The new judiciary, circa 2022

I could be wrong (I hope I am) but in my opinion, it's a waste of good breath for the so-called “legal experts” on liberal TV to tell us how bad Judge Aileen Cannon is and how her rulings in a recent case are unsupported by established law.

Judge Cannon is the Florida District Court judge who is presiding over the stolen documents case involving former president Donald Trump. She recently granted Trump’s request for a special master to review documents seized in an FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago beach club, and has repeatedly ruled in Trump’s favor on virtually every aspect of the case, much to the chagrin of legal scholars who call her decisions wrong-headed and dangerous for the country.

Judge Cannon is a Trump appointee who appears to be giving the former president every advantage as he fights against the U.S. Department of Justice over possession of classified materials. But Judge Cannon is just a symptom of a much larger malady that is affecting justice in America.

The fact is, while many of us were distracted by Trump's rallies and word salad bluster and the way he ran roughshod over the four years of his presidency, he and Senate President Mitch McConnell -- with help from their White House counsel -- were busy reshaping the country's judiciary and filling the bench with far-right appointments suggested by the conservative Federalist Society.

In all, the Senate confirmed 234 Trump judges during his single term, including three associate justices of the Supreme Court (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney-Barrett), 54 judges for the United States courts of appeals, 174 judges for United States district courts and three judges for the Court of International Trade.

By comparison, over two full terms, President Barack Obama nominated more than 400 individuals for federal judgeships but only 329 were confirmed by the Senate, most during his first term. After Republicans got control of Congress two years into Obama’s presidency, many of his nominations were blocked by the opposition party. Majority Leader McConnell instituted a virtual blockade of judicial appointments, such that very few nominations were successful during the later Obama years.

When Obama left office, he left behind 128 judicial vacancies, prompting Trump to famously say, “I’ll have so many judges because President Obama left me 128 judges to fill. You just don’t do that.”

(For the record, President Joe Biden has thus far appointed 82 judges including Associate Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, 23 judges for courts of appeals and 58 judges for district courts, but there are 56 nominations still awaiting action in a divided 50-50 Senate.)

So what it all means is this: Now that hundreds of these Trumpian judges have been set in place across the country, the former president can go shopping for a judge who will do his bidding any time he needs a friendly decision. He appears to have found one in Aileen Cannon. In other words, until someone stops him, the law in 2022 is whatever Trump and his judges say it is … and precedent be damned. Going on MSNBC and arguing about how it used to be when civility, decorum and rules of law were in order is an absolute waste of time.

In my opinion, as I said elsewhere, this is the way the court system works these days, and we might as well get used to it, because there's more of it to come. This is not your grandfather's judicial system, and it's only going to get worse.

I'll say it again, I could be wrong ... but I don't believe that I am.

Where’s my list of god-given rights? Oh, wait…

Breaking news: Americans do not have rights that were granted to us by a god. Not the god of Christianity, nor the god of Judaism, nor the god of Islam, nor the god of Hinduism, nor the god of Zoroastrianism nor the god of any other religion practiced around the globe. Rights that were actually granted to Americans were written by men and codified in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Oh, sure, the Declaration of Independence opens with a nice little preamble that talks about “unalienable rights” endowed by our creator, but the creator it references is not defined, and furthermore, the Declaration of Independence is not – and never was – a set of laws. It is a lengthy collection of grievances written by New World colonists against the King of England, alleging a series of crimes and used to explain why we were declaring our independence from the Crown. (The clue to the purpose of the Declaration of Independence is in its title. Duh.)

The Constitution, on the other hand, opens with its own preamble that does not delegate rights written by a holy deity. It says, simply: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

There is no mention of god, Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, any church or any other religious institution.

Andrew L. Seidel, writing for Religion News Service, points out that the Constitution – which actually DOES grant rights to our citizens – makes no direct correlation between religion and the law. “The Constitution, which the Bill of Rights amends, is not really indifferent; it’s simply godless,” Seidel wrote. “The Constitution’s three mentions of religion are exclusionary: (1) banning religious tests for public office, (2) prohibiting the government from aligning with one religion over another and religion over non-religion, and (3) guaranteeing the freedom of thought and belief. In other words, the Constitution keeps God out of the business of government and government out of the business of worshipping God.”

(I added the numbers for emphasis.)

So every time I hear somebody talk about god-given rights, I want to (1) scream, (2) track him or her down and (3) shove a copy of the Constitution in their, uh, face, because these rights they cling to so desperately simply do not exist. It’s just another lie told by the religious far right, which seems to excel at the practice of spreading untruth.

I got an email today from Ron DeSantis, the far right extremist governor of Florida. I don’t know how he got my email address, but I suspect I’ve been targeted because I’m a registered Independent. Somebody sold my email address and it wound up on the Potential Nutbag And Not a Democrat Mailing List. Lots of Republicans including Dr. Ben Carson and Gym Jordan send us emails, mostly asking for money and our pledge of unwavering support for somebody named Trump.

Anyhow, in his email, DeSantis complains about the “radical vigilante woke mob” that is destroying our American way of life. As a practicing member of said Woke-a-teers, I can tell you that isn’t true, but I digress. Apparently, according to DeSantis, we are guilty of “stifling dissent, public shaming, rampant violence, and a perverted version of history.” We are tearing down statues and buildings and that’s not all. We’re also responsible for tearing down the American spirit itself. We go after the family unit, parental rights, traditional moral values, the church, and fact-based education.

There’s a lot more in the email, but the punch line is this: “The time for listening and watching from the sidelines is over.” It’s now time for me to get myself out of the Barcalounger and “fight for the rights I know were given to man by God Himself.”

And by the way, while I’m at it, a small contribution of $100, $200 or more would be greatly appreciated as DeSantis attempts to get himself elected to one office or another. (Just between me and you, I promise to send Ron a check the day after hell freezes over. By then, the state of Florida should be completely under water from global climate change and my home in West Virginia could well become beachfront property.

When that happens, $200 will be a small price to pay for an ocean view.

Before I die, I’ve got a lot of questions

Every day I look around me and I see things that don’t make any sense. For example, why can’t people drive cars safely when it rains? Snow and ice I can understand, but there seem to be a lot of wrecks every time it rains. What am I missing here? It’s just water. Maybe try slowing down a scoche.

And why is there a wreck on I-79 seemingly every day, regardless of the weather? It’s a puzzlement to me.

I have a lot of questions like that, and I wish someone could explain things to me before I die. Take cereal for example. Why doesn’t cereal come in Ziploc bags?

Here are some more points to ponder:

* Why do we build new high schools because the old buildings are considered to be unsafe, and then turn the old buildings into middle schools?

* Why do we need more sunlight in the summer, when it’s warm at night, instead of the winter, when it’s cold?  

* If doctors and nurses can wear masks all day in the operating room, why can’t shoppers wear one for 10 minutes in the donut shop? 

* Why do newspapers have digital editions where the news can be posted instantaneously, but it still takes three days to report high school basketball scores...if they get reported at all.

* And when did reporters stop asking questions? Did curiosity die while I was away?

* Why are politicians free to break laws that I’m required to obey?

* Why can churches actively support political candidates and rake in billions of dollars in donations so their pastors can buy private airplanes and mansions, but are still exempt from paying taxes?

* Why are vaccination rates for Covid-19 not as high as they were for smallpox and polio?

* Why does it take only 50 votes to confirm a Supreme Court justice in the Senate but 60 votes to protect the planet from environmental catastrophe or preserve American democracy?

* Why aren’t people who run for president required to take a basic intelligence test, know something about U.S. and world history and be examined for probable mental illness?

* If you have a brain scan and the doctor tells you he “didn't find anything,” is that a good thing?

* When did discrimination become legal and racism become culturally acceptable?

* What do people think Critical Race Theory actually means?

* Why can’t basketball officials make a call in the last two minutes of a game without spending 10 minutes looking at the monitor? If they’re going to spend that much time watching TV, they should call the games from home.

* Also, when will football officials finally determine what constitutes pass interference?  

* How does anyone know what a deserted area looks like?

* Why does the Electoral College still exist? I’m a blue voter in a deep red state so my vote never counts. The opposite is true for red voters in blue ones.

* Why can’t Facebook take a joke? (Example 1: I once teased a friend who owns a Volkswagen with the words, “Damn Germans” and was suspended by Facebook for hate speech. Example 2: Asked to name the best TV dad, I said “Fred Sanford, you big dummy” and was issued another warning. Clearly the Facebook robot didn’t watch the show.)

* Why can’t climate change deniers understand the legacy they are leaving for their grandchildren?

* Why can we drive a vehicle around Mars using a remote device but can’t implement effective traffic control on earth?

* I heard recently that a person's identity was unknown. When he was growing up, didn't anyone tell him who he was?

* Why aren’t people caught abusing and abandoning dogs taken to a shelter and locked in cages for several years?

* Why don’t insurance companies cover flooding caused by rainwater running off my roof, calling it “ground water” instead. And why can’t they explain, if it was ground water, how did it get up there in my gutters?

* Why does the Postal Service lose millions of dollars every year but still puts its carriers in gas-guzzling jeeps to deliver mail. I have watched my mailman drive from house to house on a residential street, starting and stopping his motor each time, when the mailboxes are not more than 50 feet apart. My father was a mailman. When he delivered mail, he walked.

* How can you receive occupational therapy if you don't have a job?

I’m sure there are hundreds more questions I could post, but consider this my starter list. Feel free to add to it as you wish.

In addition, you can start explaining some of these things at any time. I’ll be here, where I always am, waiting for your reply.

(By the way, do you suppose Fletch is still using the Underhills' American Express card? I often wonder about that.)

I thought Russians were the bad guys

When I was younger, I didn’t think much about getting old. I was a smoker then, so if I thought about old age at all, I probably assumed I would work to retirement, get lung cancer and die.

What I didn’t anticipate was passing my 70^th birthday and spending the next two years virtually isolated inside my own house, all the while watching helplessly as the United States of America teetered precariously on the edge of democracy. I certainly didn’t anticipate that a U.S. president, his closest advisers, members of Congress and a popular outlet of broadcast news would cozy up to a global adversary like Russia and echo Russian propaganda in rallies and speeches and on the nightly news.

That’s because I was brought up to believe that the Russians were our enemy. President Ronald Reagan said so in the 1980s when he called Russia the “evil empire.” I didn’t like Ronald Reagan but millions of people did. Most of them still believe he was one of our greatest presidents ever, so when he said the Russians were the bad guys and stood up to them, he couldn’t have been wrong. Am I right?

Going back even farther into the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy had to ward off World War III by standing up to Russia during the Cuban missile crisis, when Russia was setting up missile bases on the Caribbean island with the range to destroy Washington, D.C. Russia was our enemy way back then, and if not for Kennedy’s diplomacy, might have brought the world to a catastrophic result. I did like Kennedy, who is also considered to be one of our greatest American presidents, and, like Reagan, he thought the Russians were the bad guys. Was Kennedy wrong, too?

I don’t believe that he was.

For most of my lifetime, Russia has been our global adversary. That was true even after 1991, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was dissolved into Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and a few other republics with “Stan” for last names. We had “glasnost” then (meaning openness) and “perestroika” (which means restructuring) as leader Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to modernize Russia and open it up to the world.      

With the Cold War a bad memory, we tried our best to get along. There were summit meetings, diplomatic relations, trade agreements, scientific ventures, joint missions into space, economic cooperation, nuclear arms treaties, the admission of Russia into the G8 and multiple talks between American presidents and Russian leaders. U.S. relations with Russia were cordial during the 1990s if not completely cozy. (After all, how cozy can two nations be while sitting on a stockpile of nuclear weapons?)

Then, at the turn of the 21^st Century, on May 7, 2000, Russia handed over its leadership to a former KGB spy named Vladimir Putin, and everything began to change.

As one observer put it, “It feels as if Russia came full circle” after Putin ascended to power. Instead of openness and restructuring, Putin’s government has been marked by “steady, if gradual, repression and the complete erosion of those freedoms” instituted by his predecessors. Almost from the beginning, Putin began consolidating power by restoring the role of a strong central government.

One of his first acts was to seize control of the media, and he has increased the pressure over the succeeding years. Other highlights: He created the Russian national guard to quell any opposition or protests that threatened his authority. In 2003, a referendum declared that the Republic of Chechnya was now a part of Russia. In 2012, Putin won his fourth term in office amid widespread accusations of vote-rigging. And in 2014, he seized control of Crimea, which gave Russia access to ports on the Black Sea.

When Russia intervened in the war in Syria in 2015, it marked the latest move in an assertive foreign policy and provided further evidence of Putin’s world view, which is to revitalize Russia while eroding the power of NATO, weakening the United States and stirring discontent among citizens in the West. He hit the jackpot in 2016 when his candidate, Donald J. Trump, was elected president of the U.S. with Putin’s help.

Now, of course, he has invaded Ukraine, and most foreign policy experts believe his ultimate goal is to reassemble the old Soviet Union by bringing all of its former territories back into the fold.

None of this would be remarkable, given the uneven history of U.S.-Russian relations after World War II. As I said, we have tried to be friends but our alliance was always shaky at best. What is remarkable is the number of American politicians who have demonstrated pro-Russian leanings in 2022, and the willingness of members of the Republican Party to buy into Russian propaganda while blaming the world’s problems on President Joe Biden.

I’m reminded of the fictional TV show “The Americans” in which Russian agents came to America in the 1980s, assimilated into our society and continued to spy for Russia for generations while acting like typical American citizens. They were playing the long game with a well-crafted plan to create cracks in American democracy and to widen those cracks over a period of years. Today, that program doesn’t seem fictional at all. Not when we live in an era when truth is discounted as “fake news” and phony propaganda is accepted as truth.

I don’t have to think about old age any longer. I have arrived here now, and I’m somewhat shocked at what I see. If you had told me when I was younger that Russians would finance political campaigns, help elect presidents, flood our media with propaganda, invade sovereign nations right under our nose and encourage one of our political parties to support authoritarian rule, I would probably have opted out.

I don’t know what I was expecting in my golden years, but it certainly wasn’t this.

Three statements that answer the question, 'Whither Trump?'

While talking about Trump yesterday, I offered the opinion that no matter what happens from now until he dies, he is pathologically incapable of ever admitting that he lost the 2020 election. My wife wondered what happens in people’s brains to make them believe everything he says, to the exclusion of all facts, truth and evidence to the contrary.

Now I don’t know the clinical explanation for such behavior, but in layman’s terms, my answer to that question is this: From the moment he descended the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy on June 16, 2015, Donald J. Trump took on the persona of the Grievance President. He looked out at the country – at millions people he wouldn’t invite to dinner, sit next to on a train or allow to visit his home – and saw a smoldering volcano of grievances just waiting to erupt.

And he also saw votes.

Across the country in mostly southern and Midwestern states, Trump saw an angry mob of voters who believed that black people are inferior to whites, that brown people are streaming across the border to steal their jobs and that homosexuality is an abomination that should be banished by their god. They believed that all Muslims carried explosive devices on their backs and that women who have abortions – and the doctors who perform them – are guilty of murder. Trump saw people who distrusted the government in all of its forms (even though many depended on it for their very existence), and he saw a white Christian fundamentalist religion that believes that they are the ones who face discrimination in America.

I can almost hear him telling his aides, “I think I can work with this.”  

Just look at what Trump said that day when he announced his candidacy. He started out by lying about the size of the crowd: “That is some group of people,” he said. “Thousands. This is beyond anybody’s expectations. There’s been no crowd like this.”

Then he launched into his speech:

“Our country is in serious trouble. We don’t have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don’t have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal? They kill us.

 

“When did we beat Japan at anything? They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn’t exist, folks. They beat us all the time.

 

“When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically.

 

“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.”

And grievance politics was born.

These were the first few paragraphs of the Donald Trump campaign. He could have started out by saying something like, “America is the greatest country in the world, by far, but I think we can be even better…and I have a plan to get us there.” Instead, he spent 46 minutes and 6,245 words telling us everything that was wrong with our country and nothing about what was right. Here are a few other excerpts: 

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

 

“We spent $2 trillion in Iraq, $2 trillion. We lost thousands of lives, thousands in Iraq. We have wounded soldiers, who I love, I love — they’re great — all over the place, thousands and thousands of wounded soldiers. And we have nothing. We can’t even go there.”

 

“Obamacare kicks in in 2016. Really big league. It is going to be amazingly destructive. Doctors are quitting. I have a friend who’s a doctor, and he said to me the other day, “Donald, I never saw anything like it. I have more accountants than I have nurses. It’s a disaster. My patients are beside themselves. They had a plan that was good. They have no plan now.”

 

And on and on it went, with Trump ranting about trade with China, stupid negotiators, tariffs, Ford building cars in Mexico, the national debt, his massive wealth and the incompetence of the other Republicans in the race. And that was just Season 1, Episode 1. His campaign was all downhill from there.

All of a sudden, around the country, the smoldering volcano burst forth. People who had shared their grievances with only their friends and family and maybe a local politician or two realized they had a champion who understood their complaints and could soon be president of the United States. Their grievances were HIS grievances and he told them he could make all of their problems go away. He was saying it all out loud, and it didn’t take long for millions of them to fall in line behind him. It was all Trump, all of the time, and nothing else mattered.

Looking back on the campaign nearly seven years later, you’ll no doubt remember that Trump talked endlessly at rallies and debates and Fox News interviews, spitting out millions of words that sometimes made no sense but managing to repeat his list of grievances at every opportunity. He’s still doing it today, but has added the new grievance that the election was stolen from him and he is the true U.S. president in exile, just waiting for his chance to return.

Through it all, filtering out the lies, the disinformation and the frequent word salads, I believe that Trump uttered three statements that go as far as anything to answer to the question that opened this essay – what makes people believe what he says. Those three statements are:   

(1) “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what's happening. Just stick with us.”

(2) “The news media is corrupt and the news is fake; they are the enemy of the people.”

(3) We have a multitude of problems and “I alone can fix it.”

If those were the only three ideas that got through to you during the campaign and subsequent presidency, then you, too, may be a Trump supporter. Just this week, Trump called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “genius” for invading Ukraine and took Russia’s side over President Biden, but even that doesn’t seem to matter to Trumpaloons. As my wife said yesterday, nothing will ever happen to change their minds, so unfortunately, they can’t be fixed. 

I just hope they can be overcome.  

I defend the First Amendment, but…

Nobody asked me, but in my opinion, this whole Joe Rogan/Spotify controversy is not simply a First Amendment issue regarding the right to speak one’s mind. It is so much more than that.

It’s not like Rogan and I disagree on foreign policy or what to do about Ukraine or how to balance the federal budget. This is about the world’s largest podcast with 11 million listeners spewing lies, distortions and misinformation about a deadly pandemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people – and getting millions to believe what he says.

For example, from what I’ve read (I’m not a follower), Rogan actively discourages young people from getting the Covid vaccine. He has also promoted the use of the horse dewormer Ivermectin to treat Covid-19 symptoms, although there is limited evidence to support its efficacy as a Covid treatment, and in spite of the fact that ingesting it can lead to serious side effects including dizziness and uncontrolled vomiting.

Rogan’s podcast has also featured many discredited physicians and academics who have spoken out against the vaccine, including a cardiologist who inaccurately claimed that Covid vaccines are “experimental” and that the pandemic was “planned.” That’s just for starters. I could go on, but I won’t.

For all of that, Rogan has been called a “menace to public health” by a noted epidemiologist, while other medical and scientific experts call his track record of airing false claims about the coronavirus pandemic “a sociological issue of devastating proportions.”

Spotify, they say, has enabled him, prompting an open letter from more than a thousand doctors, scientists and health professionals urging the audio streaming and media services provider to crack down on Covid misinformation.

For those reasons, among others, I applaud Neil Young and Joni Mitchell for pulling their music catalogs in protest. They refuse to share a platform with a dubious propaganda machine. Spotify was presented with a choice between retaining the music of two rock and roll legends or promoting an agent provocateur who spouts dangerous misinformation – and they made the wrong choice.

A former reporter and editor, I’m a staunch supporter of the First Amendment, but it only guarantees that the government won’t pass laws to stifle free speech. It doesn’t regulate the marketplace where citizens can decide what to hear and what to believe. The argument that this is a free speech issue is right-wing propaganda and spin. In truth, the First Amendment doesn’t give anyone the right to talk other people into their own deaths.

Like Joni and Neil, that’s something I can’t support.

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