’t just have a bad record on race, he also supported the red-baiting Joseph McCarthy and the failure of conscience that was Vietnam. Byrd could’ve continued to align himself with bitter regressive men like Strom Thurmond and Herman Talmadge, there would’ve been no political consequences as Byrd was electorally secure in West Virginia and was quickly gaining seniority in the Senate. But he didn’t continue as he did, Byrd apologized and then he spent the rest of his life attempting to come to terms with his past.

In his autobiography Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields he said “I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times … and I don’t mind apologizing over and over again.” Starting in the 1970s Byrd renounced his segregationist past and began to attempt to make amends with the communities he had harmed. Byrd was fiercely outspoken against President Bush’s determination to launch an illegal war in Iraq. After originally calling the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. “self-seeking rabble rouser”, he advocated the creation of a federal holiday to celebrate his memory and acknowledging “I am the only one in the Senate who must vote for this bill.” Byrd eventually went on to earn the support of the NAACP and respect within West Virginia’s black community. The biggest symbol of Byrd’s evolution happened in May of 2008, after a string of losses and a controversy involving an explosive pastor there was doubt about whether DNC superdelegates would continue to support Sen. Barack Obama. Then Robert Byrd endorsed Obama, perhaps securing delegate support and ultimately the nomination of America’s first black President. Byrd later went on to cast the deciding vote in support of Obamacare while dying from a terminal illness.

Byrd did not have a perfect record nor was he progressive, not really by any metric. He supported anti-gay legislation which was common for the time though still abhorrent. Byrd was a proponent of tough on crime policies and his politics while more liberal in his old age were still reflective of conservative West Virginia. Byrd’s politics overall were not especially commendable, but they were evidence of a man who was affected positively by his experiences and became a more ethical leader.

Joe Biden served with Robert Byrd for 30 years and witnessed his evolution first hand, that is why it is so disappointing that he has not learned from his example. Biden’s record may not include segregation, but it does include some of the worst policy decisions in recent years. Biden wrote the mass-incarceration ‘94 crime bill that has imprisoned a generation of black and Latino men. Biden voted for the illegal war in Iraq that left hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s dead, gave rise to ISIS, cost trillions of dollars, and has ushered us into an era of forever war. Biden wrote the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act which lead to millions of Americans falling deeper into economic despair as they were unable to file “clean slate” bankruptcies during the Great Recession forcing people into what Bob Cesca called “neo-indentured-servitude to creditors”.

Joe Biden’s record is mixed but there are countless times, whether relating to Anita Hill or his affinity for the same segregationists that Byrd distanced himself from, when Biden was decidedly not on the side of progress. Biden has had bright spots like his support of marriage equality as Vice President while the official position of the administration was opposed, but those bright spots are far and few between. Now Biden is running for President of the United States (again) and his record is coming under fair scrutiny. Biden is leading the field and stands a good chance to be the nominee of the Democratic Party and perhaps beat Donald Trump in the upcoming Presidential election. He has had a little over a decade to evolve and learn and change his politics for the better, but he’s failed to rise to the occasion thus far.

It is not too late for Biden to become a better politician and a better person by looking inward and taking account of the consequences of the actions of his career and redefining his politics to serve as reparations for those he’s harmed. Humility is often missing from politics and hubris is often excessive, and Biden has shown too much of the latter and has only been forced into the former after embarrassing himself through unforced errors. Not only do the American people deserve a better Joe Biden, but Biden deserves a better version of himself. It’s difficult to change in politics and in life and more difficult still to sustain that change (see the many faces of Mitt Romney). Biden should ask himself why does he want to be in government. If the answer is to exploit proximity to power to achieve some personal fantasy of grandeur, then it’s not necessary to change. However, if the answer is something more noble, to be in the service of the public and use government as a tool to meaningfully improve the lives of others, then he must recognize that he has not always achieved that goal and spend this campaign and a potential presidency fighting for that end.

The post The Redemption of Robert Byrd and What Biden Could Learn appeared first on Occasional Planet.

There were a number of competitive Senate races last year, Democrats ended up shocking Republicans in the Great Lakes and Sunbelt, while Republicans were able to do fairly well in the Midwest. Independent experts have described this midterm cycle as “the most expensive in history” with over $5 billion dollars spent on organizing and ads. We’ve grown accustomed to high-dollar spending in competitive races, but what’s happening in a state like Wyoming which hasn’t historically been competitive? No Democratic presidential candidate has carried Wyoming since 1964, so one might imagine that the state would be immune to the gratuitous levels of spending that we’ve seen in Missouri. Yet, incumbent senator John Barrasso raised over $7 million dollars and spent over $5 million on his race which had not even the slightest chance of being competitive.

Barrasso’s race isn’t an outlier, there are a number of noncompetitive races where favored candidates spent ungodly amounts of money. Sen. Mazie Hirono (D) of Hawaii has spent over $3 million, Mitt Romney (R) of Utah has spent nearly $5 million, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) of Massachusetts spent an eye popping $20.4 million.  There’s simply an unconscionable amount of money in politics and the tactics campaigns have been using to fundraise border on the ridiculous (Something Arthur Lieber has written about at length here and here). The numbers get even more extreme when we look into the actually competitive races. In Texas, Beto O’Rourke spent $60 million to lose to Sen. Ted Cruz (R). In Missouri, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) spent $33 million to lose to Josh Hawley. In Florida, Rick Scott had to spend $66 million to barely beat Sen. Bill Nelson (D).

Which poses an interesting question…why the hell are we spending so much money on campaigns and was it always like this? The answer to the first question isn’t overly complicated. In politics there aren’t a whole lot of quantitative measurements, metrics that have numbers and not only measure success but can be understood by voters. Of course, we have poll numbers, but voters already follow those and campaigns have essentially no control over the polls. So, when there aren’t any meaningful things to measure, you begin to measure things that were previously meaningless that you’ve decided to assign meaning to; money. A negative consequence of our decision to use money to measure success means that we’ve prioritized fundraising numbers over important things that are hard to quantify like policy positions or authenticity. Our present situation is reminiscent of Vietnam when the military began tracking “body counts” to produce some misleading characterization about American strength throughout the war. We’re at the point that voters ask candidates “how much money have you raised” and we have countdown clocks to await the end of quarter fundraising numbers, the party apparatuses are pushing candidates harder and harder to beg for money and the candidates oblige because the donor-industrial complex demands that they do.

Now as to the question of is this the way it has always been, the answer is no. Believe it or not, there was once a time where the media didn’t report on campaign contributions and knowing your constituents was enough to get re-elected. Before there was Citizens United or CNN or ActBlue or email, there was Bill Proxmire.

Sen. William Proxmire was the longest serving senator from Wisconsin, in office from 1957 until 1989, succeeding Ted Cruz lookalike and anti-communist crusader Joseph McCarthy. Proxmire did not do the rubber chicken circuit nor did he send out solicitations for campaign donations in his last two campaigns. In fact, Proxmire returned campaign donations and typically only spent $200 on each of his campaigns and that money was earmarked for postage to return donations. Proxmire wasn’t necessarily the exception, many of his contemporaries didn’t spend time dialing for dollars. Until 1976 when the Supreme Court decided Buckley v. Valeo there were very few enforced rules on spending and fundraising which allowed for some obviously unethical activities, namely the slush fund utilized by the Committee to Re-elect the President during Watergate. However most established politicians like Birch Bayh in Indiana or Frank Church in Idaho simply went about the business of legislating with the assumption that doing their jobs well would be enough. Which was true to an extent, from 1970 until 1990 incumbent senators could expect to outperform the partisanship of their state somewhere between 11 to 22 points compared to less than 3 points in 2018.

Proxmire in the elections where he eschewed campaign donations was still re-elected by large margins, 29 points in 1982 and 46 points in 1976. This is more impressive when one remembers that Proxmire was a Democrat and Wisconsin supported Republican Presidential Candidates in every election from 1952 through 1984 with the exception of a narrow Carter victory in 1976 and LBJ’s landslide in 1964. Of course, partisanship was not as high nor were the parties as fractured 40 years ago as they are today, however what Proxmire figured out then could still be true today and that is if you prioritize your principles over getting re-elected that can endear you to voters. Proxmire was famous for his monthly “Golden Fleece Awards” where he listed what he believed to be a particularly jarring use of government money like thousands of dollars spent to study why people fall in love or a study by the army on how to purchase Worcester sauce. But perhaps even more important than principle is authenticity and voters will forgive you for being wrong so long as you give it to them straight. Which is important because Proxmire was not always on the side of progress (but perhaps neither were the people of Wisconsin), he was opposed to busing, spending on public works projects that he deemed “frivolous”, and he supported the Vietnam War way longer than was politically necessary.

Proxmire was visible around Wisconsin, he visited VFW halls, he marched in parades, and he was interviewed by local papers. It’s hard to imagine this now but there was a time when our members of Congress simply went to Washington but were not of Washington. Proxmire was of course a larger figure in his day, not towering like Robert Byrd or Bob Dole, but big nonetheless and that certainly helps when running for re-election. But being well known isn’t everything, Tom Daschle found that out being Senate minority leader doesn’t mean you can’t lose re-election which happened to him in 2004. Being visible also doesn’t guarantee success, in Missouri Claire McCaskill held more than 50 townhalls just to lose 109 out of 115 counties.

So, the larger more important question is what changed? Ryan Grim discusses the emergence of big money in his book We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to AOC, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement. The moral majority and the election of 1980 permanently changed the calculus of the Democratic Party which until then had succeeded largely on the strength of organized labor. The election of 1980 was a very good year for Republicans and for the first time since 1952 they’d won control of the US Senate. This was a result that stunned Democrats but leadership still didn’t fully see the writing on the wall and there was an assumption that they would never lose the House because a so-called “blue wall” had been amassed that was insurmountable. From 1930 until 1980 Democrats controlled the House 46 out of 50 years and hadn’t lost control since 1952. Previously the organizing theory of the party was to register the most people and incentivize them to the polls, ideally with hope but occasionally with fear. However, this historic loss lead some to believe in a new theory, that raising more money than the GOP and spending it on ads or consultants and targeting voters could produce majorities. So, starting in 1980 Democrats started turning to Wall Street and other corporate interests for money and the natural consequence was a monetary arms race between both parties trying to out fundraise each other which is how we’ve arrived to our current state of affairs, made worse by a few particularly heinous SCOTUS decisions.

So, can a candidate do what Proxmire did and still win? Are elections now won on money instead of ideas? Even the examples we have of the underdog beating the more monied competitor like Donald Trump in 2016 or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, those candidates still raised huge sums (Trump raised $333 million to Clinton’s $563 million and Ocasio-Cortez raised $600 thousand to Crowley’s $3 million). Are the parties so polarized that it’s simply not enough to be effective in Congress or represent the views of your constituents? In 2018 we saw a particularly animated electorate where races were decided purely on what party had more voters as split ticketing disappeared in many states. Voters and their elected members are more partisan now than at any time since the civil war which likely means the era of landslide victories built on bipartisan majorities is over for the foreseeable future.

This chart displays the partisanship in each house of congress. The lines represent the ideological distance between the average Democratic member and the average Republican member. The distance today is greater than any time since the end of Reconstruction.

It’s worth noting that as was alluded to at the beginning of this article, every state isn’t competitive. Proxmire himself said “I think fully two-thirds of the senators could get re-elected without spending a penny.” and he very well have been right, Idaho likely isn’t electing any Democrats soon and Hawaii almost certainly isn’t sending any Republicans to Washington. The same can be said of probably 200 house seats give or take a dozen. So, for the majority of cases, Proxmire would be right. However, there are a good number of seats in the Senate and the House, enough to decide control of either chamber, that are competitive and so the question of money and fair elections is still relevant.

This is all to say that as our system currently exists, it is not possible to recreate the successes of Sen. Proxmire everywhere. However, our system does not have to carry on as it has been and some states are experimenting with ways to bring people back into democracy. In 1995 Maine enacted the Maine Clean Election Act (MCEA) which established a voluntary program of full public financing of political campaigns for candidates running for Governor, State Senator, and State Representative. Before Citizens United v. FEC there was a point when a full 85% of members of the legislature were elected using this system. It’s clear that in our current political eco-system it would be impossible to achieve Proxmire style campaigns for a number of reasons, even in non-competitive states where politicians are forced to fundraise if not for themselves then for the party and are punished for refusing. But perhaps we can look toward a system of public financing which could still create expensive races, but it would also lead to more open and transparent races. Public financing would also allow a more diverse crop of candidates. Continuing to use Maine as an example, 7 out of 10 women stated that the MCEA was very important in their decision to run.

The way forward for politics has to involve reducing the role of money or inevitably our democracy will morph into a corporate kleptocracy if that transition has not already occurred.

The post Bill Proxmire and the Art of Fundraising appeared first on Occasional Planet.

One of the most contentious and emotionally charged issues in American politics today is the issue of abortion and a woman’s right to choose. Forgotten in the increasingly divisive crusade to deny women the right to make decisions over the autonomy of their own bodies and their right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term is the fact that abortion is as old as pregnancy itself.

Contemporary discussions about abortion often seem to begin and end with 1973 – the year of the ruling in Roe v. Wade, in which the Supreme Court handed down one of the most life-altering decisions for women in the court’s history. That decision has rippled through American culture – and, indeed, across the world – in multiple ways that continue to profoundly impact women, their life choices, their financial well-being, and their expectations of fulfilling the promise of their lives.

As the debate rages on, and as countless numbers of women’s lives and the lives of their families are impacted by the narrowing of abortion access in states across the country, it’s important to remember that the undeniable fact of women seeking to control the destinies of their bodies predates by centuries that decision in 1973. It’s also important to remember that the history of abortion cannot be recalled without acknowledging the fears and sheer desperation that led our female forebears to tolerate the dangers, the pain, and the risk of remedies and procedures they hoped would end an unwanted pregnancy but often led instead to permanent bodily harm or death.

Abortion in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries

Let’s acknowledge as well that, contrary to popular belief, abortion restrictions and the outright denial of abortion access is a relatively new development in America’s history. In her definitive history of abortion in America, “When Abortion Was a Crime,” historian Leslie Reagan recounts how abortion used to be a part of everyday American life. In the eighteenth century until the late nineteenth century, abortions were commonly performed and were permitted under common law until “quickening” – a term that describes the stage when fetal movement in the womb may be felt by the mother. Prior to 1880, even the Catholic Church tolerated the reality of abortion. As Reagan explains, “the Catholic Church implicitly accepted early abortions prior to ensoulment. Not until 1869, at about the same time that abortion became politicized in this country, did the church condemn abortion; in 1895 it condemned therapeutic abortion [procedures performed to save the life of the mother].”

In 1857, the newly constituted American Medical Association undertook what could be considered one of the first large-scale lobbying efforts to criminalize abortion. Due to concerns about poisonings, but also reflecting a growing backlash to women’s emerging role in American public life and the desire of member physicians to professionalize the practice of medicine and limit the competition of midwives and homeopaths, the AMA pushed for state laws restricting abortion. In 1873, Congress passed the Comstock Law, banning abortion drugs. By 1880, the AMA’s efforts lobbying for state laws restricting abortion bore their bitter fruit.

Abortions in ancient times

Even earlier historic accounts provide a glimpse into the common practice of women seeking to abort unwanted pregnancies. These accounts not only comment on procedures but also recount a long list of recipes for pastes, pessaries, ingestions, salves, suppositories, and ingested herbal toxins. Folk cultures across the world and across time abound with an almost limitless variety of abortifacients and methods for their use passed on from one generation to the next. The acknowledgment of abortion as a fact of women’s reproductive lives was not limited to folk culture and the ministrations of shamans, herbalists, and midwives. The most influential philosophers, scientists, and physicians of ancient times wrote about and often provided advice about the most effective abortion techniques.

In the Kahun Gynecological Papyrus, one of the earliest known medical texts from ancient Egypt, the use of crocodile dung made into a pessary to be inserted into the vagina was the recommended method to induce abortion.

In ancient Greece, the musings of Aristotle in his work “Politics” foreshadow some of the thorniest terms of the debate raging through to our own time.

Aristotle wrote:

 “. . . when couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation.”

The Greek physician Hippocrates, although mostly opposed to abortion, counseled that a woman seeking to end a pregnancy could “jump up and down, touching her buttocks with her heels at each leap” – causing the embryo to come “loose” and fall out. This was a technique that later became known as the Lacedaemonian Leap. Other Greek physicians recommended the ingestion of myrrh, rue, and juniper.

In the days of the Roman Empire, Pliny the Elder’s “Natural History” provided evidence that women of his time sought to limit the number of pregnancies. His practical–-if ineffective—advice confirmed that “if a pregnant woman steps over a viper, she will be sure to miscarry.”

An eighth-century Sanskrit manuscript recommended sitting over a pot of boiling water or steamed onions –a questionable pregnancy-ending technique used by Jewish women on New York’s Lower East Side well into the twentieth century.

Here are some of the methods women have used, throughout history, to try to induce abortions

• Ingesting a meal of toxic lupines with ox bile and absinthium
• Smearing the mouth of the uterus with olive oil, honey, cedar resin, and the juice of the balsam tree
• Myrtle oil gums
• Sitting in a bath of linseed, fenugreek, mallow, marshmallow, and wormwood
• Creating a paste of ants, foam from camel’s mouths, and tail hairs of black-tail deer dissolved in bear fat
• Ingesting pennyroyal or drinking of pennyroyal tea (5 grams of which is toxic and may lead to death)
• Fumigating the womb with various poisons
• Opium ingested with mandrake root, Queen Anne’s lace, gum resin, and various types of peppers (in 2011 it was reported that women in Pakistan are still using opium bombs in the uterus to end unwanted pregnancies)
• Inducing abortion by riding horses or carrying heavy objects
• Inserting a uterine suppository of mouse dung, honey, Egyptian salt, wild colocynth, and resin

Today in America, one in four women will have an abortion by the age of forty-five. Tellingly, 59 percent of women seeking abortions are mothers. Many of us believed that the Roe v. Wade decision was settled law and that the decision would forever protect a woman’s right to choose. We also believed that access to safe, legal abortions would relegate to the ash heap of history the home-induced abortions using toxic, poisonous chemicals or the back-alley horrors of knitting needles and coat hangers. Will we be proven wrong? And will women be returned once again to the uncertainties and dangers that women who came before us were forced to face?

The post Abortion: as old as pregnancy itself appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Visiting Montgomery, Alabama to see the civil rights sites, we walked over to the old train station along the riverfront. Inside what appears to have once been the baggage room, we learned that it is now the site of a guitar shop. As we entered, we encountered a group of about 10 men, sitting in a circle, pleasantly jamming together on an assortment of guitars, mandolins and banjos. Although we began to retreat, feeling that we were intruders, the string players motioned for us to come in and listen. So, we did.

They tuned up, and the leader suggested a song — the name of which we couldn’t hear — and a key. As they began playing, I recognized the tune: “The Darktown Strutters Ball.”

I know. It’s just a song. An old song. A remnant from a very different time. But I couldn’t stop thinking about where we were, and how the song fit in. Right where we were standing was the center of the domestic slave trade of the 19th century — the very railroad station where black people had once been transported and put up for sale. Despite what I thought was historic irony, I reflexively tapped my feet, swayed to the rhythm, and began remembering the words.

Just to jog your memory — or to introduce you to a classic, written in 1915 and performed by just about every ragtime, Dixieland and jazz band on earth since then, plus Dean Martin, Ella Fitzgerald and Fats Domino — below is an antique [early 20th century] recording of it, along with some very interesting video.

Is the title considered a racial slur? Am I over-reacting? The word “darktown” sure sounds pejorative to me. But according to some historians, at the time the song was published, the title referred to a section of Chicago where black people lived. That designation presumably was okay in that era — but perhaps a reflection of the baked-in racism that was prevalent then. [Today, of course, using skin color as a way of defining a neighborhood would be completely unacceptable, and that is probably what I am responding to.]

In “A Short History of ‘Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” author Matt Macucci further explains that “…the song was inspired by an annual ball in Chicago, Illinois, that was ‘a kind of modern equivalent of the medieval carnivals of misrule, financed by wealthy society folk but with a guest list of pimps and prostitutes.’

“The “Darktown Ball” was, in fact, a real event:

…but it did not start out as being for the higher classes. It was originated by the ladies of the evening in the Darktown area of Chicago. They decided to create the ball as their way of showing that, for at least 1 night per year, they were just as good as everyone else. It was by invitation only and, over time, became THE most sought after ticket. Even the Major of Chicago could not attend without an invitation.

The composer was Shelton Brooks, a black man who was celebrating the event and the fact that it had become such an important part of the city’s history.

So, singing that song in the Montgomery railroad station — is that insensitive, ironic and further evidence of racism so inbred into our culture that we don’t even see — or hear — it?  Or is it just an innocent celebration of a very popular song from the early jazz era? It’s a complicated question, for which I have no answer.

Enjoy the song. Read the lyrics. Cringe at the imagery.

The post On hearing “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball” in Montgomery, Alabama appeared first on Occasional Planet.

From the very beginning, Donald Trump has had difficulty understanding that the Justice Department is not like every other cabinet office. He does not have unilateral control of it. The Justice Department can bite back at him, and he doesn’t like it.

We were taught in school that there are three branches of government and they have checks and balances against one another. We know the three branches as the executive, legislative and judicial.

But within the executive branch, the Department of Justice is somewhat rogue; it can do lots of things that the president doesn’t want it to do. We are learning this very vividly with Donald Trump, his friends and cronies, and the powers of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, who was appointed by the Trump Justice Department.

I have to admit that I never really knew that the Justice Department could hold the president to task until Watergate. Prior to Watergate, there had never been a modern case with a president overtly acting in a criminal way with utter disdain towards the law of the land. In my naiveté, I thought that presidents weren’t criminals, so the Justice Department would never need to investigate them. They went after other bad guys, particularly those depriving us of our rights such as voter registrars in the old Confederacy.

But as I and many others sleep-walked through classes on the powers of the Justice department, there were constitutional scholars and others who thought through what to do if the president did not follow the laws of the country. In the Watergate era of the early 1970s, we saw the theoretical become reality. President Richard Nixon had given Justice officials cause to think that he was involved in the cover-up of a felony crime and that he was obstructing justice. These were serious matters; he was initially trying to illegally tilt the presidential election of 1972. It turned out that he would win in a landslide without doing anything nefarious, but that was not the point. He and his “friends” were playing outside the rules, trying to tilt the table, and then deny that they had anything to do with it.

We know what special prosecutors Archibald Cox and then Leon Jaworski did to Richard Nixon (or more accurately, what Nixon did to himself and how Cox, Jaworski and others brought him to justice.) We know what Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr did to President Bill Clinton. In this case, Starr was not exactly neutral in trying to nail Clinton at all costs. Clinton obliged by failing to tell some simple truths in the beginning.

The Nixon and Clinton bouts with the Justice Department both happened in the prime of Donald Trump’s life. If he never learned in school that the Justice Department had special powers, he couldn’t help but learn it by growing up. He was not in some backwoods without access to media; he was in New York City and he was rabid about following the news on television.

So, for Trump to argue that he should be able to tell the Attorney-General and the rest of the Justice Department what to do reflects having learned nothing in his adult years about how government works. It’s possible that he didn’t learn anything; that he was stuck in some elementary school class in which the separation of powers was taught in a simplistic fashion.

So, in a sense, I’m willing to give Trump a break. He came into office not knowing the special powers of the Justice Department. The fact that he didn’t know this is consistent with him not know much of anything about how government is supposed to work.

He never should have been in the position; he never should have been put in this position. But sixty million voters collaborated to help him become president. Not many of them were concerned about him knowing how the levers of government are supposed to work.

Poor Donald entered the job of the presidency without knowing how he was putting himself at risk. For that reason, I have a little empathy. If he had had a few adults in the room when he decided to run, perhaps he would not be in this trouble. Unfortunately for him and the country, there now seems to be a greater lack of adults in his world than anytime since he became president.

At times like this, Dan Rather would say one word, “courage.” It’s hard to beat that.

The post In defense of Trump, and 5th Grade Students appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In May 2018, more than eleven hundred American economics teachers and  economists, among them eleven Nobel Prize winners, banded together to sign an open letter to Donald Trump and Congress. In it, they warn that the Trump administration is on the verge of repeating the mistakes of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act— an act that was narrowly passed by Congress and signed by President Hoover in 1930, shortly after America and the global economy descended into the depths of the Great Depression. Intended to limit foreign competition and help save American jobs in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors, Smoot-Hawley imposed protectionist tariffs on more than 20,000 imported goods. Smoot-Hawley was a disaster, as the imposed tariffs exacerbated and deepened the fallout from the economic crash that ruined the lives of millions of Americans.

Fearing that history is about to repeat itself and Americans will again pay the price for ill-considered tariffs, the signers of this powerful letter call on Congress and the president to heed the lessons of the past. In their call for policies based on fundamental economic principles, they write that

“…in 1930, 1,028 economists urged Congress to reject the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Today, Americans face a host of new protectionist activity, including threats to withdraw from trade agreements, misguided calls for new tariffs in response to trade imbalances, and the imposition of tariffs on washing machines, solar components, and even steel and aluminum used by U.S. manufacturers. Congress did not take economists’ advice in 1930, and Americans across the country paid the price. The undersigned economists and teachers of economics strongly urge you not to repeat that mistake. Much has changed since 1930 — for example, trade is now significantly more important to our economy — but the fundamental economic principles as explained at the time have not.”

Quoting verbatim from the 1930 letter written by their predecessors, the present-day economists and teachers seek to demonstrate that nearly a century later similar economic factors remain at play and that those who will suffer the negative consequences of tariffs will, once again, be ordinary citizens. The following is the letter schooling Congress and President Hoover on the economic principles that the signers believed should have led to the rejection of tariffs—but didn’t.

“We are convinced that increased protective duties would be a mistake. They would operate, in general, to increase the prices which domestic consumers would have to pay. A higher level of protection would raise the cost of living and injure the great majority of our citizens.

Few people could hope to gain from such a change. Construction, transportation and public utility workers, professional people and those employed in banks, hotels, newspaper offices, in the wholesale and retail trades, and scores of other occupations would clearly lose, since they produce no products which could be protected by tariff barriers.

The vast majority of farmers, also, would lose through increased duties, and in a double fashion. First, as consumers they would have to pay still higher prices for the products, made of textiles, chemicals, iron, and steel, which they buy.

Second, as producers, their ability to sell their products would be further restricted by barriers placed in the way of foreigners who wished to sell goods to us.

Our export trade, in general, would suffer. Countries cannot permanently buy from us unless they are permitted to sell to us, and the more we restrict the importation of goods from them by means of ever higher tariffs the more we reduce the possibility of our exporting to them. Such action would inevitably provoke other countries to pay us back in kind by levying retaliatory duties against our goods.

Finally, we would urge our Government to consider the bitterness which a policy of higher tariffs would inevitably inject into our international relations. A tariff war does not furnish good soil for the growth of world peace.”

A full list of the signatories of the May 2018 letter can be found at this link.

To learn more about the economic fallout from today’s tariff war, watch this video, in which twelve executives explain how their businesses are being affected.

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