Congress averts a government shutdown for 45 days.  

Trump's Falling Empire

 Though the civil case in New York has no direct connection to Trump’s other legal troubles, Engoron’s ruling suggests that the courts are now catching up to a man who has long behaved as though there would never be any consequences for his deceptions. Trump has tried to convince Americans that he won more votes than Joe Biden, that the 2020 election was stolen from him, that he had every right to abscond with classified documents and obstruct the federal government from recovering them, and that he was the greatest president in American history. This is a fantasy world, but the real world has ways of intruding on it.

-David A. Graham in the The Atlantic

Robert P. Jones - The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy - Notes

 This is the American history book that I have been waiting for, which spells out the foundation of the United States based on white supremacy.

I have long wondered how Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Purchase from France.  How did France have this land from which the U.S. could purchase it?

The Doctrine of Discovery also guided Thomas Jefferson---lawyer trained in the legal tradition built on it's logic---in his approach to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.  He knew that the agreement was technically an acquisition of France's discovery rights (the right to preemptive title of France's discovery rights (the right to preemptive title to this vast tract of land against other European claims) rather than a purchase of the land itself, which remained occupied by indigenous people.  And he understood that this logic any subsequent violence toward and displacement of Native Americans in that territory as the US sought to convert it's discovery rights into a claim of complete title through occupancy.  P. 20

The abduction and enslavement of millions of Africans was, like the killing and deportation of Indigenous people, rooted in the vision of European and Christian superiority captured in the Doctrine of Discovery.  The brutal treatment of the two groups supported the same ends: the securing of land and  the exploitation of its resources exclusively for people of European descent.  Genocide and exile of Indigenous people were key to the former, and enslavement of Africans secured the latte.  P. 45

The leaders of the Confederacy saw their project as the culmination  of the divine promise of Euro-Christian domination in the Doctrine of Discovery.  P. 45

Mississippi instituted its infamous Black Codes in 1865 to keep Blacks dependent on their former masters and incapable of living independently.  P. 47

While the Louisiana Purchase is often taught in American history courses as one the great real estate bargains in world history (the price worked out to less than four cents per acre) this conclusion relies on a critical misunderstanding about the nature of transaction.  This vast territory under consideration isn't under the control of the French government or the colonists.  Rather it remained---as it had been for thousands of years---tthe homeland of various Native American nations who were mostly oblivious to the transatlantic dealmaking.  In short, the vaunted Louisiana Purchase didn't secure a single legal title to a bounded section of earth  Rather it codified the transfer from France to the United States of the right to assert dominion over Native people in that area without interference or competition from other European powers.  What the US purchased from France, in the language of the Doctrine of Discovery, was not property but the right to "preemption," the "exclusive authority to obtain Indian title by conquest or contract" within agreed-upon geographic boundaries.  P. 122

How Minnesota was settled by Europeans: by conquest and cheating the indigenous peoples out of their lands.  P. 123

With statehood achieved in 1858,  with Native Americans lands seized, the Dakota people first decimate and then deported just five years later Minnesota was poised to be the embodiment of the dream of an idealized new Zion, a new promised land for European Christian settler colonists.  P. 137

Minnesota attempted from the beginning to be an all-white state.  P. 138

THE LAND AND EARLY PEOPLES

As a political entity, the land we know today as Oklahoma is a remnant  It was formed after other territories and states had been carved out of the vast Louisiana Purchase, of which it was a part.  Before it succumbed to the legal and extralegal machinations of white settler colonists, this area was imagined by the U.S. government as a solution to the "Indian problem" east of the Mississippi River.  Known as Indian Country, it served as a designated refugee zone for Indigenous peoples as they were forcibly driven out of the Southeast as European settler colonists pushed Red people west to make room for white crops and black slaves.  P. 183

The geographical boundaries of the state reflect this historical circumstance.  P. 184

Oklahoma is a state of unpredictable  extremes.  P. 184

Coronado and De Soto claimed Oklahoma under the Doctrine of Discovery for Spain.  P. 185

Tulsa, Oklahoma called itself "The Magic City" as it grew rapidly in the early 20th Century after the discovery of oil which helped finance the US in WWI.  P. 208

Methodist Bishop Mouzon's sermon is our White Racism 101 like today.  P. 214

The prelude to the Tulsa Race Riot is bone chilling.  The sad thing is that it could happen today.  P.215

 It started from such a small beginning but typical---white woman making a charge against a black man.

The Tulsa Race Riot took place on May31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents systematically attacked Black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  It began with white 17 yr white girl accusing a 19 yr old black man of assaulting her.  Wow, a familiar enough beginning in what was likely a powder keg town.  P. 215-216

Over the years as Tulsa reinvented itself as a progressive, sophisticated city, the sordid episode of the Tulsa Race Riot was swept from city history.  P. 228

Tocqueville is a gifted sociological observer, but he cannot deal with the slavery problem and the Doctrine of Discovery.  P. 292

I cannot handle a detailed study of Tocqueville.  

We have not traveled very far from Toqueville's America.  The spirit of the  Doctrine of Discovery haunts is still.  Are we a pluralistic democracy or a divinely ordained promised for White European Christians.  Most certainly still an open question.

The long arm of the Law of Discovery extends even to day.  P. 296

Republican politics---Trumpism---is an attempt to sustain the Law of Discovery.  P. 297

Teaching an honest and full history of the United States seems like an impossible thing now.  P.297

What we are seeing today today is a desperate attempt to protect the innocent Doctrine of Discovery view of American origins.  P. 298

Trump Guilty

 Trump found guilty of fraud in New York.  His business empire is crumbling.

Lifetime Supreme Court Justices is a Mistake

 

Nobody writing a constitution knowing how our system has evolved would include life tenure for justices. President Biden’s commission on judicial reform noted that no other constitutional democracy provides life tenure for the judges on its high court. Democratic Reps. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.) and Hank Johnson (Ga.) have just introduced a term-limit bill, and progressive organizations have endorsed it. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) has declared himself “open” to the idea. When the National Constitution Center assembled conservative, liberal and libertarian legal scholars to consider reforms to our system, they converged in support of judicial term limits.

WaPost

Bertrand Russell

 

Bertrand Russell

Yesterday at 12:51 PM  · 

Student question: “What is difference between science and philosophy?“

Russell's answer: “I believe the only difference between science and philosophy is that science is what you more or less know and philosophy is what you do not know. Philosophy is that part of science which at present people choose to have opinions about, but which they have no knowledge about. Therefore every advance in knowledge robs philosophy of some problems which formerly it had. And so if there is any truth it will follow that a number of problems which had belonged to philosophy will have ceased to belong to philosophy and will belong to science.“

— Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1975), Lecture 8. Excursus into Metaphysics: What There Is (1918), Q and A session, p. 123-24

From the WaPost

 

(Matt McClain/The Post)

As possible shutdown nears, a disconnect between political rhetoric and budget reality

Lawmakers in both parties have called for getting serious about the rising federal debt. The shutdown fight ignores its key drivers.

By Jeff Stein and Marianna Sotomayor

MORE COVERAGE

• Advice: What to do if a shutdown stops your paycheck
• The shortest and longest government shutdowns in U.S. history

 

Think this summer was bad? Just wait

ÉMILE P. TORRES

The calamitous summer of 2023 was an oasis of tranquility, compared to what's coming

Texas is a Hotbed for Extremism

 Texas has seen a sudden surge in extremist activity within the past three years, with white supremacist and anti-LGBTQ+ groups making the Lone Star state its base of operations.

According to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League, there has been an 89% increase in antisemitic incidents in Texas from January 2021 to May of this year. Along with six identified terrorist plots and 28 occurrences of extremist events like training sessions and rallies, Texas also saw an increase in the frequency of propaganda distribution.  

"Texas has a long history of white nationalist activity and for many years has had a very active presence of white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups in the state, but the report's findings really do paint a very troubling picture of the current situation," Stephen Piggott, who studies right-wing extremism as a program analyst with the Western States Center, a civil rights group, told Salon. 

"Texas is the homebase for a number of really active white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups, such as the Patriot Front and the Aryan Freedom Network."

-Areeba Shaw in Salon.com

 Donald Trump's "interview" last Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" was a spectacle, one that embodied many of the failings that the mainstream news media has willfully made throughout the Trumpocene and America's continuing democracy crisis. Trump was allowed a platform to lie, circulate disinformation, amplify his disproved conspiracy theories about how the 2020 Election was "stolen" from him and the MAGA movement, and to act like he is leading a righteous struggle to retake the White House from a usurper. What is perhaps most concerning is how Trump was allowed a platform by NBC and "Meet the Press" where he in his role as a political cult leader could recruit new members for his neofascist MAGA movement. 

Intentionally (or not), Donald Trump is also a type of teacher. As seen during his "Meet the Press" interview Trump's lessons are cruel and sadistic: his apparent pathological if not sociopathic behavior is a way of traumatizing and abusing the American people.

As I and others have argued here and elsewhere, Trump's use of political sadism is one of the main reasons why so many among the news media, the country's political elites, and general public are still stuck in a state of denial about the dire and existential threat the ex-president and the Republican fascists and larger white right represent to the country and its democracy.

-Chauncey Devega in Salon.com

 

States under right-wing control have been passing laws restricting what may be taught in their schools, especially about racism. The Republican-controlled Texas state legislature enacted a law in 2021 specifying what should — and should not — be taught to students about their nation's and state's past. Excluded were the 15th Amendment, which prohibits the federal government and states from denying or abridging the right to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude," the 1965 Voting Rights Act, "the history of Native Americans" and documents on the separation of church and state and the women's, Chicano and labor movements. Existing standards calling for teaching about the ways in which white supremacy, slavery, eugenics and the Ku Klux Klan are "morally wrong" were removed. The law is unmistakably a formula for again making Texas, where non-Hispanic whites are already a minority, what it was before 1964: a white man's state.

ROBERT S. MCELVAINE in Salon.com

 

(AP)

60 years ago, Alabama church bombing killed 4 girls and catalyzed a movement

The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church shocked the world. Now Birmingham is hosting a commemoration week, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is delivering an address Friday.

By DeNeen L. Brown

Reminds Me

 Reading the Jefferson book reminds me of how contentious and complicated American history has been from the beginning.  There is no way I can come to firm conclusions about Thomas Jefferson.

 

The Right-Wing Conspiracy-Fest Is More Openly Bloodthirsty Than Before 

Katherine Stewart

From The New Republic

 "Today's reported rise in child poverty is the result of Congressional Republicans' choice to block our Child Tax Credit enhancements and advance tax cuts for wealthy and big corporations instead," Biden said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Tuesday, vowing to continue advocating for the "expanded Child Tax Credit and get families the relief they deserve."

-Salon.com

 

Trump’s probable path to actual victory is via a slender electoral vote majority, with less than a majority of the popular vote, quite possibly aided by a third-party drain on Biden’s votes. Trump might indeed arrive at his swearing-in on Jan. 20, 2025, having been convicted, still facing trial in other cases — or both. And he would owe his political survival to religious fundamentalists and right-wing nationalists, who would staff key positions in his government.

-Charles in the WaPost

 The Jefferson book I am finishing is my best book of the yr so far.

 Nonetheless, critics of religion who rightly preach the value of open-mindedness should apply that virtue in their approach to people of faith and the institutions they build. Doing so won’t work miracles. But it might help us recognize that the path to truth and to a less fractious society often takes unexpected turns.

-E.J. Dionne, Jr. in the WaPost

Trump's Bluster Has to be Taken Seriously

 Donald Trump is a type of fascist political preacher and MAGA is his congregation. His sermons are of violence and destruction. 

On Sunday, Trump made an explicit threat and promise on his Truth Social disinformation platform to treat President Joe Biden and his other "enemies" like they were in a "banana republic". Trump even went so far as to call Biden and the Democrats "Communists". In essence, Trump is threatening to kill President Biden and the Democratic Party's leaders (and supporters) when and if he takes back the White House in 2025. 

Last Tuesday, Trump told Glenn Beck that he would put President Biden, Special Counsel Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Hillary Clinton, and his other "enemies" in prison. 

"You have no choice," Trump asserted, "because they're doing it to us."

-Chauncey Devega in Salon.com

Here to Tell You

 And I'm here to tell you that Second Amendment mythologies and revisionist history continue to result in needless firearm-related deaths, suffering and trauma. If law-abiding gun owners do not start publicly speaking up, we cannot expect to find solutions to our nation's unacceptable levels of gun-related violence.

-Rich Logis in Salon.com

And Yet

 At Starbucks I've had two literary encounters already. A man named Kevin comes over and shows me two book covers and asks which one do I like best. I pick one though neither jumps out at me.  

It turns out he is a writer and is publishing a book on resilience due to be published next May. His publisher is offering him a choice of two covers. We talk and I discover it is a fascinating topic. I take note and tell him I will purchase the book and remember our encounter.

A young lady sits down near me with a book. She shows it to me----a ghoulish sci-fi novel about a supernatural creature who intervenes in human affairs to avenge murders. 

 
I should have known: the young lady looks like a science fiction reader, dressed in black with overly thick lipstick and short, clipped black hair. She seems nice enough, nothing creepy or ghoulish about her, and yet, and yet I always wonder about sci-fi, fantasy readers.  

So far, so good.

 "There's a rot in the GOP and Tommy Tuberville is a perfect example of it."

On Thursday, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican member of Congress, slammed GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., who complained about "wokeness" in the military amid his months-long military promotion stoppage protesting the president's military abortion policy.

Tuberville told Fox News' Laura Ingraham on Wednesday that the armed forces are losing recruits because of so-called wokeness, Mediaite reports. After accusing the Biden administration of wanting to make everything "about equity" with its military policies, the Republican senator called on Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, who co-authored a scathing op-ed accusing Tuberville of "aiding and abetting communists" by carrying out the hold, to "get wokeness out of our navy."

The wokeness nonsense is getting out of hand.

Biden Advantages

And there are some other issues in Biden's favor that are extremely salient at this time such as abortion rights and the attack on democracy, which adds up to a powerful critique of Trump and the authoritarian assault by the Republican party. (Government shutdowns and idiotic impeachments will only help illuminate their extremism) After all, Biden is facing a man who is going to be on trial during most of the campaign next year and could be running as a convicted felon. Yes, his followers will stick with him through it all but the idea that Biden's age will trump Trump's criminal status is to suggest that otherwise normal people will prefer an old man who is also a criminal to an old man who has done a good job as president. It's possible but I'm not convinced it's likely.

It's in the Democratic DNA to be nervous nellies. And maybe that's a good thing. It means they won't be complacent and will work hard to win the election. For the most part it's paid off in presidential politics for the past 30 years. But it's 14 months before the election. Nobody should be losing any sleep just yet.  

-Heather Digby Parton in Salon.com

 And I'm here to tell you that Second Amendment mythologies and revisionist history continue to result in needless firearm-related deaths, suffering and trauma. If law-abiding gun owners do not start publicly speaking up, we cannot expect to find solutions to our nation's unacceptable levels of gun-related violence.

-Rich Logis in Salon.com

 In agreeing to the Compromise of 1877, U.S. officials were willing to ignore the truth about the past and pretend that racism would not dominate governments across the South. As a result, they sacrificed the rights and liberties of newly freed enslaved people to settle a disputed election and appease Southern resentment. It’s critical for us to remember this and to learn from it. Because today, some elected officials still seem willing to sacrifice the rights of the most marginalized among us to uphold white supremacy.

The recent removal of AP African American studies from Florida high schools is not the first attempt to erase uncomfortable truths, and it won’t be the last. But we don’t have to let such things happen. Taking control of the future begins with our willingness to learn the truth of our history and to share what we have learned with our friends and families and the wider communities in which we live. Then, we can start having meaningful conversations about the country we hope to build — a place that we will only reach if we can figure out how to get there together.

-Tom Hanks in Salon.com

On Brooks and Company

 In discussing "therapeutic" culture, where we're too "coddled" to face the "real world," Brooks never mentions Trump voters, in their own therapeutic bubble of lies, obfuscations and conspiracy theory.

Many conservatives are coddled in a comfy blankie of lies, obfuscations and conspiracy theory. Fox News essentially acts as free day care for aging white right-wingers. Its viewers are constantly assured that harboring their darkest impulses about women, people of color and people with different sexual and gender identities is completely understandable, even proper. After years of this steady diet of malign disinformation, they trust their authoritarian cult leader more than their religious leaders or even family and friends.

-Kirk Swearingen in Salon.com

Real Baseball Fans

 Real baseball fans know about the "the shot heard round the world." Real baseball fans know the meaning of "Tinker to Evers to Chance." Real baseball fans know the meaning of a "perfect game." Real baseball fans know what a "slider" is. Real baseball fans know the origin of the "the seventh inning stretch." How many of you real baseball fans are out there?

Everything is at Stake

 Can't we all just get along and leave our politics at the door? Actually, NO. It's too important. Too much is at stake. What is at stake? Actually, everything is at stake. That's the rub with can't we all just get along or leave our politics at the door.

Dilettante

 noun: dilettante; plural noun: dilettantes; plural noun: dilettanti

1. a person who cultivates an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge."a wealthy literary dilettante"