Reforming The Police Has To Include Keeping Racists And Bullies Off The Force-- And Firing The Ones Who Are There Now

Last week, the NYC police union endorsed 3 contemptible candidates for Congress-- "ex"- Republican Michelle Caruso-Cabrera against AOC, anti-Choice/anti-LGBTQ fanatic Rubén Díaz, Sr. against Tomas Ramos and conservative IDC-er David Carlucci against Mondaire Jones. This exactly aligns the police union-- once again-- with the Wall Street banksters. The police union are a bunch of scumbags coast to coast. In fact, there have been increasing demands that the AFL-CIO kick them out of the umbrella union. In Seattle, that's already moving along.

"AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka," wrote Candice Bernd, "has refused to expel the International Union of Police Associations and other law enforcement unions from the U.S.’s largest labor federation. Trumka told Bloomberg Friday that he won’t cut ties with police unions because 'police officers and everyone who works for a living has the right to collective bargaining' and that the 'best way to use our influence on the issue of police misconduct is to engage with our police affiliates rather than isolate them.' He told labor leaders and reporters Wednesday that 'the answer is not to disengage and condemn' police unions, while imploring labor organizers to fight racism. Trumka has praised the Minnesota Federation of Labor’s ousting of the openly racist Minneapolis Police Officers Federation President Bob Kroll. He also said the labor movement must play a leading role in the racial justice movement 'because protesting racial brutality, whether at the hands of a police officer, or a neighbor, or an employer, is not only the right cause. It’s a responsibility.'"

"I Can't Breathe" by Nancy Ohanian

Protesters set the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the AFL-CIO, aflame Sunday night, smashing in its windows and graffitiing its gold 16th Street entrance with 'Black Lives Matter.' While the motivations for the arson remain unclear, the action has put the federation’s partnership and affiliation with police under further scrutiny.

...U.S. police departments remain one of the heaviest unionized sectors in the country, representing hundreds of thousands of cops at the state, federal and local levels. The national largest police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, has more than 340,000 members. Former Minneapolis Police Department officer Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd last month, was a union member.

By continuing to affiliate with police unions, Trumka and other labor leaders are betraying the demands of protesters and some of the federation’s own affiliates, including the United Auto Workers Local 2865, who want the organization to take a stand and let go of hundreds of thousands of unionized officers. Trumka’s reticence comes as the 2018 Janus vs. AFSCME Supreme Court decision continues to erode some public-sector union rolls.

Still, racial justice activists say now is exactly the moment to “disengage,” and that the federation has done so before, pointing to the AFL-CIO’s disaffiliation with the Teamsters and other unions.

...[A]ctivists have pointed out that police unions don’t show up regularly in solidarity for the broader labor movement; instead they actively repress working people by routinely beating and murdering them in the streets. Police officers have long been used to break strikes and kill striking workers, as they have done during historic labor uprisings such as the 1897 Lattimer Massacre, the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain and the 1937 Little Steel Strike in Chicago.

Police unions largely work to protect their own. The contracts they bargain keep racist officers who have killed and abused immune from accountability. They maintain policing’s structural system of white supremacy while maintaining wages and benefits that often exceed those of public servants like emergency medical technicians and child care workers.

To be sure, Trumka has called out police-perpetrated violence in the past. After the Ferguson uprising of 2014, Trumka noted that Darren Wilson and Michael Brown’s mother were both union members, saying, “Our brother killed our sister’s son,” last September. “We do not have to wait for the judgment of prosecutors or courts to tell us how terrible this is.” During his tenure as president of the United Mineworkers of America, he criticized police for brutalizing a striking miner during the 1989 Pittston Coal Strike.

Still, amid the historic uprisings of the past two weeks, simple criticisms and affirmations of anti-racism without bold action sound like mere lip service to many in the streets.

If the [Seattle] MLK Labor council votes to disaffiliate the Seattle Police Officers Guild on June 17, it would be the first significant expulsion of a police union from an organized labor council anywhere in the country.

That said, I have very mixed feelings about defunding police departments, likely to be a major losing issue for Democrats. In fact, I think police officers should be paid more-- with grants from the federal government. Why more? Simple: bigger salaries would attract better officers, as in not racists and bullies. These are the average annual salaries for police officers in the 10 states that pay them the least, states where the police departments and the KKK have horrifyingly similar membership:

• Mississippi- $36,290
• Arkansas- $40,570
• Louisiana- $42,470
• South Carolina- $43,520
• West Virginia- $44,450
• Georgia- $44,700
• Tennessee- $45,370
• Alabama- $46,510
• Kentucky- $46,720
• North Carolina- $47,340

Higher pay for police officers (as well as for public school teachers) will be worth the money and, in the case of the police, come with strict enforcement of rules against predatory behavior against civilians. Jail time for "bad apples" must become standard, the way it is for other criminals.

Yesterday, The Atlantic issued a podcast, Would Defunding Police Make Us Safer?, that included Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing. Vitale explained that the central argument of his book is that "policing is an inherently problematic tool for the state. Policing is a tool of violence that has historically been used to facilitate gross inequalities and systems of exploitation like slavery, colonialism, the breaking of unions, and the suppression of workers’ rights movements. And so then to say that that tool is best suited to solve a broad range of community problems is misguided. And further, [the idea] that we can fix that problem with a series of superficial procedural reforms really misunderstands the nature of that institution and the missions that our elected officials have given to it... Racism is baked into the institutional mission set by our political leaders, including President Obama. So this reform cannot possibly give us any relief. Neither can having police-community encounter sessions, which they did in Minneapolis. Or instituting accountability mechanisms that were largely procedural in nature: body cameras, new use-of-force policies, de-escalation training. There’s absolutely no empirical evidence that this makes any more than a superficial difference in the way policing is conducted."

He explained that in NYC, for example, the police budget is $6 billion-- more than the Department of Health, the Department of Homeless Services, the Department of Youth Services, and the Department of Employment Services combined. NYC is attempting to cut the Education Department by over $600 million. But the proposal for the police department is a cut of $23 million.

There’s kind of a continuum for understanding what “defund the police” means, and it doesn’t really mean that tomorrow the police budget is zero. There are actually dozens of campaigns that were underway before the events in Minneapolis that were calling for defunding policing, but [they] took the form of things like we want to halt new hiring, we want to get a handle on overtime, and we want to close down certain problematic programs, like the gang unit, and shift those resources into community needs.

So this is not about: Tomorrow, there are no police. There are folks, though, for whom defund the police is also about thinking about a bigger vision of a kind of world where we don’t rely so heavily on policing and prisons, and that comes out of the prison- and police-abolition movement that’s emerged over the last 20 or so years.

...[J]ust defunding the police by itself is almost never what people are calling for. What they’re calling for is a redistribution of resources, because communities do have problems. They have problems of violence. They have problems of disorder. They need help, but they don’t need help from the police in many of these cases. So it’s got to be about redistribution, not just defunding. It needs to be targeted and specific.

Police unions are a separate problem, one that was well-examined by a team of NY Times writers Saturday in a piece called How Police Unions Became Such Powerful Opponents to Reform Efforts. "Over the past five years, as demands for reform have mounted in the aftermath of police violence in cities like Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore and now Minneapolis," they wrote, "police unions have emerged as one of the most significant roadblocks to change. The greater the political pressure for reform, the more defiant the unions often are in resisting it-- with few city officials, including liberal leaders, able to overcome their opposition. They aggressively protect the rights of members accused of misconduct, often in arbitration hearings that they have battled to keep behind closed doors. And they have also been remarkably effective at fending off broader change, using their political clout and influence to derail efforts to increase accountability. While rates of union membership have dropped by half nationally since the early 1980s, to 10 percent, higher membership rates among police unions give them resources they can spend on campaigns and litigation to block reform. A single New York City police union has spent more than $1 million on state and local races since 2014."

With the police union backing Carlucci and Díaz, Sr. against progressive reformers Mondaire Jones and Tomas Ramos and with the union backing Caruso-Cabrera against AOC, it's more important than ever to contribute to Jones and Ramos (here) and to AOC here. Back to The Times:

It remains to be seen how the unions will respond to reform initiatives by cities and states since Mr. Floyd’s death, including a new ban on chokeholds in Minneapolis. But in recent days, unions have continued to show solidarity with officers accused of abusive behavior.

The president of a police union in Buffalo said the union stood “100 percent” behind two officers who were suspended on Thursday after appearing to push an older man who fell and suffered head injuries. The union president said the officers “were simply following orders.”

All 57 officers on the Emergency Response Team, a special squad formed to respond to riots, had resigned from their posts on the team in support of the suspended officers, according to The Buffalo News.

Unions can be so effective at defending their members that cops with a pattern of abuse can be left untouched, with fatal consequences. In Chicago, after the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by officer Jason Van Dyke, it emerged that Mr. Van Dyke had been the subject of multiple complaints already. But a “code of silence” about misconduct was effectively “baked into” the labor agreements between police unions and the city, according to a report conducted by task force.

...When liberal politicians do try to advance reform proposals, union officials have resorted to highly provocative rhetoric and hard-boiled campaign tactics to lash out at them. This past week, the head of the sergeants’ union in New York posted a police report on Twitter revealing personal information about the daughter of Mr. de Blasio, who had been arrested during a protest.

...At times, the strident leadership appears to beget still more strident leadership. In 2017, Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police elected a new president who denounced a federal Justice Department investigation prompted by the shooting of Mr. McDonald as “politically motivated” and pledged to fight the “anti-police movement.” That president was ousted this year by a candidate who had derided the ensuing consent decree as “nonsense” and criticized his predecessor for failing to stand up to City Hall.

While statistics compiled by the group Campaign Zero show that police killings and shootings in Chicago have fallen following a set of reforms enacted after a federal investigation, advocates worry that the union will undermine them in contract negotiations. Police unions have traditionally used their bargaining agreements to create obstacles to disciplining officers. One paper by researchers at the University of Chicago found that incidents of violent misconduct in Florida sheriff’s offices increased by about 40 percent after deputies gained collective bargaining rights.

“By continuing to elect people who stand for those values, it more deeply entrenches the break between the community and the police,” said Karen Sheley, director of the Police Practices Project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. “It makes it far more difficult for reform efforts to go forward.”

How Much Of A Sissy Boy Is Trump?

We've all had a good time analyzing the narcissistic sociopath in the White House for the last few years, right? How about a serious look at the crackpots who not just voted for him in 2016-- after all, it was a lesser of two evils election-- but who still support him today? You're not a psychiatrist, so you can't. Well, neither is Tom Nichols (author of The Death of Expertise) but he gave it a try anyone-- at The Atlantic yesterday in an essay titled Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly President-- Why don’t the president’s supporters hold him to their own standard of masculinity?

"Historically," he explained to a PBS audience in 2017, "people return to valuing expert views in times of trouble or distress. We're all willing to argue with our doctors 'til our fever is out of control. Let's hope it doesn't come to that. But that's where we're headed. Unless we start accepting the limitations of our own knowledge, then each of us is failing in our obligation to participate in our democracy as involved but informed citizens." Nichols just described the derivation of the word "idiot" from the original Greek.

Nichols wrote that since Trump's first day as a candidate he's "been baffled by one mystery in particular: Why do working-class white men-- the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base-- support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? The question is not whether Trump fails to meet some archaic or idealized version of masculinity. The president’s inability to measure up to Marcus Aurelius or Omar Bradley is not the issue. Rather, the question is why so many of Trump’s working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity-- why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy." Nichols is a son of the working class and the men he grew top around "came from a culture that looks down upon lying, cheating, and bragging, especially about sex or courage. (My father’s best friend got the Silver Star for wiping out a German machine-gun nest in Europe, and I never heard a word about it until after the man’s funeral.) They admire and value the understated swagger, the rock-solid confidence, and the quiet reserve of such cultural heroes as John Wayne’s Green Beret Colonel Mike Kirby and Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo (also, as it turns out, a former Green Beret.) They are, as an American Psychological Association feature describes them, men who adhere to norms such as 'toughness, dominance, self-reliance, heterosexual behaviors, restriction of emotional expression and the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes and behaviors.' But I didn’t need an expert study to tell me this; they are men like my late father and his friends, who understood that a man’s word is his bond and that a handshake means something. They are men who still believe in a day’s work for a day’s wages. They feel that you should never thank another man when he hands you a paycheck that you earned. They shoulder most burdens in silence-- perhaps to an unhealthy degree-- and know that there is honor in making an honest living and raising a family."

Ann Coulter doesn't find Trump too manly either, apparently

[C]ourage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was raised.

And yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard. Put another way, as a question I have asked many of the men I know: Is Trump a man your father and grandfather would have respected?

...As the writer Windsor Mann has noted, Trump behaves in ways that many working-class men would ridicule: “He wears bronzer, loves gold and gossip, is obsessed with his physical appearance, whines constantly, can't control his emotions, watches daytime television, enjoys parades and interior decorating, and used to sell perfume.”

I am not a psychologist, and I cannot adjudicate the theories of male behavior that might explain some of this. Others have tried. Two researchers who looked back at the 2016 presidential election suggested that support for Trump was higher in areas where there were more internet searches for topics such as “erectile dysfunction,” “how to get girls,” and “penis enlargement” than in pro-Hillary areas of the country. (One can only hope that correlation is not causation.) The idea that insecure men support bullies and authoritarians is hardly new; recall that one of George Orwell’s characters in 1984 dismissed all the “marching up and down and cheering and waving flags” as “simply sex gone sour.” To reduce all of this to sexual inadequacy, however, is too facile. It cannot explain why millions of men look the other way when Trump acts in ways they would typically find shameful. Nor is arguing that Trump is a bad person and therefore that the people who support him are either brainwashed or also bad people helpful. He is, and some of them are. But that doesn’t explain why men who would normally ostracize someone like Trump continue to embrace him.

In order to think about why these men support Trump, one must first to grasp how deeply they are betraying their own definition of masculinity by looking more closely at the flaws they should, in principle, find revolting.

Is Trump honorable? This is a man who routinely refused to pay working people their due wages, and then lawyered them into the ground when they objected to being exploited. Trump is a rich downtown bully, the sort most working men usually hate.

Is Trump courageous? Courtiers like Victor Davis Hanson have compared Trump to the great heroes of the past, including George Patton, Ajax, and the Western gunslingers of the American cinema. Trump himself has mused about how he would have been a good general. He even fantasized about how he would have charged into the middle of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, without a weapon. “You don't know until you test it,” he said at a meeting with state governors just a couple of weeks after the massacre, “but I really believe I'd run in there, even if I didn't have a weapon, and I think most of the people in this room would have done that too.” Truly brave people never tell you how brave they are. I have known many combat veterans, and none of them extols his or her own courage. What saved them, they will tell you, was their training and their teamwork. Some-- perhaps the bravest-- lament that they were not able to do more for their comrades.

But even if we excuse Trump for the occasional hyperbole, the fact of the matter is that Trump is an obvious coward. He has two particular phobias: powerful men and intelligent women.

Whenever he is in the company of Russian President Vladimir Putin, to take the most cringe-inducing example, he visibly cowers. His attempts to ingratiate himself with Putin are embarrassing, especially given how effortlessly Putin can bend Trump to his will. When the Russian leader got Trump alone at a summit in Helsinki, he scared him so badly that at the subsequent joint press conference, Putin smiled pleasantly while the president of the United States publicly took the word of a former KGB officer over his own intelligence agencies.

Likewise, as Trump has shown repeatedly in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, he is eager to criticize China, until he is asked about Chinese President Xi Jinping. In the course of the same few minutes, Trump will attack China-- his preferred method for escaping responsibility for America’s disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic-- and then he will babble about how much he likes President Xi, desperately seeking to avoid giving offense to the Chinese Communist Party boss.

This is related to one of Trump’s most noticeable problems, which is that he can never stop talking. The old-school standard of masculinity is the strong and silent type, like Gary Cooper back in the day or Tom Hardy today. Trump, by comparison, is neither strong nor capable of silence.

And when Trump talks too much, he ends up saying things that more stereotypically masculine men wouldn’t, like that he fell in love with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. “He wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters,” Trump told a rally in West Virginia. “We fell in love.” One can only imagine the reaction among working-class white men if Barack Obama, or any other U.S. president, had talked about falling in love with a foreign leader. (George W. Bush once said he saw into Putin’s soul, and he has never lived it down among his critics.)

Is Trump a man who respects women? This is what secure and masculine men would expect, especially from a husband and a father of two daughters.

Leave aside for the moment that the working-class white men in the president’s base don’t seem to care that Trump had an affair with a porn star while his wife was home with a new baby, something for which many of them would probably beat their own brother-in-law senseless if he did it to their sister. Trump’s voters, male and female, have already decided to excuse this and other sordid episodes.

Women clearly scare Trump. You don’t have to take my word for it. “Donald doesn’t like strong women,” Senator Ted Cruz said back in 2016 of the candidate who attacked Cruz’s wife as ugly, but who is now his hero as president. “Strong women scare Donald. Real men don’t try to bully women.”

Trump never seems more fearful and insecure than when women question him. His anxiety at such moments—for example, when he calls on female reporters in the White House press room—is palpable. He begins his usual flurry of defensive hand gestures, from the playing of an imaginary accordion to a hand held up with a curled pinky finger like some parody of a Queens mobster, while he stammers out verbal chaff bursts of “excuse me” and “are you ready?”

I Want You To... by Chip Proser

Does Trump accept responsibility and look out for his team? Not in the least. In this category, he exhibits one of the most unmanly of behaviors: He’s a blamer. Nothing is ever his fault. In the midst of disaster, he praises himself while turning on even his most loyal supporters without a moment’s hesitation. Men across America who were socialized by team sports, whose lives are predicated on the principle of showing up and doing the job, continually excuse a man who continually excuses himself. This presidency is defined not by Ed Harris’s grim intonation in Apollo 13 that “failure is not an option,” but by one of the most shameful utterances of a chief executive in modern American history: “I take no responsibility at all.”

Trump’s defenders could argue that he is just another male celebrity whose raw authenticity offends snooty elitists but appeals to the average Joe. The analogy here is someone like Howard Stern, who has known Trump for years and has been idolized by young men across America. Stern cavorted with porn stars, said shocking and racist things, and was, in his way, the living id of every maladjusted teenager.

Whatever you think of Stern, however, he’s much more of a man, by any definition, than Trump. For one thing, Stern is often self-effacing in the extreme, which is both part of his act and a source of the charm he possesses. Stern routinely jokes about the inadequacy of his male endowment. Trump, however, went to pains to reassure the country-- in the middle of a presidential primary debate-- that his equipment has “no problem.” Stern knows how to take his lumps in public, while Trump is a wailing siren of complaints.

More important, Stern is capable of introspection and has a certain amount of self-awareness, a quality important for any mature and healthy person. Stern, who once encouraged Trump’s antics, now seems concerned. He has suggested that Trump was traumatized by his childhood and his father. “He has trouble with empathy,” Stern told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “We know that. And I wish he'd go into psychotherapy. I'd be so proud of him if he did, and he would flourish.” (Stern endorsed Joe Biden in April.)

Trump is never going to get therapy. But Stern’s observation opens the door to a better explanation of why-- despite all of his whiny complaints, his pouty demeanor, and his mean-girl tweets-- Trump’s working-class voters forgive him.

Trump’s lack of masculinity is about maturity. He is not manly because he is not a man. He is a boy.

To be a man is to be an adult, to willingly decide, as St. Paul wrote, to “put away childish things.” There’s a reason that Peter Pan is a story about a boy, and the syndrome named after it is about men. Not everyone grows up as they age.

It should not be a surprise then, that Trump is a hero to a culture in which so many men are already trapped in perpetual adolescence. And especially for men who feel like life might have passed them by, whose fondest memories are rooted somewhere in their own personal Wonder Years from elementary school until high-school graduation, Trump is a walking permission slip to shrug off the responsibilities of manhood.

The appeal to indulge in such hypocrisy must be enormous. Cheat on your wife? No problem. You can trade her in for a hot foreign model 20 years younger. Is being a father to your children too onerous a burden on your schedule? Let the mothers raise them. Money troubles? Everyone has them; just tell your father to write you another check. Upset that your town or your workplace has become more diverse? Get it off your chest: Rail about women and Mexicans and African Americans at will and dare anyone to contradict you.

Trump’s media enablers do their best to shore up the fiction that Trump and the men who follow him are the most macho of men. The former White House aide Sebastian Gorka, one of Trump’s most dedicated sycophants, has described Trump as a “man’s man,” despite the fact that Trump has no hobbies or interests common to many American men other than sex. In this gang of Sweathogs, Gorka is the Arnold Horshack to Trump’s Vinnie Barbarino, always admiring him as the most alpha of the alphas. To listen to Gorka and others in Trumpworld, the president can turn his enemies to ash through sheer testosterone overload. Some Trump voters have even airbrushed the president’s face onto the bodies of both Rambo and Rocky Balboa. (The president himself approvingly retweeted the Trump-as-Rocky meme.)

Gorka tries to cosplay the same role himself. The photographs of him carrying guns, wearing a suede vest, and posing next to his underpowered suburban Mustang are now internet legends, precisely because they are so ridiculous. But he is a good example of how so many of the men who support Trump have morphed into childish caricatures of themselves. They, too, are little boys, playing at being tough but crying about their victimization at the hands of liberal elites if they are subjected to criticism of any kind.

I do not know how much of this can explain Trump’s base of support among working-class white women. (Those numbers are now declining.) But perhaps these women, too, regard Trump as just one more difficult and mischievous man-child in their lives to be accommodated and forgiven.

The best example of women giving him a pass was after the Access Hollywood tape came to light in the fall of 2016. Trump had been caught on audio bragging about being able to grope women because he was famous. Republican leaders panicked; surely this level of vulgarity, they reasoned, would kill Trump’s chances with female voters.

Instead, women showed up at rallies with shirts featuring arrows pointing right to where Trump could grab them.

...In the end, Trump will continue to act like a little boy, and his base, the voters who will stay with him to the end, will excuse him. When a grown man brags about being brave, it is unmanly and distasteful; when a little boy pulls out a cardboard sword and ties a towel around his neck like a cape, it’s endearing. When a rich and powerful old man whines about how unfairly he is being treated, we scowl and judge; when a little boy snuffles in his tears and says that he was bullied-- treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, even-- we comfort.





Donald Trump is unmanly because he has never chosen to become a man. He has weathered few trials that create an adult of any kind. He is, instead, working-class America’s dysfunctional son, and his supporters, male and female alike, have become the worried parent explaining what a good boy he is to terrorized teachers even while he continues to set fires in the hallway right outside.

I think that working men, the kind raised as I was, know what kind of “man” Trump is. And still, the gratification they get from seeing Trump enrage the rest of the country is enough to earn their indulgence. I doubt, however, that Trump gives them the same consideration. Perhaps Howard Stern, of all people, said it best: “The oddity in all of this is the people Trump despises most, love him the most. The people who are voting for Trump for the most part... He’d be disgusted by them.” The tragedy is that they are not disgusted by him in return.

The Republicans Haven't Had Anything To Do With Lincoln For Longer Than Anyone Alive Today Remembers

I don't remember much from elementary school-- being a crossing guard, discovering why big guys could bully smaller guys, a few friends, a few teachers, my Spanish teacher outing me in Spanish many years before I had figured out I was gay... And one thing I'll never forget was an elderly woman coming to address the assembly. Back then, PS 197-- Bernie was a student there too but a couple of years before me-- was all white, just Jews and Italians and a few Irish as I remember. But the elderly woman wasn't memorable because she was black. She was memorable because of what she had to say to us. She had come to talk to us about her childhood, having been born a slave. Her face and her voice were indelibly etched into my brain. A slave... My thoughts before that day about slaves was about Jews building the pyramids and escaping from Egypt whenMoses parted the Red Sea. This woman was born when Lincoln was president.

She died very soon afterward, one of the last people on earth who had been alive when Lincoln-- who many historians consider the greatest of all presidents (although many Trumpists consider him nothing compared to The Donald)-- was in office. Lincoln had saved our country from the Trumpists of the day by successfully prosecuting the Civil War. He had freed the slaves from bondage with an executive order-- and later forced a reluctant Congress to pass the 13th Amendment, making it permanent, official and forever. Lincoln was the first president to order the use of paper currency and to enact an income tax, neither popular among conservatives, to put it mildly. It began as a flat tax of 3% on incomes above $800 ($22,300 in current dollar terms and a year later reconfigured as a progressive tax. He also passed the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act, beginning the free state university system Bernie is campaigning on reinstating (as violently opposed by conservatives of both parties today-- especially the Republicans-- as it was a century and a half ago).




Like I said, the Republican Party today-- even before the South managed to win the Civil War by putting Trump into the White House-- has nothing at all to do with Abraham Lincoln. But this week we saw the beginning of a some #NeverTrumpers begin what they're calling the Lincoln Project. They kicked it off yesterday with an OpEd by George Conway, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver and Rick Wilson in the NY Times-- We Are Republicans, and We Want Trump Defeated "The president and his enablers have replaced conservatism with an empty faith led by a bogus prophet." They want to bring the GOP back to Reagan though, not Lincoln.

Patriotism and the survival of our nation in the face of the crimes, corruption and corrosive nature of Donald Trump are a higher calling than mere politics. As Americans, we must stem the damage he and his followers are doing to the rule of law, the Constitution and the American character.

That’s why we are announcing the Lincoln Project, an effort to highlight our country’s story and values, and its people’s sacrifices and obligations. This effort transcends partisanship and is dedicated to nothing less than preservation of the principles that so many have fought for, on battlefields far from home and within their own communities.

This effort asks all Americans of all places, creeds and ways of life to join in the seminal task of our generation: restoring to this nation leadership and governance that respects the rule of law, recognizes the dignity of all people and defends the Constitution and American values at home and abroad.

Over these next 11 months, our efforts will be dedicated to defeating President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box and to elect those patriots who will hold the line. We do not undertake this task lightly, nor from ideological preference. We have been, and remain, broadly conservative (or classically liberal) in our politics and outlooks. Our many policy differences with national Democrats remain, but our shared fidelity to the Constitution dictates a common effort.

The 2020 general election, by every indication, will be about persuasion, with turnout expected to be at record highs. Our efforts are aimed at persuading enough disaffected conservatives, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in swing states and districts to help ensure a victory in the Electoral College, and congressional majorities that don’t enable or abet Mr. Trump’s violations of the Constitution, even if that means Democratic control of the Senate and an expanded Democratic majority in the House.

The American presidency transcends the individuals who occupy the Oval Office. Their personality becomes part of our national character. Their actions become our actions, for which we all share responsibility. Their willingness to act in accordance with the law and our tradition dictate how current and future leaders will act. Their commitment to order, civility and decency are reflected in American society.

Mr. Trump fails to meet the bar for this commitment. He has neither the moral compass nor the temperament to serve. His vision is limited to what immediately faces him-- the problems and risks he chronically brings upon himself and for which others, from countless contractors and companies to the American people, ultimately bear the heaviest burden.

But this president’s actions are possible only with the craven acquiescence of congressional Republicans. They have done no less than abdicate their Article I responsibilities.

Indeed, national Republicans have done far worse than simply march along to Mr. Trump’s beat. Their defense of him is imbued with an ugliness, a meanness and a willingness to attack and slander those who have shed blood for our country, who have dedicated their lives and careers to its defense and its security, and whose job is to preserve the nation’s status as a beacon of hope.

Congressional Republicans have embraced and copied Mr. Trump’s cruelty and defended and even adopted his corruption. Mr. Trump and his enablers have abandoned conservatism and longstanding Republican principles and replaced it with Trumpism, an empty faith led by a bogus prophet. In a recent survey, a majority of Republican voters reported that they consider Mr. Trump a better president than Lincoln.

Mr. Trump and his fellow travelers daily undermine the proposition we as a people have a responsibility and an obligation to continually bend the arc of history toward justice. They mock our belief in America as something more meaningful than lines on a map.

Our peril far outstrips any past differences: It has arrived at our collective doorstep, and we believe there is no other choice. We sincerely hope, but are not optimistic, that some of those Republicans charged with sitting as jurors in a likely Senate impeachment trial will do likewise.

American men and women stand ready around the globe to defend us and our way of life. We must do right by them and ensure that the country for which they daily don their uniform deserves their protection and their sacrifice.

We are reminded of Dan Sickles, an incompetent 19th-century New York politician. On July 2, 1863, his blundering nearly ended the United States.

(Sickles’s greatest previous achievement had been fatally shooting his wife’s lover across the street from the White House and getting himself elected to Congress. Even his most fervent admirers could not have imagined that one day, far in the future, another incompetent New York politician, a president, would lay claim to that legacy by saying he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.)

On that day in Pennsylvania, Sickles was a major general commanding the Union Army’s III Corps at the Battle of Gettysburg, and his incompetence wrought chaos and danger. The Confederate Army took advantage, and turned the Union line. Had the rebel soldiers broken through, the continent might have been divided: free and slave, democratic and authoritarian.

Another Union general, Winfield Scott Hancock, had only minutes to reinforce the line. America, the nation, the ideal, hung in the balance. Amid the fury of battle, he found the First Minnesota Volunteers.

They charged, and many of them fell, suffering a staggeringly high casualty rate. They held the line. They saved the Union. Four months later, Lincoln stood on that field of slaughter and said, “It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

We look to Lincoln as our guide and inspiration. He understood the necessity of not just saving the Union, but also of knitting the nation back together spiritually as well as politically. But those wounds can be bound up only once the threat has been defeated. So, too, will our country have to knit itself back together after the scourge of Trumpism has been overcome.

Over the weekend, Syacuse's Post Standard, the biggest newspaper in John Katko's district, laid into the congressman in no uncertain terms. Calling for impeachment, the editorial board thundered that "Katko has said he will vote 'no' on impeaching the president. That is a mistake, and history will judge it harshly. We remind lawmakers on both sides that they swore an oath to 'support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.' The oath does not say, 'unless the political consequences are too great.' Do your constitutional duty. Vote 'yes' to impeach President Trump. Let the president defend his corrupt actions. Then let the Senate carry out its constitutional duty."

The photo of the Times Square billboard up top-- put there by another group of Republican #NeverTrumpers, Republicans for the Rule of Law, is not related to the Lincoln Project per se. The ad-- which has also been placed in 9 congressional districts represented by Republicans who know Trump should be impeached but are too craven and cowardly to put country before party: Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), John Katko (R-NY), Martha Roby (R-AL), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), Greg Walden (R-OR, Michael McCaul (R-TX), Mo Brooks (R-AL) and Paul Mitchell (R-MI). The ad features Mike Pompeo, Mick Mulvaney, John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani, each whom refuses to testify in the impeachment hearings, despite subpoenas. Yesterday ABC News and the Washington Post published a poll by Langer Research showing that 71% of Americans-- including 64% of Republicans and 72% of independents-- want Trump to allow these top aides to testify.

One day before the Lincoln Project op-ed, 752 prominent historians signed a statement on the impeachment of Señor Trumpanzee. "We are American historians devoted to studying our nation’s past," they wrote, "who have concluded that Donald J. Trump has violated his oath to 'faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States' and to 'preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.' His 'attempts to subvert the Constitution,' as George Mason described impeachable offenses at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, urgently and justly require his impeachment."

President Trump’s numerous and flagrant abuses of power are precisely what the Framers had in mind as grounds for impeaching and removing a president. Among those most hurtful to the Constitution have been his attempts to coerce the country of Ukraine, under attack from Russia, an adversary power to the United States, by withholding essential military assistance in exchange for the fabrication and legitimization of false information in order to advance his own re-election.

President Trump’s lawless obstruction of the House of Representatives, which is rightly seeking documents and witness testimony in pursuit of its constitutionally-mandated oversight role, has demonstrated brazen contempt for representative government. So have his attempts to justify that obstruction on the grounds that the executive enjoys absolute immunity, a fictitious doctrine that, if tolerated, would turn the president into an elected monarch above the law.

As Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist, impeachment was designed to deal with “the misconduct of public men” which involves “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” Collectively, the President’s offenses, including his dereliction in protecting the integrity of the 2020 election from Russian disinformation and renewed interference, arouse once again the Framers’ most profound fears that powerful members of government would become, in Hamilton’s words, “the mercenary instruments of foreign corruption.”

It is our considered judgment that if President Trump’s misconduct does not rise to the level of impeachment, then virtually nothing does.

Hamilton understood, as he wrote in 1792, that the republic remained vulnerable to the rise of an unscrupulous demagogue, “unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents…despotic in his ordinary demeanour.” That demagogue, Hamilton said, could easily enough manage “to mount the hobby horse of popularity-- to join in the cry of danger to liberty-- to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion-- to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day.” Such a figure, Hamilton wrote, would “throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

President Trump’s actions committed both before and during the House investigations fit Hamilton’s description and manifest utter and deliberate scorn for the rule of law and “repeated injuries” to constitutional democracy. That disregard continues and it constitutes a clear and present danger to the Constitution. We therefore strongly urge the House of Representatives to impeach the President.

Me The People by Nancy Ohanian

Most Of The Democratic Candidates For President Are Part Of The Problem, Not Part Of The Solution

It's worth watching this Bernie endorsement video by Illinois state Senator Robert Peters, the former political director of Reclaim Chicago and the young man who now represents the Chicago district Obama used to represent. Biden has big lists of worthless politicians who have been endorsing him, generally mean nd women whose endorsement would want to make people run in the opposite direction. Listen to Peters explain why he's backing Bernie.

Yesterday, the Washington Post published an interesting and unexpected bit of reporting by Tory Newmyer, Goldman Sachs seeks to rebrand as wealth takes center stage in the Democratic presidential race. Wall Street's most notorious banksters has been sponsoring presidential candidate forums in Iowa and New Hampshire. "Goldman executives," wrote Newmyer, "say their purpose is to elevate small-business concerns in the contest. Small businesses employ nearly half the private workforce, and Goldman argues they lack a voice in Washington and have received scant attention on the campaign trail-- a realization executives say they reached after shepherding more than 9,100 through the entrepreneurship program they launched nearly a decade ago. But the effort is also a subtle rebranding exercise by a firm at the center of a knockdown political fight between Wall Street and Main Street. For populists such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the banking giant remains a totem of runaway Wall Street greed that helped precipitate the 2008 financial crisis and continues to reap a windfall under the Trump administration. For Wall Street titans and the uber-rich, liberal Democratic candidates are villainizing their success and threatening it with their economic plans."

Proposals by Bernie and Elizabeth are frightening-- and inciting-- the banksters and other enemies of working families. Right-of-center Democrats like Bloomberg, Mayo Pete and Status Quo Joe are sticking up for them as best they can, but Democratic-- and independent-- voters keep telling pollsters they prefer policies that force the super-rich to pay their fair share of taxes. The woman most rumored to be a Biden running mate, Rhode Island neo-liberal governor, Gina Raimondo-- also the least popular governor in the country and widely considered a corrupt Wall Street shill worked with Goldman on launching the forums. A truly disgusting person, Raimondo is also trying to suck up to Bloomberg and said she thinks Goldman’s effort "comes from a genuine place."

Democratic voters may be a tougher sell. They believe Wall Street hurts the economy more than it helps it, by a margin of 46 percent to 41 percent, according to a January poll by the Pew Research Center. More than 8 in 10 Democrats think the political system mainly benefits those in power, a Washington Post-ABC News survey in April found. And there is widespread voter concern about the industry’s political influence, with 69 percent saying financial services interests wield too much power in Washington, according to a 2018 Kaiser Family Foundation poll.

...[T]he firm also uses the events as opportunities to strengthen its ties to the candidates, sending lobbyists from its Washington office to greet them. For the Harris event, it was Joyce Brayboy, who was chief of staff to former congressman Mel Watt (D-NC), who has spent over a decade pressing the firm’s interests on Capitol Hill. The participants in the forums are, predictably, the conservative candidates: StatusQuoJoe, Michael Bennet, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O'Rourke, and Mayo Pete, all of whom have nurtured warm and corrupt relations with the bankster community. Bernie and Elizabeth are not participating. Mike Casca, a spokesman for Bernie's campaign: "This is exactly what Sen. Sanders means when he talks about a corrupt political system."

Is this message going to get through to Republicans? Probably not. As far as I can tell, most of them, empowered by Trump and Fox to let their Nazi flags fly, have utterly lost their minds.

When historians and political scientists are polled, the 3 top presidents of all time are almost always Lincoln, Washington and FDR-- in that order. Trump is almost invariably rated as the worst president ever. When the general public is polled, the responses are more varied. A recent poll by Ranker, in which over 840,000 people participated, the top presidents came out like this:

• George Washington
• Abraham Lincoln
• Thomas Jefferson
• JFK
• James Madison
• Teddy Roosevelt
• FDR

A new poll by YouGov for The Economist asked "which president was better?" They started with a match-up between Lincoln, generally considered the best president and Trump, generally considered the worst president. The general public picked Lincoln 75-25%. Among Democrats, it was 94% Lincoln and 6% Trump. Among independent voters it was 78% Lincoln and 22% Trump. And among Republicans? 75% Trump and 25% Lincoln.





A plurality of Republicans consider Trump the greatest president in history. (82% of Democrats and 48% of independents consider him the worst.) Republicans say Trump is better than any president polled other than Reagan:

• George W. Bush- Trump 71%
• George H. W. Bush- Trump 71%
• Ronald Reagan- Trump 41%
• Jerry Ford- Trump 82%
• Richard Nixon- Trump 86%
• Dwight Eisenhower- Trump 65%

Friday, author and historian Douglas Brinkley was on CNN talking about Trump's polling numbers. He told viewers that although 50% of Americans now want to see Trump impeached and removed from office, he expects that number to rise as the impeachment hearings continue to be televised and in the headlines. "Trump's heading right into the 2020 election and the Democrats are going to pound Trump on being a kind of fake president, somebody who's subpar in his behavior and who's been running the most corrupt administration since Warren Harding."

A Nation in Crisis, Again

Statue of Abraham Lincoln in Portland, Oregon. Is there one more like him in our future?

by Gaius Publius

What an odd and frightening place we've found ourselves.

Before about a month ago, I'd have agreed with the person who wrote, "The Trump-Russian investigation was a rabbit hole with no rabbit at the bottom." To twist the metaphor, I'd put it this way: The Clinton part of the Democratic Party, in an effort to maintain Party control and advance a "she didn't lose" narrative, kept looking at "Russia did it" angles like Alice looking for a hole deep enough to jump into.

They looked at a lot of holes, but none that seemed to have real evidence in them. Recently, though, information started coming out about Mike Flynn, and potentially Jared Kushner, that made it look like Russia-hunting Democrats had actually found something of substance — actual documentable election collusion with actual Russia, as opposed to "maybe Russia gave emails to WikiLeaks" or "maybe Trump cheered them on a little too loudly," with a strong side of "it had to be Russia somehow, right? because Clinton won the popular vote."

The comparison that comes to mind is Bill Clinton and Whitewater, another investigation in search of a crime, any crime. The Whitewater inquiry, initially about a land deal, eventually turned up Paula Jones, then Monica Lewinsky, then Bill Clinton's perjury (finally, a crime!) — but still, the investigation ended miles from where it started.

Same with this. I now think there's a there there, but it's not the "there" that Russia hunters were chasing when they set out. I believe they've now found something of real substance — the cover-up certainly looks vigorous — but that substance is now miles from where they started looking. As with Whitewater, it seems the investigators got lucky, though I'm glad or our sakes they did.

The Effort to Remove Donald Trump

So where are we now? I'll lay decent odds the administration will appoint no special prosecutor, and if they do, no independent special prosecutor. It would take a revolt from congressional Republicans to prove me wrong. That could happen, but odds that it will? Less than 50-50 as I see it now.

Which means the country stays in its current state, ruled by a man and a party actively perverting the Constitution to enable obvious corruption and — finally, what the Democrats alleged all along on no evidence — apparent collusion by that man with a foreign power to gain domestic power. Whether that collusion was decisive or not in his victory, matters not at all.

(Interestingly, this is the same activity that Reagan and Bush I were accused of, the foreign power in that case being Iran. Neither political party, though, nor the media of that day would allow a complete investigation, and even went so far as to ostracize from mainstream employment a very good investigative reporter, Robert Parry, for pursuing it anyway.)

All of which means that if Trump's Russia doings aren't formally investigated, either by a special investigator or by Congress, elites who want him gone will have to force him out by extra-constitutional means.

Which suggests three questions. One, who wants him to go, since that will determine the shape of the opposition he faces? Two, who wants him to stay in office? And three, what are those means? Others may answer differently, but I'll offer these.

First, those in elites positions who want him to go include:

     • All Democratic officeholders.

     • Many Republican officeholders (those who would much prefer a President Pence).

     • Many of those who work in the bowels of the CIA, FBI, and NSA — highly placed rank-and-file operatives in position to leak information and do other substantial damage. (Note what happened during the election when those in the DC office of the FBI leaked damaging Clinton material because they disagreed with Comey's refusal to recommend an indictment. It's six months later, but the same dynamic.)

     • Others in the national security establishment who don't trust Trump to be warlike enough. This ropes in neocons both in and out of the military.

     • The broader neocon establishment/infrastructure, people who would have supported Clinton's wars and staffed her administration, all of whom hate Trump's statements (true ones in my view) about NATO's irrelevance. Saying goodbye to NATO starts the tearing down of American military-backed hegemony. NATO's sole relevance is to structure that hegemony in Europe.

Note that the list of Trump's elite enemies is likely to grow in number of individuals, if not in number of groups. Note also that the key group is the second, Republican officeholders. If they turn against him in large numbers, even if only in private, Trump won't remain in office. Also, if they support him sufficiently, even if only in private, it will be up to the last three groups, working together, to pressure Trump to leave.

Second, who are Trump's supporters? Who in real power wants him to stay in office? I believe it's a small list:

     • Many in his family.
     • Steve Bannon types (who are, note, anti-NATO).
     • The Rex Tillerson deals-with-Russia crowd.
     • The Scott Pruitt anti-regulation crowd.
     • Some Republican Tea Party officeholders.

As I said, a small list, and I think a shrinking one.

Finally, what are the "extra-constitutional means" of making him leave?

The Constitution provides impeachment by Congress — articles of impeachment voted in the House, a trial in the Senate — as the only structural redress to a "Charles I" problem. (The goal of congressional impeachment is to permit our version of Parliament to "kill the king" without actually killing anyone. Charles I must have been fresh in the founders' minds when they wrote that provision.) That's all the constitutional remedy there is.

If Trump doesn't get the "Nixon treatment," official investigation and trial by Congress, elites who want him to leave have to work outside the Constitution. Options include:

     • Relentless, damaging leaks and innuendo from all quarters aimed at turning public opinion against him.

     • Privately issued threats and rewards — sticks and carrots — to induce him to step down. Remember, intelligence agencies of various stripes likely have almost all the goods on almost all officials who matter to them. Imagine what's hoarded in NSA databases, or what FBI background checks reveal. Imagine what secrets angry CIA field agents might dig up.

If you doubt that issuing private threats like these could happen, do you imagine that agency use of damaging information to influence politics ended with Hoover? No Praetorian Guard, once it grows muscular, reverts back to a simple barracks unit just because new leadership arrives. When groups like that change culture, they rarely change back.

The threats are already coming out. Consider this post-firing report in the Washington Post: "Many [FBI] employees said they were furious about the [Comey] firing ... One intelligence official who works on Russian espionage matters said they were more determined than ever to pursue such cases. Another said Comey’s firing and the subsequent comments from the White House are attacks that won’t soon be forgotten. Trump had 'essentially declared war on a lot of people at the FBI, one official said. 'I think there will be a concerted effort to respond over time in kind.'"

"Attacks that won't soon be forgotten" and "a concerted effort to respond over time in kind." The covert State is at war with the overt State. (Be sure to ask yourself, if you like these comments, if you'd like them if someone else were president.)

     • Threats amounting to blackmail and, if not physical violence, violence to his wealth, business interests, and "brand." ("We will destroy your brand forever, you will never do business again, if you don't get out. Here's how we'll do it. First...")

I'll say at the outset that real physical violence against anyone involved in this is almost certainly off the table. For one thing, if something did happen physically to Trump, his family, or his close advisors — regardless of who did it — everyone in the country would assume Trump's enemies' guilt, and assume it with the same fervor and conviction they now assume his own.

The Next American Constitution

One last thought. This country has had a constitutional crisis every 70 years, after which the government restructured itself. In effect, we have been ruled by three Constitutions, not just one, each producing, in practice, very different governments and societies. We're rapidly producing a crisis that will produce a fourth.

In order, our constitutional crises are:

     • 1789, the Revolutionary War and transition from colony to slave-holding republic.

     • 1865, the Civil War and transition from divided slave-holding nation with two competing economies to united freed-slave state. This change took down the Southern agricultural aristocracy (by depriving it of the nearly free labor it depended on); made the Northern industrial economy nationally ascendant; and put us firmly on the path to first-world industrial powerhouse.

     • 1933, the Great Depression and transition from a light-handed pro-business government to a heavy-handed regulatory state.

     • And now, this.

What will the next American Constitution look like? Turkey's and Hungary's, with their dictators and single-party governments wrapped in the old constitutional forms? A naked kleptocracy, where constitutional forms are simply ignored, like those in many third-world countries? A state in which forms are observed but the hand with real power belongs mainly to the "security" apparatus? In many countries, coups by segments of the elite, blatant or covert, are welcomed as correctives and tacitly approved (another way constitutions are revised without being rewritten).

If Trump is not successfully impeached, and it looks for now like he won't be, our government as practiced will once more dramatically change, as it did when Bush's crimes were not addressed, and Obama's after him (never forget that targeted assassination is an innovation Obama made lawful).

But whatever happens next, whether Trump is impeached or not, I think we've already been changed as a nation forever by what's already led us to this moment. After all, in 2016 the nation wanted someone like Sanders to be president, wanted an agent of change, and look what it got. This is in fact our second failed attempt this century at change that makes our lives better.

I don't think that point's been lost on anyone. We're in transition no matter what happens to Trump. Transition to what, we'll have to find out later.

And something else to consider. The last three times the government fundamentally changed, we got lucky. We found leaders — Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt — up to the task, in chaotic and troubling times, of steering an altered ship to calmer water and a safer port.

Will we get lucky once more? We can only hope.

GP
 

Sunday Classics snapshots: In D.C., still no Lincoln -- or even a Boccanegra

Leonard Warren as Simon Boccanegra

I weep for you, for the peaceful
sun on your hillsides,
where the olive branches
bloom in vain.
I weep for the deceptive
gaiety of your flowers,
and I cry to you "Peace!"
I cry to you "Love!"

Leonard Warren (b), Simon Boccanegra; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Fritz Stiedry, cond. Live performance, Jan. 28, 1950

Lawrence Tibbett (b), Simon Boccanegra; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Ettore Panizza, cond. Live performance, Jan. 21, 1939

by Ken

The great political chronicler Richard Reeves titled his book about the start of the post-Nixon (i.e., post-Watergate) presidency of Jerry Ford: A Ford, not a Lincoln. I think of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt. And while other American presidents have certainly risen to moments of great challenge, it's not something our political system can be counted on to make happen, and if anything even less so with the rabble that makes up our Congresses.

So perhaps it's not surprising that under the combined influence of the fratricidal follies rending the House of Representatives and a not-all-that-attentive watching of the whole of the upgraded-for-HD Ken Burns Lincoln film, and in addition with the notable contrast of the summonses to a very different sort of action delivered by Pope Francis on his American visit, my mind wandered to the rising-to-the-moment of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, the plebeian Doge of Genoa faced with the riot that breaks out in his own Council Chamber between the blood-rival factions of Plebeians and Patricians, following the attempted abduction of the patrician daughter Amelia (in reality Boccanegra's long-lost daughter Maria, as he himself has only recently discovered, in the Recognition Scene of Act I, Scene 1, which we spent a fair amount of time on here once upon a time) on behalf of the Doge's henchman Paolo, which was foiled by Amelia's patrician fiancé, Gabriele Adorno, who killed the would-be abductor.


ABOVE WE'VE HEARD THE DOGE'S GREAT PLEA --

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