Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Today, America is celebrating a group illegal act. The men who signed the Declaration Of Independence knew they were breaking the law, even if they had morality on their side. Human history is funny like that. Our country was founded on that breaking of the law as we declared war and declared our independence from a madman who thought he should be, and should remain, our king. But, the immorality and the insanity of that king and his supporters pushed them too far. If they could see us today...

Guest Post By Oren Jacobson-- Would Thomas Jefferson Recognize American Democracy Today?

Looks like we lost Oren Jacobson as a candidate against Lipinski, at least for the this cycle, but we've gained a sharp and dedicated new correspondent from Chicagoland. Last week he shared his reflections after Obama's speech in Charleston. This evening his topic is reflections on the Declaration of Indpendence as it has evolved and continues to evolve. His targets are the evils of systemic partisan gerrymandering and the predponderant influence of Big Money on out electoral system and their impact on American electoral democracy.

American (r)Evolution
by Oren Jacobson

Each year on the Fourth of July, I read the Declaration of Independence aloud in its entirety. With every reading I am struck by something different as if I must avail myself through life experiences of the lessons and messages contained in that parchment. This year, as political candidates launch campaigns which draw into question the way we allow the system to operate, I found myself pondering how our Founders might view the breakdown of our democratic institutions.

Despite our temptation to cast our Founding Fathers as an intellectually homogenous and unified group, they were far from it. Division, personal animus, and disagreement ran rampant. They did agree, though, on two key points. First, that power could be used to suppress the rights and freedoms of the people. Second, that the people had not only the right, but the obligation, to address what ails them.

For our Founding Fathers, the dangerous power that threatened them was tyranny. The symptoms of tyranny, however, can exist without a tyrant. Power need not be centralized to be abused at the expense of the people. We face a much different threat to our national well being than our Founders did. The dangerous combination of politicians who can pick their own voters and unfettered money in politics funnels power to the few over the many.

In 1992 there were 103 Congressional districts whose vote was close enough to the presidential outcome to be considered a swing district. This meant that 76% of our Congress was determined before the election even happened. In 2012 that number dwindled down to just 35 swing seats. 92% of the nation’s Congressional DNA was determined before a single vote was cast.

Some of this is the natural selection process of people living alongside like minded people. For example there are many states that are clearly Republican or Democratic states. Most of it, however, is a result of a political process called Gerrymandering. This process essentially allows elected politicians to draw favorable districts and thus preserve their power.

In 2012 Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives earned 1.4 million more votes than Republicans. However, this “victory” for Democrats left them with a 33 seat disadvantage in the House. The GOP had control of about 54% of the body despite having fewer people vote for them and their platform.

The problem with Gerrymandering isn’t simply that one party can artificially maintain power by taking advantage of a loophole in our system, though. It’s the incentive structure it creates for elected leaders. If I don’t have to worry about a challenge from the other party then all I have to do is keep my base happy. Therefore, my only threat, is from a primary. How do I prevent a primary challenge? I don’t take positions, or cast votes, that give the other side what they want. Compromising with the other party compromises my career. We’re taught that all successful relationships are built on trust and compromise. The result of this systemic flaw removes both.

Gerrymandering is just one major crack in the foundation of this country. The other is the influence of money in politics. In 2012 roughly 55,000 people provided the maximum contribution to a candidate according to OpenSecrets.org, a website that tracks all campaign contributions. That represents about .0002% of the population. Nearly 40% of all campaign money that year came from around 125 people, or .0000004% of the population.

Are we so willfully blind as to believe that elected officials will be just as responsive to the will of the people as they are to the will of the people who fund them?

What our founders wanted to do was to protect us from runaway power. They could never imagine a system that allowed those in control to draw boundaries that nearly ensured they would remain so. These were men who believed that campaigning was beneath them. That their election should be based on their merit and service so they would hardly be comfortable with the idea of non-stop campaigns funded primarily by the nobility of twenty-first century America. These men, I believe, would redress these grievances.

Unlike our forefathers, though, such redress need not be claimed by the barrel of the gun. We don’t need another American Revolution, but it seems clear that an American Evolution is necessary and overdue. We need not abolish our form of government to ensure that the power and purpose of democracy is protected, but we must heed the advice of these great men and alter it.

Redistricting reform that ensures non-partisan boundaries is the first common sense step we can take. Some states have already made strides in this regard. The Supreme Court just upheld a measure in Arizona that yielded an independent redistricting committee, taking the politics out of the structure of the electoral process. Adoption of similar solutions nationwide would do much to preserve the integrity of democratic representation in our country.

As it stands incumbents will win at better than a 90% rate and our elected officials will spend at least 40% of their time fundraising to protect their power. The question our elected officials should be asking themselves is whether they should follow the will of the people on an issue, or lead them. Instead they currently ask themselves how to ensure they have enough funding for the next election. Let’s make that a moot point.

Our national GDP is north of $16 trillion annually. With as little as 1/10th of one percent of that money we could fund all federal elections in the next cycle. Federally funded elections, in which each candidate had exactly the same amount of funding, would eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, the influence of money in politics. Overturning the Citizens United decision by constitutional amendment would also go far to that end.

Our Founders gave us the power to change the way our system operates, and called on us to do so in the ever present words of the Declaration. That we have ceded it willingly, or passively, is a fact for which we must hold ourselves to account. We have the government we deserve because we have the government we accept. So did our Founding Fathers. Until they decided they would no longer accept it. How long will we continue to accept ours?

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

– Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence

There's no excuse for Jim DeMoron, and still less excuse for people who take him in any way seriously

The shame of Dan Quayle wasn't that he was so lazy or stupid, or even that he has led a life and reaped the rewards of wholly undeserved privilege. The shame is that he has the arrogance to present himself on the public stage -- and has been so successful.

"Jim DeMint is correct that there was a belligerent during the American Civil War that rejected 'big government.' He’s just wrong about which side that was."

-- Ian Millhiser, in "Head Of Top Conservative Think Tank
Makes Spectacularly Uninformed Statement About Slavery"

by Ken

You remember the famous Dan Quayle potato-potatoe incident? Whe Vice President Quayle, with the TV cameras rolling, presumed to "correct" a schoolkid's perfectly correct spelling of "potato" by adding an "e"?

What was outrageous wasn't that he had been too lazy or stupid to learn how to spell a word like potato, regrettable as that may be in the case of a man wo had been elected to two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, three terms in the U.S. Senate, and a term as vice president of the U.S. No, what was outrageous was that a person of his ingrained ignorance had the gall to correct (and on national TV) a kid who had actually taken the trouble to learn how to spell the word.

Well, that and the fact that a wildly overpriviileged beast of such consummate ignorance, arrogance, and utter unconcern about either should have been elected to two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, three terms in the U.S. Senate, and a term as vice president of the U.S. That's what escalates it from the level of richly deserved personal humiliation to stinging national disgrace.

In this context, I invite you to read this exchange:

GUEST: This progressive, the whole idea of being progressive is to progress away from those ideas that made this country great. What we’re trying to conserve as conservative are those things that work. They work today, they work for young people, they work for minorities and we can change this country and change its course very quickly if we just remember what works.
INTERVIEWER: What if somebody, let’s say you’re talking with a liberal person and they were to turn around and say, ‘that Founding Fathers thing worked out really well, look at that Civil War we had eighty years later.’
GUEST: Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American people. Unfortunately there were some court decisions like Dred Scott and others that defined some people as property, but the Constitution kept calling us back to ‘all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights’ in the minds of God. But a lot of the move to free the slaves came from the people, it did not come from the federal government. It came from a growing movement among the people, particularly people of faith, that this was wrong. People like Wilberforce who persisted for years because of his faith and because of his love for people. So no liberal is going to win a debate that big government freed the slaves. In fact, it was Abraham Lincoln, the very first Republican, who took this on as a cause and a lot of it was based on a love in his heart that comes from God.

The guest was Heritage Foundation boss man (and former U.S. Sen.) Jim DeMoron, once one of the most influential obstructions in the U.S. Senate process, speaking on the broadcast Vocal Point with interviewer Jerry Newcombe of Truth in Action Ministries -- as passed on by Right Wing Watch's Brian Tashman. (I should add that Brian calls attention as well to other monumental imbecilities of DeMoron's from the broadcast, and also that I was directed to his post by a ThinkProgress post by Ian Millhiser, to which we'll be returning.)

There isn't a single assertion in this loose-screw-a-thon that isn't wrong but catastrophically wrong, in almost every case turning the actual meaning upside down. As should be clear to anyone who has spent a few weeks in a high school American-history class can tell, DeMoron has not the slightest clue what's in the U.S. Constitution, which specifically allowed and provided for slavery. As every schoolchild knows, this is the single most blatant deviation from grace in the founding of our republic.

And of course, unfortunately for him, DeMoron has heard a few catch phrases from the Declaration of Independence, but since he has never read it or had any instruction in U.S. history, he has not a shot at understanding those undigested bits. For the same reasons, knows nothing whatsoever about either the life or politcal thinking of Abraham Lincoln. His notion that he and Abraham Lincoln have anything whatsoever of a political nature in common just because they're both Republicans demonstrates that he knows as little about the life or work of Lincoln, or about the history of the Republican Party, than he knows about, well, anything else in the universe, with the sole exception of how to succeed a savage promoter of criminally insane ideologies that can only be believed by the mentally defective.

And yet here is this demented, savage beast displaying the unmitigated gall to insist on replacing actual history with his psychotic lies and delusions. Why isn't such a loathsome specimen of antihumanity not booed and spat at anytime he foists his demented carcass on an apparently unsuspecting public.

Now, if you'd like to see DeMoron's moronicisms more politely and rationally (not to mention elegantly) dismantled, in addition to looking at Brian Tashman's Right Wing Watch post, we can look at how my cherished legal eagle Ian Millhiser did it in the aforementioned ThinkProgress post, "Head of Top Conservative Think Tank Makes Spectacularly Uninformed Statement About Slavery." (I might note that the URL for Ian's piece contains the slug "jim-demint-may-have-just-made-the-most-uninformed-statement-anyone-has-ever-made-about-slavery" Yes!)

It’s difficult to know where to begin a list of the errors this brief passage. The phrase “all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights” does not appear in the Constitution, although a very similar phrase does appear in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, the Constitution, at least as it stood before the Civil War, had very different things to say about the subject of human equality. It provided, for example, that “[n]o person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” The original Constitution also contained explicit language prohibiting Congress from banning the importation of new slaves until 1808.

Nevertheless, DeMint is technically correct that “the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution.” That’s because the Thirteenth Amendment provides that “[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude. . . shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The Thirteenth Amendment did not, however, simply come into being because Abraham Lincoln had a “love in his heart that comes from God.” Rather, it happened because Lincoln led the nation in a massive big government program known as the “Civil War“.
During this war, the United States raised an army of over two million service members who clashed with a Confederate army of about half that size. Moreover, the war effort increased federal spending nearly 25 times. As the leader of a centralized government in Washington, DC, Lincoln also issued a document known as the “Emancipation Proclamation,” which ordered slaves in the Confederate states freed.

Notably, while the Thirteenth Amendment ended the legal practice of human chattel slavery, state laws such as the Black Codes and the Jim Crow laws were enacted in the South to maintain the inferior status of former slaves and their descendants. These laws were eventually eradicated by big government as well, primarily through legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It’s also worth noting that the Confederate system of government differed from the Union’s system in that it placed far less power in a strong central government. While the United States Constitution, permits the federal government to “lay and collect taxes . . . and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States,” for example, the Confederate Constitution excluded the power to “provide for the general welfare.” Thus, the United States Constitution permits major national spending programs such as Medicare or Social Security, while these programs would have been unconstitutional in the Confederacy. Similarly, the Confederate Constitution includes a rigid limit on national infrastructure spending — forbidding its congress from “appropriat[ing] money for any internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce” — a limit that does not appear in the United States Constitution.

So Jim DeMint is correct that there was a belligerent during the American Civil War that rejected “big government.” He’s just wrong about which side that was.

[Note: There are lots of links onsite.]

I don't know that anyone thinks of the Heritage Foundation as anything but a propaganda mill since DeMoron took over there, a comedown from its former status as an embarrassing fount of right-wing political hackery. Hey, there's an important gap between embarrassment and disgrace.

In case you haven't reminded yourself recently, this is what the party of Lincoln has come to.

#

Happy 4th of July!

Click to enlarge (at least a little)

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

-- from the Declaration of Independence

Some texts never get old.


AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE? A PLUG FOR
NOAH'S REMEMBRANCE OF MICHAEL JACKSON



For anyone who missed Noah's post yesterday on Michael Jackson, I'm thinking the holiday may be the perfect time to relax and let it sink in.

Noah cuts through the hack media coverage to reflect on what remains important to him about MJ as both a person (of the rarefied subspecies "celebrity") and a performer. Obviously I'm biased, but I found the piece not just insightful but thought-provoking and seriously moving. It certainly doesn't resemble any of the endless gibberish I've been unable to avoid hearing on the subject since the news broke of MJ's death.

In addition, I wonder if you were aware that the now-legendary Thriller video, whose appearance on MTV may fairly be said to have changed the face of American pop music, almost never made it to MTV. At the time, the fledgling network didn't show videos by, um, people like Michael Jackson -- an excruciatingly uncomfortable way of avoiding saying that they didn't show videos by black artists. Not many people know how that barrier was overcome; Noah offers an insider's view.


HOWEVER YOU'RE SPENDING YOUR 4TH --

Make it a happy and healthy one. Thanks for making DWT part of that day, and come back for the rest of the day's schedule of posts! -- Ken

#

Confidential to Wingnuttians: We realize you haven't heard the news, but REAL Americans believe that "all men are created equal"

[Click to enlarge]

by Ken

I'm still pretty steamed about a lot that happened in the course of the presidential campaign, but I suppose today isn't the day to dwell on it. Let's enjoy it a little.

Okay, so maybe we'll dwell just a little. And blame Tom Toles for bringing it up.

I didn't think I could be much more offended than I was by the McCranky campaign's invention of a distinction between "real Americans" and presumably some other, "unreal" kind, including the stupefying lie that only its presumed "real Americans" work for a living. How stupid and dishonest can you be? (Well, apparently, if you're the Princess Sarah, there's no cap on either category. You were born to have contempt for actual knowledge and to lie your fool head off.) But then there was that McCrankyite wingnut who proclaimed that equality isn't an American value, that it's more a French thing, whereas we go in for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

These people pretend to be the "real" Americans, and they don't even know our single most stirring and as well as most defining declaration, the Declaration of Independence? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are of course "among" the rights (not the rights but among the "unalienable rights" with which we are endowed by our Creator in consequence of the "self-evident" truth "that all men are created equal."

There is no more inherently American value, and any wingnut doodyhead who doesn't know it might want to consider shutting the fuck up about what it means to be an American.

I'm just saying. (Okay, I've got that off my chest.)

#