Here is a puppy, spaghetti and the beach

 

If democracy starts to crumble, who will stop it?

It’s been more than 75 years since the end of World War II. Most of the men and women who fought in that war against German and Italian fascists and imperial Japanese bent on world domination have since passed into history.

Today, as we watch American democracy sliding toward the edge of a cliff, the question arises: Who will be left to stop the fall?

I just finished watching a six-part documentary on the Smithsonian Channel entitled, “Apocalypse: The Second World War.” It should be required viewing for every American, especially those who are too young to remember a father or mother who served overseas in the years 1941-45.

It especially needs to be seen by members of the Republican Party, with emphasis on those who compare coronavirus mask requirements in 2021 to the murder of six million European Jews before and during the war, and any others who believe the January 6 insurrection was nothing more than a casual outing by tourists visiting the Capitol.

More on that later, but first, a condensed version of history: 

The second world war was fought between the Allied powers of mainly the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union against the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan. The Axis countries shared an obsession for world domination, were disenchanted with the Treaty of Versailles that had ended WWI and were driven to political totalitarianism, ultra-nationalism and fascism as a result, starting about the time of Adolph Hitler’s rise to power as German dictator in 1933.

The war in the Pacific started in 1937 when Japan invaded China as part of its global conquests. Germany invaded Poland two years later to launch the European war, gaining Italy as an ally in 1940. France and England declared war on Germany and united to defend Europe, and the U.S. entered the war after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Both my father and my father-in-law fought in the Pacific Theater against the Japanese, and both have been dead for many years. If my father were alive today, he’d be 108 years old. I was born five years after the end of the war, which makes me 71 today. Likewise, the sons and daughters of the other brave Americans who fought to preserve democracy are living out the latter portion of their lives.

Which brings me back to the question: After we’re gone, what happens next?

The Smithsonian documentary is culled from more than six hundred hours of video taken by “front-line soldiers, top-secret operatives, resistance fighters, and private citizens” who experienced World War II first hand. Much of it is graphic in nature, but out of necessity to tell the true story of the war. Watching it, I couldn’t help but wonder what my father and the others of his generation who fought against the fascists would think about America today.

I’m not going to rehash all six episodes of the series or revisit the entirety of World War II, but how can you watch Hitler speaking to hundreds of thousands of adoring, chanting fans without remembering our former president inciting rallies of his own?  The crowds were much smaller, of course, but they were no less enthusiastic.

And how can you learn about German propaganda and its Big Lie without thinking about Trump’s Big Lie and the Republican Party’s failure to refute it? (A recent poll shows that 53% of Republican voters don’t believe Joe Biden won the last election.) And I could go on ….

You may not agree with me that fascism could ever replace democracy in America, but look around before you criticize. It’s happening all over the world … again. Did you see where the authoritarian leader of Samoa recently lost his re-election but refused to transfer power, locking the true winner out of Parliament? Have you looked at the political climate in the U.K. or parts of Europe recently? Check out the rise of far-right nationalism in Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and most other European countries. And that’s just for starters.

Back at home, the bogus vote recount underway in Arizona and the avalanche of voter suppression bills working their way through state legislatures are not really intended to overturn the 2020 election, which can’t legally be done. Instead, they are setting the stage for partisan state lawmakers in the future to throw out results of legal, fair elections if they don’t like the results and to literally appoint the next president of the United States.

Think about that for a minute, then go watch “Apocalypse: The Second World War” and tell yourself it can’t happen here. (That’s what the world thought in 1933.) Your next question should be, “But if it does, who’s going to stop it?” Let me know if you have the answer to that one.

If you think your vote counts … Volume 2

Today in Maricopa County, Arizona, there’s a bogus election “audit” under way by an unqualified organization known as Cyber Ninjas, ostensibly to review the validity of ballots cast for president in the 2020 election. The so-called audit was initiated by Republican members of the state Senate to look for evidence of massive voter fraud—a claim that has been debunked repeatedly and was proven to be false by three official recounts of the votes.

The real reason for this effort is not to validate the actual votes but to throw out the official results and declare that Donald J. Trump was the true winner of Arizona’s 11 electoral votes and is the rightful president of the United States … and that he would be president now had the election not been stolen by radical Democrats.

None of this is true, of course, but truth no longer exists in the land of Trump … and hasn’t for several years. He has already declared that Arizona will be “the first domino to fall,” while similar “audits” are already being demanded in other swing states including Michigan and Wisconsin, with Pennsylvania and Georgia soon to follow if they haven’t already by the time this is read.

When all is said and done, conspiracy theorists will no doubt find the “evidence” they seek to prove that Trump won the 2020 election “by a landslide,” and start looking for ways to evict Joe Biden from the White House. They have already shown, on January 6, 2021, that they are not afraid to use violence to attack American Democracy, so there is no reason to believe we won’t see similar demonstrations somewhere down the road.

Are you frightened yet?

You should be, because Democracy is teetering on the edge of a cliff in this country and Fascism is waiting in the weeds to take its place. (Wait! Let me correct myself. Fascism isn’t even hiding in the weeds any longer. It’s sitting out in the open in Republican governors’ offices, GOP-dominated state legislatures and the halls of the U.S. Congress.)

Following is part of a summary of voter suppression and restriction laws that have been introduced in various states since the election last November. It has been edited for length and clarity by me, but was written by the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization that works to reform, revitalize and defend our country’s systems of democracy and justice. The unedited report can be found here:         

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-march-2021

According to the Brennan Center, “In a backlash to 2020’s historic voter turnout, and under the pretense of responding to baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities, state lawmakers have introduced a startling number of bills to curb the vote. As of March 24, legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states.”

Five such bills have already been signed into law, at least 55 are moving through legislatures in 24 states where 29 have passed at least one chamber, and another 26 have had some sort of committee hearing, amendment or committee vote.

“Most of these restrictive bills take aim at absentee voting, while nearly a quarter seek stricter voter ID requirements. State lawmakers also aim to make voter registration harder, expand voter roll purges or adopt flawed practices that would risk improper purges, and cut back on early voting. The states that have seen the largest number of restrictive bills introduced are Texas (49), Georgia (25) and Arizona (23). Bills are actively moving in the Texas and Arizona statehouses, and Georgia (has) enacted an omnibus voter suppression bill….”

That’s all bad enough, but the most damaging legislation includes a bevy of bills aimed at undermining the power of local officials to determine and certify the results of a free and fair election. For example:

* Texas has introduced at least six bills that would penalize election officials for various infractions and impose financial penalties for refusing to purge voters.

* A Wisconsin bill would prohibit election clerks from sending absentee ballot applications and absentee ballots to voters who did not request them and create a felony offense for violation.

* A Missouri bill would threaten any local election official with loss of funding if they refuse to purge voters on their rolls that the Secretary of State has called on them to remove.

* And Iowa’s new law allows the state Commissioner of Elections to impose a fine on county election officials for any technical infraction, including failing to purge voters.

Consider this scenario: Voters in your state go to the polls in record numbers and select a Democrat to be president. That means your candidate wins your state’s Electoral College votes. But because of new laws passed this year, the legislature can decide that local election officials are not qualified to determine the winner, so they toss out those results—claiming massive voter fraud or some other reason—and declare the Republican to be the winner instead. The electoral votes go to the candidate that the legislature wants to win, regardless of the actual outcome of voting. The Republican official in charge then certifies the results.

Now apply that scenario to the five critical swing states that pushed Joe Biden to the top, and the Electoral College is transformed from a representative of the will of the people into a tool to establish one-party rule in America. And not just in the next election but in every election from now on. If you don’t think that can happen, look around. It’s happening already.

One way to prevent this nightmare scenario is for Democrats in the U.S. Senate to end the filibuster and pass legislation that reforms the way elections are conducted. Among other provisions, the “For the People Act” expands voter registration and voting access; provides for states to establish independent, nonpartisan redistricting commissions; addresses campaign spending, financing and security; revises disclaimer requirements for political advertising; establishes an alternative campaign funding system for certain federal offices; sets forth provisions related to ethics in all three branches of government; and requires candidates for president and vice president to submit 10 years of tax returns.

The bill, which passed the House as HR1 but languishes in filibuster hell in the Senate, would fix many, if not all, of the nation’s federal election issues … but there’s even a problem with that. According to the Brennan Center, bills have already been introduced in several states to oppose the For the People Act, should it ever pass, and Texas lawmakers have proposed setting up a parallel system with its own rules for state contests if the federal law is enacted. That puts Texas’s 40 electoral votes in a kind of election limbo land.

There is so much more to this story, and I encourage everyone to click the link to Brennan (above) or do your own research to learn what’s really going on in this country. As for me, I just want to make one more point, and you can take it for what it’s worth: If all of these Republican legislatures are able to manipulate the results of future elections, toss out the will of the people and decide which candidate wins, Donald J. Trump will be re-elected president in 2024 regardless of the popular vote or the true Electoral College result … and if that happens, he will stay in office as King of America or Dictator for Life until he dies or until he can hand it off to Ivanka or one of his sons.

If you don’t believe me, I sincerely hope you are right … but if what I said comes true, please remember that you heard it here first.

If you think your vote counts, think again

What did you learn way back in civics class about American Democracy? Did you learn that voting is a sacred privilege granted to all U.S. citizens? And that it’s your duty as an American to vote on Election Day? And that every voter is treated equally? And that in a representative Democracy, the voters select their leaders to represent them in Congress, and that those elected leaders vote the way their constituents want them to vote? And did they teach you that the will of the people will always prevail?

If that’s what they told you, they may have had good intentions, but they were wrong … and here are some reasons why:     

One Person One Vote

Theoretically, the American system of government is built around the principal of “one person, one vote.” In a series of cases brought during the height of the civil rights movement, the Supreme Court upheld that principal by applying the 14^th Amendment of the Constitution. In 1964, for example, the court declared that equality of voting (one person, one vote) means that “the weight and worth of the citizens' votes as nearly as is practicable must be the same,” and that states must draw federal congressional districts containing roughly equal represented populations.

If, over time, these districts became disproportionately one-sided--either racially, politically or otherwise--the court said they must be realigned after the next census. 

The problem was that some states had created an “upper house” similar to the U.S. Senate which provided for an equal number of representatives from each county, which in turn gave undue political power to rural counties. In addition, many states had neglected to redistrict for decades during the 20th century, even as population increased and became less diverse in urban, industrialized areas.

Gerrymandering

That led to the expansion of a political tool called “gerrymandering,” which is the enemy of one person, one vote. Under gerrymandering, the political party in power within a state can establish an unfair political advantage for itself by manipulating the boundaries of electoral districts. The two principal tactics used in gerrymandering are (1) “cracking,” in which the voting power of the opposing party's supporters are diluted across many different districts, and (2) “packing,” which concentrates the opposing party's voting power into one district to reduce their voting power in other districts).

The result is voting districts that look like Rorschach tests or the silhouette of a grasshopper.

In general practice, gerrymandering is used to disadvantage a particular political, ethnic or racial demographic, specifically Democrats in Republican-held states and minority groups such as Hispanics and African Americans. This would seem to violate the constitutional guarantee of “one person, one vote,” but subsequent court action on gerrymandering has not been that consistent, that specific or that clear.

For example, the Supreme Court affirmed in one case that gerrymandering based primarily on race is a violation of constitutional rights, but in another, separate decision found that extreme partisan gerrymandering, while also unconstitutional, is up to Congress and state legislatures to correct according to state constitutions and laws. Does anyone see the problem here? (Hint: The court said the same state legislatures that authorized gerrymandering are empowered to decide its constitutionality.)

As late as 2019, the Supreme Court punted the ball back to state courts and legislatures by saying that claims of unconstitutional gerrymandering are not subject to federal court review, presumably forever. That gives state legislatures wide berth to manipulate voting districts to benefit their own candidates … and they’re taking full advantage of the opportunity today.

Electoral College

If you believe in “one person, one vote,” you cannot support the Electoral College system. If you live in a deep red state like I do, for example, voting for a Democrat for president is a waste of your time. The Democrat can’t win the state, which means that all of your state’s electoral votes will go to the Republican candidate regardless of how you voted. The opposite is true in deep blue states like New York and California. The bottom line is, the candidate who wins the popular vote is not guaranteed to be elected president, as history clearly shows. In two of the last six elections, the loser of the popular vote—Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016—was elected president by the Electoral College. This has happened three other times in history.

Supporters of the Electoral College argue that it was created by the founders to “preserve the constitutional role of the states in presidential elections,” while critics argue that it gives too much power to “swing states” and allows the presidential election to be decided by a minority of voters. There are over 300 million people in the United States, but just 538 people decide who will be president, many of whom represent states with very little population. And this doesn’t explain the role that slavery played in establishing the Electoral College, which is another subject for another time.

So to recap, with regard to “one person, one vote,” I am one person and I cast one vote and it should always help my candidate who is trying to win the popular vote and become president … but on two occasions it didn’t because of gerrymandering, dubious Supreme Court decisions and the outdated and dangerous Electoral College. I don’t remember hearing about that back in civics class.

Filibuster

And that brings me to the filibuster, which is the real reason for this essay.

The filibuster, in case you forgot, is a tactic employed in the United States Senate to prevent a measure from being brought to a vote. It used to mean that Ted Cruz or some other senator opposed to legislation had to stand at the podium for hours or days and read Doctor Seuss books or War and Peace to prevent a bill from coming up for debate. In reality, it means that no legislation that’s not part of the federal budget can be brought up for debate and passage unless three-fifths of the senators (60 out of 100) vote to do so. In today’s highly partisan Senate, where the representation is split 50-50, the prospect of getting 10 members of one party to support 50 members of the other party is virtually zero, nada, zip, zilch, nil, naught, no way, never  and ain’t gonna happen.

So today, a bill that would restore voting rights to perhaps millions of disenfranchised voters and effectively preserve American Democracy sits wallowing in Senate filibuster hell. So, probably, will a bill that would authorize a commission to investigate a violent insurrection that attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election by people who broke into the Capitol, killed or maimed federal police officers and threatened to hang the vice president of the United States.

This, despite polls that show these bills and many others like them are what a majority of the American people want. They are lingering in limbo and will probably die because leaders of the Republican Party are afraid to offend a narcissistic, racist con man pathological liar with Fascist ideas and a probable mental illness who lost the last election, but refuses to accept the truth while continuing to promote the Big Lie that it was stolen from him and he actually won.

One person, one vote? Not in this lifetime. It looks to me like the fate of our Democracy is coming down to one person, one lie … and a fractured majority party that apparently can’t do anything about it.

When our ‘visionaries’ lack long-term vision

The founding fathers of the United States passed the Second Amendment to the Constitution in 1791. Mark Zuckerberg and friends founded Facebook in 2004. What do these two things have in common? In both cases, the people behind this law and this social media platform, respectively, were considered to be visionaries in their fields of endeavor.

The Second Amendment, which generally gives U.S. citizens the right to keep and bear arms, was ratified after American colonists—fighting for their independence—had used guns to ward off their English overlords. Its fundamental purpose was to give citizens the opportunity to fight back against a tyrannical federal government.

The intended purpose of "The Facebook," as it was originally known, was to allow students at Harvard University to use their email addresses and photos to connect with other students at the school. Zuckerberg, then a Harvard student, saw it as a way to bring the college social experience onto the Internet.

So here’s the problem. In 1791, when militiamen used single-shot muskets to repel the enemy, nobody could have imagined that in the distant future, a gunman with a semi-automatic weapon could fire up to 400 bullets every minute, reload in seconds and start all over again. And in 2004, nobody could have imagined that in 2016, a room full of hackers could sit in a warehouse in St. Petersburg, Russia, and flood Facebook with millions of phony comments created by non-existent individuals in order to make Donald Trump the president of the United States.

Unfortunately, both of those things came true.

I could go on all day talking about the Second Amendment, but that’s for another time. The news today is that an independent board of oversight has upheld the decision by Facebook on January 7 to ban former president Donald J. Trump. According to the New York Times:

A Facebook-appointed panel of journalists, activists and lawyers on Wednesday upheld the social network’s ban of former President Donald J. Trump, ending any immediate return by Mr. Trump to mainstream social media and renewing a debate about tech power over online speech.

 

Facebook’s Oversight Board, which acts as a quasi-court over the company’s content decisions, said the social network was right to bar Mr. Trump after the insurrection in Washington in January, saying he “created an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible.” The panel said the ongoing risk of violence “justified” the move.

 

But the board also said that an indefinite suspension was “not appropriate,” and that the company should apply a “defined penalty.” The board gave Facebook six months to make its final decision on Mr. Trump’s account status.

So here’s the point:

I agree with the board that if Facebook is going to ban users for any period of time, it must establish standards for doing so, much the same way the government establishes penalties for various crimes. Murder is obviously worse than jaywalking, for example. In the case of Facebook, inciting white supremacists, domestic terrorists and neo-Nazis to storm the U.S. Capitol and attempt to overturn a lawfully-conducted election is certainly worse than calling the current president “Sleepy Joe” or your primary opponent “Lyin’ Ted.”

But how much worse? What’s the penalty for both? The answer is currently unknown.

Facebook’s seemingly arbitrary “community standards” clearly need to be more effectively defined. For example, a good friend of mine once posted something about his wife’s Volkswagen automobile and when I jokingly replied, “damn Germans,” I was threatened with suspension for violating Facebook’s rules governing hate speech.

Are you kidding me? That was considered hate speech? I could understand Facebook’s concern if I had said, “Those damn Germans are mentally deficient, substandard people with no sense of dignity or class who are only 3/5 human and should be eliminated or, at least, segregated from the good people of the earth.” But that’s not what I said. So why was I threatened then?

In a word, “algorithm.”

Since its inception, Facebook has attracted billions of users, including the above-mentioned fake accounts commonly referred to as “bots.” To monitor and control what they post on its platform, Facebook needs a system of moderation, which I know something about. I used to be one of three moderators on a sports fan site that had a few hundred users, and it was our job to observe what members posted and sanction or ban those who broke established rules.

But Facebook couldn’t hire enough people to moderate billions of users, checking every post in the context it was used, so it created an algorithm to search for certain words and phrases that it deemed objectionable, and to issue warnings, suspensions and bans based on those violations. Because the algorithm doesn’t read context, words like “damn Germans” apparently set off an alarm.

In the wake of today’s decision by the Oversight Board, it’s my opinion that Facebook needs to do two things: (1) find a way to redesign its algorithm to be more discerning (don’t ask me how; I’m no programmer) and (2) create a schedule of community standards that assigns appropriate punishment for various levels of violation.  

For example, typing “Joe Biden is a crook” might get you a 3-day ban, “Joe Biden is a pedophile” might get you banned for six months and “Joe Biden stole the election and we need to rally at the Capitol and take the country back” might you banned for life.

Or something like that.

It’s not up to me to determine appropriate punishment, so I have to trust Facebook to do it the correct way. If they do, it won’t solve all of social media’s problems, but it will be a step in the right direction. And if they don’t, I hope the Oversight Board will be back, telling Zuckerberg and his minions to try again.

Meanwhile, I hope Trump's ban is made permanent for what he has already done to this country, a lot of which was instigated through social media accounts. In my opinion, nobody deserves it more.

If the epitome of fraud isn’t fraud, then there is no fraud

Some time tomorrow, the Oversight Board of the social media platform Facebook will announce its decision whether to reinstate the account of Donald J. Trump. Facebook suspended Trump after January 6, when a riot at the U.S. Capitol—inspired and encouraged by the former president—resulted in five deaths and injuries to at least 140 police officers, caused major damage inside the building and threatened one of the pillars of democracy on which this country was founded: the peaceful transfer of power following a Constitutionally-mandated election.

The argument against Trump is that his mountain of lies, misinformation and hateful rhetoric over the five-plus years of his campaign and term of office should disqualify him from a place on the social media forum. According to the Washington Post, Trump was allowed to make 1,440 posts containing misinformation or extremist rhetoric last year alone on such subjects as the Covid virus and unfounded claims of voter fraud.

The argument for Trump boils down to freedom of speech as promised in the First Amendment to the Constitution, and, to paraphrase the bard, thereby hangs this tale.

As a former journalist, no one is a bigger defender of the First Amendment than I am. Freedom of speech is the bedrock that allows the media to exist and to report virtually unfettered on stories it considers to be of interest to its audience. But every journalist should recognize that the First Amendment is not absolute. The overused example of exceptions is the claim that no one has the right to yell “fire” in a crowded theater, although I suspect that doing so would be entirely appropriate if the theater was, in fact, on fire. But there are more notable and more important exceptions.

As a refresher, The First Amendment reads as follows:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

It sounds pretty simple, but like most things American, these words have been considered and interpreted over the years by the Supreme Court of the United States, which has generally upheld the Constitution while allowing for limitations on certain categories of speech. Those categories that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is also an exception to free speech.

Now I have no evidence (yet) to link Donald Trump to obscenity or child pornography, but as far as I’m concerned, the rest of the exceptions apply directly to him, and collectively should be reasons enough to support a permanent ban from the social media giant.

Let’s take incitement, for example.

The Supreme Court has held that “advocacy of the use of force” is unprotected when it directs people or groups to take lawless action or “is likely to incite or produce such action.” So did you watch TV on January 6? Did you witness five hours of lawless action both inside and outside the U.S. Capitol? Did you also read or hear the dozens or maybe hundreds of lies and misstatements about the 2020 election that encouraged Trump supporters to go to Washington to “stop the steal?” I did, and frankly, I think those three simple words in quotes are sufficient to invalidate Trump’s First Amendment protection as far as Facebook is concerned.

And now let’s talk about fraud.

Officially, the Supreme Court said in 1974 that there is “no Constitutional value in false statements of fact,” and developed a framework that enumerated four such areas for exclusion from First Amendment protection, including false statements that can be subject to civil or criminal liability or are punishable under libel and slander laws. While not all false statements constitute fraud, I looked up the definition of fraud in the dictionary and Donald Trump’s photo was there.

Before he was elected in 2016—when he thought he was going to lose—Trump began a phony narrative that the election would be “rigged” by Democrats to make sure he had no chance to win. That claim failed miserably when he was elected, but that didn’t stop him from rolling it out again in 2020 with unfounded and debunked claims of widespread voter fraud which he said was occurring, remarkably, only in those toss-up states that Trump needed to win re-election.

When state after state investigated the claims and found them to be false, Trump filed a wheelbarrow full of lawsuits in state and federal courts, making the same claims of fraud that no one could find. All of them were dismissed, so when he couldn’t prove voter fraud in court, Trump attempted to overturn the certified election results with a series of speeches and social media posts that culminated in the January 6 rally.

Even today, after everything else has failed, he is still trying to overturn the election of Joe Biden by supporting a secret campaign to recount ballots in Arizona’s largest precinct, which, when it declares him to be the true winner, will no doubt find its way into Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan—the other states Trump needs to claim victory. “Arizona will be the first domino to fall,” Trump has said.

So here’s the point. Donald Trump has built his entire career as a businessman, TV celebrity, real estate developer and politician on some type of fraud. That was proven in the case of Trump University, which admitted to defrauding students expecting to become millionaires; Trump charities, which are now banned in the state of New York; and even Trump’s tax returns, which show how he inflated the value of his properties to secure loans but deflated the value when tax time rolled around.

Now it’s “stop the steal” and the Big Lie that the 2020 election was taken from him by illegal voting.

I could go on, but how many examples of fraud does Facebook need to determine that Trump has forfeited his place on the social media’s daily news feed? I mean, seriously, Donald Trump is the epitome of fraud. If the epitome of fraud isn’t fraud, then there is no fraud, and for my money, if Facebook has no desire to filter out fraud, then maybe there should be no Facebook, either.

The decision has been made, we’re told. Let’s hope it was the right one. Tomorrow will tell.