Not giving up the fight, just moving to a new place to post.

I am closing this blog, and plan to start posting in Medium. I don't have much money to break through paywalls, but I do pay to break through this one. Not all of this content is behind a paywall. Applaud what you like. I particularly recommend Umair Haque of Eudemonia and Company and also independent military writer James M. Ridgway, Jr. Hope to see you there.

The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution Modifies the Method for Electing Presidents: an Argument

1. Each new amendment to the Constitution modifies the parts of the Constitution which came before.
2. The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution holds that "[T]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude . . .[.]"
3. U.S. Constitution Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 provides "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress . . . [.]
4. It could well follow that any method of selecting electors that denies or abridges the right of citizens to effectively vote because of their race or color is unconstitutional, and that, therefore, the counting of electoral votes arising because of senatorial seats is unconstitutional. The small states that get electoral college power beyond what they would have on account of house seats have proportionally fewer African-Americans eligible to vote than the large ones do.
5. Approximately 12.7% of Americans are African-Americans. Of the states in the Union and the District of Columbia, 17 out of 51 jurisdictions have more than the mean proportion of African-Americans than the nation does. Out of the 538 total electoral votes, the blacker 17 have 217, less than half. U.S. Senatorial seats abridge their power to vote, and, therefore, are unconstitutional.

The Barriers to a U.S.--Mexican Border Wall Illustrated

This blog is intended to document how unrespecting of the often-unwritten mores of the Presidency of the United States the current president is. Now recent presidents have put forth policies based on based on impossible technologies (Reagan's Star Wars) or by manifest denial of a clear fact of a military or diplomatic situation (Nixon's Vietnamization, which ignored that South Vietnamese draftees were disinclined to die for the corrupt figures who had always run their government-- perhaps even Obama's denial that the political base for moderate Afghanis and Iraqis barely existed), but nothing compares to the current president's southern border wall-- a central promise and theme of his campaign, but which a casual knowledge of the territory shows to be impossible. Now--Surprise!-- he's backing off the wall.
The border between the United States and Mexico is defined by a river-- the Rio Grande (the Big River), also known as the Rio Bravo del Norte-- the Wild River of the North-- and runs for almost 2,000 miles.
One of my pet peeves is when English speakers call this body of water the Rio Grande River-- they nearly always pronounce it the Rio Grand River, which is to call it the Big River River
Here are some photos of the Rio Grande.
1.

2.

 

3.

These sites are plainly unsuitable for the installation of a border wall.

Even worse, the river moves, which could easily have the effect of the wall not matching the border.

In the past, I submit, a presidential candidate who was considering advocating a wall between the U.S. and Mexico )would have had a staffer do a little research (like what I've done here), looked at the photos and would have not advocated that project. Such statements don't bother the President; the truth is not in him.

Rabbis Don't Want to Talk with the President

There are four main denominations of Judaism: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist. President Obama began the tradition of having a conference call every year before the High Holidays with representatives of the American rabbinical organizations for the Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements. But the rabbis have canceled the call that had been planned for this year with the current President because his Charlottesville statements in their view "gave succor to those who advocate anti-Semitism, racism, and xenophobia." Late 20th century and early 21st century Presidents of the United States don't make those kinds of statements, except for our President.

For a Presidential Candidate to Work with a Thug to Ally a Hostile Government to Illegally Support the Candidate's Campaign's Not Normal

I want to contrast the president with other presidential candidates who have spent substantial amounts of their lives, just being business people without having a short-term focus on running for office. Neither of the Clintons apply-- lawyers, officeholders, or professors nearly their whole careers. Johnson's business interests grew out of his political power, as did generally, Humphrey's, Nixon's, Wallace's, McGovern's, Carter's, Mondale's, Anderson's, Dole's, McCain's, Obama's and Dukakis's. Reagan is an unusual case; he made his money not so much as a businessperson as that term is normally understood but as an actor.
Perot is an unusual case, too, in that huge business success and the military adventurism that made him more well known, were, I suggest, grand speculations, and at least in the employee rescue operations, his team members were not people of probity.
For conventional business people, we have left, the Bushes and Mitt Romney. I shall tell the story of one business person's venture, but I will use the name of another business person.

A business associate of Mitt Romney's, a former F.B.I. informant who is famous for having once smashed a martini glass stem into another man’s face, promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Romney win the presidency. Emails related to this show that, from the earliest months of Romney’s campaign, some of his associates viewed close ties with Moscow as a political advantage.

Now, of course, it wasn't Romney, it was the current president. but when you read the story with Romney's name-- isn't it clear that neither Romney (nor the Bushes) would associate with a business person like the current president's, and that if they got such an offer they would report everything to the F.B.I. right then?

Romney or the Bushes should be the norm, not our current president. Who continues to lie, as you see below.

The President Keeps a Court from Protecting Minorities, Weakens All Federal Courts, and Corruptly Signals Witnesses against Him.

At first, I thought that the President's pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio was bad, but wasn't unusually bad. This is not true. The closest I could find was George W. Bush's commutation of the sentences of former Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean who shot a Mexican drug dealer and tried to cover it up, but that offence had its roots in the challenge of peace officers' having to make split-second decisions-- I don't agree with W.'s choice, but I understand that that is a matter about which reasonable people might disagree.

Joe Arpaio had been fighting a racial-profiling case that has been going against his Maricopa County Sheriff's Office on for years. Before the case went to trial, U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow, a George W. Bush appointee, ordered the agency in 2011 to stop detaining people solely on suspicion they were in the country illegally. They were either to arrest individuals for a state crime or let them be on their way. In 2013, Snow found deputies had used race as a factor in their policing, and ordered sweeping reforms of the office’s policies. But Arpaio’s deputies continued business as usual for at least 17 more months. According to trial testimony, 171 people were illegally detained by MCSO deputies and turned over to federal immigration authorities. Snow found Arpaio in civil contempt for violating his order, and forwarded the case for criminal contempt. Prosecutors from the U.S Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Unit prosecuted the case in a bench trial this summer before U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton, a senior district judge appointed by Bill Clinton. Arpaio’s attorneys argued the violations were unintentional, and that Arpaio delegated the court’s order to subordinates. Bolton flatly rejected that argument. In her ruling, she said evidence showed Arpaio’s “flagrant disregard” for Snow’s order. Arpaio was scheduled to be sentenced for the contempt-of-court charge on October 5th, and he could have served up to six months in prison.

The President disagreed with Judge Bolton's ruling. There is no reason to think that he thought her ruling inaccurate.

First, it appears that the President doesn't think that violating racial discrimination laws is harmful, notwithstanding his oath of office. The President used his pardon power to remove legal sanctions for a person who violated the rights of a racial minority.

Second, pardoning contempt of court is particularly sensitive; the contempt power is a vital tool for keeping order in courts, and the President's action encourages other popular bad actors not to obey federal judges, magistrates, and marshals e.g. Roy Moore. The executive branch disempowers the judicial branch.

Third, the President is being investigated. By this action, he signals the other targets of investigation that he can use the pardon power to offer better deals to them than Robert Mueller, among other people, can. 

Texas has faced similar problems in the past, and we have changed our laws such that the governor doesn't have pardon powers. They have been delegated to a Board of Pardons and Paroles-- now the Board is chosen by the Governor with the advice and consent of the Senate, but it means that if there is an abuse of the clemency powers it would need to be authorized by a majority of the Board and the Governor, which can either be sanctioned by criminal laws, or, in the Governor's case, by impeachment.

It may be easy to impeach a president for corrupt use of the pardon power or hard, but the president's pardon of Arpaio is a dereliction of duty, an attack on the separation of powers, and a corrupt signal to criminal suspects that they need not obey the law.

He's Done Bad Things, But He's Not Going to Burn Me Out.

The current president has done terrible things, but he's not going to take away my vacation. Got to keep finding joy in the struggle, and I need to rest. See you all on or about July 31, 2017. Keep the candles burning for Robert Mueller.