markpkessinger
markpkessinger's JournalSOTU: As usual, the Right gets it wrong
(I did a screen grab of the image below from last night's Rachel Maddow show, and posted it to Facebook with this commentary. after seeing various posts by right wingers fulminating aboutt President Obama's "abuse" of executive orders.)
(1) Where in the Constitution is it contemplated that a political party that holds a majority in one half of one-third of the government could or would be permitted to prevent a duly-elected president from governing? Before Republicans have any room to talk about violations of the constitution, they should be required to demonstrate whence their authority to stymie a president, not through voting yea or nay on legislation, but through an absurd quirk of procedural rules? Yes, Congress hs the right to vote down legislation a president might want them to pass. Under the Constitution, the appropriate way to exercise that rigbt is to vote on legislation, not to abuse procedural rules for a purpose they were never intended.
(2) There is nothing unconstitutional about executive orders. They have been repeatedly upheld by the Court, suhject to certain limitations as to scope, duration, etc. And as Rachel Maddow pointed out tonight, Obama has issued fewer executive orders in his time in office than any of his recent predecessors (see the attached chart, which I screen-grabbed from the Rachel Maddow show).
Once again, Republicans are simply wrong -- wrong on the principle, and wrong on the specifics.
At first blush, the SOTU sounds great -- until you start delving into the substance
The President sounded some good themes last night. Unfortunately, when it came to the issue of raising the minimum wage, he swung not for the bleachers, but rather for the dugout. Once again, his opening volley in what will surely be a back-and-forth negotiation with (or capitulation to) Republicans, of $10.10 per hour probably means we'll be lucky if we see $9/hr when it is all said and done.
The MyRA proposal strikes me as a distraction from the more pressing issue of addressing Social Security (i.e., raising the cap). As a reader on Alternet observes:
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What I've heard no one discuss is the president's shocking planned end-run around Social Security which he calls "MyRA". An individualized private investment plan that supplements, (i.e., supplants and circumvents the existing SS retirement plan). Instead of removing the cap and extending the viability of SS well into the future, MyRA does nothing to address future SS problems and instead lays the groundwork for its competition, in which citizens are 'encouraged', (wink-wink) to manage their own retirement.
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In addition, I fail to see how these MyRAs will make it any easier for working people to save for retirement. The 'problems' the MyRAs appear to address are those of (1) risk to principal investment, and (2) uncertain return. But the reason working people haven't been saving for retirement is not because standard IRAs are too risky or their returns too uncertain. The reason people haven't been saving money for retirement is that their real wages have been flat for the last two decades, thus they don't have any money left over, after meeting basic living expenses, to save. The proposed MyRAs do nothing to address that fundamental problem.
I was encouraged by much of what the President said about the environment. But then he went on to tout continued fracking. And then, in a final contradiction, he proceeded to champion his beloved trade agreements -- particularly the TPP, which works at cross-purposes of both environmental protection and income inequality.
On the surface, it sounded like a great speech, and he certainly did an impressive job of delivering it. But sadly, like so many things with this Administration, when you begin delving into the substance of it, you find it's a hot, muddled mess.
What is particularly striking here . . .
. . . Is that Seeger did not invoke the Fifth Amendment, like many others understandably chose to do when called before HUAC. No, Seeger simply refused to answer the questions on the ground that he resolutely refused to recognize the legitimacy of the questions being asked by HUAC, whether directed to him or to any other citizen. This was a much more powerful statement than if he had invoked the Fifth, but it also left him with one less defense at trial. In refusing to invoke the Fifth while refusing to answer HUAC's questions, he left himself with only one avenue of defense in his eventual contempt trial, and that was his freedom of speech under the First Amendment. And he did this knowingly. Now THAT's courage! I mean, any other person facing any kind of criminal prosecution would (quite understandably) want to leave open every possible avenue of defense. But Seeger, God bless him, was intent on making a much more important, and significant, statement.
Pete Seeger has died
Wonderful man and humanitarian - R.I.P,
Pete Seeger, the singer, folk-song collector and songwriter who spearheaded an American folk revival and spent a long career championing folk music as both a vital heritage and a catalyst for social change, died Monday. He was 94 and lived in Beacon, N.Y.
His death was confirmed by his grandson, Kitama Cahill Jackson, who said he died of natural causes at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
Mr. Seeger’s career carried him from singing at labor rallies to the Top 10 to college auditoriums to folk festivals, and from a conviction for contempt of Congress (after defying the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s) to performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at an inaugural concert for Barack Obama.
For Mr. Seeger, folk music and a sense of community were inseparable, and where he saw a community, he saw the possibility of political action.
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Still more pro-corporate propaganda from 60 Minutes
Tonight's segment on a jobs training program was nauseating. Here is the text of two comments I posted to 60 Minutes' website:
and a follow-up:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/jobs-program-aids-fortune-500-underprivileged-youth/
"Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did"
(NOTE: I saw this essay on Daily Kos yesterday, and was just completely blown away by it. It's a view of Dr. King's legacy that probably hasn't occurred to most of us, because, unlike the writer, we didn't live the reality of day-to-day life of an African American in the South both before and after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This writer's perspective is profound, and it is beautifully and eloquently expressed. Brilliant! I hesitate to even try to provide a meaningful excerpt. I will provide ab excerpt of the first four paragraphs, but bear in mind they really don't provide a very good indication of what is to come. Just trust me on this: take the time to follow the link and to read the full essay on DailyKos -- you won't regret it.)
The topic at hand is what Martin Luther King actually did, what it was that he actually accomplished.
The reason I'm posting this is because there were dueling diaries over the weekend about Dr. King's legacy, and there is a diary up now (not on the rec list but on the recent list) entitled, "Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Dream Not Yet Realized." I'm sure the diarist means well as did the others. But what most people who reference Dr. King seem not to know is how Dr. King actually changed the subjective experience of life in the United States for African Americans. And yeah, I said for African Americans, not for Americans, because his main impact was his effect on the lives of African Americans, not on Americans in general. His main impact was not to make white people nicer or fairer. That's why some of us who are African Americans get a bit possessive about his legacy. Dr. Martin Luther King's legacy, despite what our civil religion tells us, is not color blind.
I remember that many years ago, when I was a smart ass home from first year of college, I was standing in the kitchen arguing with my father. My head was full of newly discovered political ideologies and black nationalism, and I had just read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, probably for the second time.
A bit of context. My father was from a background, which if we were talking about Europe or Latin America, we would call, "peasant" origin, although he had risen solidly into the working-middle class. He was from rural Virginia and his parents had been tobacco farmers. I spent two weeks or so every summer on the farm of my grandmother and step grandfather. They had no running water, no gas, a wood burning stove, no bathtubs or toilets but an outhouse, pot belly stoves for heat in the winter, a giant wood pile, a smoke house where hams and bacon hung, chickens, pigs, semi wild housecats that lived outdoors, no tractor or car, but an old plow horse and plows and other horse drawn implements, and electricity only after I was about 8 years old. The area did not have high schools for blacks and my father went as far as the seventh grade in a one room schoolhouse. All four of his grandparents, whom he had known as a child, had been born slaves. It was mainly because of World War II and urbanization that my father left that life.
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A question for Mayor Zimmer of Hoboken, NJ
First, a thousand thanks to you, Mayor Zimmer, for coming forward with this. But here is my question for you. You are reported to have written in your diary:
I thought he was honest. I thought he was moral. I thought he was something very different.
But Mayor Zimmer, why on Earth would you ever think that a person, such as Christie, with his legendary reputation for his nasty, rude, dismissive bullying of anybody who has the temerity to ask an uncomfortable question of him, was an honest broker in the first place? That kind of tactic is not the personality trait of someone who is honest; It is the hallmark of someone who is trying to control a conversation and manipulate perceptions.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why more people don't grasp this simple truth of human nature.
To all the New Jersey Democratic Mayors who supported Christie over Buono . . .
. . . Are you all proud of yourselves?
Gov. Christie: "I was misled by a member of my staff . . . "
" . . . who swore she hadn't put my instructions in an e-mail."
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