Benjamin Netanyahu has proven how little control or compassion he has a leader. Let’s just get something said: Hamas and other decidedly anti-Israel entities are terrorists! The many opportunities to establish a Palestinian state have been wasted. That area has seen wars and bloodshed for years with at best many uneasy Peaces. There have been opportunities to create a lasting peace but the people who had the possibility or ability to create a Palestinian state and allow Israel to coexist within the area are gone. Their removal has allowed Dictators and radicals to assume and take power in the vacuum. Currently we have a entire population that is now becoming enemies of Israel when all they wanted was a state of their own. True enough the radical Palestinians in association with other bad actors from surrounding countries have contributed to the Chaos but the recent events have set the course of peace back years.
The solution is now more distant but still possible with the right people in the right places and in cooperation the moderates on all sides.
‘Trump isn’t fun anymore’: Columnist claims MAGA leader’s greatest charm has died
Story by Adam Nichols- RAW STORY
• 21h • 2 min read
The dancing, joking, story-telling persona that helped lure Donald Trump’s adoring MAGA base has become a casualty of Kamala Harris’ campaign, a columnist wrote Friday.
And she based the revelation on Trump’s emergence from days of Mar-a-Lago isolation to give a news conference Thursday that many commentators described as a chaotic event suggesting a flailing campaign.
“He was dour and angry and frankly is starting to look a whole lot older, just in the past few months,” Parton wrote.
“He’s not enjoying himself and it shows and, compared to the excited crowds greeting Harris and Walz this week, this sad, pathetic appearance seemed almost funereal.”
Parton wrote that the change was fully down to Biden stepping aside and Harris taking the mantle as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. Even facing possible prison time in four criminal prosecutions hadn’t dampened his spirits as much.
“Donald Trump is in a bad way,” she wrote.
Parton went on, “I think he’s considering for the first time that he might lose again and he is not psychologically equipped to deal with that reality.
“Sure, he’ll fight it and tell his supporters that it was stolen and perhaps even incite more violence. But deep down he knows he might actually lose just as he knows deep down that he lost in 2020. There’s a look of panic in his eyes right now.
“If he fails this time he might just break apart at the seams. “
To some fanfare, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign today launched Republicans for Harris, which will kick off with events this week in the swing states of Arizona, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Their goal, campaign officials told Zeke Miller of the Associated Press, is to make it easier for Republican voters put off by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to back Democratic presidential nominee Harris. Curiously, though, in their embrace of the nation’s growing democratic coalition, Republicans crossing the aisle in 2024 are returning to their party’s origins.
The Republican Party itself began as a coalition that came together to stand against an oligarchy whose leaders were explicit about their determination to overthrow democracy. As wealth had accumulated in the hands of a small group of elite southern enslavers, those men had turned against American democracy. “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are created equal,’” South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond said.
Enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia rejected the other key principle of the Declaration of Independence: that everyone has a right to a say in the government under which they live. “We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” he wrote in 1857. “All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force.” There were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote, he said, “[b]ut we twelve hundred…never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.”
Enslavers like Hammond and Fitzhugh believed that some people were better than others and had the right—and the duty—to impose their will on everyone else. If they did not, men like Fitzhugh believed, poor men and marginalized people would insist on being equal, receiving the value of their work and living as they wished.
Under this dangerous system, Fitzhugh wrote, “society is insensibly, and often unconsciously, marching to the utter abandonment of the most essential institutions—religion, family ties, property, and the restraints of justice.” He defended human enslavement as the highest form of society, since paternalistic Christian masters would care for their wards, preventing a world of “No-Government and Free Love.”
The elite enslavers came to control the Democratic Party and, through it, the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. The Whig Party tried for decades to make peace with the increasingly extremist southern Democrats, and as they did so, the party splintered, with those opposed either to human enslavement or the spread of human enslavement to the West—those were actually not the same thing—creating their own upstart parties.
And then, in 1854, with the help of Democratic president Franklin Pierce, elite enslavers managed to push through the Senate a bill to organize the two giant territories of Kansas and Nebraska in such a way that they would be able to spread their system across the American West. The new slave states that would form there would be able to join forces in the House of Representatives with the southern slave states to outvote the northern states that rejected enslavement. Without a brake on their ambitions, the enslavers would be able to spread their worldview across the nation. From their position at the head of the United States, they expected to spread their slave-based economy around the globe.
But their triumph was not to be. With the bill under debate in the Senate, Democrat Amos Tuck of New Hampshire—the state Pierce hailed from—wrote: “Now let Frank Pierce consummate his treason, if he dare. There is a North, thank God!… We have…rebuked treason, condemned the Nebraska Bill, and discarded the President.” Tuck noted that the Democrats were losing “their best men. I think they (the leaders) can never recover from the consequences of having tried to betray their country.” He looked forward to “bringing out in future the true characteristics of our people, so long belied by the most unworthy demagogues….”
Tuck was not alone. The day after the House of Representatives began to debate the Kansas-Nebraska bill, Whig representative Israel Washburn of Maine invited about thirty antislavery representatives to meet at the rooms of his friends, Massachusetts representatives Thomas D. Eliot and Edward Dickinson (whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poetry), in Mrs. Crutchett’s select boardinghouse in Washington, D.C. The men who called the meeting were northern Whigs, and the men who came to it entered the elegant room as members of a variety of political parties, but they all left committed to a new northern organization that would stand against the spread of slavery into the West. They called themselves “Republicans,” hoping to invoke Thomas Jefferson—who had called his own political party Republican—and recall the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
When the House passed the bill on May 22 and Pierce signed it on May 30, the anti-Nebraska movement took off. Conventions across the North called upon all free men to fight together “for the first principles of Republican Government and against the schemes of aristocracy, the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed or man debased.” There were 142 northern seats in the House of Representatives; in the midterm elections that year, voters put “anti-Nebraska” congressmen in 120 of them. Anti-Nebraska coalitions elected 11 senators and swept Democrats out of state legislatures across the North.
In 1855, Pierce insisted that Americans opposing the spread of human enslavement were trying to overturn American traditions, insisting that the United States was a white man’s republic and that the Founders had intended to create a hierarchy of races.
But those coming together to oppose enslavement denounced Pierce’s recasting of American history as “False all through!” As for the Founders, Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill wrote, “their ‘one guiding thought,’ as they themselves proclaimed it, was the inalienable right of ALL men to Freedom, as a principle.”
When Democrats tried to call those coming together as Republicans “radicals,” rising politician Abraham Lincoln turned the tables by standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. “[Y]ou say you are conservative—eminently conservative—while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort,” he said, addressing the Democrats who remained determined to base the United States in enslavement.
“What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live’; while you with one accord…spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new…. Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated.”
When voters elected Lincoln president, the fledgling Republican Party turned away from a government that catered to an oligarchy trying to overturn democracy and instead reinvented the American government to create a new, active government that guaranteed to poorer men the right to be treated equally before the law, the right to a say in their government, and access to resources that had previously been monopolized by the wealthy.
The present looks much like that earlier moment when people of all different political backgrounds came together to defend the principles of the United States. In today’s moment, when someone like J.D. Vance backer billionaire Peter Thiel says, “Democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted,” and the Republicans’ Project 2025 calls for replacing democracy with Christian nationalism, it makes sense for all people who care about our history and our democratic heritage to pull together.
Today, Olivia Troye, who served on national security issues in the Trump White House, said, “[W]hat is happening here with the Republican Party… is dangerous and extreme. And I think we need to get back to the values of…observing the rule of law, of standing with our international allies and actually providing true leadership to the world, which is something that Kamala Harris has exhibited during the Biden Administration.”
As Lincoln recalled, when people in his era realized that the very nature of America was under attack, they “rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver. We…are rapidly closing in…. “ And, he said, “When the storm shall be past,” opponents “shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
Indeed, when the storm passed in his day, Americans found that the magnitude of the crisis they had weathered, and the rise of entirely new issues meant that old party lines had fallen apart and people reorganized along entirely new ones. Famously, Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, who in 1860 had worked for the election of extremist Democrat John C. Breckinridge, stood heartbroken by Lincoln’s bedside as he breathed his last and blessed him, saying: “Now he belongs to the ages.”
George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters (Richmond, Virginia, 1857), pp. 353–354.
George Fitzhugh, Sociology For The South Or The Failure of Free Society, (Richmond, Virginia: 1854), pp. x–xi.
Chicago Tribune, January 9, 1856, p. 2.
James Henry Hammond to Thomas Clarkson, Esq, January 28, 1845, in Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Honorable James H. Hammond of South Carolina (New York: John F. Trow & Co., printers, 1866).
Gaillard Hunt, Israel, Elihu, and Cadwallader Washburn: A Chapter in American Biography (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1925).
Abraham Lincoln, Address at Cooper Institute, New York City, February 27, 1860, in Basler, Collected Works, 3:522–550.
Comments Off on Politicians: victims of their own ineptitude!
Apparently, the political class has fallen into disarray along with their seemingly inability to do the simple job of legislating instead of “gotcha” politics. Some of us are relishing the hyperbole and vitriol while missing the point that no rational or reasonable legislation is being offered or proposed. This is not them against us, it is the elite’s will being done by legislators we (the people) elected to do our (the people’s) work. Promises made, promises broken always no matter what is said on the stump. party designations are no more than identification for voting purposes, what we (the people) need to heed are the words and deeds along with the effects on our lives.
Comments Off on Rogue court following rogue “former guy”?
Apparently, the high court is as corruptible as “the former guy” and so much of the GOP/ Dems The modern-day politics have become more of a “knee jerk” war rather than a movement to inform voters on the candidates. Remember the High court opened the door for “dark money”, so no surprise in recent revelations and rulings.
Apparently, the lessening of historical information is evident in our politics. The banning of books, the removal of true history in schools and lack of “civics” education all should remind us of the reason for 1933 – 1945 world war and it’s aftermath. One (1) person played on the woes of their countrymen to persuade them that they were being targeted by a specific group of citizens and those “people” were the reason for their problems. Fast forward to 2016- the most unlikely candidate for President of the United States gains that position. This event provided some of the same primal issues that resulted in our Civil War as well as a basis for the later European, then worldwide conflicts resulting in millions of lives lost, countries devastated and a long slog to normalcy. During that time of “normalcy”, the United States continued its “Jim Crow ” ways resulting in years of repression for anyone who was considered “less than”. This underlying layer of America appeared to be subsiding at one point but was rapidly revived with the election of DJT. aka, LOTUS, Orangeman or any of several other sobriquets. Using the same (less than or othering) playbook DJT took on the office of President and proceeded to run it as he ran his businesses with an iron fist and no plans other than whims (against expert advice in many cases). Aided by a group of sycophants and Neer do well Congressional members, laws were enacted which had no basis in the real and overall needs of the country.
Democracy: system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.
Republic: system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives:
The two descriptions above appear to be the same until it’s interpreted by any one of many factions or beliefs. The Names can and have been interchanged over the years to suit the speaker or factions that follow the basic tenets of each. It is unfortunate that “buzz words” and “alternate” descriptions dominate the airwaves and print as “news” creating a confusion or conflation of facts which serves to sway the thinking of voters. When the public can no longer deem the media as credible then we have the crumbling of a Republic or Democracy. It is a fact that some of the worst historical wars and human tragedies have occurred when the basic ideas of those two words were replaced by the darker side of humanity espoused by charismatic people whose sole objective is their own personal gain. We can’t have it all or any if we are not informed on the facts. This brings up the Media that either tells the fact or distorts them (lies). We need to choose and be open to the truth and historical facts.
Mary Trump slammed her uncle, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, as the “death candidate” in a blistering new edition of her newsletter, “The Good In Us.”
The former president’s niece noted the irony of the Supreme Court’s recent overturning of the Donald Trump-era ban on bump stocks and her uncle’s response that he actually “respected” the decision. Trump has taken the opposite approach with recent legal judgments against him, from his hush money trial conviction to the fines he has been slapped with in civil fraud and defamation cases.
Oh, and she also called out his subsequent boast about being endorsed by the National Rifle Association.
The court’s decision “horrified” Mary Trump, she said. But it also made “so clear what the election in November is all about: life or death” and that her uncle is “the death candidate,” she added.
The ex-POTUS’ ambivalence to gun violence and his kowtowing to the gun lobby wasn’t the only reason for slapping him with the scathing moniker, though, she said.
His “incompetence and malicious inaction” during the coronavirus pandemic, essential killing of the GOP and risking of lives with his stance against abortion rights, denial of the climate crisis and calls for violence are all added reasons for the nickname, she argued.
“The harsh reality is that Donald is a serious national security threat to the American people. This is a life-or-death election,” Mary Trump concluded the newsletter. “And my uncle is the death candidate. Let’s choose life, shall we?”
Comments Off on Who’s most responsible for the monopolization of America? As the United States moves against Google, antitrust law is still under the influence of Robert Bork
(Robert Bork is a failed nominee for the high court under Pres. Reagan)
ROBERT REICH SEP 12
Friends,
One of the most important initiatives of the Biden administration is its attack on corporate monopolies.
Today, the Justice Department’s case against Google goes to trial. The Department alleges that Google illegally abused its power over online search to throttle competition. It is the government’s first monopoly trial of the modern internet era.
Later this month, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will file its lawsuit against Amazon, alleging that Amazon favors its own products over competitors’ on its platforms and uses predatory tactics with outside sellers on Amazon.com.
Whether it’s Ticketmaster and Live Nation consolidating control over live performances, Kroger and Albertsons dominating the grocery market, or Amazon and Google scooping up every operation in sight, corporate concentration is on the rise.
Over the past several decades, giant corporations have come to dominate most American industries, as this chart shows:
[Source: “100 Years of Rising Corporate Concentration” by Spencer Y. Kwon, Yueran Ma, Kaspar Zimmermann]
The social costs of corporate concentration are growing.
— The typical American household is paying more than $5,000 a year because corporations can raise their prices without fear that competitors will draw away consumers.
— Such corporate market power has also been a major force driving inflation.
— Huge corporations also suppress wages, because workers have fewer employers from whom to get better jobs.
— And corporate giants are also fueling massive flows of big money into politics (one of the major advantages of large size).
Yet the federal courts have been reluctant to do anything about this and are pushing back against the Biden administration’s efforts. Why? Because of a man named Robert Bork.
Let me explain.
I first met Bork in September 1971, when I took his class on antitrust at Yale Law School. I recall him as a large, imposing man, with a red beard and a perpetual scowl.
He was only in his mid-40s then, but he seemed impatient and bored with us (also in that class were Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton).
We kept challenging his view that the only legitimate purpose of antitrust law was to lower consumer prices.
“What about the political power of giant corporations?” we asked.
His retort: “How do you expect courts to measure political power?”
“But what about the power of big corporations to suppress wages?”
“Employees are always free to find better jobs.”
“What about their power to undercut potential rivals with lower prices?”
“Lower prices are good for consumers.”
“What about the sheer power that comes from their gigantic size?”
“Also good for consumers. Large size means lower costs through efficiencies of scale.”
Bork had an answer to each of our objections, but we were never satisfied. He spouted economic theory based on dubious “Chicago School” assumptions that all economic players have perfect information and face no cost of entering or leaving markets (Bork had attended the University of Chicago and its law school).
Even in our mid-20s, we knew this was bullshit.
Bork refused to recognize power — even though antitrust laws emerged from the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, when a central concern was the untrammeled power of giant corporations.
A few years later, Bork wrote a book called The Antitrust Paradox that summarized his ideas. The staff of a conservative California governor bound for the White House read it and passed it along to their boss, and Bork’s book formed a basic tenet of Reaganomics.
Federal judges read it, too. Most judges didn’t (and still don’t) know much economics and hated getting bogged down in interminable and almost incomprehensible antitrust trials that could last for years. They found Bork’s simplicity and cogency helpful in limiting such lawsuits.
BORK’S INFLUENCE over the courts represented the culmination of years of work by the monied interests to kill off antitrust law. They’re still at it.
Which is why the new view of antitrust now being pioneered by the Biden administration through the FTC and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department is so important.
This new view regards corporate concentration as a problem even if it provides economies of scale that might allow lower consumer prices in the short term. That’s because corporate concentration also means less innovation, more wage suppression, predatory behavior, price-push inflation, and increased political power.
Besides their lawsuits against Google and Amazon, the FTC and the Justice Department have proposed new merger guidelines to keep monopolies in check. Not surprisingly, giant corporations are doing whatever they can to stop these new protections from taking effect.
The optimist in me thinks that as the public becomes more aware of the close connections among corporate power, predation, inflation, wage suppression, and political corruption, the new antitrust movement will eventually succeed.
Michael1942's Blog 
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