capital punishment

Riddle Me That, Batman


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The Riddler, aka E. Nigma

We human beings are walking contradictions. We say we want to be fit and healthy but we forget the New Year’s resolution and drop the gym membership before January 20 (to get the full membership refund) and we eat stuff that tastes good, but we know it’s bad for us.

We know the climate is warming, causing not just more natural disasters, but far more destructive ones. Check with Uncle Phil who lives in the California mountains to hear what he has to say about that right now – if you can get through to him. Or what Aunt Gloria in Ft. Myers, FL said about the hurricane last September. Or check with anybody in the still not fully rebuilt Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, these 18 years after Katrina, or any farmer who’s watched his crops wither and die in a massive draught. These disasters really are becoming more frequent and more devastating, but we still go out and buy a 17 mpg SUV or a 13 mpg pickup truck. Riddle me that.

Sometimes we’re contradictions in ways that are devastating in immediate and very personal ways.

For example, pro-life people are staunchly against abortion. They offer various rationales for their views, including calling abortion murder, stating their religious justifications and more. Here’s the riddle me part.

These folks are often in favor of capital punishment. That is decidedly not pro-life. You could ask any of the former death row inmates who were released due to the fine work of The Innocence Project. They know a lot about capital punishment from a perspective you don’t have and they’re quite sure that capital punishment isn’t pro-life.

And what about the pro-lifers who don’t want us to support healthcare for poor people, some of whom die for lack of healthcare? Or those who don’t want to provide supplemental food for poor children. Or those who won’t support a first rate education for kids regardless of their home address? This is starting to look very much like these people aren’t pro-life at all and perhaps aren’t even pro-kids. They’re just pro-fetus and don’t demonstrate much caring for kids following their birth. Riddle me that.

And while we’re on the subject of giving birth, how is it pro-life to refuse an abortion to pregnant women whose lives will clearly be in peril if their pregnancy continues? And how is it pro-life to force a 10-year-old girl in Ohio, a victim of rape and incest, to carry a fetus to term, endangering her life? Riddle me those life-of-the-mother contradictions.

Should you take issue with my indictment of pro-life, read Thom Hartmann’s exquisitely clear unmasking of it.

Our military people were ordered to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, this to ensure our fighting forces would be ready when needed, unlike the sailors and ships the Navy had to sideline in 2021. Some refused the order to be vaccinated. Bear in mind that they were required to receive various vaccines upon entering military service, so their objection surely wasn’t about vaccines.

They took an oath freely and without reservation, they affirmed, both to protect and defend the Constitution and to obey orders. And they kept their word, right until the moment when they didn’t. Riddle me that one, too.

Click me for the story

There was a gang of thugs who were going to kidnap and execute the Governor of Michigan because of her mask mandate and the 2021 lock down. They were conspiring to violate a bucketload of laws, all the while calling themselves patriots. That looks a lot like the January 6 insurrectionists carrying Blue Lives Matter flags, the flagpoles of which they used to beat and stab police officers. They proclaimed that they were true patriots, too. Riddle me those cruelties.

How about the mania for book banning and book burning that’s sweeping states with extremist, self-serving governors and legislatures? It’s always done with some excuse about protecting our delicate children from the truth, always with the patina of some invented notion of parents’ rights. But in the end it’s about what a minority of hair-on-fire types want and the ignoring of the truth that the majority wants taught to their kids. Riddle me that, too.

People exercise their rights by parading outside polling places carrying intimidating assault rifles. They scream insanely at school board meetings and threaten peaceful protesters. They repeatedly lie in Congress and claim the right to abuse asylum seekers and kidnap their children and more. Pay no attention to the constitutional rights they deny others. Riddle me that.

That’s very much like the right of state officials to gerrymander fair representation out of existence, and to wipe people off voting roles for the sneakiest, most manipulative of Jim Crow-like reasons. It’s about the right of states to remove polling places and ballot drop boxes in order to make it far more difficult for a select group of citizens to vote. It’s about the right to bollix up the system such that it takes 20 minutes to vote in White areas and 8 hours to vote in Black areas.

It’s always about the freedom and rights of those in the minority but who are in control, as they deny freedom and rights to others. Effectively, they tell us, “Freedom for me, but not for thee.” Riddle me that, Batman.

Oh, and Florida SB1316 requires bloggers who make comments about the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and others to register with the state. This is a blatant attack on freedom of the press.

That control freak power grab of a bill is not without precedent, as Vladimir Putin passed that same law in Russia in 2014.

That raises the question of why some of our Republican elected officials, self-proclaimed patriots, support dictators Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Duterte and other authoritarian bullies who strip rights and freedom from their people. Why do our homegrown anti-Americans call for us to abandon Ukraine, as it fights for freedom and democracy? Why do these elected officials call themselves patriots, even as they hate our democracy? Riddle me that, too.

Like I said: we’re walking contradictions.

Except when there isn’t a contradiction, as when all that matters is, “It’s all about me and what I want.”

For a fine explainer of our self-contradictory and often cruel crowd, read Ed Gurowitz’s offering, “Woke Is the New Code for Fascism.”

And if you have struggled to understand decades of dirty tricks and the mind numbing cacophony of cruel and self-contradictory absurdities Republicans spout, you must read Prof. Heather Cox Richardson’s explainer here.

Finally

The International Criminal Court has indicted Vladimir Putin for his war crime of kidnapping thousands of Ukrainian children. That prompted me to wonder what plans he has for them. Try this awful scenario.

We know that he is sending untrained soldiers to die in his war, using political criminals and other Russian undesirables as his canon fodder. He sends many to fight without weapons.

Now imagine him putting uniforms on older Ukrainian children and sending them unarmed to the front lines, forcing the Ukrainian army to kill their own kids. He’s diabolical enough to do that.

Let’s hope I’m wrong.

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PS

In my last post I observed that “woke” is commonly used as a pejorative but there’s no definition of what it means. Turns out I was wrong. Here’s an explainer.

Today is a good day to be the light.

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  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


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    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Restoring the Dream


    • You got trouble, my friend. Right here in River City.
    • Oh, we got trouble with a capital “T” and it rhymes with “D” and it stands for Democracy.

With apologies to Meredith Willson, creator of the wonderful music and lyrics for the wildly successful musical The Music Man, paraphrasing his words became irresistible after seeing Rob Reiner’s tweet from April 20.

He’s right, of course, as today’s Republicans work every day to replace democracy with authoritarianism led by Donald Trump or a Trump imitator. But there’s a problem with Reiner’s tweet: It doesn’t sell.

For many, a threat to democracy is too esoteric, too theoretical to solidly grasp it, much less to be motivated by such a claim. Worse, millions of Americans believe that democracy has already been taken from them, stolen by elitists in the 2020 election, stolen by people who don’t understand or care about regular Americans. That makes Reiner’s tweet sound like a lie to them. Perhaps they hear his tweet and then believe that left-of-center types think regular Americans are stupid enough to believe his vaporous claim.

I was on a Zoom call last week with a couple dozen like-minded people who were bemoaning the continuing threat to our democracy by extremists and self-serving liars. The context was about how to win in our next elections. The problem is that the argument about the far right’s threat to democracy, however impassioned anyone may feel about it, is only motivating to those who already agree and there aren’t enough of them to win an election.

The real battle is not to win over the far right extremists. The battle is for the independents, the middle-ists,* the regular Americans just going about their lives and who don’t like getting bashed by crazy claims from those who would inflame them. To win these folks over will take something more tangible to them than a claim about an idea.

From the Captain Obvious System Operating Handbook:

Appeal truthfully to the middle-ists on the basis of what’s important to them.

Now, there’s an idea that just might be good for both middle-ists and our country. Pair that with some Rock ‘n Roll philosophy from The Rolling Stones’ Ruby Tuesday:

    • “There’s no time to lose,” I heard her say.
    • Catch your dreams before they slip away.
    • Dying all the time,
    • Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind.
    • Ain’t life unkind?

Okay, what about the American Dream? We figured it was ours, and it was. But some of us, perhaps millions of us, feel like it’s already gone or is being stolen from us and the robbery is happening in plain sight. The millions are angry, just as any of us would be if something dear to us were being taken away. Perhaps life doesn’t have to be that unkind.

What if we were to do something about restoring the American Dream, that sense of limitless possibilities (watch this space on Wednesday)? That might help. But the view of our possibilities is dramatically clouded by the anger and hatred that has been unleashed from the American subconscious by self-promoting thugs. This isn’t going to be easy. Nevertheless, it is necessary, because the alternative is unthinkable.

We have to catch that dream before it really does slip away and we all lose our minds.

Must Reads For Restoring the American Dream

First, Hillary Clinton wrote a wonderful piece about Madeleine Albright shortly after Albright died. Two notes about that.

  1. We have a national obsession to bash Clinton or defend her. Whatever your opinion of her, set that aside and learn about Albright.
  2. Albright lived under authoritarianism until she was 11 years old, so she knew the difference between that and freedom and democracy. She valued democracy likely far greater than those of us for whom democracy has been a given. Read and learn, grasshopper.

Second, Emmanuel Macron won the presidency of France over fascist, Putin loving, bigoted, authoritarian wannabee Marine Le Pen, daughter of fascist, Putin loving, bigoted, authoritarian wannabee Jean-Marie Le Pen. NATO and those who love freedom and democracy can breathe a sigh of relief over that.

David Leonhardt’s piece about that election provides clues to what is going on in the United States. For example, why do far right, angry, hateful extremist politicians get so many votes from ordinary citizens? I encourage you to read Leonhardt’s essay and substitute USA for France as you read and you’ll get a better understanding of how and why our nation is divided and perhaps a clue as to how to deal with that.

Hint: It’s a hard, uphill pull to convince people to let go of our protective “fear of the other,” of our need to blame and our enormous capacity for rationalizing of the irrational. That struggle is connected to restoring the American Dream.

Bonus Section: Gotta Fix This
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Click me for the story

Read that carefully: ” .  .  .  prosecutors may have used false testimony;”  “.  .  .  prosecutors suppressed other evidence that would have been favorable to her.” Oh, and they browbeat her into a false confession – it’s on videotape.

I’m no lawyer or Constitutional expert, nor am I conversant in all the details of this case, but I’m pretty sure that prosecutors cheating is not okay. Nevertheless, it happens. Note that the chief prosecutor in Ms.Lucio’s case is now in prison for bribery and other things no prosecutor should be doing.

There are hundreds of innocent people who have been falsely imprisoned, some nearly executed, but who were exonerated through the work of The Innocence Project. We’ll likely never see the end of cheating prosecutors or inept pubic defenders, but Ms. Lucio’s case and the cases of others are why we need to end capital punishment, even in Texas.

Gotta fix this.

Updated Children’s Book

With the disclosures of recorded telephone calls of House Republican leadership shortly after the January 6 insurrection, we were rewarded by learning of the concern they held for the welfare of others in Congress. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Spineless) was specifically concerned that the ongoing vilification of other legislators by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Pedophilia) could ignite additional violence. McCarthy said that kind of thing would have to stop and that he’d have words with Gaetz. Isn’t it wonderful that McCarthy had concern for the well being of others, for doing the right thing and for stopping Gaetz and others from putting other members of Congress at risk?

Sadly, his moment of morality didn’t last long. It appears he never took any such action and that he later lied about having said that he would. That’s just so surprising.

Meanwhile, Republicans in the states are moving to burn books and Gaetz is still running wild. Do you think the Republicans will ban this book, too?

Gaetz is under investigation for having sex with an underage girl and for sex trafficking. Many thanks to JN for the cartoon.

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* There’s nothing wrong with the word “centrists.” There’s just something pleasing today about “middle-ists,” regardless of the fact that until this post it wasn’t a word. I like it. Might use it again.

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The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.

Did someone forward this to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!)

And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

Thanks!

The Fine Print:

  1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings, so don’t bug me about it.
  2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
  3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
  4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
  5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town vibrant.

JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

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