Donald Receives Phone Call From Taiwan
Who is Taiwan? Well, Taiwan is an island a hundred miles off the coast of mainland China. Its current population is about 23-1/2 million. Its current government was formed when the “nationalist” Chinese military forces, hard pressed by Chinese Communist armies, fled the mainland and established a government in exile in 1949. Late in 1949, Mao Tse Tung and the Communist military forces declared a unified “People’s Republic of China” (PRC.) The PRC currently includes approximately 1.357 billion people. (Data from Wikipedia.)
The government in Taiwan styled itself the “Republic of China” and was recognized until the 1970’s by the United States and the United Nations as the legitimate government of all China. There have been no significant military hostilities between Taiwan and PRC since 1949.
Western governments generally followed the US lead, although many began to trade with the PRC quietly. The Soviet Union at first recognized the PRC, but a falling-out led to a brief border war between the two countries in 1969. As a result of the discord between the two nominally Communist countries, the PRC decided to cultivate better relations with the United States.
In the early 1970’s, then-President Richard Nixon initiated a diplomatic “tilt” towards the PRC that eventually resulted in the PRC’s obtaining Taiwan’s seat in the United Nations Security Council. Since then, US policy has included an overt diplomatic relationship with PRC and a covert relationship with Taiwan that includes quantities of weapons designed for defense. In 1979, then-President Jimmy Carter severed formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan as part of the “one China” policy. For more than 35 years, the leaders of the two countries have not spoken with each other openly.
The covert US relationship with Taiwan has included Obama’s sale of $1.8 billion in arms, but no telephone calls, until this past Friday, when Donald, the President-elect, took a phone call from the President of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen. Parenthetically, Tsai is the first female president of Taiwan. The telephone call was pre-arranged, and news of the contact was on the pages of Taiwan’s newspapers before the call even took place.
Although expert reaction to the phone call was generally negative, many conservatives and Republican congressmen approved of the move. One rabid conservative who has advocated “playing the Taiwan card” is former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton. He visited Trump Tower on Friday, although no reason for the visit was mentioned.
Donald had excoriated PRC during his campaign for “currency manipulation” and its exploitative trade relationship with the US. He even claimed that he would slap a 45 percent tariff on imports from China. Many conservatives have also advocated a “get tough” policy with PRC and a “pivot” towards Taiwan.
Not coincidentally, 93 year-old Henry Kissinger met with Donald two weeks ago and with President Xi on Friday. Kissinger had been Nixon’s shuttle diplomat and helped develop the “one China” policy that resulted in Carter’s actions. Kissinger’s talk with Donald centered on the US relationship to the PRC, and his talk with Xi on Friday covered Donald’s approach to China. PRC government spokesmen have reacted cautiously to Friday’s phone call; President Xi Jinping himself told reporters, “We, on the Chinese side, are watching the situation very closely. Now it is in the transition period.”
The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos describes the real risk behind Donald’s telephone call with Taiwan:
Trump has also shown himself to be highly exploitable on subjects that he does not grasp. He is surrounding himself with ideologically committed advisers who will seek to use those opportunities when they can. We should expect similar moments of exploitation to come on issues that Trump will regard as esoteric, such as the Middle East, health care, immigration, and entitlements.
For a piece I published in September, about what Trump’s first term could look like, I spoke to a former Republican White House official whom Trump has consulted, who told me, “Honestly, the problem with Donald is he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.” It turns out that is half of the problem; the other half is that he has surrounded himself with people who know how much he doesn’t know. Since Election Day, Trump has largely avoided receiving intelligence briefings, either because he doesn’t think it’s important that he receive them or because he just doesn’t care about them. George W. Bush, in the first months of 2001, ignored warnings about Osama bin Laden. Only in our darkest imaginings can we wonder what warnings Trump is ignoring now.
It seems that the President-elect is listening to rabidly conservative Republican experts and following the advice of those who appear poised to steer his opinion to match their pet peeves. This means that US government policy is likely to follow arch-conservative, “alt-right” lines. There is likely to be considerable confusion and disturbance among US allies and there may be erratic changes in policy.
Comment of the Day
This comment was posted on the New York Times in response to a column by Gail Collins about the effort to recount the votes. Gail noted that Jill Stein was leading the recount effort and had received enough votes in Wisconsin to cover Hillary’s deficit– in other words, if all the people who had voted for Jill Stein had voted for Hillary Clinton, Hillary would have won Wisconsin.
Montreal Moe
WestPark, Quebec December 1, 2016
It is little things that destroy a country not the big things. In a healthy USA Donald Trump doesn’t participate in politics. In a healthy USA Jimmy Carter is reelected in a landslide. In a healthy USA Jimmy Carter is a conservative trying to maintain a country loyal to its constitution and Ronald Reaganis a fraud and a phony. In a healthy country the intelligence agency is a servant of the country and its citizens not its Chamber of Commerce. In a healthy country a man like Antonin Scalia does not get a spot on the Supreme Court when he rejects everything the country stands for and hates the men who founded the country because their philosophy stood in total opposition to his world view. In a healthy country Clarence Thomas does not get a seat on the Supreme Court because he is Black but unqualified he does not get a job on the Supreme Court because he is morally Bankrupt and totally unqualified. In a healthy country Bill Clinton is not impeached for lying about sex because he doesn’t have to lie about his inability to control his sexual desires. In a healthy country the leader of the senate doesn’t vow to destroy the President because success doesn’t serve the political needs of the Senate majority
Donald Trump is only the symptom of the disease and may not even be the symptom of a disease anymore he may be the death rattle of a once great nation.
Distraught Dog, Running Off
Deeply distraught today. Watching TV, ancient Greece depicted in movie with wars, tyrants, assassinations and political murders (same thing?)
I wondered how people could be induced to do things like kill others, leave behind comforts of home to go on campaign and then kill others, submit to being judicially murdered, participate as a jailer or a killer in a political/judicial murder (“legal” execution), or be a woman who goes along with these things.
How can people be induced to do things against their better interests? Have they been fooled that far?
How can I live with this?
As noted yesterday, it would be potentially productive to examine the relationship between population growth and changes in voting numbers. Here are the totals for the thirteen swing states presented in the voting totals on the google document mentioned yesterday.
The increase in total votes in the US compares well with population growth: total votes went up 4.5% between 2012 and 2016, and the population grew by an estimated 4.1% between 2010 and 2015.
Here are the numbers for the thirteen swing states:
Arizona: votes went up 12.1%; population grew 6.82%. Democrats lost by 3.5%, a shift of 5.5%.
Florida: votes went up 11.2%; population grew 7.82%. Democrats lost by 1.2%, a shift of -2.1%.
Colorado: the votes went up 8.2%; population grew 8.5%. Democrats won by 4.9%, a shift of -0.5%.
Iowa: votes went Down -1.0%; population grew 2.55%. Democrats lost by -9.4%, a shift of -15.2%.
Maine: votes went up by 3.9%; population grew 0.07%. Democrats won by 2.7%, a shift of -12.6%.
Michigan: votes went up 1.4%; population grew 0.39%. Democrats lost by -0.2%, a shift of -9.7%.
Minnesota: votes went up 0.3%; population grew 3.5%. Democrats won by 1.5%, a shift of -6.2%.
Nevada: votes went up 10.9%; population grew 7.5%. Democrats won by 2.4%, a shift of -4.3%.
New Hampshire: votes went up 4.7%; population grew 1.07%. Democrats won by 0.4%, a shift of -5.2%.
North Carolina: votes went up 5.2%; population grew 5.32%. Democrats lost by -3.7%, a shift of -1.6%.
Ohio: votes went down -2.0%; population grew 0.67%. Democrats lost by -8.0%, a shift of -11.0%.
Pennsylvania: votes went up 5.3%; population grew 0.79%. Democrats lost by -1.1%, a shift of -6.4%.
Wisconsin: votes went down -3.0%; population grew 1.48%. Democrats lost by -0.7%, a shift of -7.7%.
We see that Hillary lost votes in every swing state except Arizona, but some states showed dramatic losses of ten percent or more, like Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio. Hillary lost Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio, but won Maine, a state in which Obama won by a landslide of 15%. Hillary also lost Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and showed large percentage losses over Obama, -6.4 and -7.7%.
Hillary’s percentage increase in Arizona could be attributed to the unpopularity of Republicans in that state with Hispanics, who made up a large percentage of the large population increase, which was doubled in the vote increase.
Voting numbers went down in Ohio, Iowa, and Wisconsin, all states that Hillary lost. For voting numbers to actually go down, there had to voter suppression or disenchantment, both distinct possibilities which could be distinguished by studying impressions of voters in those states.
Voting numbers increased out of proportion to population growth in Arizona, Florida, and Nevada, all states in which many Hispanics were registered and which showed large growth in Hispanic populations. Hillary lost Arizona and Florida, but won Nevada.
These numbers show possible pre-poll problems with Hillary’s campaign. The only states that might have had problems in the polling booth itself were those where Hillary lost ten percent or more compared to Obama’s voting. We can’t be suspicious of cheating at the ballot box based on these numbers, although the states that showed voting numbers going down suggest some type of problem– those states happen to account for enough electoral votes to swing the election.
No-one can say, based on potential scenarios, whether there was cheating in the ballot boxes without reviewing paper ballot comparisons to electronic voting tallies, because there are several ways in which cheating could be done in an undetectable fashion. The completely disastrous nature of Donald’s win at the electoral college makes it potentially useful to reverse the conclusion by spending enough money to pay for recounts in the most problematic states. Unfortunately, the recount attempt appears to be centering on two other states in which the totals were extremely close.
Objective analysis could account for Donald’s win by describing it as a function of the voter’s exposure to Donald’s Hitler-like speaking style, especially by such widely watched television stations as CNN– as described in yesterday’s post about John Oliver’s video. Voters were essentially mesmerized by this exposure, and became uninterested in later attempts to expose them to the truth about Donald because they were emotionally attached to him.
Hillary failed to efficiently counter this emotional attachment to Donald because she was excessively detached from direct campaigning. In fact, it was said that she never appeared in person in Michigan during the campaign. Michigan could be said to represent the problem in microcosm: there is the city of Detroit, a black-majority population center which has actually become depopulated as a result of the loss of manufacturing jobs which supported black residents followed by a loss of all city services and bankruptcy. Black voters could have won the state for Hillary if they had been mobilized and motivated to vote, but that didn’t happen enough.
The city of Flint represented the loss of security in government because of the poisoning of its water by attempts to save money on supply; this disaster could have worked in Hillary’s favor if she had come out on the side of the people of Flint and visited the city in person to gain sympathy. However, that didn’t happen and she lost Michigan as well as the nation as a whole.
The conclusion is that recounts will probably not show that there was cheating in the ballot box and it is unlikely that they will change the results of the election, especially if the three states that had decreased voting are not examined. Donald’s unlikely (but mathematically possible at a third of the odds according to Nate Silver) win is explained by his hypnotizing speeches aired to low information voters early in the campaign without sufficient factual confrontation at those early stages. This is an argument for bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, which was destroyed by the Republicans years ago, in 1987. The lack of adequate time and space for factual rebuttal of emotional but untruthful claims has caused no end of trouble.
From Space.com and Seeker.com today:
A new headcount of galaxies in the observable universe turned up 10- to 20 times more galaxies than previous estimates, bringing the tally up to as many as 2 trillion, a new study shows.
And from Science News yesterday:
Not all galaxies sparkle with stars. Galaxies as wide as the Milky Way but bereft of starlight are scattered throughout our cosmic neighborhood. Unlike Andromeda and other well-known galaxies, these dark beasts have no grand spirals of stars and gas wrapped around a glowing core, nor are they radiant balls of densely packed stars. Instead, researchers find just a wisp of starlight from a tenuous blob.
“If you took the Milky Way but threw away about 99 percent of the stars, that’s what you’d get,” says Roberto Abraham, an astrophysicist at the University of Toronto.
A new telescope called the Dragonfly that is designed to mimic the compound eyes of insects is able to pick up these ultrafaint galaxies that are full of gas and dark matter but aren’t forming stars. The Dragonfly, with 48 telephoto lenses, has an advantage over larger, single lens telescopes because faint images aren’t blotted out by internal reflections that plague larger lenses. In 2014, astronomers pointed the Dragonfly at the Coma cluster, which has been observed in depth for 80 years. The Dragonfly found 48 galaxies that had never been seen before, some as large as the Milky Way. These substantial galaxies have very few stars, so they are very faint, but they appear to have been present as long as normal galaxies, and they appear to be as large. Astronomers are concluding that these galaxies are composed of mostly dark matter, which lurks in an invisible halo around all galaxies but composes a much larger proportion of these faint galaxies.
After studying older photographs of Coma, astronomers realized that there were nearly a thousand of these faint galaxies, just as big and heavy as their brighter cousins but bereft of visible stars. Some of these “ultradiffuse” galaxies are small, but some are as heavy as the Milky Way and composed almost entirely of dark matter. The mystery now is how these galaxies formed; there are many theories but no definite answers.
What is important is that astronomers are finding new things constantly, even when looking at the same parts of the sky. New and better telescopes discover new and more interesting stars and galaxies. The answer to the puzzles of dark matter may lie in some of these new galaxies.
This video, of John Oliver’s last show for 2016, shown on November 14, includes this admission by the president of CNN, Jeff Zucker:
“If we made a mistake last year, it’s that we probably did put on too many of his campaign rallies in those early months, unedited, and just let them run. And I think in hindsight we probably shouldn’t have done that as much.”
As I wrote in a recent post, Donald had a book of Hitler’s speeches that he studied and that gave him the material he needed to refine his own speaking style and content in such a way that he became almost as mesmerizing a speaker as was Hitler himself. This speaking style, combined with CNN’s habit of allowing his speeches to run unedited and with little or no comment from the moderators, allowed him to enter the psyches of low-information people, especially those in rural areas where almost their only exposure to news was to have the television playing in the background while they ate at a cafe or truckstop. How many people were hypnotized by exposure to CNN running Donald’s speeches while they ate in restaurants and truck stops throughout rural America?
Once the television news readers began to catch on to Donald’s habit of repeating false and fake news, combined with his frequent bald faced lies when confronted with problematic statements that he had made, they started to run banners on the lower part of the television screen showing corrections to statements he was making. However, it was too late, because as John Oliver explains in his show:
“The problem is that the impact of corrections like that which may have sunk a candidate in another era is compromised because there is no longer a consensus on what a fact is. Trust in mainstream news has been falling.”
Oliver goes on to cite studies which show that a majority of adults state that they get their news from social media (62%) and 44% specifically from Facebook. Buzzfeed, one of the social media sites, performed a study of the news prior to the election that showed that 38% of the news on Republican leaning pages is partly or completely false, and 19% of the news on Democratic leaning pages is also partly or completely false. This means that nearly a fifth of the news on Democratic sites is false and over a nearly two fifths of the news on Republican sites is also false.
People who lean towards one party, or towards liberal or conservative viewpoints, get almost all of their news on social media from sites that lean in the same direction, leading to an echo chamber effect in which the only news they receive agrees with their views. This is because the media, especially Facebook, is set up to agree with or “like” the same sources that their consumers “like.”
Donald is especially in thrall to these same fake news sites and frequently echos their false or distorted news items. When he is confronted by news people who tell him that the stories he has re-tweeted are false, he responds dismissively as if he has no responsibility to find out for himself whether the stories he repeats are accurate or not.
This story has not received enough attention: among the numerous conflicts of interest which Donald has created for himself by being elected, there is one which he probably cannot get out of: his lease on his hotel in the District of Columbia. This story on NBC News explains that he will violate the terms of his lease by becoming an elected official:
Steven L. Schooner, a professor of government procurement law at the George Washington University Law School, and Daniel I. Gordon, a senior advisor to GW’s Government Procurement Law Program (and President Obama’s first administrator for federal procurement policy) pointed out this week in Government Executive magazine that a provision in Trump’s lease with the General Services Administration states that “No … elected official of the Government of the United States … shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom…”
This provision appears quite plain and it behooves the General Services Administration to terminate its lease with the Donald before January 20.
A typical low information voter.
Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee in the recent presidential election, is pushing an effort to get recounts in the following three states: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. The total by which Hillary lost in those three states is less than 100,000 votes altogether, which probably explains why she is concentrating on those three. Her initial effort, to bankroll the attempt in Michigan, netted over $2,000,000 in initial funding. She raised the bar after seeing how quickly she reached $2 million, and as of the last writing, she was already up to $4.3 million. The other two states will follow, as the deadlines for filing a recount request are later. You can read the details of her attempt on NBC, here. By the way, the recount requests are not required to state a reason, so she need not allege any wrongdoing to get the recounts.
Trump won Michigan by about 9,500 votes, Wisconsin by 22,500 votes and Pennsylvania by 69,700.
The first column is Hillary votes, the second Donald votes, the third Jill Stein votes, and the following columns are percentages for each and the changes in counts. The most important number is the last, which is the “margin shift” or the percentage loss in Democratic votes from 2012:
| Michigan* | 2,268,839 | 2,279,543 | 250,902 | 47.3% | 47.5% | 5.2% | 9.5% | -0.2% | -9.7% |
| Wisconsin | 1,381,823 | 1,404,000 | 189,490 | 46.4% | 47.2% | 6.4% | 6.9% | -0.7% -7.7% |
| Pennsylvania | 2,875,952 | 2,944,123 | 214,571 | 47.7% | 48.8% | 3.6% | 5.4% | -1.1% | -6.5% |
Note that in Michigan and Pennsylvania, Hillary received a large percentage fewer votes than Obama did in 2012. The same holds true for several other states, which I will discuss further below. A spreadsheet showing the running totals is here, in google docs.
In the total vote count, Hillary saw a margin shift of -2.1%, but in 13 swing shifts, her margins went down by -5.4%, and certain states were significantly worse. In Arizona, which Hillary lost, she actually showed an improvement: her losing margin went up by 5.4%, meaning she gained that many votes. In Iowa, she lost -15.2% and lost the state where Obama had won by 5.8%. In Maine, which she won, there was a -12.6% shift. In Ohio, there was a -10.9% shift and she lost the state where Obama had won. New Hampshire showed a -5.2% shift, but she still won.
These dramatic losses compared to Obama’s 2012 showing are interesting in themselves, but combined with the fact that 1.1 % fewer people voted in Iowa compared to 2012, 2.1% fewer in Ohio, and 3.0% fewer in Wisconsin, they are striking. There was a 4.3% increase in voters in the nation overall, and there were comparable shifts in the 13 swing states overall, but there were dramatic shifts in the number of people voting in some states. These changes can be explained in part by the number of people living in the state, as shown by census data. For example, a 10.9% increase in voters in Nevada is explained by population shifts, but some of the losses in voters are not explained so easily.
I haven’t time today to make a direct comparison between census population changes and changes in the number of voters state by state, but tomorrow I will attempt to compile that data. There are some odd differences that stick out immediately, for example in North Dakota there was a 6.6% increase in voters even though the state has lost population over the same period.
These changes in votes between the Barack Obama campaign in 2012 and Hillary’s campaign in 2016 represent losses related to propaganda by the Donald campaign and their sympathizers. The propaganda put out by Donald at his rallies and such low-information magazines as The Enquirer (which gave prominent front page coverage to every unsubstantiated rumor that could damage Hillary and even demanded her imprisonment) was vicious and covered the places where most people who do not read or study news would see them.
There is little doubt that Hillary’s losses are real; most election observers think that it would be very difficult to alter the votes registered by the voting machines by hacking or other ulterior means. The problem is simply that Democratic voters failed to come to the polls, and Donald’s voters showed up en masse.
Nonetheless, the expense involved in recounting the votes is relatively small, and there is one person who could easily finance a recount: Donald. The fact that he does not suggests that he has no incentive to do so, whether he thinks it is unnecessary or possibly dangerous.
In addition, the attitude that he takes towards a recount is a function of the fact that he has won the Electoral College; if he lost, he would certainly have financed immediate recounts wherever necessary.
Cat Picture, As Promised
Embattled presumptive President-elect Donald Drumpf (Trump) wants to nominate Dr. Tom Price, a Republican Congressional Representative, who at 62 has been an orthopedic surgeon representing a portion of Atlanta and a strident critic of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA), for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), a rump department once known as Health, Education, and Welfare but stripped of its education responsibilities by Republicans who want to destroy federal supervision and support of the nation’s health, education, welfare, and in general all federal help for the lower 99 percent of the American public.
According to the New York Times (NYT), Dr. Price wants to repeal the ACA (ObamaCare) and substitute an extensive set of new rules:
The legislation Mr. Price has proposed, the Empowering Patients First Act, would repeal the Affordable Care Act and offer age-adjusted tax credits for the purchase of individual and family health insurance policies.
The bill would create incentives for people to contribute to health savings accounts; offer grants to states to subsidize insurance for “high-risk populations”; allow insurers licensed in one state to sell policies to residents of others; and authorize business and professional groups to provide coverage to members through “association health plans.”
As secretary, Mr. Price would be responsible for a department with an annual budget of more than $1 trillion, health programs that insure more than 100 million Americans, and agencies that regulate food and drugs and sponsor much of the nation’s biomedical research.
The NYT article states that Dr. Price has aligned himself generally with the positions of the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Medical Association of Georgia (MAG), voluntary associations that include less than half of all practicing physicians. The AMA was strongly opposed to Medicare at the time that it was established by President Johnson in 1965. (A medical insurance program for all Americans was first proposed by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, and then by President Truman in November 1945, shortly after he succeeded President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.)
Medicare had been feared to be a budget buster; in 2015 it covered over 55 million Americans and it laid out over $583 billion, or 14 percent of the total federal budget. The ACA reduced expenses and projected costs dramatically, easing fears of stretching the budget. Nonetheless, the Republicans strenuously decry the ACA, saying that it is a “government over-reach” or “boondoggle” that “infringes on American’s freedom.” It appears that the Republicans object to the drive to “force” all Americans to have health insurance, disliking the “loss of freedom” that this represents. (Those quotes are from my own imagination but, I think, fairly represent Republican attitudes.)
Dr. Price has specifically decried “a stifling and oppressive federal government.” His main complaint is that the law inserts itself into the doctor-patient decision making process. He has presented the Republican’s objections vociferously, and is described in the NYT as a leading critic of the ACA.
Dr. Price has served six terms in the House of Representatives; previously he was a Georgia state senator. Dr. Price has always been known for his retrogressive positions, as described in the NYT article:
He has introduced legislation that would make it easier for doctors to defend themselves against medical malpractice lawsuits and to (sic) enter into private contracts with Medicare beneficiaries. Under such contracts, doctors can, in effect, opt out of Medicare and charge more than the amounts normally allowed by the program’s rules.
He also supported legislation to bar federal funds for Planned Parenthood [PP], saying some of its clinics had been involved in what he called “barbaric” abortion practices.
Dr. Price’s attempts to defund PP have led some to label him “a grave threat to women’s health” (as stated by Cecile Richards, president of the PP Foundation of America.) Gay rights groups also vehemently oppose him; he called the Supreme Court ruling allowing same-sex marriage “not only a sad day for marriage, but a further judicial destruction of our entire system of checks and balances.” (Apparently he feels that judicial approval of same-sex marriage, rather than endorsing Constitutional fairness/equality in marriage, infringes on Congressional authority to enforce a basically unfair and religion-centered policy– which is absurd, because the Republican-controlled Congress is not about to recognize the basic equality and fairness in marriage doctrines that is required by the Constitution.)
To put the icing on the cake, so to speak, Dr. Price’s website describes him as a member of the Tea Party Caucus. He has said that he is proud to support efforts to roll back a “vile liberal agenda.” His use of the term “vile” goes to the heart of his attitude towards liberal attempts to provide health care for all Americans.
Parenthetically, the “liberal” ACA has not been particularly helpful in the effort to provide health care for everyone due to its lack of incisive policy changes that would remove barriers to access for poor people, as the following abbreviated comments explain:
The ACA has prompted a dramatic increase in the number of Americans with health insurance; unfortunately, many of these policies, primarily those for individuals, have very large deductibles, exceeding $5,000 in many cases. The deductibles and other restrictions cause considerable financial problems for those without large amounts of free cash; these policies tend to represent purely catastrophic coverage. Less affluent people still find it difficult to afford treatment for relatively minor illnesses and less serious health catastrophes.
Lack of health insurance, it is claimed, results in poor health due to lack of access to treatment; having insurance, however, does not readily provide access without other conditions which have not yet been met. As we repeatedly stated in earlier posts, this problem has been nearly solved in European countries that boast comprehensive health care systems; these structures provide health and illness care nearly free and for a total societal cost of half or less that of the American “system.” Discussion of these problems is far beyond the scope of this post and has been covered in prior posts on this blog; these discussions will be postponed to later posts that will reiterate the problems and their potential solutions.
Typical effects of alcohol and drug abuse on White Americans
Alabama Republican Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was nominated to a federal judgeship by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Sessions was at that time U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, and he was 39 years old. A year before that, he had attempted to prosecute three black civil rights workers for alleged voter fraud. The three were quickly acquitted. The case was unusual in that it appeared to be a reaction to the increase in black voters among Alabama’s electorate, in response to voter registration drives. Sessions apparently spent hours interrogating black absentee voters and eventually located fourteen allegedly tampered ballots out of 1.7 million cast. Civil rights groups claimed that Sessions was looking in the wrong place for voter fraud. (New Republic article from 2002.)
During the confirmation hearings, Sessions admitted that he considered the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “un-American.” In addition, he admitted to calling President Johnson’s signature civil rights legislation, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a “piece of intrusive legislation.” He admitted to calling a white lawyer “a disgrace to his race” for pursuing civil rights cases. Finally, he admitted to saying during a murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) that he “used to think they [the Klan] were OK” until he discovered that some of them were “pot smokers.” He claimed that the remark was clearly made in jest (Perhaps so, but who was he making fun of?)
Another lawyer who worked for the Attorney General’s office, a black man named Thomas Figures, said that Sessions had called the National Council of Churches and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference “un-American.” He corroborated the “pot smokers” remark and said that Sessions had told him to “be careful what you say to white folks” after Sessions heard him “chastising” a white secretary.
That nomination failed over allegations that Sessions had made racist remarks, among other peccadilloes. Sessions was still popular in Alabama, and he was elected Attorney General for the state in 1994. He continued to investigate alleged voter fraud in absentee ballots among the black community, and he was accused of not investigating the burnings of black churches that swept the state the year he became Attorney General. In 1996, Senator Heflin retired and Sessions was elected to his former seat in the US Senate, where he remains. At age 69, he is still the junior Senator from Alabama.
Senator Sessions also received a seat on the Judiciary Committee, the same committee that rejected him in 1996. He has supported many notoriously racist nominees since then, including Charles Pickering, who wrote a paper defending Mississippi’s law against race-mixing in marriage (miscegenation) in 1959, before it was nullified by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. Sessions actually described Pickering as “a leader for racial harmony.” (All of the above quotes are from the New Republic article.)
In 2009, President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. That nomination succeeded, but during her confirmation hearings, Senator Sessions spent 30 minutes grilling her on allegedly racist remarks she had made; you can view his questioning here. (Thanks to Mother Jones for the link; you can read their analysis of the questioning session here. For completeness, here is Sen. Lindsay Graham’s questioning, and here is Sen. John Kyl’s turn.)
Donald’s transition team put out a press release that listed several people and groups who supported Sessions’ bid for attorney general. The groups were described as “civil rights and law enforcement groups” but none of the groups or people listed actually worked to support enhancing civil rights; those whose work could be described as being in the civil rights field were actively opposed to civil rights for immigrants or people of color. In fact, actual civil rights groups are broadly and vehemently opposed to Sessions’ nomination.
I could go on, but I think Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III’s record speaks for itself. The photograph at top illustrates the strenuous efforts that US Attorney General Sessions will exert to protect our white womanhood from the pernicious effects of that Negro devil Marijuana.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 