Author: carlzeitz

This space as they call it on cable will have more to say about this.

But tonight’s events in Tennessee are as earth shattering as Feruary 1965 in Selma, Alabama.

The White Party (formerly the Republican Party) was, is too raist and too stupid to miss the point of expelling the white woman along with the Black men.

The White Party is now at war with three generations.

It is a war the White Party is guaranteed to lose.,

It loses every time an old white voter in a red state dies and his or her place is taken on the voting rolls by a 21-year-old voter.

It’s number and generations and the numbers and generations say grin and bear it because in 10 years they will lose – lose simply because the numbers and generations guarantee they not only will lose, they already have.

People who run for president of the United States of America and gain election to that office swear an oath to defend the United States Constitution.

At Article IV, Section 2, 2nd paragraph, the United States Constitution declares:

“A person in any State charged with Treason, Felony or any other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the jurisdiction of the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.”

It is therefore not a choice the governor of Florida, any governor of any of the 50 federated states of the United States can refuse should it come to that.

It is not a choice at all. It is the essential federalism in our federal Republic.

No, the governor has no such choice.

It is a federal constitutional requirement.

“I never took a human life, I only sold the fellow the gun to take it with.”

Will Rogers

What the piece about Kamala Harris’s prospects as candidate for Vice President a second time around, and how it diminishes the coming candidacy of President Biden for reelection, should have noted – so it is noted now – is immediacy.

There is speculation among the speculators in the media that Biden will announce his candidacy in April.

Whether then or not too long after, it puts the Harris matter front and center now, not somewhere, as they say, down the road.

When he announces for reelection the president either will announce as a ticket or alone. As of now it seems from the signs this week at the State of the Union, including the clear good feeling between the First Lady and the Second Gentleman, it will again be Harris.

So, whether her or another, we will have the answer soon enough.

The election for president may be 20 months off but announcement of the decision to run is but two or three months away.

A lyric keeps running to the tune of “Camelot” a song that urges, “Oh Kam-ala, Oh Kam-ala, just NOT WITH Kam-ala.”

Yesterday, Feb. 6, 2023, the NY Times posted a story observing what you and I and everyone else knows is the greatest vulnerability in a campaign by President Biden.

The vulnerability? Not his age but that at this age you have to contemplate who would be vice president if – if he became incapacitated or died. He will be 82 if and when he is sworn in for a second term on Jan. 20, 2025.

If he is reelected and lives out the term he will be 86 when he leaves office on Jan. 20, 2029. He sure looks fine and as long as he and Jill are good and great together we think he will be.

But, as we all know, especially those of us who are Biden’s age, people die in their eighties, lots of them. You get to be 80, well it gives you a lot to think about. Just look at the obits in the Times, or anywhere else for that matter.

So what is Biden’s big vulnerability if not exactly his age? Well, as the Times reported, it is Vice President Kamala Harris.

You can parse things up and down and in and out but it kind of gets back to that moment when Barrack Obama said to Hillary Clinton, “You’re likeable enough Hillary.”

However unfortunate, Kamala Harris is not “likeable enough” and just is not liked. In fact, worse, she is generally disliked by a whole lot of the public. Whether she is as she seems, as she comes across or whether it is unfair in some ways or all ways, Harris is just not likeable – to the point of being disliked.

Even Democrats don’t like her so how can she be expected to be liked by all the voters who are not.

If Joe Biden was 62 years old or some such age, even 70, whether people liked Harris and would be okay if she stood next in line to be president would matter a lot less.

But he is 82 and would be 86 at the end of term two, so it matters a whole lot. It matters more than any other consideration in his running for a second term. Before Biden the oldest president was Ronald Reagan, who left office at age 78 already revealing to intimates signs of affliction with Alzheimers. Biden is entirely mentally spry but – but 82 will be 82 and no changing that.

In political and governmental terms Harris simply has not shown herself up to the job. She is an awful, shrill, hectoring public speaker, cannot seem to manage or use staff to any benefit, or keep them long. She is tone deaf in public and to the public with a slim record of accomplishment in the Senate and as Veep.

Then what to do? Well in a column a day later, today, Feb. 7, the Time’s Michelle Goldberg examines all the reasons Joe Biden has been the best president in 60 years.

In fact he has been better.

The last president who accomplished so much was LBJ except he got us “knee deep in the Big Muddy”, mired in the pointless, filthy war in Vietnam.

Biden got us out of the pointless, filthy war in Afghanistan. The media, espeically the boneheads on cable TV, protest it was a mess and a stain on his presidency.

What’d they expect? A going away party from the Taliban?

One, one airplane, took off with people chasing and clinging to it. Video of that got shown and is shown again and again to demonstrate that it was a mess because – because there is nothing Wolf Blitzer and his ilk love so much as good video, whether of a mess at the Kabul airport or a Russian balloon.

Neither Wolf nor any of the rest on cable TV news showed all the planes that took off subsequently evacuating 100,000 people in the final 10 days – just wasn’t good video.

If you were alive and an adult in 1975 you should recall the final scenes televised from Saigon, the last videotape from the quagmire, when we were literally forced driven out by the victorious North Vietnamese Army.

Remember the people clinging to the landing treads of helicopters on the roof of the U.S. embassy in Ho Chi Minh City (then Saigon)? There was a Republican in the White House, Gerald Ford. Was it his fault or LBJ’s and Richard Nixon’s that getting out was an ugly, unfair mess?

Afghanistan? Et tu George W. Bush and Barrack Obama.

Leaving a lost war, fighting a losing battle is a mess. So?

So this was a lot less of a mess than Vietnam, and then remember the aftermath of the Lebanon bombs killing 200 U.S. marines, the Bay of Pigs, “Blackhawk Down” not to mention the Battle of the Bulge, the “Frozen Chosin” or First Bull Run – if you want to go back to when they didn’t have videotape.

So Ms. Goldberg, who contends Joe is great, has been a great, important presdident announces he should not run again.

First, it is really late for others to start organizing a presidential campaign. All that money to be raised, all those consultants to be recruited, all those party activists in every state, especially the early states, to be persuaded you’re the woman or the man for the job.

Ms. Goldberg observes politics. She doesn’t do politics. As was once observed, “it ain’t bean bag.” Running for president is not the same as whipping off 700 words with the answer to everything. No, it is a big, messy, expensive, ugly at times, uplifting at other times, business. And it is a business, not an adventure.

If the president did not, had not intended to run he would have signalled that starting after the 2022 election so that prospective candidates could get started on the hard business of running for president.

Thankfully, he didn’t. He is running and the main reason that is a very good thing is that, as he has demonstrated, as his staff, who we mostly don’t even know by name because they know how to do their jobs so well – the main reason is that Joe Biden knows how to be president.

He spent 50 years watching it, running too soon in 1988 when he didn’t know how to be president, then eight years as VP to a man who, like most before him, had to learn how to be president on the job.

But this president knows how to be president and no one, no one else out there in either party does. One of those who does not, although by now she should given her proximity to the Oval Office, is Harris.

Then what? Well, FDR twice dumped his Veeps, favoring Henry Wallace in 1940 over his first two-term vice president, John Nance Garner (“the vice presidency is not worth a warm bucket of spit”), and unceremoniously dumping Wallace in 1944 when Democratic Party bosses nixed Wallace.

FDR was too sick, too tired and otherwise too occupied fighting Germany and Japan to have a fight with them. They said Missouri Sen. Harry Truman would be okay and FDR said so be it.

True, FDR did not have to worry about anything but geography in balancing his ticket, no one knew he was dying so the choice was not seemingly so important – Truman certainly didn’t know , almost no one outside his close inner circle knew FDR’s perilous condition. Gender and race were not factors or even considerations in FDR’s time except as negatives.

But Biden would be removing a person credited with being the first woman and first Black and Asian vice president. He would be removing a VP who might resist, might be resisting that now as she is being pummled in the press (and might these stories indeed be signals from within?).

All of that is a problem but not as big a problem as having Harris run in the circumstances of being possible successor to an 82-year-old president.

He has to do it, find a way to do it (and don’t ask me what that is because other than appealing to her patriotism and loyalty it beats me).

And if he does, who?

The usual suspects? Warren? Too old to start anew, too narrow politically. Bernie? Preposterous and older than Biden. Buttigieg? The country is not ready and while he is facile in politics and public life, he is not yet presidential. Klobuchar? She has grown and should stay where she is and one day become the first woman majority leader of the Senate. Governors and other senators oft mentioned? None are that convincing. The most likely is Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan but hardly close to a sure thing.

Then who, who in this nation is prepared intuitively and by demonstrated ability and capability in everything she has done in public life to be president? Who has been a force in this administration? Who has state and local political and governmental experience.

Who has understood the president gets to bask in the light you make? Who again and again and again in her career has demonstrated execuitive ability and decision making prowess with tact and competence?

Gina Raimondo, former attorney general and former governor of Rhode Island and presently Secretary of Commerce in Biden’s cabinet where quietly she is deemed a star (the CHIPS bill, managing fraught trade relations with China).

There, yes the unpleasant truth – there would be hell to pay for a while from Joyce and “the Rev” on MSNBC and from some Black Dems though likely not Hakim Jeffries, a true grownup in politics. That would go on for a while but in the end the videotape will change and they will be, would be for a Biden/Raimondo ticket.

If needs be and we hope not, if Gina Raimondo becomes first in line for the presidency from Jan. 20, 2025 to Jan. 20, 2029 when perhaps she would raise her right hand in her own right to take the presidential oath of office, we – the United States of America – will all be in the best of hands.

A former president of the United States dined in recent days with a Nazi who says the Holocaust never happened, who says 6 million Jews were not murdered, says it is all a lie.

It is just the latest execrable demonstration of Jew-hate in the United States. Ugly to say it that way isn’t it? So to assuage language, it is called antisemitism. Call it what you will, it is eternal through two Christian millennia.

Until the 19th Century, hatred of Jews was immersed in Christian religious fears, hartred, bigotry, church teachings and myths like the blood libel. In the 19th Century, in England but especially in Germany it began to morph into racial hatred – Jews being defined as a race rather than members of a religion. Whether religious or racial begs the eternal question,why?

Why, century, after century and, after all, this century is the century after the Holocaust, are Jews the object of unending, unyielding hate ?

We have rational historical, physchological and other explanations that meet all the tests of rational reductive, reserved, understanding, analysis and explanation across two millenia. And yet, and yet…

And yet, across 22 centuries those who hate Jews the most hate themselves and their failed lives even more. They are ever in need of an object for and receptable into which to pour resentment born of their own lacks, for an explanation for everything in the world they cannot explain, understand and fear.

For one moment, at the end of WWII, the world took stock of what this special, unending, unyielding hatred had resulted in during the conflict. It paused to consider what resulted from Germany’s policy to murder all the Jews in Europe as prelude to murdering all the Jews in the world. Germany’s leader said he would do it. Then Germany and Germans did it.

Most of the world, cognizant of what had happened, which then as now included every nation in which it happened, stood back, took an historically deep breath and for a brief, a very brief moment condemned hatred of Jews.

In this spasm of redemptive guilt, the nation of Israel came into being, not with overwhelming support, but with help that mattered from the U.N. Security Council, and because in the General Assembly most of Latin America’s nations voted yes to partition then Palestine. Until 1918 it had been an Ottoman province. After WWI the Treaty of Versailles awarded it to Britain as a protectorate, a nice bad word for colony.

The partition meant to create a Jewish nation, Israel, and an Arab nation, Palestine. We know what happened and keeps happening there, down to the recent Israeli election and its woeful outcome. There is only one nation, Israel. It rules a Palestinian colony.

This is not about all of that, except to observe that the total population of Israel, including the land partitioned in favor of the Arabs and now known as the West Bank, includes 9.2 million citizens of Israel – not people but Israeli citizens because there are many millions more who are not citizens but stateless Arabs.

Among the 9.2 million citizens are 7.4 million who are Jewish and 1.8 million who are Arab Israeli citizens, for whom it might as well be 1925 in Alabama because being a Jewish Israeli does not make you a saint.

All the other Arabs in the West Bank and the territory in Gaza are citizens of no nation. They are, as it turned out and remains, a colonial people.

All of that is context.

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It is polite to bemoan antisemitism. It is impolite and raw to say what it really is. It is Jew-hate. Say it in those words and you want to cover your ears.

In Charlottesville, Va. in July 2017 at a Nazi rally they chanted “Jews will not replace us”.

Politely we say they were – that they are white nationalists. We say they were -that they are racists. But what is that if not a Nazi? They were, they are Nazis in exactly the meaning it had in Poland in 1942 when the extermination camps began their work.

The man who had dinner with former President Trump is no different from the SS in the camps. He is one of them.

They are Nazis because from Jan. 30, 1933 unto time immemorial the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany stamped all who hate Jews as one thing and one thing only, of one belief.

It is not white supremacy. It is Nazism, the political gorgon that murdered millions of people for one and only one reason, that they were Jews.

In that context, let’s examine the Virginia Nazis’ replacement proposition.

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Across a range of historical sources the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust ranges from about 5.8 mill0n to as high as 6.6 million. The number estimated by the Israeli national memorial Yad Vashem is the one assigned and accepted – 6 million.

It is 6 million – 6 million Jews dead at the hands of Germans and Austrians but also thousands upon thousands of willing accomplices in Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Byelorussia and Hungary, and yes France and Holland. In Paris the SS did not round up the Jews for deportration. The gendarmes did.

How close did they come to achieving what historians increasingly view as the main war objective of the Nazi Party and Nazi State as ordered by its leader and chancellor – the murder of all the Jews in Europe as a prelude to worldwide destruction of all Jews?

The “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” superceded even Lebensraum, the conquest of Eastern Europe to reduce it to slavery under the heel of Germans who would be resettled into those former nations. In the Nazi universe, Jews were for killing, Slavs for enslavement, for reduction to what Plutarch called “living tools”.

Lebensraum and the Final Soultion went hand in hand as one policy in the hands not just of the SS, the Waffen SS, Gestapo and the SD, but the Wehrmacht – the entire German military, including, as the historical record amply shows, the entire German Army.

Then surely, you say, as monstrous as the murder of 6 million people is, it didn’t come close to killing all the Jews in the world. After all, you would think with all the past and present commotion about them, there must be hundreds of million of Jews in a world of 8 billion people, or at least many, many tens of millions of Jews.

If hatred of Jews is so old and persistent then – surely – the Jewish population of the world must always have been and must even now be a very big share.

If the tiki torch bearers in Charlottesville believe Jews could replace them then they must believe there are so many tens, even hundreds of million of Jews that they could do that (i.e. as if one human could or would replace another).

Let’s examine the proposition.

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The world population on Sept. 1, 1939 was 2.2 billion people. The worldwide Jewish population on that date was 16.8 million (estimates vary but this is a very real, reliable number and no estimate is higher than 18 million).

On the 16.8 million Jews worldwide in 1939, 9 million lived in Europe including the European parts of the Soviet Union incorporating what are now the Baltic nations, Ukraine and Beyelorussia. The largest European Jewish population was in Poland, home to 3.3 million Polish Jews. The next largest concentration in Europe was in Hungary, about 850,000 and the next largest in Romania, about 550,000.

However, when talking about those and other easter European countries in 1939 and during the war it is important to remember that they were delineated by national lines drawn by three nations who presided over and decreed the Treaty of Versailles that formally ended World War I (France, Britain and the United States – the fourth victor, Italy, content with its Austrian spoils, was largely disinterested otherwise).

The treaty redrew the map of Europe, a not uncommon occurence on that continent over the centuries. What had been part of one country one year might well be part of another the next, especially in the Balkans and eastern Europe.

The biggest thing Versailles did in redrawing the map of Europe was to reconstitute Poland as an independent nation after nearly 150 years of partition between Prussia/Germany, Russia and the now defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The treaty dictated a smaller two-piece defeated Germany with a corridor between the pieces given over to Poland – the Polish corridor. It carved from Austria-Hungary a much diminished Austria, a much diminished Hungary. It expanded Romania at the expense of Hungary and Russia, and created two new nations, one called Czechoslovakia and the other Yugoslavia. It establised three small Baltic nations, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from territory taken by Russia from Poland and the Duchy of Lithuania in the 18th Century.

As reborn at Versailes, Poland included the former Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, parts of which, notably a region called Bessarabia, would move on the tides of war back and forth in the 20th Century betwen Romania and Ukraine. Today it is mostly in Moldava.

The city of Lemburg as the Austrians called it became the city of Lvov when it became part of the new Poland, and is now Lviv as part of Ukraine from the post WWII redrawing of boundaries. When you look at the map of Ukraine today, embroiled as it is in war with Russia, Lviv is its easternmost big city. In 1900 it was a far-western outpost of Austria-Hungary.

Complicated? Oh yes, as are the hatreds that remain among the peoples of those lands for one another but where one universal hatred subsumed all others.

The nations of eastern Europe contained more than two-thirds of the 9 million Jews of Europe at the start of the WWII. The highest toll was taken among Polish Jews, 2.9 million, most of whom died between September 1939 and the end of 1943.

The Polish Jews did not mostly die at Auschwitz but were killed in main part at the first giant killing camp, Treblinka. It is estimated 1 million of the 1.1 million who died at Auschwitz were Jewish. About half of them came from Hungary. At Treblinka alone, 925,000 Polish Jews perished.

The bulk of Poland’s Jews died in five death camps Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec, and Majdenak. These were not concentration camps but death camps, built for murder, not for confinement or to extract the slave labor of inmates.

Second highest, the toll of Hungarian Jews, 55 percent of whom died between March and July 1944 after the Germans occupied the country with the allowance of the Hungarian facist allied government. The Germans sent them to Auschwitz. A further 110,000 were killed after the the Hungarian Black Arrow Party (the political antecdent of the present Hungarian government) overthrew the government of Admiral Horthy.

The admiral, the Hungarian leader, was a fascist nationalist and German ally – until he wasn’t. By early 1944 he was wary, fearing there would be accountability if the Germans lost – and by 1944 he was convinced they would. While in power he kept the Jews of Hungary as a relatively untouched bargaining chip. When the Germans, doubting his shifting loyalty, took over Hungary early in 1944, Adolph Eichmann arrived and the transports to Auschwitz began.

After it overthrew the Horthy govenrment, the Black Arrow rounded up a further 110,000 Jews for the Germans, including an estimated 10,000 shot to death on the banks of the Danube in Budapest, leaving their shoes on the riverbanks by order of the Hungarian kiillers. Today, sculptures of empty shoes at the river bank memorialize them.

To understand how complicated nationality and borders and boundaries were in Eastern Europe consider the case of perhaps the most famous figure to emerge from the Hungarian Holocaust.

Ellie Wiesel was born and lived with his family in a small town in Romania. But the fortunes of war resulted in the town and its environs moving inside the wartime boundaries of Hungary.

When the Holocaust came to Hungary, Ellie Wiesel and his family became caught in the deportations to Auschwitz. Was he Romanian? Or Hungarian? Does it matter? Did it matter? Only as to when the Final Solution would consume the nation in which you lived. All that mattered to the Germans was were you a Jew – a man, a woman or a child to be murdered because you were (1.2 million of the victims were children under the age of 12).

The Romanians for their part, gave up well over 100,000 Jews to the Germans from territory they had annexed from Hungary after WWI and in the Balkans. When they toyed with switching sides as the Red Army moved inexorably east, the Germans took over and Romania’s Jews perished. Before the war there had been 550,000 Jews living under Romanian rule. The Holocaust consumed 500,000 of them.

In all, of the 6 million killed, over 1.3 million were shot to death by the killing units that accompanied the Wehrmacht into the Baltic nations, in eastern Poland, which had been ceded brefly to the Soviets in the August 1939 non-aggresi0n pact with Germany; and by shooting in Ukraine, Byelorussia and other western Russian areas after Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

Some 4 million Jews died in the killing and concentration camps. A further 800,000 were consumed by disease, starvation, slave labor and murder in the ghettos and concentration camps.

At war’s end the remnant of European Jews totaled about 3 million, perhaps half living in parts of the Soviet Union the Germans did not reach, and in small surviving communities in east European nations, in partisan units, in the remnant that emerged from the camps and among the fortunate 300,000 who lived in Great Britain.

Nonetheless, the hatred continued. Several thousand Polish Jews were murdered in Poland when they attempted to return in 1945 and 1946 to what had been their native land – their country.

Thus, at the end of the war, the worldwide Jewish population, less than 17 million at its start, had been reduced to 11 million as two-thirds of the Jews of Europe were murdered.

Notwithstanding the great toll of the war, world population remained above 2.2 billion.

Besides the 3 million still alive in Euyrope, who included more than 1 million in the Soviet Union, where were the remaining Jews in the world in 1945? Mostly in one place, the United States, where Jews numbered about 4.5 million in a nation of 140 million people.

There were about 600,000 in Palestine, several hundred thousand in
Arab nations including Yemen, Egypt, Syria and Iraq and several hundred thousand across Latin America, with the largest such population in Argentina.

Fast forward across 70 plus years. Today worldwide Jewish population has recovered to about 15 million, including 7.4 million in Israel proper and the West Bank and 7.3 million in the United States. Britain and France still have sizeable communities of about 300,000 each though rising antiseimitism in France caused an exodus the past 20 years.

So in all the world today there are but 15 million Jews among 8 billion people. In the United States, a nation of 330 million according to the 2020 census, there are about 7 million Jews.

How exactly would 7 million people replace 323 million other people, even if they so intended, which of course they don’t?

The tiki torch bearing American Nazis of Charlottesville are – in their bitter, mordant, losers’ sense – right. Jews will not replace them because first no one is replacing anyone and second because 7 million cannot and could not replace 323 million others even if they intended to try – that’s just math, never mind humanity or reasonable common sense, a quality devoid in Jew haters.

No, the only people – the only people — being ever so slowly replaced in this world are 6 million murdered Jews of Europe.

The results surprised, surprising pundits most of all but -but undeterred they are off and running pell mell toward 2024.

The polls? There are too many, too many with clear built in partisan bias, e.g. Trafalgar and Rasmussen. Very few except perhaps the Des Moines Register/Selzer survey can be believed any longer. The latter got Iowa exactly right. It always does. But it surveys only Iowa, no longer contested ground or a national predictor.

The man most responsible for the election outcome? Smug Samuel Alito. Who else but the author of the Dobbs decision, abetted by his far right brethern and sister on the U.S. Supreme Court.

You can think of them as a Doo Wop group, “Sammy and the No-No’s.”

The Dobbs decision clearly, definitely, most assuredly put a strong wind into the sails of the Democatic Party and behind its candidates.

In his opinion Alito said in so many words that if women didn’t like it they could vote otherwise.

Women took him at his word. They voted.

Following on Kansas in its primary in July, in every one of the five states where a general election ballot question tested abortion the winner was choice, even in Mitch McConnell’s ruby red Kentucky.

The person whose appeals voters listened to and heeded at campaign’s end? President Obama. His sound sense oratorical talent resounede from critical state to critical state in the last 10 days of the campaign, resonating on cable news channels, on local TV news and on social media with one big message- VOTE.

All that happened while Donald Trump took to the hustings at the same time to remind people, other than his diehards, that they flat out despise him. If he was a factor, it was in the bad candidate choices made by him and his party and the fact that well over 50% of Americans just wish, really just wish he would SHUT UP and go away. But he is not going to, is he?

No, instead Trump is about to run for president again and likely to announce in the middle of the run-off campaign for the United State Senate in Georgia. He can’t help but hurt his candidate there and the man is, literally, his candidate.

Reading the runes and ruins of the election, what is the long-term drift ? It is that old white people, Republican voters, are dying. Its inexorable, it happens. Their votes are going to the grave with them.

Young voters of all races, all genders (there are more than two anymore) and all backgrounds defied the doubt about what they would do. They voted. For every aged Republican voter, for every Boomer GOP voter there is a young man or woman voting for Democrats and they will be for long years to come.

The Gens X and Y have moved decisively – decisively – into the Democratic camp, where they find their liberal beliefs affirmed especially on the defining issue of their lives, climate change.

Republicans simply refuse or are perhaps just too dense to understand the depth and breadth of young people’s concern about what climate change is doing and will do to their lives. It is literally the issue of their lives and lifetimes.

As it stands now it is more likely than not that when all is counted that Democrats will have a 50-t0-49 Senate pending a last decision in the Georgia runoff Dec. 6. In other words, control with or without Georgia and 51 seats if Sen. Raphael Warnock holds his seat there.

That is tempered by the fact that Republicans will very narrowly control the House of Representatives. Most ironically as it turns out that owes in the end to gerrymandering excess by New York Democrats. Their congressional map was rejected by a state court in upstate New York for excessive partisanship.

Instad the court appointed a guy from Pittsburgh as a special master to redraw lines. He knew next to nothing about the Empire State as he went ahead and redraw 25 congressional districts. Republicans gained five of them even as Gov. Kathy Hochul won a clear Democratic victory.

The New York Democrats political overreach shot them and their national party in both feet on a path into the minority. As it stands, Republicans are likely to have a 5-to-7 seat House majority, far from the 20 to even 40 seats that pundits told one other they foresaw.

But again, if there is one person, one man Democrats can thank for the midterm election, it is Samuel Alito for his Dobbs decisio0n.

Had it never happened, Republicans would have won decisively. But it did and instead they trumped and tromped their way to an election disaster that defied the common politcal wisdom that the out party dominates in mid-terms.

Alito absolutely galvanized women to come out and vote for themselves and doing that meant voing for Democrats.

Perhaps then the biggest question coming out of this election and its result is not who will run for president, or anything about 2024, as important as all that is.

Rather it is will the six arch reactionaries on the U.S. Supreme Court take stock, pay heed and appreciate that their hard right ideology of the Federalist Society is not that of the American people, that it is at complete odds with how a clear majority of Americans see the world and want their country to be?

A good guess is that they will not. In their cloistered, closeted, arrogant existence, with virtually no participation in the life of the nation or any understanding of the daily trials and travails of Americans, the six just won’t get it because they don’t get it, and they never have.

So we will have another election to further inform them.

As of today the national average price of gasoline continues to drop, reported today at $3.764, down about 8 cents per gallon the past week.

The polls are all over the place so that Republican outliers (nicer word than crazies) like Kari Lake and Blake Masters are tied or in the lead in Arizona for governor and senate; the Senate races in Florida and North Carolina are slipping away from Democrats, but Democrat Mandela Barnes is back to a tie in Wisconsin with Sen. Ron Johnson, and in Michigan Gov. Whitmer clings to a lead against Republian outlier (that word again) Tudor Dixon.

And no one knows what it going on in Pennsylvania (where there is lots of early voting but, if you recall 2020, they don’t start opening mail ballots until Election Day, delaying that final result by several days). The governor’s race looks solid for the Democrat, Josh Shapiro in his contest with the outlier of all outliers, Doug Mastriano, but Fetterman/Oz or Oz/Fetterman is a total jumble in a contest that is a shambles.

Even today, two weeks out, two polls count the national congressional preference at +4 and +5 for Democrats whereas a day ago two other polls found the exact reverse.

So as to the polls? Believe the ones you want and you’ll feel better and, when all is said and done, there’ll be lots to read about what went wrong and right for them.

Early voting though is moving along at a brisk pace as more and more of the 35 states that use it come on line, with early voting time periods ranging from 4 days to 45 days before Election Day.

In Georgia, as of this morning, record early voting is over 1 million ballots cast by mail or at an early polling station, well ahead of 2018.

Nationwide more than 12 million had voted as of Oct. 25, two weeks before Election Day, with all reports projecting turnout equal to or higher than the 2018 midterms when the percentage of eligible voters who voted was 49.5% and the highest since the 1914 midterms when only men could vote.

So much as it can be or is reported, more Democrats are voting early but the spead against early Republican vote shares in 2018 and 2020 is trending lower.

What does it all mean? Anyone who tells you they know is making it up.

Did it all move back in favor of Republicans? Yes, definitely. Is it still? Seems that drift has slowed.

Is there a sleeper in all the Senate races? Yes. Where? Iowa. But there has not been a new poll reported there for 10 days so it is a sleeper on which we have one eye open and one shut.

The truth is no one knows though the pundits will all tell you it is this or that, with a Republican tilt and everyone in agreement the House is going to be Republian.

But they, those pesky pundits, are at least four days behind on gas prices, favor their own polls if they have them (CNN for example just reported a spate of better polling news for Democrats and so that is what it is talking about) and there is only beginning to be mention of early voting.

So? So as always we’ll see what we’ll see when the vote is counted and watch with increasing trepidation until we know.

We know the flow up to now. Last winter and spring a Democratic debacle loomed.

Then came the Dobbs decision (expect everyone knows but if any don’t that’s the ruling by the Supreme Court last June on abortion).

That led to a wave of pro-choice protest, Democratic resurgence, a changed political landscape reflected in at least two primary elections, one in the Hudson Valley in New York where a Democrat narrowly won a seat a Republican had been expected to win with his victory attributed to Dobbs backlash.

The other election was in Kansas where, with a 59% majority in a very conservative Republican state, voters chose choice, voting to keep the underlying right to an abortion in their State Constitution. The result was deemed possible but the size and demographic scope of the majority was stunning. Yet, even as if to provoke the pro-choice vote, Republican legislatures in a dozen states began one-upping each another with draconian anti-abortion laws.

On June 14 the price of gasoline, rising steadily through the spring peaked at a national average of $5.01. That is a national 50-state average, not the price at every pump in the country.

Then in part prompted by a release of 100 million barrels from the national strategic oil reserved directed by President Biden and by other factors, pump prices began to fall. Day by day they dropped a penny a gallon, two cents a gallon, maybe a half-cent a gallon until in late September the average stood at $3.676 per gallon.

If there is a benhmark against which to measure these fluctuations in gasoline prices it would be the $3.37 a gallon national average one year ago when few were complaining about the price.

In Washington the Democrats with scant or no Republican help in Congress and plenty of opposition from them, enacted laws to invest in infrastructure, act on climate change, reduce drug prices, and invest in domestic research and manufacturing of chips – not the chocolate ones but the computer chips that now make everything work from can openers to computers to cars, airplanes and space ships and are the building blocks of all future technology.

Hardly anyone noticed. They were busy noticing the price of gasoline.

In the period between June and late September, with prices at the pump receding,including in most of the so-called battleground states, and with the force of the Dobbs decision channeling Democrats’ energy and engagement, Democrats began to rise in the polls.

Some of them jumped out to significant leads over their Republican opponents or put enough distance between them as to signal much better chances as Republican primaries regugurgitated extremist candidates onto November ballots.

Who was it who said, “Exreremism in defense of liberty is no vice”? Oh, yes, Barry Goldwater. Could even he have imagined Kari Lake and Bart Masters, the Republican candidates respectively for governor and U.S. senator in his Arizona? It’s what, these days, they call an existential question.

Now, of course the pundit is a herd animal. It has a talent for repeating the last thing it heard unless and until it hears something different.

So from June to September the pundits all remarked on improved Democratic chances but hedged always with reports on inflation. Then in late September the national average price of gasoline began to inch up topping out at $3.93 a gallon two weeks ago in early October. Also, two national reports showed inflation at 8.8% annually in September and 8.4 % in October.

The pundits did not note the rise, had been checked but that it continued to be high. They spokes as always with one voice. At any given moment the inflation rate reduces in the public mind to but one number – but it is a number about which millions and millions of words of doom are written and spoken.

They kept up the drumbeat though if they looked across the ocean they could see inflation rate ranges between 12% and 24% among European nations. But Americans don’t care about 24% inflation in Lithuania. They should But they don’t. They are much more interested in the bread aisle at the local supermarket.

Regardless, the revised take on the election was that inflation had moved to the fore again, heralded once more by rising gasoline prices and that Dobbs angst was receding.

But, then what happened to the price of gas? The national average began to fall back and has been falling a penny or two a day. As of this writing Friday, Oct. 21, it was back to $3.82 with every prospect of dropping back to its recent low.

Given the ups and downs in pump prices and the ebb and flow in the polls, you could surmise there is an inverse relation between the price of gasonline at the pump and the polls. Will falling gasoline prices make it back into the news with time for that to be reflected in public opinion – and polling – and then at the ballot box? Who knows. Certainly I don’t but chances are, time running out to Nov. 8, it will not.

Polls the past two weeks clearly show a shift no matter the quality of some Republican candidates. They are who and what they are and their races are in play notwithstanding – and notwithstanding that many have closed on their opponents or taken a lead.

This reflects a wave of purposefully hysterical but wickedly effective Republican advertising accusing Democrats of promoting, tolerating and just plain causing crime. That murderer in the house next door? No doubt a Democrat say the ads. What? Shades of Willy Horton? You bet. Shameful then, shameful now. Oh yes. But does it work? It works.

What to make of it all? Well but for one factor there is both evidence and a feeling that if you are a Democrat you will not be happy the morning of Nov. 9 or perhaps more likely two or three days later given the changes in how we vote and how much longer it takes to count early voting results.

Early voting is a combination of voting by mail or voting at polling places opened before Election Day. It varies from state to state but is underway now in almost 40 states.

What do we know about how that is going so far? Not much but what we do know is surprising, possibly telling, maybe not but interesting.

First though some context. In the 2014 mid-terms about 36% of all eligible American voters cast a ballot. In 2016, a presidential year, that rose toward 60%.

Then came the Trump mid-term in 2018. Turnout went to 49.5%, the highest mid-term percentage since 1914 (when only men could vote). That year, 113 million of us voted, just 18 million fewer than voted for president in 2016. It was reported that 40% voted early.

Two years later President Biden got 81 milion votes, Donald Trump received 74 million, 155 million between them as early voting surged to become the way we vote.

In 2020, only 27% of voters voted on Election Day. An equal number -27% -voted early at the polls and 45% voted early by mail. In other words by the time we got to Election Day two years ago, 73% of us had already voted.

And so what about this year? It is beginning to look, though the evidence is still limited but mounting daily, that the same is happening with early reports focused on two states, Georgia and Florida.

As of Oct. 21 a news report placed total nationwide early voting at 5 million though only a handful of states had started with others coming on line every day. That means over the first three days of early voting anywhere it was take place, 4.4% of the record 2018 turnout was in and 3.2% of the historic 2020 turnout had been achieved. Small percentages but perhaps portending another voting surge this year.

One could conclude if you make it easier for people to vote more will, which explains why the conservative U.S. Supreme Court has cut up the 1965 Voting Rights Act and why two dozen Republican legislatures have imposed new voting restrictions, notably in the old Jim Crow south, as in Georgia for instance.

It could be backfiring but then you can always say afterward there was fraud, it was stolen, they cheated, dead people voted, illegal people voted. You can say those things. They are not true as is demonstrated over and over and over but you can say them and create chaos and mistrust. Such fun.

In the 2018 midterm in Georgia, 70,000 voters cast a ballot on the first day of in-person early voting. In the 2020 presidential year 136,000 Georgians voted on the first day. On the first day this year, Oct. 17, 135,000 voted early and on the second day, 134,000 voted.

In Florida as of Oct. 18, the first day of early in person voting, more than 2 million votes had been recroded, over 1.8 million by mail and more than 185 000 in person at polling stations.

Both of those states have critical races for the U.S. Senate and governor and several House seats.

Are these reports aberrational? Do they reflect a trend we will see across the country? Are they one-offs? Do they presage an historic mid-term vote? Way too early to say that. Does it seem possible? Yes.

We know both anecdotally and from actual past voting records and patterns that more Democrats vote early than do Republicans, at least up to now. We know we are bitterly and intractably divided – that one voter’s truth is another’s fiction and the reverse.

So is everyone voting early, that is on both sides? Is it decidedly more by Democrats as in the past? Have Republicans increased their early voting?

Is it inflation and Republicans harping on crime, or is it Dobbs? Or is it all of that bringing out an early vote?

Then from all this where are the midterms headed? Seemingly moving clearly toward the Republicans in the polls and in the punditry, which always has a self-fulfilling, self-congratulatory element.

If the early evidence of a record mid-term turnout continues there could in fact be long nights and extra days of counting, watching and waiting for the result to become clear – to decide several State Houses and which party will control the U. S. Senate the next two years.

We can’t know for now, nor can the pollsters and pundits, what forces are underlying and driving a potential record voter turnout and in which direction it is moving. In the days ahead there will be further reports on early voting and some clarity as to who is voting in greater numbers. Look for clues in those reports.

Until we see those, and until the votes get counted, Republicans right now have more reason to think it is going their way and for the pundits to say it’s so.

But remember, pundits are herd animals. Sometimes they lose track of the scent.

The reason our country is broken irreparably is the electoral college, equal state representation in the Senate, the rules of the Senate, and the unlimited terms of members of the Supreme Court.

These things are all in the Constitution. They have broken the nation.

The United States can’t be repaired unless the Constitution is repaired and that simply cannot happen in such a bitterly divided, angry nation as we have become.

The root of it all is in two intertwined deals made by the men who wrote our vaunted Constitition.

On May 25, 1787 delegates from 12 of the original 13 states met in Philadelphia to decide how, if they could, to fix the Articles of Confederation, the weak document that theretofore structured the nominal notion of a unitary nation, a United States of America.

The delegates quickly decided to abandon that project to write a new national charter, a constitution. In all 55 white men served as delegates to the convention of whom 39 signed the document on Sept. 17 that year, and sent it the states for ratification. The Constitution itself required that at least nine of the 13 states consent before it could take effect.

Among the 39 signers, 17 owned slaves a reflection from 11 years earlier in Philadelphia when 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence included 25 slave owners or former slave owners. Among those were former slave owner Benjamin Franklin and plantation slave lord Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration, who wrote its ringing announcement that “All men are created equal…”

The first state to ratify the Constitution was Delaware in November 1787, the ninth was New Hampshire in June 1788, thereby installing it as the law of the land. Several states, including New York, Virginia and North Carolina objected that the Constitution did not set out the rights of “We the people…” for whom it spoke in the very first words of its preamble.

Their objection would be satisfied in 1790 when the First Congress adopted and the states ratified the first 10 amendments – the Bill of Rights.

The only state not to attend the convention was smallest in territory and population, Rhode Island. The Ocean State liked its latitude under the loosely binding Articles and believed that to enter a strong federal scheme would leave it at the mercy of large states.

The Rhode Island objection turned on one of the two great differences that threatened to undo the constitutional project.

Those divisions were between large and small states over representation in a national legislature; and disgreement over slavery and what to do about it.

The First Deal

The Constitution directed a census within three years of seating the first Congress elected under it and then every ten years thereafter, the decennial census we know.

Which were the large states, which the small, looking only at their free white populations, both men and woman, as so categorized in the 1790 census? It reported population in the 13 states, as well as in Kentucky, Vermont, Maine (none were yet states and Maine remained part of Massachsettes until 1820 when it gained statehood) and territory in the “southwest” – today the southeast.

The 1790 Census counted 1.62 million “free” white men and boys; 1.55 million “free” white females; 59,511 called “all other free persons”, and 701,098 slaves, the Black people, who constituted nearly 18% of total population of 3.96 million. (Homage to Wikipedia, source for 1790 census information).

“All other free persons” meant Indians living outside their tribes but mostly it included indentured white servants. The Constitution terms Indians living in tribes as “Indians not taxed” and so by exception it directed they not be counted in the U.S. population.

The largest white populations, with numbers over 300,000 each, were in Massachusettes (including Maine), New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

The largest slave populations were in: Virginia, 292,627, South Carolina, 107,094, Maryland, 103,036 and North Carolina, 100,572. Together those four states held 86% of all slaves.

In 1790, only Massacusettes counted no slaves because it had already abolished the abominable practice. The impact of these massive slave populations would result in a second compromise (see below) that gave slave states control of Congress for generations.

But first the delegates had to resolve the small state/big state impasse concerning congressional representation that seemed on the verge of ending the convention wihout result.

On July 17, 1787 they broke the first impasse when by the narrowest margin, a 5-4 vote, they approved what is called the Connecticut Compromise because Connecticut Delegate Roger Sherman proposed it. Note that it did not require a super-majority like the modern filibuster.

The filibuster derives from Article I, Seciton 5, paragraph 2, which says, “Each House may determine the Rules of its proceedings…” The super-majority filibuster is a Senate rule. It is neither written or so much as implied in Article I of the Constitution, the legislative article.

The convention required but a simple majority to resolve this core element of the Constitution, legislative representation and apportionment.

The 5-to-4 deal called for a lower house of the national legislature apportioned by population, a House of Representatives (subject to the pro-slavery three-fifths clause, see below), and an upper house, a Senate, in which each state would get two votes.

Under the Articles of Confederation each state had one vote in a one-chamber Congress. In the proposed two-house Congress each would have two members in the Senate. But rather than cast their votes as one unit for the state, each senator would have one vote with every vote thus carrying the same weight without regard to weighted popular representation as in the House.

It was, it is a deal that reverberates through history. It undermined democracy then as it does now in a nation increased from 3.96 million to 340 million people, in which the inequality of representation inherent in the scheme is a grotesque artifact thwarting democracy.

It also distorts and distends the other gigantically undemocratic mechanism in the Constitution that undermines the will of the majority, the Electoral College, because it awards a full electoral vote for each senator. Wyoming, with 590,000 people, gets two electoral votes equal to two of those representing California’s 39 million people. Two of Wyoming’s three electoral votes thus outweight two of Calforinia’s 55 electoral votes by a factor of 66-to-1.

The Second Deal

Then there is the other deal, a truly malignant one.

Article V of the document is devoted exclusively to how to amend it. To propose an amendment requires approval by two-thirds of each house of Congress, or by petition joined by two-thirds of the states to convene a convention to propose amendments.

Then to ratify a proposed amendment requires approval by three-fourths of the states, either by their legislatures or by three-fourths of conventions convened by them, either way but not by a combination of the two. Today, 39 states would have to say yes to ratify an amendment.

However, Article V makes two exceptions to the amendement process. One bars any change in each state’s equal Senate representation without the consent of that state.

The other says that under no circumstances could the following language in Article I, Section 9, be amended before 1808, the year it says importation of slaves must end. There was to be no amendment that “…shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article…”

Article I, Section 9, first clause (paragraph):

“The Migration or Importation of such persons as any of the States now exisiting shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.”

Such persons? What persons?

Black persons captured in and shipped from Africa to become slaves in bondage to white Americans.

Article I, Section 9, fourth Clause (paragraph):

“No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in proportion to the Census or enumeration herein directed to be taken.”

Together the two Article I, Section 9 clauses, clauses the Constitution did not permit ever be amended, set out that slaves could be imported until 1808 but that if they were the federal government could tax them at up to $10 a head just as it could tax an imported barrel of rum, bolt of cloth, or iron plow.

So, if Congress passed any head tax or other direct tax on the people then as far as slaves were concerned, the tax burden they created per slave for their owners would be in the same proportion as their weight in a national census as set out in Article I, Section 2, third clause (paragraph).

And, what does that say? It declares:

“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, 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. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.”

What does all that mean? It orders a census in three years, 1790 to be exact, and then every ten years after that.

It further orders that everyone is to be counted – counting every white person, indentured white servants, and Indians living outside tribes as one whole person, with “all other Persons” to be counted not as a whole person, but as three-fifths of a person each. Tribal Indians? They didn’t count and didn’t get counted. Free blacks? Never mentioned.

Who were “all other persons”? They were 701,000 slaves, almost 600,000 of whom lived in just four states, Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina and North Carolina.

That meant in the first national Census and every one afterward, if the Congress created by the Constitution passed and the president signed into law a federal tax per person as permitted under Article I, Section 9, then slaves would count only as three fifths. Why?

To assure their owners would pay less because, after all, a slave is worth money but has no money to pay a tax. That would fall on the slave owner to pay. But slave owners got a corresponding benefit by having their slaves counted toward their state’s representation in the House of Representatives.

Ok then, so far we have a Constitution that says until 1808 you can capture free black people, bring them in chains to our new democracy to sell, work and breed like cattle but you might have to pay up to $10 per head duty to import them.

And then, when we count the population if we set a tax on each and every person if you own a black man, woman or child, you pay less than for a white person – you pay three-fifths of that per head. But then on the plus side for you the slave owner, each slave counts as three-fifths of a person for your democratic representation that of course does not represent them because – because they are not people – they are property.

Example: If Virginia’s Mr. Jefferson owned 100 slaves (he owned many more than that) he would have to pay any per capita tax on only 60 of them and they would be counted as 60 people toward Virginia’s delegation proportion in the House.

Good deal right? Americans always love a good tax break with sweeteners.

But what if one of those black people ran away, like to Vermont or Massachusetts, which had already outlawed slavery by 1787, states where they could live as free men and women?

The Constitution had a ready answer for that. It says at Article IV, Section 2, third Clause (paragraph):

“No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.”

What did that mean? It meant a slave who escaped to a free state or federal territory where slavery was not enforced could be captured and dragged back to his or her master or mistress to wear the chains and feel the whip of bondage on his or her back. As the decades passed and more and more slaves escaped to the north, bounty hunting fugitve slaves became big business.

Without all these special gifts to slavery in the Constitution, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia would never – never have ratified the Constitution. They made that very clear and that is why the document’s origin remains soiled, among other things, by slavery. Even, New York with the largest slave population in the North, more than 21,000 in 1790, might not have ratified it without the slavery deal.

Later amendments revoked all of the provisions that pertain to slavery but they did not erase the language. Even now it remains in the Constitution, an ever present Constitutional reminder of America’s original sin.

Thus, was it the “original intent” of the Founding Fathers that the United States would continue to be a slave nation? Yes.

So, Here’s the Deal

Taken together the two compromises, the Connecticut Compromise and the Slave Compromise demonstrate there was nothing noble about the writing and adoption of the Constitution.

It was, from the get-go founded on sordid deals with the slave power. The deals compromised and yet compromise democracy. Like all political deals, they were messy, unpleasant, reeking of favor, self-serving, and serving privilege at the moment of their making by the pols we call the Founding Fathers.

The Constitution is not sacrosanct. It is not eternal truth. It is not revealed truth or unchanging for all time, at least until in our time when to open it to change is both unimagineable and fraught with peril.

Certainly, it is not original truth. There is none in government and politics.

It was a deal between men – only white men, privileged men who were New England merchants, Middle-state bankers, farmers and tradesman, and southern plantation owners, with more than a few lawyers.

The Constitution is a detailed set of instructions to assemble and use a new government and to allocate a broad array of responsibilities and powers between the parts of the government it creates. It sets certain limits on each part while setting out those powers reserved solely to the states that comprise the nation to be governed by the plan.

Least of all is it a document that binds us to the year in which it was written and ratified, 1787. Least of all does it demand the peculiar, self-serving nonsense called originalism that would freeze common sense, knowledge, experience and all possibility in 1787, 235 years ago.

It was written in the exigent moment when a new nation was tearing apart at the frayed seams of its former colonial boundaries and splintering into 13 different countries. It stitched them back together.

The Constitution’s writers and ratifiers were practical men, political men – politicians- looking for practical solutions to their practical problem of creating a firm but not unchangeable framework for a unitary nation.

They had seen their entire world change in the space of 20 years. They had gone from protesting English taxation levied on them to repay the English Crown for protecting them and Crown trade against the French and Huron Indians, to rebellion, on to full scale revolution and nationhood. They began that adventure as Englishmen. They finished it as Americans.

In their lifetimes their world had already changed beyond their wildest imanginations and expectations. They knew when they wrote the Constitution that nothing is writ in stone, is writ forever. They had changed their world, who was to say it would not, should not keep on changing?

There is nothing so original as to be forever, as to be beyond change, Darwin proved that when he showed the world it was not created in seven days.

Indeed, the great oginality of the United States lies in its being a place born of change, and ever changing to fit and suit the times and progress in which it finds itself.

In all of that change, the one direction it has never travelled is back in time, at least not until now: Now, when it finds itself in the hands of a Supreme Court on which the majority cannot see what’s ahead, seeing only darkly and mistakenly what lies far behind us all and calling it “Originalism.”

But Originalism is to law and constitutional understanding as Creationism is to the origins of nature and life. Each is a brittle, backward, deceit with orginialism being a truly bad deal made up out of wholecloth that undermines our future as a constitional nation.

Well Regulated Militia: Def.

The guy sitting nex to you at the ballpark on his fourth beer with a Glock in his waistband.

Fifty years ago, Sen. Howard Baker, Republican of Tennessee, famously asked,

“What did the president know and when did he know it?”

This time, the Jan. 6 committee hearings have made abundantly clear that the question this time is not what did the president know and when did he know it?

No, we know what he knew and when he knew it.

He knew on election night 2020 that he’d lost the presidency.

The questions this time are:

What did the president do? When did he do it? Did he stop doing it? Is he still doing it?

And then we can, we must ask:

Et tu, Merrick Garland? Et tu?

What do you know and how long have you known it?

And what, pray tell, are you going to do about it?

“I never took a human life, I only sold the fellow the gun to take it with.”

Will Rogers.

Today we watched the House of Representatives pass a series of gun control bills in a package responding to the Uvalde, Texas massacre of the innocent.

The two most siginificant of the seven pieces of legislation voted on in the Houe would mandate a minimum age of 21 to purchase an assault rifle, the kind used these days in the war in Ukraine, or in American classrooms and supermarkets.

The other would ban high capacity magazines, those big enough to feed enough rounds into an automatic weapon in less than a half-minute to take out a squad in a U.S. Army platoon, at least as big as a squad was back in my day in the Army when there were 10 soldiers in a squad.

Of course as the seven proposals increasingly prescribed stiffer controls on guns and gun capacities, like how many bullets you can insert into an automatic weapon magazine, there were fewer and fewer Republican votes for the bills.

I think four voted to limit the assault weapon purchase age to 21 and three voted to limit magazines; or three voted for the age limit and four for the magazine limit. Whoopdy doo! There are about 190 Republicans in the House. Woopdy doo.

In fact, 190 Republicans voted yesterday for murder, mayhem and killing children.

But this is not about them or about the various restrictions and reforms in the House gun control package and it certainly is not about the phony shit being considered in the U.S. Senate — or that Mitch McConnell wants the least possible of that shit passed so he and his mostly fellow white men Republicans can beat their chests, say they responded, did what could be done – so now let’s talk about the price of gasoline.

A shooting in which — from testimony by their pediarician today in the House prior to the gun limits votes, the doctor who saw their bodies at the hospital — two of the children were literally decapitated.

They literally had their heads separated from their bodies by the bullets from the AR15 that killed them.

They had their heads blown away from their bodies – by an AR15.

No wonder no one wants to let us see that, least of all that fucker McConnell.

No, this is about an even far more important piece of gun control legislation, one more important than any of those the House passed today, more imporant than others they didn’t even bring up like a total ban on AR15s, on all those terrible, murderous, war weapons you can just walk into a store and buy in this country.

No, the most important gun control measure that will never see the light of day absent 60% Democratic majorities in both houses – and that won’t ever happen – is to remove the product liability protection conferred on but one industry in the United States – gun manufacturers.

While they are not 100% immune from law suits pinning blame on them for what is caused by what they make – guns – they are at least 95% so protected. No other business or industry in the United States of America has this protection. None, zero, none.

Tobacco manufacturers did not have it. That’s why over 30 states could sue them and gain settlements 25 years ago for a total $246 billion. But gun manuifacturers? They have it.

The most recent version of the gun manfacturers’ federal liability exemption is the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act – read the words, so high and mighty, protecting the makers of murder.

Congress enacted this law in 2005 with both Democratic and Republican votes in the Congress, albeit more Republicans, but also Democrats and one independent, the oh so greatly esteemed Bernie Sanders.

Bernie Sanders voted to protect Daniel Defense company from law suits by the parents of the children who had their heads blown off by the AR15 the killer fired in the Uvalde School.

Bernie Sanders. Man’s a real killer, isn’t he?

Know who voted against this monstrous law and whose 2016 presidential platform called for its repeal.

Yep, you’re right, Hillary Clinton did that.

Anyone out there feeling some remorse about their 2016 vote? You should.

If your child or grandchiled dies tomorrow or is injured tomorrow in a plane crash, you can sue the airline, you can sue the airplane manufacturer. If the child dies in a car crash in a car with faulty brakes or whatever, you can sue the auto maker and the parts makers. If the child chokes on a piece of a toy, you can sue the toy maker.

You might or might not win in court but you can sue, you can make your case that the manufacturer is/was negligent, that the manufactuter knew or should have known the harm its product could do, would do, any and all of that.

But if someone blows that child’s head off with a gun made by Smith & Wesson, or Remington or, as in Uvalde, by Daniel Defense, you can’t sue. Her parents can’t sue, his grandmom and grandad can’t sue. No one can sue.

Why?

Because federal law gives gun manufacturers immunity from law suits. They wrote the law, they handed it to the NRA, which handed it to Congress, which passed it and sent it to President George W. Bush, who signed it.

The NRA is a horror cartoon that, without the largess of the gun manufactuers, would not amount to squat.

It is the gun manufacturers who purchased the Republican Party and own it and will continue to own it. But hey, ask the reactionaries on the Supreme Court and they’ll tell you money is speech.

Well, it isn’t. It’s money. It buys votes, it buys people and it has bought a nation and half of its national legislature in one party.

The most important gun control measure would be the removal of the liability protection cloaking the purveryors of death, the manufacturers.

It won’t happen in this country, not now, not ever that we can see or imagine. The gun makers bought the United States and its Congress.

They own it. You don’t.