Yes. It's been my concern for many years. Conservative federal
judges now outnumber moderate and progressive judges. But it did us
little good to have Barack Obama in the Presidency, when the Congress,
especially in the Senate, blocked all the progressive bills, because
Obama was Black. And Obama believed...or said he believed...that he
could have a dialogue and come to a compromise on issues affecting
such areas as Health and cost of Drugs. And as he crept through his
second term he became even more ineffective. The major plus in his 8
years was that Barack Obama presented better than any of the previous
three presidents.
Anyway, it strikes me that when the People are upset with their
elected officials, they tend to turn toward the negative, tearing down
persons and institutions, alike. And it doesn't help that our
political campaigning is reduced to 30 seconds or 1 minute negative
ads. After thousands of years of developing a complex language, we
now express life and death issues in little Twitter Bursts. There's a
very good reason it's called Twitter and people Tweet one another.
Birds twitter and
tweet...at least those that don't gobble and quack...and now humans
have been reduced to the level of a bird brain.
In the summers I would spend a few weeks at my grand folks in Spokane
Valley. Besides the milk cow and a couple of hogs that got butchered
each Fall...different hogs every year, of course...and a big
Thanksgiving Turkey, my grandma kept a herd of chickens in the hen
house. Of course they clucked and crowed rather than twittering and
tweeting. On Saturday afternoons, Grandma and I would select a plump
hen and Grandma would stretch its neck across the chopping block and
with her little hatchet she would chop off its head. I watched the
hen's head. It would blink its eyes and open its mouth, apparently
unaware that it's body was missing. And the hen's body would fall off
the chopping block and then jump to its feet and dash about, flapping
its wings...until it dropped. Today, when I hear reports from
Washington DC., I fall back on those images of headless chickens. But
of course, that's on a good day.
Now that our Ruling Class has neutered the American Labor Unions, it
has started the final touches on the News Media, turning a lackluster
press into "Enemies of the State". Once the Press is led to the
chopping block and its headless body has given up dashing about, we
can all wave a sad goodbye to our Great American Experience. Sure, it
began to die back following the Second World War, but after the death
of FDR, our wonderful democracy was already running headless, around
the hen yard.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/28/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
There's another point to be made about the importance of how one votes,
even
when the system is so bad, and that is the appointment of judges. One of
the
worst things that has happened since Trump's election, is the kind of
judges
who have been appointed to courts at various federal levels. Their
decisions
on cases, on appeals, affect us, especially women, poor people, people of
color, religious minorities, and now, the general public when it comes to
environmental cases. But even in the environmental cases, it's the poor
people who are most negatively affected by the decisions of these judges.
People whose homes are fouled because they live near industrial farms or
damaged pipelines. Yesterday, you posted an article about disability
benefits. As benefits are cut, there'll be court cases, decided by judges.
No, we're not going to change this rotten system wholesale, but you fight
where you can to hold onto as much as you can. Hillary Clinton would not
have appointed the two men whom Trump appointed to the Supreme Court. That
matters, and it will continue to matter for the next thirty years.
Miriam
